If you’re a fan of the sport of CrossFit you surely would have seen people do kipping HSPU and Ring Dips and possibly wondered why we don’t use these movements in our gym and where they fit into the spectrum of exercise. The answer is both simple and complicated. I’ll give you the complicated one first.
To understand the answer you must first understand that there are two sides to CrossFit – the sport, and the strength and conditioning program. The sport side of CrossFit tests the ability of it’s participants by having them complete a variety of tasks and the person who comes out with the best average result across the tasks is the winner. If the tasks are varied enough, then it would be fair to say that the person who won is a fairly fit human being. The thing to realise is that just like all sports there is an objective and a set of rules and the person who best meets the objective within the boundaries of the rules is the winner. There no consideration given to any physical adaptation that is achieved through this process and nor does there need to be as that is not the objective of the test. If we look at HSPU and Ring Dips specifically, like it or not CrossFit has allowed the use of kipping of these movements in their competitions and if an individual is able to meet the objective of a workout more effectively through the use of these techniques, they would be stupid to do otherwise.
If we examine the use of these movements within a strength and conditioning context (which is our primary focus) then the objective changes. Physical adaptation now becomes the focus and we are not necessarily looking for the fastest, easiest or most fun way of doing something.
If a movement is programmed with the goal of developing strength and the athlete is weak, (read: most amateur CrossFitters) then it would make no sense to sacrifice the strengthening aspect of these movements by allowing the athlete to kip them when that is the very reason that they are included in our program.
What about intensity, isn’t that the most important thing? Intensity is an important consideration in the development of a well rounded athlete but it is not the be all and end all and affiliates or athletes who focus purely on intensity at the expense of strength and technique development are missing the point in my humble opinion. Furthermore I can think of a about 10 trillion safer and more effective ways to create intensity in conditioning workouts before I would use kipping HSPU and Ring Dips.
Why do we Kip Pull-ups and Toes to Bar then? If you look back through our programming you will quickly realise that we do a lot more strict pull-ups and toes to bar than we do kipping. Why? for the same reason as stated above. The development of strength is far more important to us considering that the large majority of our athletes are considerably more conditioned than they are strong. Why Kip at all? Unlike kipping HSPU and Ring Dips, kipping pull-ups and toes to bar are great ways to develop intensity in conditioning workouts and they don’t usually result in the athlete landing heavily and repeatedly on their head when they become fatigued.
Am I training at the wrong gym if I want to be a regional or games competitor? Absolutely not. True strength and conditioning is the foundation for all successful CrossFit athletes and you don’t have to do much research to discover that the large majority of dominant CrossFitters already had a significant background in some sort of sport where strength and conditioning played a role.
We are more than happy for our athletes to kip these movements if and when they have reached a point of development where they might be able to forgo the strengthening benefits that these movements provide – we just haven’t seen it yet. Moreover if you plan to compete at this level and we have not equipped you with the necessary tools to complete the task, then we have not fulfilled out duty to you.
The short answer: If you’re strong enough to forgo strength work, then you should learn these techniques and practice them to a point where they may provide an alternative in the right situations but strict work should remain the foundation.
