Pursuing Health

47-year old Darryl Chajon didn’t start CrossFit until later in life, but once he did, he was hooked.  After several years of regular training, he even set his sights on becoming a competitor.  He started ramping up the volume and intensity of his sessions, dialed in his nutrition, and worked hard to get in better shape than ever.   Then, in March of 2020, just as he was preparing for a competition...

Dr. David Johnson is a brain and spinal neurosurgeon who has had a pioneering role in the establishment of multidisciplinary spinal practices and holistic care for neurosurgical patients in Brisbane, Australia.  He is also the co-owner of CrossFit Neuro, the first clinical CrossFit affiliate.     By combining his passion for CrossFit, Olympic weightlifting, neurosurgery, and science, Dr. Johnson w...

Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist and 2X New York Times/Wall Street Journal Best-selling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired To Eat . He and co-author Diana Rodgers recently released their book, Sacred Cow , which explains why well-raised meat is good for us and good for the planet.    Robb is a longtime CrossFit enthusiast, and he is the co-founder of the 1st and 4th CrossFit affiliate...

Seemingly healthy and in his late thirties, Robert Oh was shocked when routine blood work showed that he was prediabetic.     He was at a healthy weight, did CrossFit 3-4 times per week, ate mostly healthy foods, and worked as a military family physician.  He had no family history and no risk factors, and he had no intentions of starting the metformin recommended by his colleagues.   The more he r...

Alec Smith is a 3-time CrossFit Games competitor who is perhaps best known for his incredible expertise at gymnastics, and for being one of the first openly gay male athletes in the sport.   He started in gymnastics at age 2, and excelled at the sport through middle school when a car accident forced him to retire.  After recovering and dabbling in several other sports, he eventually began training...

This week’s story features Katie Spilka who shares her story of being diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease called scleroderma at age 16 and how CrossFit and a positive outlook have helped her put her symptoms into remission.   Katie was an everyday teenager when she first experienced unusual symptoms, including numbness in her fingers.  Because of her family’s medical history, Katie’s mom advo...

At age 18 and finishing high school, Alan Fredendall topped the scales at over 400 pounds.  Climbing a single flight of stairs to attend class on the second story of his school left him wheezing and breathless.   During college, he began a weight loss journey involving body building and lots of cardio, but he hadn’t yet found a way to make sustainable, long term changes.  A stent in the Army gave...

Despite being the youngest Individual competitor at the 2020 CrossFit Games, Haley Adams brought a wealth of experience to the field, including three CrossFit Games podium finishes as a teen competitor.   In 2019, Haley’s first year participating in the Women’s division, she finished in 6th and earned the title “Rookie of the Year.” In 2020, she continued to climb her way up the leaderboard and le...

Maddie Tretter was an accomplished Division 1 swimmer at Cleveland State, preparing for the Olympic Trials, when she she started coming down with a laundry list of seemingly unrelated symptoms: panic attacks, nausea, migraines, swollen joints and more. After trying several treatments with no success, Maddie was encouraged when she finally tested positive for Lyme disease - she figured now that she...

“If a woman can understand how she feels on different days her cycle, then she can start dialing and being more personalized with her training. When the hormones are low, this is where women have more power, more speed, recover better, have more “mojo” because they have less central nervous system fatigue. Around ovulation, with that boost of estrogen, some women feel bulletproof and other women f...

“I think the biggest thing that I take away are these transferable skills where, you would think that touring the country and hustling and making it happen in that way is specific to music, but it’s really not. That’s going to help us in the future with our gym, it has already as we bootstrapped the gym and figured that whole thing out, and even with our kids, just that idea of one step at a time....

We noticed her speech was definitely years ahead of her age, her confidence, her ability to walk into a room and own it, and other people started noticing all of these social, emotional, physical things about her, and we’re like, “yeah, it really works.” Through physical activity you can really have an impact on a child’s social-emotional health, you can. Mental health, speech, everything. So, Mat...

“For all my friends who are struggling to find where to get started, just do something. Just find something you love. It does not have to be CrossFit. I love CrossFit, and I would love if you loved CrossFit, too, so we could talk that language together, but just find something. Just start. Baby steps. You’ll be far more successful just by taking baby steps instead of trying to do everything all at...

“The model of medicine where you base treatment of patients on statistics and epidemiology- what works for most people- we felt like we could do better as a society and as a group of physicians, and that’s what took us down the route of creating Wild Health and focusing on precision medicine.” - Dr. Matthew Dawson, Wild Health CEO Can human performance be optimized by tailoring medical care to eac...

“When we think about exercise in general as sort of a hermetic stressor, it just makes sense to think about, if you’re going to do it at a higher intensity and have these repeated hormetic stressors, you’re going to get an overall greater response. It’s a lot of the same mechanisms that we see for exercise causing a lot of great brain health and cognitive benefits, but we’re just seeing it to a gr...

Six-time CrossFit Games athlete Brooke Wells was just 19 when she qualified for her first CrossFit Games in 2015, and she's competed at every CrossFit Games since, always placing inside the top 20.  This year, at the 2020 CrossFit Games, Brooke earned her best finish yet, placing 5th amongst an elite field of competitors. When Brooke started CrossFit, she had a natural gift for strength and liftin...

“You have something like a major surgery, whether you have MS specifically or whether you have any other type of autoimmune disease or anything like that, but those don’t have to be death sentences. Even though that’s what they feel like when you first get diagnosed, and if the relapses are hitting harder and harder, or if the symptoms are getting worse. It’s easy to think it’s just going downhill...

As you learn more, and more, and more about disease, prevention is the key.  Why get sick in the first place? Don’t get sick!  Why are we going to wait until you’re end-stage or sick as a dog before we try and provide you with help?  No.  Let’s be smarter with our minds, resources and approaches.  It just doesn’t make sense when you think about it, really.  A lot of times we’re just putting Band-A...

“I think that’s part of why I love competing, is being side-by-side with people, having the spectators cheer you on and scream you on, and just being in the environment- it’s just so much energy.  You push yourself and you don’t think as much about the pain as when you’re doing a workout by yourself. But I’m thankful that there was… because CrossFit ended up sending judges, it was nice that we had...

“I have learned how to adapt to the unknown and unknowable. I have learned to focus on what I CAN do. This led me to my main mantra to date which is, “What’s the next step?” which is what I focus on in any type of adversity or workout.” - Cory Schmidgall Cory Schmidgall tried just about every fitness program out there.  Nothing seemed to light the fire he remembered from his football days, or sati...

“I think a lot of doctors kind of know this but don’t really… it’s never really been at the forefront of their minds until now. We know, for example, that people who have high blood glucose or type 2 diabetes have worse outcomes from any infection - specifically respiratory infections. So, when I started looking at the literature and also looking at how immune health links to excess body fat, obes...

“There's no diet plan, there's no 30 day challenge that's going to stick with you forever.  You, ultimately at some point, are in the driver's seat.” - EC Synkowski EC Synkowski is the founder of OptimizeMe Nutrition , a company dedicated to helping anyone improve their health and well being with simple, non-restrictive diet methods. EC started CrossFit in 2006 and over time her enthusiasm and har...

“My journey to finding myself and my will to live began with finding CrossFit.” - Becky Fox The stress of everything was just too much. If she could just lose weight, Becky believed, she would be okay. She drastically cut her calories, restricted food intake and began exercising incessantly. A sophomore in high school, she succeeded only in losing athletic opportunities, a sudden drop in academic...

“I think if I just limited myself to being an athlete I’d be doing a disservice to the other demographics that I represent.  I’m a wrestler. I’m a former West Pointer. I’m an Army officer.  All these different intersectionalities that are composed within me, and everyone has their own group of intersectionalities that they represent. That’s how you - if you want to create understanding about somet...

“So, you have this term sheet, and the term sheet is non-binding, either party can walk away.  The most important part of it is that you’re agreed on some basics for the transaction, and there’s what’s called a no-shop or exclusivity period. Usually lawyers write that, and that says that the seller can’t talk to anybody else. You can do a lot of work, spend a lot of time, spend a lot of money figu...