Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Cranking

Yesterday, one of my clients brought me an article that was in the Roanoke Times recently. The article was on a new fitness craze called cranking. Cranking is basically just a spinning class for your upper body. You use one of the physical therapy upper body cycles for the workout. Please do not fall for the hype of this type of workout. Cranking is not going to get anybody into shape. Cranking is an exercise for people in physical therapy who either need to correct shoulder problems or they cannot use their legs to exercise. If we look at cranking from a Crossfit perspective, which means that you should move large loads, long distances, and quickly, then cranking would not even be as effective as cycling and people who read this blog already know what I think about spinning classes. Cranking uses a smaller muscle group which means that you cannot produce the same amount of force that you can with your legs. It has been a trend over the last couple of years to use physical therapy exercises to try and get people into shape. Physical therapy exercises are great for helping with injuries and imbalances in the body but nobody ever got ripped by doing physical therapy exercises. Basically, cranking is someone trying to make money by marketing a physical therapy tool. One cranking machine costs $1700. How could that money be better spent. For $1700 you could buy a power rack with over 300lbs in plates, a set of rings, and some dumbbells. So for $1700 you have the choice to either just crank or you could do squats, deadlifts, lunges, pullups, snatches, cleans, or any other free weight exercise.

Yesterdays Top Performers
Male Rich 11:08
Female Ashley 9:37

Workout of the Day
Weighted pullups 5x3
Weighted pullups 3x6

1 comment:

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