Parker Fire Crossfit

August 24, 2011 « The Workout CrossFit

Putting out Fires by Lon Kilgore (CF Journal March 07): Honolulu Fire Department, Hawaii; Orange Country Fire Authority and Oakland Fire Department, California; Woodinville Fire and Life Safety District, Washington; Marietta Fire Department, Georgia; Parker Fire District, Colorado. What do all of these fire departments have in common? You’ve probably already guessed part of the answer: They use CrossFit, officially or unofficially, to prepare for the rigors of their profession. But there’s more. In firefighter competitions around the country, it seems that whenever CrossFit-trained personnel enter, they end up at the top of the field. We might even say that fire companies like those above dominate the competition. For those of us familiar with CrossFit and its results, this success is not terribly surprising. However, we have observed a phenomenon in these competitions that is curious indeed. In the parts of the competitions that require contestants to use oxygen tanks, CrossFit-trained firefighters consumed less from their oxygen bottles than other competitors. At first this seems odd—winners using less oxygen? The conventional understanding is that the more fit you are, the more oxygen you can consume (i.e., the greater your VO2 max), the higher levels of exertion you can sustain, and the faster you can get the job done. Doing the same amount of work in less time should require at least the same amount of oxygen, if not more. So why would these athletes show a reduction in oxygen consumed? This flies in the face of all accepted wisdom on the subject. Did the CrossFit-trained firefighters somehow become better at oxygen handling? Is there some kind of elaborate respiratory adaptation occurring that is related to an improved aerobic capacity? It is really tempting to look for some elegant explanation involving gas transport kinetics, enzymatic energy of activation, and a whole bunch of other scientific jargon.

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