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CT,

Could you give a brief summary of your main issues with it?

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It is desgined as a one-size fits everything (literally) program. Training for a decathalon? Do CF. Fat guy who wants to drop 30 pounds? Do CF. That's a recipe for wasted time and effort, and usually failure.

I love the fact that it gets women lifting weights and eating sensibly, and some of their poster girls are hot.

The poster men are, to a man, guys who were studs before they ever heard of CF.


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This is a good point about posterboys in general. Pretty much every fitness system of any size sooner or later get someone who is good looking in it or represents its look well. Just like those bowflex commercials or those old ads where Arnold is lifting pink dumbbells, though, your results may vary. Of course, the use of fitness models skips rather than true devotees or members skips over these issues entirely.

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Anyway, the big thing to me is, if you were looking for any specific goal, there is a much better/safer way to go about it than pursuing CF.

I suppose if you really like being nauseous after workouts and losing in sports and having worse physiques than guys who train less hard and eat more of what they want (there are people like this), you can feel more hardcore than them while you do it.

It was specifically designed to work better for everything, under the theory that somebody who became a halfway decent sprinter, powerlifter, gymnast, & Olympic weightlifter would outperform most athletes (You can read the first CF journal and early interviews with Greg Glassman). In practice, it doesn't work.

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I agree that all but the most gifted natural athletes need sport-specific training and plenty of time to inculcate just the right habits, reflexes and sport knowledge if they want to outperform regular players of a sport, but CF sounds fine as more of an end in itself, which is a more realistic expectation. Just being generally fit and having a really useful body is a worthwhile goal even if you're unlikely to be a better basketball player than someone who doesn't do anything but play basketball.

One thing that, though I think it can go too far with some people, can be good about CF type programs is that they will build mental toughness. That's a good thing that has a big carryover even entirely outside athletics.

They lose me when they start celebrating barfing blood or whatever. And this from a guy who used to get kicked in the balls five or six days a week by his martial arts instructor to toughen him up.