Let me be clear for the record…In general I am not a big fan of Cross-Fit. This is for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here. There is however a ‘workout’ that Cross-Fit seems to have adopted that I actually dig. Personally I wouldn’t necessarily categorize it as a workout, or training however, but more of a test. To me there is a big difference between the three. But back to the test. It’s called Murph and it’s named in honour of a U.S. Navy Seal, Michael Murphy who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005 at the age of 29.
If you go online you might find a wide variety of versions of Murph. Often times its people dumbing down the activity; but like I always say… it’s a free country. You aren’t gonna hurt my feelings any. Below is the version of Murph that I like:
1 Mile Run
100 Pull-ups (Strict not Kipping)
200 Push-ups
300 Squats
1 Mile Run
(oh yeah…almost forgot.. all done while wearing a 20llb vest or body armor, and combat boots)
People of course do this test for time. I think that if you can do the strict version of this in less than one hour then you are doing pretty well. Like I mentioned earlier there are a bunch of variations that people have contrived if they can’t do the version mentioned above. The only concessions I would allow are the order of the exercises. The hardest version is doing the full amount of repetitions in the order listed. The other acceptable version from my perspective is partitioning the exercises in some fashion, such as 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 Squats… for 20 sets.