The 7 Most Underrated CrossFit Exercises

Coach Ken (CJ) Crowder of CrossFit 77 in North Carolina previously laid out his thoughts onthe 7 most overrated CrossFit exercises. Now he is back with his thoughts on the 7 mostunderrated CrossFit exercises/movements. (Yes, queue up the Goldilocks jokes here … drop a note in the comments with your thoughts on the 7 CrossFit exercises that are justright …).

1. Turkish Get Up

Coach Crowder doesn’t mince words. “NOT FOR TIME, because a ‘for time’ Turkish Get Up is STUPID.”

Turkish Get Ups are a phenomenal exercise for building a strong core and mobile shoulders. A pretty awesome feat is being able to do a Turkish Get Up with 100lbs. An example workout would be 50 Turkish Get Ups at 1.5 pood (men)/1 pood (women), focusing on quality of movement.

2. Strict weighted pullups

Per Coach Crowder:

At [CrossFit] 77, our athletes do lots and lots of both weighted and strict pull ups. Why? Because strict pull ups are a tremendously useful way to build pulling strength by developing the lats, upper back, and shoulders.

We encourage our males to shoot for a 1RM weighted pull up at 33% of their bodyweight and our females to shoot for a 1RM weighted pull up at 20% of their bodyweight (via OPT Assessment Level 3 Upper Body Pulling). This is a lofty goal for most people (especially females) but the pursuit of this goal guarantees many, many benefits.

An example workout to do every Monday and Friday would be 2 sets x 6-8 weighted pullups with 2 minutes rest between sets.

For more on this topic, read How To Improve Your Pullups.

3. Heavy sled (prowler) pushes/drags

Sleds are a great tool for training full body strength/power and conditioning.

If you aren’t sold on sleds go drag/push one a little while and you’ll understand.

Per Coach Crowder, “one of the reasons we love using them is because you can go bananas on them without much soreness or lasting negative effects (lack of eccentric loading). This makes them a great tool for ‘in-season’ athletes or for active recovery sessions.”

An example workout would be for time: 6 laps (25 yards down & 25 yards back) pushing a sled with 90 pounds (men)/50 pounds (women).

4. Shoulder health exercises

There are a number of these to choose from, and make sure to focus first on your weaker side. Try dumbbell external rotations, Powell raises, prone trap 3 raises, face pulls, scapula pushups, wall slides, and scapula pullups.

5. Squat Therapy

Sounds like something everyone could use, right? Coach Crowder explains:

[P]erforming an air squat with your hands in a fixed position (e.g., facing a wall or elevating your hands with a bar). We have yet to find a better way to improve someone’s air squat and mobility than constant squat therapy. I recommend doing wall squats everyday in your warm up.

An example workout/warm up would be 3 rounds, each round consisting of 10 wall squats + 200m run. To geek out on this, read our squat series: Why Deep Squats Are Good For You,Squats: Toes Forward or Toes Out?, Front Squatting Mobility, You Don’t Know Squat!, andHow To Perform a Proper Front Squat.

6. Airdyne Bike

There is truly no substitute  for this piece of equipment.

If you haven’t had the pleasure to use one of these bad boys you have yet to discover the depths of your pain cave.

Coach Crowder feels that “[b]ang for your buck, there is no other device (outside of The Shake Weight) that can elicit this type of response in such a short period of time. This machine allows the user to achieve an incredibly high turnover rate which allows for tremendous power output.”

Check out Coach Crowder doing an example workout (1 minute effort for max calories) in the video below.

7. Single Leg Split Squats

Per Coach Crowder:

A lot of movements in sports are done off of one leg, e.g., running, “cutting”, throwing, etc. … we have seen huge improvements in our member’s performance, balance, and well-being with the inclusion of single leg squatting into their program.

The balance one gains from training both legs individually is highly unique. It is much more difficult to achieve this balance with double leg squatting because it allows you to favor your strong side. If this imbalance goes uncorrected it can increase the likelihood of injury.

An example workout would be barbell front rack single leg split squat, 8-10 reps x 3 sets. Rest 1 minute between sides.

Coaches and athletes, what do you think of this list – are these exercises truly underrated, and are there other exercises that belong on this list (or the Goldilocks list in the comments)?