Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, Family Physician and

Former CrossFit Games Athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy!

Hello, today we are here with Dr. Amy West, who is a physiatrist and CrossFit Level 1

trainer, and we are going to talk about CrossFit and injuries. So we've all had someone

come to us saying, I'm too scared to try CrossFit because I don't want to get injured.

How do you respond to that?

Well, the main thing that I say to this is that that idea that CrossFit is dangerous is

actually not supported in the scientific literature. So that CrossFit injury rate in multiple studies

has been between 2.1 to about 3.4 per 1,000 training hours, which is fairly low, very

comparable to other types of sports, lower than contact sports, and much lower than something

running, which the rate can be up to 9,000 training hours. And that's an often recommended

form of exercise for people. So overall, CrossFit has not been proven to be more dangerous than

any other sports. Factly, in fact, it's more safe than many other things that we do.

Little known fact. So you're telling me that the injury rates in CrossFit are essentially

the same or lower than many of the other sports that people are doing.

Yeah, also, I mean, the CrossFit is based in functional movement, right? So for someone to

fear doing CrossFit, they're also fearing those functional movements. And once your functional

capacity drops below the functional demands of your life, you're at risk of injuring yourself,

you're at risk of losing your livelihood, losing your independence, all of these things. So

if you're afraid to do CrossFit, you're also afraid to train the very movements that can

affect save your life when you think about it. I love when you put it that way. I think that it's

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