Pretraining Warm-ups and Localized Pain May Be Associated with CrossFit-related Injuries: Nationwide Cross-sectional Study

Background: Developed in recent years, CrossFit has gained much popularity in the industrialized world due to various advantages such as scalability, availability and high sense of community. Nonetheless, with growing interest, reports on associated injury have also emerged, highlighting the need for better characterization and analysis of specific risk factors. Our goal was therefore to characterize injuries related to CrossFit and to describe specific risk factors associated with their occurrence.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study by using a questionnaire aimed at CrossFit athletes responding to personally delivered questionnaires nationwide.

Results: A total of 502 fully answered our questionnaire. Athletes who reported injury had a slightly higher mean weight (P=0.065) and Body Mass Index (P=0.059) compared to their non-injured counterparts and the most affected area was the upper extremity (N.=133, 26.4%) followed by the shoulder (N.=101, 20.1%). Athletes who performed preworkout warmup exercises were significantly more prone to report an injury (P=0.007) as well as those who had prior injury in the affected area. Backward stepwise regression model assessing injury predictors revealed that preworkout warmup (OR 1.816; 95% CI 1.095-3.011; P=0.021) and preinjury local pain (OR 1.554; 95% CI 1.004-2.046; P=0.048) in CrossFit athletes were significant predictors of injuries.

Conclusions: Pretraining warm-ups and preinjury localized pain were found to predict significant injury among CrossFit athletes.