Thursday, June 28, 2018

"in 2013, an NSCA journal published a study claiming that CrossFit had a 16% injury rate"

BF:
According to more than 1,500 pages of documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, the CrossFit study was indeed tainted by phony data. After it was published, the study was retracted, the journal’s editor stepped down, the Ohio State University professor who led the study resigned, and a judge accused the NSCA of lying under oath and withholding evidence. Just this month, two of the NSCA’s three law firms stopped representing it, and its insurer filed a complaint to get out of covering the nearly $500,000 in penalties lodged on the organization for failing to produce evidence.

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Inspired largely by this flurry of press, the Russells launched their blog and began strategizing what to do about their number one enemy, the NSCA.

Greene began filling a Google Doc with all of his opposition research, titled “CrossFit vs. Big Soda.” It’s now 270 pages long. Once, he covered a whiteboard with lines and arrows connecting PepsiCo and Coca-Cola employees to various rings of the NSCA, from low-level members to board members, to the editors of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, which had published the study.

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The Russells contend that the NSCA and a similar group, the American College of Sports Medicine, are out to get CrossFit because the upstart has threatened their long-standing dominance of the industry. Historically, a personal trainer would pay to get certified through an organization like the NSCA (which claims more than 45,000 members) or the ACSM (more than 50,000 members). But now a growing number — some 134,000 trainers around the world — are choosing to get credentialed by CrossFit.

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And there was a hashtag, #CrushBigSoda. In June 2015, CrossFit Instagrammed and tweeted a Coke ad, replacing its “Open happiness” slogan with “Open diabetes.” The next day, pop singer Nick Jonas, who has Type 1 diabetes, tweeted an admonishment: “This is not cool.” Greene tweeted back a screenshot showing that Coca-Cola sponsored Jonas’s concerts