Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service

with me, Rachel Naylor.

Today, I'm taking you back 22 years to the birth of CrossFit, a fitness phenomenon.

They now run an annual global games, and this year competitors from 25 countries took

part.

I've been speaking to the first woman to be crowned fittest on earth twice.

CrossFit, short for Cross Discipline Fitness, was founded in 2000 by a personal trainer Greg

Glassman. He explained his thinking behind it in the CrossFit Journal in 2011.

The goal initially was to develop a fitness program that was broad general and inclusive.

A fitness program that is special to you was not specialising and a fascinating thing was we

were told from the start you can't do that. That was all he needed to hear, turns out he could.

Rather than doing cardio on one day and waits on another, he wanted to combine both in the same

workout. He also wanted to encourage competitiveness. At his classes, he would keep score and encourage

his clients to beat each other. Essentially, he wanted to turn going to the gym into a sport.

It sounds obvious, but it was radical for the time. The official definition is a bit of a mouthful.

Constantly varied functional movements executed at high intensity, but that can be really hard to

say to somebody because they kind of look at you like you have you know six heads and okay well

why should this be interesting to me. That's Nicole Carroll, the general manager of education.

Practically typical workouts combine some running, cycling or rowing, with movements like push-ups,

pull-ups or sit-ups. They opened their first gym in Santa Cruz in California in 2001,

but it didn't look like a normal gym. There were no mirrors at all. The floor was

open for the most part and really the only equipment were things like pull-up bars,

...