Well crud. I made a post, tried to edit it and then messed up editing it. Little late getting around to fixing that, so sorry. Here's everything from my original post...
So I have a few years experience with Crossfit, the first year or so doing it, the rest of those years seeing how Crossfit is working for those around me. I work as a firefighter for a medium sized department (250 people) and when I came on a few years ago we did Crossfit workouts during rookie school. This was once or twice a week with the other mornings being focused on either running workouts or practical workouts like hose-pulling or redbag drills (3 times up 3 times down a 6 floor tower in full bunker gear and on air while carrying a 50 pound hose pack). The rest of the day's physical activity was from doing whatever skill or activity we were learning,.
We were the first rookie school to use Crossfit and before that it was popular among some of our department. Since I came on it's become a huge part of our department's culture because everyone who doesn't hate it absolutely loves it and will tell you why in great detail. Whether you ask them to or not. Personally, I think it's a decent program when taken in small doses.
The CONCEPT of Crossfit is great for this job. Two dozen or so exercises that utilize your entire body as a unit and range in difficulty from highly advanced (olympic lifting) to caveman ("hit the thing with the thing") mixed up and varied and done in quick succession with little rest for a WOD that lasts about as long as a 45 minute air bottle lasts in the real world (15 minutes or less).
We like to say that firefighting is 15 minutes of fun followed by 3 hours of hard work. In the first 15 minutes on scene (the "fun") of a fire you're doing a LOT of work. Catching a hydrant, dragging hoseline, forcing doors, crawling around, using handtools, manning a nozzle (way harder than you'd think), etc. If there's any type of work that Crossfit's "generalist" approach would work perfect for, it's this job. It was great as a gut-check to help us see just what going all-out for 15 minutes would feel like and learning to push ourselves.
Beyond that use as an occasional gut-check, however, the returns greatly diminish the more you use it. Guys on our department who do Crossfit, and only Crossfit, experience a greater level of injuries due to higher rep and poor form workouts. They also see fewer gains over time as the people who take a more balance or strength based approach to keeping in shape for this job. I should also note that they do seem to start sucking wind quicker during the 3 hours of overhaul (i.e. where the real work takes place) after we've had our 15 minutes of fun, but everyone eventually gets worn out from overhaul eventually.
The guys who stick with it also end up doing more and more ridiculous exercises (wallball burpees? high-rep box jumps? handstand pushups?!?!) which result in poor form, less strength gains and more injuries. There is no reason someone should be doing band-assisted ring dips when you can't do a few bar dips.
When I quit doing Crossfit and found ETK (I will give it to Crossfit, they introduced me to kettlebells, albeit through the less than perfect overhead swing) I noticed greater strength and cardio gains and I can go as long as anyone during the 3 hours of hard work.
So yeah, beyond it being great an occasional group WOD for fun to see how well you can push yourself (in a similar idea as the once-a-month snatch test from the RoP) I see very little use for Crossfit.
As a side note, my BIGGEST gripe about Crossfit is that any time you do something with high intensity intervals, Crossfit devotees try to say you're doing Crossfit. Listen, getting your crew together to have a friendly competition to see who can flip some tires, drag some hose, do some (real) pullups and farmer-carry some dumbells the fastest IS NOT doing Crossfit! It's working out and you don't own a copyright on that.