Meet the Seniors Who Do CrossFit
Building strength and grit to live better, longer
“I think you can handle this,” says Karima Adi, holding out a 20-pound dumbbell. The weight is thankfully not for me — I’m still using a six-pound kettlebell — but for my workout buddy Bill Cox, a 70-year-old retiree living in London. We’re at CrossFit Shapesmiths in Clapham, where I’ve been invited to join the CrossFit Masters class for people over 60. Adi, a certified CrossFit trainer and the driving force behind the Masters class, assures me we won’t be doing any of the handstand pushups I saw people completing on my way in — at least not yet.
As Bill Cox and I make our way around our parallel workouts, doing snatches, push-ups, and ring-pulls, Adi explains that the movements are similar to daily life activities: bending down to pick something off the floor, taking things off high shelves, and pulling yourself out of bed. “This is about functional movement,” she says. “My aim is to help people maintain, or restore, their natural movement,” she says. “You have to sit down and stand up for the rest of your life, and you want to make sure that you never struggle in that.”
Cox, a tall man with salt and pepper hair and glasses, has been doing CrossFit for three months and he’s already advancing to lifting heavier dumbells. Like the other seniors in his…
