@channel7 I've been Crossfitting for a long time. This has been kicking around in my head for awhile and your post just brought it out of me. Please bear with the wall of text. I'm open to any criticism or dissenting opinions.
OP, you are absolutely correct in your reasoning. Kipping handstand pushups are more dangerous than strict. However, I think that you are only addressing a symptom of and not the disease that is hurting Crossfit right now.
Crossfit started in the early 2000's as an exercise ideology designed to optimize fitness and health. Fitness across many modalities, Crossfit! The named WODs were used as a repeatable measurement of fitness. The point was to get fitter and WODs were a tool to determine if one had. We all could measure our improvement against ourselves and others. Repeatable workouts were not the point, being fitter was. However, due to the design and nature of named, repeatable WODs competition was inevitable and Crossfit philosophy slowly became less oriented towards health and more oriented towards sport.
Today for many Boxes (certainly not all) Crossfit is a sport first and a fitness ideology second . The Point IS the movements and the WODs. This change in social climate is centered around Crossfit "athletes". Like football players, marathon runners, or any other high performance athletes, Crossfit athletes are sacrificing health and fitness to test and improve the outer limits of human ability and willpower. This is an important distinction, Fitness is no longer the primary motivating factor, performance is. This type of training CAN make you very fit, but makes injury highly likely. One can take any exercise past the point of improving well being and put it into a place where one is actively hurting their own body.
The average person coming into Crossfit fresh is not interested in become a Crossfit "athlete". The benefit does not outweigh the risk to the average person in doing kipping ANYTHING unless they are already sufficiently fit and trained in gymnastic movement. If any significant percentage of Crossfitters experience injury then Crossfit as a fitness ideology has failed. Crossfit will have made those injured overall less healthy, less fit.
Coaches need to change their mindset. We aren't trying to get as many people as possible to the open. We are trying to improve lives through constantly varied, high intensity, functional fitness. This means programming to minimize injury potential first, and only then increasing intensity and complexity. Even Crossfit Corporate realizes this, as evidenced by their recent videos showing "less than optimally fit" people doing basic movements with everyday objects.
I'm not trying to say no one should learn advanced movements if they are interested. They should just go in with their eyes open. Those individuals who push for a 30 minute Murph, or a sub 2 minute Fran, are no longer attempting to maximize their own personal health and fitness. They are attempting to maximize their performance in a sport. Like any high performance athlete, injury of some kind is inevitable for these individuals.
As to the average person, Crossfit boxes will continue to have issues with things like kipping handstand push-ups as long as they continue to prioritize the sport over the health of their clients.
