Let's suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream - and that you could, for example, have the power, within one night, to dream 75 years of time. For that 75 years of time your focus was on fitness. From you as a small child developing, to maturation, to old age, you saw the best version of yourself athletically. (I know, probably not the subject you’d pick for the ultimate dream, but say you did.) You would naturally fulfill all your sport specific wishes and imagine yourself at the pinnacle of that sport/activity. After some time of dreaming that dream, night after night, reaching the highest level and pleasure that dream could afford you would most likely say “well, that was pretty great.” At some point however you would cease to be amused by the same euphoric sensation night after night, and also, that one specific activity. You might say “well let’s throw a few surprises in there, just to make it interesting”. “Let’s have a dream that isn’t just about one particular thing but how about a few? Let’s roll the dice a bit and see how I might combine them. Maybe not be so sure of the outcome?”. What you’d be asking for is some variety in the activities you are great at - not just one sport. You would then take that dream and dream it for some time and you might say “well it’s great to be really good at everything I throw at myself in this hypothetical dream but let’s make it even more interesting. Let’s make it hard enough where the outcome of my success isn’t a certainty”. What you would then do is add complexity, difficulty, multiplicity of outcomes, and even some scenarios where you wouldn’t be as successful as you would in others.”
Finally, what you would arrive at is the best way to train long term. It would seem unnecessary to start there, but it would be where you ultimately would end up. Not a specific adaptation to imposed demands (i.e. doing the same thing over and over again), but you would vary the routine so you couldn’t predict the outcome. You’d make the workouts difficult so you wouldn’t be so certain of your success. You’d have a mixed modality, really hard, GPP program.
Functional fitness (yeah, crossfit) isn’t just great because of the community is fosters but because it presents a program that is the eventual conclusion for every single specialty program, every single sport program out there. Take any starting point of any specific sport or niche, single modality program (that means one thing that you do, over and over again. Yoga, stationary biking, stationary vera climbing, etc) at at some point you will have to evolve/include something else. (Either that or you are okay plateauing, or doing the same thing over and over again without progressing or you are already doing something so novel, so complex with always an unknown variable that you are the exception...but then we'd say you probably agree with what we are saying)
Don’t get us wrong, any place you start is GREAT! But once you get as good as you can get inside that particular “dream”, then what do you do? You’ll do consistently varied routines, without conclusive evidence that you’ll be successful (that means it will have to be hard) and you’ll rely on the movements that will get you there (which for the above reasons, won’t be 1 or 2).
See you in the gym...only if you want to live your dreams!