I think anyone who does CrossFit has done it for a year or so.
I think if you asked them, you said, are you now a more moral creature than you were
a year ago?
I bet most of them would say yes they are.
Look, if you come in and follow sort of the CrossFit or the high intensity strength training,
your body is going to respond with what we know, what we call neuroendocrine response.
It's going to respond in a way to make you basically the awesomest, sorry, the awesomest
that you can be as a human.
But I would suggest that there's been changes in their brain in the emotional system, the
limbic system, and in other parts of the brain that have actually made them a better person.
Your brain is everything, 30 to 40 percent of your body's energy is taken up by your
brain.
The blood flow of your body is to the brain, and so if your vascular system is not working
appropriately because you've got high cholesterol, it's going to impede your cognition and other
functions of your brain.
What we did was we asked participants who didn't know each other to work together to
solve a problem.
We scanned their brains simultaneously using functional magnetic resonance imaging or
FMRI.
What we found is that people enjoyed working together.
That is an activated reward parts of the brain, part of the brain called a cardiac nucleus
in particular.
What's happening is there's a reward circuitry, principally governed by neurotransmitter known
as dopamine.
What we know about the cardiac nucleus is that it's what we call highly dopaminergic.
That is, it's reactive to the neurotransmitter dopamine.
That fires off when we engage in things that give us pleasure or reward.
But what's even more interesting is that when they work together and successfully completed
the maze or the problem, they cooperated successfully, it was inherently more rewarding
than if they did it by themselves.
The reward system definitely triggers when we engage in social activity because it's
to our advantage as a species to be social organisms.
We've evolved such that in that manner, the hunter-gatherer society, we need to get together.
Those who evolved individually died off, and the rest of us, we evolved in such a way that
our social interaction is more advantageous to our survival.
And so evolutionarily, what has happened is our species is a social species.
Rewarding cooperation has been favored through natural selection, through evolution by natural
selection because it's rewarding in our brain.
But the other major role for dopamine in our body is movement.
We evolved to exercise.
We evolved to get out there and hunt the animal or to squat down and pull up that root.
And those of us who are not doing that kind of thing now, those of us who are not exercising
in a diverse way like we do in CrossFit, are actually aberrant to our species, and the result
is that our bodies are rebelling by becoming diabetic, obese, atherosclerotic, etc.
So it turns out that movement is highly rewarding, and we know this from data taken from sedentary
people.
People who are sedentary, people who sit on the couch, eat Cheetos, and watch Jersey
Shore, I guess, right?
They have a much higher likelihood of developing major depression because of their sedentary
nature.
And one of the best ways to immunize individuals from depression, especially young individuals,
is to get them moving.
That brief moment at the end of a wad where you and your friend who both finished a really
tough wad, and you turn to that friend of yours and you give him a high five and you
say that sucked, that bond, that link that you have for that one moment, fires that reward
system such that you want to come back the next day and do the same thing.
So you feel like, man, I'm right there with him.
I'm going through it.
When you do that, not only do you have a dopamine, or you don't have an endorphin
rush there, right?
Like, I don't like literally feel his pain, but I do feel the motor aspects of it.
And the way that that happens is via a really cool neurological process.
There are these, I'm going to say they're called their neurons, but it's actually parts
of the brain that are called mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are really interesting, especially as an athlete.
It's fascinating, but it's what is observed in research and in laboratories as well.
This dopaminergic reward system is fired in the setting of shared adversity.
So every time you see somebody do something, even if you just see somebody walk, wave their
hand, yawn, shake their head, do fran, huge cleaning jerk, your brain is firing as if
you did that movement, right?
So that is a huge input to our empathy system.
You know, in a very strange way, when we're working out in these boxes throughout the
country, we're making people into morally better people because they're willing to face
their fears or to overcome them.
So these things all intertwine together.
When I think about CrossFit, we're all working towards the same goal.
We're all experiencing the same blood, sweat, and tears, right?
You know, when you're done fran, holy moly, right?
You're like, this is horrible.
Why did I do that?
And then you stand up and you cheer for the guy who's starting or hasn't finished yet,
because you can empathize with that.
Part of that empathy is this capacity for like, I know what you're going through.
I feel your pain.
You're going in the same direction as I am.
And when you introduce that person into society, it's like a virus, you know?
They will infect other people that don't work out.
And maybe those people that don't work out will start to see what you're doing and, you
know, start to work out themselves and then get back to what they genuinely are and what
we are as a species, which is, which are organisms that move a lot, that take risks,
socialize, and that bond, and that tries to make our environment a better place.
