Venn diagrams show relationships between sets of ideas, and Tyler Hass thinks they help explain CrossFit’s success.
Venn diagrams are a simple and effective visual representation of concepts and their relationships. They work by putting a concept into a circle. Any place where circles intersect shows a relationship between them, resulting in a new idea or concept. The Venn diagram comes out of mathematics and is a powerful tool for exploring ideas and relationships.
To understand CrossFit, the three most important concepts are functionality, variance and intensity. These three principles are the foundation of CrossFit. A lot of training programs and sports have one or two of these qualities, but CrossFit is the first that is built around all three. You can’t take one away from a training system and still call it CrossFit. However, being “incomplete” doesn’t make a sport bad. And as we’ll see, at the intersections of two of the three circles, we will find the component sports and activities that make up CrossFit.