“CrossFit is different from other competitions because in other sports, I have always had a team to rely on, but when you compete in CrossFit, it is all up to you.”
To Ignacio Caviglia, playing sports has always been a daily activity. The 20-year-old has participated in rugby, soccer, horseback riding and more recently, ice hockey and professional inline ice hockey. He is currently a player on the Argentine inline hockey team.
Caviglia found CrossFit at a globo gym.
“I was doing one exercise and this guy came over and corrected my form,” he recalls. “After that, we started talking and it turned out that he was a CrossFit coach, so he invited me to give CrossFit a try at his box … and so I did.”
That coach was Juan Cruz Sartori, owner of CrossFit Argos and a recognized athlete in the Latin America CrossFit community.
“At first, I considered CrossFit as a good conditioning tool for inline hockey,” Caviglia says.
But it soon turned into another passion. A couple of months ago, he travelled to Chile for work and had the opportunity to attend a seminar run by two-time CrossFit Games champion, Rich Froning. For Caviglia, this affirmed his commitment to CrossFit.
In 2012, soon after first starting CrossFit, Caviglia participated in the Open. He did well enough to earn a spot at Regionals, but a hockey game resulted in an ankle sprain and he wasn’t able to compete.
Later that year, he had knee surgery and was forced to take the rest of the hockey season off to recover. He was able to return to CrossFit, which contributed to his recovery, he says.
“Many CrossFit movements were also some of the exercises that my physical therapist had recommended, so I trained only CrossFit during that time,” Caviglia says.
With such a varied athletic background, Caviglia says he is pretty comfortable with constantly varied movements, which is why he and his coach feel quite confident after only 18 months of CrossFit.
“I have been working a lot on my Olympic lifts and my knee has been improving tremendously, so I expect to have good results in the Open,” Caviglia says.
His training schedule is usually pretty hectic.
“I have inline hockey practice almost every day,” he says.
But now that he’s in the offseason, he has more available time to train CrossFit, so he does so four times a week.
He does, however, struggle with his diet.
“I find it really hard to stay on a diet … and the times when I did try it, I didn't really notice a huge difference,” he says. “But I never really stayed on them that long either.”
Caviglia is no stranger to competitive environments, but even this seasoned athlete has to adjust.
“CrossFit is different from other competitions,” he explains, “because in other sports, I have always had a team to rely on, but when you compete in CrossFit, it is all up to you.”
Caviglia scored 152 reps on 13.1 for an 84th place in Latin America, and 270 reps on 13.2, successfully overcoming some initial discomfort on his knee (which is still in recovery) due to the high-volume box jumps. He recorded an impressive 259 reps on 13.3 and currently sits in 39th place in Latin America.
He is most definitely a contender to pay attention to in the following weeks.
