Its also not worth your time and energy, because its a shoulder injury waiting to happen. And if youre smart, youre going to walk away from this one, instead of tearing a delicate shoulder tendon while undertaking this 10-minute bout with stupidity.

Heres the thing with CrossFit: Not every workout is bad. After nine years of the CrossFit Open, youve very likely heard both sides of the CrossFit narrative. Its proponents will tell you that its the ultimate fitness competition, that it creates a unique sense of fitness community, and that its the one workout that can get an average Joe to push his heart rate through the roof. Its critics, meanwhile, will tell you that its workouts are injuries waiting to happen, and that every new box that opens is worth a new Lamborghini to your local chiropractor.

The truth about CrossFit lies somewhere in between. But 19.3 manages to be the worst of CrossFit.

Heres Training 101: You progress to a everything. You work towards a 225-pound bench press by gradually increasing your bench press, work toward a complicated gymnastics move by breaking it into smaller parts, mastering each part, then performing the whole. And once youve gained some mastery over the move, you can test yourself in that move.

Heres what 19.3 does: It attempts to fatigue the most delicate joint in your body, then it tests that joint in a brand new position thats nobody could prepare for, that some CrossFit boxes dont even train, and that half the population isnt ready for: The strict handstand pushup.

Youre in a dangerous position to start 19.3. Well before reaching the handstand pushups, guys hoist a single 50-pound dumbbell overhead, hold it there, and lunge 200 meters. You can switch the weight between hands at any time, but regardless of that, you have a hefty amount of weight above your shoulders for a sustained period of time.

Why is that bad? Because most humans, courtesy of desk jobs and a variety of other issues, cant even find the overhead position correctly.

Getting a straight arm directly overhead in truly balanced, controlled, and safe fashion requires you to do more than you think. First, your deltoid, your meatiest shoulder muscle, raises your arm so its nearly perpendicular to the floor -- but its not the only muscle doing the work. To finish things up and get your arm fully perpendicular with the floor, a handful of smaller back muscles must also contract.

Most people dont execute this as cleanly as you think. Stand in front of your mirror, so you can see the side of your torso, and try lifting your shoulder overhead. Before you reach that fully-perpendicular position, did your ribcage start to open up? Did you start to arch your back?

These are all compensations for a lack of pure shoulder mobility, and theyre more common than you think. Theyre also present in even the best athletes, top NFL and NBA players and MLB stars.

To small degrees, theyre not helpful, but to larger degrees, they can be cause for concern. If you cant get your shoulder overhead with clean (or close-to-clean) mechanics, theres a chance that the humerus (the long bone of your upper arm) can get very close to your clavicle (your collarbone) as you approach that overhead shoulder position.

When the space between those two bones get close, in that overhead position, your rotator cuff tendons can get squeezed by bone, and get an opportunity to fray. Thats how shoulder tendon issues very often start. And shoulder tendon issues dont go away easily, like muscle pulls and some other injuries.

What does this have to do with 19.3? Hows your overhead position? Do you actually know beyond the kip thats saved your pullups and saved your handstand pushups since the beginning of your CrossFit education?

Do you know how to safely hoist and hold a 50-pound dumbbell overhead while controlling that ribcage flair? Do you pull your shoulder blade and shoulder complex down to do that? Or do you keep pushing up? And does it matter, since youre going to work to a nasty fatigue point? Because heres what people do when they get fatigued: They revert to their most natural mechanics. Oh, and those mechanics break down and get sloppy, too.

Shoulder cant take it? Well, if youre keeping that dumbbell up high, something else will take the brunt of the work. So youll arch through your mid-back (your thoracic spine) or, worse, you may arch your lower back. CrossFit 19.3 offers to zones for this nightmarish positioning: The overhead lunges at the beginning and the handstand pushups later on.

So heres what happens in 19.3: You start out with 200 feets of hell that are designed to put you in bad shoulder and back positions. Youre doing these lunges with that single dumbbell overhead, shouldering a heavy load.

You should be pushing your shoulder high as you do this, trying to create as much joint space as possible through the entire motion. But by the end of 200 feet, you can expect to have a good layer of fatigue from all that overhead work. Your shoulder might even be a little bit sore.

Your reward for that overhead work: A quick breather for your shoulders in the form of some box step-up work (thanks CrossFit!). And then, after a few scant minutes, its onto more shoulder-isolating work in the form of handstand pushups.

And these handstand pushups are special for several reasons. Among them: CrossFit wants you loading your shoulders more than you ever have before on a handstand pushup. If youve ever been to a CrossFit class with handstand pushups, youve seen a handstand turn into a headstand, then turn into a barely-there handstand, with every CrossFitter in the gym dipping their legs low, then missiling those legs back upwards to create momentum and help drive their shoulders upward.Thats how CrossFitters are most familiar with the handstand pushup, how theyve been trained to do it, and how theyve learned to judge and push past their shoulder fatigue.

Thats not how youll do them in 19.3. In 19.3, youre doing 50 strict handstand pushups (or as strict as CrossFit likes to make its arbitrary, self-serving movement standards in that youre still using a wall). By removing the kip, from the equation, youre now loading your shoulders that much more aggressively, in something closer to a standard military press.

Military presses are great and all, except this press occurs with your torso upside down, with plenty of bodyweight load, and with your feet against the wall. That creates a ton of opportunity for back arching as you look for ways to alleviate some of the new strain on your shoulders. And thats a ton of opportunity for injury.

Walk. Away. Unless youre trying to win the Games, you dont need this challenge, because its not a smart one. One of the strengths of CrossFit is the creativity of its programming; its because of CrossFit that EMOMs and AMRAPs are well-known.

The weakness of CrossFit has long been an inability to marry that creativity to smarts and safety. Single workouts rarely consider anterior/posterior balance, fail to consider the risks of overhead pressing (hey, look at 19.3!), and dont understand the sheer stupidity of the American kettlebell swing (but that ones another column). And 19.3 is a programmed shoulder nightmare waiting to happen.

So why even bother doing it? No, its not easy to walk away from a fitness challenge, especially one in a competition thats designed around the idea that you, too, dear Average Joe, are an athlete. And thats partly why CrossFit bills its competition around the idea that its competitors are the fittest athletes on Earth: Its designed to make you feel like an athlete when you run yourself through a brick wall of pain and shoulder soreness.

Newsflash: The true fittest guys on earth, the true athletes, the NFL players and NBA stars and world-class sprinters? Those athletes only run themselves through brick walls of pain and soreness and Toradol because they get paid. Pro athletes know when not to do a competition, because its not worth it.

Be a pro on this one, and pass on it. Dont get lured in by the mystique of CrossFit, especially when doing the RXed weights on this one. There are safer ways to build your shoulders.

In a decade, when youre not earning any money for your CrossFit exploits, but youre still trying to stay in shape, your body will thank you.