After his right leg was crushed between two ships while serving in the Navy in Somalia in 2009, Alec Zirkenbach spent almost a year rehabbing before deploying again. Zirkenbach (above, right) leaned into CrossFit to forge the fitness he needed to serve—he says the community spirit saved him—and just before leaving the Navy, he founded Fathom CrossFit in San Diego in 2012. The initial goal was to provide a space where wounded soldiers could train, but that quickly expanded to include all people with disabilities. “Fitness isn’t specifically aesthetics,” he says. “It’s not siloed [away from] your mental health—it’s all connected. Without community-based fitness and a supportive network, I wouldn’t exist today.”
Zirkenbach’s personal experience, as well as what he learned in talking with other veterans, athletes, trainers, doctors, and therapists, led him to develop an adaptive training program for CrossFit and eventually to form the Adaptive Training Academy (ATA) in 2017. It provides fitness professionals with the skills they need to train those with physiological and cognitive impairments, whether that means adjusting exercises for amputees or creating programs for people in wheelchairs.
“One quarter of Americans have a disability, but when you walk into a gym, that’s not what you see, even accounting for people without visually expressive conditions like neuromuscular impairments,” he says. “In every fitness facility, there should be at least one trainer that has taken some [adaptive training] education, preferably ours.” So far, 2,700 trainers have graduated from ATA. Zirkenbach is also the accessibility and adaptive sport specialist for CrossFit and runs the CrossFit Games’ adaptive program, which now has eight categories.