Simone Arthur And CrossFit: What It Takes To Be Elite

Simone Arthur is one of Australia’s fittest women. At 27 years old,  her sheer resilience, passion, and excitement towards the world of CrossFit has earned her plenty of fame within the CrossFit community. On episode 46 of the Rebuild Health and Fitness Podcast, Simone discusses her journey into the sport, the mammoth effort that goes on behind the scenes, and the intensive training that is required to be even simply decent at CrossFit. CrossFit, a form of high intensity interval training (HIIT), is known as a conditioning and strength workout made from functional movements performed at a high intensity. It’s not only a form of exercise but also is a competitive fitness sport – involving combinations of elements of a high intensity workout, Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics and powerlifting. The opportunity to do things differently came about when Simone was a year away from completing high school, where she’d been playing soccer locally. “One of our coaches told me he got a coaching job at a university in the United States, and asked me if I’d wanted to play for his team,” she says. “I was just playing soccer locally, I had just thought okay I’ll get done with school, go to university, just take that route. But this happened and I thought I’ll just go this way then.'A few ups and downs in the States led her to find weight-lifting, which slowly became the first step and everything else from there followed. “I was always a bit of a gym junkie, just going in to lift weights. I was used to the traditional bench press and deadlifts but once we did a hang power clean in the States, it was nuts. I found it really cool and that was where my interest in weight-lifting came from.”Arthur weighs in at 59kgs, and measures up at 159cm - small in stature but only in that, she can clean and jerk over 100 kgs, back squat over 130 kgs and deadlift over 160 kgs – all while being able to sprint fast, do endurance events, handstands and push-ups.Simone discovered CrossFit after she moved back to Australia from the States, unsure of what she wanted to do.  She says came across a video of her cousin, James Newbury, doing the ‘Randy’ workout from the 2015 CrossFit regionals. “I saw that and I thought, ‘that’s pretty cool, I want to do that,’” says Simone. She then made the switch and moved down to live closer to James, where she officially began her training.“It’s not like I came from nothing, I knew my way around the gym, and I’d been playing soccer my whole life so I had a foundation in playing high-level sport. The gymnastics aspect was super hard and like, figuring out how to do pull ups was hard”, says Simone. All it took was for Simone to incorporate more of what she couldn’t do, and to be consistent, before she found her way around all of it.Coming from a CrossFit star herself, Simone spoke about the immense effort and resilience required to excel at the sport. “To be good at this, I’m training morning and night; twice a day, to be good. If you want to be excellent then CrossFit needs to be your entire life. You have to wake up every day with a sole goal, to win at the CrossFit games. You hear about all these great athletes and how they leave their day jobs to be good at what they do” says Simone.Simone says though, people often underestimate the dedication, time and consequences of the sport.“I rely a lot on the people around me to do what I’m able to do. To train for these many hours, you put your blinders on and forget that there’s family and friends or a partner, its definitely something where they do take a back seat and its hard, but you see it in retrospect,' she says. “I have to remind myself, this is something I choose to do. I don’t have to do it, I just choose to do it.”Having competed at both regionals and sanctionals since 2017, Simone competed at the Torian Pro - Australia’s premier functional fitness festival, on May 29 2021 – ready to add more achievements to her existing list.Tune in to the podcast below, and see her on Instagram @SimoneJaneArthur.