Alexander Zahariev is the coach who is always ready to “put himself in the shoes of the others”. In other words, he won’t make you do something you don’t want to. He plays tennis and has developed a special CrossFit workout targeted for tennis preparation. A little more about him in the next rows.

You’re… Alexander Zahariev.

You started practicing CrossFit because… I’ve been interested in the general physical preparedness for a long time. My interest aroused after a student tennis tournament where I played three games and on the third one I could barely walk, and I was about 20 years old by that time. My opponent was much fresher and older than me. I thought that’s not normal and I have to do something about it. And hence started the workouts for general physical preparedness, which are tennis-oriented, running drills, exercise complexes to improve your physical condition so that you can play longer at a good level.

So CrossFit can be useful as a physical preparation for other sports as well…  Of course. There are quite a lot of professional athletes practicing CrossFit. However, everything should be measured in terms of workouts and physical performance in view of the particular type of sport, the stage of preparation, competitions, etc. But the logic is simple: CrossFit can be very useful because it focuses not only on the area where the athlete is strong but on the whole body as well. And hence progress is made at the particular sport.

CrossFit is actually… in my case, a cool group of people who do together a variety of workouts, which are rarely repeated and have a good effect. There are two key things that are also in connection – diversity and entertainment.

The difference between fitness and CrossFit… are the functional movements. In fitness, you focus on a specific movement, a specific muscle, while in CrossFit you perform movements and complexes that work on your whole body.

You decided to become a coach because… It was interesting to me. I wanted to see what the next level was.

The responsibility to be a coach requires… to be careful instead of the people who train. The most important thing I watch for is the proper implementation of the elements, which reduces the risk of injuries. This is a priority number 1. The second priority is not to make the training a job or an obligation but to make it pleasant and running in a fun way, because this is how people will come back to the gym. I have seen it myself – when we were running, just for the sake of improving our time, at some point I started to decrease the frequency of the runs because it was no longer fun…

Isn’t it the core of CrossFit to constantly improve yourself… This rather happens by itself. Once you have the diversity and the various workouts, you improve without effort in many directions. It happens naturally.

Some of the hardest workouts in CrossFit have names. If you were such a workout, you would have been… I don’t know. Michael was the first workout with a hero name that I did and finished and so I remember it. It is certainly one of the easier workouts of this type. Otherwise, in CrossFit, workouts with girls’ names are indicative and are used as benchmarks to measure progress, as they are repeated 1-2 times a year, and workouts with men’s names are brutal as a physical activity and are named after dead troops from the US army.

To create CrossFit Serdika was… a long process for the four of us who were there from the beginning – Koko, Roman, Niki and I. We went through a lot of things and we overcame them, we learned some lessons, others are still ahead and, ultimately, we are on the way to realize it. A lot of time spent, emotions, money. But that is not the most important thing – what is important is to make it happen, the way we imagine it and want it. And then it will be worth everything.

At this stage of your life your biggest achievement is… my family.

To everyone who enters the CrossFit Serdika gym, you say… Hello.