It has been a year and a half since the last CrossFit Open and a whole lot of changes have occurred as well. Many of you are probably wondering what it means for you personally. A lot of you might not have participated in the Open before and are wondering what exactly it is. I want to take this opportunity to briefly walk through the changes to the Open and what it means for each of you individually.
Let's start off with a brief overview of the CrossFit Open. What exactly is it? The CrossFit Open started in 2011 as the first stage in qualifying for the CrossFit Games (which started in 2007). For the first two years of the CrossFit Games (2007 and 2008) you could just sign up and compete, but as participation grew they added qualifying competitions for the next two years (2009 and 2010) which were on site competitions. As the field continued to grow, CrossFit HQ realized that they needed to add another level of qualification to keep up with demand. This led to the CrossFit Open in 2011, which was an online competition that consisted of 1 workout a week for 6 weeks. From the Open you could qualify for regionals, which was an in person competition that you could qualify for the games for. There have been a lot of iterations over the years (which I will not go into detail here) but they have all led us to 2021.
There have been many changes at CrossFit HQ over the past year, with one of the main ones being the CrossFit Open. For starters they moved it back to the spring (the last open was held in the fall of 2019) and shortened it from 5 weeks (which it has been since 2012) to three weeks long. They also changed the qualification structure for the CrossFit Games. The next stage after the CrossFit Open is what they are calling the Quarterfinals. This will include the top 10% finishers from each continent and will be another online competition over one weekend in April. If you finish in the top 120 in North America (for our purposes) in the Quarterfinal you will qualify for a Semifinal. There will be 4 semifinal events throughout North America that will take place in May and June. Finally, the top 5 finishers from each Semifinal will qualify for the CrossFit Games, which will take place in July.
That is a lot of info I just threw at you but I wanted to give some context as to why the CrossFit Open even exists. So now you might be wondering where you fit in to all of this. Should you do the Open? How should you participate? What should your goals be? Let me answer each question separately.
The first question you might be asking yourself is if you should participate. As a gym we will be doing the Open workouts in class every Friday for the next three weeks. We will also be doing an Intramural Open where each location will compete against the others to win a trophy and a banner in their gym. If you are going to come to class on Friday you will be doing the workout, in whatever form you can, on Friday anyways. The only other step you would have to take to participate would be to sign up on the website (games.crossfit.com), have a judge count your reps (which we will provide), and submit your score on the website each week. It truly is that easy. There will also be multiple variations of each workout, including an at home, no equipment option. So why should you participate? I think that any competition is going to bring the best out in most people. It will push you to do things you might not do otherwise. It will also help connect you to the hundreds of thousands of people doing the same workout around the world. Pretty cool! You can also help your home gym compete in the Intramural Open, which adds another layer of teamwork and bonding. Finally, having something to train for and to complete can motivate you to take your training to the next level (whatever level that may be for you) so that you can improve on your worldwide, statewide, or gym wide ranking next year. There is nothing quite like a leaderboard to hold you accountable and push you to do things you wouldn't normally do.
So let's say you do decide to do the Open. How should you approach it? I'm going to address three different types of people here.
1. The average gym goer. This type of person comes to the gym to live a fit and healthy lifestyle. Most days they do the Fitness or the Performance track in class. I would recommend doing the workout in class on Friday, submitting your score on Friday, and then forgetting about it. Don't spend your time looking on the leaderboard until the competition is over with. There is no point in worrying about where you will finish or who beat you. Use the competition for what it is-something fun to do to push you a little bit harder than normal and to motivate you to train hard for the next year. Nothing else. Doing even think about redoing the workouts.
2. The borderline Quarterfinals athlete. This person typically follows the Performance and Competition tracks and wants to see if they can qualify for the Quarterfinals. They feel like they have a good chance of making it into the top 10% of the competitors on the continent, whether in the Open, Masters, or Teen divisions. This is the ONLY group that I would recommend repeating workouts. For this group that might be right on the bubble a few reps can make the difference between moving on or not. I would do the workout Friday, then rest and recover on Saturday and Sunday for a repeat on Monday. The one caveat to this is to realize that you will be sacrificing some progress to try to qualify for the next stage. If you are willing to make this sacrifice then by all means repeat every workout!
3. The Quarterfinals shoe-in. This type of person has done the Open before and knows they will fall well inside the top 10% (either Open, Masters, or Teens). I would recommend that this person hits the workout hard on Friday and then continue training the rest of the week as normal. The next stage will be the most important stage to prepare for so everything done during the Open should be to prepare for this stage.
Finally, I want to end by saying that whether you do or do not do the Open is not a big deal at all. There are some great reasons to participate but if you decide that you don't want to then that is completely fine and no one will judge you either way. If you have other goals that are much more important than participating in the Open than continue to focus on those. This also goes for everyone participating in the Open. Remember that, at the end of the day, no one is going to care about your Open finish. Have some fun, give it your all in the workout, and then move on. Keep the end in mind and let's get after it!