CrossFit Open
What is the CrossFit Open
From Games.CrossFit.com:
“Where grassroots meets greatness: Compete with hundreds of thousands of athletes in five workouts over five weeks. Do it for fun, your affiliate family, fitness, or to reach regionals and fight for a chance to make it to the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games.
The Games season is broken up into three stages. The first stage is the Open. This five-week, five-workout competition is held in the winter in CrossFit affiliates and garage gyms around the world. Workouts are released online each Thursday, and athletes have until the following Monday to submit their scores. Anyone who's at least 14 years old can sign up, and join in the first stage of the CrossFit Games season.
The top athletes from each of the 17 regions qualify for the second stage of the competition—regionals. The regionals are live, three-day competitions that are held in May. The top athletes from two or three regions combine, and compete for the five qualifying spots for the CrossFit Games .
The season culminates in the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games. At this point in the season, the field has been whittled down from hundreds of thousands of athletes in the Open to the world's fittest 40 men, 40 women, 40 teams, 80 teenagers, and 240 masters. The CrossFit Games rank the world's fittest, and determine who is the Fittest on Earth.
A key element to a fair test of fitness is the unknown and unknowable. Athletes cannot train for what they do not know. At each CrossFit Games, the athletes engage in a series of challenges unknown to them until right before the competition. The combination of highly trained athletes and unknown events makes for an explosive mix.”
When is the CrossFit Open
The online Open competition spans five weeks. Workouts are announced Thursdays at 7:00 PM CST as CrossFit broadcasts the weekly Open workout announcement live on Facebook or YouTube. After the weekly workout is announced, some of the world’s best CrossFitters compete against each other in the workout during the broadcast. Open participants then have until Monday night to perform and video their workout with a judge and submit their scores online.
The first of five Open workouts is announced Thursday night, February 22, 2018. Each additional workout will be announced the subsequent Thursday nights.
What types of work-outs are in the CrossFit Open
At CrossFit City Limits, our programming is designed to be CrossFit with a strength bias. As such, our typical workouts seen in classes will be very similar to the Open workouts that are announced. You have likely done previous Open workouts in classes without even knowing it. You can find archived workouts at Games.CrossFit.com.
How to Participate at CrossFit City Limits
There are a number of ways to participate in the Open and choosing the right one is crucial to making the Open experience enjoyable. 99% of us do not have ambitions to compete in high-level CrossFit competitions, so I’ll start by speaking to the majority of us. So, for 99% of us, we will not be registering for the official online open and we will simply be participating in the Open by completing the workouts each week in regular classes. We will do this without submitting our scores online and therefore do not need a judge or to video our workouts. We can still use the world-wide, online leaderboard if we want to see how we did relative to the world-wide community on particular work-outs, just our name will not be part of the leaderboard. The Open workouts are a great time, even for us non-competitors, to put ourselves in competition mode. There will be a lot of excitement and talk about the Open workouts at the gym and on social media and can provide a fun experience of planning optimal strategy for a workout, putting 100% effort into a workout, and dealing with the nerves that come along with treating a workout like it means more than a regular day in class. Done correctly, this is a great time to test your fitness, do something that gets you a little out of your comfort zone, and get some baselines on workouts we will likely do again in the future. Additionally, if you are not interested in this at all, it won’t matter because you can also treat the workouts like just another day in class.
At CrossFit City Limits, we will be performing the Open Workouts the following Monday in classes after they are announced.
Our programming at CFCL is designed to peak for the Open. As such, we are starting our last macrocycle in preparation for the Open, so it will be a great time to set some new PRs and really challenge ourselves.
If you want to register and are interested in seeing your name on the worldwide on-line Open leader board, you can complete the workouts anytime during open gym and there are a few things for which you need to plan:
1. You will be held to CrossFit standards for all movements and you will be required to take the judges course to become familiar with movement standards and the ability to judge for other online competitors.
2. You will need to plan ahead of time to have a judge to judge every rep on each of your workouts. You must organize and find your own judge from CFCL (someone who has also taken the judges course) Score sheets will be made available for print from games.crossfit.com on Friday mornings and scorecards and videos will be submitted to Kyle by Monday at noon.
3. Your workout scores must be submitted online by the due date.
4. If you are attempting to qualify for regionals, then you will need to record every workout and your video must be submitted by the due date.
Standards and video Submissions must be up to the CrossFit movement standards. Ever year there is controversy about movements and videos submitted. The controversial videos not only tarnish the name of the athlete, but also the gym who verified the video. It is extremely important that CrossFit City Limits’ reputation is maintained, so it is possible for your video to be denied if it does not follow the video standards exactly.
CFCL coaches make for tremendous judges and can be available to judge your work-outs. If you would like a CFCL coach to judge your work-out, please email the gym, so we can get you in contact with a coach to schedule a time. The judging fee will be $15 plus $1 per work-out minute. The fee for a 7-minute AMRAP would be $15 + $7 = $22.
In which Division should I participate?
There are gender divisions and different age groups. Within each of these are RX and Scaled. If you are submitting your scores officially online, you must choose a division and stick with it. If you are part of the 99% who are just participating for fun and not submitting scores online, you can choose which work-out variation you’d like on a work-out by work-out case.
Movements Historically Required for each Division
Rx’ed
1. Double Unders
2. Handstand Push-ups
3. Muscle ups (Bar and Ring)
4. Chest-to-bar Pull-ups
5. Toes-to-bars
6. Squat Snatches and Power Snatches
7. Squat Cleans and Power Cleans
8. Push Press, Push Jerk, Split Jerk, Shoulder-to-overhead
9. Clean and Jerk/Ground-to-overhead
10. Overhead Squat
11. Wallballs
12. Thrusters
13. Deadlift
14. Box Jump
15. Burpees
16. Row
17. Shoulder to Overhead
18. Dumbbell Snatches
19. Burpee Box Jump-overs
20. Dumbbell Cleans
21. Dumbbell Lunges
22. OH Lunges
Scaled
1. Overhead Squats
2. Squat Snatches and Power Snatches
3. Squat Cleans and Power Cleans
4. Push Press, Push Jerk, Split Jerk, Shoulder-to-overhead
5. Clean and Jerk/Ground-to-overhead
6. Jumping Chest-to-bar Pull-ups
7. Jumping Pull-ups
8. Thrusters
9. Single Unders
10. Hand Release Push-ups
11. Row
12. Wallballs
13. Deadlifts
14. Hanging Knee Raises
15. Dumbbell Lunges
16. Dumbbell power cleans
17. Dumbbell snatch
18. Burpee box jump-overs
Skills and Mobility Prep
We have seen it every single year and assume this year will be no different. The open workout will be announced and will include a high skill movement like muscle-ups, handstand push-ups, chest-to-bar pull-ups, double-unders, heavy Olympic lifting, or overhead squats. People start freaking out as they hear the announcements and realize they need to improve on the movement and at this point it is too late. You may be able to improve your skills a little bit, but you have missed the opportunity of prepping months before hand.
If you are going to register for the Open RX division or want to do the Open workouts RX’ed, then now is the time to practice those skills. Before or after class, replacing a class, or doing personal trainings with a coach are necessary to develop the high skill required for RX’ed workouts. If you would like to schedule a personal training session, please email the gym. Sessions are $75 an hour and can be purchased at a discount in packages. Technique is crucial for developing skills, so having an expert coach’s eye assist you can have a dramatic impact on your Open season.
We plan to host a Workout, Mobility, and Skills Prep session Friday nights after the Open workouts are announced. We will discuss the workout standards, strategies, work on any skills required for the movements, and have a mobility session to prep our bodies for the workout. These Open Prep sessions will be $15 each and only $60 if you buy the package of 5.
CrossFit Open Macrocycle
The workouts you complete in class are far from random. There is very specific periodization and methods used to develop our overall fitness. The coaches at CrossFit City Limits have a ton of experience with proven results creating workout programs that fit the goals and needs of our members. Below is some insight into what the next three months of workouts will look like.
The week of November 20th starts our CrossFit Open (See: What is the CrossFit Open?) macrocycle allowing us to build and peak for the CrossFit Open workouts in late February. This macrocycle is built with 2 preparation mesocycles and 1 pre-competition mesocycle allowing maximal results with our time in the gym. As we continue to work on skills, we will also build bodies, create efficiency using our bodies, and peak for a specific date.
Preparation Mesocycle 1/2: Build. This is a month of higher volume workouts meant to bias building bigger muscle fibers and muscle endurance. Look for bigger sets and more reps.
Preparation Mesocycle 2/2: Learn to Use. This is a month of slightly less volume workouts meant to build on the previous preparation mesocycle and develop strength with our bigger muscle fibers. Look for sets with heavier weights that build linearly from the previous week.
Pre-competition Mesocycle 1/1: Peak. This is a lower volume, higher intensity month designed for us to take advantage of recovery and supercompensation to be at our best for the Open workouts. We will start to move towards maximal strength and then back off with speed work to allow our bodies to be ready for a slew of personal records late February and early March. Look for 1 RM’s early and more Olympic-style weightlifting for speed and power leading up to the start of the Open.
In addition to the focus on peaking our overall fitness and strength gains, skills mini-cycles will be implemented to ensure adequate practice and development of the more complex movements that have been historically required in the RX division of the Open workouts. These skills include: Handstand Push-ups, Handstand Walking, Chest-to-bar Pull-ups, Toes-to-bars, Muscle-ups, Double Unders, Squat Snatches, Squat Cleans, and Split Jerks. Look for skill sessions that build off each other for 3-4 weeks at a time.
Enjoy!
Kyle