If you got through the 5 weeks of the Open, congrats. You should be proud of yourself. These are challenging workouts designed to test the fittest people in the world!
For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to use the Open as the main reference. However, you can use the same principles for anything you have going on. Maybe you’ve just finished a work project or you organized a big event. You can always look back and evaluate.
The Open will always test a handful of these skills; TTB, double unders, muscle ups, HSPU, pull-ups, etc. All whilst testing your strength, muscle endurance, and aerobic capacity. This is a known fact and I will bet you $1000 most of them are re-tested again in October (the 2nd Open of the year).
We know what will be tested we just can’t say for sure how it will be tested but we can make some pretty good guesses with all the data we have. I’d say we are in a pretty good position to train for the Open if that’s one of your goals (totally cool if it isn’t).
I’ve got two stories to tell you:
The first is about someone who came to see the gym because they have been doing CrossFit for years (mainly at home) and every Open they still can’t do the same skills as the previous year. This person seemed pretty frustrated and we had a good chat about getting them involved here to start leveling up their training. This was two weeks ago and I’ve not seen them again, yet!
The second story is about one of my members. Last month Zenplanner (our gym software) added a feature where you can see your attendance totals each month. This member was a bit shocked to see their attendance was lower than they thought. Since then I’ve seen them in the gym almost every day.
In one of these stories, the person took action and the other didn’t/hasn’t yet.
A test like the Open, or an exam, or a work project, will give you a unique opportunity to learn something about yourself and about your current competency levels. What you do afterward will determine how good of a learning experience that test was.
Heres my advice if you weren’t happy with your performance in the Open and how to use the next 6 months to improve:
- Sit down with your coach and list all the movements you couldn’t do or the ones that were difficult
- Devise a plan to tackle all the ‘low hanging fruit’ – things like double unders that only require practice rather than getting stronger.
- Categorize movements that require similar muscle groups that you may lack – pull-ups and bar muscle ups and TTB may not be great because you need to improve your kip for instance
- Add some private coaching into your routine – if you have specific goals, this will help tremendously
- Do it all NOW! Don’t wait until the next test is here to start wishing you had done something.
If you want some help creating your plan, click on the link below:
Thanks for reading
Darren