CLOSING THE FITNESS GAP
If you got through the 2024 CrossFit Open, I would like to say congratulations! It is always a fun time of the year for avid crossfitters who love to push and challenge themselves.
Throughout the weeks, you might of said things to yourself like “ouf my burpees need work” or “I really struggle with cardio” or even maybe “those weights were pretty heavy for me.”
Everyone would have had a different experience depending on where they are in their fitness journey and that’s totally okay!
Now, what should you do? You were placed on a leaderboard, and even though it is put up against others – it really is not JUST a competition. But a beautiful way to see where your fitness weaknesses are in relation to your peers.
Why does that matter?
Well in CrossFit the goal is to see any fitness component pop up and we can hopefully do everything fairly well. The best of the best will have less of a discrepancy between week to week placements.
Example, the winner on the women’s side placed 8th, 3rd and 24th in her workouts. All fairly close together. Which tends to be fairly common for the elite as they have closed the gap on their weaknesses.
Folks like you and I how ever, might have a bigger difference in placement. Lets take myself for example, I finished 27 260th in week 1 and then 7520th in week 2. There is clearly a large gap between the two – so what I take from it is, I might need to build up my burpee speed/capacity up a little bit more to balance out my fitness and become more well rounded.
The cool thing about looking at it this way as opposed to it being a competition, is it’s nothing more than just statistics on a year to year basis. Can I close the gap between my placings and maybe keep workouts that might look similar more within 8000 spots as opposed to 20000. If that happens, I have probably improved on a few components of fitness that I lacked previously.
Ok so now what? Well, now you have a better idea of what your weaknesses are – you can try and set hard goals.
When you see that double under workout, show up, put some focus on learning the skills to improve. When you see thrusters, add that extra 5-10lbs to get a bit stronger so when you approach that second barbell in a workout like 24.3 you’re able to do larger sets.
Fitness is fun because you get to test, train and retest and do that often to see progress. So for now, focus on the training aspect and have fun improving your fitness in all the modalities that CrossFit offers.
See you on the gym floor,
Coach Nani