THE CROSSFIT OPEN – QUALITY ASSURANCE TESTING
Ladies and gentlemen… It’s CrossFit Open time. Week 4 of the CrossFit Open is upon us and 15.4 will be announced this evening. Anxiety, anger, thrill, excitement, and many other emotions overcome each athlete upon the “Dave Castro” announcement. The result of that emotion is our first quality assurance test of our boxes programming.
The definition of Quality Assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers. Each CrossFit Box has a manufactured product. That is the programming. A good programmer does CrossFit. CONSTANTLY VARIED being the key ingredient without overthinking leads to success in CrossFit programming. CrossFit lives in the world of WODs that are couplets and triplets. The movements compliment one another for the intent of high relative intensity. Duration of all WODs should vary as well. Long duration, moderate duration, short duration, and extremely brief powerful durations are of the utmost importance.
So you are asking yourself…. What about my weaknesses? I need to get stronger on my barbell movements… I can’t do a muscle up… Etc… In order to get better at weaknesses, your coach needs to attack the weakness with a bias. The bias being your specific progression. What part of the movement are you struggling to achieve? Your coach should be able to determine that fault and make you more aware of the struggle. From that point, your coach should give you skills and drills to practice perfectly. Practice that mechanical fault and struggle fix will help you beat that fault. If you avoid that movement (“cherry pick”), you won’t get better at that movement. However, do not consume your entire CrossFit life around that movement. You will begin to lose your ability to do other movements and hence you are no longer doing CrossFit. Maybe, just practice the weakness during open gym time or preQ/post-WOD. Practicing pre-WOD is ok to practice as long as the movement doesn’t fatigue you before the class.
Finally, the Open is a time to check quality assurance. Here are the first questions you should ask yourself. Are you struggling to achieve all the movements? Do you feel like you did movements better this year versus last year? Did you truly set-up your expectations to a realistic goal? At the end of the open, did you rank higher than the previous year?
Then, question your coach. Ask them why you don’t work on a certain movement that needs to be programmed more regularly.
If movements are not an issue but you did not do as well as you expected, check your ego and expectations. Don’t limit yourself but be realistic. If you can only do banded pull-ups or jumping pull-ups, and your max overhead squat is 45lbs. did you expect to do the entire round of 10s on the scaled division of 15.2. If so, you are not being realistic.
At the end of the open, compare yourself to yourself one year prior. The sport of fitness is exactly what is stated above. You versus you. Don’t just look at your ranking. As you know, the sport is growing at a rapid rate. More so, take your rank and turn it into a percentage. If your percentage is better than last year, you win. If you ranked lower than last year, take a redirection in your CrossFit life. That means, what happened this year in comparison to the prior year? Were you consistent with sleep, training, eating, and life in general. If not, life happens. If so, maybe it’s time to redirect your coach and your CrossFit Programming Quality Assurance.
