Welcome And Why The Open Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hey everybody, welcome to the Herd Fit Podcast with Dr. Sam Reed and myself, Coach David Siberson. This podcast is aimed at helping anyone and everyone looking to enhance their healthy lifestyle through fitness, nutrition, and most importantly, mindset. All right, welcome back to the Herd Fit Podcast. I am Coach David Syberson. I am here flying solo. I'm going to break down the cross it open. I know it's in the rearview mirror. We want it basically gone forever, never have to think about it again. Not going to break down every single workout rep by rep or leaderboard or scores or anything like that. Um, I'm kind of breaking this down from a perspective, three different perspectives of what we should get out of it. What can you get out of it? Whether you're a coach, whether you're an athlete, whether you're an affiliate owner, and what can you look forward to next year? What are things you can actually build off of? Now, let's be clear. This is not the episode that we do every year of like, hey, how can you get better at CrossFit? That's a very common question we get this time of year. People get really ambitious after the open, whether they're unhappy or happy with the results. They want something to train for, which is vital, in my opinion, to training in anything. What are you actually trying to do this for? Um, that episode will come in a few more weeks. I might even wait till after semifinals so we can get it from a few different perspectives. And I'm also going to get a couple of different coaches on this one. I'm I'm going to fly solo on just what the open was this year and why is it important to do this, in my opinion? There's a lot of talking heads out there in the CrossFit Media space right now trying to bash the programming, saying it's um it was not a good test, yada, yada, yada. And that gets kind of recycled through members in gym sometimes. And if you know anything about me and it comes to programming, I don't like the being critical of programming unless you have a lot of facts and data and experience. I think every program and every programmer should be constructively criticized. I think you should do it about your own program. You should always be critically thinking about whatever you're putting out there for the masses, whether it's for yourself or a group or for an affiliate or a group of affiliates. Um, with that said, though, every time I've heard, almost every time I've heard someone be critical about programming, it's almost incredibly biased towards that individual person's um weaknesses and strengths, what they like to do in the gym. So

Three Lenses For Judging Programming

SPEAKER_00 2:31

I'm gonna try to look at it from three perspectives. What three perspectives am I going to do this? I'm gonna take all the emotion out and I'm gonna look at it from the athlete experience. Um was it fun? Was it safe? Was it inclusive? Was it CrossFit? Was it testable? Was it something I can train for and try to beat down the road? Is it repeatable? Um, and then I can look at it from the affiliate side. All right, and this is probably the most important perspective that anyone, and when I say affiliate, it's not the owner, it's not the coach, it's everybody, it's the athlete, the coach is the owner. Those are that's the lifeline of CrossFit in the open, but also as a business. If the affiliates are not happy, if you're pissing them off, if it's not consistent, um, if you're struggling to kind of feed what they need, at some point it's going to fall apart. Um, and then also, lastly, it's the brand. Uh, what are you trying to prove in the open? What are you actually trying to accomplish in the open? Um, are you seeing progress uh with athletes, with your own programming, with it with the brand itself? Um, are you putting the methodology into the workouts? You know, there's a lot of things that we preach in CrossFit training, but I want to ask you the brand has to ask themselves are they actually putting the brand out there for everyone to consume? Because there's a lot of people on the fence about the open. There's a lot of people on the fence with CrossFit in general, and this can be a marketing tool. So I'm gonna bring that perspective into play as well. Um, one thing I don't think the CrossFit open needs to be about is necessarily the sport. And I don't always say that every year. This year I do because the quarterfinals were 25%. That's a lot of people, and uh it opens the door to getting into the sport side, harder workouts, longer workouts, um, more competitive type workouts. Where to me, when you're gonna make the quarterfinals 25%, uh, the open can be a little bit more, dare I say, watered down, dare I say basic, not easy. It's never easy. We say that all the time at Bison. If it's if it looks basic and easy, that's gonna be one of the hardest workouts of the week. Um, but it can be a little bit more about the inclusivity side of it because here at Bison, I know a lot of affiliates out there, you're trying to get more and more people to sign up for these things. These are human beings with a lot of different interests and a lot of different scheduled demands. A lot of people just don't want to do it. But this is could be a marketing tool to get them involved. And I think the more I think Push Press has put out studies about this, that gyms that have a lot of people signing up for the open, um their their uh sorry, their churn rate is a lot less. They have a lot of people staying at the gym. Why? Because they have something to train for. So the the elite athletes, the games athletes, they are the last people I'll ever listen to when it comes to what the program was and what was not. The quality of the programming, they usually don't know. And I think this day and age, most of them don't have any clue what's going on in the affiliate side. So their opinion or the people that cover the sport and media, very few of them have a credible opinion when it comes to this side of it. They can play in the quarters, semis, and games. Uh, but when it comes to the open, I don't think many of those guys are really capable of sharing uh an educated opinion on it. So let's dive into these workouts one by one. Just give me a quick second here. Just got to do something. All right, cool. House is not burning down. We're good.

26.1 Wall Balls And Leg Stamina

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Okay. So I'm gonna actually dive into uh 26.1. I am gonna screen share a couple things here, uh, just so you guys, if you're if you're watching on YouTube, you can follow uh what I'm talking about here. Bring back some PTSD, maybe. All right, so 26.1, we did a I did a a kind of a strategy workout for 26.1 when it came out. Um this one to me was probably not the greatest way to start off the open, not because it's a bad test of fitness, it's a great test of fitness for a lot of different reasons. It definitely had an open feel to it. Um, but from the athlete side, which is where I'm gonna start off each one of these, okay, was it fun? You have a lot of people that are on the fence of whether or not they want to sign up for the open. And I do think you don't want to be too predictable when programming something like this, especially when you only have three weeks. But with that said, I think 26.1 or anything point one needs to have a fun label to it. Now that's subjective, I know, but there is a there is a group of workouts over the years that were absolutely more fun than others. Even this year, for example, 26.2 had a very fun feel to it. Um, when you have people that are on the fence and they see a workout like this come in, like, wow, I do not want to do that for a lot of reasons. You can actually turn away a lot of people that would have signed up if the workout had been a little different. So that there's nothing wrong with the workout. There's nothing wrong with the ref scheme. But to me, this would probably have been better placed either 0.2 or 0.3. Um, why do I say that? I've been owning an affiliate for a long time. We're very into the open. We have a lot of people that compete. We have a lot of people that don't compete. Wall balls are one of the most hated movements in CrossFit at Bison, anyway. Maybe we're unique, maybe we're not, but I do think bison represents CrossFit uh on a larger scale. And when you put this many wall balls into a workout, and that was the deal breaker. That was whoever did well in this workout is very good at wall balls. It's not good at box jumps, it's not good at gymnastics, they're just good at wall balls. Very few people really get excited to train wall balls throughout the year. So that's one thing I would just say that it probably wasn't the best workout to take uh in 20 as the opening workout of the 2026 Cross It Open. But hey, athletes, what can you get out of this one? What to me, it's a very non-complimentary workout. Your legs were doing the same thing the entire workout from start to finish for 12 minutes. We didn't have anyone in our gym finish. We had a couple close calls, but to me, your legs were basically pushing the ground, squatting or almost squatting with those step overs uh in terms of depth the entire workout. And this was very, very sore-inducing. I mean, to me, the volume was probably a little too much for the general athlete. There wasn't a person in our gym that wasn't sore three, four, five days later. Um, I do think it initially just put a negative thought into people that were kind of on the fence. Meaning, we have a lot of people at Bison in particular that do the open because it's just what we do. I've even had a few people say, I don't feel like doing the open, but hey, because it's you guys, I'll do it. And you know, you see them walking with with that kind of that sore quad, sore groin, sore glute uh limb five days later, and you almost feel a little guilty in that the next few days were um the next days of training were just really rough for a lot of people. So, you know, can an athlete get something out of this and say, Hey, you need to do more squatting throughout the year, you need to do more leg stamina workouts throughout the year. That's not something I would really promote too much because there's a lot of negatives that come with it. So that was the athlete perspective who was hey, I'm in for the open. Oh, this workout is not very fun, even if I do well in it and I'm gonna be sore for five days. Um, from the affiliate perspective, this was really easy for us to plan. Uh, it was uh basically a box, a ball, and wall space, or wall ball target. So we've had a lot of workouts over the years that are very difficult to plan with schedule, equipment, timing, especially when uh when you're doing two heats in a class. We didn't have any issues with this. The cleanup was easy, the setup was easy, the judging. I mean, technically it is easy, but wall balls are notorious for uh people getting away with murder with either squat death or not hitting the target over and over. Uh, but to me, it was a very affiliate-friendly workout. It also was an opportunity for us as coaches as well to teach basics. Um, everyone wants the fancy, sexy stuff, but at the end of the day, I mean, that wall ball buried everyone. We had the we have really strong lifters in our gym, and we got to a point they couldn't even do a wall ball because their legs were so tired. Imagine that. So it's it's a good opportunity for us as coaches to teach them that strength is not measured by how much weight you put on a barbell. Um, it can really come down to muscle stamina, muscle endurance, and even movement efficiency, a big part of wall balls there. Um, it also helps us teach about the grind, all right? You could really talk about that in in any workout, but the grind in this was there was not a lot of skill and there was not a lot of heaviness to it. So to me, it was just being able to grind through stuff. And instead of resting 15 seconds, you're resting 10 seconds and that kind of stuff. So I liked it from the affiliate side. I thought there was nothing wrong with it. Uh, the brand, uh, the ability to keep the legs going. That's a big part of CrossFit fitness testing. That lower body stamina. I always like to say this in front of classes when we're about to do something really difficult with a wall ball. Um, you're not you are going to fail wall balls because of accuracy or your legs are so tired you can't get up there, but you're not going to fail the squat. Never seen someone fail a squat in a wall ball. I have definitely seen them fail getting the ball up to where it needs to be, but it is a big part of uh CrossFit, big part of fitness testing in general. You have more juice, more stamina down there than you think, but you have to fight through that burn. And that's a big part of CrossFit, in my opinion. Big part of CrossFit testing, in my opinion, is the ability to do that. Um, trusting the squat and the basics and just grinding through a workout is a big part of what CrossFit brand is. Um, and what I like most about this workout from a brand perspective is that you were pursuing a goal that was slightly out of reach for everyone, meaning nobody in our gym finished. We had a woman named Amy in our gym almost finished this, and she's probably worldwide top 100 in the world and in masters, I'd say top 10 in the world in wall ball/slashbox workouts. They were both in here and she destroyed it. She didn't even finish. And I think it's really cool, a cool way to connect people in the gym, especially during a somewhat competitive environment like this, that even the best, all right? We have a guy that was top 10 in the games last year in the 35 to 39 Masters games, he didn't finish. And to see him struggle and not get there, to me, it can help connect other people that are constantly doing that. They're constantly getting capped out in workouts, they can't get there. There, it's that hard-to-reach goal that is borderline impossible to reach. And that's a big part of what fitness uh the pursuit of fitness is you're always trying to reach for another level. And it was a really cool thing as a brand to make the cap 12 minutes and not 16 minutes, so that essentially nobody in your affiliate could finish that workout. Um, so that was a really cool component to 26.1. Let me get rid of this and I'm gonna go to the next one. Uh

26.2 Mobility And First Muscle Ups

SPEAKER_00 13:25

26.2. Uh, in my opinion, 26.2 was the best open workout of the year, um, because it really did kind of show a lot of people what it is, uh, what crossfit is. So if you're kind of new to CrossFit or you're new to the open, this to me was the open more than anything, even more than 0.3. A lot of people don't agree with that. Um, but 26.2, it had the overhead walking lunges right after the soreness went away, hopefully, had alternating dumbbell snatches, and then you had progressing gymnastics for everyone for RX, for scaled, for masters. Uh, we made the gymnastics dip more difficult as you went. Um, and it was kind of an easy workout to flow. So, from the athlete perspective, um, you looked at this as a combination of skill, strength, mobility, pacing. Um, but it also had the that first muscle up, the magic of the open. We had a couple people in our gym get that. It's it's been a while since we've seen that in the open, a ring muscle up, first one. I think the last time was 2023, where we saw someone get the first ring muscle up in a workout, and there's nothing like it. The video, the kicking the finger uh feet, and realizing that you just have three more minutes, let's go get another one. That's in this workout. And that's I think that's one of the reasons why I thought it was the best one. So, athlete perspective first. Um, to me, starting off with the overhead lunge was awesome. Most workouts that have something like this two dumbbell movements, one of them is lunges, you do a dumbbell snatch into the overhead lunge. And that was not the case here. You had to walk 80 feet with a dumbbell above your head. And if you do cross it often or you're doing it for a while, you probably underrate how difficult that is. Meaning, if you have a lot of fit friends that don't do cross it, have never done it, I bet most of them could not do this. They couldn't get through the first part of the workout. And I liked starting it off with the challenge. Um, dog just walked in. If you if you hear a heavy breather, it's not me after the assault bike, it's my heavy, my dog walking in. Um, but to how much time do you spend on on mobility, that thoracic mobility? Do you even care about it? When when you're in class and warming up or cooling down or you're there a little early and you have some time to do something, do you hop on the bike or just kind of text on your phone, or do you just go work on some mobility work? Because it shows up in this workout right here. This exposed a lot of people that are very fit, but they don't work on mobility enough, or they don't have it. And that overhead lunge, I always say this, it's not heavy. That's not a heavy weight to lunge, it's a heavy weight to get and keep in a that dumbbell in the right position if the mobility is not there. Um, I love seeing athletes that are normally not on the stronger side with weightlifting absolutely rip through these next to other people that normally have the biggest lifts, the biggest deadlifts, the biggest cleans, the biggest squats. Uh, but if you don't have the mobility, it just doesn't matter. It's almost useless at that point. I love having that start off this workout. Um, I also like having gymnastics in open workouts because that's something that a lot of people work on throughout the year, whether it's getting their first pull up, their first toaster bar, or once they get it, they're trying to learn the butterfly, or once they get the butterfly, they're trying to get 10 in a row. Once they get a muscle up, they're trying to learn how to string them together. It's constant skill work over the years. And I've been doing this 13, 14 years now, and you never stop trying to pick up on little things that can make you more efficient with gymnastics in general. This workout kept the door open for everyone at the start. You had the pull-up, and now you get the chest bar pull-up. Cool. Now you got the muscle up. 20 ring muscle ups in an open workout at the end, very difficult. Uh, but the true test was exactly that it was the ring muscle up. And a lot of people don't have a ring muscle up, or they have them, but they don't have them in a workout, or they have them in a workout, but they don't have them in a workout where they've already done 40 pull-ups and a lot of pulling with the dumbbell snatch. So it really can expose either strengths or weaknesses, but it kind of made it a race to get there because a lot of people could not get it, but they were going to race to the finish line, meaning race to that tiebreaker, that that finishing that that third round of 20 alternating dumbbell snatches. And that was a lot of fun to watch. It was fun to really see people essentially turn that into a four-time workout uh that was in the six to seven to eight minute range because they knew they couldn't get that ring muscle up. So it kind of exposed a few different ways for the athletes to really pursue hard work in that workout. Um, from the affiliate side, um, I would say one thing that made this difficult for the affiliate, it didn't affect us that much, but it it definitely would have at the old space, our original space for five years at 59 Greenwood. Um, having a pull-up bar and rings in the same workout, in addition to needing 20 plus feet of walking space for every individual athlete, that is a major, major challenge for affiliates. And I think it probably would have been more affiliate friendly if they either did not put the um rings into the workout, they kept it bar muscle up so that everyone could just be in the same station every time they got to the gymnastics. Um, or you don't make it 20 feet of walking lunges, you make it another kind of lower body centered movement. You can even do lunges in place, in my opinion, um, where you don't need to measure out all this square footage. Because again, if you have a big class of 20 to 30 people and you got to do two heats, 15 people, 10 to 15 people per heat, that that's a lot of work to do for the affiliate owner if you're trying to get two of these heats done in one class. So, again, fortunately, bison had a good enough space to get that done. But if we had to do this at the old space, I don't I don't even know how we would have done it. And that would have put the affiliates in a bad spot. And that's one thing that affiliate owners, um, I've been on calls, they they really do feel that way a lot in a lot of cases that they kind of get looked over by CrossFit HQ when they program these workouts. Um, just logistically, just not possible. The brand, right? I talked about that first muscle up feeling. Those videos, those pictures, there's nothing that can replicate them. And when you put that stuff on social media or you're just sharing it with your community in general, who got the first muscle up? Um, A, it gives that person that that feeling of like, wow, I just accomplished something major, but it also inspires a lot of people to be the next one. That's one question we always ask. When hey, when we announce that someone got their first muscle up, we still try to do that to this day. The very next question is who's next? And when you see someone do it, we just had a girl that's been a member since man, I mean, I think she first came in in 2016. She just got her first ring muscle. That's a long, that's a long time. It's almost 10 years. Um, and she got her first ring muscle up in this workout. And that it was really special to see because I think what it does, A, for her, it was it was an awesome experience, but B, I think there's a lot of people in that gym that think they are so far away from something like that. Um, and they might be, but it's not impossible. You can always set your uh set your hopes and dreams high with movements and and uh accomplishments within CrossFit. And eventually, I do think the people that keep their foot on the gas and they keep working hard, they're going to eventually get there. Um, but that's something that really can inspire future generations or future CrossFitters to say, hey, I if she can do that, I can do this. And that's a big part of what we do. Um, so I really tip of the cap for that work this workout, it gave the opportunity for people to try it slash get their first muscle up. Um, I also think I touched on this earlier. This workout for the brand, it shows the importance of mobility. And I brought up the example of your friends that don't do CrossFit. A lot of them are not mobile enough to simply put one dumbbell above their head and walk. Imagine we made them do both. We had to do that in quarterfinals a few years ago. Um, and maybe that'll show up in the semifinals when it gets to a more of a sport type stage. But that that's a huge part of what we think health and fitness is is the ability to maintain an integrity in your joints as you are doing different things. And that gets overlooked because it's not fun, it's not sexy, it doesn't burn calories, no one really cares about it on social media. So people just don't do it. But if you don't have the mobility, I think you're not fit. And I'll say that if you can't squat, you're not fit. If you can't deadlift, you're not fit, if you can't put a dumbbell above your head and lungs, you have a huge hole in your fitness. And it's something that can be improved, but you got to put the time in. And it's really cool to watch people that have had issues in the past um bang those out unbroken over and over again because I've seen it over the years. They couldn't do that five years ago. Now they're asking if they can go heavier, and that's a really cool part something that sets cross. At brand apart because we do put a lot of attention on that. Balance too. Being a Crossfitter is being versatile, right? Being able to do a lot of different things. That is what fitness is. You don't want to be a specialist. This workout had a lot of versatility. You have to be a balanced athlete to get through this pretty well, right? If you were, if you look at the gym leaderboard, I have it next to me. I'm not gonna not gonna share that for obvious reasons. Um, just don't think we need to go there. But when I look at the people that did well in this workout, I'm looking at the top 10 scores right now, those are people that I know A have been doing this a long time. And this workout is really tough to do unless you've been doing this a long time. And they also they go about it the right way, they they follow progressions, they don't just lift, they don't just do gymnastics, they don't just do short workouts, they don't do long, they do it all, and that's why I think it shows up in this kind of workout that you have to be balanced and versatile to do well in this workout. You don't have to be the best at anything, but to quote Spencer Hendel, you can't suck at anything. Um, so that how many people walked out of this workout saying, I'm getting my first muscle up next year? I already know of a few. And that to me, that's part of what the open secretly quietly should be trying to do is creating kind of hopes and dreams and goals for across. It's almost like the workout can create the goal for you, and now you have to put the work in for the year, but you're staying involved. And that's a big part of what this open workout did. And we've seen workouts like this in the past a lot. Um, that people that they they get a a really an ambitious goal from an open workout because they couldn't do something, and it really kind of kept them in the game for a long time. All right. Let's move on to the third one.

26.3 Grit Pacing And Push Pull

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Let me just remove this again. I know I'm a little slow with this stuff for my YouTubers. Um, let's see here. Share screen. We'll go to number three. Nope, wrong one. So that third workout to me, uh, some a lot of people do think this was the most crossfit workout uh in the open. I can see why, basically because there's burpees and thrusters, but I don't think it was the best test of fitness. Um that can be debatable. I don't think that that argument's really that fun anyway. What was the best test of fitness? That's a little too subjective. But 26.3, that was the one with the 12. Everything was 12. You had to do two rounds. Um boxed the announcement. I'm actually going to get to that in a little bit. But this one, this workout had an ascending weight. The strength did come into play into this workout. You had to do a ton of work in a short time frame to get there, uh, but it was very gritty. It had the tradition of thrusters and burpees being in the open. So that part of it was really cool. I love ending workouts that just have pure grit in it. You know, we've had thrusters and burpees multiple times, we've had thrusters and rowing, uh, we've had thrusters and pull-ups, chest bar pull-ups multiple times. Um, last year you had that gritty wall walk row workout with the barbell stuff. I mean, I love stuff that at the end you could just say, like, hey, let's just go as hard as we can, see what we got. This had that feel to it. So, from that regard, it was cool. The athlete perspective, um, you get your burpee pacing out of this. We just did a workout last week at Bison. We were trying to teach people what does pacing actually mean? What can you take uh from workouts and information, put it into your own programming and your own thoughts in the next year? Um, so this one could teach you a lot about how long do 12 burpees take you over the bar when you're fresh, how long do they take you when you are seeing stars at the end of the workout? Um, you want to be somewhere between there, by the way, with burpees. And I think that's something that can help a lot of athletes out. Um, I love the pull push combo for athletes, right? You can pull, if you can pull a lot of people that are good at pulling cleans, they struggle with pushing thrusters. A lot of people that are good at pushing thrusters, they struggle with pull cleans. So this one was a good way for work uh athletes to see, like, all right, where am I really good here? Where can I do cleans well? Where can I do uh uh thrusters well? Where do I have to break this up and hold on to that? So that was a really good, a really well put together combination of movements for athletes to really get a lot of a hey, this A, it's a great workout, very challenging. Uh, but B can kind of open the eyes to all right, where am I at with pulling and pushing my burpee type pace? What I also like about this from the athlete's side is that everyone can play. We had a lot of people RX this workout. It might have actually been the most RX'd workout. And again, I don't care too much about RX and scale, but when I see that as an observation, it kind of can put everyone in the game. They, you know, you walk in with a little different swag or some of these people, but oh, I can do this one. This doesn't start off with a really heavy snatch or a heavy thruster, it doesn't have pull-ups or thrusters, it's you know, movements that we do essentially almost every week. I mean, I would say burpees are every week, some sort of clean is every other, is every week. Uh, thrusters, not as much. Um, but I would say at least every three to four weeks, you'll see some sort of thruster. So it's something that is trained all year. People feel comfortable with these that they've been doing cross a long time. So, from that athlete perspective, quality workout. From the affiliate, this was probably the easiest one in terms of spacing and timing and coaching. Um, you can watch any coaches can watch, should be able to watch anyone do this workout from start to finish and essentially assess them mobility, squat, pull uh pulling weight, pushing weight, burpee technique in the beginning, burpee technique at the end, pacing at the beginning, pacing at the end. I like this from the affiliate side that you can really teach a lot. The math is somewhat easy because everything is 12. You can really teach athletes, coaches can teach athletes based on this workout alone. Um, example, I have the the 0.3 scores of bison on my other computer right now. And if I just pick a random, hey, uh 30th place in this workout, got 201 reps. Um, I could do really simple math on how many reps per minute did you do, 201 divided by 12, and talk to that athlete throughout the year about like, hey, your number is is right about you know, it's 15 reps a minute, 14 reps a minute in a workout like this. Um, what really and then you could assess further what was better than that, what was worse than that in terms of the movements. So to me, this is a workout you can get a lot out of from a coach that wants to assess an athlete. Remember, coaches, that's a big part of your job throughout the year. Um, not necessarily coming up with their own program for them, but when you coach them in class, you're a better coach if you know what they've done in the past. You're a better coach if you know where they're strong and where they're weak in relation to a workout like this. And there's really not much to it. It's pretty easy to figure out a by watching and b by looking at a score. Um, also from the affiliate side, we we're big on pacing. I'm personally big on pacing in terms of teaching people what it's about. Whether or not they do it is up to them. Whether or not they get a lot out of trying, that's up to them. But I like teaching it. There's some because the the crossfit equation of trying to do the most amount of work um in the smallest amount of time possible, that's the goal. It's not do the first two rounds as fast as possible, it's not doing the first four rounds as fast as possible. It's essentially trying to get as much work done as possible in that 16-minute time cap for this workout. So, to me, when you look at the leaderboard, when you look at someone's score, it's easy to look at that and be like, hey, you were way too fast on the first 12-12. Because on those last six cleans that you did, I mean, it they took over a minute. And it's just it's not just because the load was, it's you couldn't control the quality of the moon, you couldn't control your pull off the ground, you couldn't control your burpee pace at some point. And this is a really good opportunity for affiliates to do that. You can take results. Sorry, I think I said a wrong cap earlier. Um, all these reps in a 16-minute cap, you divide it by that those reps by 16, and now you have something to build off of for the rest of the year.

Predictable Trends And A Messy Announcement

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Um, brand, this being here's one thing I would kind of not cross it for in this workout. This was the final week of the open. It was very predictable with this one. I always get heat for people thinking I know the workouts ahead of time because I try to put a workout in Monday or Tuesday before the open to kind of practice what I think is coming up. I don't, but if you look at the history of the open, there are certain trends that are very predictable. In three weeks, in some ways it's tougher, in some ways it's easier. But we essentially knew we were doing burpees over a bar and thrusters. Um, I thought we might be deadlifting, but essentially I had that right as well. And it's not because I'm a whiz kid, it's just that the the open Boz, Castro, they've gotten predictable with these workouts. I would love for them one year to not put a single burp into the open. I would love, I'd really love for them not to put a thruster in the open. Because if you do that, it kind of throws everyone off their game. Like that one year at regionals, they didn't do one barbell workout, they found different ways to test strength. I think they should do that in the open one year, just to prove to you guys, prove to us, prove to uh athletes and coaches and affiliate owners that you're never gonna be able to predict what's coming. Um, so to me, that was a little disappointment that it was a little too easy to figure out what we were gonna do. Um, the announcement De Castro did and also doing at Wadapalooza, I think that's a one and done operation at Wadapalooza. I don't even think they want to do it in March anyway, uh, from what I've heard. But the announcement, I don't want to make a stink about it. I don't actually care that much. I just want to see the workout. Um, I do like it when Dave's involved in the announcement. I think just adds like some nostalgia. I think it adds a little bit of credibility to the workout as well. But you got to get it right when you announce it. You can't say bar facing burpees when it wasn't bar facing burpees. You can't explain it to a point where there isn't a single person on the face of the earth that knew what that workout was after Dave said it. Um, we all make mistakes, especially on live TV. I've probably made 10 in this episode alone. Um, but to me, that announcement of the workout, it just needs to be cleaner. We don't care about it being ultra professional all the time. I think it's there's uh truth to it that we like the whole garage raw feel to it, but you can't get the workout wrong. You can't get the movements, you can't get the verbiage wrong. Uh, it just kind of takes a little bit bite out of like uh the the credibility of the competition. It's one of the biggest things we do, the biggest fitness competition in the world. Why would we not get that part of it right? Um, this was the strength test of the open, correct? This was not a strength enough test for it to be the strength test. A, you had to do way too much work to get to the 135-pound barbell. And most people in our gym did not get to it. We have a very fit gym. A lot of people didn't get to use their strength. Now, trust me, the coach of me says, get fitter so that you can get there next time, right? If you're a strong athlete and you couldn't get to that lost barbell, you move too slow. Just acknowledge that, and that's okay. But now you have something to work on throughout the year. That strength you could still lift, but you got to get better at burpees, right? But I think the workout could have been much better suited if that if that first bar, sorry, that empty, that heavy barbell. Well, okay, speak talking about making mistakes. That heavy barbell came earlier in the workout so that those people did get to kind of even the playing field a little bit. With that said, though, I will say I'm looking at the leaderboard of the top one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten work people in the gym right now that I would say are probably the 10 fittest people in the gym. We're all in that work, the top 10 in that workout. So I don't think there's anything wrong with it, that the fitness test component. I just think there should have been something a little heavier, or that heavy barbell should have come earlier. Example, how about one round of that 9565 barbell? How about two rounds of the 11575 and then three rounds of that 1355 barbell? That would have been a much better strength test and it would have given it opened the door to the uh the lifting component. So I will say though, this was a very cross-fitty test. If for people that don't really do cross it or they used to, and they kind of think about what cross it was, this was the workout that was the most cross-fitty one of all. So if CrossFit was trying to use this workout to kind of expose their brand and kind of remind everyone, hey, this stuff is really hard, you know, suck it up. Uh, they were big on that marketing campaign early in the year. This workout did that for them.

What Made The Open Successful

SPEAKER_00 34:17

So that wraps up my little spiel on what the open was for the athletes, for the affiliate, and the brand. Was it a bad open? It absolutely was not. Um, most people that have negative words about programming or the open in general, it's usually the people in the middle, meaning if the workout was swayed in this direction, they would have kept their mouth shut, but you would you would have had the other side of the middle kind of barking and complaining that it was too this or to that. The best athletes I know rarely ever complain about programming. We all have our bias. We want things to show up and we don't want things to show up. But at the end of the day, you sign up for the open, and part of what this is is you don't know what's coming, you can't train for that is what CrossFit is. It's fitness, it's unknown and unknowable. Um, and I don't think you should ever look at one open and assess, like, hey, that's a good test of fitness. I think you have to look at it a few years in a row to see, all right, are we too biased towards one thing? When I do that, I don't see anything that's too biased towards strong athletes or weak athletes or gymnasts or high rocks type endurance type people. Um, there are certain years where strength was not tested that much. This year is absolutely one of them. Uh, but when you have an event that is only a max lift, that is way too much swayed in that direction. So maybe we'll get one of those next year. My only advice to you, if you are a coach, an owner, or an athlete that wants to say something negative about programming in the open, um, ask yourself is it coming from your personal opinion about what it should be, or is it from these three perspectives? Because very few of you will actually look at it from a perspective outside of your own. And that those are the three ones you want to pay attention to. The athlete, like the normal member at the gym, the affiliate, which is everyone, not the owners, not the coaches, everyone and the affiliate, and then the brand itself. That's the purpose of the open quarterfinals, semifinals games. That's where that's for the sport. And we are gonna break down that side of it um next week, where we kind of talk about the quarterfinals. I don't know the semifinal workouts, but you can kind of uh we can still touch on it a little bit in terms of what to expect. And this whole semifinal fiasco with invites all over the world that are going out and people are declining for XYZ reasons. We'll touch on that as well. But the open itself, just remember what it is. It needs to be inclusive, it needs to be affiliate friendly, and it does need to kind of keep the brand alive of what this stuff actually is. And if you work hard at CrossFit, if you're part of a responsible affiliate, you should be able to get better at all three of these. But it takes your effort, the coach's effort, and the programmer/slash owner's effort. If you do all, if all three of those boxes are checked, um, you can take your open rank from this year and really work towards getting better by just kind of planning around these workouts, really, or the past five seasons of

Training Plan And Next Week Tease

SPEAKER_00 37:15

open workouts. If you want to go even more depth this year at Bison, we're gonna do every single open workout throughout the year. Every week we're gonna be doing an open workout from now until next February. That's gonna be a really fun, exciting challenge for me to do to put into the programming while we're working on other things. But that to me, I believe in you pursuing these tests of fitness to make you fitter and more capable for next year's open. So I hope you guys enjoyed that and we will see you next week. Thank you everybody for taking the time out of your day to listen to the Herd Fit podcast. Be on the lookout for next week's episode.