The Crossfit Open is fast approaching! For those of you who have been doing Crossfit for some time you know that means some of the hardest workouts we will tackle all year are fast approaching. Hopefully your training has been ramping up to prepare you for the coming three week test of fitness. However, training for the Open isn't what I want to discuss today. Today I am going to talk about more of the “tactical” side of the Open. How to look at a workout and pick it apart like a surgeon to see where you can make your moves in the workout, strategize the best approach for you as an athlete, and avoid possible pitfalls that might be hidden within the workout. This is a broad and nuanced discussion but I will do my best to paint with broad brushstrokes to give general themes and strategies to help YOU be successful in the 2025 Crossfit Open.
Let’s get into it then shall we?
It’s only appropriate to start by addressing that we know the Open is going to be unknown to a large degree each week. Only spanning three weeks in 2025 even by the end of week two CrossFit HQ will have numerous movements, time domains, and loads at their disposal we won’t have seen in weeks one and two. Unlike previous years when the Open was five weeks it is unlikely even the best coaches will be able to predict the exact movements coming or workout structures with a high degree of accuracy. Now yes, there are certain themes that are common year to year in the Open, but I am referring to a coach or athlete being able to predict what will be included in a workout with a high probability of being correct. With this being the case my very first piece of advice for athletes taking on the Open is; DO NOT stress about what movements will appear. We know for certain the workouts will be Crossfit and if you have been doing Crossfit to prepare for the Open you are on the right track. In tandem with this, the first concrete thing athletes and coaches can do to successfully tackle the Open is limit the intensity of training after Monday each week. Keep volume within check, intensity moderate to low, and avoid movements that will cause a large amount of eccentric loading and damage. For the sake of time I am not going to dive into those subtopics today.
So let’s continue down this thought exercise.
The first week of the Open is here. You have had appropriate training in the beginning of the week and are primed to attack the first workout! Bang! The workout is announced. You are excited, nervous, and everyone at your affiliate is ready to go get after it. This is the moment when you can set yourself up for the most success in the coming workout. Take a moment, find a quiet place, and break down the workout. There are many, many different ways to dissect a workout, but for this discussion I am going to explain my preferred method of breaking down a workout.
For the sake of this discussion we will pretend the first Open workout is a 12 minute AMRAP with rowing, wallballs, and double unders. Nothing about those movements is special, these are just for the example. The first thing I do when dissecting an amrap is to look at the time domain and just see what the round times would be for different scores. So if we have a 12 minute AMRAP, 4 rounds would be 3:00 rounds, 5 rounds would be 2:30 rounds, 6 rounds would be 2:00 rounds, etc. just to get a general idea of the time splits for rounds in that time domain. Now this is all somewhat arbitrary until it’s referenced against the actual rep number and movements for the workout itself. Say the full workout was written like so:
AMRAP 12:
50 Double Unders
12/9 Calorie Row
15 Wallballs with 20/14lbs to a 10/9’ Target
Now that we have some reps to break down in this workout we can break down the movements themselves and see how long each movement should roughly take. 50 doubles unders if done unbroken is around :25 for most athletes. Now 12/9 Calories on the row can be different based on how hard an athlete is rowing, but let’s stay they can hold a pace that completes the calories done in right around :45 of work on the rower. 15 Wallballs takes around :30 for most athletes if they complete all 15 without dropping the ball. Adding those times together gives us a total of 1:40. So outside of the variable of the rowing pace we know the minimum work per round is 1:40 and this isn’t taking into account transition time and assumes there is no fall off in rep speed or deterioration in ability to stay moving across the workout. The next step is to start taking into account the transition time. A safe place to start with this one assuming there are no floor plan stipulations is a :05 transition on and off the rower at least, and a :05 transition to the wallballs and to the rope back from the wallballs. So we will add :20 to our 1:40 rounds. This gives us a 2:00 round.
The next portion of this is what I call the “smell test”. After you do this math, zoom back out and look at the workout as a whole. For a 12 minute amrap of those movements and reps does a round every 2:00 FEEL like it’s doable? Does it feel aggressive? Does it feel conservative potentially? This “smell test” is INCREDIBLY valuable in self assessing the workout math against your own individual abilities as an athlete.
A finishing touch on making sure the pace you are setting for yourself is realistic and doable is something surprisingly simple, but oftentimes will be avoided by athletes. DO a round of the given workout at a moderate effort and see how long it takes you. You can then reference this time and how you feel after one round based on the mathematical game plan you laid out prior to make any adjustments you feel will be wise before diving fully into the workout. There are situations where this may be difficult, for example if there is a very heavy lift each round of the workout or it is a chipper, but doing a small portion of the workout to get an idea of what is coming can help in making minor tweaks and changes to your strategy.
In conclusion when preparing to tackle the coming Open workouts remember to examine the details of the workout. Get an idea of how long each movement and round will take. Reference that information off of your own fitness level, then finally get a taste of the workout to make any further changes before beginning. Use this framework to strategize your Open workouts and watch yourself outperform what you thought was possible!!
-Coach Triston
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