Your CrossFit Open Recap: Lessons Learned and Future Goals

The Open often happens in the blink of an eye for the CrossFit community. The anticipation builds in the months and weeks beforehand, and then looking back at the three-week competition filled with community, competitions, and notably uncomfortable workouts, it always seems to happen soon once it's over. Those three weeks are a whirlwind even after doing the Open for 10 years. Returning to regular training after the Open can feel sluggish and out of place. Athletes often feel motivated to dive right back into training and hammer themselves into the ground with the things that held them back. As a coach, I love this mindset. Still, I advise against throwing yourself immediately back into the fire with maximal intensity and obsessing entirely on what held you back in the Open. It's essential to properly analyze what held back your performance in each workout to truly understand how to adjust your upcoming training to improve your performance on a workout similar to the Open tests. With CrossFit being constantly varied, it's critical to dissect the workouts so you can train to improve at not only the Open workouts we just completed but tests similar to those in the future. 

How to Analyze Your Open Performance

Let's begin by analyzing your Open performance. The first step is easy in the sense that the leaderboard tells you exactly where you placed amongst your peer group in each workout. From an analytics standpoint, this is the easiest step and the only step where the leaderboard serves much use. Each athlete is different, and the reasons you performed a certain way will differ from what held back five other random athletes we could pull off the leaderboard. 

As an example, take 25.1. A 15:00 AMRAP with ascending reps of dumbbell hang clean and jerks, lateral burpees, and a bodyweight lunge. Yes, for the elite, this was a burpee endurance and speed test; however, for you, it may have been more of a dumbbell workout. Perhaps your pressing endurance or strength was exposed, and you had to break the dumbbell multiple times. Overall, cardiovascular conditioning may have been exposed for you, and none of the movements get particularly difficult. You couldn't stay aerobic long enough to continue moving or moving quickly the entire 15:00. Another possible limiter may have been your leg endurance. This is rare in this workout, but the compounding impact of the burpees, extending the knee using the quads, and lunging may have pushed your leg endurance to the threshold early in the workout and limited your performance. In just a few moments, we have identified three different potential limiters that may have helped you back in 25.1, but without taking an objective look back at your performance and either remembering what you felt during the workout or watching a video of your workout to see where you started to slow down or deteriorate it's possible to incorrectly access what portion of the test needs improvement leading to wasted training time. Additionally, without identifying which physiological stimulus or system was the limiter, it would be nearly impossible to have variance that leads to transference in your training moving forward to improve your performance on 25.1 and workouts like 25.1 with different movements. 

Analyzing your Open performances requires attention to detail and honesty with yourself. However, doing this correctly will set you up for success as you progress with your training in the coming weeks and months.

Setting Goals for the Next Phase of Training

Creating training goals after the Open is critical. These goals can vary, but setting a landmark for where you want to go with your training will guide your programming and keep you focused as time goes on after the Open and the motivation you feel now starts to fade. After you have analyzed your Open performances and found the limiters in each workout, you want to boil down to their base physiological properties as much as possible. Do you need to be stronger? More aerobic? Have more muscle endurance? Do you need to improve your rep speed on a particular movement? These are all questions you want to answer in the analysis phase that will inform the goals you set for your next training phase. 

As a general rule, I am not a fan of outcome-based goals, and I prefer process-based goals. Outcome-based goals say you will get X outcome. Oftentimes, we don't have sufficient control over outcome-based goals, and they can leave us with a sense of failure even if we have improved greatly and achieved tremendous success in our training. However, outcome-based goals in training are more reasonable, and this would be the time to set some of those goals. So, for example, let's say the 50-calorie row at the beginning and end of 25.3 was an absolute struggle for you. An easy outcome-based training goal you could make would be to improve your 2K row time. Improving your 2K row time will improve your ability to row faster at a non-maximal and maximal effort under fatigue, as you did in both of the 50-calorie rows in 25.3. The gymnastics in 25.2 is a significant limit for you. Setting the goal of being able to do 15 more pull-ups, 10 more chests to bar pull-ups, and 5+ more bar muscle ups in an unbroken set than you can right now is a goal you could set that will improve your performance not only on 25.2 but all workouts with those gymnastics movements incorporated in them. 

Setting goals for your next phase of training doesn't need to be overly complicated. Keep them simple and attainable, and make sure they transfer to the stimulus that held you back in the Open workouts. By setting these goals, you'll be taking control of your training and setting yourself up for success. You'll be on a great start to setting goals that will improve your performance across the board! 

Using Your Results to Guide Programming and Progression

This is my favorite part of the process in the wake of the Open (I suppose that's not surprising, being a coach who has an honestly troubling number of spreadsheets with progressions and programs I have built over the years). Designing training could be its own series of articles, so what I discuss here will by no means be an exhaustive list or include every detail, but my aim here will be to give you a solid bedrock to build your post-Open training around. 

First and foremost, it's important to pull the most significant levers. What constitutes the most considerable lever will be different for each athlete, but if you have identified common trends from your analysis in all three workouts, prioritizing that stimulus will give you the greatest return on your investment the fastest. Theoretically, say an athlete struggled with the dumbbell hang clean and jerks in 25.1, had to break their thrusters in multiple sets due to the weight on the barbell in 25.2, and the barbell weights in 25.3 were over 60 or even 70% of their one rep maximum in the deadlift, power clean, or power snatch respectively. Improving overall strength will be the most significant lever this athlete can pull to improve their overall performance in all three open workouts with a high degree of certainty in their performance moving forward. Therefore, prioritizing a strength-building phase for their next training block makes the most sense. Identifying a strength limiter is often the most manageable weakness in CrossFit, so let's examine another limiter that may have held someone back. 

As we continue, the better an athlete is, the less pulling a lever will translate to over-general physical qualities. As you reach a higher level of training and performance, your weaknesses become smaller, as does the amount of transference you get from attacking that particular weakness. This is both a blessing and a curse and should be viewed as an unavoidable consequence of performing at a high level, which is our second example here. 

You could have performed 25.2 in under 7:00 as a female. This is a respectable time, but by no means can it be improved upon. Since this is all a thought experiment, you are a strong athlete, and the barbell weights weren't a factor from a strength perspective. Your analysis of the workout and video review concluded that you couldn't breathe well enough and had to rest before you picked up the barbell or started the next movement. You broke the gymnastics early to keep your heart rate down, but you are proficient and have high capacity in unbroken sets on the gymnastics movements tested: pull-ups, chest-to-bar pull-ups, and bar muscle-ups. While this seems like a more complicated problem to solve in the analysis, it's not. This athlete needs to build their aerobic base and/or lactate threshold to improve their ability to move at a non-maximal point physiologically, therefore moving faster from movement to movement in 25.2. Additionally, this athlete needs to train their comfort and ability to go FAST for a short period of time. 

To start improving these things, general low-moderate intensity aerobic training in the next phase of training makes the most sense, while sprinkling in high-intensity threshold intervals or sprint workouts every 7-14 days so they can practice that speed of movement and realize their potential to go faster. As I stated above, I could write an entire series on designing programming if we went into every detail. The most important lesson from the Open is to find the trends and pull the most extensive levers you can to get the most return on your training time that will improve your performance across multiple styles of workouts and tests. 

Echoing what I wrote above in the goal-setting portion, I think it's important to keep designing your next phase of training as simple as possible. If you can keep the themes the key and have identified the levers to pull, then the specific methods you apply can be nearly anything you can think of as long as they will improve the qualities and physiological limiters you have identified. 

Training after the Open is always a time of high motivation. Leverage this time, but make sure you put your energy in the right places to start moving toward your new goals quickly and efficiently! Use this article and the steps above to dissect your training, set new goals, create your next training phase, and start ascending in your training!