Preparing for the Open (even if you aren't doing it)

There is a lot of buzz right now about the CrossFit “Open". Rightly so, because its fun! It’s a time for our gym to all come together, get to know others from other classes that you may not know, and have a good time cheering each other on in workouts. The Open is great, but its just 5 workouts that we use as an excuse to create a community bonding event at the gym. For some around the world who compete at the games it’s a very important event that they train for all year, but not us. We just have fun with it!

If you are on a CrossFit There Open Team

We know you want to do well, and we want that too! We’ve gotten a lot fo questions the past couple of weeks about how to prepare for the workout on Friday so I wanted to address them and hopefully prepare everyone to perform their best.

  • Don’t change up too much. If you are use to working out 4+ days per week, then don’t change that just because you are trying to be “fully recovered” on Friday. The worst thing you can do is lay around and do nothing for the 2-3 days leading up to the workout.

  • Taper off on the heavy weight towards the end of the week. If you want to be 100% on Friday, don’t find a new 1rm Deadlift on Thursday.

  • I will NOT be programming according to the Open ( light day Wednesday, recovery day on Thursday), so its up to you to be smart and make sure that you are recovered.

  • Monday & Tuesday - Full speed.

  • Wednesday - Full speed but light weight.

  • Thursday - Get your heart rate up. Maybe some very light weight exercise but nothing extremely taxing. Just don’t let yourself become mentally lazy

  • Friday - Full Speed but faster

This is what I do leading up to competitions and it seems to work well! Also, It’s a similar schedule that Ben Bergeron gets his athletes to follow leading up to the Open and he’s pretty smart too.

But I’m not doing the Open…

Awesome! The last thing we want is for you to feel left out or pressured into it. Like I said, it’s just workouts. So because I like bullet points, here’s some if this is you

  • Keep working out like normal and killing it! Don’t taper off. Like I said, I won’t be changing programming for the Open so don’t change your schedule at all.

  • Come watch! We want you to come on Friday afternoons to be a judge or just to watch and cheer other athletes on.

  • You will be doing the workouts if you come on Friday. At the end of the day, they are just workouts much like the ones we program daily. So they will be the programmed workout each Friday for the next 5 weeks.

Let’s have fun and keep getting better. It never fails that the Open pushes us to want to learn new skills and many in the gym do things that never thought were possible for them. Thats the awesome thing about it and the reason that we do it every year. Also, we aren’t requiring anyone to sign up online this year, but I still encourage it. It’s a good way to keep up with progress from year to year.

John Mayfield