The CrossFit Open is an annual event that provides CrossFitters with a chance to assess their fitness and see how they stack up against others around the world.
The workouts are more than a test of strength, skills, stamina. They are also a test of strategy.
That last piece often gets overlooked, but it’s a crucial component to leaving the workouts feeling good and not breaking yourself apart.
Each workout offers different challenges, and therefore requires different strategies to achieve your outcome.
Strategy is also the component that translates to what you do outside the gym.
The gym is often my lab for how to approach other areas of life. Winning workout strategies are also winning strategies for work in other contexts.
Open 26.1: The Workout
The workout for Open 26.1 was a couplet of 2 different movements, with a pyramid rep scheme for one movement and a steady rep count for the other — but with a twist:
In a 12-minute time cap, complete as many reps as possible of the following:
- 20 Wall Ball Shots
- 18 Box Jump Overs
- 30 Wall Ball Shots
- 18 Box Jump Overs
- 40 Wall Ball Shots
- 18 Medicine Ball Box Step Overs
- 66 Wall Ball Shots
- 18 Medicine Ball Box Step Overs
- 40 Wall Ball Shots
- 18 Box Jump Overs
- 30 Wall Ball Shots
- 18 Box Jump Overs
- 20 Wall Ball Shots
The “Rx” weight for the wall balls is 20 pounds for men, 14 pounds for women. The scaled weights were 14/10. For both Rx and scaled, box height is 24 inches for men and 20 inches for women.
Scaled athletes are not required to do box jumps; stepping up and over is permitted.
The Main Challenge of 26.1
It’s crucial to note that most athletes will not finish this workout in 12 minutes. For all but the top 1% (perhaps even the 1% of the 1%), this workout is about seeing how far you can get in the 12 minute time cap.
The main physical challenge here is that both wall balls and box jump overs/step overs are intense quad burners. There’s no movement that rests your legs. You’re going to feel the burn early.
The other challenge is that there’s no place for heart rate recovery. There’s no built in rest.
Wall balls jack up the heart rate. And box jump overs keep it elevated. Even the box step overs don’t give much relief; by the time you reach them you’re already riding a high heart rate and now you’re moving with load.
The mental challenge in this workout is that, like all pyramid schemes, it’s a trap. When you first look at the workout you might think it doesn’t look too bad. But if you go in without a strategy you’ll burnout quickly.
How I Won 26.1
I did 26.1 in the scaled version after watching some friends do the Rx version. I got 242 total reps — 14 wall balls into the second set of 40, which means I reached the apex of the pyramid. I felt good about my score — but even better about my strategic approach.
I was able to manage my energy well throughout so that in the final 28 seconds I could get those last 14 wall balls without putting down the ball. Even more important, I the workout didn’t leave me dysregulated or in pain. I didn’t even need to lay on the floor after.
For me, that’s a huge win. After all, you want to workout in a way that’s sustainable. If a workout kills you for the rest of the day, it’s not effective in the long term.
3 Strategies From CrossFit Open 26.1 to Avoid Self-Implosion
Here are 3 common tendencies that I’ve witnesses in workouts like this, and what I did in stead to avoid burning out.
(1) Be Disciplined in Your Pacing
The Tendency: It’s common in workouts like these to sprint out of the gate and go as fast and hard as you can while you feel strong, in the belief that “getting ahead early” will get you further.
This approach often backfires in blowing up too soon.
What to Do Instead: Go slower than you think you need to. Start the workout at the pace you’d use when you’re tired, so that you can settle into a sustainable pace. Think about what’s coming and leave enough in the tank for it.
If I were just doing a single set of box step overs, I’d probably sprint through them. But then I would have been gassed before I even hit the set of 40 wall balls. Instead, I took my time with the step overs, being very deliberate and moving at a steady pace.
(2) Break Up the Work Before it Breaks You
In this workout, the big strategy decision is how to break up the wall balls.
The Tendency: It’s common to want to ride momentum and make the sets as big as possible while you feel strong at the start of a workout.
I have fallen victim to this mistake many times, going for unbroken in early sets because they seemed small enough to handle. It never pays off.
What to Do Instead: Break up the wall balls into manageable sub-sets from the start. Go in with a plan for how you’ll break them up, and a back-up plan in case your initial plan proves too ambitious. Stopping before you fail is crucial.
My plan going in was to break up the wall balls into sets of 10. I held that strategy for the sets of 20, 30, and 40. When I got to 66, I broke it up in to 11 sets of 6. This turned out to be a great strategy that left me with enough in the tank to get 14 wall balls unbroken in the final 28 seconds. If I had gone with bigger sets earlier, I likely wouldn’t have even gotten to that final set of wall balls.
(3) Don’t Do More Than Necessary
This is crucial for you over-doers and over-givers.
The Tendency: Always push yourself to do as much as you can, no matter what, to prove what you can do.
What to Do Instead: Do what is necessary without striving for “extra credit.”
Doing that volume of wall balls with a 14-pound ball is beyond my capacity. If we were doing this workout in class outside of the Open, I might have scaled the weight of the ball but still done the box jumps.
But in the Open, there’s no credit for doing more than the standard requires. Doing the scaled weight meant that I was doing box step overs. Admittedly, at first I thought this would be a waste of time. I have been working on my box jumps and wanted to test that skill.
Letting go of the need to prove my skills — even to myself — was probably my biggest challenge of this workout. In fact, I almost didn’t do the workout for that reason.
In the end, I’m glad I did it. Releasing the need to do more than is necessary was exactly the practice I need to take to other parts of my life.
If that’s something I can take beyond the gym, that will be the biggest win of all.
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