CrossFit Open 26.2: How to Get 20 Pull-Ups (Even If That’s a Stretch For You)

I often have a love/hate relationship with CrossFit, but one of the things I love about the CrossFit Open is that it can disprove your limiting beliefs about your capability.

The structure of certain workouts forces you to attempt movements you might believe you cannot do, or in a volume that seems unattainable. When that happens, it’s magic — both for the athlete performing the workout and the people observing.

Open 26.2 offers the potential for that magic, if you play it right.

CrossFit Open 26.2: The Workout

The CrossFit Open 26.2 workout features three movements organized into three rounds. The first two movements stay the same throughout, and the final movement of each round is an escalating gymnastics skill.

Here is the “Rx” workout:

Within a 15-minute time cap, complete:

80-foot dumbbell overhead walking lunges
20 alternating dumbbell snatches
20 pull-ups

80-foot dumbbell overhead walking lunges
20 alternating dumbbell snatches
20 chest-to-bar pull-ups

80-foot dumbbell overhead walking lunges
20 alternating dumbbell snatches
20 ring muscles ups

The Rx weight is a 50-lb dumbbell for men and a 35-lb dumbbell for women.

For scaled athletes, the weights drop to 35-lbs for men and 20-lbs for women, and the gymnastics progression changes to jumping pull-ups, pull-ups, and chest-to-bar pull-ups.

At the end of each set of snatches, a tie-break time is recorded.

This is a workout where athletes will be separated on the leaderboard by skill. There will be a bottleneck at each gymnastics skill level, and each rep in that section will move you up in ranking over the others who are stalled at the previous level.

It’s also the type of workout where some athletes will find themselves in what seems to be a CrossFit “rite of passage:” watching the clock count down at the end while they try to get one rep of that gymnastics skill that is eluding them.

What If You Can’t Do Pull-Ups?

For athletes who have these gymnastics skills down, this is about managing energy to get to the finish line or the tie break point before your bottleneck skill. You can find plenty of strategies online for your situation.

But there’s another type of athlete out there, and most of the online strategy guides don’t address this athlete.

This is for you if you’re thinking:

I can’t do 20 pull-ups or I can’t do 20 chest-to-bar pull-ups.

For some of us, that’s a high volume to do in one shot, without breaking it up with other movements.

You might be thinking, there’s no way.

One of my friends boldly proclaimed that she’d likely be riding out her time on the pull-ups because her “daily max” is only 12.

I get it.

In a typical workout we do in class, if we have 5 pull-ups per round over several rounds, I often end up scaling the number to do what I can do on that day.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn’t fly in the Open. You’ve got to do all 20 before you move on.

How Do You Manage High Volume of a Challenging Movement

Before you dismiss this as impossible, here’s the mindset shift:

Stop thinking about it as a set of 20.

You don’t need to do 20 pull-ups unbroken. You can do sets of 3 or 2 or even singles.

When I did this workout, I approached the pull-ups as singles:

One. Rep. At. A. Time.

Get on the bar, pull yourself up, chin over the bar, and come down. Breathe. Shake out your arms. Do it again.

This is how I approached the pull-ups from the start.

This approach doesn’t just manage your energy for the current movement; it keeps you in the game for the rest of the workout.

A Win You Can Take Beyond the Workout

This might slow you down, and it likely won’t land you at the top of the leaderboard. But it will do something more important: it will show you your capacity.

It’s also faster than hitting failure.

Hitting the mark on a single rep gives you momentum and confidence for the next one. On the other hand, if get too close to failure — or hit failure — it can be hard to refind your grip strength and your confidence.

Here’s the truth: depending on where you’re at with your gymnastics skill, and your fatigue level at that point in the workout, you might not get all 20 reps.

But if you manage your energy well and break it down into smaller bites, you’ll do more than you thought you’d be able to do — and the impact of that accomplishment is far more long-lasting than your ranking on the leaderboard.

That’s the magic of the Open.

Like my friend who predicted that she’d run out the clock on the pull-ups:

She did the workout scaled, so for her the pull-ups was the second round movement. She got through them all and through the next round of lunges and snatches, and back to the bar for the chest-to-bars. She even managed to get a chest-to-bar pull-up in the final seconds.

Don’t let the big number intimidate you.

By focusing on one rep at a time, you can do more than you think.

That’s not true only in the Open; it’s also true in other parts of life.