The CrossFit Open for Regular People

At CrossFit Magni… we aren’t making it to the CrossFit Games. Not because we aren’t exceptional people. But Because we don’t want that for ourselves. We have constructed a life with a different path that leads to happiness and fulfillment. But we still do the Open! Why? Because it’s a really fun, challenging endeavor to participate in! We get together every Friday evening and give it our all! We separate the gym into 2 teams and have them battle for points. You earn the most points through being a team player! You don’t earn many through being the best. As is the case in every CrossFit class, you aren’t rewarded through being “good,” but you are rewarded for your EFFORT and ATTITUDE.

The CrossFit Open is a 3 week (4 weeks for us) online competition, hosted by CrossFit Headquarters. Each week CrossFit lets out a workout on Thursday (beginning February 29) and CrossFit gyms ALL OVER THE WORLD participate, most commonly on Friday nights! The energy is electric. It is similar to signing up for a 5k fun run, but it is cheaper (like $22) and lasts 3 weeks instead of a couple hours.

Every CrossFit gym is required to have official judges that must take the online certification course. Athletes will then sign up and when they perform the workout, they must follow the standards set from CrossFit and the judges are there to enforce the standards and count reps/rounds and track time/weight. Reps that don’t meet the standards are not counted. This way, every athlete’s score has some level of accountability that it is true to the standard!

Once the athlete has finished the workout, they go to the CrossFit Games site (where they signed up) and enter their scores before the deadline on the following Monday evening (6PM MST if my memory serves!). Now each athlete is on a worldwide leaderboard that can be filtered in virtually any way and each year you can see if you rank better than the year before. And because CrossFit is constantly varied, the average of your performance will remain somewhat steady since the workouts are different week to week, year to year. This gives you the confidence that your fitness level isn’t tied to anything specific and that no matter what life through at you, you are among some of the fittest humans on earth. And that is no fabrication. The average CrossFit goer is in fact, fitter than 95% of the world (even though it sometimes feels like you aren’t because you are comparing against that top 5%!).

Each workout comes with variations for all divisions. Divisions typically range from different Masters or Teen divisions based on age as well as a scaled division. Typically the scaled version is VERY accessible with some exceptions where they might want to give athletes the opportunity to stretch their efforts. These exceptions typically come at the end of a workout where there is a more accessible tie breaker for people to still make their separation and it usually happens in only one out of the 3 workouts.

Here is an overview for CrossFit Magni members and how we will run the Open.

Sign up by February 25th to be drafted onto a team (you may still sign up till March 1)
Team Captains will reach out to team to start game planning their victory and communicate any important details (usually via Instagram chat, but could use virtually any platform)
Week 1 : March 1 starting at 6:00PM ( BRING A FRIEND NIGHT )
Week 2 : March 8 starting at 6:00PM ( TBA )
Week 3 : March 15 starting at 6:00PM ( TBA )
BONUS Week 4 : March 22 starting at 6:00PM ( CrossFit Magni Decathlon Party )

After each week one team “wins” the week. That team gets to construct a “punishment” workout for the other team. This is usually a physically, relatively simple thing, with a silly twist. For example, we have had one teammate holds a handstand while the other feeds an ice cream sandwich to the upside down athlete… HILARIOUS! Life wouldn’t be very fun if we couldn’t embrace opportunities to laugh at ourselves!

After everyone has completed the workout, we as a large group head over to a bar/restaurant and eat and hang out and it is a fun way to close the night!

The decathlon week is the final week that we exclusively use for teams to make a last ditch effort to win through a series of physical challenges (that are built off the 10 components of fitness) that are relatively silly, most of the time. It adds one additional week to the Open for us, but it makes it fun and allows for one final punishment workout to be dealt. We also make this potluck style and have everyone bring a dish.

GET SIGNED UP!!!

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