What now?

The 2025 CrossFit Open is done and dusted and I am so incredibly proud of the great movement and effort I saw on display and the standards that were upheld.  The reason you were all able to make me so proud is because this is what you guys do day in, day out at CrossFit Uckfield.  You work hard to move well,  you work hard to go through the full range of motion, to count your reps accurately and to hit the standards - and it paid off!  Well done all.

So now what?

Well, if we listen really carefully, the CrossFit Open will speak to us…

Once we remove luck, illness or pregnancy from the equation,  it will tell us everything we need to know about how we trained over the last year, our mental and physical approach to our training, how our minds and bodies respond to pressure and challenge and whether or not any of that has changed since last year.

It will highlight our strengths and expose our weaknesses; it will reveal the work we did (or didn’t) do. 

It will put on display our nutrition, sleep and alcohol intake.

It will tell us how family and work commitments make an impact and how stress, age, neurology and hormone levels take effect.

It will tell us what we think of ourselves, how we see ourselves and how we want others to view us.

It will tell us what’s important to us.

And this information, once accepted and interpreted intelligently and without emotion (obviously the denial, anger, bargaining and depression having come first) can inform where we go from here.

The CrossFit Open is a unique opportunity to test our fitness and see how far we’ve come since last year, yes but it is also a handy benchmark - a flag in the sand to help us move forward with purpose.

While I try to help you all see CrossFit as an intrinsic part of your lives forever - an insurance policy we take into old age, to stave off decrepitude and disease, it is also a fun hobby!  We like to work on getting better at our hobbies.  The Open helps us make a plan of action to do that.

In analysing and assessing our CrossFit training,  it is useful to unpack 7 variables that will have contributed to how we performed in this year’s Open or how we continue to improve in CrossFit.  Understanding where our strengths and weaknesses lie will allow us to train with more purpose and to plug the gaps, whilst acknowledging, sustaining and building upon our strengths.

1 Endurance, stamina and speed (how fast can we move and how often do we need to rest?)

2 Strength and power (how heavy can we lift and how quickly can we get it done?)

3 Balance and coordination, accuracy and agility (how efficiently are we able to move?)

4 Skills (how well can we make use of numbers 2 and 3?)

5 Mental game (how well can we make use of 1,2, 3 and 4?)

6 Approach (how cleverly can we use 1,2, 3 and 4?)

7 Luck (sod’s law)

The first 4 are all about how we approach every workout we do and how consistently and regularly we show up.  5 and 6 require some time, experience and maturity along our CrossFit road.  Number 7 is pretty much out of our control but how we respond to it is 100% within our control (see 5 and 6)

It’s very tempting to come out of a workout, where one particular movement held us back, and think: if I just do that movement every day, by the next Open, I’ll be brilliant! I’ve thought it myself at the end of more than Open. Here’s why that isn’t our best plan.

I’ll take wallclimbs as the example.

If you do wallclimbs every day for a week, how do you think those wallclimbs are going to look by the end of the week? With sore shoulders and muscles that haven’t been given adequate time to recover, joints that are beginning to feel a little inflamed from extra volume of work, on connective tissue that wasn’t strong enough to get you the wallclimbs of your dreams in the first place…I’m guessing they are going to deteriorate rather than improve.  Now, add the mental anguish you’ve created by watching yourself get worse, not better, at something that already made you feel bad about yourself with a dose of tendonitis that then prevents you from doing wallclimbs - or anything overhead - next week and you’re worse off than you were before you did the Open!

Instead, look back at what your wallclimbs used to look like.  I know for a fact that all my members’ wallclimbs look stronger than they did last year because we have worked really hard on gymnastic positions in pullups and pressups and we have worked our core, hip flexors, glutes, hamstrings, shoulders, lats with leg raises and front squats, deadlifts, pressing overhead…

Hang on…you’re all better at wallclimbs without actually having done a million wallclimbs…?

Bam! That’s CrossFit!  Right there! Minimum dose for maximum return!

In a nutshell, to get better at wallclimbs or snatches or whatever you want to get better at for next year’s Open, you just have to do CrossFit with intention.

Here’s how:

1 Address your nutrition - fruit and veg for fuel, protein for recovery, a little full fat for both.

If you need a hand, there are sheets at the gym with everything you need to know about nutrition on one page - ask for one.  Consider arranging a month of nutrition support.with Krish.

2 Sleep well - if you can. If you can’t, listen to your body and rest when it’s had enough!

3 Avoid or at least limit alcohol

4 Train regularly and consistently

5 Train with intention and purpose - think about what you are doing

6 Address your thoughts and attitude 

7 Try to have some fun!  You don’t HAVE to train, you GET to train.  

That’s it.  

*Barbell drop.