What is the CrossFit Open and Why do I Care?

One of the things we love most about CrossFit and why it's so effective is that it's extremely measurable. We can quantify how much weight you moved over what distance and for what time, and we can actually figure out your power output in a very real, empirical sense, - how much wattage, horsepower, or pound feet of torque you can generate. That's a great tool, so that we can measure your progress over time, but what we can also do is measure your progress against someone else's progress, and we can compare, We can essentially race.

Now, CrossFit does get a bit of a bad rap sometimes for people sacrificing form and safety so that they can “win” a workout. That's not what we do on a regular basis here. We're always increasing our capacity, so that we can see progress over time. But once a year, we, as CrossFitters throughout the world, gather to compare ourselves against each other and have a friendly competition. That's the CrossFit Open. For five weeks .starting Thursday, October 10th, CrossFit HQ will announce the first of five workouts. They will tell us what we're going to do, and we have until Monday at 5:00 PM to submit our scores. This will repeat for the next five weeks.

The workouts are judged, which means you have someone watching you, making sure you're moving correctly and executing the proper movement with the proper weights and doing everything correctly, so that we can really compare apples to apples with everybody worldwide. We'll do that five weeks in a row, and then at the end of that the winners, the fastest or the fittest men and women in each country, will move on to the next stage of the CrossFit Games, which is held in August. There are other ways to qualify to get to the CrossFit Games, but to be honest, you have to be a committed, pretty full time athlete to get to those competitions that would qualify you. The CrossFit Open is the way that absolutely everybody can measure themselves against the fittest in the world and have a chance at glory.

The other nice thing about the Open is that it develops a nice sense of community throughout the world by having everybody working out in the same way at the same time. We will do the same Open WODs on Fridays and Saturdays here at Sequoia CrossFit, in case anybody can't come in on Friday. We also have our own internal competition here, called the Sequoia CrossFit House Cup. There's no money involved - it's just for fun and for bragging rights, and everybody gets really into it. We have different teams and different ways you can earn points. It's really, really fun. Think of the CrossFit Open like your Thanksgiving Turkey trot or fun run 5K, except with CrossFit.

Just like in our classes where we scale movements to be the most appropriate for your fitness development, the CrossFit Open has prescribed and scaled versions of the workouts, so absolutely everybody can at least get a score of one rep, or one pound, or whatever it is that we're measuring. Everybody can compete in the CrossFit open. It's great. It's a lot of fun. Trust me. It'll be great.

If you want to be a part of it, click this link to book a No Sweat Intro. You can come in, talk to us about your individual fitness needs and we’ll show you how Sequoia CrossFit can help you out. We hope to see you in here really soon.