Most CrossFit athletes have strong preferences. Short workouts over long ones. Heavy days over high-rep gymnastics. Anything but running. Definitely not muscle-ups.
We joke about them with training partners or quietly dread certain movement patterns when they appear in our programming. Sometimes we even program around them, telling ourselves we’re “focusing on strengths” or “being strategic about recovery.”
But preferences become a problem when your goal is elite fitness, especially when you’re preparing for the Open, where you have zero control over what’s coming.
The Harassment of Preferences
The Open will expose every preference you have. You hope for thrusters but get muscle-ups. You pray for short and heavy but get long and light. You want anything but burpees, and suddenly it’s 7 minutes of burpees.
Like the garage athlete who skips movements they don’t like or the member who cherry-picks workouts, we tell ourselves stories: “My body doesn’t feel right in overhead squats.” “Rowing isn’t my thing.” “I’ll just focus on my strengths.”
But here’s what CrossFit methodology teaches: whether you like a movement is irrelevant. CrossFit’s prescription for elite fitness — constantly varied functional movements executed at high intensity — prepares you for the unknown and unknowable. Cherry-picking your favorites doesn’t.
There’s a reason we define fitness as “increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains.” Broad. Not narrow. Not specialized around what you prefer.
When Preferences Stop Limiting You
Adaptable athletes are dangerous because they’re open. They aren’t so stuck on preferences they can’t perform when the Open delivers a curveball. They’ve trained everything, so they’re ready for anything.
Less preference = more adaptability.
What the Open Reveals
If you stay focused on preferences, hoping for certain movements and dreading others, you’ll never attack whatever appears with confidence.
The Open doesn’t care what you like. It’s going to test everything. The only question is whether you’ve trained with the same philosophy: preparing for everything by specializing in nothing. Or whether you’ve quietly avoided what you don’t like, thinking no one would notice.
Your preferences are showing. And they’re limiting you.
The goal isn’t to love every movement or time domain. The goal is not to let your preferences create weakness. Train it all. Be ready for anything.
Because that’s what CrossFit promised from day one: preparation for the unknown and unknowable.
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