Sport

In this talk from Aug. 1, 2017, during the CrossFit Health Conference at Monona Terrace in Madison, Wisconsin, Professor Timothy Noakes shares his "untestable hypothesis" about the role of self-belief in sports victories. He discusses his then-forthcoming research as well, noting that he found, “If you put two competitors against each other, the instant the one guy goes ahead, the other person’s physiology changes.” The brain, he explains, “regulates the exercise performance … [and] the athlete who wins a close race chooses that outcome.”

Today, CrossFit, Inc. announces the 2020 CrossFit Sanctionals™ season: 28 events in 21 different countries on six continents. From November to the following October, a CrossFit-sanctioned event will take place nearly every weekend somewhere around the world. As in 2019, top finishers at each CrossFit Sanctionals™ event will receive invitations to compete against National Champions and the top 20 Open finishers at the 2020 Reebok CrossFit Games in Madison, Wisconsin.

CrossFit WOD 190513 challenged athletes to perform a 400-meter handstand walk in as few sets as possible (ASFAP). To calculate their final score for the workout, athletes multiplied their time in seconds by the number of sets they required to complete the distance. Congratulations to the two athletes with the lowest scores (one for men and one for women). Each has earned a $1,000 prize.

CrossFit WOD 190505 challenged athletes to test their farmers carry strength and endurance by carrying two dumbbells 400 meters. A $1,000 prize was reserved for the two athletes (one man and one woman) with the heaviest successful carries. The video review process is now complete, and the two winners have been named.

The 2019 Open began Feb. 21, spanning five weeks and featuring five tests of fitness. The Open is the single largest participatory test of fitness on the planet and is open to anyone with garage gym equipment and a will to pursue a challenge. Individuals from all cultures and walks of life unite in competition, drawn to the universality of the CrossFit methodology. It begins in the 15,000 CrossFit affiliates around the world and ends in a celebration of those individuals and communities at the CrossFit Games.

The final workout of the 2019 Open featured a descending ladder of thrusters and chest-to-bar pull-ups, totaling 105 reps of each movement, with a 20-minute time cap. Last year, 18.5 presented athletes with an ascending ladder of the same two movements, so it’s no surprise that nearly the same percentage of Open participants decided to tackle the final Open workout as prescribed in 2018 and 2019. Read on to see how the community fared with this year's rep scheme.

This 2003 CrossFit Journal article captures an early conception of a universal, multi-event test of fitness that laid the foundation for CrossFit competition, including what would become the CrossFit Open and the CrossFit Games. The design requirements for such a test "included but were not limited to the following: quantifiable results; consistency with the CrossFit fitness concept; raising our commitment to improving absolute strength, relative strength, and gymnastic foundations; balancing intrinsic abilities of smaller and larger athletes; emphasizing exercises critical to and foundational to advanced training; mixing training demands within each test and, of course, over the total competition; a design that would identify an athlete’s weaknesses and possibly stand as a workout plan for improving overall fitness; and, finally, we wanted to design a competition that would be 'hard as hell.'"

The fourth workout of the 2019 CrossFit Open featured two couplets separated by a mandatory 3-minute rest: three rounds of 10 snatches and 12 bar-facing-burpees, and three rounds of 10 bar muscle-ups and 12 bar-facing-burpees. This was the second week of the Open in which athletes were asked to perform a high skill movement, and once again athletes worldwide rose to the occasion. A total of 99,924 men and 25,327 women successfully performed at least one bar muscle-up before the 12-minute time cap in 19.4.

The third workout of the 2019 CrossFit Open was a chipper with dumbbell overhead lunges, dumbbell box step-ups, strict handstand push-ups, handstand walks, and a tight 10-minute time cap. Workout 19.3 marked the first appearance of strict handstand push-ups in the Open. Despite the introduction of a new high-skill movement, an impressive 88,000 men and 25,000 women were able to perform at least one strict handstand push-up. Jonathan Kinnick provides the CrossFit btwb analysis of 19.3.

The second workout of the 2019 Reebok CrossFit Games Open was a near repeat of 16.2. Workout 19.2 featured toes-to-bars, double-unders, squat cleans, and an initial 8-minute time cap (a change from 2016 that guaranteed all athletes a longer workout). Facing challenging movements and heavy weights, many more athletes chose the scaled version of the workout this week of the Open. In this analysis, Jonathan Kinnick of CrossFit btwb breaks down the data from 19.2.