TIPS FOR THE OPEN 2018: Open Prep
"Do or do not, there is no try." - Yoda
By: Marc Young
Another week down, another week closer to the open. Today, my message is simple, and probably won’t be all that long-winded.....TIP #2 for the 2018 CrossFit Open is:
DON’T BUY INTO THE MYTH OF OPEN PREP!
Enjoy the open, do not over-prep for it.
Guys, let’s not try and reinvent the wheel here. A lot of gyms in a lot of places try to make a huge deal about open prep. People will come in twice as often because they feel it’s time to prepare for the open. Gyms will advertise weeks of crazy workouts to prepare you, or schedule nothing but former open WODs for a month leading up to the open.
DON'T FALL FOR IT!
The fact of the matter stays the same: the CrossFit Open is a test of fitness, and that is what
CrossFit should already be about, 24/7, 365. If you feel you can somehow pour three times the energy into your workouts in preparation, you were doing something wrong all year folks! There is no shortcut to prepare you for fitness, except fitness. For those of you taking the time to read this, this means you should have been working hard all year in preparation. That’s why we dabble in the dark arts of CrossFit in the first place; it is an opportunity to become more fit on the daily. Simply put, you cannot jam-pack in a month of really intense WOD's hoping to overcome your inefficiencies.... I know it's tough to hear, but it's true!
Hard work happens year-round, not the month before the open kicks off.
BUT.....
I will say, as devil’s advocate, that there is a purpose to repeating a handful of open workouts. I’m not saying all the time, I am not even saying multiple times a week. Just one, at most, for the month leading up to the open. The purpose for this is to feel the pacing of some of the different workouts you may see, and to try out some of the other WOD's you may have missed in years past.
In a world where gym owners try to get all 'cutsie' with fancy workouts, we must remember that Ol' Davey Castro tends to program pretty classic couplet and triplet AMRAPS. If this is something your gym doesn’t do often, it would be a good idea to work that in minimally to feel the pace of that sort of workout. This will allow that pacing strategy to feel fresh in the head come game time.
There is no magic formula for developing that sub-three Fran time. - Marc Young
What I am saying here guys, is this. If your Fran time is 5:30, there is no magic formula to bring it down to sub 3 in a month. If you can hardly complete a handstand push up, there is no special trick to suddenly do 20 in a row.
The CrossFit Open is an exciting time to measure your growth over the course of the year, and to see how you stack up to others like you all over the globe. But let’s not get too crazy. There is no magic formula, and killing yourself in the gym for a month as “prep” will do more harm than good, I promise you.
Marc, OUT.
Have a thought or question? Email Marc here at: marc@voyedgerx.com