Lessons From the past

By: Kyle Spears

Over the past couple of months, I have been having a lot of conversations about what could be called the second generation of CrossFit competitors and competing in that era. This would be the 2011–2018 time frame, starting with the introduction of the Open to the death of Regionals (RIP). This was really a special era of competitive fitness, and we saw a lot of athletes make a living for themselves and really set an amazing foundation for the sport. With the setup of the season structure going from the Open to Regionals to the Games, there were an unbelievable number of lessons learned that, in this chaotic time frame of the third generation of the sport, I believe athletes are missing out on. From the precision of execution to the intensity needed to win or perform best at competitions, and finally the importance of a season structure, the third generation has been driven by FOMO. While this has allowed athletes to make an even better living, for the less talented or bubble athletes, it has enabled them to make a better living, grow a social media following to help them after the competition ends. And while performances are improving, it has caused a lot of fitness to be left on the table.

In the old Regionals format, there was a unique aspect where athletes would forgo CrossFit's constantly varied guidelines and practice the same workouts for anywhere from one to three weeks until their region's Regional arrived. While this often felt like an eternity for athletes, it provided a very valuable experience in mastering things like transitions, strategies, and pacing. This allowed athletes to be dialed in when they took the floor, and execution was top-notch. This level of detail has been slightly lost on the third generation, and it isn’t until they are a couple of years into the sport that they really learn the nuances of the competition floor and how important little things like a two-second difference in transitions can catapult places on the leaderboard. The difference between third and fourth place at the Games in the men’s division last year was 0.02 seconds. I’m not saying that these individuals don’t understand its importance—because if you are competing at the top of the sport, you have to—but this goes to show how important the little things are: things that don’t get practiced as much as they have in the past.

While this was monotonous to repeat over and over again, it was extraordinarily helpful in also providing athletes with high levels of intensity, as they were absolutely dialed in to what their job was on the competition floor. This created a higher level of intensity, as athletes were able to push their physiological limits even further on those things and run faster races due to their understanding of the fatigue factors at play. Moving away from the top of the sport, intensity is probably one of the most missed things from an individual's ability to transcend different bubbles in their fitness progress. Athletes during this time were also trained to just go hard, and almost every training day was max effort. While this doesn’t bode well for longevity in the sport, it does help out on the competition floor. There does need to be some balance in training now, but it is much harder to teach this skill set today when it isn’t preached daily. You must develop the switch before you can flip the switch, so going through periods of time where you are absolutely sending it and teaching athletes to have no fear in their performances is needed for the true development of an athlete.

Lastly, one of the most important lessons that athletes learned was season structure. Today, because there are so many competitions, it is challenging for athletes to dial in exactly what they should be doing month to month or quarter to quarter, and often they end up competing too often due to FOMO. In the Regionals time frame, athletes were taught that traveling anywhere from January to May was a no-go, and their life revolved around CrossFit for that period of time. They took an off-season in June if they didn’t qualify for the Games, and then they were back to training hard for a fall comp or qualifier. Everything had a very neat and easy flow to it. Now the season is year-long, and it is hard to get athletes to focus on training for an extended period of time just to develop capacity in order to qualify for an event they are looking forward to. The CrossFit season has also become a little bit more of a back-burner event for people, and there is a much bigger focus on live events.