Three Mistakes Athletes Make During Online Qualifiers

Online Qualifiers are the bed rock of the sport of fitness. As soon as the open was completed in 2011, people knew that this was a sustainable, and future business model that was here to stay for the sport. Far from their heyday now, there are still foundational truths that are held up to perform your best during this time frame. Today we will be focusing on Three mistakes athletes make in online qualifiers and how to correct or fix the issue. From competing too much, to not enough intensity, to training too hard… the list could be endless here. We will focus on the three main ones that are rearing their head during this October qualifier season. 

Doing All of The Qualifiers.

Gone are the days in the sport where a former collegiate athlete could walk into a CrossFit gym, think oh this is pretty fun and qualify for the games after 6 months of training. The sport is very hyper specialized now, and there are years of training that need to take place in order for athletes to perform at the highest level. The field is dense, and the competition is high. Often, athletes don’t have a plan going into a competition season, and this leads to wanting to do everything and anything that their friends might be doing, or what most recent comp pops up on their feed and they have fomo. Participating in too many qualifiers can lead to a couple of different issues. Burnout, lack of intensity, and under training. 

The season's competitions overlap now. There are a lot of fish in the sea at this point in the sports journey, and if you are going to try and compete at all of these competitions you are going to be left on the sidelines, watching all of your friends have a good time on the competition floor. In order to qualify for these events, you have to put in your best possible score from both an effort and execution standpoint. As stated above, very few athletes are walking into these competitions doing normal training throughout the week and just hitting the qualifier for fun. The competition is too high to be doing that now. When we are hitting multiple qualifiers in a 2-4 week period we are bleeding intensity and cannot elicit the proper push when the occasion calls for it. This is leaving reps or seconds on the table and dropping you down spots on the leaderboard. 

If you are truly wanting to participate at these events, you should be choosing competitions that are spaced at least 2 weeks apart. This will allow the body to recover and give you the push that you need to elicit your best score possible in these qualifiers. 

Not Properly Structuring Their Training Weeks

In the qualifier we have to maximize our performances, all while balancing training and fitness so we don’t compete ourselves out of shape. There are a couple different formats of online qualifiers right now and we will examine 2 week with multiple workouts and a longer 4 week with 1 workout a week similar to the open. Each has a different template, and different priorities while they are going on. 

For a two week qualifier, our focus is going to be solely on attempts and recovering during the 4 days window that scores are usually due. If this window is extended, then we are focused on making attempts rather than any training stimulus. Typically, this means from Friday to Monday or Tuesday we are making attempts, and then Tuesday and Wednesday we have some training. The biggest thing that we need to make sure we are doing is getting touches on strength work during this time, and Maintaining a healthy aerobic system, and the doses of intensity we will be hitting during these things can have a propensity to shift us into more of an anaerobic state, and over the course of time especially if we are doing 2 two week qualifiers in a 6 week period our aerobic system can suffer. Tuesday can be dedicated to maintenance work in a 4-day window while Wednesday will have maintenance work, plus a little bit of a “stinger” style workout that will drop the intensity and give you a taste of the power output you are going to want to elicit come Friday. Thursday will be a rest day, and one other day during the weekend. 

For Online qualifiers releasing one workout a week, with a 4-day window the same Tuesday and Wednesday will be followed. We will have our first attempt on Friday followed by strength maintenance work on Saturday and a flush/aerobic piece. Sunday will be full rest pending on the athletes training schedule with Monday being a re-test. This should allow for optimal training in order to elicit higher intensity levels on each attempt of the qualifier workout.

Oftentimes athletes will be too aggressive with training and if they don’t have a day where they are doing qualifier workouts, their training will look like a full training day with either higher volume or higher intensity. This then puts us further into a hole

Not Changing Anything on Their Retest

Coaching involves analyzing workouts and how athletes can do better. If athletes are going into a retest without a different game plan, they are missing a crucial component to the coaching side of the sport. Your job as a coach is to analyze the athlete's workout and change something either from a pacing standpoint, movement standpoint, transition standpoint or other that should give the athlete a better score. Going into a retest with the goal of just pushing hard (all though not out of the realm of coaching advice I’ve found out this year.) is insanity. Even if the goal is to get 1-2 more reps on the piece, you should be doing something to get those 1-2 more reps. Transitioning faster, slowing some rounds down, picking up the pace on something, changing your overall pace. There is always something no matter how small you should be doing on your retests. 

While we went over only three things today, the list could be much more expansive than this. Seeing as we are already at two pages of single-spaced typing, we will save those for another day. The goal of these three points is to help you to understand how to maximize each attempt on your re-test which leads you to accomplishing the things you want to accomplish in an online qualifier. So take these, apply them, and hopefully they will help you achieve your goals in the next qualifier you have! 

Kyle