Watching Film:

By: Kyle Spears

In every other professional sport, athletes sit down and watch game film. In CrossFit, this isn’t much different at the top level—but more often, athletes engage with it because they love the sport or enjoy the entertainment around it. One of the biggest things up-and-coming athletes can do to improve their ability to compete is to watch film of higher-level athletes.

I’ve seen many athletes learn tough lessons—or experience a slower development curve—because they don’t study film. Film can teach you a lot: strategies, transitions, and pacing—all things that are essential to performing well on competition day.

Strategies & Pacing

This is probably the most important aspect of watching film—studying other athletes’ strategies and understanding what they are doing within their workouts. It also shows you how to adjust on the fly.

Watching film reveals what top athletes in the sport are capable of, which should push you in training and give you a clearer picture of where you need to go. It also allows you to see how elite athletes handle adversity—how they stay composed when things don’t go according to plan, and what they do when they blow up.

This is something that is bound to happen in competition, especially when you’re racing someone. Exposure to these situations can be critical in helping you respond the right way when it happens to you.

Transitions

In live competition, the speed of movement is amplified, and there are often larger floor spaces to navigate between implements. There are small tricks that can help you shave seconds off transitions—and those seconds matter, especially at the end of a workout when you’re racing someone.

Watching how top athletes transition can teach you how to practice these movements in training so they become automatic on the competition floor. This is especially important in team workouts, where efficiency moving from one implement to another is crucial.

You’ll also pick up on small details—how to move a barbell, where to place chalk, how to get in and out of machines—that can be easily learned just by observing. You might even discover new techniques.

Flow

Every competition has a different workout flow. If you don’t understand that flow—or can’t learn it quickly—you lose valuable time that could be spent visualizing your execution.

Poor transitions or moving to the wrong place can cost you seconds in a workout, and as we’ve seen countless times, those seconds can impact leaderboard positions.

Watching live competitions exposes you to a wide variety of workout structures and flows. Over time, you can categorize these patterns and draw from them during competition. This allows you to learn transitions faster and spend more time visualizing instead of figuring out where you need to be.

Up-and-coming athletes didn’t always have the advantage of watching CrossFit as it developed. Now, it’s easy to see something once, go into the gym, and just go hard. Maybe you saw a clip on social media and want to emulate that athlete—but if you want to improve quickly, you need to focus on learning.

One of the fastest ways to do that is by watching full competitions—not just highlights, but every heat. There are lessons to be learned from Heat 1 just as much as from Heat 4 or 5.

You just have to study it.