With the 2017 Open officially kicking off this Thursday night we have a couple of announcements on what you can expect.

Schedule – throughout the 5 weeks of the Open our Friday evening (5:30pm) and Saturday (9:00 & 10:00) classes will be reserved for people participating in the Open. We’re very sorry to anyone who’s schedule this screws up…this is something we’ve done every year and we do it to be fair to those we paid the sign-up fee.
Workouts – there is really no difference between the workouts we do during throughout the year and the workouts of the Open. The biggest difference is that Mikey and I program our regular workouts and Dave Castro / CrossFit HQ program the five Open workouts. At the end of the day it’s still the same pool of movements that they’re programming from…you can expect to see burpees, box jumps, pull-ups, power cleans, snatching, wall-ball, deadlifts, push-ups, toes to bar, thrusters etc…
Judging – this is probably the biggest differentiating factor of the Open. Since the Open is essentially an online competition, making sure movement standards are maintained and upheld is paramount to the success of the event. It’s safe to say you can expect a bit of extra instruction on specific movement and judging standards. Each person participating will also have the opportunity to get their feet wet with Judging as well as have all of their workouts Judged & Validated…so exciting.
Guess The Open Pool – whether you’re participating in the Open or not there is no reason not to get in on the Pool. It’s Open to everyone – you get one guess at which week will be repeated, as well as one guess at which workout will be repeated. In the past I’ve been able to print out large posters with all the workouts and unfortunately I haven’t been able to do that at my other job this year. To help people out I did make a quick cheat sheet that gives a very brief description of each week (see below). If you’re looking for a more complete breakdown / description of a given workout you view the full description on the CrossFit Games Site
- Cheat Sheet: Guess The Open Pool
- CrossFit Games - Previous Open Workouts
Workout Heats – since everyone gets to have their workout judged we will be running multiple heats for the workouts within each class. Heats will be set on a first come, first serve basis and will limited by the number of Judges. If we have a 20 person class we can run 2 heats of 10, or 3 heats at 7/7/6 ..we can not do a heat of 15 or 20. As we saw last year with the overhead walking barbell lunges some of this is also limited by the workout. What this means is - please show up on time.
Entering Scores – completing the workout is doing 90% of the work, the other 10% comes down to entering your score. After completing the workout both you and your Judge will sign the scoresheet acknowledging your score. The gym gets one copy and each person gets a small slip of paper with their score as a reminder. From there you will have to login to games.crossfit.com in order to submit your score...which we will then verify and validate.
Scaling / Modifying Workouts – just like any other workout we do, it is completely acceptable to scale and modify the workouts. At the end of the day we want people to get in a good workout and have a little fun. What we will talk about is how the score gets entered on the games site. Depending on how the workout was scaled or modified it may be entered on the games site based on how much of the standards were completed. We’ll talk about this more with each person modifying the workout throughout the five weeks. The point is that scaling and modifying workouts is an option. Now I will say that if there was ever a time to try and push to go Rx on a workout...this would be it.
Support / Encouragement – this is by far one of the best parts of the Open. It’s an amazing environment. We’ve seen people get their first double unders, first chest to bar pull-ups, toes to bar and muscle-ups, we’ve had people set PR’s on lifts and then continue with it for multiple reps. There is something about the Open that creates an environment that exudes positivity and encouragement. It’s helps give us that extra push we can all use.