Five Reasons You Should Participate in the CrossFit Open
The CrossFit Open is here! Every Saturday for the next three weeks, we will do the Open workouts together. Maybe you're an Open veteran and know exactly what you hope to accomplish, awesome! On the other hand, maybe you’re new to the CrossFit community and unsure of what the Open means. That’s cool, too.
Regardless of how long you’ve been at CrossFit, participating in the Open is beneficial for a number of reasons. “But how,” you ask. Well, below are 5 good reasons to participate in the Open.
Five Reasons You Should Participate in the CrossFit Open
Enjoy the Sanctify Community
The Open is a chance for our gym community to bond by way of a little suffering and a lot of accomplishment. We work out alongside one another, support and cheer for each other, and get to know one another better. Though the situation is quite different this year, throughout the weeks of the Open, our community makes an effort to socialize and mingle a little more. For new members, the Open is often when they begin to feel more integrated into the Sanctify community.
Develop a Training Focus
Like a runner trains for a race, the CrossFit Open gives you a focus in your training. If you’ve been doing CrossFit for some time, the Open is an opportunity to test your fitness and skills. Even if you are new to CrossFit, your performance can indicate where you are at a given point in time, and it becomes something against which you can compare your progress over time. Used as a focus for training, the Open can serve as a source of motivation throughout the year. These workouts are measurable and repeatable and likely will come up again in our programming. Use the Open to establish some personal benchmarks and to set a few training goals for the upcoming year.
Explore your Competitive Side
Within the context of our everyday training, having only a competition mindset can be detrimental to progress. However, on occasion, it can be productive to embrace our competitive side. Competition can reveal capabilities we didn’t know existed, and as a result, build confidence. A competitive atmosphere shakes us out of our comfort zone and gives us a reason to push harder. We are all competitive to a certain degree, and part of us craves the thrill of competition, even if we are only competing with our own past performances.
Build Mental Toughness
The Open workouts are never easy. They are intended to test you. Open workouts are meant to be completed at a high level of intensity and are apt to include heavy loads, high skill movements, and/or a high volume of reps. Sometimes a fast conditioning piece is followed by a one-rep-max strength effort. Or, higher skill lifts and gymnastic movements, such as snatches, double-unders, or muscle-ups, follow on the heels of a fatiguing set of strength focused movements. Mercifully, there is always a time cap to stem the suffering. Nevertheless, what at first seems manageable on paper, in reality can sneak up on you. You will have to draw on the mental toughness you’ve been cultivating throughout the year to push through to the end.
Gain an Appreciation for the Sport of CrossFit
The CrossFit Open has always been an essential component of the CrossFit Games. In previous years, it was how competitive athletes who aspired to make the Games qualified for Regionals, which was the last step in winning one of the 40 spots (for each gender) at the Games. For the tiny fraction of individuals capable of competing in the CrossFit Games (0.17 percent of Open participants make it to the Games), the stakes are very high.
During the Open, we do the same workouts as the elite athletes in the sport of CrossFit. This gives us unique insight into what it takes to perform at the elite level. When you consider how hard you struggle to complete each of the Open workouts, the fitness of elite CrossFit athletes is put in perspective. In short, our experience doing the Open workouts allows us to appreciate their efforts, and hopefully, they inspire us in our personal pursuit of fitness.
Have we convinced you? Good! Click below to officially sign up for the Open.