Introducing The 2018 CrossFit CBD Benchmark Cycle!

The CrossFit Open has ended for another year. What a ride it was!! Now we have also gotten past the Easter Holiday season too we can look to get our "normal" training regime back on the table.

With a new fresh year of training to look forward we here at CBD have been busy behind the scenes developing a new way for us test our Fitness out without losing our core values of training for GPP & training in true authentic CrossFit programming.

So, when we say say a "new" way of testing, its not exactly a new way, we haven't reinvented the wheel here! What we have come up is a selection of famous CrossFit Benchmark WoDs ranging from your classic "Girl WoDs' to "Hero WoDs" to famous ".Com" WoDs. We will call this the "2018 CBD BENCHMARK CYCLE"

Because of the constantly varied nature concept of CrossFit programming, we wanted to implement a method to test the programming that lies in relation to the goal of our program. By its very design, CrossFit programming is varied, and the tenets of the program hold that constantly varied, functional movements, executed at high intensity, will yield increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains. In the simplest of terms, your benchmark workout scores should improve over the course of the year without specifically training to be better at those workouts and movements.

Benchmark testing has long been a part of CrossFit and Coach Glassman has written about it numerous time. From our perspective as coaches and programmers, we want a systematic approach to test our athletes’ progress and evaluate gym weaknesses at CBD as a whole. In addition, we found that some of the most rewarding days for athletes occurred when they retested a workout and saw huge improvements. We have always had a special place in our heart for "named" WoDs and outside of things like the CrossFit Open you may have noticed you get exposed to a Named WoD every 6-10 days or so. You get to visit so many cool & famous WoDs that perhaps some of them won't come back quick enough for you to see results. Well this changes that.

(Side note: This doesn't mean that the 13 WoDs we've selected will be the only Benchmarks you get to do here. We will still reserve right to pick any of the other Benchmarks if we see it as an appropriate addition the Gyms programming at that time. It just won't be labelled as part of our "Benchmark Cycle" and as such won't be guaranteed a re-test 4 months down the track).

And so the Benchmark Cycle is born.

How Does it Work?

We select 12-15 workouts that collectively represent a broad range of fitness and capacity – from short to long workouts, low to high skill, light to heavy workouts, and more. Over the course of the next year, we will incorporate those workouts into the monthly programming and retest each benchmark once every four months. That allows us to retest three times over a year which we think will be the sweet spot. The "Year" will run from April to April starting directly after the CrossFit Open & run up until the next one.

How Do We Choose?

What do you do when you’re tasked to select 12-15 workouts that will best test the effectiveness of programming and the development of fitness for a large population of everyday athletes? We start our search by narrowing it down to CrossFit benchmark workouts – including Girls, Heroes, Open, Regionals, and Games workouts, and also pull from the coaches’ notes & class debriefs to collate data on general gym weaknesses or workouts that stood out as “stumping” our population. From there we apply a great resource from the CrossFit Journal, “A Theoretical Template for CrossFit’s Programming.”

In this article, the founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, walks us through the logic behind creating a template “to allow for a wide and constantly varied stimulus, randomized within some parameters, but still true to the aims and purposes of CrossFit as described in the “What is Fitness?” issue.”

The template divides movements into one of three modalities: metabolic conditioning, gymnastics, and weightlifting. Metabolic conditioning is described as monostructural movements such as running and rowing and are commonly referred to as “cardio.” The gymnastics modality is all things bodyweight and weightlifting is all movements that incorporate an external load. From there, the workouts are combined into singlets (30 muscle-ups for time or 30 snatches for time), couplets (Elizabeth), triplets (Helen), or chippers (Filthy Fifty). Each workout can further be categorized to reflect the combination of the type of modalities involved. Take for example the workout Helen – 3 rounds for time of: 400m run, 21 Kettlebell Swings, 12 Pull-ups. This workout would be classified as Monostructural/Weightlifting/Gymnastics WoD.

With the movements categorised, and the singlets, couplets, triplets, and chippers all on the table for consideration – we dive one layer deeper and classify workouts as:

High or Low Skill Gymnastics
Light, Medium, Heavy Weightlifting

We then select workouts that, collectively try to incorporate all areas listed above – and not bias one area – such as heavy weightlifting.

From there we narrow down to roughly 20 Benchmark/Named possibilities and further filter using 2 criteria: constant variation in movements and time domain. We want to make sure we’re not just testing power cleans and pull-ups over and over and we need to ensure that we’re hitting short, medium, and long time domains. (lot of spreadsheeting going here btw!)

Using a spreadsheet grossly simplifies the process but let’s be honest, there is still some subjective element in the choosing of the workouts. The “sexy” or “fun” aspect is definitely considered which is why once the list is compiled it receives many eyes and feedback before it is finalized, placed in a calendar and then dished-out in your regularly scheduled group classes!

How to Participate

Participation is quite simple – come to class!! You’ll know the benchmarks for the year and we’ll remind you about it over & over. Make sure to log your score in Beyond The Whiteboard as you’ll want to track your progress over the course of the year.

When you review the workouts, there will probably be 1-3 workouts that you look at and say, “Ugh, I DON’T want to do that.” Or, there will be a few workouts that you do and think – “Why was I so bad at that?” And right there, you have self-identified the exact workouts that YOU MUST come to if you want to improve your fitness. We don’t become better athletes by working our strengths. If you fall short in capacity on the workouts that involve running, make every effort to come to the workouts at the gym that involve running.