Steven just beat me to this topic but I feel it must be addressed. Let me know what yall are thinking.
An interesting thought and I would be intrigued to hear thoughts about this is how do we legitimize a test that replicates our training? For the most part what the competitors did last weekend was an example of a week of programming on the main site.
I have been thinking about this for a while now but I really feel that the test can’t replicate the preparation. So what do we do to test fitness?
I can’t say that I have the answer but some ideas I had are listed below.
First and probably the most outragious would be the old Indian test of traveling a certain distance with a mouth full of water and the person that finishes first with a set amount of water in their mouth would take that event. By the way it has to be a multi event competition.
Second would be to pile all competitors on an island for 30 days where you control diet sleep and testing to see who is best in all catagories.
Last idea and probably most logical would be to set up an extended obstacle course. I would use both crossfit and non crossfit movements. I would require rest at certain points and limit it at other points. This would be great for TV but tough for spectators.
Of course I wouldn’t tell the competitors what they would be doing after the start.
Thoughts?
Dutch,
I’ve been thinking about this topic all week. Your first two ideas are great, but I agree the obstacle course is probably most logical. Since last year’s Games I thought an obstacle course would be an AWESOME event, and I really thought we might have seen one at this year’s Games. Perhaps even an obstacle course that last for two straight day.
I know the logistics on this would be really hard, but I say have all the competitors bunk in the same location, on site. They’ll never know when they’ll be called out for an event. It may be at noon, or maybe 3:00 AM. Send them out to do some crazy stuff, like do the 7.1K mountain run, or chop down a tree and cut it into firewood. Of course they should throw some typical CF movements in there too, but honestly, aren’t we training to be ready for what life throws at us? This year’s Game’s theme was “Unknown and Unknowable.” Sure, maybe the competitors didn’t know what their next event would be, but why not throw in some non-CF challenges and see how people do. They did this with the stake drive this year, and most competitors looked completely out of their element. I say add in a lot more of these types of challenges.
We all train CF movements, but how is that really translating into most of our lives outside of CF. I know it must be helping Military/Police/Fire/Rescue/etc. but what about all the “average joes” out there? But I digress…
Another idea is to send competitors to hunt and live with some paleo-esq tribe in Africa or South America and see who can last the longest.
Honestly (and I think it is becoming more obvious from the CF Games), testing fitness is a tough thing to do, and have results be legitimate. We never know who, what, when, where, why and how we are going to be test in real life day in and day out. Everyone just needs to be ready. You may get tested with something that is your strength, or something that is less than a strength. Just be ready. Be fit. And give everything you have when you’re tested.
Edward
Good points. The only question I have is what did you mean by LAST when you were talking about living with the paleo people…?
I think, in using Crossfit’s definition of fitness it is hard to have a legitimate champion. We are told that he who is fittest is he who fares the best on average out of everything that comes out of the Hopper. My contention is that they use a real Hopper at The Games. The Hopper could be filled with numerous WOD’s that could be done with the equipment available on site. Then, at The Games, WOD’s are pulled from the Hopper. While we wouldn’t be guaranteed that the test would cover all time domains and all CF movements. We could be assure that the test would be random and not made favorable to anyone. Being that in CF we endorse being apart of the community, a community hands-on approach could be taken in that WOD’s could be submitted to CFHQ in the chance that they might be used for The Games. I also like the idea of an obstacle course though.
Well, first you have to simply everything down to its components to even attempt to start hammering out “testing scenarios.”
What is CF? Well, we have a bunch of answers to that which all illuminate some different aspects we can incoporate in testing.
1. “constantly varied functional movement executed at high intensity”
2. “increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains” (aka power output which may be tested through a hopper-like model)
3. 10 physical skills: “cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy”
It’s pretty clear that CF has been utilizing lots of different functional movements at high intensity.. although so far (besides possibly one or two movements in this years games) there hasn’t been much in the way of “unknown movements” which would still fall under constantly variety and functional such as various parkour/obstacle course related elements or possibly other drills in other sports such a soccer dribbling, catching something, hauling objects, farmers walks, shoveling, running backwards/sideways/crawling, etc.
In my opinion, as long as the “unknown movements” are varied enough, it should be able to eliminate some of the bias for the people who have to do things for a living (such as Hackenbruck’s experience with hammering/sledge in the 500m/stake/500m workout. Not everyone is going to be practicing every sport and every movement such that it would confer such as huge advantage (and heck you can use movements that may not necessarily be in sports). One of the ‘old’ mantras in CF after all was to go play and learn new sports.
Testing along the lines of the 10 physical skills is hard because you don’t know how much to weight each other in certain categories. For instance, we know that athletes with a strong background of strength (backed up with main page metconning) really excel extremely well in CF games format which is very similar to main page programming. And even though strength backed with metcon ability is important, how much do you weigh the strength? Speal has a 2.5-3x bw deadlift, but it was only good enough to get him like in 50th place at the games just because the weights on the DL test were too heavy… and even the top weights weren’t heavy enough to distinguish between 16 of the competitors! The strength to bodyweight ratio vs. absoloute strength is always going to plague the programming of those who try to make up any competition, and I don’t think there’s any way around it besides breaking up competitors into weight classes (which we all don’t want). This, like many other sports with no weight classes, will probably end up biasing towards a certain body type both in height and weight as CF progresses. Just a fact that cannot be gotten around like the tendency for gymnasts to be short and light or basketball players to be tall and now fairly strong/large.
In the end though why not just pull out some “extreme” real life scenarios that have occurred and try to replicate them? Pulling someone from a burning house/vehicle, running back from “out in the woods” to get medical assistance for your hurt friend, scaling walls/climbing a rock wall, scaling obstacles to catch perpetrators as a policeman, digging a bit for a fencepost or something as a farmer and then possible doing something with the mounted object, chopping logs, archery for hunting, swimming, etc.
For something “fitness” that is supposedly able to transfer to real life well… maybe we need to test in actual physical capacity besides the functional movements inside the gym. In this respect, some of the above comments such as living with tribes et al. sound like fairly good (except for logistics and such).
Shrug. Just food for thought. (I had some other points but I kinda forgot them… maybe later).
Oh one other thought before I get off.
I think there’s sort of a lack of mental aspect of CF that is missing. What’s the point of having “extreme fitness” if you can’t use it under extreme situations.
This article recently on t-nation was particularly good at breaking it down in some respects of mental ability under pressure:
http://www.tmuscle.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance/combat_psychology_and_sports_performance
Basically, I wouldn’t be opposed to have some mental task or decision making that you would have to do during or even to “game” before the actual events that are taking place.
For example, it could be simply applied to something like we saw at the qualifiers such as “get 7000/5000 lbs overhead the fastest.” You can make it “easier” on the competitors by giving them weights with which to choose such as the 75/95/115/135 IIRC or you can make it even more interesting by throwing them in with a bar and plates up to say 225 lbs and give them X minutes prep (say 1-2 mins or something) to decide how they want to attack the workout before the time starts.
Similarly, this can be applied with different size shovels for hole/fence digging. Or something along the lines of you have 50 reps of pullups, dips, and deadlifts to get through… and you can program it however you want. First one to finish wins.
I just think that something along these lines would make the games themselves more interesting, and test people’s mental fortitude under pressure as well. Even though there is a lack of mental component in the definition of CF there is always a mental component during workouts and in real life. Thus, I think this needs to be tested for overall fitness.
this might have been said in previous posts, but here it goes…..to find Crossfit’s “fittest person in the world, all regional qualifiers need to be exactly the same. Then you take the top 75 men and women from all the regions combined… So even if I had the 3rd best finish out of my region but didn’t crack the top 75 list I don’t qualify. Then when you make the games all 75 competitors get to compete in all events to determine the “fittest person in the world” with events pulled from the hopper like someone else suggested.
Crossfit is evolving, and their will never be a format that is perfect for everyone…for people to say “Dutch, you got the raw end of the deal by the order of the workouts”, I would have to agree with that. To say my bro n law, JT got the raw end of the deal because of the sledge hammer event and where in the line he had to hit that “stupid” thing, I would have to agree with that as well.
I’m just starting to ramble now…. Dutch keep doing what you do, life is bigger then the Crossfit Games, and who knows, this might piss you off enough that you just might win the games next year.
To truly test the CrossFit brand of fitness you need many trials.
The organizers of this past event understood this and made some great selections.
However saw what happens when you forcing a week of programing into roughly a 30 hour period.
A series of events spread over the course of several months would most likely be a better test of true fitness. Competitors would earn points and the athlete with the best total at the end of the series would be the ‘Fittest’.
This of course is a cumbersome model requiring even more organization than the current games format and is in no way going to be nearly as dramatic. It would however most likely be a better overall test and less detrimental to the athletes in the long run.
Dutch,
I was sort of joking…but what I was implying when I said “LAST” was see who can get up and keep up with a poleo-esq culture the longest. I guess it would sort of be like Survivor, see who throws in the towel, or see who can’t complete necessary tasks to survive. I’m not talking about letting anyone die. It was just a relative comment about testing fitness in real life, outside of our Boxes.
I love the CrossFit Games as a test. It’s always different. You never know exactly how to prepare or what to expect. That is what distinguishes it from other sports. It’s like a Fear Factor for athletes.
To call the winner the fittest man or woman in the world is a big stretch. Quite simply, they are the 2009 CrossFit Champion. Great training, mental preparation and a bit of luck brought them that title.
Edward
I figured you we’re joking but throbly problem as evidenced last weekend is that crossfitters will die for the crossfit games.
Dutch,
In ’07 I did the Men’s Health Urbanathlon it was an obstacle course in NYC we ran from Central Park, crawled threw some pipes, ran again, walked across some scaffolding did some marine hurdles, ran again, climbed 104 flights of stairs, jumped taxi cabs and scaled a wall to the finish.
I believe it was a real test of fitness. If Hq did something like that but put some weights and CF obstacles in place like the NorCal qualifiers I would be very excited to qualify for that!!!
The obstacle course sounds like a great idea to me. The beginning of the Crossfit Journals used to have a lot of Parkour movements and training in them, and I haven’t seen much of that as of late in the Journal, or even on main site. In my mind, it is movements like that rather then just 1 rep max deadlifts or squats which will help individuals more in everyday life, especially those involved in things such as firefighting, military, MMA, police force, etc.
By taking more of a Parkour mix into the equation too to test overall fitness, I think that the playing field would level out. I’m not sure how many guys deadlifting at 600+ could scale an 8 foot wall if they had to do that to get to the deadlift station first.
Side note, also liked and agreed with your posts about the volume of the workout at the games. It kind of turned into an A.A. design just to see who would break and who would still be standing at the end. Like you said, not a healthy way to test fitness.
wow. Dutch my friend: (btw, I didn’t get a Dutch greeting at alllll this weekend! Cheers always my friend)
I agree with Kepler’s post. Geesh, we need to have a uniform qualifier. As we all looked at the qualifiers wod’s, one would wonder how ‘easy’ qualifiers would compare to those who had ‘hard’. That was obvious and he’s spot on to have the same wod for those qual’s, it simply starts there.
Secondly, I agree with Edgar taking a more ‘militant’ stance…plus, put it on the 30 day format in some weird terrain (bring on the ice, baby) if they’re going to have the title ‘world’s fittest..”, it needs to be ‘multi-regional’.
I’m not saying what you and those AMAZING athletes did was unjustified, by any means, what so ever! Just that, if you’re going to be the fittest man or woman, or team, it should be a slightly different CF approach, one more all-encompassing to everyday life.
btw…all I did was sell stuff, but this is on a trainers ‘eye’ level.
BG out.
I had an idea about those Regional Qualifiers. I thought it was kind of cool that they had the freedom to create their own workouts. Basically the Qualifier allowed those who ran and programmed the event to select workouts of which they thought would best select those who were most fit to advance to the Games. Since Crossfit is an open source community, and since we all continue to learn from each other’s training methods and programming, I like the idea of the freedom for those running a Qualifier. It allows each region to create workouts that they think will produce the fittest athletes in their region. Therefore, it adds to this open source material. If it is all left in the hands of the few at HQ, not as many minds will be involved in the process.
Uniform qualifiers would not be a good idea based on CF principles I posted earlier:
1. “constantly varied functional movement executed at high intensity”
2. “increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains” (aka power output which may be tested through a hopper-like model)
3. 10 physical skills: “cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy”
You are missing the point on having uniformed qualifiers StevenL…….you can still have:
1. “constantly varied functional movement executed at high intensity”
2. “increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains” (aka power output which may be tested through a hopper-like model)
3. 10 physical skills: “cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy”
tell me how that can’t happen still
what crossfit has PROVEN is that not everyone will be satisfied with the outcome, there are always going to be the whiners, complainers, ..judgemental individuals with an opinion that has NO positive constructive advice. but everyone deserves to share their opinion, that is the American Way, right?! I think that is why I peruse so many crossfit blogs, a lot of great info put on by the host but the often hilarious comments left by the followers that make you go hmmmm?
Kris,
I am not “missing the point” at all, and speak for yourself with your last paragraph.
You can look at some of the pros/cons here as this has been discussed. I am still personally against.
http://www.board.crossfit.com/showthread.php?t=47075
StevenL,
not to seem catty, I do speak for myself.. and in no way was I insinuating that you are what I was describing in my last paragraph. The games are a work in progress as are the qualifiers, but all I seem to be reading lately is that this didn’t work, or so and so should have won if the run didn’t have so many points allotted for that event. Internet discussions can seem negative, so no hard feelings buddy I wasn’t attacking you…. this is one of the main reasons I stopped posting on the .com, everyone is 1000lb gorilla behind a computer screen. peace
They should send them to bud/s! Or atleast combine Angie-Fran-Elizabeth-Diane-Helen-Grace-Murph into one wod, non stop. Or the “Vahalla”. Survival of the fittest