The Open is Over -- What Now?

The 2018 CrossFit Open is officially over, and hopefully you all took some time to relax, have some fun, and congratulate yourself for your achievements over the last 5 weeks.For many, the Open constitutes the peak of the competitive “season,” and can be viewed as the culmination of all of the work that they’ve put in at the gym over the prior year (or several years). For others, the Open is more casual: a chance to connect with friends, have fun, and be a part of something that is bigger than themselves.Whichever group you fall under, this post-Open period is significant, and can be a perfect opportunity to reset, re-focus, and create some structure for the following year. The urge can often be to get right back into intense training, either because you are unhappy with your results on the workouts, or because you are “amped up” after seeing others perform so impressively around you. I’m going to explain why, I feel, this is a mistake. Instead, the focus now should turn toward getting our bodies and minds back to a state of balance, and ready for training over the long haul.In every sport, the competitive season is ALWAYS followed by an off-season. While professional athletes certainly train year-round, I can guarantee you that none of the Patriots got up the week after the Super Bowl, put their pads on, and ran tackling drills. And, while some athletes do not have a clearly-defined “season,” such as fighters, dancers, or year-round track and field athletes, there are ALWAYS planned periods of lighter training, or transitional phases, immediately following intense competition or events.For myself growing up, after my wrestling season was over, I would always switch gears in my training; generally, I would do some body-building, eat a ton, and spend as much time in the sun as possible (wrestling is a winter sport, and between early lifting sessions and afternoon/evening practice, being in the sun was a rarity for the 3-4 months of the competitive year). This helped me to not only maintain my health, by bringing my body back to homeostasis, but also my sanity, as well as my love for the sport. If I were to go right back in to hard training and drilling in March, I know that I would have been hard-pressed to find the motivation to slog it out through December and January of the next season.As I mentioned before, each of us perceive and approach the Open differently. Thus, our approach to the “off-season” can and should vary as well. Here are my recommendations, based on where you fall on this spectrum:1. This was your first Open, and you did it entirely for fun, or just “to see” where you stand amongst others. OR, you skipped the Open, said “maybe next year,” and now regret it (Fitness):To you, I say congratulations! Pat yourself on the back, share some pictures and memories with your friends and family, and be sure to stay on top of any lingering aches and pains that you may have. Take some time to reflect on your experience, and it may or may not have taught you about yourself. Continue coming to class, eating well, and always trying to get a little better every day.2. You finished the Open, did most or all of it RX, and are now looking to come back next year “with a vengeance” (Performance, or maybe Fitness up to this point):Again, congrats on finishing, we are proud of all of you!Now for the hard part, and I hope that you’ll listen to me here: you NEED to take some time to get your head together after the Open, and make sure that you EMOTIONALLY are in a good place going forward. So many people at this stage take for granted the fact that they feel good physically, and jump right back in to pushing themselves to the limit, or even INCREASE the amount of training they are doing right away. They forget the basic concept that MORE is not better, and that only BETTER is better. I’ve seen it every year, with many different people: they come out of the Open hell-bent on beating everyone the following year, and never take the time to ask the important questions of themselves. These people almost always either plateau in their training, get injured, or come to dislike training, or the sport in general, or both.Instead, I urge you to treat the next few weeks as a period to reflect on and analyze your results from the Open. See where you placed on each workout, and you can easily identify which events were your strongest or weakest. From their, determine what it was that held you back in those weaker events; was it the movements, the loading, the overall length of the workout? Did you just mentally quit one week, and now see that that was your biggest issue. Sometimes, things such as what you ate the day leading up to the workout can have a huge effect, but we will never know that unless we look back, clear-headed, and try to put all the pieces together.In helping with this period of self-assessment, we will be spending some time over the next several weeks of the “Performance” program conducting some baseline testing. Approach these workouts with high effort, but do not get too attached to the results; this is simply to help us guide our programs for the coming months, and to help you all get a sense for where you need to make improvements to achieve a more balanced level of fitness. Once that is completed, we will be able to better help you determine what you need to do, as an individual, to reach your goals.3. CrossFit is “your sport,” you train 5-6 days a week toward it, and the Open is your main event of the year (Competition)Those that follow our Competition program should already be very clear with the protocols here, but the general theme is the same as the last group, only with a longer period of rest and transition before getting back to intense training. The more intense the peak we create, the more easy work we must do on the other side to bring things back “down,” so to speak.The next 3 weeks of the Competition phase will be structural in nature, with some longer aerobic work. The goal here is, as above, to bring the body and the mind back to homeostasis, and to address any structural imbalances. From there, we will get into some testing, followed by our first true building phase of the 2019 competitive season.I cannot stress enough how important it is, at this level, to take some time away from the mental grind of the sport of CrossFit. We train ourselves to be able to push through pain, and perform complex tasks while under extreme fatigue. That takes a huge toll on the body, the nervous system, our hormones; really everything that goes into making us function properly is affected. We MUST put in the time here to rest and recover, as well as the meticulous work of planning out the coming year, if we want to continue seeing gains in the future.(This post originally ran April 2nd, 2017 -- the underlying message remains the same!)