Over the Xmas period we announced that changes were coming to our athletic levels. The new Athletic Levels can be downloaded from the resources page on our website or viewed at the box.
This is a working document for a constantly developing system. We’re pretty confident with the numbers we’ve arrived at for most things, but there are still some unanswered questions:
(i) Running - You’ll notice that “Helen” is still a goal met-con for Level 4, despite the fact that we can’t run on the road anymore. We’ve also still left running times for 400m and 1km in there. Running ability is a really important part of your overall athletic skills set, so we want it to still be something that we evaluate. We’re working hard on coming up with solutions for this for the future. One idea is trying to find some space for treadmills (we particularly like the self-propelled versions used in the CrossFit Regionals/Games workouts like the Trueform/Assault Air Runner), but that isn’t likely to be a solution for group classes. Another will be to do some track sessions on a semi-regular basis (we’ll speak to local tracks about this), but that isn’t going to enable us to do many met-cons that require a pull up rig/barbells alongside the running. The reason we’ve kept “Helen” in there is that it’s often one of the first CrossFit Benchmark workouts that people are able to do “As RX”. It’s also a fantastic gauge of your fitness, containing a good mix of monostructural (running), simple weightlifting (kettlebell swings) and gymnastics (pull ups) over a moderate time frame (9-15 mins). So, it may be one that people just do on their own in an open session for now. We may, on the other hand, decide to take it out in the future. We’ll let you know.
(ii) Assault Bike – We wanted to test short, lactate system capacity, and thought a minute test on the Assault Bike a great way to test that. We haven’t had much of a chance to check our numbers on that yet though, so we may adjust these in the future if we think we’ve got them wrong.
The new Level 1 we feel is a crucial addition for those people who are less trained and need some realistic figures to aim for in their first few months.
As we mentioned in the previous post announcing these changes, we are now encouraging more of you to move up to the Performance Programme, if you’ve hit the numbers on the new Level 3. If you’ve got all these, or have all but 1-2, speak to Jon about moving up (some of these are definite pre-requisites, whereas others may be overlooked for a while). He’ll check with you that you’ve not got any niggles that need looking at before starting and may ask to see some lifting/kipping or anything else he fancies checking first.
At Level 3, you will be scaling almost all of the Performance Programme workouts. The Performance programme is written with RX being for someone at Level 4/5, so if you don’t scale you’re not going to get the intended stimulus (you won’t be able to maintain the same speed and intensity the workout is designed to be done at).
Our new Level 4 is roughly equivalent to the old Level 2. It’s at this point that we feel you may be ready to compete in the sport of CrossFit, if you are interested in that. You are likely to be able to do many of the workouts RX, although you will probably still need to scale some. Find out the suggested finishing times or expected scores for a workout and scale to achieve that if necessary.
Level 6 is roughly current CrossFit Regionals standard. For those aiming high, those are the numbers you’re likely to need.
We hope this will be a really useful framework for you to assess where you’re at and help you to make some goals for the coming months.
The new Athletic Levels can be downloaded from the resources page on our website.
This is a working document for a constantly developing system. We’re pretty confident with the numbers we’ve arrived at for most things, but there are still some unanswered questions:
(i) Running - You’ll notice that “Helen” is still a goal met-con for Level 4, despite the fact that we can’t run on the road anymore. We’ve also still left running times for 400m and 1km in there. Running ability is a really important part of your overall athletic skills set, so we want it to still be something that we evaluate. We’re working hard on coming up with solutions for this for the future. One idea is trying to find some space for treadmills (we particularly like the self-propelled versions used in the CrossFit Regionals/Games workouts like the Trueform/Assault Air Runner), but that isn’t likely to be a solution for group classes. Another will be to do some track sessions on a semi-regular basis (we’ll speak to local tracks about this), but that isn’t going to enable us to do many met-cons that require a pull up rig/barbells alongside the running. The reason we’ve kept “Helen” in there is that it’s often one of the first CrossFit Benchmark workouts that people are able to do “As RX”. It’s also a fantastic gauge of your fitness, containing a good mix of monostructural (running), simple weightlifting (kettlebell swings) and gymnastics (pull ups) over a moderate time frame (9-15 mins). So, it may be one that people just do on their own in an open session for now. We may, on the other hand, decide to take it out in the future. We’ll let you know.
(ii) Assault Bike – We wanted to test short, lactate system capacity, and thought a minute test on the Assault Bike a great way to test that. We haven’t had much of a chance to check our numbers on that yet though, so we may adjust these in the future if we think we’ve got them wrong.
The new Level 1 we feel is a crucial addition for those people who are less trained and need some realistic figures to aim for in their first few months.
As we mentioned in the previous post announcing these changes, we are now encouraging more of you to move up to the Performance Programme, if you’ve hit the numbers on the new Level 3. If you’ve got all these, or have all but 1-2, speak to Jon about moving up (some of these are definite pre-requisites, whereas others may be overlooked for a while). He’ll check with you that you’ve not got any niggles that need looking at before starting and may ask to see some lifting/kipping or anything else he fancies checking first.
At Level 3, you will be scaling almost all of the Performance Programme workouts. The Performance programme is written with RX being for someone at Level 4/5, so if you don’t scale you’re not going to get the intended stimulus (you won’t be able to maintain the same speed and intensity the workout is designed to be done at).
Our new Level 4 is roughly equivalent to the old Level 2. It’s at this point that we feel you may be ready to compete in the sport of CrossFit, if you are interested in that. You are likely to be able to do many of the workouts RX, although you will probably still need to scale some. Find out the suggested finishing times or expected scores for a workout and scale to achieve that if necessary.
Level 6 is roughly current CrossFit Regionals standard. For those aiming high, those are the numbers you’re likely to need.
We hope this will be a really useful framework for you to assess where you’re at and help you to make some goals for the coming months.
The new Athletic Levels can be downloaded from the resources page on our website.
