2018 Benchmark Program
To kick off the New Year, we are implementing a new series of benchmarks. Our goal is to provide everyone an opportunity to measure their fitness throughout the year, as well as test the effectiveness of our programming. Because of CrossFit’s constantly varied method of programming, it can be difficult to measure effective programming, and for those of you who’ve been doing this program awhile, you may find it harder to see progress on a regular basis.
During the early days of CrossFit, Greg Glassman (CrossFit’s founder) took it upon himself to define things like health, intensity, work capacity, and fitness. Most of this had never been defined before and what good is a fitness program if you’re unable to observe and measure its effectiveness? The CrossFit Journal explains it like this:
“The CrossFit program is driven by data. Using whiteboards as scoreboards, keeping accurate scores and records, running a clock, and precisely defining the rules and standards for performance, we not only motivate unprecedented output but derive both relative and absolute metrics at every workout. This data has important value well beyond motivation. Overall, the aim of CrossFit is to forge a broad, general and inclusive fitness, supported by measurable, observable, and repeatable results.”
Our 2018 Benchmark Program is designed to test and retest your fitness through a series of 9 tests, which include CrossFit benchmark WODs, weightlifting, gymnastic, and skill movements. We will retest each benchmark every 4 months throughout the year, which gives us the opportunity to collect 3 sets of data points for each of the 9 benchmarks. The WODs for this year are “Jeremy” (short in duration), “The Ghost” (long in duration), and “Helen” (medium duration). We are also including a 1RM Clean & Jerk, a 3RM Overhead Squat, and a 1RM Weighted Pull up; this gives us a variety of movements (explosive and heavy) and a variety of rep schemes that test strength and stamina. Lastly, we’ve added a max set of push ups, a max broad Jump, and a 70/50 calories Bike for time to round out our benchmark series; these tests are included to gauge high skill, upper body strength, and metabolic conditioning.
Our plan is to continue to schedule as many of these benchmarks on Monday’s as possible in order to stay consistent and allow as many of you to engage in the program as possible. We hope you all have fun with these and enjoy monitoring and gauging progress as much as we do. Good luck as we kick start 2018! Below is the program schedule we will follow this year:
