As someone who loves CrossFit and is an analytics professional, I wanted to share what I believe is the best way to use the CrossFit Open to measure progress.
Before I get there, let me say: no approach is perfect. You will have a good idea of your progress in the year knowing the skills you’ve unlocked, the workouts that felt easier, and the good ol’ look-in-the-mirror test.
Plus, the Open tests vary year to year. Some years will favour you, others will not.
But the Open does provide what analytics cries out for — a large sample size.
If you haven’t explored it, you may not know that you can create custom leaderboards that are tailored to the criteria you want (it will even suggest some criteria for you). You can create leaderboards going back to the 2018 Open, and you will find the link here: https://games.crossfit.com/manage-custom-leaderboards
A lot of fun can be had keeping an eye on the CrossFit Harrow leaderboard itself, but that’s not the one I’m recommending here.
Instead, what I would strongly recommend you do is create a custom leaderboard for your own specific sex and age for that year of the Open. For example, for myself I would select 40-year-old men this year (and 39 year old men for last year’s leaderboard etc.).
That then allows me to calculate my percentile rank, telling me where I sit relative to everybody within my specific peer group.
Doing this is simple. First, look at your own personal rank on the leaderboard.
Then navigate to the last page and capture the rank of the lowest-ranked person (the rank of everyone who failed to register a score). By dividing your personal rank by the rank of the lowest-ranked individual, you will get your percentile — and the lower the better.
Percentile = Your Rank ÷ Lowest Rank
For example, if your percentile shows 0.4 (which is the same as 40%), you will know that you finished behind 40% of peers – and ahead of the other 60% of athletes in your peer group.
And this is the best metric to track from one year to the next. Moving from 90th percentile to 85th the next year, for example, is a sign of meaningful progress.
As I say, it is not a perfect measure. But for anybody wanting to keep a pulse check on their progress, there’s nothing else I would recommend higher.
If you have any questions, come and ask me in the gym or drop me a message. Otherwise let’s look forward to getting up that leaderboard 💪
Rich P