The Open 2024

The Open 2024 is approaching, and our community is getting super enthusiastic about it - planning community wods and parties. Being the owner of four CrossFit gyms, it’s exciting to witness how much the community can outgrow from these four weeks.

For some athletes, the CrossFit Open 2024 can have a different meaning/focus this year. To begin with, this year, we’ll have 15% more athletes that move from the Open to the Quarterfinals, which can be pretty hectic to manage another series of workouts in a time frame of 6 days only. 

However, from the Quarterfinals to the Semifinals, we’ll only have 40 men and women in each region (last season, we had 60 men and women per region).

In the Age Group Category, we now have 25% advancing to the quarterfinals, which means an increase of 15%, with a minimum of 200 athletes from each age group, significantly expanding the number of athletes that now participate in this online event.

Another significant announcement to the Masters’ athletes: we’ll now have 40 men and women competing (instead of 10 per gender as we’ve been watching over the last years. This is only valid until the age group of 45-49).

The Age Group categories will compete at the Legends competition. The Masters CrossFit Games by Legends will take place from Aug. 29-Sep. 1, 2024, at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Center in Birmingham, Alabama.

If the Open is a meaningful event in your competition calendar and each year you like to see where you stand on the leaderboard, witnessing how much you improved from year to year, in 2024, your chances of progressing through another stage (s) of the open are higher than ever. 

However, have you ever thought about how you are preparing for it? We often hear some athlete saying, “I’m doing an open prep,” and usually, that circles around repeating some open workouts from the previous years. Regardless, that should be called The Open Validation instead of the Open Prep. Let me explain to you why.

If their scores are better, it shows that the work done until they repeat such workouts was what actually got them better. For most athletes, the Open Prep should be CrossFit classes - attending consistently to classes and having a Coach correct them will be all the Open Prep that this kind of athlete needs. 

Suppose the Open starts to be a significant event, and you see yourself working hard to progress through the different stages. Have you considered the modalities in the Open and the modalities you use in your training? There is no skierg, or running outdoors (although you can experience death by shuttle runs), no Atlas stones, Yoke carries or Axle bars. There is no swimming, and no Peg board ascends.

The Open is always completed inside a CrossFit affiliate with similar standard equipment for a long time. If you are deep about it but see yourself stuck year after year, you can start looking at that restricted equipment and plan your preparation around it.

The preparation is inevitably different for the ones who know they have passed the Open and reached the final stages of the competition. For those, the priority will always be to prepare for what comes next, approaching the Open as a competition to “tick” in the competitive calendar but not as the final destination.

That said, what goals do you have for the Open?

I would love to hear your thoughts about it: message me here.