The 2020 Open workouts
***Don’t forget Saturday is our End of the Open Party at 11am. We got the drinks, you bring the snacks!***
The 2020 Open had a lot to chew on. The first two workouts were excellent entry level workouts, to encourage mass participation.
20.1 and 20.1 were simple in movements and execution. Find a pace, hold on and dig to the end. In my mind, both workouts had the same mental stimulus – once the reality set in of what the workout would require, you had to really decide to hold the pace. The workouts were “boring.” That’s not an insult – there was no mountain to climb, no special skill to unlock, no heavy lifting to create cheers. Just grinding.
20.3 and 20.4 were strangely similar. They were double couplets, requiring difficult gymnastics and heavy barbells in part 2. These 2 workouts are legitimately the heaviest workouts in the history of the open, and we saw them back to back. I actually didn’t like these workouts too much – I don’t like difficult standards, like on the HSPU, and there were weight changes, rep changes, just tougher logistically.
But, if the Open will continue to be the needle through which the top 20 Games athletes will pass, these are the kind of workouts we need to expect – doing the hard and heavy stuff when you are tired.
20.5 was basically bananas. 40 muscle ups in a workout is just crazy, and crazier still that so many people completed the work. The “choose your own adventure” added an infinitely interesting strategy option – I’m not sure anyone did it “perfect” yet. I know I was 0 for 2 on my strategy options. Maybe next time I nail it…
The craziest part of the Open for me was the stuff we DID NOT see: there were no pull-ups, heavy snatch, or barbell thrusters. This is the first year in the history of the Open that we did not do any pullups. And the first year that we did not end the Open with a barbell thruster.
Workout of the Day
Front Squat
Build to a heavy single in 20 minutes
Conditioning
Up Ladder 9
1 Hang Squat Clean, 1 Thruster
2 Hang Squat Clean, 2 Thruster
3 Hang Squat Clean, 3 Thruster
Keep going up by 1 each round. You can “thruster” out of your last squat clean.