The Sevan Podcast - Best Programmed CrossFit Games EVER | Shut Up & Scribble Ep 7

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

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Okay. All right. Today's show, the best ever CrossFit games programmed in history. The best ever programmed CrossFit games ever in history, ever. All right. So, yeah, how do we want to start this? I'll start by saying this. I think I fucked myself because I made a Google sheet and went through years 2013 to 2022,

which I thought were the relevant years, in my opinion, of candidates for the best programming ever. And I broke down monostructural movements, weightlifting movements, gymnastics, movement patterns within each, how many each year had, what they were, how many couplets, how many triplets, how many chippers, how many triplets how many chippers how many intervals how many single modality um i also put two categories that were like theme of the year and deficiencies and it just got so muddy like it it it was like so much information it's like data overload can i just interrupt you real quick i thought you were gonna say you fucked yourself because you like spent 12 hours in the sun and you look like a tomato no it's because of this i have this warm edison light bulb dude here let me i can show it on my screen if you can see that bad boy that is very orange yeah it's a warm it's a warm it's a thomas edison light bulb dude he made it so shut the fuck up and he's my hero um anyway so that yeah i kind of messed messed me up a little bit and took away

some intuition that i had um i feel like we should all three start by saying what our favorite year is because that was gonna say well no i actually like what you did there of just like giving a little bit of your process of how you you know went about starting this uh adventure maybe jr wants to do the same and then i can do so yeah i already had like three years in my head and i was like all right i know where to go it's going to be between these three i think every year has at least one workout that i don't really care for which is fine but i i actually found myself eliminating the two other years solely because of a workout that I just really did not like. In the year that I picked as the most well-programmed, there wasn't a single workout that I was like, yeah, I'm all except that one.

While we're talking through it, it's probably a good point. Just because you don't like a workout, does that mean that it wasn't part of a really well written test? Because you're supposed to be objectively picking the best programmed, not the programmed year you like the most. So I think while we may have a favorite year and then a year we think was the best programmed, I think it would be silly to think that, um, we didn't let a little bit of our personal biases come into play. No. And I mean, if it's a well-programmed year, then I think it will produce an enjoyable product as well. And I'm not sure which three years you're talking about. I've had this conversation before

and I pretty much always default to 2014, 2017, and 2018 as the top three years. I don't know if those are the same ones you're referencing. But to get to that point years ago when I first started kind of looking at this, I hadn't did the same as Taylor. I eliminated the front part of the programming. And I think 2010 and before, and if you guys are super interested in that stuff, Bill and Chase do a deep dive on every single one of those games years and kind of lay it out. And in a vacuum, yes, 2007 is well-programmed for three events. But to put it in par with the games from the last 10 years, it's not really the same conversation.

Yeah, I found myself also, to what JR was saying, going back and being like, man, this year has a lot of good workouts, but there's one I hate and I can't pick it. And not even, it's not even just that I hate it, you know, personal bias comes in a little bit, but there are some dumb workouts that are just like, that's unnecessary. Or some of it too, is like, um, you, you find the one thing that makes that year, the that wasn't picked yeah like you find the hole in the programming yeah and you're like oh well they all have holes i mean if you're pretty good at knowing program design it's easy to pick apart any year and be like oh well that year was super squat centric and didn't have any single leg movements but then the next year only had one volume squatting workout out of 15 and they went heavy three or four times.

Like you're going to find a hole and I think all of them. So even in the ones that we all picked, I'm sure there's going to be something about that year that we still don't really think hit the mark. Yeah. I, for example, 2020, the online COVID games year where they had the two stages, you could make an argument that there are eight out of the 19 events across both stages are single modality or testing single implement or single modality. Like if you take the CrossFit total, that's weightlifting, weightlifting, weightlifting.

So you could call it a triplet, a weightlifting triplet, but you could also call it single modality. So that's the one. It has seven without that, but in my opinion, you have eight out of 19 workouts are just testing one thing. That's too much for me. That's where we're going to disagree big time because one of the reasons why I picked my year

is because I think Dave did that, and I think to me the biggest flex of a programmer is being able to do what you just said, and you can still look at it and really not notice it. Right. Because they're that good. In 2014 – Because they're that good at balancing it out. I'd agree. And in 2014 – or sorry, I just gave it away.

I fucked us all over. But in that specific year that you're talking about – Us all or me? You. In that specific – well, yeah. In that specific year, you don't notice it. In 2020, you notice it big time. And then you have instances where you're repeating the same movements

and really similar workouts from stage one to stage two. GHDs, GHDs, thrusters, thrusters. One rep max squat, one rep max squat. As much as I don't like the word fair is it really fair to like to to try to pick apart 2020 other than the final leader you have 19 events you could you had 19 events you could do whatever you wanted and you repeat yeah dude i can do whatever you wanted there was like a certain amount of equipment that could be sent to for online but then you only have that was over half that was over half the events yeah but i thought the online workouts half of those were better than anything else what you could do is use it as an example of of how you evaluate a

year and that in evaluating that year that was something that taylor noticed personally if i was evaluating that year i would not count all 19. I would only count the 12 scored events at the games in California. I liked the online. I liked Nasty Nancy. I liked Damn Diane, Friendly Fran quite a bit. Oh, no, they were great. I mean, yeah, there were some phenomenal workouts in there for sure. But no other game season has 19 tests.

Almost all of them that are in the relevant years are between 11 and 15 tests. And the in-person version fits into that mold. So I think that that's a fair sample size to evaluate relative to the other years. All right. What I think we should do is we're going to start with 2022 and we're going to work back. And we'll start with that year. We're not going to go over all the workouts, but we'll start with a year and we'll say, this is why you thought it was the best or not.

And what we're going to do essentially is if we didn't pick this year, Jr is going to give his one reason why Brian will give his one most glaring reason why I'll give mine. So we'll start with 2022 and let me fix this so we can share the screen and get all the workouts in there. You can do that with every year except 2014 okay no way we can definitely do it 2014 you can't you cannot find a picture that has them all on there oh no oh i thought you were saying what to find the air all right like this picture yeah we there

isn't one for 2014 i know there's a few there's a lot of things about the way that the game's website has changed recently that i like there's a couple things there's a lot of things about the way that the games website has changed recently that I like. There's a couple of things that being one of them that I really, really dislike. The other one is if you go to a leaderboard and sort by an event, you can't sort the same page by overall rank. Again, you have to like completely leave and come back to be able to do it.

Right. Please fix that. Whoever's in charge of that. They won't. They might. They've made so many other positive changes recently. Okay. All right. Well, let's, let's go to this so we got asked nicely 2022 and there are two and a half reasons why i didn't why i don't like it but do you want to start with me or does anybody else want to go first no you go okay i don't like speed skill medley i thought alone each of the movements within that test

were great and appropriate i don't like the way they made the cuts or how the workout played out one guy finishing it no women even getting to the press the handstand i thought that was a big miss i also don't like in that year, their opportunity for like a classic CrossFit couplet or triplet. I think to me, I look at three workouts. I look at alpaca has the potential to be pretty classic. Hat trick has the potential to be pretty classic up and over is pretty classic. I thought because hat trick had so much rest between rounds, right? It's three rounds for time, sprint 20 wall balls, took a 50, 40 yard sprint, 20 wall balls, six dumbbell snatches. I just, I know it was execution based, but without the opportunity or without the

foundation or base of enough classic CrossFit workouts in 2022, I thought that was a miss, meaning there aren't any great, okay, three rounds for time, 21-21, Friendly Fran or Damn Diane-esque workouts. There was essentially one, right? You had up and over, and sorry, I'm missing. If I scroll down on this you also have elizabeth elevated like those two workouts stick out to me as like pretty classic crossfit maybe echo press but i didn't like hat trick hated that and how there was so much rest between rounds i

would have rather just seen it three rounds for time um and i didn't like speed skill medley and then this is kind of outside of their control but taking the legless road climbs out of alpaca due to the rain i thought ruined things to a degree all right now that he's given all of the reasons this year jr try to build on that um yeah for me i think first of all i want to to say that this year has at least two of my top 10 all-time favorite games workouts in it. And how many? Oh, top 10. There are parts of this competition that I think are unbelievable.

I think this year does have the broadest range ever programmed at the CrossFit Games as far as variance goes. I think this is – Are you going to tell us what those two workouts are? I messed that up. Nope. But I think four interval-based workouts is too many. So that's my one thing.

There's four interval-based. And I think two is great. I think three is even fine because I really like work-to-rest workouts, but I think four is great. I think three is even fine because I really like work to rest workouts, but I think four is too many. And then I think that there was too much new for us to appreciate. So like skill speed medley, the thing over the format, over the way they eliminated, over the way they progressed, but then eliminated also. So you couldn't see if there were a lot more people that were capable of those skills that only five people got to try. I think there was just too much given to us new for us to really appreciate any of them, the P bars and the sandbag ladder, maybe one more,

like maybe the block that would have been enough for a full games of like new stuff. But yet we had the pirouettes, we had the low start or the press to handstand. We had the double under crossover. So in that workout alone, there were three things that we've never done before in competition. And I think that it was just, there were so much that we couldn't appreciate any of those one things for how cool they were muddy yeah i mean you guys have said you know a majority of of the sentiments that i think most people probably have though and i know that we're kind of harping on the same workup but if we are gonna if you are gonna have something new at the games i like to have something new

that everyone can do and that's what i really didn't like about speed skill medley was that there were it was eliminating and changing as we went. So we didn't actually get to see what kind of percentage of the athletes had some of those skills. It was only a few who even got to attempt them in a live competition setting. And it's like, you know, kind of it's an analytical and historical study mindset that I bring to that. But like I like to be able to look back at the first time double unders were at the games and see how difficult it was for majority of the athletes. And now know that that's a given the first time that we saw a couple of those skills,

we didn't really get to find out how many of the 40 men or women there could do them. And so we'll never really know what the progression was from the first year to when, you know, whenever in the future. Cool. Okay.

2022 out. Those two workouts are back nine and up and over your two top 10 favorites yep wow if i if i can't believe you actually told us if i had to pick two from that year would be the capital and elizabeth elevated those are the two i would have guessed also yeah that's what i would have guessed okay um all right 2021 a little bit cleaner to see most of the events i'm not going to start this time jr or brian well how about jr starts this one and we'll just cycle through that that order yeah we can do that um So this year, and really from 20, let me think for a second, from 2010 to 2015, the finale had more than one workout. And I thought that those were the best finale years ever.

Starting with 2016, all the way up to the present that has never happened since so right off the bat like this finale to me was just very underwhelming lunging you could argue is one of the most exciting things to a finale in a workout period but we just really didn't get much of a race at the end maybe that was just due to where the leaderboard was, or maybe that was due to what people focused in on, um, on the broadcast or whatever. But like, I look at the finale first when evaluating is like, Hey, was this a really good finale? Was this a really good final? Because I do think it's really important. The other thing I look for is, is there a swim and how is it presented? And this is one of those years where I felt like the swim was just presented in the same way. I really, really like when we test swimming in more of a

mixed modal setting and it's not just monostructural stuff. It's not run, swim, run. It's not swim, kayak. It's not, um, swim paddle. It's not, you know, whatever. It's not just swim tested and an endurancey type workout so like those right off the bat for me was enough for me not to really look farther at this one is there is the event eight listed below event nine on this image i mean it's the handstand walk obstacle course but it's out of order it's not there yeah it's out of order let me scroll down here it is navigate the handstand walking course you know something to always to always look at is when you have cuts in the field that the ordering of the events matters a lot when i look at when i look at the events leading right up to the cuts here

just in a vacuum you see events six and seven that are testing a pretty similar thing and then you see especially in the way that it's written here uh event nine which is again a pretty similar time domain that's going to reward you know a powerful athlete and obviously there's event eight there that's completely different with the handstand walk but three of those four events leading into the cuts are you know two of them are somewhat redundant. And then one of them favors, you know, another power athlete, in my opinion, that would also do well on the on the cleans. And so I don't really like the density of that style of workout. Similar time domains, similar, I think, rewarding similar athletes throughout the four leading into a cut when I mean, there is a second cut in this year.

And I also don't like that it's only one event before the second cut, but that's completely different. So. Okay. I, for me, biggest things I'm going to agree with JR. I think the lunge finale finish is amazing, but a lot, it matters so much what comes before the lunge. So years that stick out to me in this kind of format of finale are Aeneas, which I believe is 2019 JR, maybe 18. 18. Aeneas, this workout, and Jackie Pro, where the density of movements is so massive that it's almost like the incentive to race at the end of the weekend after 14 events. Things aren't broken up in a sense where intensity is easily obtained, and the race is just diminished because of that. So think on Jackie Pro, right?

You have the 1K row, and yes, or is it 1500? It's 1K row with the time designation for intensity on the row. Great. But then everybody goes to the thrusters, and it's 50 in a a row at 95 pounds and boom, the race starts to fall apart. And then you get to the bar muscle ups and it's 30 in a row at the end. Again, race to a degree begins to fall apart for Aeneas. You have the five, four peg boards to start already. You can pretty much cut out half the field, which is okay. Then you get to the thrusters, another 40 in a row. And then the yoke is, it just, it gets boring when there's so much density. And this year, again, the same,

the 600 meter row, five sets of 15 chest to bar pull-ups, the race is gone at that point. And then Justin Medeiros is 200 feet ahead of everyone else on the launch. And it's just boring to watch. You look at a year in contrast, like Fib from 2017 and on the men's side it was challenging because only one person finished but on the female side it gave you potentially the best race you could have ever watched and the movements were extremely difficult arguably more difficult than these other finales but they were broken up in a sense a couplet back and forth back and forth back and forth that it allowed for a race to unfold. So I really just like that aspect of it. The finale, I just didn't like. It's really interesting too, that you're saying that because I've heard Brian

say before, and I, I, I used to really disagree with him. And now I'm kind of coming around to the idea that the finales were not sprints. And a lot of times at regionals and semis, we're used to seeing that sprint finale, which is exciting. But Brian's kind of made the point that it kind of leaves you like, I didn't really get to see anything because everything happened so fast.

I didn't get to see any back and forth. You got that a little bit this year at semis. It was a little bit of a longer final. There were three rounds. You could kind of see people move. You could see differences in cadence on the bike. It's interesting that you picked those three years about why you didn't like them because yeah they're all like triplet chippers and they're all have chunk volume so it kind of is like

even though the time domain here is more so what brian's talking about that that like six to eight or nine minute time domain where you can actually see some things unfold and see some people fall apart and see some people pull away you it seems like you think it would be better off to do in a cyclical rounds for time for sure take this workout we'll make it three rounds 300 meter row 30 chest to bar lunge repeat repeat different lunge repeat repeat different lunge different storytelling yeah i think in that sense it's probably an awesome workout um the other two reasons for me is the yoke interval workout was vastly underestimated by the games team programming should have been like 25 ghd's and 10 cheese curd burpees over the bale yeah um and it just

from the start it was like oh shit Tia almost finishes the workout at one interval. That was a bust. So that for me, and then the final reason, where is it? Where is it? Why is this slipping from my mind? Ah, and a highlight. I just think these, and I can do them well, but I thought the standard and the visual of the freestanding handstand pushups on that workout was just to me, boring and stupid. And for the only instance of handstand pushups, I thought it removed any sort of capacity in gymnastics pressing and made it entirely skill-based and you already had that handstand obstacle which was fully skill-based you know overhead gymnastics yes you have the 55 wall walks which is hard and important but there's no other handstand push-ups and now you

just have 30 here and it's not even about the push-up it's just all about you know learning a new standard that you heard about 30 minutes before the workout. So I'm not, I didn't like that. All right. 2020. Do we want to skip this year? Yeah, I think we, I mean, we kind of already touched on it a little bit. Unless there's a good, a really good thing that you think is in here that like to me having to do classic throwback ramped up versions of benchmarks um was really cool like i thought that i thought like i thought about writing an article called make couplets cool again because they're kind of like they kind of get lost in programming these days yeah but like going back to some of these classic couplets and triplets is really cool yeah i love that aspect

of stage one it was so fucking cool but then i look at the program in totality and i guess i with it all on one page i can't help but take both stage one and two into account but you have the 1rm front squat 1k row handstand hold corn sack sprint crossfit total handstand sprint ranch loop snatch speed triple sprint sled sprint arguably like so many so many almost single modality or single implement tests like i don't know just, and then really the kicker for me. So dumb, dumbest thing ever. There's no intensity. There is no excitement, none. So I just, yeah.

Would you have liked Atlanta as an opening event for a games on a Thursday rest day, pick up from there. I think I would still, I think a super aggressive workout for sure. But dude, you get way more intensity out of it at that point. And maybe at that point you might hurt. I don't know if you hurt people in that sense where like you put it first on the weekend and people go fucking nuts on it. And then everybody has rhabdo in their legs, shoulders and biceps. I don't know. No, they would be fine fine i think they'd be fine too i like it as an opening workout hate it as a finale one thing from that year though if you're still you're not

there anymore go ahead i'll go back is only a few times in crossfit games programming history by dave was an ascending rep scheme and an ascending loaded workout ever programmed. It happened in Happy Start. I love that workout. That not unlike in the previous year, the run toe-to-bar workout, a monostructural gymnastics couplet

has only been programmed in competition, I believe, four times ever. Boz made a point about it this year. Shuttle run burpee pull-up. 21.1 was double under wall walk. That workout, toes-to-bar run. And then in the year that I picked, 2014, there's another one. So little like, oh, you don't really think about that.

They've been doing programming for 20 years. But why are there never been any monostructural gymnastics couplets? It's only happened like four times ever. So I love that workout, but part of the reason that I don't like 2020 is how they take the same exact movement from stage one, like Friendly Fran and a barbell thruster. And now you have Happy Star and a barbell thruster at the games. Why not? There's not a dumbbell in 2020. Why not make it a dumbbell thruster ascending weight?

I thought that would have been quite a bit cooler and just my opinion. It did stand out to me a lot, even though I'm sure that, you know, maybe time or resources or whatever, that even though it was at the ranch with a really small field, the amount of odd objects and the amount of monostructural

apparatuses other than just running was not used at all. Yeah, not at all, which is challenging. Okay, 2019. My turn to start? Brian's favorite year. Yeah, this is the best one for him to start on. Honestly, if you look at the programming

as a whole with all the events and you eliminate the format, I think it's a very well-programmed year. But you can't. And I don't really need to say much about it. But the ordering of the events, the events that were selected, immediately preceding critical cut after critical cut after critical cut, completely detract from the validity of this year in almost every way I can come up with. A question. If you kept the first three cuts, first cut 75, second cut 50, ruck 40, and they kept it there, would you have been okay with it? Because then you're cutting i just the thing is like it's very obvious what was trying

to happen with the first and second cuts those two workouts are on their own they're good workouts they're they test a variety of different things you have to have skills you have to have strength you have to have capacity the third one if it's just the rock right there then like for those 10 athletes that are the last ones in the last ones out, it's a little bit like, man, if you just give me like anything else, I would have had a chance to do the rest of them. So the first two for sure. I don't have a problem with, I do like the idea a little bit better. Um, but I probably would still want to substitute something else in, in place of theuck before the final cut. I think what's interesting is they have running in some form or fashion in three of the first four workouts, and that cuts to 30 people.

Running clearly important to games, but interesting for sure. I wonder, would you change your opinion if instead of the ruck, they cut to 40 if they just flipped sprint couplet and the ruck? I don't like that really either. sprint couplet and the ruck yeah i don't like that really either i mean for the thing is if you're looking at each individual workout on its own and you had to say like you know these ones would be okay to put before a cut these ones not realizing how critical they were most of the ones that they chose ruck sprint couplet mary and sprint all of them have, I think, are poor choices. Maybe they put the standard in there for cut three,

but then what do you finish with? Well, I mean, look, we're coming up to the 2023 CrossFit Games, and they just announced the cuts. And this is a great example for people to go back and look and study and realize, okay, we're going to have these cuts, two rounds of them this year. Programming-wise, what they put before the cuts matters a ton and if you're gonna have an extra day before another cut the scoring table is gonna change and those workouts are gonna weight

differently not the top obviously the winner is gonna get the same but in those middle places doing you know placing 15th in a field of 30 compared to a field of 60 we got to you know, what 30 out of 60 and 15 out of 30 looks like at semifinals. And we know it's dramatically different. It's the same at the games. Okay. So your big thing is the cuts for 2019. I mean, if you're going to have cuts, if you're going to have variable scoring tables, then the programming matters a ton. And I think that the placement of the workouts had a negative effect on the overall result of this competition year. And I can't ignore that when I'm trying to pick one best year of programming.

But I do think it's worth saying that as a whole, from beginning to end, I like the programming this year. For me, at least this year, cuts play a little bit of a role i think more than that in my particular opinion the programming lacks a meaningful chipper like there's no straight through classic chipper which me and jr talked a bit about i mean you have second cut, I guess, but it's pretty short. Um, and then beyond that, I see overall a bit of lack of squatting in general. You know, you have the 30 overhead squats at 95, 135, you have the squat snatches to start. And I don't know that I count the pistols and Mary to a degree. I guess I would have liked to see a little bit more of bilateral squatting. So for me, three things really stand out.

One small thing, which I look forward to reprogramming for Crucible this year, is that the bar muscle-ups and sprint couplet didn't mean anything. So those probably should have been 24 for male and female. I think 24 is the number to even get them coming close to can they all go unbroken or not. And then obviously that workout's remembered for the sled

and whether or not certain lanes were wet or dry or whatever. But I really liked that workout. I think just the number of reps on the bar muscle-ups wasn't done correctly. And then two huge things. Typically, we see athletes take the biggest hits on swimming workouts and on lifting workouts. We were already down to 10 athletes at that point. So whether or not someone had a huge gaping hole in strength or couldn't swim,

like we were down to 10 at that point. So if they were better than five of the other people that they were going against, they could hide two of those major holes. And I think that the order of events like brian is saying here like to me you should have had the swim in the clean before you cut to 10 you should have had at least 20 people in the field for that workout yeah okay 2018 Okay. 2018. Back to the top.

You lead us off, Taylor. Starts with me. Pull up my cheat sheet. Because you can't remember why you didn't pick this year? No. Aeneas is one. The final. You had Vellner rolling his plates into the fucking stands on that workout.

Vellner has nothing to do with the program. I know. I know. I'm just making a comment. But I didn't like just the final lacked excitement in a massive way i guess maybe potentially some of that is how dominant fraser was in the men's side but otherwise it just is not again not a final let's break it up into three rounds like you said um the other reason again this year i didn't like how much single modality or single implement there was. You had the crit, 30 muscle-ups, CrossFit total, marathon row,

Madison tri-plus, I don't know, and the clean and jerk speed ladder. Handstand walk. That's what. There you go. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. speed ladder handstand walk that's what where's the there you go so one two three four five six seven seven out of seven out of yeah half the test single modality i don't know i mean dude five i'm i'm good with five that's a lot but i'm good with it seven fuck too much for me and that's my opinion. Out. JR?

I thought it got a little bit – I thought it ended up being a little bit heavy-centric, a little bit. So you had the total, and then you had – Aeneas really came down to the yoke for almost everyone, and then you had the clean and jerk speed ladder. Biclub at one and two, you've talked about this in a lot of back-to-back workouts. We were testing the same exact thing for two of the workouts. Sometimes people like that. Sometimes people don't like that.

Imagine if there was a cut after this. Right. But not only that, you take that into conjunction with seven other single modalities. And now this other workout is double scored for, like you said, essentially the same thing. I think though,

and like, this will be something cool to do. We take the first, you could do three or four. We take the first three workouts from every single year at the games and they have to stand alone as a crossfit games test because generally on the first day you'll get a pretty good well round like to me crit 30 muscle up and crossfit total is unbelievable from a programming standpoint if you said hey you can only do three

you can only have three tests it's 2018 what test do you come up with to see the fittest person on earth is i think that like those three could hold up as probably some of the best in in against any other year so they're they're they're parts of this year that i love like i love those first three workouts i thought that um two stroke pull gave an amazing story along with it right you have that back and forth with brent and with hogberg and then i also i thought the battleground yeah and i thought yeah just seeing laura kind of emerge and then the battleground to me is one of the coolest workouts ever written awesome also i was a huge fan of Chaos. People were like, do you think they should ever do it again?

Probably not. But I think that was as good of an unknown and unknowable test that they could have ever done and actually pull it off. So there are parts of this year that I love. But just overall, it didn't give me something. It was just missing something. You know what it wasn't missing was cuts. Brian, you're up.

Yeah, this comes in at number three on my overall list of programming years. I like this year of programming. I do think that the points the guys have made are valid. I do think it's a lot of single modality tests, but I think that, you know, like we kind of alluded to in the intro that uh well you know i think well-programmed tests create memorable moments and that this year had a lot of memorable moments and even some of those single modality tests created some some very memorable things i think that uh one you know one of the challenges uh on that first day of competition

although they're really well programmed there's so many athletes doing them. All of them were doing crit at the same time. There were big groups on the floor, 20 at the time for the muscle-ups. It was a less than three-minute workout, two minutes for a lot of the athletes. Marathon row, everyone's out there at once. Had to be that way, of course.

In CrossFit total, there was just a lot going on. So it was kind of hard to digest all of it. And I think that, you know, that it does matter to some degree. Um, but overall, I think this is a, a pretty, a pretty good program year against the entirety of all the years of programming. And I think you guys already addressed some of the, some of the issues that prevent it from being my choice. Okay. Copy on to my personal favorite year, On to my personal favorite year, but not my choice for best.

JR, you start now. Yeah, this came in at number three for me. So Wyatt came in at number three and not a little bit higher. Again, much to Taylor's disagreement, having that swim again with just monostructural only in that kind of environment I really don't like as much as actually putting it in mixed modal settings Fibonacci as a final only looking at the programming of it for everyone and I to me this bothered Dave so much that he went ahead and put it in the next year to make sure that he got it right and i think maybe even in the book he even talks about that but that workout for the men was just a little over programmed and with all the other really

really good events this year i mean strongman's spheres in my top 10 for sure two two three intervals probably my top 10 for sure um there was a little bit of like was a salt banger like you could cheat it kind of so was that like a lot of people that stands out to them as well the reasons why they didn't like this one um but like to me as far as the formats go and the mixture of implements, this was amazing to me. Like I really, really, really enjoyed this one. Having the heavy dumbbell at the end of that chipper, um, strongman sphere. Again, I've already talked about it, but mixing of strongman elements with gymnastics is one

of my favorite movement combinations. The other reason that was a big miss for me was in this muscle up clean ladder doing one muscle up per bar. I thought that that wasn't needed. I thought it took away from any pulling or grip fatigue that to bar move, 15 chest to bar move to tell a story. You're only doing four bar muscle ups. So why you break those up into singles, I just don't understand. Get to know yourself and your roots better in 2024 with Ancestry DNA. Want to know where your family comes from in Northern France? Maybe you'd like to see how your genes influence certain traits like diet, fitness, and allergies. There's so much of you and your heritage to discover. Visit Ancestry.ca and get started with an Ancestry DNA kit today.

If you're going to break them into singles, then they might as well be burpee bar muscle-ups, right? Yeah, that would have made it awesome. This is actually my choice. 2017 is my choice for the best programmed year by a small margin over 2014, which obviously we'll get to. I don't know. Do you guys want me to say anything negative about it anyway? No. Tell us why it's your best.

Say why. You picked it. Yeah. Oh, I i think you know first first of all in case anyone's unaware was it was the first year in madison and so obviously there's a brand new canvas there for dave to have his freedom with programming and i think that he did a nice a nice job of that in the first year uh you know i think that uh as i've been saying you know there's when when you have well-programmed tests and well-programmed know, I think that as I've been saying, you know, there's when, when you have

well-programmed tests and well-programmed years, I think that it really, really plays itself out in the competition. And you can look at a majority of these tests on paper. And if you have any knowledge of the CrossFit Games history, you can, I can pick out a memorable moment without thinking too hard about it from every single one of these tests. And to me, that goes, you know, that goes a long way to say that there's, you know, if I was going to look for a couple of things to pick apart of it. Yeah. I think that, you know, anyone who wants to have a problem with a salt banger, I'm not going to argue against them. And I do agree with JR that the, the muscle ups in that muscle up clean ladder were ridiculous to have as singles. They were basically irrelevant in the workout anyway, though.

It was all about the last few barbells, and there were plenty of great moments made there. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much time you guys want me to spend digging into it, but in the past I've gone through and done what Taylor's done, and I just think that from top to bottom this one hits pretty much all the marks that I'm looking for for a CrossFit game season. I think as the guys who program the games always say,

the athletes end up making the story anyway. But when you give them tests that are legitimate, that test a wide range of skills, they're all able to take the test for the entire time. I never felt like there was any one day that was too crazy or that got forgotten in the mix of the other days. I just think that from start to finish, this is a complete test. And even though JR is right about the final,

it also did create some of the most memorable moments in the history of our sport. There were three daughters racing to the end. Then there was the thing with Tia and Cara. Then there was Matt looking around, taking it all in. So I think that on many, many fronts this year is very difficult to argue against, but for me, it stands as the best this is

is it really interesting too because i actually was surprised i picked a year with the same similarity what in this year was new i mean uh in terms of like we've never seen it before at all like cyclocross? Pretty much. It was really just biking, right? Like actual biking other than like Pendleton, right? That was pretty much it. Well, the hate bail, of course. I don't know.

I'm trying to think. But like burpee getover had been done at regionals before, right? Yeah, so there were just like wrinkles of new things. Yeah. And like, I mean, I guess the new thing was like, this is the first time that a true interval was ever programmed.

Now. And two, two, two, three intervals has stood up for six years now. I mean, it is still being programmed in competitions. It's still being programmed on the game site.

It's like that interval. It's better than three, three, three, four. It's better than three three three four it's better than one one one two like it you know and and this was the the origin of that um some of the you know like like i said maybe the movement itself wasn't new but like the logs that they used or whatever they're called for strongman sphere for the farmer's carry there were a little

some elements of new stuff right plus you got the running in the rain hard to beat it yeah and i mean it just kind of shows you too like you don't have to have anything brand new and sexy to have a really really really well programmed year because like i said this was this was number three and the longer we talk about it i feel like it's probably you know i ever do and i also like the uh the level up of the open workout in the 17.5 i think that that's a nice touch that the community can appreciate especially especially the men who now go and see the women doing the same workout of the same way twice as fast or maybe that's just right you guys have to correct me on this brian

you'll probably know original amanda was the first workout on friday at the stub hub center 2010 yeah it wasn't called that though though. It was called Squat Snatch Ring Muscle Up. And then Amanda 45 was the first workout on Friday night at the new venue, correct? Super cool. So that was really cool. A little homage to history. And again, I think of that workout,

and I think of Ricky Garrard. He kind of made his mark right there of saying, yeah, okay, running, swimming. Obviously, I'm amazing at biking, but he was a challenger to Matt right off the bat. Ricky Gerrard you know he kind of made he made his mark right right there of saying like yeah okay running swimming obviously I'm amazing at biking but he was a challenger to Matt right off the bat and there's like that moment of them kind of get into the last set of rings Jamie Green kind of after winning the open the previous year coming up and it's like every single workout from this year I could do that you can tell me the workout and I'll tell you the person or the or the race or whatever and I don't know if there's another games where I just have like that vivid memory of details event after event

after event of drama you were there that year Brian I've been at every CrossFit game since 2016 other than 2020 okay so my my question and I asked myself this because this is my favorite year i wonder how much of the glam and like that star power almost and the i don't know just the how much of it of that is due to crossfit media being at its peak at that point the road to the games behind the scenes, seven crushing it, whatever. Even this year's documentary was amongst the best in my opinion. I didn't watch it. I think personally, this year's this year's documentary. Yes. 2017 and 2014 are my two favorite documentaries. And they're also my two favorite years of program. So I wonder, I wonder how much of a role that plays for me, I love just about every workout this year. I love this run, swim, run, a bit of an homage to kind of the Bud style of pairing the run with the swim, and it destroyed athletes, which I love. Cyclocross was super cool to watch.

Amanda 45, one of my favorite workouts ever. You have two movements that are so total body and so amazing to watch the best athletes in the world move so efficiently and smoothly. It's just like, holy shit, that looks cool. The sprint obstacle course, super cool event to watch. The 1RM snatch, even amazing. I love the triple G chipper. I personally was a fan of Assault Banger.

Watching it as it played out was a bit cool. Again, Strongman S fear. Awesome to watch. I didn't hate the fact that bar muscles were broken up into singles because when I watched it, I thought it was a cool workout. Maybe that was just me being a lot less fit and a lot younger. And the first CrossFit documentary I watched, but I thought that workout looked so fucking cool. And they were doing it the race on heavy 17.5 t and cara again madison triplet another one of my favorite workouts ever um two to three intervals similar the reason i didn't pick it as my first is because i thought it's just a bit heavy on the squatting 45 squat snatches on amanda

60 single leg squats and triple g chipper you count the pistols when it's too many but not yep i counted when it's too many i knew somebody when you do. Yep, I count it when it's too many. I knew somebody was going to say that. I thought it was going to come from the comments, but thanks. Muscle up, clean ladder, more squatting, heavy 17.5, more squatting, two to three intervals, more squatting. Just a lot, a lot of squatting. But that's also why it's my favorite. I love how much squatting is in it.

I just don't think that makes it the most complete program. Okay, on to 16. I love how much squatting is in it. I just don't think that makes it the most complete program. Okay. On to 16. So this is where it's going to get a bit more challenging to share the screen. Who's starting? Is it back to me? I think I was 19. You were 18.

It should be JR. Oh, no. Oh, no, it is you. I just. Yeah, because he started with 17 okay so big reason couple big reasons I personally

don't like how they did the squat clean pyramid right after Murph I also absolutely despise this fucking idiocy right here a lot of people think it's coming back yeah potentially it will um and athletes can do them but the subjectivity of the movement

standard and that year and how just fucking dumb it was dude i i hate it so that's enough for me to keep it out the uh this is you know is it me i don't even know who cares um i thought this was overall was a pretty good year this is the first year i went to the games as a fan i was as uh there with my dad and we watched a lot of the or all the events um there's a couple that i you know what as long as we're on this page like rope chipper was a miss for me. It was just like, you literally didn't need the first 10 minutes of the workout. It didn't matter very much at all. And it was kind of, it was right at the end of the competition. And it was kind of fun to see people manhandle the sled and others just get stopped in their tracks. But as a, as a last day event, I didn't love it

that much. The morning events were pretty fun. Having the back and forth, the girls made it super fun. Obviously Tia and Katrin, and it was a very dramatic workout or a competition on the final day. I thought that, um, I just kind of thought that the week got off to a slow start. The workouts were okay. Um, but the offsite for offsite workouts over two days to start. And, uh, I, I don't know. I just like when I think back about this year and I look at the, at those things, it's hard for me not to,

to factor them in. I did like, no, that was the year that they had the voting, right. Where you could do double T T T or heavy DT. Yeah, that was cool. And I did think it was cool. And I, I want to give him some credit for that. I don't think that either one or the other necessarily skews the programming here. Or was it 2015 that they did the voting and then 2016 was just the other one? They did the other one, right? Yeah, 2015 was the vote. So it's fine.

I think both those work out. I mean, I probably would say that overall this is in my top five games years. But I think for some of the things Taylor mentioned and that I added, it comes up a little bit short of some of the best ones. JR? This year and the year that precedes it, the Murph years is kind of how I think about them. That was just a – it just kind of becomes a battle of attrition.

And I think having Murph, Squawkling Pyramid, and Double DT is just like, it's just too much. It's just too, it's just too much. So. That's a savage day. At least they got to do more from the morning that year. Yeah. Okay. 2015. Brian back to you. Yeah.

Yeah. Is this one we can see on one screen or not oh not again from here on out it's all yeah that's difficult um i'm trying to think what i um this is oh this year's okay uh i'm just kind of scrolling through here i don't know if you're doing it also yep but there's a couple things on here that that jump out to me um for i mean i'm at the back here but the first is just the it's so hard for me to get past things that just completely skew the the results and so when i see you know what happened in pedal to the metal one i can't like I really struggle to get past that and if anyone's unfamiliar most of the women couldn't do it and they all got rewarded 50 something points for doing nothing and I like that this never sits well with me when you

have you know you have a test and it's something new and I don't think there's anything wrong with that but I just never like rewarding athletes for not accomplishing any work i have this like kind of thing that i'm uh beating beating the drum about which is like no no work equals no points and then the results of that crossfit game would have been quite different if that was in effect and i mean we could i guess we should talk more about the programming than that thing but you know this the scoring choices like we've said do matter and. And for me, it's difficult for me to really, really celebrate this year knowing that that exists. Maybe I'll let you guys talk about some of the other stuff.

I think for me, big thing in 2015 is there's not a single total bar GHD. And I think core flexion, testing the midline with one of those two movements to me is just pretty important. Otherwise, if there was, so like, for example, uh,

either the year prior is midline March. JR is 2014. Yeah. Yeah. I love that workout. So this year in, in midline madness, instead of a run GHD overhead lunge, like year, in midline madness, instead of a run GHD overhead lunge like it was in midline March, add the GHD sit-up to midline madness.

I don't know. If they put a GHD in midline madness, this might be, in my opinion, the best year. Oh, wow. This one had a lot of workouts that I remember. I love the soccer chipper yep um it had a lot of really really good workouts in it but again starting it with the starting it with the um with the swim and just a long monostructural setting it just just became really really predictable to me so i i found myself just

being really underwhelmed with the competitions that all started that way i think there's ghds or toes to bar and if they had burpees that year that was the other movement they didn't have that do you think they had an appropriate squatting volume um if there was if murph was in it probably not they had 100 they had 300 vested squats and then they also had 31 thrusters 15 squat snatches uh yeah it means hard I only ask because it seems to be a very critical factor for you it's hard to compare in my opinion with Murph when you have Murph in there, it kind of just – probably too much squatting. But I don't care if it's Murph. Fuck him.

All right. 2014. JR, you can start. Yeah, 2014. So this is my year. Going through all the workouts and everything, obviously I wrote down notes of a lot of different things and how I kind of opened the show by saying,

while I always advise against it for people trying to program competitions, because I think it's really risky. If you can program a competition with six and we're going to say single modality in quotation marks, I know what that really means. What I'm saying is just that there's one monostructural gymnastics or weightlifting tested, not one single movement necessarily, but just one of the three tested. One RM overhead squat, sled sprint, triple threes, Sled sprint, triple threes, clean ladder, sprint carry, and double grace. But when I was looking through the workouts, I didn't notice that until I got done,

which was kind of telling me if you go through and you look at all those, okay, the clean ladder and the overhead squat, heavy traditional weightlifting for load essentially. Sled and sprint carry carry odd object horizontal displacement which i just love in general i love that strong man take this move it over there go get that thing take it move it over there push this thing it's just super primal and it does show a lot of just raw capacity as well as like the ability to buffer acid and all that kind of stuff too and then you have the triple threes which is straight up monostructural. So all capacity engine and then double grace, the back-to-back finale and more so the back-to-back finale that was unknown.

So I really, really liked that this year compared to like other years finales, not just the workouts themselves, you have thick and quick so you have a heavy barbell more technical with a thick rope and then you go to a really light barbell for a lot of barbell reps that's cool too but the fact they didn't know it ahead of time i think pushes it over the edge for me the gymnastics really mattered this year so you had 45 ring muscle-ups and they had to be unbroken or there was a penalty. We've never seen anything like that before. So that kind of unbroken or dive format, unless you guys can

think of one, there's never been a penalty for breaking anything before. And that was a long time ago. Like think about the last time you saw that programmed in general and being penalized for it. I think that's something we could see come back into play this year. The single-unders last year, was that the last time there was an unbroken requirement since muscle-up biathlon? I think it was. Didn't they ever do something like that in the open? I think they should. Almost doing something that's ahead of its time back in 2014,

I think was really cool in that way. This is a main-site workout. I know we're kind of going off on a tangent, but Brian's like five rounds for time, 50 double unders, 50 foot overhead dumbbell walking lunge. But just say that the, just say the double unders have to be unbroken and think about how much it changes the game. If you have one trip up and you're trying to do that workout as a quarterfinals test with a 70-pound dumbbell to make it to semis, how many times are you willing to redo that workout just for tripping on the double unders once you know that it's just a fluke thing? But it values what we've come to realize as what's really important to Boz, like execution, accuracy, that kind of stuff. accuracy that kind of stuff um the barbell wasn't wasn't tested overly in this workout i gotta go in one minute yeah so it was only tested fresh once in the

overhead squat obviously the swim being with the kettlebell thruster and the burpees and like a kind of um up and back pyramid chipper style i thought was really really cool um and they didn't overdo the squatting so unlike taylor i look look for that as a positive. So they did a hundred kettlebell thrusters, one heavy overhead squat, three heavy overhead squats in part of the finale, and then a squat clean speed ladder. For me, this was also the year I picked for the best for similar reasons. While I look at squatting and I love it. The reason I didn't pick 2017 because there was too much of it. Um, the only thing that I saw in this year that I was like, Hmm, I'm not sure if I like this is it seemed like there was maybe a lack of, but looking

at the programming in totality, um, to me, the squatting seems appropriate. And with the 2115 nine complex, I love that workout i think it's an amazing piece of variance the same thing you talked about in terms of the finale being an announcement and not known and people going from double grace into thick and quick i thought was just awesome probably one of the coolest things ever and then again what you said i do love the run swim run and that format but i like doing thrusters with kettlebells on a beach with like no shoes, burpees in the sand and swimming in between is an awesome workout. I got to jump off for a phone call, but you guys can finish out the show. Yeah.

Yeah. And the last thing I'll say about that was, you know, alluded to it. We're talking about happy star. Oh, push and pull. Everyone remembers it for the finish. Everyone remembers it for rich and josh but what people lose in that is that that workout was ascending handstand push-up repetitions with increasing deficit and the sled got heavier every time and most people don't don't see that from a

programming nuance that it wasn't this like oh yeah yeah, the deficit gets, gets lower as you go. Or the, as the reps go up, the deficit goes down or, you know, it was, it was ascending everything, which is like a really, um, it's a really less frequently programmed style of workout. Yeah. I mean, this, this is a, like I had said, this is coming at my number two year. And the one thing that kind of keeps it out for me is I don't see, and JR, you know, please feel free to jump in if you think I'm totally off base here. I don't see athleticism tested that much this year. I don't see an event that kind of like on its own test for athleticism that we see in a lot of other years, you know, show up here or there. And I think that that's maybe the one thing that's missing from the 2014 program. So I wrote down makes and misses of this year. My misses were agility, balance, coordination, question mark, which is basically what I'm grouping as athleticism,

no explosive running or jumping athleticism. no explosive running or jumping athleticism okay and was the sprint carry and the sled testing the same thing it was another thing i was going to bring up and i and i basically i feel like if you just replaced the sprint carry with just for a lack of something else with an obstacle course for example that that this one probably elevates to be my, my top one. Yeah. Cause like, I love that just like, Oh yeah, there's three things. They all weigh a little bit different. Like you got to run down there, pick it up, carry it back, run back at the other one, go back. Like, I love that. It's just a very simple, like, no, let's just like, who's the grittiest, like who wants to do it? But if the, if the sled,

if the sled wouldn't have been an issue of what lanes are the best or what grass was dry what grass wasn't like i love that style of workout especially when you're talking about in a single modality setting which is like it's just pushing a sled it's just carrying things and i think when done with workouts that can balance those out, it's a stimulus that you really can't get any other way. I agree. And I think that, you know, important to mention what, you know, one of the reasons this, that this year is so great is that there's tons of memorable events and moments from this year

as well. I, you know, I'm kind of waiting for a swimming workout similar to this to reappear at the games. And it feels like the, like the closest thing we've had was during the 2020 year where they had, you know, some other stuff that factored heavily into the workout other than the swim or another monostructure element. So I'm kind of hopeful that we'll get something like that soon. Obviously, you know,

you mentioned some of the highlight events from this year or Taylor did 2159 conflicts. We haven't even talked about triple three. That's like triple three. You know, I like workouts like this that show up at the games and humble the games athletes. And then, you know, they showed up at regionals, but a lot of that people who've been doing CrossFit have tried triple three and got to experience it for that self. Like the barrier to entry is not so ridiculous that most people can't do it. And it was also relevant for, for the highest level athletes in this field.

You talked about muscle up by Athlon push pull is considered to be one of the best workouts of all time. Again, it's the athletes that make that. And of course you have, you know, the final, I do like the isolation element of the final. I like, you know, I actually recently talked about on be friendly fitness that i would like to see more elements of this introduced to the games as a whole which is less less of the athletes and later heats knowing what's already happening on the field of competition i do think that there are ways to make that happen i don't think it has to be this like

super isolation chamber thing that they did in this year and also was it 2011 or 10 that they did it the one other time but anyway there's tons of great workouts from this year it's a very well programmed year and i think it's you know it's kind of splitting hairs between for me between 2017 and 2014 i just that's the one thing for me that really jumps out is the lack of a true kind of athleticism test or two and the other thing I put down on this year was, um, was there enough high skill? Like, was there enough high skill at 45 muscle ups in a fashion that penalized you for breaking? I think made them, you know, super, super vital. This deficit handstand pushups. Um, you know, I just, the 45 reps on 21, 59 complex, like was that workout more about the barbell cycling than it was about the gymnastics? I, I, it, it would be a good question to ask some

of the competitors from that year, because as I'm trying to evaluate it, I see a lot of workouts where I'm like, nah, they both mattered. Nope. All three things mattered. And I think that's like a really good sign too, of good programming is when you can look at a workout and not know right away what's the linchpin right when you look at a workout and you can see that it's really balanced that all the things matter and it's not just oh the only thing that matters in this workout is the hand over hand sled whatever yeah and you had obviously some good like even midline march i like this workout with good interference and you get the ghgs the hand stand walking and you know for that time period fairly long unbroken segments and then

you compliment it off with the overhead lunge so yeah and and that just that i mean i obviously have a bias for odd objects but just using that drum that wasn't like a actual like it didn't feel like a barbell right like a lot of people said it just felt different right it didn't rotate you don't have any of those uh laying around in your trailer do you no i don't very similar to like i guess how maybe how an uh how like an axle bar would feel because it doesn't spin maybe um but yeah i just thought that was really cool and obviously there's callbacks too because the sink goes one and two you know that had an overhead walking lunge in it too i mean it was cool to see year to year how dave has kind of recycled things and he has movement combinations that he really likes and i think in five or six years we'll probably see the same

thing from boz are we doing any other years or have we already achieved our mission i think we achieved it we could maybe do 13 but other than that i don't think i mean taylor had said 2013 through 2022 i think maybe look at 2013 and because it was a good year too and talk about maybe what prevented it from being towards the top and then wrap it up let's do it and i think there's there should be a picture of 2013 that you can just pull up on there without having to do the workouts individually i don't know about that i don't know about that should i just google search for it or what yeah you can find it right away if you google search it well but i'll talk about i mean i'll just open up the conversation here 2013 to me has potentially you know the density of some of the

best workouts in one year bird and run right off the bat legless naughty nancy sink goes one and two in the pool you know not not to say that any of the other workouts weren't weren't great i also had the clean and jerk ladder that kind of introduced us to this style of workout that we'd see it had a throwback 2007 zigzag sprint that created uh you know some memories um so there were quite a few workouts this year that i think have stood the test of time did you would you want to add to that at all jr yeah for sure well i just texted you a picture of i don't know if it's easy for you to pull it up that way so when we did the our like all-time favorite CrossFit Games events, maybe it was last year or two years ago,

this year had more than any other year. Burden Run and Legos are two that I still think hold up today. A lot of people see the capital as just a 2022 Burden Run. And I wouldn't argue that. I think it's very similar in the design. I kind of wonder if Boz was thinking about that workout when he wrote it um we start to see this midline centric thought process from dave this year this is the first year so even though it's only 21 of them, we see the med ball GHD. We see what I think is going to come back with the unbroken requirement of weighted pistols. That's kind of goes unnoticed

here is that it wasn't just that it was weighted pistols, but they had to go five, five. So to me, like what, what, what says progression from the ruck? Welluck well maybe maybe it's kind of a callback to this this style of thing right so you have the deadlift and the pistol with the handstand walk and then you have the deficit handstand push up with the muscle up on the overhead lunge so again like we start to see this year and if you look moving forward you see a lot of these same movement patterns repeated you see a lot of these same movement patterns repeated. You see a lot of maybe different movement combinations, but a lot of midline on Sunday. So when I was looking at this year, I was like,

oh yeah, that's the first year that Dave kind of started to really hit the midline on Sundays. What is it that keeps this one out for you? One of the things you said you loved about it, that doing bar muscle-ups, jumping out of the pools. Oh, loved about it, that the, that doing bar muscle ups, jumping out of the pools. Oh, I didn't say necessarily love that.

I just said it's a, it's a memorable, a memorable workout for sure. Yeah. I think like it kind of like maybe it is not known for the workout. It's, I mean, I remember it more so for Jordan Troyan and I think that's probably not what a

lot of people think about when they think of this workout but if that workout would have been like if that workout would have been burpee over a wall jump back into the pool this is probably the best program CrossFit games here to me so just one thing right so like just that like this is my number two 2014 and then 2013 and then 2017 so just just that movement combination was like it was enough to make me not pick this one because in 2014 there isn't one workout that i dislike i wanted to ask you about specifically row one and row two and then cinco one cinco, Cinco two. I mean, you mentioned that I, you know, recently had written about the back to back workouts and we see two of them here and they take on kind of different fashions. Obviously both of the rowing

workouts are specifically rowing. And then you have Cinco one, which is, uh, you know, the deadlifts with the pistols followed by the handstand walk and then Cinco two, you know, right afterwards with muscle ups, deficit handstand pushups, and then another version of a lunge or sorry, it was a handstand walk and then a lunge. It was just traversing the floor in the opposite direction. Um, and I had, you know, I mentioned in the, towards the end of that article that if you're going to have back-to-back workouts, you got to be careful of, of what they're testing for if they're redundant. And I, and I think, you know, uh, you can agree or disagree, obviously. I think that this is a nice

balance where the one of them is testing something, even though you can take the risk on the row, the first row and blow up on the second one or vice versa. Um, it's, you know, the, the good rowers prevailed and did very well on both elements of that. in 5-1 5-2 you had some highs and lows and it was really fitness that prevailed over those two no i i agree and what taylor said that he couldn't stand row one and row two that he thought to just just doing the half marathon row was just like completely inappropriate to just sit on the rower for that long at a crossfit games for an event um the reason why I really didn't mind it is because of the 2K time trial.

Like, forcing that intensity. I mean, really, this is kind of odd that it was on a rower. But since Jackie Pro, I mean, this has been like the only time I can think of where it's just like, hey, yeah, you got to do this thing. But if you don't go hard in the beginning, you're just going to not get a good score. It's not that their workout was over if they didn't row at least like a 152 K, but still in the same way,

you had no choice, right? That Dave wasn't giving you a choice. You, you either took an awful finish or you had to row harder than you wanted to. And as far as impressive performances go of any workout period i mean khalif has got to be up there for this to win both of them like that is unbelievably impressive to me and did sam briggs do the same uh two and one she was first and second or first and first as well maybe she was and then uh and then obviously he backs it up with the burden run that could you know totally change the way that high-level athletes think about preparing for aerobic capacity tests within this sport. I think 2013 is a good year, and I do think it's probably also kind of a good place to stop because the programming was changing quite a bit through those early years. But I think from 2013, I think there were 11 scored tests in that year. And every year since then has had at

least that many, I think maybe one exception, 2019, but they have 10 or 12 that year. But anyway, you get that kind of that consistent range of 11 to 15 tests year in and year out that makes it a good sample size to study a decade worth of CrossFit Games tests. And, you know, I think it's probably telling that independently we all came up with pretty similar kind of ones towards the top even though we're not we're kind of you know nitpicking some different things uh individually about each slate of tests yeah i'm i am interested like to see because it took a long time for some things to circle back around and it's like 2013 is when most people can start to just rattle off games workouts like there are a lot of people out there

that are crossfit fans that if you ask them to name three from 2012 they probably couldn't but 2013 they could name like five because it's just kind of like when i guess the glory year started um so do we see some things start to get called back, right? Like it's been a long time since they've used the snail. I think Chase and Bill talked about that. Does he bring that back out? It's been a long time since we've seen a cut rope or a thick rope. Does that come back in?

Like things like that will be interesting to see if like almost like in a 10-year anniversary type way. I mean mean we saw boz pick legless 2014 regionals as something he wanted to repeat at a semi-final level so do we see some more of that stuff kind of come back it'll be cool to see yeah man i think it would you know uh in some cases the same workout but in other cases an evolution of some of the workouts from this particular year would be really well received and i'm kind of you know uh the fan in me hopes that hopes it's going to see one this year because i do think 10 years later it would make sense to have a legless

2.0 or yeah like if you have if you have that legless workout and you you ride it the same way in the same rep scheme but you say hey like it, like, you're going to have four ropes. And you're going to traverse across them. And then you're going to do an L rope climb. And then you're going to come down and go back to the thruster. And you're going to have three ropes. And you're going to do three of those. And you're going to have two ropes.

And you're going to do two of those. So you climb up, touch, control the descent down, move over to the next rope. Cl up touch control the descent down move over to the next rope climb up come down move over to the next rope and it it it brings a progression from semifinals but also is just like hey four three two one just regular legless rope climbs that's that doesn't hold up anymore with you guys or maybe you invert the workout and you just go one two three four you increase the thrusters as well. Make force the race a little different way. I mean, just in part, it depends on the time domain you're looking for,

you know, and the totality of the workout, but some, some return or evolution of a workout like that, I think would be well received and that, you know, I think is still relevant in the testing. Yeah. Is that it? You guys are done? Yeah, I think that's good.

Great show. If you like the show, hit that like button, subscribe to Sevan, help him out. He needs all the help he can get. You can follow us on Instagram, show up in Scribble. You can send us a DM. I'll eventually read them all. I know there's like 14 in the request box that I saw, so

I'll get to them. JR I know there's like 14 in the request box that I saw. So I'll get to them. And JR and Taylor will do another Q&A show sometime in the future. We're only a few weeks out from the game. So I'm assuming that you all have some ideas maybe about stuff that'll be content that'll make sense to have happen before the games show up in August. So I know we're all getting excited for that. But thanks for watching. I just put a link in the chat. If you want to go watch on our self-made training program YouTube,

we did a video of Taylor talking about a week of Michelle's games training. So if you want to hear him talk about basically where she's at, what they're thinking about, what he's thinking about while he's programming a week of training for her leading up to the games, it's basically 15 minutes of him talking through that process and thinking through each day in the week, what are things you need to hit this day? And he's going to go through and say, okay, we're looking at doing this implement this day. We want to make sure we hit this. We

want to make sure we are testing this lift on Monday. And because of that, this is what we're going to program for Tuesday. And so if that's interesting to you, check out that video for sure. If you have any feedback, leave it in the comments. We'd love to make any of those videos y'all are interested in when it comes to programming, giving a little insight into what it looks like to program for a games athlete. I haven't seen many videos, if any, like that, where it's just talking through this is what it looks like to program for a games athlete. What are the things we're thinking of? What are the things that we're just talking through uh this is what it looks like to program for a games athlete what are the things we're thinking of what are the things that we have recorded that we need to make sure we're testing to see you know a month out from the games where we at in these certain lifts

where do we need to focus for this last you know big big run right up into the game so check out that video and that's that's it i had to drop off for a work meeting. It was super fun. Working normal eight to five jobs is awesome. So, but it looked like a great show. Glad I could catch the end of it. It was good.

You have to go back and listen to it. Cool. Well, even though you weren't here, thanks Brian for hopping on, uh, Jr. You killed it.

Of course, even the parts i didn't watch and um we'll be back i guess you guys will be back next week same time yep see