Taylor Self (00:02):
Live boy.
Will Branstetter (00:04):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
Ladies and gentlemen up.
Speaker 4 (00:12):
So keep the political commentary to yourself or if someone once said, shut up and dribble.
Taylor Self (00:39):
Worst program, CrossFit games ever.
JR Howell (00:42):
Geez, dude. Or
Taylor Self (00:43):
Best. Hey. Hey, come on. I’m just kidding.
JR Howell (00:45):
No, definitely not the worst.
Will Branstetter (00:47):
My mic stand broke before we
Taylor Self (00:51):
What? Were you sitting on it? Were you trying to sit on it?
Will Branstetter (00:54):
Dude? Yeah, dude. No. The screws came out and there’s only one left and I lost it. Oh shit. I’m just going to be that guy that picks it up every time. What’s up everybody? We’re back from the games. All three of us were there. JR had to leave early. I know he was bummed out, but he’s a good family man. Got back to his family and he was there coaching. Noel Henderson, an adaptive athlete. How did she end up doing?
JR Howell (01:19):
Yeah, she won really cool multi extremity. 2023 champ. Get to add another banner to the wall. So it’s cool.
Will Branstetter (01:27):
That’s awesome. And then Taylor and I were there together. We got there on Sunday after we missed a flight and we were there all week and Taylor was coaching Michelle and we had a lot of fun. It was a blast, honestly. Great experience. It was cool to meet everybody. Meeting Stevon was awesome. Getting to hang with him, getting to hang with Susa, Caleb Hiller, getting to hang with these guys. It was awesome. So really cool week. Had a lot of fun. Felt like there was a lot of excitement in the air. People were excited about being there. It was packed even on Thursday, as soon as the game started. Thursday, yeah. Yeah. The first event, our pig chipper in North Park stands were packed already on Thursday. It was cool. It was really cool. Felt like everyone was really excited. Greg was there for a day.
(02:15):
It was cool seeing Dave back. Dave and Bo working together. Cool. Seeing it on E S P N. I was sent a text this morning, an account manager I work with got on our call this morning. He was like, Hey. He was like, I was watching the CrossFit games this weekend on e s pn. I saw it there and watched it for a while and he was like, I’m just so amazed by CrossFit. It’s so awesome. He went on to make a metaphor about our work in relation to CrossFit, which is kind of funny. Doesn’t do CrossFit, but that was cool. So today we’re going to do a kind of recap show of the programming. Well, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to sit here and these guys are going to talk because that’s what you’re here for. But we’re going to recap. We’re going to set it up doing three things that they both really liked that Taylor and JR really liked about the programming this year. And then three things that they would’ve liked to see changed or modified or that they think events could have been better if they made these tweaks or whatever it may be. And then they’ll just kind of give their overview of the programming and we’ll wrap it up. Our goal is to do 45 minutes, so let’s go and get started. Jr you want to give your first thing that you liked?
JR Howell (03:19):
Yeah. Well, and I think it’s really important for people to know that we are going to break the whole season down maybe on another episode, maybe next weeks, where we actually start from beginning to end and we go, how do we like the entire year, open quarters, semis games. Because I think when we get into that, we’ll be really good for us to get into how collaborative is the programming effort now moving forward when we see the games being programmed, when we see the other three stages of competition being programmed. Did we see clear progressions throughout the year? Did we really not see clear progressions? Did we see some regressions? Did we see some things that maybe didn’t fit along the way? Were there things that were programmed for the age groups and other levels before the games and then at the games we’re expecting to see things that we didn’t see at all. I think we need to try to stay away from that kind of stuff today. But broad thoughts. Taylor, based on what you said about worst program deer ever, did you like the programming and what are some just overall thoughts?
Taylor Self (04:33):
Yeah, I liked it. I liked this year a lot. In a way it seemed after last year in a way, it went from crazy complicated, complicated is maybe not the right word, out of left field, all this new stuff, holy shit. Never would’ve expected that to extremely simple almost. It to me was a pretty stark dichotomy, which maybe is a bit due to Dave coming back. It just seemed like in terms of simplicity and what we can normally expect this year was kind of right up the alley typically of what you could expect from a CrossFit games. Whereas last year was different in a lot of ways. But real quick, we could probably do a whole show on this, but I think I just found out who Trish is, man, Tate’s girlfriend. Dude, he’s Kevin. Have you seen that documentary? Yeah. That’s you Trish. All right. Got half a smile from jr. So that’s cool.
JR Howell (05:42):
Yeah, I mean, I like the programming. I was a little bit frustrated with the programming a little bit because there were a lot of things, there were a lot of progressions, there were a lot of things that I thought would be revisited that were not. And it’s easy to make guesses all that we do. That’s all that I do is try to make educated guesses. They’re not really predictions, they’re just going to stop. But when you see workouts come out and you think about what workouts might come out later in the weekend and what fits and what makes sense and then they don’t, you get emotional about it. I know I get really emotional about it because that’s what I like to do. It’s my art too. So when I see things like age groupers doing handstand hold for max time teams doing ring support hold, and I’m saying, okay, it makes sense for individuals to do some kind of a static hold this weekend at some point, whether they do it, whether they do a gymnastics hold in a workout where they do it in a skill setting, whatever, and then it doesn’t happen.
(06:50):
I kind of freak out and I know I shouldn’t freak out that way because it’s like it doesn’t have to be uniform like that. But it just made a lot of sense to me to see things like that. And
(07:01):
There were points of the weekend that I thought to myself, that really looks like a b workout. I can tell Adrian wrote that workout. And there are other times in the weekend that I kind of scratched my head and was like, that doesn’t feel like a b workout. That kind of feels like a Dave workout based on the past. And I think the effort was super collaborative and Dave mentioned that they tweaked some things and all that kind of stuff. But I would give so much to know, Hey, what were the first iterations of all these workouts? How were they changed as you guys went on? How did they change with testing? How did they change even all the way up into the execution of the workout?
Taylor Self (07:38):
What would you give specifically to know,
JR Howell (07:43):
Oh, an amount of money that mattered to me that may or may not make my family pay rent or pay a mortgage. So that’s
Taylor Self (07:50):
A lot of money for you guys that don’t know,
JR Howell (07:53):
Don’t stop. That’s a lot of
Taylor Self (07:54):
Money.
JR Howell (07:55):
I’m a gym owner. My wife works very hard so that we can live in this house. So you want to just start out with the three things that we really liked?
Taylor Self (08:08):
And I’ll go first, I think, and this is, it may perplex some people because it’s very simple, but for me, seeing it in person, it was one thing that really stood out to me and was one thing over the course of the weekend. I was like, oh, that was pretty cool. And it was the I’ll start general and get specific. It was the way they made the test heavy without a barbell. And that really stuck out to me on alpaca when 3, 2, 1 go, everybody lined up to push the sled to start. And some of the biggest and most powerful athletes in the field just got fucking stuffed and pushing that sled, the first what, 10 yards is it, or 15 or 20 yards was a fucking grind. And people going to their knees halfway through that first section. And I know they did alpaca at that weight last year with the sled, but seeing it in person was just a little different and was insane. And I love that.
JR Howell (09:07):
So that’s one of the things that you liked.
Taylor Self (09:08):
Yes.
JR Howell (09:10):
Okay. Mine is along the same lines, but mine was the perceived bias of odd object use. I love that. In the competitions that I program, I try not to be super barbell centric, and we only saw two barbells. We saw it for the total and then we saw it for the thrusters at the end. So to me, that put a smile on my face because I just love the use of all the odd objects. They used the sandbag twice. They used it once to throw up and over the logs with the carry, and they used it again for the heavy squat test. They used dumbbells, they used kettlebells, they used sleds. I just really enjoy all the odd object use.
Taylor Self (09:53):
Yeah, and that’s a question. It’s interesting how biased CrossFit has been toward a barbell, at least at the games in years past. But it makes you wonder what is the practical application in terms of making a movement as functional as possible? You would think a sandbags a bit more functional than a barbell. It’s a lot more like something you would do in everyday life. And
JR Howell (10:18):
So you’d almost make the argument, why aren’t we doing more odd object as we lead up? And then at the games we use more of the traditional
Taylor Self (10:30):
Emphasis. No, no, I think the odd object is appropriate at the games. I wasn’t thinking in terms of just the game specifically, but even in your standard class, how often do 99% of affiliates use a sandbag versus how often do they use a barbell? I know you’re special and we are maybe half special. We use sandbags a bit, but not a lot of affiliates use them. And it’s like picking up a bag of mulch with fucking concrete in it.
JR Howell (11:00):
Would it make you like, eh, I don’t really like that. Or would you really enjoy it if the equipment list came out for the entire 2024 season, including the open quarterfinals and you saw kettlebells, dumbbells, sandbags and maybe another concept two machine or two are like an echo bike and it just said, Hey, you need to have all these things so that the tests earlier on that more people participate in the entirety of the test is more broad.
Taylor Self (11:30):
I’d care less about the machines, but I think a sandbag would be an extremely easy way for affiliates to get something new and different in their gym for cheap. They’re fuckload cheaper than dumbbells and kettlebells, and again, extremely practical. So I like that as well. Second thing that I liked was I think the way that first event reading it to start when they announced it’s a 40 minute amrap, I was underwhelmed and I was like, me, I don’t like that. And then when we saw the course and then some of the races playing out and how, I guess to my perspective, experience on a bike was less important as important for sure. But just having massive amounts of muscular endurance and stamina on the bike, you had to have confidence, I think to the degree that your experience, to the degree that it contributed to your confidence was important. But it wasn’t like it was this crazy technical course. It was if you have the balls to push on the bike, go, I liked that event. I liked it as the single modality test and I liked that they didn’t have swimming. I think you have to have it every year.
JR Howell (12:55):
Along the same lines, I really liked the single modality tests in general. I think I said when we picked out our best program CrossFit games, the one that I picked had lots of single modality, not necessarily just one movement, but a workout that was all carries a workout, that was all weightlifting, a workout that was all gymnastics. And I think if you can do that and make it to where it’s not super noticeable or you can do it and where the test is still pretty balanced, that it just shows you that you have a really good grasp on programming. And we’ve talked about before, I think at the games is the best time to do it because you have 12 to 15 workouts. So I think doing the five K run, doing the bike, doing the Olympic total, doing the gymnastics medley, I really enjoyed the single modality.
Taylor Self (13:44):
And you think it’s okay that they tested single modality twice with mono structural elements and the others?
JR Howell (13:50):
I definitely do not, and I’ll save that for the three things that we didn’t like. Okay.
Taylor Self (13:55):
And then the third thing that I liked, wow, did it just, I think it slipped my mind. Well, I guess that explains how much I like this year’s programming go.
JR Howell (14:07):
It’ll come back to you. Yeah, it’ll come back to you. I can go again. So I’m actually going to piggyback on your bike and say that when that came out, I rolled my eyes at the fact that it was an AMRAP two. And while I do think that it could have been changed a little bit and still gotten the same stimulus out of it, the fact that they chose to have everyone do that was really cool. And I’m wondering what you think as someone who’s really experienced, especially in the water, and if I asked some other swimmers this, do you think that handling a mountain bike for that long is just as much skill limiting and skill dependent as when they do a swimming? Because I know athletes that can do things on a biker that no one else can do, and I watch those same athletes struggle when they had to actually handle a bike and deal with people in their way and all that kind of stuff. Do you think that that’s legit or no?
Taylor Self (15:06):
So yes, yes. Long story short, yes, but I think it’s less skill dependent and more confidence dependent. If you grew up playing in the water and your fucking brother held you under for 20 seconds trying to drown your ass every other week and you’re just super comfortable in the water, you know how to swim, you can be in the water out of breath and uncomfortable. Huge advantage of the CrossFit games. Similarly, on a bike, if you grew up riding a bike every day, mountain biking at all, even riding a dirt bike or racing through the woods, I did a lot of that. And I wouldn’t say I’m a technical bike rider, but I’ve eaten shit on a bike a ton enough to where I’m not super scared of it. I’ve wrecked so many fucking times and had done a bit of mountain biking. And again, I don’t consider myself a skilled mountain biker, but just having the confidence to push and not be scared of the turns or scared of being tight in the pack or scared of wrecking, I think that’s a massive advantage. So when you say how important is it familiarity wise? I think very, but I don’t necessarily think
JR Howell (16:12):
When you compare something like a long swim or a long bike versus a long run or a long row, do you think that how much less capacity dependent is it? I would say a lot. It makes a huge difference because the amount that you have to make up for someone growing up in the water, swimming, swim team in elementary school, middle school, high school, and then just stopping and they get back in the water and they’re like, oh. I mean, it’s like the proverbial, it’s like riding a bike. It really is for them in the water where they don’t really have to do anything and they can still beat 90% of the field.
Taylor Self (16:52):
Yeah, it is important. And I would just say that it’s less you have a lower barrier to entry with the row machine and a run, whereas it’s your mental capacity and psychological tolerance, whereas on the bike and the swim, are you actually comfortable doing it and have you done it enough because not a lot of people have and it is in that sense. I’m not sure that, I mean, look at that level. If you’re not comfortable on a bike as much as they’ve biked your fault,
JR Howell (17:20):
Probably just not prepared. Yeah, I thought that the placement of that too was perfect because if you have watched any of the videos that have come out or you’ve watched any interviews with people afterwards, I mean obviously there were physical repercussions as far as injuries and crashes and stuff go. But what that did to people’s legs for the rest of the week, it really set the tone in a way that a lot of people probably weren’t used to. I’m going to go out and ride a bike for 40 minutes, basically as hard as I can on flat grass and then going out in the hot sun and doing a hundred wall balls and doing the pig flips, just that people really felt the bike cramping, cramping right after the bike cramping during the pig chipper. It really seemed like the placement of it was just put everyone in a hole from the start, which I thought was really cool.
Taylor Self (18:13):
And I think what contributed to a lot of that fatigue was that, again, the course was not massively skill dependent. There was a lot of straight, there was a lot of flat, there was a lot of grass.
JR Howell (18:24):
I thought the part where they got off and they were interrupted and having to run what their bike really maybe made it the hardest part of it. And I think just added a lot of mental to it. Every lap I got to get off in a second, I got a good rhythm, now I got to get
Taylor Self (18:39):
Off. I think if there was a part on that course to me, aside from some of the tighter turns where it showed athletes who are most comfortable with the bike, it was there dismounting and mounting the bike going fast. My third thing I remembered it was just the gymnastics or the inverted medley as a whole. I don’t know if people thought it was gimmicky, but I loved the 360 pirouette on the box down the ramp. I thought that was fucking cool. I typically hate freestanding handstand pushups. I just think they’re one of the most gimmicky forms of a handstand pushup ever. But for whatever reason, I loved it in that workout. I liked the bar pullovers. The only thing I didn’t like about the workout was one of the standards during the briefing, and that was just kind of muddy water. But aside from that, I thought that the box press to handstand or kick to handstand on top of a box, do a pirouette down the ramp was so freaking cool straight into freestanding handstand pushups. Only thing I disliked were a couple of the standards there.
JR Howell (19:38):
Yeah, that’s good. And we can get into the things that we really didn’t enjoy because my first one kind of goes along in line with the single modality test.
Taylor Self (19:46):
It does it have to do with the five K run
JR Howell (19:50):
Kind of. So I would say
Taylor Self (19:51):
That, okay, this different, so you go first or I can go first. Mine’s really easy.
JR Howell (19:58):
I think that to have all of the athletes do the 40 minute bike and to do a gymnastics only test and to not have them all do a weightlifting only test was a huge, I don’t really want to say mistake, because the way we talked about the workouts when Pat came on before anything came out was, hey, the way they’re doing the cuts Thursday and Friday have to stand alone. Saturday has to stand alone, Sunday has to stand alone as well-Rounded tests and the order of events does matter when you’re making cuts. So when you do certain events throughout the course of the weekend will inevitably reflect and change the leaderboard as you go. And you may have people that are still there on Sunday that wouldn’t have been eliminated on Friday, but fact that the workout came out that would’ve exposed the hole didn’t come. It happens. So if you’re going to have single modality tests, awesome, I love them. But of the six, why not have those three? So half the tests are single modality, everyone lifts heavy, everyone bikes long, everyone shows skill. It is tradition. Maybe it had to do with what they wanted to put on E S P N, I don’t know. But the fact that all of the athletes in the field did not lift and only some of them lifted to me was like a big miss from just from a programming design standpoint.
Taylor Self (21:28):
Yeah, it was either do three of the single modality tests before Saturday or all three in a different modality on Saturday. Weightlifting, mono, structural gymnastic, single modality Saturday I thought was the only way that that was going to play out where I was like, all right, that’s perfect.
JR Howell (21:48):
Either save them all for the people that proved that they had the fitness to do things in a single modality setting, save them all for Saturday and do ’em or do them all Thursday and Friday when everyone has to do them.
Taylor Self (22:04):
Yeah, and to be fair, the level of thought I’ve put into that is minimal being enveloped in coaching for at least the first half of the weekend. And when it was playing out, I guess I personally wasn’t very upset about it. I wasn’t upset about any of the workouts because I liked all of the workouts, but it doesn’t make sense. I’ll say this after the unique perspective that I have. I think as an athlete who has competed against several of the people there at a relatively high level and then also coaching someone there, I changed my mind about the cuts. And I think the cut from 30 to 40 is completely appropriate. And I don’t necessarily think that the first six workouts, as long as they’re relatively varied and CrossFit in a general sense are super important to me. It seemed like the people that were cut from 30 to 40 after the first six events were not going to be able to compete the rest of the weekend regardless of the tests that showed up.
(23:18):
That being said, and on the other side of that, you saw the women like Abby Dome and Caroline Stanley who were in a bubble spot going into that first cut and fucking sold out and made the cut and girls like that and guys like that live on to fight on Saturday, the cut from 30 to 20 at that point in the weekend. I think the only thing look to say that is wrong to me after nine events is there’s only been barbell and one of them. And at that point in the weekend there had been, well, there hadn’t been sandbag, there’s only been one sandbag as well. So I don’t know my perspective of the cuts completely changed at the games. So that’s a hard one for me to disagree with at this point on paper, when you say cuts and you say, these are the first six workouts, then we’re cutting to 30, it’s like, yeah, why are you doing that? Because there’s a discrepancy in single modality tests. But in application when I was there, I dunno, did not seem to make a difference or a big one at that.
JR Howell (24:35):
Okay. What’s your didn’t like
Taylor Self (24:40):
First? Didn’t like was that the five K run was 4.5 k and how thousands of people potentially logged a five K score? That’s not actually a five K. It makes me cringe.
JR Howell (24:55):
Yeah, I think it didn’t make my top three, but the fact that they tried to incorporate the community to the extent of, Hey, on your profile
Taylor Self (25:05):
Log this score,
JR Howell (25:07):
Let’s have the games athletes do variations of or do things that we all do as everyday people. We all go out and we have to run the five K even though we don’t want to. And look, they have to go out and run five K two. We all have done Helen before. They’re going to do a variation of Helen. I thought that was creative and while some of the athletes probably didn’t enjoy coming and just doing classics like that, it was a way to engage the community and get people to go out and participate, which is fun. But I’m with you on knowing that when you go into a workout that has any kind of distance, I mean there’s all competitions will inevitably have something that’s a little longer than they say it’s going to be or a little shorter, whether it’s a swim, a run, whatever. But when it is a benchmark and when you’re having a lot of people participate in the community on site and you’re having high level athletes do it where people are going to text their mom and dads and say, Hey, did you know that this person ran this time that would’ve made my cross country high school team or college team versus oh my gosh, look how slow they ran comparatively to the best. You want to be able to say that and if it’s not the same distance. Yeah. It kind of, and
Taylor Self (26:23):
To me, really the biggest gripe that I have about that is at one point during the broadcast that I was watching, sorry, trying to fix my mic. Chris Hinshaw goes out of his way to say, and Jay Mac, one of the head judges has wheeled this course several times and each time it’s exactly five kilometers. I remember that specifically. And just to go out of your way to say that when it’s like now we have over 10 athletes who’ve tracked the course on their run with data and multiple people, I’m sure a shitload of people did in the community vision and it comes back as 4.5 k. Dude, that just seems like so classic CrossFit,
Will Branstetter (27:05):
I just think it’s like the CrossFit cringe. I said it, it’s like CrossFitters did a kipping five K. It just kind of adds into the CrossFit, Hey, if you’re going to do something that everyone knows it’s recognizable. Everyone knows what a five K is. Most people, a lot of people know what their five K time is, and it’s just kind of cringey. You look across and you’re like, wow, CrossFit didn’t even actually run a five K.
Taylor Self (27:26):
No. The thing, and there are a lot of people in the comments, oh, what do we think happened? Did they make a mistake? No, they fucking knew it wasn’t five K. That you don’t go out and measure that thing and run it and test it and not know it’s not a five K until fucking 30 athletes submit their Garmin data and it says 4.5. They just knew it wasn’t a five K.
Will Branstetter (27:44):
I feel like they didn’t know because it was an easy change. Because even I went on Google Earth and just mapped it out there. I did the course, they actually did, lined up to 4.5 k, made a few adjustments on turns they took like take a different turn on the RV park, take one different turn on the field and it lines up to about five K. So you think
Taylor Self (28:03):
They did 5,000 yards instead of meters,
Will Branstetter (28:06):
Yards or just because of the gravel, whatever they were using to wheel it out was bumpy and they didn’t get an accurate measurement. Something like that.
Taylor Self (28:15):
Well anyways, I disliked that a lot. Agreed. Second one jr.
JR Howell (28:22):
Yeah, I’ll stay on the topic of the five K. I thought that that run needed to be fast. It needed to be a sprint. So even if it was still single modality, you already had a long single modality, mono structural with the bike. And we saw you have to run sustainably hard efforts, Helen for three of them, but they were very much sub maximal. They weren’t a dead sprint. So I thought that that five K run to me where it was placed in the weekend even could have easily been, I’m not saying to repeat the 550 meter run that they did in 2021, but more so something like that. Maybe some change in direction and then a sprint to the finish. Something like a sprint effort. I think we talked about that in last week’s show before all the workouts were out or two weeks ago where we said, Hey, based on what’s come out, what do you think they need in there? And I was waiting all weekend for maybe the hurdles to come back or maybe the pylons to come out where they have to do some kind of a zigzag obstacle sprinty type thing. I really thought that that five K didn’t add a whole lot to the entirety of the programming. I thought that it would’ve been better to have it in more of a maximal effort run instead of not long and slow, but hard and sustained effort
Taylor Self (29:56):
Copy. Apparently, a lot of people in the comments are saying that 5,000 yards.
The above transcript is generated using AI technology and therefore may contain errors.
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