We know that every time an Open workout is announced people call it brutal, but the CrossFit Open’s 18.3 workout was pretty darn brutal.
With its AMRAP triplet of toes to bar, hang clean & jerks, and rowing, 18.1 was a punishing, high-rep metcon, and with its one-rep max clean, the 18.2 workout introduced a completely different way to test the body’s limits. (Check out the heaviest cleans from 18.2 here.)
But 18.3 took things to a different level. As a reminder, this is the workout:
Time cap: 2 Rounds for Time with a 14 minute time cap:
- 100 Double-Unders
- 20 Overhead Squats (115lbs/80lbs)
- 100 Double-Unders
- 12 Ring Muscle-Ups
- 100 Double-Unders
- 20 Dumbbell Snatch (50lbs/35lbs)
- 100 Double-Unders
- 12 Bar Muscle-Ups
Your score is your time to complete both rounds. If an athlete is unable to complete both rounds, then the total number of reps completed from the workout will serve as your score.
[Look at the faces on these 10 athletes who got their first muscle-up during 18.3.]
This workout tested a lot: your anaerobic output, your endurance, your mobility, your gymnastics, your coordination. And according to a new post published on the CrossFit Games website, just 17 percent of athletes who Rx’d the weight managed to start the second round.
This was an article from Jonathan Kinnick, a lecturer in economics at California State Polytechnic University who publishes statistical analyses of CrossFit® workouts. (You can read about his breakdown of 18.1 here.)
He found that just 25 percent of men and 6 percent of women who used the Rx weights made it past the first round. (When taking into account the different numbers of male and female athletes, it comes to about 16.7 percent of everyone who participated.) Seventy-seven percent of men and 57 percent of women aged 18-34 used the Rx weights.
Kinnick also put together this chart, which gives the distribution of Rx’d scores based on the movement the athlete was performing when they ran out of time. Check out that big spike during the second set of double-unders — that’s where athletes were most likely to run out of time.
Featured image via @richfroning on Instagram.
