The design and crafting of workouts is CrossFit’s primary concern. Factors like impact, motivation, perception, recovery, and timing combine with decades of experience seasoned by luck and intuition to create our daily fare, the “Workout of the Day”.
Though the process by which we engineer our workouts is largely rational, the finished product is often seemingly infused with qualities more commonly associated with art than exercise like symmetry, theme, or character. It is in this sense that we have in the past referred to “the choreography of exertion” in describing the best of workout design.
When everything goes right the finished product comes alive in a blend of elegance, simplicity, form, and impact.
— CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman, “Benchmark Workouts”
Measurable, observable, repeatable.
In CrossFit, we observe and log our results, repeating workouts at an irregular cadence to measure our progress — because CrossFit is empirically driven.
Referred to as the “choreography of exertion,” programming CrossFit workouts is an art form — “When everything goes right, the finished product comes alive in a blend of elegance, simplicity, form, and impact,” wrote CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman. Benchmark workouts are a perfect example of the marriage of these elements.
CrossFit’s benchmark workouts are classic tests of fitness, each with its own unique character and stimulus. Often given distinct names, these workouts are generally recognized as extremely potent, featuring varying combinations of weightlifting, gymnastics, and monostructural elements in couplets, triplets, and max-effort blends.
If you are doing the Workout of the Day (WOD), you are doing everything you need to do to improve your benchmark scores. Doing the WOD and applying yourself 100% to benchmark workouts when they come around is enough. If you do them, you will get better — if you get better, you have gotten fitter.
We recently added 13 well-known CrossFit benchmark workouts in the CrossFit app, and we invite CrossFit athletes around the world to complete the workouts and log their scores.
Through the shared experience of completing and logging our benchmarks and sharing our scores, we can encourage each other, we can compete, and we can collectively create the sense of accountability that makes our program so powerful and effective.
And as an added bonus: By doing so, you’ll get 20% off our Benchmark Collection in the newly launched CrossFit Store.
Whether you’re completing these benchmarks for the first time or are re-testing each for the 40th time, we invite you to join the global CrossFit community in completing and logging these 13 benchmarks, now included on the CrossFit app:
1-rep-max back squat
1-rep-max clean and jerk
1-rep-max deadlift
Fight Gone Bad
Filthy 50
Fran
Grace
Helen
L1 Benchmark
Max pull-ups
Run 5K
1-rep-max snatch
Sprint 200 meters
Download the app now, complete a benchmark, and log your score via the “Progress” tab in the app to receive 20% off CrossFit Benchmark apparel.
CrossFit Community Invited to Complete Benchmark Workouts, Log Scores in App