Concerned what effect the 2010 programming will have on future competitors :(

[Steven Ngo]

Originally Posted by Justin McCallon

I think you should get a bunch of task-based events. Make them very different tasks:
...
Humping

would that be for time, amrap, reps, or load?

[Richard Lee Sattro]

I think part of the reason why they did the programming they way they did is because they weren't seeing enpough gymnastic work in peoples programming. So they wanted to throw everyone for a loop and punish the people that were working on strength too much. I might be there way of driving the affliate programming

Next year I would assume that it will be more balanced. If not at least it will be entertaining to watch.

[Stu Christensen]

Originally Posted by Justin McCallon

Could you explain why?

And no you don't need all the competitors to do all the events and saying "Period" doesn't mean you're right. I agree that proper programming is (obviously) essential and I never said that. If you go with rank-based scoring then you can still fix it by reassigning ranks when you make cuts.

Because by eliminating athletes, you are now making the final events worth less than the starting events. The only true way to test the athletes is let everyone go and see where the chips fall in all events. Adding in the "cut" athletes for the final events will most definitely put spaces between the athletes who made the cut - its inevitable that some guys will just be better at some events, and if those events happen last - it truely affects the outcomes and final placings.

I promote and compete in strongman and I see this with every comp I do....you need all athletes for all events for it to be effective. I don't see why people can't see this?? trying to figure out some stupid formula of dividing the total points is BS because it does nothing to fully evaluate the performances. If anything, you are taking away the disadvantage of a poor showing on an event because you are making the defiicit in points someone gets by placing poorly smaller because you've just divided the difference and then let them proceed on the basis that the final event deficits will be taken at full value. It does not work.

(oh, and your other post about 1RM i agree with, so I'm not sure if you were trying to argue with me or what...but whatever).

[Stu Christensen]

Originally Posted by Richard Lee Sattro

I think part of the reason why they did the programming they way they did is because they weren't seeing enpough gymnastic work in peoples programming. So they wanted to throw everyone for a loop and punish the people that were working on strength too much. I might be there way of driving the affliate programming

Next year I would assume that it will be more balanced. If not at least it will be entertaining to watch.

The affilitate owners I have talked to don't give a crap about mainpage.

WHY DON"T THE FOLLOW THIER JOURNAL ARTICLE THAT EXPLAINS CROSSFIT PROGRAMMING?!?!! IT REALLY IS JUST THAT EASY. THAT ARTICLE TEST 1RM, TEST COUPLETS, TRIPLETS, ENDURANCE.... EVERYTHING.

[Katherine Derbyshire]

Originally Posted by Stu Christensen

The affilitate owners I have talked to don't give a crap about mainpage.

Maybe they should. No one who had been paying attention to mainpage programming would have been surprised by the skill-based events in these Games.

Katherine

[Justin McCallon]

Originally Posted by Stu Christensen

Because by eliminating athletes, you are now making the final events worth less than the starting events. The only true way to test the athletes is let everyone go and see where the chips fall in all events. Adding in the "cut" athletes for the final events will most definitely put spaces between the athletes who made the cut - its inevitable that some guys will just be better at some events, and if those events happen last - it truely affects the outcomes and final placings.

I promote and compete in strongman and I see this with every comp I do....you need all athletes for all events for it to be effective. I don't see why people can't see this?? trying to figure out some stupid formula of dividing the total points is BS because it does nothing to fully evaluate the performances. If anything, you are taking away the disadvantage of a poor showing on an event because you are making the defiicit in points someone gets by placing poorly smaller because you've just divided the difference and then let them proceed on the basis that the final event deficits will be taken at full value. It does not work.

(oh, and your other post about 1RM i agree with, so I'm not sure if you were trying to argue with me or what...but whatever).

I don't think you read through my link, because my scoring system (and probably the one embraced by anyone that understood Statistics 101) uses standard deviation and doesn't rank athletes. It's not a rank-scoring system. The last events are worth the same amount as the first events, regardless of whether cuts are made or not.

I should have given more details on how to make the rank-scoring (which is a less-than-ideal scoring system, for the record) system work with cuts, but that was explained in a couple other posts in other threads and I didn't want to repeat it. I'll repeat.

So you have 4 athletes. You cut to 3 athletes after 2 events.
Abby - 1st both times (2)
Beth - 2nd and 3rd (5)
Catherine - 4th and 2nd (6)
Dorothy - 3rd and 4th (7)

Ok, so now you cut Dorothy. She's out. No more even considering her in anything. Now you reassign scores before the next event:
Abby - 1st both times still (2)
Beth - 2nd and 3rd still (5)
Catherine - Changes. Dorothy doesn't get considered, so she gets 3rd and 2nd (5).

So now the next event begins. There's only 3 competitors, and you rank them as you normally would and add their scores to their totals. The difference is that the earlier events don't have any more people because they are fixed to only consider those that advanced. So the next event is:
Catherine - 1
Abby - 2
Beth - 3

So that comes out to be:
Abby: 2+2 = 4
Beth: 5+3 = 8
Catherine: 5+1 = 6

Are there still problems with this? Yeah, because it's rank-order scoring and rank-order scoring sucks and shouldn't be used and they should use a system that uses proportional scoring and standard deviation and normalizes scores to 100 to make things easier. But it's still a way that they can make cuts and make it have only a minimal affect on the legitimacy of the competition.

[Tom Woodward]

Originally Posted by Kevin Bensette

You can argue about weight classes and lifting until you're blue in the face, but a properly programmed series of events that hit all 3 energy systems will balance out the whole size and strength issue.

In response to the OP, I don't think that's true. Look at some of the 'fittest' people in the range of sports that CrossFit is most similar to in terms of pathways:

Sprinting, olympic weightlifting, MMA, soccer, tennis, decathlon, gymnastics, powerlifting, endurance competitions....

justin gatlin, GSP, lionel messi, rafael nadal, bryan clay, every gymnast, every triathlete, and most weight class lifters, etc.

They are all on average under 6 feet, about 160-185 (gymnasts much smaller) and 10% BF or less. It's just the fact of the matter that small, lean individuals have a better mechanical advantage moving external objects and have to do less overall work moving their own body as well as external objects. All else being equal, their relative strength will always be higher. In a competition that spans all of the pathways (even if a 1RM lift is thrown in), a 6'2" 215 pound or bigger athlete will probably not be able to win.

Even if you get Pierre Spies (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3muAkT0K9Y WFS) to come workout against Speal or Rich Froning in a legit CrossFit comp, he'd probably lose. Would be fun to see though.

[Stu Christensen]

Originally Posted by Katherine Derbyshire

Maybe they should. No one who had been paying attention to mainpage programming would have been surprised by the skill-based events in these Games.

Katherine

I agree. BUT It doesn't mean they had good programming. It was still not balanced and lacked many modalities. It wasn't a surprise, but wasn't good either.

[Justin McCallon]

Originally Posted by Tom Woodward

In response to the OP, I don't think that's true. Look at some of the 'fittest' people in the range of sports that CrossFit is most similar to in terms of pathways:

Sprinting, olympic weightlifting, MMA, soccer, tennis, decathlon, gymnastics, powerlifting, endurance competitions....

justin gatlin, GSP, lionel messi, rafael nadal, bryan clay, every gymnast, every triathlete, and most weight class lifters, etc.

They are all on average under 6 feet, about 160-185 (gymnasts much smaller) and 10% BF or less. It's just the fact of the matter that small, lean individuals have a better mechanical advantage moving external objects and have to do less overall work moving their own body as well as external objects. All else being equal, their relative strength will always be higher. In a competition that spans all of the pathways (even if a 1RM lift is thrown in), a 6'2" 215 pound or bigger athlete will probably not be able to win.

Even if you get Pierre Spies (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3muAkT0K9Y WFS) to come workout against Speal or Rich Froning in a legit CrossFit comp, he'd probably lose. Would be fun to see though.

I agree with the point you're making here, but some of your examples are kinda off.

Put GSP in a fight against Brock Lesnar and he gets crushed. Even though he's, imo, the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, Brock's overwhelming size and strength advantage is too much.

Powerlifters/Oly lifters aren't small dudes. Especially not the ones moving the most weight. And almost all the elite ones put on as much muscle as possible (they keep low BF if they're not SHW's). Also, a lot of those sports aren't really the same energy systems as CF. The Decathlon is the most similar.

But again I agree with your general sentiment. Imo what you should theoretically see assuming a perfect competition, where the mix of strength/speed/endurance was equal when compared to the genetic limits of human performance performed by a gifted specialist, is a normal distribution of athletes ranging from various weights/sizes.

So, basically, someone that is 240-250 and 6'2-6'4 might have a .01% chance of winning, whereas someone of the ideal size of 5'9-5'11 and 180-190 might have a 30% chance of winning. This is all pretty theoretical but hopefully you get the point.

[Tom Woodward]

Right, I guess my main point is that the more GSP-type build is more beneficial from a CrossFit perspective. If you put GSP against Brock in a well balanced CF competition, GSP would win every time. Same is probably true with Darren Sproles against Vernon Davis. And Nate Robinson vs. LeBron James (that I would like to see).

Despite bigger engines, it's just not big enough to overcome the extra work they have to do. I remember running my Cindy numbers a while back on the P Menu calculator and at 6'4", 220, doing the same number of rounds as Dutch Lowy (5'4" 145) would require nearly twice the mechanical work from me. Spread that out over an entire CrossFit competition and it's VERY impressive that Moe Kelsey can finish where he did the last two years. CrossFit, after all, is about completing tasks, not doing mechanical work. If they were judged on work performed, Moe would have won going away.

Edit: I'm not complaining BTW, I think the task oriented framework they use is the best way to do it