Preparing for the 2025 Open WODs

If you aim to improve your performance year-over-year in the CrossFit Open, this article is for you. We’ve seen a shift in CrossFit’s programming bias in the Open over the last two years, and understanding these changes and historically common movements will help you best prepare for the CrossFit Open.

In recent CrossFit Opens, we’ve seen a shift towards an intentional choice of movements and loads that allow a larger percentage of the CrossFit community to participate in the workouts.

Examples from the 2024 Season:

• Workout 24.1 featured dumbbell snatches and lateral burpees with a focus on endurance rather than heavy lifting.
• Workout 24.2 included a 20-minute AMRAP with rowing, light deadlifts, and double unders, again highlighting conditioning.
• Workout 24.3 started with light thrusts and chest-to-bar pullups before advancing to heavier thrusters and bar muscle-ups.

 

The programming is clearly conditioning biased more than it has in the past. Putting stronger athletes with a lower capacity engine in a deficit and greatly helping more conditioned athletes climb higher.

 

However, on the gymnastics side, we continue to see higher-skilled movements used as differentiators in athletes. We see gymnastics skills programmed as an Open performance separator.

Workouts like 24.3 are a great example of this. The workout progressed to 7 bar muscle-ups over 5 rounds after having already completed 50 chest-to-bar pullups. Not only do you need good conditioning for this WOD, but you need high levels of gymnastics capacity.

Another example is 23.1 (repeat of 14.4), which had 50 Toes to Bars as the second movement in the WOD. Athletes who can’t string together larger rep sets of T2B got slowed down significantly early on in this workout.

The bottom line – if your conditioning isn’t up to par or you lack gymnastics capacity, the new programming biases in the Open aren’t in your favor.

 

The Most Common CrossFit Open Movements

Based on your unique strengths and weaknesses, you can bias your upcoming weeks towards the area that will help you the best. For gymnastics movements, it is crucial to look at the movements most likely to show up in the Open.

Here are the movement patterns that have shown up in the CrossFit Open by year.

We can then look at the frequency of different movements in the CrossFit Open. Looking at the chart below, it is clear that muscle-ups, double unders, pullups, and toes to bars are critical skills to have for Open success, as each movement has shown up at least 12 of the 14 years the Open has existed.

But we still have plenty of time to make great strides forward in your Open performance!

 

Here are the top five resources we have at Performance Plus to help get you there!

1. Build Your Engine – jump into our Rower or Air Bike program for six weeks of detailed programming to unleash relentless conditioning, power, and endurance for next-level metcon performance!

2. Bar Muscle-Up Overhaul – muscle-ups are a staple in the open. If you have strict Chest to Bars Pullups but haven’t mastered consistent bar muscle-ups, start here. Our endurance program is a game-changer for those with a few singles that want to really climb up the leaderboard.

3. Toes to Bar Overhaul – another highly likely movement to show up (especially since it didn’t last year). This plan will help you get your first few reps or clean up form for larger sets if you are an athlete already hitting low-rep sets.

4. Double Unders – another movement that has shown up every year. Athletes need to be able to hit sets of 25 consistently for the Open. If you are sick of DUBs being your Achilles heel (get it?) then this program will get you on the right path!

5. Pullup Base – whether you need to get that first strict pullup, learn kipping mechanics, or want to build Lats to Fly, we have plans to help all athletes improve their pullup capacity. Pullup variations are the 3rd most common movement to show up in the Open, don’t overlook them!