It’s official, it’s CrossFit Open month!  This year, there’s more buzz than ever around the worldwide competition, and over at CrossFit HQ they’re seeing record registration numbers of athletes of all ages and abilities who are signing up.

Getting closer to go-time means fine tuning our form and workouts, and spending a borderline unhealthy amount of time analyzing workouts from years past to figure out what we’re in for in 2017.

While we are by no means as horrifyingly creative as Dave Castro (and we totally mean that as a compliment), we’ve put our heads together here at FitnessHQ to come up with our 2017 CrossFit Open workout predictions.

We analyzed the workouts over the past several years, looked at patterns in movements and rep schemes, and even did some digging on social media to see what skills top competitors are working on in order to develop our list.

We even reviewed our guesses for 2015 and 2016 to see what we did right, and where we missed the mark.

Here are the workouts we think we could end up muscling through come February 23rd when the CrossFit Open kicks off for 2017.

Traditionally, the first workout of the Open has been what sets the tone for weeks to come.  While Crossfit is all about well-rounded programming, in years past it’s been common to see the weeks follow a similar theme to what we see in the first one.  In 2013 we kicked off with a progressively heavier burpees and snatches couplet, and we proceeded to see three additional workouts that coupled a gymnastics movement with a barbell movement.  Those workouts also included a progressive rep or weight scheme.

Fast forward to 2016 and we saw a long grueling triplet AMRAP that combined never before done in the Open walking lunges with gymnastics movements.

In the early years of the Open, you could almost reliably predict that burpees would make an appearance in Week 1, recent years have proven that to be false.

Taking all of that into consideration, plus this oh so helpful and terrifying teaser from Dave Castro’s Instagram, we predict 17.1 will be:

17.1 

21-18-15-12-9-6-3

DB Thrusters (100/60)

Burpees

You thought 16.5 was bad?  This is the same thing, only with dumbells.  The only silver lining, if we’re right, they’ll be a little lighter.

Becca Voight agrees with us on the dumbells, but she’s thinking Snatches.  Who’s right?  Only time will tell.

**Editors Note** Within 24-hours of finalizing this article, two big things happened on Facebook that have us second guessing this prediction.  First, Crossfit HQ posted this video where Greg Glassman notably says, “nobody’s doing enough with dumbells” when speaking of workout programming.  While the video was actually recorded on January 9th, they reposted it on February the 2nd.  Interesting.

Perhaps even more interesting,  just one hour before reposting Glassman’s comments, Crossfit HQ posted this video of Games alumni and Crossfit Staff Member Julie Foucher demonstrating DB OH Lunges. **

17.2

Typically the completely unpredictable workout, the second week of the Open is always both challenging and unexpected.

In recent years, we’ve seen this to be the week where the workout really begins to separate out the top athletes on the leaderboard with the introduction of some of the more complex gymnastic movements or opportunities for the elite competitors to hit heavier lifts.

This is also the week where we typically see a workout that, if you complete a certain number of reps in a given period of time, you get more time added to do another round.  We expect to see that trend continue.

Here’s our guess for 17.2

In 3 minutes complete as many rounds as possible of:

10 chest-to-bar pull-ups

10 snatches (95/65)

If you complete the round before time runs out proceed to:

12 chest-to-bar-pull ups

12 snatches (105/75)

If you complete the round before time runs out proceed to:

14 chest-to-bar pull-ups

14 snatches (115/85)

Continue pattern of adding 2 reps and 10 pounds per 3 minutes until you meet Pukey or start seeing pretty pretty stars.

Ah week three, where for the past two years running muscle ups make an appearance.  We have a sneaking suspicion that this year will follow that trend.

Week three is where the leaderboard really starts to separate out, and once the scaled version of the Open was introduced back in 2015, it’s also where the heavier lifting and complex movements really pick up speed.

Here’s how we think 17.3 will shake out:

Repeat of Open Workout 13.3

12-minute AMRAP

150 wall ball shots

90 double unders

30 muscle ups

Games veteran Elijah Muhammad is ready- he’s already stepping up his double under practice.

The only thing we’ve got to wonder- will this be the year we see triple unders in the workouts?  It looks like some athletes seem to think so.  Even Crossfit HQ has featured athletes, like Tia-Clair Toomey practicing on their Facebook page.

Week 4 is traditionally an AMRAP, though it has also been programmed as a chipper a few years along the way.

This year, we’re thinking AMRAP.  And when we asked him for a workout prediction, Mat Chan threw out pretty much exactly what we’re thinking:

9-minute AMRAP

3 deadlifts (225/155)

3 HSPU

6 deadlifts (225/155)

6 HSPU

9 deadlifts (225/155)

9 HSPU

Continue ascending ladder by 3 reps each round.

Ah, the .5 workout, also known as grand finale week, this is where Dave Castro loves to do one of two things.  He either (1) repeats a workout from years past that was so miserable we swore we would never do it again, so he makes liars out of each of us or (2) pulls something totally new out of his bag of tricks.

We think this year is going to be something totally new out of the bag.

We haven’t seen a really good, hard chipper in the open since 2014, and we think that 17.5 is going to be the perfect time to throw together a nice long workout with a few favorite movements.

We think it’ll look something like:

20-minute AMRAP

60 calorie row

50 box jumps

40 toes-to-bar

30 clean and jerk (115/95)

20 OHS (115/95)

10 burpees over the bar

For the record, we really hope we’re wrong about this one!

 

So, are our predictions anything like yours?  What do you think we missed?  Do you think we will see any new movements make a debut this year?  Be sure to let us know in the comments, and keep us posted as you go through the Open on your progress!