Week 3 of the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games Open brought us a challenging couplet of chest-to-bar pull-ups and squat snatches.
Open Workout 17.3 was reminiscent of 16.2, which had similar elements (4-minute sections, ascending weight, descending reps). The workout gave us an 8-minute minimum and split the weight sections into 3 rounds. This element broke up the work a little bit and allowed athletes to advance a little further than they potentially did in 16.2.
The best of the best were able to finish this workout before the 24-minute final time cap. To accomplish that, you’d be required to do 153 chest-to-bar pull-ups and 63 squat snatches. To give you an idea of the difficulty of this workout, less than 2 percent of Rx’d individual competitors—males or females—made it to the 245- /175-lb. round (and less than 1 percent made it to the 265- /185-lb. round).
8 Minutes in Heaven
Getting past the 8-minute mark was a big challenge. There wasn’t a lot of room to dilly dally in the early rounds. It was crucial to bank as much time as possible in order to have ample opportunity to complete the heavier rounds.
Overall, only 31 percent of Individual Men and 11 percent of Individual Women made it past the 8-minute cutoff. As you can see below, 50 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women capped out before completing the rounds of snatches at 135/95 lb.
Distributions and Percentiles
Although chest-to-bar pull-ups can be challenging, the real separator in this workout was the squat snatches. Most competitors finished on the 135/95 section (Rounds 4-6), with 55 percent of Rx’d Individual Men and 63 percent of Rx’d Individual Women finishing there.
The next most common section was 185/135 (Rounds 7-9), with 29 percent of the men and 19 percent of the Rx’d women finishing there.
The following graphic breaks down percentile by section. For example, a competitor who made it past the 8-minute time cap but couldn’t complete any snatches at 185/135 lb., would be in the 71st percentile for men and the 86th percentile for women.
Since the heavier snatches were so separating in this workout, we decided to focus in a little closer on those reps and their respective percentiles.
The following graphic shows your percentile based on how many snatches you completed at a given weight. Just about every rep on the 135/95 section represented multiple percentiles of difference.
Getting 1 rep at 185 lb. for men put you in the 74th percentile, but finishing the 185s put you in the 91st percentile. There is a big difference in being able to hit a few reps at 185 lb., and cranking 12 of them out within the 4+ minutes allotted.
Finally, we have the full percentile table for all divisions. This table tells you what percentage of each division did the workout as Rx’d, as well as some popular percentiles for each division. This can give you a better idea of how you stacked up against your peers.
Analysis by: 
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