The final workout of the 2019 Open featured a descending ladder of thrusters and chest-to-bar pull-ups, totaling 105 reps of each movement, with a 20-minute time cap. This workout continued a long tradition of week five workouts containing some brutal combination of these two movements.
Last year, 18.5 presented athletes with an ascending ladder of the same two movements, so it’s no surprise that nearly the same percentage of Open participants decided to tackle the final Open workout as prescribed in 2018 and 2019. Read on to see how the community fared with this year's rep scheme.
Workout Analysis
For 19.5, a total of 88 percent of Men 18-34 and 62 percent of Women 18-34 performed the Rx’d workout. Despite the high rep count, 25 percent of men and 11 percent of women were able to finish within the time cap.
Breaking down the scores by section and time, we can get a sense of where most athletes finished the workout. For men, we see the largest concentration of scores on the round of 21, followed closely by the round of 15. For women we see a similar trend, with the addition of a decent-sized pileup on the round of 33. This was primarily due to a cohort of women who were able to perform the thrusters but either couldn’t do a chest-to-bar pull-up or weren’t proficient enough to get through 33 of them.
For our country analysis this week, we are looking again at performance based on what it took to reach the 99th percentile in that country. In order to keep the numbers statistically relevant, we limited the analysis to only countries with more than 1,000 Open participants overall (24 countries). We separated the numbers by gender in the individual divisions (18-34, both Rx’d and scaled). By looking at percentiles, we can compare countries with vastly different numbers of competitors and get a relative performance metric. This requires countries with more participants to have proportionally more high-performing athletes in order to place higher in the rankings.
Based on this analysis, the top three countries for men on 19.5 were Mexico, Russia, and Spain, respectively. Mexico beat Russia for the top spot this week. Spain was a newcomer to the top three, bumping out the New Zealand men. The top three countries for women were Iceland, New Zealand and Belgium, respectively, for the second week in a row. The table below shows the rest of the countries in the top 10 spots.
Below is the percentile table for all divisions. You can see the breakdown of how many reps it took to achieve a particular percentile. For example, for Rx’d Masters Men 50-54, you needed a score of 19:46 to get into the 95th percentile. You can see the percentage of athletes who did the Rx’d versus the scaled version in each division as well.
Note that these percentiles compare scores in the same version of the workout only, so they will differ from the Games app, which offers a composite percentile including both Rx’d and scaled results in a particular division.
*The data used for this article is from the official CrossFit Open submissions.
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