Tracking progress is one of the most important aids in getting better. This is true for all things whether it be fitness, business, or any other endeavor. Benchmarking allows us to see what’s working and what isn’t, this is why it exists. In business, companies track quarterly profits. In CrossFit there are benchmark WODs. Doing a WOD once, though, does not make it a benchmark, you have to track your progress on that performance by repeating the test at different stages.  Tracking is usually kept in a journal or in an online CrossFit tracking app.In other sports it’s easier: for powerlifting and weightlifting it’s about the total, getting that number to increase over time. In CrossFit however you need to be prepared for anything that may come up in the Open, Regionals, and Games. The goal of CrossFit is to be well rounded, so tracking just the lifts isn’t adequate. Over a given time an athlete might lose 15lbs on his or her squat which as a power lifter would be bad, but as a Crossfitter this might not make a difference. Example: you have an athlete that squats 500lbs and shifts his focus to improving his weaknesses. So if he goes from 500lbs to a 485lbs on his back squat, but gains the ability to do muscle ups and improves conditioning, he is a better Crossfitter. Since the sport requires a well-rounded athlete, you will need to work on your weaknesses first. In a WOD it doesn’t matter how great you are at something if you take too long or can’t get to it because there is a weak movement for you before it. The Monarch Training CrossFit level guide has been built to help define the route to improvement as a CrossFitter.  

How to determine benchmarking  

Many of the standard goals out there aren’t true indicators of your performance. Example: many places say a double-bodyweight back squat is a good goal. Using a bodyweight ratio as benchmarking for Crossfit, however, isn’t specific enough. It doesn’t work for a few reasons.

First, strength doesn’t scale based on body weight. In weightlifting in the lightest weight class a triple-bodyweight clean and jerk has been accomplished, but no super heavy weight has clean and jerked double-bodyweight. In a lightweight class, double-bodyweight isn’t good enough, and as a super-heavy weightlifter who weights possibly 350lbs you’d have to break the world record by over 100lbs.

Second, in CrossFit, a workout like Fran is pull ups and thrusters at 95, not half body weight. There are standard weights. This is expanded upon more in our Monarch Training CrossFit Level Guide. Benchmarking should be based off of performance. Our performance in the benchmarks should be directly related to our performance in our sport. Benchmarks also need to be basic and simple. It’s important for them to be most beneficial in the aspects of building a greater athletic base. This is to prevent becoming specialized in the test.

Through years of training you may also find indicators of performance that can become personal benchmarks that you use. An example of this for a weightlifter could be as your push press increases you always see you jerk increase. There isn’t anything wrong with using a lift variations as a benchmark, but you will need to be careful. The variations will be different based on weaknesses in the lift. If the variation you use is a relative strength for you or eventually becomes a strength it will no longer be an indicator.

An example of this is a powerlifter using good mornings as a benchmark/ indicator. Lou Simmons is very fond of using this, and often is very successful. Brandon Lilly has talked about how he focused on increasing his good morning for this reason and became specialized in that movement, lifting 600 or 700lbs. But Lilly didn’t see a carry over to the platform. The exact same thing happens in weightlifting with the snatch balance. Some coaches swear by it as an indicator for the snatch, and for some this is true. For me personally it isn’t. My 2nd time ever doing a snatch balance, besides an empty bar warming up, I could do 365lbs without much difficulty. My snatch was nowhere near that. The best choice for a variation as a benchmark/ indicator of progress would be to choose a weakness.     

As I said before, the importance of benchmarking is to see what is working and what isn’t working. We can use the benchmarking to make changes to the program. We can view the program much the same as a science experiment. We start with a making a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis, refine based on results, test again. The way we use this in programing would be to view each cycle as the experiment and the performance in benchmarking would be the results of the experiment. Example: we notice the consistent reason for missing a back squat is weakness in the bottom of the squat. From this we make the hypothesis that pause squats will help fix this issue. So, in the next cycle we add drop sets of pause squats one day a week. At the end of the cycle we retest and find we still have the same issue and didn’t improve on back squat. The next cycle we focus on flexibility and might find that this improves our bottom position. At the end of that cycle our squat increases and the issue is fixed. In this example our benchmarking is 1RM back squat. If we based it off our max pause squat, we would have seen an increase in the benchmark test but not in what matters. This would be an example of specializing in the test.  

Benchmarking is a useful tool to track progress and to make sure we are not wasting time. When used correctly it can keep us focused on our overall goals. Benchmarking can also be a powerful tool mentally, to see just how much we’ve improved can be a huge boost of confidence going into a competition.

 

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