As CrossFit’s membership continues to grow each year, Open rankings become less meaningful for many athletes as their ranking drops year after year, even though their fitness isn’t getting worse. This is a result of more people joining the leaderboards – being top 10% one year might mean a ranking of 20,000, and the next year top 10% is 30,000. So even though you’re staying in the top 10%, your ranking plummeted 10,000 spots. If you find that frustrating, you may want to consider using BeastScore to track your fitness instead.
BeastScore is an absolute measurement system – just like pounds for back squat or seconds for a sprint. It has no dependence on the performance of other athletes like a ranking does. So if your fitness improves, then so does your BeastScore. It takes the guesswork out of trying to understand how your fitness is changing over time or with respect to confusing leaderboard rankings. (More on how BeastScore is calculated.)
BeastScore is also not biased towards gender, weight, height, age, or anything else. A higher BeastScore means more capacity to do work. It’s a direct measure of one’s ability without bias. So if you have a BeastScore higher than Sam Briggs, then more often than not, you would out perform her in a competition involving the “unknown and unknowable.” Your higher BeastScore indicates most prepared for whatever may come out of the hopper. And you know you are getting fitter as your BeastScore increases over time, regardless of what happens with your Open rank.
