Level Testing

In June, we held a week of Level Testing, which served several purposes:

• Assess the fitness level of our clients
• Provide a challenge
• Help you understand where you are on your fitness journey
• Create some healthy competition
• Collect some data

We defined the levels as 1: Novice, 2: Intermediate, 3: Advanced, 4: Elite.

David developed the standards over several years, and we gave them one final tweak before the tests. The levels roughly correspond to the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile of athletes and CrossFitters – in other words, performance percentiles of fit people. Unfortunately, “fit people” is not easily defined, but given that much of the population has a tough time just walking up stairs, think of it as the top 10% of the US population in terms of fitness. (That’s a WAG, so don’t waste your time nitpicking the 10% estimate, please.)

For example, to set the Cindy scores, we pulled up Beyond the Whiteboard and looked at the distribution, and pulled the levels according to the percentages above. BTWB isn’t perfect, but it’s a large, relevant database. For the lifts, David estimated these from experience and observation of thousands of athletes; since BTWB doesn’t necessarily include body weight, calculating a useful standard is tricky. We came up with some pretty solid benchmarks for each of a set of core exercises.

Another good question is “what if I’m a Level 4 in one area and Level 1 in another?” The intent of the levels is to assess your versatility as an athlete. If you are working toward an Olympic berth in rowing and are a Level 4 rower and Level 1 on pullups, that’s fine, but most of us are not going to the Olympics and thus benefit more from general fitness than from elite specialization. CrossFit develops athletes “not to suck at life” – to develop a broad range of skills that make us proficient at a range of functional tasks. The Levels follow this principle, and thus your Level is your lowest level attained across all of the events.

We contemplated setting area levels – for example, extracting the endurance events and creating and Endurance Level – but we could slice and dice it hundreds of different ways, and not really gain any information. Therefore, we are standing by two Level standards:

1. Your overall level, defined as the minimum attained on the events
2. Your level for each individual event.

Therefore, you can brag about being a Level 4 deadlifter, but if you can’t do a pullup, then you are a Level 0 overall.

Many of the females, and some of the guys, can do everything BUT an unassisted pull-up and are going to be unhappy with this metric. Therefore, we will allow you to talk about your level “except for the pullup.” It’s a way of scaling the levels, and chances are you are also scaling Cindy. If you fall into this category, you have other mountains to climb and victories to declare before getting wound up about levels, so jam away on developing your pullups and other skills and watch your benchmarks improve.

We also had several people get very hung up on the numbers (you know who you are). If you find yourself very motivated by metrics and benchmarks, talk to us! Let’s take advantage of your metric motivation and pin down some specific goals, or post them if you haven’t already.

Want to score your levels? See a trainer with your logbook. We will post the levels on the bulletin board, and we can help you score yourself as needed.

Great job with the level testing, and enjoy getting back to basics for another round of building strength!