Have CrossFit Media Voices Lost the Plot?

OPINION  |  CROSSFIT CULTURE

When commentary on the Open reveals more about the commentator than the competition, it may be time we ask harder questions—of ourselves.

Every year it arrives like clockwork: the CrossFit Open is announced, hundreds of thousands of athletes worldwide sign up, three weeks of workouts are released—and then a familiar chorus of voices in some of CrossFit media begins its annual ritual of dissatisfaction. The workouts were “too simple.” The programming was “boring.” It was “too easy to game.” The scores “don’t separate anyone.”

The 2026 Open has been no exception. Within hours of each workout announcement, podcasts, YouTube channels, and social media accounts operated by some of the sport’s most prominent media personalities delivered their verdicts—and the tone was, to put it simply, ‘luke warm’. But beneath the hot takes and the performative frustration lies a more important question that almost none of these voices seem willing to ask: Have they forgotten what the Open is actually for?

The Criticism Machine

The complaints tend to follow a predictable pattern. A workout is released. Within minutes, elite-level athletes and their adjacent media commentators post their scores, finishing (or not) under the time cap. Then the analysis begins—not of strategy or execution, but of the programming itself. “This didn’t test anything.” “Anyone could RX this.” “What was the point?”

What’s notable about this cycle is not the criticism itself—healthy debate is a sign of a passionate community—but what is conspicuously absent from nearly all of it: any meaningful engagement with the CrossFit methodology that underpins the entire enterprise. The theoretical hierarchy. The pyramid. The relationship between mechanics, consistency, and intensity. The foundational principle that variance in programming is a feature, not a bug, and that the Open is designed to test a broad population across a broad range of time domains and movement patterns—not to entertain a narrow class of commentators who finished their competitive careers years ago, if they ever had one at all.

When a media personality says a workout “sucked” because it felt too easy, they are implicitly measuring the workout against their own capacity—a capacity that was built, in many cases, by doing exactly the kind of simple, high-intensity work they are now dismissing. The irony is difficult to overstate.

Forgetting the Climb

There was a time when every one of these commentators was new. There was a time when a workout consisting of wall balls and burpees left them gasping on the floor, questioning their life choices and marveling at the elegant brutality of simple couplets. There was a time when finishing a workout Rx’d for the first time felt like a genuine athletic achievement—because it was.

That memory appears to have faded. Somewhere between accumulating followers and building media brands, the perspective shifted. The Open stopped being a celebration of COMMUNITY fitness and started being content to be consumed, evaluated, and critiqued through the narrow lens of elite performance and entertainment value.

But the Open was never designed to be a spectacle for the already-elite. It is, by design, the most inclusive event in competitive fitness—the widest part of CrossFit’s competitive funnel. Its purpose is to meet people where they are: the forty-five-year-old mother of three doing her first pull-up. The military veteran scaling a workout from a wheelchair. The teenager discovering for the first time that fitness can be measured, tested, and shared. For these athletes—who represent the overwhelming majority of Open participants—the workouts are anything but “easy.” They are transformative.

The Missing Conversation: Intensity and Ownership

Perhaps the most telling gap in the media discourse around the Open is the near-total silence on the concept of intensity—the single variable that CrossFit has always identified as the most correlated with results. The methodology is explicit about this: it is not the complexity of the movements or the novelty of the programming that drives adaptation. It is the intensity of the effort applied to any given workout.

If a workout felt “too easy,” the methodology has a very clear response to that: you didn’t go hard enough. Did you leave everything on the floor? Did you push into the pain cave and stay there? Did you treat the workout like the test it was, or did you pace conservatively, post a comfortable score, and then take to your microphone to complain that you weren’t sufficiently challenged?

This is where self-ownership enters the conversation. The athlete who finishes a workout and immediately blames the programming for not being “hard enough” has made a choice—not about the workout, but about where to direct accountability. The methodology would suggest they look inward first. If the workout was truly easy, then the score should reflect a level of output that left nothing in reserve. And if it didn’t—if there was gas in the tank at the final buzzer—then the criticism belongs not with the programmer but with the person who chose not to push harder.

This is not a comfortable message for media personalities whose content model depends on having strong opinions about programming. But it is, if one takes the methodology seriously, the honest one.

Judgment Over Curiosity

What would it look like if CrossFit media approached the Open with curiosity rather than judgment? It might look like asking why a particular couplet was chosen and what it reveals about the programmer’s intent across a three-week arc… and BEYOND.  It might look like exploring how different athletes—scaled, Rx’d, masters, teens, adaptive—experience the same stimulus in radically different ways. It might look like revisiting the theoretical hierarchy and explaining to a growing audience why the pyramid matters, why mechanics precede consistency, why consistency precedes intensity, and why none of those principles require a barbell complex at 80% of your one-rep max to be valid.

Instead, the dominant mode of Open coverage has become something closer to food criticism—a performance of taste in which the reviewer’s sophistication is the real subject, and the actual product is merely the occasion for display. The workouts become props in someone else’s content strategy. And the people doing the workouts—the real people, the community—become background noise.

A Mirror, Not a Window

None of this is to say that the Open is beyond critique, or that CrossFit’s programming decisions should be treated as sacred text. Thoughtful criticism—rooted in methodology, supported by evidence, and offered in the spirit of making things better—is valuable. The sport needs it.

But what we have seen in 2026 has not been that. And for some of us newer to CrossFit a bit of a bummer.  What we have seen is a cohort of media personalities who appear more interested in performing dissatisfaction than in doing the difficult intellectual work of engaging with the system they once claimed to champion and in return leaving those new to the methodology feeling like somehow whatever they managed to do over the course of 3 weeks is somehow “less than” because these ‘experienced’ people say it was “shitty programming”. Along the way, they have mistaken jadedness for expertise. They have confused the fact that they have outgrown the Open’s difficulty with the conclusion that the Open has failed.

The Open is, in many ways, a mirror. For new athletes, it reflects possibility. For intermediate athletes, it reflects progress. For elite athletes, it reflects a reminder of where the pyramid begins. And for media personalities who have drifted from the methodology that built them—it reflects something they might not want to look at too closely… themselves in the mirror, facing the real question.

Perhaps the most radical thing a CrossFit personality could do this season is not offer a hotter take or a more withering critique. Perhaps it would be to step back, revisit the foundations, and ask a simpler question: Did I bring everything I had today? And if the answer is no—if there was room to go harder, move faster, push further—then maybe the problem was never the workout. Let’s hear more of THAT.

Maybe it was always the effort.

■