Scaling Saturday’s Dubai Fitness Championship Workouts for Your Gym
All of Saturday’s workouts have been released for the Dubai Fitness Championship and we’re going to give you scaled options of the workouts that you can tackle with friends at your gym!
Event 2 (Dubai Version): The strength event for this weekend features a hang squat clean ladder building in weight, with a tie-break of 5 hang squat cleans at a fixed weight.
Our version: To make this inclusive and accommodating to fit in a CrossFit class, we’re removing the ladder style and allowing athletes to build up to a max, relative to their strength. We’ll keep this on a clock so it’s not too casual and builds a sense of urgency for each round.
Every minute for 12 minutes:
1 Hang Squat Clean (building to a max lift)
If athletes in your gym are not fluid with the movement pattern, they can perform a complex of 1 Hang Power Clean + 1 Front Squat.
Event 3 (Dubai Version): This triplet is a total of 90/66 calories on a SkiErg, 120 toes-to-bar, and 70 snatches with increasing weight broken across three rounds of work.
Our version: The goal of this workout is to be in the 15-20 minute time range, so we’re going to scale down the toes-to-bar volume and decrease the snatch weight to help preserve the stimulus of the workout. We’ll keep the cardio element the same, with a rower option in case your gym doesn’t have a SkiErg.
3 rounds for time:
30/22 Ski or Row calories
40-20-10 Toes-to-Bar
40-20-10 Snatches (increase weight each round)
Men (75lbs, 95lbs, 135lbs)
Women (55lbs, 65lbs, 95lbs)
If your gym doesn’t have enough rowers to have this in a class, you can have athletes substitute a 300 meter run for the ski/row to make up for equipment limitations.
Event 4 (Dubai Version): The final workout on Saturday is a burner, with descending sprints on the echo bike and legless rope climbs, using the popular elimination bracket-style.
Our version: The goal of this workout is to finish the first round in about two minutes, the second round in about 90 seconds and the final round in about a minute.
We’re going to drop the calorie volume down on the bike to make up for the crazy paces these elite athletes are holding. For context, the men are holding 85-90 RPM’s (~725+ watts), and the women are holding 75-80 RPM’s (~500+ watts) on the echo bike. These are insane paces for the average gym goer, so we want to lower the volume to maintain the intended time domain for the interval. We’re also changing legless rope climbs to regular rope climbs to minimize breaks between rope climb reps. There is an RX+ option for anyone who is good at legless rope climbs and wants the extra challenge!
During this event, athletes had about 20 minutes to rest between round one and the semifinal, and another 10 minutes rest before the final round. We’re going to tweak this to be a fixed interval format so it works better in a group class, while still maintaining an anaerobic work-to-rest ratio.
For total time:
30/20 Echo bike calories
3 rope climbs
– rest 4 minutes –
20/10 cal Echo bike
2 rope climbs
– rest 3 minutes –
10/7 cal Echo bike
1 rope climb
RX+ (legless rope climbs)
When you’re done with the workout, deduct 7 minutes from your total time to calculate your final score. If you don’t have enough bikes, you can run delayed heats, or have a running substitution of 400 meters, 200 meters, 100 meters to make things simpler.
The bottom line: Hitting a modified version of these competition workouts is a fun way to build a true appreciation for how incredible these athletes are. Challenge yourself to finish each workout inside the intended time domain and grab some gym buddies to do it with you!
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