Fran Through the Ages

There may be no more perfect pairing of movements in the world of fitness than Fran’s thrusters and pull ups. It combines upper body pushing and pulling with lower body pushing and pulling so that no muscle or joint is left untouched.

At 45 reps of pull ups and 45 reps of thrusters it is just long enough to leave you wrecked but just short enough that there is no excuse to slow down.

The bar is only 95lbs for men but when you do the math, the power output is remarkable. You are moving nearly 100 pounds from the rack position in the bottom of a front squat to locked out overhead 45 times not to mention your own body weight from squatting to standing. And then you have to take your body weight from hanging at full extension below the pull up bar to chin over the bar another 45 times. It’s a lot of work!

And the best in the world are completing Fran in just about 2 minutes! Fran can and has been thoroughly analyzed because it is a remarkably elegant test of fitness and an incredible driver of athletic adaptations. Fran is the perfect workout to demonstrate CrossFit’s efficacy and efficiency above and beyond training methodologies that have come before.

There are few things in life as humbling as Fran. And tomorrow, wait listed or not, you will get the opportunity to do Fran.

Your goal is to scale the movements so that you can complete Fran as close to 5 minutes as possible. We will give each heat up to 10 minutes to complete but if you’re taking that long you haven’t scaled appropriately and you’re not getting the intended stimulus.