Quality matters more than quantity where fitness is concerned.

Missing the Point

July 10, 2025•5 min read

The goal of CrossFit has always been to develop superior fitness outcomes. Everything else is to serve that goal. CrossFit founder, Greg Glassman, made fitness fun by gamifying it. By quantifying work capacity and power output he made fitness outcomes measurable, something that had been done in sports and the military but never before in the fitness industry. This is useful for tracking your athletic progress and motivating you to improve on past results but paired with other training partners it also encourages you to push harder, increasing your intensity and producing superior fitness results. Maybe.

At the start of my CrossFit journey I found the leaderboard very motivating. Seeing my name dead last was a real kick in the pants and slowly climbing my way up the rankings gave me an exciting sense of progress. Win or lose, it was always fun going head-to-head with my training partners and we all got fitter as a result.

The leaderboard isn't the point

But at the upper reaches of the leaderboard I met athletes who had missed the point entirely. Somehow these individuals had become so focused on the leaderboard that they mistook their ranking for the most important thing, forgetting that our primary goal was fitness. Competition standards were created to make sure that these athletes weren’t shorting reps at CrossFit competition. But these standards were only meant to level the playing field, not to represent the correct or optimal way to perform the movements.

Athletes fixated on shortcuts to the top of the leaderboard then mistakenly applied competition standards into their daily training. What is the minimum standard I need to meet in order to achieve the coveted Rx? By so doing, they may top the leaderboard scoring the most reps or the fastest times. But are they really getting fitter?

These are the athletes you will see picking up the deadlift bar then dropping it every rep instead of controlling it back to the ground. Their belly buttons will sag to the floor at the bottom of their push up. They will shorten their air squats by reaching the minimum possible depth and then forget to squeeze their glutes at the top of the movement. Their burpees look like someone crawling up off the floor instead of being an explosive, plyometric expression of athleticism.

Yes, they may be going faster than you but they are missing out on the full fitness benefits of the movement. For example, the eccentric phase of the deadlift (lowering the bar to the ground under controlled muscular tension) stimulates greater muscular fatigue resulting in superior strength adaptations. Squeezing the glutes at the top of each squat stimulates more muscular development. Explosive burpees train and maintain the all-important fast twitch muscle fibres. Maintaining a strong plank position throughout the push up creates a powerful, stable midline.

Quality matters more than quantity

In other words, quality matters more than quantity. Where fitness is concerned, a few good reps are better than a bunch of sloppy ones. Unfortunately, while the leaderboard is a great tool for motivating performance, it is a poor tool for assessing quality.

By moving so fast, these athletes may finish first, but they do so at the price of shorting their own fitness outcomes. They have lost perspective and forgotten that the reason we are here in the first place is to get fitter, not to be top of the leaderboard. And they mistakenly believe they are winning. These athletes become almost uncoachable as they are in so great a hurry, they are unwilling to make any corrections that might slow them down even if it is for their own good.

Glassman anticipated these athletes with his article on Virtuosity in which he discusses the importance of “doing the common uncommonly well.” The athletes we’re discussing struggle with the common because they have spent no time working on the basic fundamental movement patterns. They squat in such a way that they are damaging their knees instead of taking time to refine the movement and hinge correctly through their hips. They fail to engage their scapula during push-ups resulting in chronic shoulder pain. Their lifts look sloppy and portend future sports injuries. Based on the leaderboard, these athletes consider themselves elite, but they move like novices.

When CrossFit Games athlete Katrin Davidsdottir took Ben Bergeron as her coach, the first few months all they worked on was correcting her air squat. Yes, she was a world class athlete, and her air squat was a mess. Under Ben’s relentless coaching, she corrected her movement mechanics and went on to become the CrossFit Games champion.

The leaderboard is a fun tool, but it is only a tool. What we are here for is fitness. That is the main goal. Everything else is in service to your fitness results. The leaderboard is to help you achieve better fitness outcomes, not to detract from them. Do not let yourself get distracted from what is most important because nobody cares what you score is if you look like this guy:

After all, what is the point of being top of the leaderboard if you cannot even perform one correct push up?

The workout for Friday, July 11

Please arrive early and go through the Empower Champion’s Warm Up so that you are warm and ready to move when class begins. It is suggested you use a weight 40-50% of your clean & jerk 1 rep max. You may approach this as an EMOM or E2MOM. Depending on how you approach this you may complete between 3 to 5 rounds. In full classes you will be required to share a barbell with a friend. Compromise on a weight. The E2MOM format works great if sharing a barbell.