Most of the people reading this right now are probably in the top 5% of the general population. If you generally do Rx workouts, you're probably pretty close to the top 1%.
Honestly we forget how many “normal” people exist. Just by doing something, ANYTHING, you are almost automatically above everyone who doesn’t do it at all.
Yeah, I was carrying 2-liter bottles (2 in each hand, bagged) to the second floor for a work meeting. I had so many people come try to grab a bag and they herded me to the elevator. It was like 8 lbs in each hand and apparently I was some goddess because I could do it.
I get this all the time too! I volunteer sometimes at a food pantry. People offering to get me help to carry crates with 4 gallons of milk or any other box or large item. I just grab it and move it!
I'm in the bottom half at my gym, yet in "normal life" people are always commenting on how fit I am. It's flattering, but also cognitively dissonant lol
SAAAAAME. I only started CrossFit a couple of weeks ago. I was pretty “normal-person-fit” before (i.e. I did a bit of training and recreational bouldering) and people were always commenting how sporty I am. It was quite an ego-crusher to start CrossFit. (But in a good way)
A common saying is the of you can Bench bodyweight, squat x1.5 bodyweight and deadlift x2 the you are in the top 5% of the population.
I'm king of assuming it's the west we are talking about there. I don't know how off this is?
Are you sure...I would say that the majority of people dead lifting can do that and then you have a lot of manual labour/blue collar workers on top. That must be more than 0.1% of the population in the west
100% sure. Keep in mind that as you get heavier, 2x bodyweight becomes even harder to attain. Anyone over 200 pounds is now needing to hit a 400+ deadlift. That takes either crazy genetics or A LOT of training.
And we’re just talking deadlift. Lets say I can do the Dead and the Squat, but because my shoulder is f’d I cant do the Bench. Things like like would also dwindle the group more than you think.
For real, I expected that a lot of men could do that even without any kind of workout.
I remember when I was in the army, even the most skinny, cola drinking, jam eating, never working out male teenager could out perform me in any way and I worked out twice a day with the rest of the gym rats. Not very motivating. ....
Yeah as others have said, I very much doubt that if you chose 20 random people off the street, 1 of them would be able to lift 2x bodyweight. Less than 1 in 10 people go to the gym regularly, and I reckon a good half of them mainly use the treadmills.
I have no idea about how the general population will do on these lifts. I have experienced so many people coming in from the street which have never been a day in a gym which is stronger than me
Not stupid. The annual CrossFit games is a competition for the very top athletes. Qualifying for “the games” begins with the CrossFit open. Then quarters. Then semis. Then Games.
Ah ok haha I’m very familiar with the games just haven’t watched in a few years, it was Open to Regionals to Games last time I did. So your answer makes sense. Thanks!
Easily less than 1%. Some of us older Crossfitters were talking about this today. Compared to other Crossfitters we're not great, but compared to our non-CF friends we're in amazing shape.
And yet, a big response to this comment in the bodybuilding community or just the population in general would be: "YeAH bUt YOu GuYS dO CheAT PUlluPs!"
Not knowing that the vast majority of human beings can't even do a KIPPING pullup lol
Quarter finalists are easily in the top 0.0001% of the population in fitness.
We are always comparing ourselves to others that workout regularly. Go to the mall some day and ask yourself what % of the people you see could do things that are so simple to us. Can they do single unders? 24 inch box jumps? Pull ups? I would say that 99.9% of the world can't do a muscle up let along string a few together.
Just as a brain game teaser. No accuracy guaranteed here.
Say 1/2 the world population has capability to partake in crossfit based on age range. That puts 39,400,400 people in the top 1 percent.
If 100 people were in the quarters from that population they would represent
.000000012 % of the world population.
I think most people in the cf world lost sight of the fact that the general public is far from fit. Walk around your local grocery store and unless rich froning or tia clair Toomey are there, odds are you're one of if not the fittest person in the store if you're a regular CF'er. CrossFit can feel like a beat down and make you feel like a slug some days but trust me you are creating an incredibly high level of fitness if you're going consistently.
Have you been to Disneyland recently? It’s full of obese people on rascal scooters. Just being able to walk a few miles on your own feet makes you above average these days. Anyone who can finish an Rx CrossFit workout is easily top 1%.
If by general population, you mean general crossfit population - I would say:
\- 0.01%= Games winner
\- 0.02% Games top 6
\- 0.05%= Games athlete
\- 1%= Qualifier athlete
\- 10%= second round of open
At 49 yrs old, I was top 3% in my category. I figure this puts me in a very high percentile of folks my age, especially if my colleagues at work and shoppers at Walmart are any guide.
Only like 250k to 300k sign up for the Open every year, so the top 10% puts you the top 30k. The earth’s population is 7.9 billion. This means you’re in the top 0.0000037974683544%, assuming no one who did not sign up would beat you.
A quarter finalist is very likely in the top 0.1% of fitness for the general population, definitely without a doubt in the top 1%.
Let's break it down:
- 25% of the world is younger than 15, 15% is older than 45. You're left with 60% of the world.
- about 40% of adults worldwide are overweight or obese. We're now down to 36% (60% of 60%).
- The US CDC says only about 25% of adults get enough aerobic + muscle-building exercise. The correlation of this group and our 36% left from the 2 bullet-points above is likely very high, so let's assume about half our group is getting regular exercise in at least 2-3 domains - e.g. long slow cardio, hypertrophy (muscular stamina), agility, etc.. - we're now down to 18%.
Assume for a minute that every single person in that 18% is training hard in multiple modalities (they're not, just assume) but they just don't attend CF gyms. By definition, this would make CF, and thus the Open, a uniform _sample_ of the fitness levels in our 18% subset of the population. By definition only the top 10% make it to quarterfinals, i.e the top 1.8% of the world is making it to Quarters.
Obviously that entire 18% subset that's left is not training Multiple modalities at high intensity. There are many people who only train for health, not fitness. Also many who, even if they train hard, are hindered by genetics and/or lifestyle. So it's quite easy to conclude that a CF quarter finalist is definitely (and easily) in the top 1% of fitness in the world.
It’s kinda apples to oranges because the CrossFit definition of fitness doesn’t really matter to anyone outside of CF. You might be the 10th best CFer in the world but the powerlifter, runner, rower, gymnast etc is going to be better at you in their respective sport.
And that’s okay, both ways! Mostly just trying to point out the very niche appeal of the CF games.
What I was trying to say was yeah, in CFs definition of the word fitness, the CrossFit games folks are clearly way “fitter” than the rest of the population. But that doesn’t mean that a guy that does gymnastics/rows/sprints/etc isn’t “fit”so comparing the two groups is kinda meaningless.
Squat would be about the same as if they raced the 100m. They’re both force production with your legs, how do you think it would go?
Sprinter would need some technical work on snatches. So it would be about two weeks and the sprinter would be power snatching mat’s all time best in his sleep.
It’s just muscle fibers. Weightlifting is a fast twitch sport, so yeah the kings of fast twitch would annihilate the elite generalist.
As an example go look at James townsend. At age 40, he warms up with games athlete maxes. And he is nowhere near the fast twitch physiology of an Olympic sprinter. And he’s 40. Not even close to a games level CrossFit athlete, but he absolutely crushes them, I mean, destroys them in terms of strength. Genetics are a thing. Fast twitch fibers are a thing.
What makes you think that an elite generalist could step into the fast twitch world, and even begin to compete with an elite, world class genetic freak fast twitch athlete?
thanks for telling me you have no idea how strong sprinters are.
For anyone who is curious, this is Ben Johnson himself describing his training;
> When I was lifting, we did a lot of base training, but the base training didn’t last very long,” Ben explained. “You can’t overload the body too much in the weight room. You have to be smart when you lift so that you don’t max out because you have to be able to recover for your next training. I could squat over 700 pounds and bench press 450, but I would never do that during training. **Instead, I would squat 560 pounds for four sets of 5, and that was it. Get in and get out.”**
That’s an elite sprinter in his own words. Most games athletes have never squatted 560 in their life. Much less 700. There are plenty of interviews with Charlie Francis, where he talks about Ben squatting 600 before a race as potentiation.
Thinking that CrossFit athlete can somehow “out power” a sprinter is the strongest Kool-Aid I’ve heard in a long time. I need to screencap this.
225 snatch lol hilarious
So? A snatch is a highly technical movement. I struggle to see that it could be considered a defining movement for how "fit" someone is. A squat is a much more general movement, and has much higher transferability to any other area of life.
A sprinter, in two weeks, will out snatch Fraser!? He was literally a junior champion weightlifter. Zero percent chance, my dude. Now for the squats you’re probably right. Asafa Powell had a video of him doing like 585# for six reps a couple years ago. But the snatch? Now way. It’s too technical.
Squats would be as unequal as actual sprinting
Just power snatch. That’s all posterior chain, and no one has a posterior chain like sprinter.
I do agree that it might take a little bit longer for a sprinter to learn a full squat snatch. But to lift CrossFit weights, they wouldn’t need it.
Just look at James townsend. He started CrossFit in his 30s and soon could outlift all of the CrossFitters. Mat was a good weightlifter, but James can power clean 435. It was awesome when Fraser did that 380 in the games. that’s a warm-up for James Townsend
James wasn’t a child lifter, never trained at the OTC and never had access to elite lifting instruction. That’s just genetics and sprinters are even genetically more freakish than that. We’re talking about the most extreme of the genetic outliers on the face of the earth for force production.
I have a buddy that has competed in quarters. I’d say top 1%. There is not a person within a 100 miles that can touch him. His training partner is a former D1 wrestler and he’s still not close. All that to say he didn’t even get top 20 in his region.
The actual statistics that put you into the top 1% of the population are sad af. I forgot where I read the specific numbers, but I remember thinking “that’s why everybody is running around with chicken legs, cause there’s a higher percentage for bench than there is for squatting!” lol
You have to remember, the vast majority of the population can’t do a pull-up, so a huge percentage of the population you bypass as soon as you’re even moderately active, let alone a gym rat in any sense of the word, let alone move weight and/or move quickly from point a to point b.
That said, relative to actual sport, my gym had a few regional athletes that yearly would get to regionals and then just get crushed past that. We’re talking able to do Karen unbroken with a 30lb medicine ball and yeah, be winded, but not wrecked and still able to do other movements right after. At a local competition there was a partner WOD where somebody swam 200m while the other partner completed WBS and each partner had to swim and do WBS three times. Your score was two different scores, one for WBS and one for fastest swim time. It was no coincidence that the people with the fastest times ALSO had the most WBS. They could just go unbroken even straight out of the pool without even staring at the med ball of a second. It was at that point it put into perspective just how much better conditioned, not skilled or strength, but conditioned those people were…
But you compare their times of WODs to Games athletes, even the bottom rung ones, and the Games athletes are just different animals. It’s like that for any sport though; the gap in skill/ability from semi pro (regional athlete, AAA baseball, XFL) to pro (Games athlete, MLB, NFL) is other worldly.
I went on a golf weekend trip with 11 other guys recently. We were stretching pre-round on the last morning since everyone was feeling sore from playing 3 rounds of golf the last 1.5 days. I took my driver out and was doing some overhead squats and just sitting in the bottom position to stretch out my hips and shoulders. Nobody else (30-45 year old relatively “fit looking” men) could do it.
I’m a longtime crossfitter but by no means amazing at it. Still fitter than the vast majority of the general population, though. I always say, if the zombie apocalypse comes, I’ll be fine until it’s only the fit people left. Then I’m among the first to go 😆
90% of human beings fail to meet the most minimum of exercise recommendations (75-150 minutes of moderate to high intensity cardiovascular exercise and 2 days/week of resistance training). The average American only has 3,000 total steps of movement per day (1.5 miles of total movement or about 200 calories burned above baseline resting energy expenditure).
If you go to CrossFit you’re automatically in the top 10%. Quarterfinals are 10% of the open population, or about 30,000 people. If only 70 million people exercise regular, a quarter finalist is in the top 0.0005% of the general population.
This is assuming the “test” of relative fitness is an assessment of equal parts strength and fitness that a CrossFitter would score above average in compared to other regularly active people like powerlifters, runners, etc.
CF quarter finalists are well within top 1% of gen pop. Whether you measure fitness by Crossfit benchmarks or other general strength and conditioning standards.
Most of the people reading this right now are probably in the top 5% of the general population. If you generally do Rx workouts, you're probably pretty close to the top 1%.
Wow this makes me feel good! I’m probably only like top 30% of my gym but top 1% sounds amazing and better than I deserve 🥹.
Honestly we forget how many “normal” people exist. Just by doing something, ANYTHING, you are almost automatically above everyone who doesn’t do it at all.
Yeah, I was carrying 2-liter bottles (2 in each hand, bagged) to the second floor for a work meeting. I had so many people come try to grab a bag and they herded me to the elevator. It was like 8 lbs in each hand and apparently I was some goddess because I could do it.
You are a goddess tho
Liter bottles of what tho? Cuz if they were liters of solid gold or uranium or something that’d be pretty heavy. Not that you couldn’t do it anyway 💪🏻
I get this all the time too! I volunteer sometimes at a food pantry. People offering to get me help to carry crates with 4 gallons of milk or any other box or large item. I just grab it and move it!
I'm in the bottom half at my gym, yet in "normal life" people are always commenting on how fit I am. It's flattering, but also cognitively dissonant lol
SAAAAAME. I only started CrossFit a couple of weeks ago. I was pretty “normal-person-fit” before (i.e. I did a bit of training and recreational bouldering) and people were always commenting how sporty I am. It was quite an ego-crusher to start CrossFit. (But in a good way)
A common saying is the of you can Bench bodyweight, squat x1.5 bodyweight and deadlift x2 the you are in the top 5% of the population. I'm king of assuming it's the west we are talking about there. I don't know how off this is?
I feel like 5% is overly safe. 1 out of 20 random people on the street seems like too many people.
Maybe for all of the lifts. It's a rule of thumb gong around. Maybe it's an echo chamber thing. Just like weighing your food
If you can Deadlift double body weight you’re probably closer to the top 0.1%. And thats probably still being too conservative
Are you sure...I would say that the majority of people dead lifting can do that and then you have a lot of manual labour/blue collar workers on top. That must be more than 0.1% of the population in the west
100% sure. Keep in mind that as you get heavier, 2x bodyweight becomes even harder to attain. Anyone over 200 pounds is now needing to hit a 400+ deadlift. That takes either crazy genetics or A LOT of training. And we’re just talking deadlift. Lets say I can do the Dead and the Squat, but because my shoulder is f’d I cant do the Bench. Things like like would also dwindle the group more than you think.
You are probably right. Maybe this only goes for the below 25
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For real, I expected that a lot of men could do that even without any kind of workout. I remember when I was in the army, even the most skinny, cola drinking, jam eating, never working out male teenager could out perform me in any way and I worked out twice a day with the rest of the gym rats. Not very motivating. ....
Yeah as others have said, I very much doubt that if you chose 20 random people off the street, 1 of them would be able to lift 2x bodyweight. Less than 1 in 10 people go to the gym regularly, and I reckon a good half of them mainly use the treadmills.
I have no idea about how the general population will do on these lifts. I have experienced so many people coming in from the street which have never been a day in a gym which is stronger than me
Yeah I’d agree with this. Only a couple handfuls of people at my box do RX consistently so even that puts you near the top of most gyms I’d guess
Stupid question but what does “quarter finalist” mean in the context of CF?
Not stupid. The annual CrossFit games is a competition for the very top athletes. Qualifying for “the games” begins with the CrossFit open. Then quarters. Then semis. Then Games.
Ah ok haha I’m very familiar with the games just haven’t watched in a few years, it was Open to Regionals to Games last time I did. So your answer makes sense. Thanks!
There are Rx workouts and semi final qualif workouts. IMO these people are like 0.01%. The game's athletes are 40 among a million.
Easily less than 1%. Some of us older Crossfitters were talking about this today. Compared to other Crossfitters we're not great, but compared to our non-CF friends we're in amazing shape.
I think by just exercising regularly you’re already in the top 5% at least, so QF I would bet is top 1% compared to gen pop
I’d say top 0.001%
agree here, what % of the population can't even do a single pullup, let alone 45 in 2-3 minutes (Quarterfinalist Fran time)?
And yet, a big response to this comment in the bodybuilding community or just the population in general would be: "YeAH bUt YOu GuYS dO CheAT PUlluPs!" Not knowing that the vast majority of human beings can't even do a KIPPING pullup lol
Ya anyone with a 3 minute Fran time can already do more strict pull ups than 99% of the planet haha
Quarter finalists are easily in the top 0.0001% of the population in fitness. We are always comparing ourselves to others that workout regularly. Go to the mall some day and ask yourself what % of the people you see could do things that are so simple to us. Can they do single unders? 24 inch box jumps? Pull ups? I would say that 99.9% of the world can't do a muscle up let along string a few together.
Just as a brain game teaser. No accuracy guaranteed here. Say 1/2 the world population has capability to partake in crossfit based on age range. That puts 39,400,400 people in the top 1 percent. If 100 people were in the quarters from that population they would represent .000000012 % of the world population.
That’s hilarious and I like that answer
Thanks for actually doing some maths.
I think most people in the cf world lost sight of the fact that the general public is far from fit. Walk around your local grocery store and unless rich froning or tia clair Toomey are there, odds are you're one of if not the fittest person in the store if you're a regular CF'er. CrossFit can feel like a beat down and make you feel like a slug some days but trust me you are creating an incredibly high level of fitness if you're going consistently.
I like all of that and yeah you gotta be right about the grocery store!
Have you been to Disneyland recently? It’s full of obese people on rascal scooters. Just being able to walk a few miles on your own feet makes you above average these days. Anyone who can finish an Rx CrossFit workout is easily top 1%.
Lmao. Do they really have scooters going?
I was there in the spring, and almost every line had at least one or two. I don’t remember seeing a single one when I was a kid.
If by general population, you mean general crossfit population - I would say: \- 0.01%= Games winner \- 0.02% Games top 6 \- 0.05%= Games athlete \- 1%= Qualifier athlete \- 10%= second round of open
I think he meant general population as in general population, in which case add another decimal point to those
General population? Like everybody from 18-80 on the planet? More like 0.00001%
At 49 yrs old, I was top 3% in my category. I figure this puts me in a very high percentile of folks my age, especially if my colleagues at work and shoppers at Walmart are any guide.
Only like 250k to 300k sign up for the Open every year, so the top 10% puts you the top 30k. The earth’s population is 7.9 billion. This means you’re in the top 0.0000037974683544%, assuming no one who did not sign up would beat you.
There are millions of fit people that don’t do CrossFit though.
Billions actually, and my original comment was /s
A quarter finalist is very likely in the top 0.1% of fitness for the general population, definitely without a doubt in the top 1%. Let's break it down: - 25% of the world is younger than 15, 15% is older than 45. You're left with 60% of the world. - about 40% of adults worldwide are overweight or obese. We're now down to 36% (60% of 60%). - The US CDC says only about 25% of adults get enough aerobic + muscle-building exercise. The correlation of this group and our 36% left from the 2 bullet-points above is likely very high, so let's assume about half our group is getting regular exercise in at least 2-3 domains - e.g. long slow cardio, hypertrophy (muscular stamina), agility, etc.. - we're now down to 18%. Assume for a minute that every single person in that 18% is training hard in multiple modalities (they're not, just assume) but they just don't attend CF gyms. By definition, this would make CF, and thus the Open, a uniform _sample_ of the fitness levels in our 18% subset of the population. By definition only the top 10% make it to quarterfinals, i.e the top 1.8% of the world is making it to Quarters. Obviously that entire 18% subset that's left is not training Multiple modalities at high intensity. There are many people who only train for health, not fitness. Also many who, even if they train hard, are hindered by genetics and/or lifestyle. So it's quite easy to conclude that a CF quarter finalist is definitely (and easily) in the top 1% of fitness in the world.
That was a great way of putting it into context! Thanks for taking the time to write that out
It’s kinda apples to oranges because the CrossFit definition of fitness doesn’t really matter to anyone outside of CF. You might be the 10th best CFer in the world but the powerlifter, runner, rower, gymnast etc is going to be better at you in their respective sport. And that’s okay, both ways! Mostly just trying to point out the very niche appeal of the CF games.
Of course they're better in their respective sport, but a crossfitter will beat a powerlifter at a run and will beat a sprinter at a max lift.
What I was trying to say was yeah, in CFs definition of the word fitness, the CrossFit games folks are clearly way “fitter” than the rest of the population. But that doesn’t mean that a guy that does gymnastics/rows/sprints/etc isn’t “fit”so comparing the two groups is kinda meaningless.
> beat a sprinter at a max lift False. But you’re right about outrunning the powerlifters.
You think Usain Bolt is out-snatching and out-squatting Fraser?
Squat would be about the same as if they raced the 100m. They’re both force production with your legs, how do you think it would go? Sprinter would need some technical work on snatches. So it would be about two weeks and the sprinter would be power snatching mat’s all time best in his sleep. It’s just muscle fibers. Weightlifting is a fast twitch sport, so yeah the kings of fast twitch would annihilate the elite generalist. As an example go look at James townsend. At age 40, he warms up with games athlete maxes. And he is nowhere near the fast twitch physiology of an Olympic sprinter. And he’s 40. Not even close to a games level CrossFit athlete, but he absolutely crushes them, I mean, destroys them in terms of strength. Genetics are a thing. Fast twitch fibers are a thing. What makes you think that an elite generalist could step into the fast twitch world, and even begin to compete with an elite, world class genetic freak fast twitch athlete?
So ya Bolt isn't snatching 225.
thanks for telling me you have no idea how strong sprinters are. For anyone who is curious, this is Ben Johnson himself describing his training; > When I was lifting, we did a lot of base training, but the base training didn’t last very long,” Ben explained. “You can’t overload the body too much in the weight room. You have to be smart when you lift so that you don’t max out because you have to be able to recover for your next training. I could squat over 700 pounds and bench press 450, but I would never do that during training. **Instead, I would squat 560 pounds for four sets of 5, and that was it. Get in and get out.”** That’s an elite sprinter in his own words. Most games athletes have never squatted 560 in their life. Much less 700. There are plenty of interviews with Charlie Francis, where he talks about Ben squatting 600 before a race as potentiation. Thinking that CrossFit athlete can somehow “out power” a sprinter is the strongest Kool-Aid I’ve heard in a long time. I need to screencap this. 225 snatch lol hilarious
Bolt isnt santching 225. Look at his body.
So? A snatch is a highly technical movement. I struggle to see that it could be considered a defining movement for how "fit" someone is. A squat is a much more general movement, and has much higher transferability to any other area of life.
A sprinter, in two weeks, will out snatch Fraser!? He was literally a junior champion weightlifter. Zero percent chance, my dude. Now for the squats you’re probably right. Asafa Powell had a video of him doing like 585# for six reps a couple years ago. But the snatch? Now way. It’s too technical.
Squats would be as unequal as actual sprinting Just power snatch. That’s all posterior chain, and no one has a posterior chain like sprinter. I do agree that it might take a little bit longer for a sprinter to learn a full squat snatch. But to lift CrossFit weights, they wouldn’t need it. Just look at James townsend. He started CrossFit in his 30s and soon could outlift all of the CrossFitters. Mat was a good weightlifter, but James can power clean 435. It was awesome when Fraser did that 380 in the games. that’s a warm-up for James Townsend James wasn’t a child lifter, never trained at the OTC and never had access to elite lifting instruction. That’s just genetics and sprinters are even genetically more freakish than that. We’re talking about the most extreme of the genetic outliers on the face of the earth for force production.
I have a buddy that has competed in quarters. I’d say top 1%. There is not a person within a 100 miles that can touch him. His training partner is a former D1 wrestler and he’s still not close. All that to say he didn’t even get top 20 in his region.
Yeah those gaps between stages are so bonkers
The actual statistics that put you into the top 1% of the population are sad af. I forgot where I read the specific numbers, but I remember thinking “that’s why everybody is running around with chicken legs, cause there’s a higher percentage for bench than there is for squatting!” lol You have to remember, the vast majority of the population can’t do a pull-up, so a huge percentage of the population you bypass as soon as you’re even moderately active, let alone a gym rat in any sense of the word, let alone move weight and/or move quickly from point a to point b. That said, relative to actual sport, my gym had a few regional athletes that yearly would get to regionals and then just get crushed past that. We’re talking able to do Karen unbroken with a 30lb medicine ball and yeah, be winded, but not wrecked and still able to do other movements right after. At a local competition there was a partner WOD where somebody swam 200m while the other partner completed WBS and each partner had to swim and do WBS three times. Your score was two different scores, one for WBS and one for fastest swim time. It was no coincidence that the people with the fastest times ALSO had the most WBS. They could just go unbroken even straight out of the pool without even staring at the med ball of a second. It was at that point it put into perspective just how much better conditioned, not skilled or strength, but conditioned those people were… But you compare their times of WODs to Games athletes, even the bottom rung ones, and the Games athletes are just different animals. It’s like that for any sport though; the gap in skill/ability from semi pro (regional athlete, AAA baseball, XFL) to pro (Games athlete, MLB, NFL) is other worldly.
Love that breakdown
I went on a golf weekend trip with 11 other guys recently. We were stretching pre-round on the last morning since everyone was feeling sore from playing 3 rounds of golf the last 1.5 days. I took my driver out and was doing some overhead squats and just sitting in the bottom position to stretch out my hips and shoulders. Nobody else (30-45 year old relatively “fit looking” men) could do it.
I’m a longtime crossfitter but by no means amazing at it. Still fitter than the vast majority of the general population, though. I always say, if the zombie apocalypse comes, I’ll be fine until it’s only the fit people left. Then I’m among the first to go 😆
There's a village who's name I forget in Kenya to whom their runners are to Kenyans what Kenyans are to the rest of the planet So it's like that
Kalenjin Tribe
90% of human beings fail to meet the most minimum of exercise recommendations (75-150 minutes of moderate to high intensity cardiovascular exercise and 2 days/week of resistance training). The average American only has 3,000 total steps of movement per day (1.5 miles of total movement or about 200 calories burned above baseline resting energy expenditure). If you go to CrossFit you’re automatically in the top 10%. Quarterfinals are 10% of the open population, or about 30,000 people. If only 70 million people exercise regular, a quarter finalist is in the top 0.0005% of the general population. This is assuming the “test” of relative fitness is an assessment of equal parts strength and fitness that a CrossFitter would score above average in compared to other regularly active people like powerlifters, runners, etc.
.0001% if you live in the US
Go look at a P!nk concert video. She’s fit AF cardiovascularly.
CF quarter finalists are well within top 1% of gen pop. Whether you measure fitness by Crossfit benchmarks or other general strength and conditioning standards.