The difference in weekly training days
In a competition, you work up to the day or days that you compete. You´ll make sure that you feel fresh and that there is no soreness in the muscles whatsoever. Inside the gym classes, individuals usually train on their own agenda. One does Monday-Friday-Sunday (subject A) while the other may do Monday-Thursday-Friday-Sunday (subject B). In this example, you can see that subject B will probably be more fatigued on Sunday than subject A. So if they would compete against each other on that specific day, the odds are not fair and if they are both on an equal athletic level then subject A will most likely ¨win¨ the workout.
The difference in weaknesses.
Although CrossFit mixes physical skills up, you can see some dominant factors in a lot of workouts. Like with Murph, the ATP/cp system is minimally working, there are no external objects whatsoever and there is a ¨long¨ running piece before starting the bodyweight drills. If you consider yourself a well-balanced athlete then you should be able to get a great time on Murph and snatch a lot of weight. If you are one of those people, then you are doing a good job. Every skill is being trained slowly and your entire ¨cf game¨ is being improved. Now let´s grab a marathon runner who has been doing bodyweight strength training for all of his life and just jumped into CrossFit. Chances are he would beat the well-balanced athlete, but it´s only in one workout. Any other workout that does not require these physical skills (and there are a lot) he would not be able to catch up to him.
When I did my first CrossFit open, there was one thing that really stood out to me. The first workout I did not do well, the other guys scored better than me and I thought like I was a shitty CrossFitter at our box, but eventually, I did a great job with the other workouts and had a better score than most of the participants at our box. That day I learned that you can´t ever determine one individual is ¨fitter¨ than another by just one workout. I am not even sure you if can determine who is the fittest by doing the open. But I do know that it is a stupid choice to try and prove yourself during training every day in order to be ¨the fittest¨. Training is for IMPROVING not PROVING, prove yourself during competitions or occasionally during workouts.
Periodization
Whether you are or aren´t a competitive athlete, periods of higher intensities should be planned. Individuals should respect periodization principles as this gives them guidelines to keep them from applying too much intensity or volume. It also gives them a way to structurally change up the stimulus which will help individuals to keep progressing and just gives them basic guidelines as to what kind of training they should do which can be pretty helpful when you are doing CrossFit because it has so many different ways. Competitive training can really fuck up this plan. That is not a good thing when you know that most professional athletes periodize their training. Most athletes only do max effort pieces 2/3 times a year, I am not saying you should do the same. But I am saying that individuals should be more thoughtful about doing max effort pieces. That is difficult when you are constantly going max effort trying to prove yourself to everyone.
Form
What you´ll see often times happen is that, when intensity increases, the attention for the proper execution of an exercise decreases. Individuals are more concerned with not being second in a workout than they are concerned with executing the exercise properly. This is detrimental as it causes a lot of compensations and often times messes with the intended dose-response.
Imbalances in energy systems
The aerobic energy system is one that is very underrated, the power of this system is that it will aid in recovery between intense pieces a lot. This is very important for CrossFitters since a lot of exercises require the anaerobic systems to work. A robust aerobic engine can make a huge difference in recovering better and faster between reps and sets. The problem only is that it is most effectively trained under lower intensities. Which is really difficult to do when you are busier with keeping up with your buddy. Due to people always wanting to go faster and competing during training, the aerobic system gets little work in comparrison to the glycolitic and phosphagen system. It is important to understand that energy systems never work on their own, off course the aerobic system is activated to a degree during high intensity workouts, but the glycolitic system will most likely to be the more dominant one during competetive workouts. So you are building an imbalance in energy systems when you are constantly doing workouts at 100%+. Especially in CrossFit, the motto is to be good at everything. This also means using fat (aerobic) as a source of energy, instead of only being able to use sugar (glycolitic) as a primary source of energy.
Proving through improving
Individuals are not able to truly leave their ego at the door. Maybe because they are afraid of other people´s opinions, it does not matter what the reason is. You can´t go 100% all day, whether you think you can or not, your recovery will eventually not be able to catch up or you will be mentally tired from always needing to prove yourself all the time.
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