Complete your squat – the internet is watching

NEW YORK – In 2001, Greg Glassman, a personal trainer in Santa Cruz, California, was kicked out of the upscale fitness studio where he had been training clients for several years. Having already cycled through most of the gyms in the area, he moved into a jiu-jitsu studio owned by one of his clients, Brazilian martial artist Claudio Franca. Over the next year, Glassman used that small space to teach his unique fitness methodology, which he called CrossFit.

Franca’s academy was built for jiu-jitsu, and its floors were lined with smooth, padded grappling mats. To account for that, Glassman’s clients could not wear shoes and instead of doing Olympic weightlifting, which uses heavy steel barbells, they practised their technique with medicine balls.

As a drill, he had them pick up a medicine ball, perform a squat, then stand and throw the ball at a target on the wall about three metres off the ground. He called it a wall-ball shot, or just wall balls. When CrossFit exploded in popularity, it became one of the practice’s defining moves.

In the years since, this simple movement has become one of the more controversial exercises in the world of fitness and sport, thanks to social media critics who police the move at Hyrox events. And that criticism is changing how the sport is judged.

A popular fitness race created in Germany, Hyrox combines 8km of running with eight functional fitness movements. Most of the movements are straightforward and practically impossible to perform incorrectly: a 1km row, a 200m farmers carry with kettlebells, a 100m lunge with a heavy sandbag draped over the shoulders.

But the eighth and final segment of a Hyrox race is a wall-ball station – participants must complete 100 wall balls for time. And this station is the focus of outrage and debate.

There are two primary ways to get a wall ball wrong. The first is to miss the target. The second, and much more common, way is to botch the squat. A perfect squat involves descending – chest up, back straight – until the hips are below the knees, or “below parallel” as it is usually described. In theory, it should be easy to spot when someone is not squatting deep enough on a wall ball. But hundreds of thousands of people compete in official Hyrox races each season and it has proved remarkably difficult for the organisers to catch every violation.

“It’s a very different scenario to judge an event with 30 people in a gym versus an event where 15,000 people are coming through over the course of a day,” said David Magida, the global head of training at Hyrox. “The idea that you’re going to get everybody’s reps perfect is impossible.”

Hyrox has traditionally stationed 40-odd judges in the wall-ball area to keep an eye on staggered waves of athletes, who enter a few dozen at a time. Each judge oversees a maximum of two athletes, and there are head judges who oversee the operation. The judges are meant to watch for squat depth and whether the ball hits the target. If either action is not accomplished correctly, the participant receives a “no rep”.

For many Hyrox athletes, judging this station consistently is vital to the integrity of the sport. Letting bad reps slide, some people feel, undermines the entire race, like letting somebody take a shortcut on a run. With aspirations of one day becoming an Olympic event, the organisers have made a point of showing that the rules really do matter.

Mintra Tilly, Hyrox’s director of sport and the creator of the original workout sequence, said that she structured the race to minimise interpretation, forgoing movements like pull-ups, for example, because of the ambiguity inherent in each rep. “When it came to the rules, I initially thought, ‘Oh, this is pretty straightforward’,” she said. “But it’s not that easy.”

Most of the judges at a Hyrox race are volunteers, and as the race has rapidly grown, finding the right people for the role has been a challenge.

An uninformed or indifferent volunteer judge might find it easier to count marginal reps than to give an athlete grief over his or her squat depth, especially in the heat of the moment. But in the age of social media, there are many more eyes than just a judge’s on these live-and-let-live reps.

Videos of flagrantly bad reps being counted as good are widely shared on fitness racing social media and a kind of armchair judging has become a common pastime.

One YouTuber in particular has become known for calling out no reps on his channels: Andrew Hiller, a CrossFit coach and gym owner who is obsessively vigilant about proper form.

Hyrox has two levels of difficulty, Open and Pro, and some feel that the former should not be judged by the same standards, or at least with the same scrutiny.

“With the pros, I would kind of expect that there should be some higher standards held,” said Mathew Fraser, a five-time CrossFit Games champion. “But it’s a mass-participation event. It’s like a Tough Mudder (obstacle course). Just get over the fence, you know?”

This year, Fraser completed a Hyrox race in the Open division. “I didn’t even really know they had judges,” he said.

That separate standard based on who is competing was echoed even by people connected directly to Hyrox.

“When I have a 65-year-old woman who’s racing, who maybe had a hip replacement, and she can’t quite get to the depth, I’m probably going to be a little more relaxed with her,” Magida said.

Hiller objected strenuously to the idea that standards should matter less for athletes who are not competitive.

“It might matter even more,” he said, noting that athletes who disregarded squat depth were not getting the training benefits that come from participating in such races in the first place. “If you go into the garage right now and do 150 wall balls above parallel by two inches (5cm), you’re working yourself backwards, not forwards.”

Videos like Hiller’s are part of what is driving Hyrox to strengthen its judging standards on multiple fronts.

Tilly said that the company was focused on making sure that its volunteers understood both the rules and the stakes. “We need to do a better job educating our judges,” she said. “We’re getting there, but it’s a work in progress.” NYTIMES