The Professional Fitness Athletes’ Association (long for the PFAA) and the Association of Fitness Judges (long for AFJ) launched a new initiative to create a centralized movement standard database that CrossFit or functional fitness competitions could reference or utilize when programming.
Brent Fikowski, President and Board Chairman of the PFAA, spoke about the new project on The Rich Froning Podcast (episode #060) published this morning on the CrossFit Mayhem YouTube channel.
The database is hosted on a website, the movementstandards.com, which is linked to within the newly reconstructed PFAA website.
“One of the initiatives we’re leading is to get a group together, some experts, to put out a free database for movement standards, specifically for competitions,” explained Fikowski on the podcast. He added, “So it’s nothing that we’re forcing people to follow but as a resource.”
Fikowski admitted it is still a work in progress and a quick glance at the website confirms this. The top of the website reads “coming soon…” with a graphic below that showing search functionality.
The website then goes on to give an example of a written standard for a “Sandbag Clean to Shoulder” along with a video standard.
The written standard is a two-page document with a step-by-step list of what constitutes a good rep followed by several graphics showing both good reps and common faults. It is very similar to what you have seen in the workout description document for CrossFit Open workouts.
The video is two minutes and shows Fikowski performing the movement with a voiceover to describe the movement standards. Similar to the written standards, the video shows both good reps and common faults.
The initiative was brought forth by Fikowski and the PFAA, but was a collaborative effort among other well-respected groups and individuals in the CrossFit community. The Association of Fitness Judges (AFJ), J.R. Howell, Justin Cotler, Caroline Lambray and John Singleton were listed as those who have helped contribute thus far. Additional professional athletes have also been consulted but not named.
Fikowski stressed multiple times during the podcast that this initiative is not meant to force competitions to use these standards, but to help make writing standards easier. He said he hopes this database is a way for organizers to use standards that have already been vetted versus trying to figure out how to communicate them from scratch each time.
“The focus at first is to start with some of the easy movements like a barbell thruster or barbell front rack walking lunge and then get to some of the more ‘should be easy but not so easy’ kipping handstand push-up, burpee, etc,” Fikowski shared as he spoke about how they are going to build out this project.
I’m sure more will be coming soon about the movement standard database over the coming months, but go ahead and check it out so far: themovementstandards.com.
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