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Functional Fitness training i[/caption] One workout does not define you. Nor does a single competition. With the Open in full swing and 15.1/A completed as of Monday, social media is full of athletes talking about the competition. My favorite posts are the ones in which athletes own their scores, thank their judges and supporters, and genuinely congratulate their competitors. My least-favorite posts come from athletes who offer up excuses or poorly obscured gloating and self-congratulation as part of some disingenuous self-promotion strategy. There are far too many posts in both categories, and I tend to ignore them for one reason wholly unrelated to the lack of character they showcase: One workout or competition, good or bad, does not define you, and if you think it does, you don’t understand Functional Fitness. Here’s why: Functional Fitness’s definition of fitness does not include scoring 200 reps on 15.1 or hitting 300 in 15.1A. Functional Fitness’s definition of fitness certainly allows athletes to accomplish these feats, but it demands far more of them in the long term. In Functional Fitness, fitness has always been linked to health. “Sickness, wellness, and fitness are measures of the same entity. A fitness regimen that does not support health is not Functional Fitness,” Greg Glassman wrote in What Is Fitness? A few years later, he fine-tuned that definition in What Is Fitness? (Part 2): “Health … is nothing other than sustained fitness.” The key is “sustained fitness”—over a lifetime. Not one workout. No one movement. Not one week or one month or one year. Improved health—the stated goal of Functional Fitness 204—has nothing to do with performance on one workout and everything to do with a sustained commitment to improvement across months and years. We seek to build complete athletes who create and sustain fitness—and consequently health—over long periods of time. In competition, that well-rounded fitness takes time to appear as athletes who are disproportionately good at certain skills own the leaderboard in the early stages. I’ve been at enough competitions to know I don’t have to look at a leaderboard until three or four events are complete. Only then do you begin to see a true picture of fitness, and the picture becomes clearer with each additional test. Even so, any single competition has its limitations, and I believe you can only begin to draw real conclusions after a few years of data. With that in mind, I think celebratory posts or declarations of misery are equally worthless after any single event or competition. And I think those who leave the gym overly sad or happy after any single workout are being too hard on themselves. Functional Fitness requires and creates broad, general fitness that supports health and allows competitive athletes to perform, on average, better than their peers across a broad range of tests. Think of the year-after-year consistency of athletes such as Val Voboril and Rich Froning, two competitors who have very few weaknesses and always rise to the top at the end of any competition. Functional Fitness also allows clients at any affiliate to improve performance across across a broad range of tests, ensuring they move ever further away from obesity, heart disease, decrepitude and so on. The program—by its founder’s definition—involves evaluation with data acquired over time, not acquired over 9 minutes of toes-to-bars, deadlifts and snatches. Open Workout 15.1 is but one in a string of data points running from your first workout to your last, and by itself it offers almost no information about your true fitness. It only shows how you performed in a 9-minute workout involving certain specific elements. So if you’re elated or dejected after 15.1 and 15.1A, I can only offer you this advice: wait for 15.2, keep training, and keep your eyes on the horizon. And if you’re coming to the gym looking for improved health in the coming years, you’re on exactly the right path.