How to measure fitness?

Measuring fitness is a lot like gerrymandering — it’s all how you look at the data. Gerrymandering is the act of manipulating voting boundaries to influence elections. Could we do the same with the sport of fitness?

SOURCE

CrossFit has given us The CrossFit Games. The goal of the ‘Games’ is to crown the fittest humans alive. The 2013 Games was the year Jason Khalipa was supposed to beat Rich Froning for the crown. But Khalipa fell short.

What if we changed the way we measured fitness? Could Khalipa have beaten Froning if we looked at the data another way?

How CrossFit crowns the fittest

Let’s first take a look at how CrossFit crowns the fittest people. The process goes like this:

• A bunch of athletes come together in an agreed upon location.
• They compete over a few days.
• The athletes at the bottom of the scoring are cut from the competition at the end of each day. The rest of the athletes get to continue competing.
• Points are awarded based on finishing place of each event.
• The person with the most points at the end wins.

Dave Castro, the Director of the CrossFit Games, abides by the philosophy it pays to be a winner when it comes to awarding points. The points…