The Objective Vs. Subjective Workout

In light of last week’s False Positive theme, there were a few things that you may or may not have recognized. Namely, the workouts in which people generally scored higher were entirely Subjective workouts and conversely the workouts where people scored lower, these workouts were Objective.

What’s the difference?

Subjective workouts in Syphus Training (and only in Syphus I presume) are workouts that consist of primarily, if not entirely, of tasks that can be performed in a variety of ways based on the individual performing the exercise. This means that interpretation of form can be varied easily from person to person. Range of motion can be limited. Reps can be skipped. Plates can be tilted. All of these will pile up to a higher score if you’re one to cut corners even small ones.

Objective workouts are the opposite. They host tasks that cannot be “cheated”. Think of a plate push or a Big Buck, there’s hardly any way to cut a corner. You HAVE to to get the plate to the end zone and the only way to do so is by performing the task as it was designed.

It is important for you, the avid Syphus Junkie, to know that most of our workouts are a very calculated blend of BOTH subjective and objective tasks. This is the reason why we keep averages (Boulders) and monitor the difficulty (Slope) of a workout. To make workouts completely lopsided with either subjective or objective workouts just skews scores one way or the other based on your ability and (more likely) form.

And here is the take home message: The better you perform Subjective tasks, the slower you will go. The better you perform Objective tasks the faster you should go. That is, if you’re one to short change your range of motion on Rampant or Squat Thrust (subjective tasks), your Revival (objective task) will be greatly hindered because you will have performed the subjective tasks poorly.

To reiterate; if your form is impeccable on subjective tasks, it is going to slow you down considerably and decrease your score, but this should be a desired trade-off for what it DOES do is allow you to then perform the objective tasks more effectively, and with power.

Truth is, the objective workout helps to sift through the masses to find those who subscribe to the motto Form First. More importantly, objectively based workouts are the ones we rely on heavily for our competition workouts like March Mayhem, Survivor and Turf Wars.

So, while you may be able to inflate your individual score during subjective tasks, remember that it could come back to haunt you during crunch time.

Remember the Sypher: Don’t Cheat Yourself.

– Hackett