This is the site of Brant M Cebulla. Pretty awesome.
Grace is a workout in CrossFit in which you do thirty clean and jerks for time. Men have to clean and jerk 135 lbs, while women have to clean and jerk 95 lbs.
What’s an average time for Grace? I’ve collected data on 5,376 CrossFit Open athletes, so we can answer this question.
Of the 5,376 athletes, 530 men self-reported their best Grace time, and 184 women reported their best Grace time.
For men, the mean Grace time was 3:23, with a standard deviation of 1:34. This means in a normal distribution, we’d expect 68% of CrossFit Open men to fall within the range of 1:49-4:57.
For women, the mean Grace time was 3:56, with a standard deviation of 1:38. This means in a normal distribution, we’d expect 68% of CrossFit Open women to fall within the range of 2:18-5:34.
I assumed you could predict how fast you could do Grace by how much you can one-rep max clean and jerk. So I ran an exponential regression for both men and women, modeling Grace PR times with one-rep max clean and jerks as the independent variable.
For men, in an exponential model, Grace(seconds) = 1310.1*e^[-0.008*Max-C&J(lbs)].
The R-squared value is 0.60156, meaning that how much you can one-rep max clean and jerk accounts for 60.2% of the variability of Grace times in this model. I would guess that with more controlled reporting, it accounts for an even higher percentage, with skill (how efficiently you can do clean and jerks) and general motor influencing your time as well.
If we plug our mean one-rep max clean and jerk for men in this equation, we’d predict that a man who can one-rep max 226 lbs to be able to do Grace in 3:35, about 12 seconds slower than our mean Grace time.
For women, in an exponential model, Grace(seconds) = 1574.9*e^[-0.013*Max-C&J(lbs)].
The R-squared value is 0.6474, meaning that how much you can one-rep max clean and jerk accounts for 64.7% of the variability of Grace times in this model.
If we plug our mean one-rep max clean and jerk for women in this equation, we’d predict that a woman who can one-rep max 137 lbs to be able to do Grace in 4:25, about 29 seconds slower than our mean Grace time.
These models might be useful to trainers, gyms and CrossFitters. If you know an athlete’s one-rep max clean and jerk, you can roughly predict what their Grace time should be. If they fall significantly short, it can help you evaluate if they are not lifting efficiently, need to work on their motor, or have some mental shortcomings.