Crossfit Open Workouts 26.2 puts ring muscle-ups at the center

For athletes staring at their score sheets, crossfit open workouts have a way of turning a training year into a single number. In 26. 2, that number often stopped at the first ring muscle-up. The second workout of the 2026 CrossFit Open asked for a fast climb through increasingly difficult pulling movements, and the early results show just how many people met a hard limit when the rings arrived.

Jonathan Kinnick’s 26. 2 breakdown and the rep 112 pile-up

Jonathan Kinnick of Beyond the Whiteboard laid out what made 26. 2 distinct: alternating dumbbell snatches, dumbbell overhead walking lunges, pull-ups, chest-to-bar pull-ups, and muscle-ups on rings. The workout carried a 15-minute time cap, and athletes who did not finish recorded how many reps they completed, along with tiebreak times.

The rings mattered because they marked a change from the bar muscle-ups used in the past two Opens. And the data shows the moment they became a wall. Kinnick pointed to a “huge pile-up” at the 112th rep, where the muscle-ups began to decide the workout. Most athletes who pushed past that point still ran out of time during the first 10 muscle-ups, leaving the cap as a second, blunt constraint after the skill itself.

Completion rates underscored how narrow the path was. Only 4% of women and 13% of men finished all the reps within the time cap on the Rx’d version. Even among those who had trained for advanced pulling, 26. 2 functioned less like a race and more like a filter.

Ring muscle-ups in crossfit open workouts, by the numbers

Viewed across the field, 26. 2 did not hinge on the earlier pulling standards so much as the final one. An impressive 9, 918 women and 41, 773 men managed at least one ring muscle-up. Yet the workout still revealed how rare that movement remains when it is required under pressure, in a scored setting, and near the end of a long sequence.

By comparison, chest-to-bar pull-ups looked far less disruptive this year. More than 58, 000 women and 100, 000 men hit at least one rep across all divisions, suggesting that many athletes arrived with that capacity already built in. The jump from chest-to-bar pull-ups to ring muscle-ups, not the presence of pulling itself, created the sharpest separation in results.

The choices athletes made about workout versions also shifted as the difficulty rose. The advanced pulling elements led to fewer athletes selecting Rx’d compared with 26. 1. For women aged 18–34, 70% performed 26. 2 as Rx’d compared with 78% on 26. 1. For men aged 18–34, 88% performed 26. 2 as Rx’d compared with 92% on 26. 1. That drop captures a familiar moment in the Open: when a single skill becomes the difference between participating at the top standard and scaling to stay moving.

Participation and performance varied by country as well. The top three countries by Rx’d participation rate were South Korea at 88%, Australia at 84%, and the United States at 78%. Still, selecting Rx’d did not mean finishing it. The top countries to finish 26. 2 Rx’d were Spain with 10. 1%, followed by Australia and Italy, both at 8. 4%.

Another way to measure the workout’s bottleneck is to look only at who touched the rings successfully. By the percentage of athletes who got at least one muscle-up, the top countries were Australia with 29. 5%, Spain with 28. 8%, and France with 28. 2%. In 26. 2, a single rep on the rings became a meaningful milestone on its own.

Roman Khrennikov, 26. 2 debate, and the Community Cup next step

While some athletes looked at the numbers and saw a clear skills test, others argued about whether 26. 2 was programmed well. On a CrossFit Open update show, Tyler and Spin clashed over the workout’s difficulty. Tyler, speaking from the perspective of a top 5% athlete, argued it was too easy. Spin disagreed. Their dispute landed on an unusual tension in the Open: one workout can feel simple to athletes with a complete toolkit while still stopping large segments of the field at a single movement.

The same episode turned to Roman Khrennikov and controversy around his special invite to the French Throwdown. Tyler floated a conspiracy theory that Khrennikov is injured and received the invite because he could not do the qualifier. The discussion pointed to a performance swing: Khrennikov was 612th in the world after a really bad first week, then followed with a 101st on 26. 2. Over the past three years, he has not finished worse than 18th in the world. The show also noted he had hip surgery in October 2024, raising the possibility of lingering issues.

For the broader community, the next confirmed step is not a debate show or an invite, but the season structure itself. For the 2026 CrossFit Games season, the Community Cup comes after the Open, and the tier athletes compete in depends on the level they receive after completing and submitting scores for all three Open workouts. Kinnick’s percentile tables offer a practical way to translate one difficult workout into what happens next. One example: women aged 55+ need at least 117 reps on 26. 2 to make the Advanced tier for that workout.

In the end, the story of 26. 2 returns to the same place many athletes began: a scoreboard shaped by rings. With only a small percentage finishing Rx’d inside 15 minutes, and a clear pile-up at rep 112, the workout left a record of how far each person got when the sequence reached its hardest demand. The Community Cup tiers, set after all three workouts are submitted, will be the next moment when those numbers turn into matchups.