Handstand push-ups have finally made it into the Open.

For the fourth week of the 2015 Reebok CrossFit Games Open, competitors were asked to complete as many reps as possible in 8 minutes of handstand push-ups and relatively heavy cleans (185 lb. for men and 125 lb. for women).

The handstand push-up reps started at 3 and increased by 3 reps each time the athlete returned to the wall (3, 6, 9, 12, etc.), while the clean reps started at 3 and increased by 3 reps after every third round (3, 3, 3, 6, 6, 6, 9, etc.)

Since the workout started at the wall, handstand push-ups—like muscle-ups last week—were the price of entry for any Rx'd competitor 14-54 years old.

Let’s take a look at how this played out in the community.

Community Performance Breakdown

More than 195,000 people submitted scores for 15.4. Of those, 81,067 men and 33,270 women ages 18-54 submitted Rx'd scores.

Below, you can see where the Rx’d men and women finished the workout.

Many people, around 4,000 men and 4,000 women, finished within the first three reps, as you can see by the spikes (we dig into that below).

You can see it was more common to finish on the handstand push-ups than the cleans—the heights of the darker-colored handstand push-up bars are generally higher than the adjacent, lighter-colored clean bars. That certainly stands to reason because there were more handstand push-ups, plus when those handstand push-ups go, they don’t come back.

Incredibly, 19 men and 27 women reached the round of 27 handstand push-ups and 9 cleans, including the worldwide winners—Jacob Anderson 183 reps, Kristin King 180 reps—which puts them literally off the charts. Scores like theirs put them securely into the 99th percentile of the Rx'd competitors, as you can see below:

Percentile Score HSPUs Cleans Reps/Min Men 25th 25 18 7 3.12 50th 45 30 15 5.62 75th 66 45 21 8.25 90th 84 63 21 10.50 95th 98 71 27 12.25 99th 121 85 36 15.12 Top Score 183 135 48 22.88 Women 25th 14 9 5 1.75 50th 34 25 9 4.25 75th 58 43 15 7.25 90th 83 62 21 10.38 95th 99 72 27 12.38 99th 127 91 36 15.88 Top Score 180 135 45 22.50

HSPUnami!

Let’s dig into how many people got washed out by the first three reps of handstand push-ups and how many made it further.

It turns out that heavy clean was a pretty big obstacle in its own right, especially for women—you can see that from the big pile-up at three reps in this table:

1 2 3 4 5 6+ All Men 686 381 2,857 489 297 73,999 78,709 Women 817 486 2,876 357 255 27,778 32,569 All 1,503 867 5,733 846 522 101,777 111,278

Fewer people scaled 15.4 than 15.3, though the rate of scaling was still relatively high this week: 24.6 percent of men and 57.8 percent of women opted for lighter-weight push presses and cleans.

This graph raises the question: Are the same people scaling 15.3 and 15.4? Or is it fairly common to have a muscle-up but no handstand push-up, and vice versa?

The answer is what you likely guessed: for the most part, they're the same people. Of the women who scaled 15.4, 99.8 percent of them also scaled 15.3. Essentially that entire red 15.4 bar falls within the 15.3 bar. Among men who scaled 15.4, 94.1 percent also scaled 15.3. The overlap is also high there, but is less complete.

We can carry this question further by looking into all of the different ways competitors have interacted with the Rx'd and scaled versions of the workouts over the last four weeks. The graphic below shows the top eight combinations for the athletes ages 18-54 who have submitted scores for all of the workouts.

As you can see, the most common pattern for men is to do the Rx'd workout every week (63 percent). The next most common, at 13 percent, is do the scaled workout every week, and the third most common is to only opt for scaled for 15.3 (11 percent).

Women have the same top three patterns as the men, but in a different order. The most common pattern for women is to do the scaled workout every week (32 percent). The next most common, at 23 percent, is to only opt for scaled during 15.3, and the third most common, at 17 percent, is to do all of the workouts as Rx’d.

These are mostly the patterns you'd expect—scaling both 15.3 and 15.4, opportunistically doing a single workout as Rx’d or doing most workouts Rx’d but scaling as needed. But there are 16 possible patterns of Rx'd/scaled, and every single one of them has been observed.

The rarest pattern, seen with just 98 men and 6 women worldwide, is to do 15.1/a and 15.3 Rx’d, but 15.2 and 15.4 scaled. Anybody out there that did this combo, please post to comments. What led you down this least-traveled road?

Relationships Between Height, Weight, Other Factors and 15.4 Performance

With this one, you figure the handstand push-up favors a shorter, lighter athlete—Josh Bridges' initial experience notwithstanding—but they've also got to be able to manage that 185-lb. / 125-lb. clean, so you might expect that to tug things back toward the middle.

Here we see a pretty strong signal that shorter is better and lighter is better, but indeed not too light. Last week the optimum body weight for the men was 185 lb., but this week it has dropped to 165 lb.

These next hexagonal plots show how height and weight interact. Since you can’t do much about your height, these plots give you a sense about the optimal weight for a given height in this workout. You can see that the reddest spots, corresponding to the highest 15.4 scores, land right about where the peaks are in the plots above.

Then there's this "ridge" of body composition, roughly at 2.7 lb. of body mass per inch of height in males, and at 2.2 lb. per inch in females, that seems to yield the best scores for this workout for a given height.

Since there are other stats—such as Helen times and max back squats—available on the Games athlete pages, we looked at the relationship between those stats and the athlete's performance on 15.4.

When all factors were evaluated simultaneously, the top four relationships with higher 15.4 scores for men were younger age, lower body weight, lower max deadlift and higher max snatch.

For women, the top four factors associated with higher 15.4 score were younger age, faster Fran, higher max pull-ups and higher max snatch.

Height was lower on the list for both sexes.

It's important to remember we're dealing with correlation here, not causation. A faster Fran time doesn't directly make you better at handstand push-ups or vice versa. What's more likely is that there are some common underlying factors between a fast Fran and a good 15.4. Like, fitness. Taken as a whole, these associations point to an agile athlete with a strong midline, not too bulky if male and with strong shoulders if female.

15.4 Variability

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fittest region of all?

This week it's the South East with an average Rx'd score of 49.8 reps for the men and 42.3 reps for the women. SoCal is in second for both men and women, trailing by a very slim margin. Apparently the happiest places on Earth are also the fittest ones.

These plots are put in order based on the average Rx'd 15.4 score, with the regions with the highest average score on the left and the regions with the lowest average score on the right.

If you haven’t read a box plot before, or at least not for a while, here are some basics. The shaded box ranges from the first quartile (25th percentile) to the third quartile (75th percentile). The line at the center is the second quartile (50th percentile or median). The dots above the T-shaped whiskers are outliers like Kristin King, Michele Letendre, Jacob Anderson, Rich Froning and others.

What's remarkable is the scores are very similar across the board on the men's side, with little drop off, and no noticeable separation between the three traditionally weaker regions, Africa, Asia and Latin America. In fact those regions were ahead of Europe and Canada West. The scores are fairly similar across the board for women, too, except there is some drop off for Africa and Asia.

One workout is hardly enough to tell the story, but this is an interesting direction to explore. Are we approaching parity at the community level across the regions? If so, how soon will this lead to elite-level parity across regions?