Ryne's Coaching Blog

  Constraint Based Coaching  I've been brainstorming about this idea for a while, and after listening to a recent podcast with Steve Magnus and David Epstein, it inspired this blog. If you want to listen to that podcast, it can be found here:  https://open.spotify.com/episode/76vjoiesP3hYdkmEMzwgrv?si=IkywYOzDTwmVtdJnQBfl9A   Epstein, if you don't know him, wrote The Sports Gene and Range , and his latest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better  is about how to improve anything that you do. The core concept is straightforward: whatever is preventing you from performing at the next level is the thing that needs to be the center of your training. Your constraint is your bottleneck, and until you identify it accurately, everything else is just busy work. In sports like running, this is much easier to identify. For instance if you look at a runner who has a 5 minute mile and their best 400 meter sprint is 68 seconds, but they can hold 75 second laps fo...

  Results Reporting and Why It Matters One of the most integral aspects of my coaching approach that tends to get overlooked is results reporting. The athletes that work with me understand this but my perception is that athletes who haven’t worked in a similar system do not. I don’t mean just logging that a session happened, but actually communicating what happened inside of it. There is a meaningful difference between those two things, and athletes who understand that difference tend to get a lot more out of their programming. The short version is this: when I get quality feedback, I can create the highest quality progressions I am capable of. When I get a check mark, I create more generic ones. What Quality Feedback Actually Looks Like Most athletes default to objective reporting. They'll tell me they hit a 5x5 back squat at 275 pounds and that's it. That tells me it happened but doesn't tell me whether that was a 6 RPE or a 9 RPE, whether their core was the limiting fact...

  In any realm of athletic performance, we tend to look at the tangibles. How strong, fast, agile is someone? What does their movement profile look like? And in the CrossFit space, this especially makes sense given that we can train all of these things and there is a direct link to performance in the sport compared to football or baseball where strength is less correlated to output. The thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the mental aspect of competing is what truly separates those athletes who perform to their potential and those who consistently fall apart. I think about mental performance as four main pillars although you could certainly expand upon this as needed or desired. The pillars are Attention, Anxiety, Adversity Response and Confidence. By improving these four things, I believe that an athlete has greatly increased the likelihood that they will have success in the sport. Attention Attention is the first pillar because I believe that everything else is enti...

  How Hye Soo Made the Jump: A Season Built on Appropriate Priorities This was a massive year. First-ever in-person semi-final qualification, highest quarterfinals finish of her career, and an invite to Magic City on the table. Before I break down what we did, the credit starts and ends with her. She came into this offseason with a more exploratory mindset that was process oriented and focused on the details that allowed improvements. That shift made everything else possible. That said, I want to be honest about the coaching side of things, because when an athlete has the capacity to compete at a higher level and isn't getting there, something in the approach has to change. There were several things that helped drive this change, but taking on The Stimulus Matters Podcast pushed my boundaries as a coach and helped me grow immensely as a coach. This is something that I was able to pass on to the athletes that I coach.  Priority One: The Engine Needed to Grow Hye Soo ha...