Ryne's Coaching Blog

 I see a lot of running coaches in the CrossFit space treating running as one skill that looks the same everywhere. Running inside of CrossFit carries a lot more nuance than that, and understanding those details can help athletes improve dramatically on the leaderboard.  My job as a coach is to simplify things so an athlete can succeed with as little friction as possible. A simple cue works best when it comes from a coach who knows the athlete and has earned the trust behind it, which is why I'm slower to hand out quick answers to athletes I haven't worked with. This post lays out the reasoning that sits underneath those cues. We run two different modalities in CrossFit In CrossFit we run in the open world on concrete, dirt, and trail, and we run on an air runner. They look like the same test on paper, and they reward different athletes and different mechanics. Even within the open world, we have a major change in terrain and technique that has a lot of changes, but for today ...

  One of the things I've been thinking about lately, as we get into competition season, is how athletes handle the stress of this time of year. Kyle and I spent a full episode of Coaching Conversations on the mental performance side of competing. If you want to listen to that conversation, it can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UMwSH8KkrTuK6dO1qeupG?si=_QUKoSJxQ3GG3sX-IRQRFg   The short version is this: a lot of athletes spend the entire day in a heightened state of stress and then expect to turn it off the moment after the lights go out. That doesn't work very well in a normal training week, and it works even worse the night before a competition. The good news is that there are simple things you can do about it. The Night Before I have personally never had much of an issue sleeping, except for the night before a competition. Even at a multi day event, it's just the night before the first day, and after that I've always been fine. Coaching is a bit diff...

  Coaching the Injury-Prone Athlete One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how to manage the injury prone athlete. I think about this as an athlete who has historically had a hard time staying healthy, not one who got unlucky once. I have some personal experience here. Between eight seasons of competitive baseball in high school and college and four years of competitive CrossFit, I went through a single season fully healthy exactly one time in eleven or twelve years of competitive sport. When I found running, I was, for whatever reason, a lot more resilient to it. A few tweaks here and there, but no real injuries. That was a profound experience for me, because it meant I could finally explore a capacity sport where I was able to lean in and do appropriate volume and appropriate intensity without something breaking down underneath me. Even now, working into HYROX, I'm still modifying things when I do mixed modal work. I have injury dispositions I'm managing, ...

  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...