The First Things We Change in a New Athlete's Program

"They're elite athletes because they move like elite athletes."

That was Ryne Sullivan's answer, about halfway through episode 10, to the idea that you can't move like the elites because they're elite. The plan was to cover the first things we change when a new athlete starts training with us. We got there, but first we spent twenty minutes on running, because Ryne wrote the best blog on running for CrossFit athletes I have read: The Air Runner and the Road Reward Two Different Runners.

Why you run better on the air runner than on the road

Ryne's starting point is that CrossFit athletes run in two different environments: on a curved treadmill indoors, and outside. Some athletes thrive on one and struggle on the other.

"Bigger, heavier, stronger athletes on an air runner get to express strength on an air runner, similar to a C2 bike versus a road bike," Ryne said. Outside, air resistance, heat and body mass climbing hills all work against a big athlete. More body means more surface area for the sun to heat. Take a big athlete out of the heat and "you just put them in an air-conditioned room, they're going to do a little bit better relative to small athletes because they've offloaded some of the strain of heat dissipation."

The way I put it on the show: running on the road, a track or anywhere outside is a relative strength problem. On a non-motorized curved treadmill, your body weight helps, because there's more weight pulling the tread back.

The research lines up with this. Edwards and colleagues had 14 trained runners run at matched speeds overground, on a motorized treadmill and on a curved non-motorized treadmill. The curved treadmill was the least economical of the three, and the lighter the runner, the bigger the hit.

Stride matters too. On an air runner, an athlete who overreaches and lands with the leg out in front lands high on the curve, and gravity speeds up the slats. Do the same thing on the road and every step works against you. "If you overstride on the road, you're putting on the brakes every time you take a step," I said. "On the runner, if you overstride, you're allowing your body weight to pull on the tread for a longer period of time."

So why do so many people say the curved treadmill fixes road mechanics? Ryne's guess: "They are conflating running hills with running on a curved runner." Hills force good mechanics. Low knee drive gets you nowhere, the hill stops you from overreaching, and it forces a forward lean. Take that same pattern to flat ground and you run faster.

Power hike the steep climbs

I've been doing long trail runs twice a week with Haley while she preps for a 50K, so I asked Ryne the question I keep asking myself on the climbs: hinge and hike, or stay tall and run?

"If you are not an elite trail runner, which neither one of us are, the rule is once it gets to a certain degree of incline, you walk, and you adopt the hinge method, and you just power walk your way up."

Running a steep grade spikes heart rate and lactate, and at 12 kilometers into a 50K that bill comes due. Best case, running saves you about 90 seconds a mile. "I would rather get to the top of a 1K hill 90 seconds slower with my heart rate at 140 than 90 seconds faster with my heart rate at 186."

He pointed to the trail run at the Games in Aromas this year as an example of athletes who would have placed better hiking the steep sections.

For me, hills spike breathing the way barbell cycling does in a metcon, and it comes back down once I crest the top. Same lesson in a metcon: keep moving, the breathing recovers.

Scratching the surface isn't the same as knowing it

Ryne's Instagram post about that blog reached 800 to 1,000 people. The blog itself had six views the morning we recorded, and I'm pretty sure two of those were me.

"People are seeing a little four-slide thing with minor bullet points and saying, yep, that was good enough, I got everything I needed out of that whole blog."

That's the Dunning-Kruger effect: people with less skill tend to overrate how much they know. I see it with coaches who apply for mentorship. They rate their energy systems knowledge an eight out of ten, then can't name the fundamental components of speed.

Ryne's version: "You can make running as simple or as complex as you want to make it. But if you're in a position where you are struggling to move the needle with an athlete, oversimplification is usually not the answer anymore."

Simple systems work for the masses. Chris Hinshaw's Aerobic Capacity was popular because it boiled running down to a handful of assessments. But a running program slapped on top of four classes a week is a different job from fitting six miles into a week of doubles and a triple on Saturday.

The first things we change

Fewer metcons in the off-season

This is the number one change I make. Most people who come to me are coming off a group program that no longer serves them, and they're doing a true metcon every day.

"For almost all of them, I'm cutting them back to maybe two true CrossFit pieces in a week. Maybe one."

All the time and intensity they were pouring into metcons for time goes into skill acquisition, fixing mechanics, and building the weak parts of their energy systems so they can catch up with the rest of their fitness.

Fix technique before you layer volume

Ryne's programs carry far more technical work than most athletes are used to: snatch technique blocks, handstand positional work, ring muscle-up technique blocks. "Some of those things can last for three, four, five, six months at a time." Some athletes fix a fault with one cue. "Those are the fortunate ones. But most people don't live like that."

I spend the first three to four months with most new clients on technique, and nobody is immune. We have made small changes to Alexis's GHD sit-ups, ring muscle-ups and rope climbs, and to her handstand walking, which is already one of her best skills.

That goes for simple movements too. When Brandon Smith won Fittest of the Coast, we overhauled his burpee box jump-over footwork. I built a drill for it, a triangle tape setup that maps where the hands and feet go (it's on my YouTube). Two sessions later he told me, "Wow, this is the easiest these have ever felt," and he was averaging three to four seconds faster per 20 reps.

That's where Ryne's line about elite athletes came from. There are exceptions, like our friend Tyler's ring muscle-ups, built on arms that aren't long for his body and huge pulling strength for his size. You would still teach an athlete like Brandon that tool if it saves half a second a rep. You just wouldn't teach it to someone who got their second ring muscle-up last week.

Movements also have to change with age. "What Alexis can do right now in the peak of her athleticism with things like ring muscle-ups and things like handstand walks might not be accessible from a pure speed standpoint in a decade," Ryne said. I know this one personally. I used to do uprise muscle-ups, and while I can still do them, I can't use them efficiently in a metcon anymore. So pure dip capacity matters more for me now, and it shows up in my training twice a week.

Peaks and valleys, not a straight line

New athletes have to learn that they don't need to be at their best at everything all the time. Not their best thrusters, chest-to-bar, burpees, running, heavy cleans and back squat all at once.

"Not everything has to be linearly progressing all the time, because that's impossible." There should be stretches where some qualities slide while others climb. That cycle is the difference between being a good CrossFitter all year and being a competitor who peaks when it matters.

Structured energy systems work

Ryne's pet peeve is lactate threshold work written as mixed-modal pieces. LT2 means producing lactate at the same rate you clear it. "If you are doing burpees and you're doing thrusters and you're doing things where there is not this ability to stay cyclical and smooth, you're going to get these spikes."

I agree, with one note from the intervals I taught in the Collective the day before. For an elite athlete, a sustainable pace with light dumbbell snatches, double-unders, shuttle runs, burpees and the rower can look a lot like threshold work, even if it isn't building lactate threshold. Swap in touch-and-go power snatches, thrusters or heavy wall balls and it stops looking like threshold at all. The time domain and the work-to-rest ratio matter less than you think. "The movement selection and intensity of it is what's going to dictate the stimulus."

In a competition, "the point is racing," and closer to the season a random mix of movements earns its place. In training, the stimulus matters.

Most athletes I onboard run the speed retention index: what percentage of their mile pace they hold over a 5K. Almost everyone in the sport lands between 80 and 90%. The athletes at 80% look like me, powerful and less enduring, so we build the enduring end. The ones near 90% get repeated sprints. One of my Games athletes is doing this right now:

Repeat sprints for a high-endurance, low-power athlete
3 x 10s sprint on the Echo, 4:00 rest
3x per week

His peak went from the high 1200s to just shy of 1,400.

I also match the modality to the athlete. Bigger athletes run on the road if their joints can handle it, because moving their body weight is their weak side. Smaller, weaker athletes express their power on the ergs.

Ryne's caveat for athletes who arrive with a running background: "I need to do enough running for their running to not fall off, because when running shows up at a live event, they need to win the workout." His example was the heavy Nancy at this year's Magic City masters semifinal in Birmingham: "If you lose your running capacity and you end up trotting around at an eight and a half minute mile instead of running a seven minute mile, you end up giving up a ton of placements there."

Accessory and assistance work aimed at the limiter

Ryne has an athlete working on ring muscle-ups doing curls and triceps work with the shoulder in extension, facing away from the cable, to build the lockout from the bottom of the dip. I rigged rings to my cable pulley for the same reason: getting out of the bottom of the dip is my limiter.

For rope climbs, I've moved almost everyone to narrow neutral-grip pulling, because it matches the joint angle on the rope much more closely than prone-grip pull-ups.

We also split two words coaches use interchangeably. Accessory work keeps the athlete healthy: external rotation, adductors, hip rotation, the things CrossFit never trains. Assistance work targets a specific movement, like Ryne's towel-grip, band-assisted strict pull-ups as an early legless rope climb progression.

The effort happens between the ears

The first good Fran Ryne ever did was in the low 2:20s, at 19, on a summer afternoon in New Orleans. His heart rate never went above about 172.

One of the most intense sessions I've done is Evan Peikon's repeat desaturation. Evan built it from Moxy data to drive an athlete's muscle oxygen saturation close to zero again and again: a 15-second Assault Bike sprint at 75% of max wattage every 90 seconds. For me that meant repeated 1,500-watt sprints, and eight sets in I'd quit with full-body lactate shutdown and a heart rate around 155.

"The effort happens between the ears. Always," Ryne said. Heart rate won't settle it either: "There's no physiological marker that's going to show you your best effort on any given day."

Some days the limit is something else. A few weeks back his low back tightened 3K into the second of two 4K repeats, so he dropped from four-minute kilometers to 4:08 to 4:10. "That's the effort that I had that day. It wasn't a failed session."

That's the mindset I see in elite athletes. I've coached 23 first-time Games athletes, and the ones who make it accept daily fluctuation. The ones who keep bumping against the ceiling take a down day personally and start doubting themselves. The shift is: "I'm going to give what I can give every day. And whatever I was able to give is the best I had."

Own the plan

The last big change is athlete IQ. When Ryne asks a new athlete for a game plan, the answer is usually "we'll see when we get there." Two years in, it's paces, rep schemes and which grip they're saving for tomorrow. The elite athletes I coach plan every piece that way, even a 20-minute EMOM. "It is the coach's responsibility to make sure the athlete knows what the overarching intention of training is," I said. "But within the movements themselves, and within a metcon, the athlete has to have ownership of that."

Part of that ownership is stealing technique. At a Games prep camp, Tyler Christophel wiped the floor with everyone on high box burpee jump-overs. Ryne watched Noah Olson ask him how he did it, and the next week Noah was moving at a much faster cycle rate. I watched Bethany Flores annihilate a toes-to-bar and devil's press final at Wodapalooza by hanging nearly still and scooping, and I grabbed my phone to film it. If you don't have Danielle Brandon's thoracic extension, you can't handstand walk like her, but you would be foolish not to study her.

"It's just important to have that curiosity."

Referenced in this episode

• Ryne's blog. The Air Runner and the Road Reward Two Different Runners, Ryne Sullivan, October 8, 2026. Why some athletes thrive on the air runner and others on the road, and what to do about it.
• Repeat desaturation. Evan Peikon's session, built from Moxy muscle oxygen (SmO2) data to repeatedly drive saturation close to zero. Evan writes at On Human Performance.
• Curved treadmill vs overground running. 14 trained runners ran at matched speeds overground, on a motorized treadmill and on a curved non-motorized treadmill. At a given speed the curved treadmill cost the most (about 22% more of VO2 peak than overground), had the worst running economy, and the drop in economy was larger in lighter runners. Edwards RB, Tofari PJ, Cormack SJ, Whyte DG. Frontiers in Physiology, 2017;8:914. Full text
• The Dunning-Kruger effect. Kruger J, Dunning D. "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999;77(6):1121-1134.
• Aerobic Capacity by Chris Hinshaw, the assessment-based running and engine program.
• Heavy Nancy. Ryne's running example, from the 2026 Magic City masters semifinal in Birmingham.
• Ranch 7200. The 7,200 m trail run at the 2026 CrossFit Games in Aromas, California.
• The speed retention index. My mile vs 5K test for profiling whether an athlete's engine is limited by power or by endurance.
• The burpee box jump-over triangle drill. The tape setup I built for Brandon's footwork, on my YouTube channel.
• Last week's episode. Why Can't Athletes Sleep Before a Competition?

Inside Ruth Performance Collective we start our fatigue series this Tuesday. Week one is monitoring fatigue: how to use resting heart rate and heart rate variability, and how to read training load metrics like TRIMP and the acute to chronic workload ratio to judge an athlete's readiness.

- Kyle