What Does It Mean to Be a Student of the Sport?

"Feeling is overrated."

My college swim coach used to say that to us all the time, and it annoyed me as an athlete. Then I had a meet where warm-up felt terrible and the water felt like Jell-O, and I swam a season best. You'll find the same thing in CrossFit: days where you feel awful and then you PR your snatch. That line came up in episode 14, where Ryne Sullivan and I talked about being a student of the sport, what it looks like for athletes and for coaches, and why Ryne thinks "people who actually study the sport that they're trying to master have a stronger tendency to master said sport."

Speed exposes the holes

I opened with something I found this week. I've been using Metric VBT, an Australian company with two apps: one films a lift and gives you the velocity of every rep, and one films your jumps. I'd say I'm fully recovered from the hip flexor I tore at a weightlifting meet last year, and split squats feel even. Then I ran their single-leg countermovement jump assessment: 33 centimeters on my left leg, 22 on my right, the side I tore. It also separates a force production problem from a speed problem, and that leg has both.

Ryne wasn't surprised. "The faster you get, the more the holes are exposed." Plenty of people can snatch well at 50% of their 1RM, and at 82% the hips rise early and they jump forward. "The higher the need for intention, the more you get exposed in your movement flaws."

Watch the sport to get better, not to spectate

Ryne splits being a student of the sport into two jobs. The coach's is big picture: the demands of the sport and of the competition the athlete is going to, and the pairings an athlete struggles with. The athlete's is more granular, "the nuance studying and technique adaptation, along with the ability to review their own pacing."

For athletes, I think it starts with recognizing that someone is better than you at a movement. I've coached athletes who say "I'm good at that, we don't have to work on it," and there are levels to this game. A student of the sport consumes the sport because they want to get better, and watches for movement patterns and strategies that would help them perform.

Ryne's example was Chad Becknell, who was on his regional team in 2014. In 2013 Chad watched a few athletes go power clean and push jerk straight into the overhead squat. The next year he did a power clean and squat jerk into his first rep at Regionals. "He took it and refined it and made it even better. And to me, that was a perfect example of this person gets it." The alternative, going overhead, down to the back rack, wide out and back up, costs seven to fifteen seconds.

The small things add up. Think about the final event at Syndicate Crown this year, 49 toes-to-bar into 7 overhead squats at 255/175: if you're vying for top five and you clean it, go to the back rack and then overhead, you're out of the top five. Others:

Small things students of the sport pick up
DB bench: finish the last rep, tuck the knees, set the dumbbells on them and roll up
DB bench break mid-set: rest with them on the knees, then roll back and go
Rower: in and out without straps, first calorie as fast as possible
Light thrusters: hands on the bar, pull yourself directly under it

"Only people who pay attention pick it up," and everyone else either has to be told by a coach or misses it completely. Ryne's point is that almost every athlete has something to gain on almost every common movement. The exceptions are elite athletes among the elite, like Alexis on strict handstand push-ups.

Even there, though, we've spent the last year and a half on technical work: when to time a brace in heavy squat cleans and thrusters, holding a barbell in the back rack, relearning front rack, where her hand sits on the rope, different ring muscle-up styles for short sets, long sets and long straps. I have athletes on the semifinal bubble who think they just need to train harder. "Most of the year is spent building technical capacity and improving economy. That's what most of the year is spent doing for those athletes."

Learn the global optimal, then play

Drills only go so far. Ryne walked through how he teaches bar-facing burpees in phases: where the hands land, which foot touches where, popping off the trail leg, a barrier over the bar to stay low. It's the same drill set I use (the triangle tape drill on my YouTube). "If I did that for every single movement, at some point we're no longer training any capacity work," so the athlete picks one or two things at a time and plays with them.

Once an athlete has the mechanics, it's repetition in varied settings: GHDs into bar-facing burpees, intense rowing into bar-facing burpees, a thruster and burpee couplet. Your press fatigues in the thruster pairing, and your midline fatigues and you start snaking in the GHD pairing. The sport requires adaptability, so learn the global optimal technique, then take it and play. In Thursday's Collective office hours we spent 40 minutes on GHD sit-ups with a group of coaches who have all worked with semifinal-level athletes, and we kept coming back to letting athletes find what's best for them inside the guardrails of optimal.

Every sport has athletes who sit outside the textbook. Grant House just qualified for short course Worlds in the 100 IM, second to Caeleb Dressel, and he has one of the most unique freestyles I've ever seen, easy to pick out in a heat of eight, and it meets every requirement for fast freestyle with asymmetries that work for him. "As a coach, sometimes our natural tendency is, hey, let me jump in and fix this," Ryne said. "But it might not be something that we need to fix."

Ryne takes it further with running: fix the fault first, then maybe bring the old style back in a posterior chain dominant metcon so the posterior chain gets a break. "As the sport continues to move towards zero sum, it's going to just be everyone has to think about things like that. Otherwise they're going to fall behind the field."

New technique feels terrible, and feel isn't real

Every time I put a new drill in, an athlete says the same thing. Ryne got it before I finished asking: "This doesn't work. This feels terrible." I've been telling athletes for 20-plus years that any new technique is going to feel terrible, and even elite athletes forget it. Part of being a student of the sport is understanding that "just because it doesn't feel good now doesn't mean that after you've spent time with the drill or time with the new technique that it isn't gonna feel good."

Ryne warns athletes before he changes their running, because the muscular demands shift and he cuts their running volume while it happens. "Every time it takes eight, 10, 12 weeks or more for that change to come around and for the athlete to develop movement economy." At some point in the year he tells them this is what we've got for the season, and more changes wait until they're done competing.

The second half of my swim coach's lesson is that with technical changes, feel isn't real. I'd tell a swimmer to tighten their streamline off the wall, they'd come up and say "I did," and I'd show them the handheld camera footage: not even close. The same happens with ring muscle-ups. "I feel like my legs are lower." Look at your video, it's exactly the same as the one before.

Review the target, then yourself

Ryne's point: video review has to happen inside the session. If you can make a three percent improvement within the session and compound it over six weeks, you're far ahead of the athlete making the normal one or two percent jump between sessions.

I write skill sessions this way, and the piece I should remind athletes of more often is the first step: watch what you're trying to achieve before you film yourself.

Skill session with video
15:00 practice: ring muscle-up, rope climb, handstand walk or another gymnastics skill
Review video of the target: how it should look and feel
Execute, filming every rep or clusters of 5
Review your own video, then the target again
Repeat

Ryne adds a split. When he has athletes play with long handstand walk steps versus short, fast turnover, he asks which one they gravitate toward and which one is actually faster, because sometimes the one they like is the slow one. Then they get a model: Lydia Fish for the high-cadence athletes, Danielle Brandon or Alexis for the long steppers. "Don't try to take Alexis as your model of handstand walking if you're a fast turnover person."

I coach more athletes between 6'2" and 6'4" than I ever have, tall for this sport but still semifinal to Games level, and I've started pulling video of James Sprague and Brent Fikowski for them. There's a reason Brent used a knee-drive kip on his muscle-up instead of the long sweep out of the dip: the limb lengths, levers and timing are different. They still learn every technique, but they watch athletes built like them. It's optimal technique within the guardrails for your population.

The coach's side: event history

For a competition like Rogue, the first thing I do is build an inventory of every event that's been done there. AI is now good enough to run a statistical analysis on that history and find biases and patterns I'd never see, and I'd consider myself pretty good at pattern recognition. Rogue's picture is fairly clear:

What Rogue's event history shows
A single-elimination sprint event
A longer run, often with external load
Bench press, back squats and heavy deadlifts inside metcons
A max of some sort
Pegboards
New Rogue equipment, so an unknown strongman element

History never repeats perfectly, so you make your best guesses and bias training toward them. Last year the women had 225-pound back squats inside a metcon, and they all flooded to the tables afterward with their legs cooked. You could see that event coming from miles away. Ryne's caveat: most of these athletes are coming off the Games, so the preparation window is short and something has to be compromised.

That's the coaching problem in general. I put out a post this week on concurrent training, and a lot of high-level coaches reached out about the same thing: how do you get a key running session in while an athlete is still 20 or 30 pounds below the standard for the sport? Blocks, or concurrent with more of a wave through the year? My answer is usually an emergent one: I adjust the dials and the program emerges.

Know each athlete's rate of decay

The longer you coach someone, the more you know. Some of Ryne's athletes can do one strength session every 10 days and stay strong while conditioning gets built. Others lose everything they aren't constantly touching, so they need a more concurrent approach.

It goes down to individual movements. Some athletes can take a big dose of GHD sit-ups every two to two and a half weeks and be fine. If I don't get a big dose weekly, dense and at sport-specific speed, and then do 50 to 75 in a workout, I'm wrecked and cramping. I have athletes who need handstand push-ups in the program twice a week, always, because pulling them for two or three weeks and they're gone. That same athlete can do one legless rope climb session every fourth week and still be elite at rope climbs.

Ryne is building his notes on each athlete into his programming template so they show up when he writes. One athlete's squatting speed isn't good enough relative to their strength, across every squat: step-ups, lunges, pistols, thrusters, overhead squats. Their raw strength would put them in the top half of a semifinal field. Absolute strength can be pulled back and it holds, but training speed needs to be in year-round.

That's where I'm taking VBT next: run every athlete through a velocity profile from 40% to 90%, so I'm not guessing who has high force and low speed or the reverse. VBT also measures range of motion, which matters because Ryne once watched a 5'11" athlete complain that the 5'7" athlete next to him squatted so fast, when the taller athlete was moving the bar faster. The shorter one was just traveling four inches less each way.

Competition history

Ryne also mines competition results. One athlete he coaches has their worst finish of the weekend whenever there's a burpee in the workout, at every level, so burpees are in the program all the time. Jeremy Meredith, who now coaches with me at Kyle Ruth Coaching, built a tool that pulls an athlete's entire competition history and reports strengths, weaknesses and movement limitations. It separates time domain from movement complexity, and "it's always barbell and burpee" from "it's actually always burpee."

It changed how I saw a Games athlete I onboarded. There was never a consistent type of workout he struggled in. The tool showed it was movement complexity: the heavier or more complex the work, the better he did, and the simpler it was, the more it became a pure engine test he lost. That lined up with his aerobic and bike power metrics. When there's low-hanging fruit like that in an athlete who's already talented enough to make the Games, you get excited as a coach, because that's progress built in.

Ryne's last observation: athletes who came into the sport after 2018 or 2019 don't bury themselves the way athletes from 2010 to 2012 can, because back then the programming was full of run, burpee, pull-up. That's not a knock on them, it's how the sport changed. Cindy used to be an engine-limited workout, and the simple stuff got pulled from competition because it's so hard to judge. As Ryne put it, "it also leaves a gap in fitness."

Referenced in this episode

• Metric VBT, the camera-based velocity and jump apps I used for the single-leg jump testing.
• Does Cardio Kill Your Strength Gains? My concurrent training post from this week.
• Ruth Performance Collective office hours, where the 40-minute GHD sit-up discussion happened: kyleruthcoaching.com/collective.
• Next episode: Jeremy Meredith joins us on critical speed testing and durability: Why Do Athletes With the Same Fitness Perform So Differently?

Inside Ruth Performance Collective, this month's Tuesday calls work through onboarding a new athlete, from the consult to in-gym testing.

- Kyle