"Relaxing is a skill just as much as a ring muscle-up is. And if you want to be good at it, you have to practice it on a consistent basis." Almost every conditioning workout I write ends with box breathing for exactly this reason. Athletes who never practice calming down in training can't find the switch between events, and the night before a comp turns into a 2 AM replay of event three. The rest of it: - what to review when you wake up at 2 AM, instead of the heat sheet - the breath counting drill I put in warm-ups (and the running version from Brent Fikowski) - why most CrossFitters panic in the pool, and what CO2 has to do with your metcons - Ryne's case for a hobby that has nothing to do with CrossFit - what the best athletes count as a failed skill session - what a 2026 review found when it compared ice baths and compression to doing nothing Full episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UMwSH8KkrTuK6dO1qeupG Written recap with every study linked: https://kyleruthcoaching.com/fieldnotes/cant-sleep-before-competition Corrections: the recovery review we mentioned is Jin et al. 2026 in Frontiers, not a Steve Magness paper. And the CO2 therapy results from Breath on air were a reduction not elimination of panic attacks; the recap has what the book actually reports. Questions and pushback in the comments. If there is a topic you want us to cover, put it here.

"What is sport specific for you as an athlete is dependent on the level that you are trying to achieve." For an Open athlete, sport-specific running means shuttles. At semifinals it means long runs and mixed running. At the Games it means all of it. Ryne and I walked through how to define specificity one movement at a time, and why the stage you're chasing should change where you spend your training. The rest of it: - The three numbers I use to define sport specificity for any movement - Why Ryne will skip an athlete's biggest weakness before an in-person comp, and why that bet fails at quarterfinals - The 2026 Games workout that had Patrick Vellner thinking he had rhabdo - Set size before speed, and the GHD numbers I'm chasing myself - Ryne's four-week plan to get a hamstring ready for a 40-yard sprint - Why athletes feel out of shape right before their best performances Full episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2TirD5pKLs0WTm3rXcrA5Z Written recap with every study linked: https://kyleruthcoaching.com/fieldnotes/sport-specific-training-crossfit Two corrections from the episode: the APEX women's bench standard is 115 lb, not 155. Questions and feedback in the comments. If there is a topic you want us to cover, put it here!

Hello everyone! Francesco here, just wanted to share a question that's been bugging me lately. Why are some people better at wall-facing compared to normal Strict HSPU, and why are some people the exact opposite? I myself am more in the second group and can feel a big difference between how many reps I can handle (both unbroken, when fresh, and in a mixed-modal setting) in the two movements. In your experience, is it more a biomechanics problem? with forearm/arm length involved, or is it a muscular thing? like people with stronger upper pecs and pecs in general can use that more on the wall-facing variation... Not sure this is super relevant to overall performance, but it'd like at least to have an idea for what to look for. Thanks!

Coaching Field Notes No. 4 is live. In the first Ruth Performance Collective education call, I asked every coach to write down their own definition of strength before the call. The question we answered was: why doesn't improving general strength automatically improve sport performance? I think as coaches we all know this intuitively. There's never a situation where we improve someone's back squat and automatically see all of their barbell cycling improve in the sport, because absolute force generation is only one aspect of strength expression. Full note: https://kyleruthcoaching.com/fieldnotes/strength-is-specific New note every week. It goes out by email first: https://kyleruthcoaching.com/fieldnotes