Laura Horvath, Chris Hinshaw & James Sprague: What Separates Champions From Everyone Else

0:07Gabrielle Lyon:You won the CrossFit Games in 2024. You're 23 years old. Winning has not always come easy. No. To me, winning has had two definitions in my life. Winning used to be standing on top and being the best version of myself and all the sacrifices I made. and to me now winning is still all those things but yet having the community around it and doing it with my people and being happy in that pursuit so um definitely winning now to me has a different meaning and it's it's something really special to be able to win anytime i got on the floor now like anything less than winning to me is like you didn't give your best or you made a mistake like i know i can do it innately because i proved to myself once you won the rogue invitational there was another event that you just the WFT.

0:59Gabrielle Lyon:Talk to me about what the Rogue is and WFT. So the Rogue Invitational is a invitational. They invite you if you are in the top 20 of the world and they can also invite whoever they want. Top 20 of CrossFit. Yes. And in order to be in the top 20 you have to it's a point system. Yes it's like they take Rogue takes a lot of events and they just like you get points for those events. I'm not very sure about how they do it, but they have their own like, you know, leaderboard. So if you compete in like any kind of event, which is related to CrossFit or fitness, you're going to get on their leaderboard.

1:41That's awesome. So when I train athletes like for a world championship, one of the pieces leading up to the world championship, You can't just give them workouts that you create this like it's really hard because they're so skilled. They're going to know that's a cream puff workout. It's like throwing a soft pitch. It's like they're going to catch it. It has to be something that rattles them, something where they look at it and it's like, man, there's no way. But when they do it, they come out and it's building confidence as they go into it. And that's a huge piece of it. So you're applying friction is what you're doing.

2:16Yeah, right. It has to be authentic when they're going in. It's a very difficult piece to do, and it's the most stressful for me. But what you just said is afterwards, even if they win, there's - Especially when they win, they're vulnerable. So is it, that's interesting, right? So someone who wins versus someone who gets 10th.

2:34Gabrielle Lyon:Winning is a risk. Because that's what I've noticed is that someone who wins, it's like their recovery, right, from a mental recovery. Yep. Right. They're physically capable, but they're still fatigued. They can't get back in the game. These games, it's not necessarily predictable. Is that how that works? Why don't you kind of highlight you do CrossFit and High Rocks? You do both? For me as a professional athlete, I train six days a week with the six day being more of a lower impact running, swimming, biking day and five days a week being higher impact. And people of other sport, sometimes train seven days a week.

3:11Well, for me, I truly believe like my body needs the recovery and the rest to be able to perform. So rest days are a big part of my protocol.

3:19Gabrielle Lyon:When you say recovery, when you say doing nothing in between, does that mean they're resting or? It's a passive rest versus an active rest. So runner, like you take a good runner, a sprinter, what they'll do is they'll sprint and they won't just sit in a chair and do nothing because the active recovery portion will get slow twitch fibers firing and that slow twitch will see any present lactate and consume that lactate and take those fatigue-causing metabolites out. And so even a sprinter who has prelims and semis and finals, the recovery matters, even though maybe their longest event is, let's say, 19, 20 seconds.

3:51But the recovery part does matter. So how does a sprinter do it? They sprint, and then they walk. They sprint, and then they jog. They create the fatigue with that anaerobic fast twitch, and then they go into a slow twitch aerobic where the muscles can help clear that lactate. So why isn't that applied in other pieces? It's just because people don't actually think about it. You look back five years ago, like, there's no way people can keep getting better. It's like a four minute mile. Yeah, it's stupid. And just like Adidas just had a guy break the 100k in sub six hours. Like there's all these things, all these challenges that keep getting broken because, you know, we keep innovating.

4:31And that comes with better product, to better training strategy, better recovery protocols. And just, you know, I think it's going to keep happening, even though I don't want it to. Like, I'm like, I wish I could just stay this fit forever and win. But no, I'm going to have to keep evolving as the sport keeps evolving. I have running sessions that I, okay, this week I want to go into one long, which is like base work. And then I will have two intervals. One of them is going to be like a longer intervals, slower. And then the other one is going to be a higher intensity, shorter interval. So it's not something I, you know, I go in and write it up on the whiteboard that morning.

5:05I have a kind of idea what I'm going to do. It's just not like setting stones. Like if today I was supposed to do intervals, like, and I feel like shit, I might do my base work today instead of that. Which is really interesting. So we just, we had a recent conversation with an athlete and she came in here and she's like, I don't use wearables. I could know by feel. and her way, because she does that, she's not dependent upon what my pace is. She knows, and she's aware of the chaos and she can control the chaos and she doesn't even see it. And I was like, it caught me by surprise because she's so gifted.

5:44And if I was competing against that gifted athlete, that would terrify me. It's like, how do you do this without any information? It's all self-governed. What is even VO2? Like seriously, how do you get into performance and performance is associated and that's what you've done perfectly. It is about your muscles. That is what's driving performance. That's what's driving your lifestyle. But what we're interested in, what we're measuring long-term should be what you're talking about. What are the muscles doing at that level of intensity? So this is the problem in CrossFit. Intensity should only happen when you have the movement down correctly so you shouldn't go push squats and muscle ups if you're moving horribly you shouldn't do them for time you should move through them for quality so that's what crossfit gets its bad rep is you see all these people doing high intensity movements with horrible technique and it's like that person shouldn't be doing that yet because they haven't shown the capacity to be able to do it right even even without the intensity so mastering the Movement first is what I tell everyone.

6:49You know, it could be like a grindy, like a longer event with heavy lifting in it. Or it could be just like a one rep max back squat. It's nice that it's so like different and diverse and you always do different things. But it's also hard to understand because like, you know, there are some movements that you've never seen and they introduce it. I'm going to be mad at myself if I lost because I did something wrong or I didn't push hard enough. I know I could have done better. but if i'm like i did everything absolutely right and i did the best of my abilities but the other person were just better i'm like good for you next time that will happen i will fuck you up yeah i always try and have that second mindset um of hey like i'm in this let's let's try and look at the positives what's going well right now even though my body's my blood's boiling and it in my body's in so much pain i feel like i'm falling apart like i always and this is why i think i'm I'm a champion it's because I'm able to like identify like hey like what's going good what what can I prove on for the next set um hey this is hurting good like that's where you're growing um and not fearing that feeling of pain because that's part of part of the process so if you're like skittish before you start a workout and you you know you're looking at the workout like this is gonna really hurt from the beginning gosh dang it like yeah you're not gonna get the most out of but you're preemptively setting yourself up for failure.

8:12So like, look at it like, oh, how much can I get out of myself here? Like, how can I attack this? How can I maximize this performance? I might not be feeling my best today. I might've woke up tired, but what can I do to get 100 % out of myself today? So basically the movements are always different. And that's what's like very appealing at a CrossFit competition. It's not like at like the Kotlin. You have your events, like you have the run, you have the hurdles, you have the throw, you have the hold. Yes. And here, it's like kind of unknown. They announced it a couple of weeks ahead, like maybe one or two.

8:47You start with the higher reps and go down in reps and the movements always change. So we started with 150 double unders and then went into a GHG sit-up, which is like a core exercise. And then from there, you went into a hands-end walk and then you use one station and then you leave it. You do it only once. And then from the hands-end walks, you went into box jumps, and then you finished with some muscle-ups. So basically you went from 150 reps down to the muscle-ups, only 20 reps. So the reps decreased and the movements always changed. Like I never would have thought that I'm going to say like yesterday we just ran for 70 minutes that I enjoyed that, but I did.

9:24Gabrielle Lyon:Wait, you ran for 70 minutes?

9:30Yeah, right? But it's not like I started with 70 minutes. I built it up. So it started with maybe 20 or 30, and then we added the 5 to 10 minutes, and we did intervals of like one-hour intervals. And then, you know, now it's just 70 minutes. It might go up to 90. What you're really doing is building structural integrity. You're creating stronger bones, ligaments, and tendons. You're building the structure so that you could take on what's going to come next, because your body will adapt to that low intensity. Eventually, you're going to need to put in the high-intensity piece. So you need to have a safe foundation as a buffer so that you can absorb that damage.

10:12The problem is, is that people don't realize that when they get tired and running, they're not sure what that means. What I mean by tired is, is your limiting factor, your breathing. Do you feel like you're hyperventilating? Is that your limitation? Because they didn't have enough time on their feet. So what you want to do is you want to build up the structural integrity so that your neuromuscular system is capable of supporting the high intensity. The three bases of the sport are monostructural movements, aka running, swimming, biking, rowing, skiing. Then you have your gymnastics movements. You have things like muscle ups, walking on your hands, burpees, moving your body in free space.

10:53And then you have weightlifting. So our main two weightlifting movements are snatch and clean and jerk. But also we do every form of squatting. We lift sandbags. We lift odd objects. We carry crazy things. So CrossFit is the combination of all of those elements at mixed modal time domains. So you can combine a couple of those movements and say, we're doing this for 10 minutes and get as many reps as you can. You go head to head with the guy next to you. You see who does better. And over the weekend, you combine different elements with different time domains to get a different stimulus and that way you're getting the complete test of fitness by doing constantly varied exercise at high intensities with mixed time domains you have to put yourself in that very uncomfortable positions if you want to be one of the best in the world and i think you're gonna want have to want it a little bit you know like like training is uncomfortable like there has been some sessions that I did that like I don't want to do them again but I know I will like there will be a time and I know I need to go there but at the same time also what you said yesterday like when you're getting better and better your strengths are not as important your weaknesses are more important and they're gonna pull you down so you kind of have to figure them out a

12:09Gabrielle Lyon:little bit you and I were about to go figure that out Laura Horvath thank you so much for coming on the show. It's just such a pleasure to sit down with you. Thank you. Chris, so happy to be able to sit here with you. I'm looking forward to more of like the voice that you have and the confidence that you're creating, especially in the way in which you speak. I mean, I find that very appealing. I really appreciate that. I want to thank you for joining us today. I really do. I personally have loved this conversation and I'm going to grab the recording and write down my notes and my actions. So thank you very much for being here.

12:39Gabrielle Lyon:James, thank you so much for spending this time with me. It has been so valuable and I know inspiring for so many. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. It was awesome to get a chat with you and what an amazing platform you have to spread such a positive message. So thanks for letting me be a part of it.