01/12/2025
A strict ring muscle up… but the story behind it is so much bigger ❤️🔥
Last week I ran a 6-day intensive with Sam; hours of biomechanics, functional screens, myotome mapping, neurosurgical history, infancy reports, the things she was never told, and the things she learned to forget. What surfaced changed everything.
At two years old, her malignant astrocytoma didn’t just affect L5 (despite almost every report focusing on the nerve root). The tumour removal caused an incomplete spinal injury from T11 to S2.
On her right side: near-complete loss of glute max, lower intercostals, half her hamstrings, and almost everything below the knee. A subtalar fusion left her ankle permanently pronated, with an enforced AFO to prevent fractures considering all muscle has atrophied. Functionally, this limb behaves more like a prosthesis.
Putting the full picture together was both shocking and relieving. Sam has been competing as Lower Minor for years - even after our 2025 reclassification request was rejected. She still made the Games. Still held her own. Still kept fighting… until several injuries forced her to pull out of the 2025 season and question whether CrossFit even had a place in her future.
Then everything shifted.
When we trained her according to her actual functional profile - more BK/AK than Lower Minor, with even less usable muscle than many BK athletes - everything made sense. Her 1RMs came in triples. She cycled heavier loads. Understanding her lack of hip mechanics let her build tension elsewhere, and for the first time she could use elastic energy instead of muscling through everything strict.
For the first time since childhood, she wasn’t disconnecting - she was feeling her body, and honouring what it could do. Learning what she does have, rather than trying to move in able-body patterns she could never access.
On day one I told her, “You’ll hit a strict ring muscle up by the end of the week.” She already had the strength - she just needed to reconnect.
This morning, the last video landed in my inbox.
This isn’t just a rep.
It’s clarity, reclamation, and a new beginning.
Never been prouder.
This is Sam and this is only the beginning.
