Not In My Box | The Fitness and Coaching Podcast · Caffeine and Kilos | Fitness and Coaching Culture w/ Danny Lehr

Are We Teaching CrossFit Wrong to Beginners?

December 16, 2025·58 min·5 clips

They open with a blunt test: would you teach this on day one? Wes and Blair start firing off yes-or-no answers on air squats, deadlifts, running form, and rowing. Nobody wants a biomechanics lecture. The point is to figure out what a beginner should really get first. Wes is fine teaching the basic lifts right away. Blair agrees, though he is more careful around running form. If somebody is a terrible technical runner, too much correction can make the gym feel like a place they hate. That is not the goal. The conversation then backs up and asks the bigger question hiding under the drill. Are coaches teaching principles, or are they teaching movement patterns? Their answer is that the principles live inside the movements. So a coach can talk about dip and drive, hips moving first, and other cues, but the new member still needs something they can actually do and feel. That makes the air squat and deadlift easy examples. Rowing and running matter too, but only if the cue helps the athlete instead of crowding them. The conversation stays grounded in the kind of judgment you make on a gym floor. What can this person handle today? What will they understand and remember later? What will keep them from checking out? By the end, the episode has turned into a practical debate about how much theory belongs in early coaching. It is funny, blunt, and comfortable with the idea that a lot of good coaching is knowing what to teach now and what to leave alone until the member is ready.

As heard by us

Movement basics come first, with theory left for later.

This episode asks a simple but useful coaching question: what should new people in fitness learn first? Wes Pyatt and Blair move through air squats, deadlifts, running form, and rowing, then settle on a more practical point about whether beginners need the movement pattern or…

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You want the day-one coaching debate, not a seminar.

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