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

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:07)
You won the CrossFit Games in 2024 You're 23 years old.
Winning has not always come easy.

**James Sprague** (0:15)
Mm-mm, 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 definitely winning now, to me, has a different meaning, and it's something really special to be able to win. Any time I got on the floor now, anything less than winning to me is like, you didn't give your best or you made a mistake. I know I can do it innately because I proved it to myself once.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:53)
You won the Rogue Invitational. There was another event that you just, the WFT. Talk to me about what the Rogue is and WFT.

**Laura Horvath** (1:04)
The Rogue Invitational is an invitational. They invite you if you are in the top 20 of the world and they can also invite whoever they want.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:12)
Top 20 of CrossFit?

**Laura Horvath** (1:13)
Yes.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:14)
In order to be in the top 20, you have to, it's a point system.

**Laura Horvath** (1:20)
Yes.
Rogue takes a lot of events and you get points for those events. I'm not very sure about how they do it, but they have their own 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.

**Chris Hinshaw** (1:41)
That'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. Like 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.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:14)
So you're applying friction is what you're doing.

**Chris Hinshaw** (2:16)
Yeah, 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-

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:26)
Especially when they win, they're vulnerable.

**Chris Hinshaw** (2:29)
So that's interesting, right? So someone who wins versus someone who gets 10th.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:34)
Winning is a risk.

**Chris Hinshaw** (2:35)
Because that's what I've noticed is that someone who wins, it's like their recovery, right? From a mental recovery.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:42)
Yeah.

**Chris Hinshaw** (2:42)
Right? They're physically capable, but they're still fatigued. They can't get back in the game.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:48)
These games, it's not necessarily predictable. Is that how that works? Why don't you kind of highlight, you do CrossFit and Hi-Rox, you do both?

**James Sprague** (2:56)
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 sports sometimes train seven days a week. Well, for me, I truly believe my body needs the recovery and the rest to be able to perform. So rest days are a big part of my protocol.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:19)
When you say recovery, when you say doing nothing in between, does that mean they're resting or?

**Chris Hinshaw** (3:23)
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 assume 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. But 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.