Ryan
A Hero WOD honoring Sgt First Class Daniel Ryan, killed in Afghanistan in 2013. A deceptively simple couplet of high-skill gymnastics and burpees.
- Format
- For Time
- Level
- advanced
For Time
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Ryan is a for-time workout by Fiz, built from 2 movements. It is set at advanced level.
About Ryan
Ryan is five rounds of seven muscle-ups and twenty-one burpees. It honours Ryan Hummert, a twenty-two year old firefighter from Maplewood, Missouri, killed by sniper fire in 2008 as he stepped off his fire truck.
Two movements, and one of them is a gate
Thirty-five muscle-ups is the number that decides whether this workout is a fifteen minute effort or a forty minute one. There is nowhere to build capacity and nothing to switch to: it is muscle-ups, then burpees, then muscle-ups again, five times, and the burpees are specifically chosen to wreck the breathing and shoulders that the muscle-ups need. Athletes with a comfortable ten-rep muscle-up set find this hard. Athletes with a five-rep set find it brutal.
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Break the first set you do not have to
The reliable approach is to break the muscle-ups in round one, when it feels completely unnecessary. Four and three, or singles with a short rhythm, will beat seven unbroken followed by four rounds of failed attempts almost every time. On the burpees, the temptation is to sprint them because they are the movement you can do: resist it, because the only thing burpee speed buys you here is a slower return to the rings. Step back and step up, breathe at the top, and arrive under the rings with your arms available.
What's a good Ryan time
Your muscle-up set size predicts your Ryan time more precisely than any other single number in this catalogue predicts anything. A comfortable set of seven puts you inside fifteen minutes, and the very best go under eleven. A set of two or three puts you past thirty, and no amount of burpee speed changes that. If muscle-ups are not yet reliable, scale to a jumping muscle-up rather than swapping in pull-ups and dips. The transition through the rings is the skill being asked for, and the substitution trains everything except it.