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6 Adaptive Athletes Who Inspire Us

One of the things we love most about functional fitness is how everyone is part of the community. Regardless of age or ability level, there’s a WOD for you — and that includes adaptive athletes. These athletes don’t let anything get in their way and have approached their limitations unwilling to accept defeat. The words “I can’t” are only allowed in one sentence: I can’t give up. Here are six of our favorites.

1. Kevin Ogar

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When a freak lifting accident left Kevin Ogar paralyzed from the waist down in 2014, the 6’2” competitor had to reframe his focus. He had gone to Regionals the last two years in a row and had his sights set on the Games, but things were definitely going to change.

Leaving CrossFit behind wasn’t an option, though. Instead, he applied himself to learning how to adapt workouts to his changed abilities, and then he started offering adaptive training to others.

Today, Ogar runs his own box, CrossFit Watchtower, and trains a mix of adaptive and non-adaptive athletes alike.

2. Krystal Cantu

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Days after Krystal Cantu signed up for her first CrossFit competition, she was on the road with her boyfriend when a tire blew out and they lost control of the vehicle. The damage to her right arm was so severe that it had to be amputated above the elbow.

A month after the accident, she was back at her box, relearning how to do movements — snatch, clean and jerk, deadlift, front and back squat — with one arm. It’s safe to say she successfully found her balance: she now lifts heavier weights than she ever did with two arms and even competes.

3. Wesley Hamilton

At age 24, Wesley Hamilton was 5’4” and 230 pounds when he was shot twice by a person he had never met. He spent three weeks in the ICU and woke up paralyzed.

Overweight, depressed, and confined to a wheelchair, he found inspiration in his two-year-old daughter and his desire to be the best dad he could be. He changed his diet and started working out, and in eight months, lost 100 pounds.

Since then, he has competed in adaptive CrossFit competitions including the Working Wounded Games, WOD 4 Wheels, and Wodapalooza, where he took second place in last year’s adaptive division.

4. Steph “The Hammer” Hammerman

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Diagnosed at two weeks old with spastic cerebral palsy, Steph “The Hammer” Hammerman has dealt with physical challenges her whole life. She found CrossFit in 2012 and started using it to become a stronger hand cyclist. A year later, she became the first certified female CrossFit coach with cerebral palsy.

She has since helped to establish competition opportunities for adaptive athletes, both through the Adaptive Division at Wodapalooza Fitness Festival and the WheelWOD Open. Along the way, she has fought and beaten Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spoken openly about body image and self-esteem.

5. Corey Reed

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A late night car accident changed Corey Reed’s life forever. He was just 23 years old when a night out with friends ended in a collision with a tree. Reed didn’t wake up for a month, and when he did, his right leg was amputated below the knee and he was completely blind.

Escaping the darkness that surrounded him didn’t happen immediately, but eventually, he started getting back into snowboarding and wakeboarding, two sports he’d enjoyed his whole life. Then he tried CrossFit, with the plan of using it to condition for his other sports. It only took one class to get him thinking about competing.

Since then, Reed has competed with CrossFit Los Angeles as the first adaptive athlete in SICest of the Southwest 2012. He’s also competed in adaptive CrossFit competitions like the Working Wounded Games.

6. Zack Ruhl

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Born without femurs due to a congenital defect, Zack Ruhl has been a double amputee since age two — and he’s never lived with prosthetics. He rolled around on a skateboard his whole childhood and didn’t use a wheelchair at all until adulthood. Life without legs is Ruhl’s normal — it’s not something he’s ever been depressed about — but that doesn’t make his accomplishments any less impressive.

After growing up playing football (he would literally crawl around the field to make tackles), Ruhl found himself getting bored with the typical bodybuilding routine. When he found CrossFit, it reawakened his love of fitness. His abilities differ from other wheelchair athletes due to the fact that he’s not paralyzed, meaning his core is still active throughout his torso, so handstand push-ups while strapped in his wheelchair are a regular part of his workouts.

Main image: Krystal Cantu/Instagram

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6 Things You Need to Know About Adaptive Athletes

Regardless of who you are — whether you are an adaptive athlete or you are a coach who works with adaptive athletes or you are just on the outside looking in when it comes to this community — chances are you have a few assumptions about people with disabilities who train at the gym. The WOD Life reached out to two well-known adaptive athletes to find out what all of us should know about the athletes who come into our gyms and do workouts a little differently.

Zack Ruhl is an adaptive athlete and coach who was born without femurs due to a congenital defect. Both of his legs were amputated when Zack was two years old, but he never got prosthetics and he did not use a wheelchair at all until his mid-20s. Zack prides himself on his independence and helps the adaptive athletes he trains make moves toward independence on their own.

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Krystal Cantu was only a few months into doing CrossFit when a car accident led to the amputation of her right arm. She went back to her box a month later, first donning a weighted vest and running. “I just wanted to be in shape again like the way I was before,” she said. Before long, she was teaching herself how to do lifts with one arm. The words “I’m an adaptive athlete” never crossed her mind.

Ruhl and Cantu list six things everyone should know about adaptive athletes.

6 Things You Need to Know About Adaptive Athletes

1. We Are Not Helpless


“People that know me and see my videos and have seen me do muscle-ups, all this crazy stuff,” Ruhl said, “they still ask me if I need help pumping my gas.”

Not that it is wrong to offer someone help, but Ruhl gets frustrated by the seemingly constant assumption that if someone is in a wheelchair, they cannot do things for themselves. The way a person who is paralyzed or has amputated limbs goes about life may not be the same as their non-adaptive neighbor, but that does not mean they are incapable of taking care of themselves or putting their own weights away.

2. We Do Not Want to Be the Center of Attention

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It can get really old being singled out and spotlighted strictly because of a disability.

“Make them feel like they’re just another member at your gym, because I can guarantee you they don’t want to feel like this extra special person getting all this attention,” Cantu said.

3. We Do Not Always See Our Own Potential


The first thing Ruhl does when he is training wheelchair athletes is get them away from their wheelchair. This forces them out of their comfort zone and shows them they do not need the tool they have grown so dependent on. “It’s okay to use it as a crutch,” Ruhl said, “but there’s a time and a place, and you’re never going to get the fitness you want if you’re staying in your wheelchair all the time.”

Ruhl is all about setting small goals for his athletes — small goals that are easily attainable and eventually lead to a big goal.

“I’ve never had an adaptive athlete come to me and see their potential the way I’ve seen it,” Ruhl said. “They always come in with their head down … until they start seeing a little progress and they actually start believing it.”

4. We Are Still Athletes

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“I love competing and I hate competing,” Ruhl said, “because I feel like people look at us and they’re just like, ‘Awww.’”

He understands that there is a “wow factor,” but when he is competing, he wants to be seen as a competitive athlete, not just a feel-good, inspirational story. He does not have legs, but his bench press record is not impressive solely because of that: 501.5 pounds is on par with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

5. CrossFit is Not the Only Thing We Do


When Cantu got involved in competitive adaptive CrossFit a few years ago, her Instagram became a sort of tribute to the sport and erased just about every other part of her identity. To her followers, she was Krystal Cantu, adaptive CrossFit athlete. But in reality, CrossFit only took up a couple hours of each day; there was (and is) much more to her as a person.

“I used to have athlete on my Instagram page and everything,” she said. “I’ve just taken that down completely, because it’s no longer going to define me.”

Cantu wants people, adaptive and non-adaptive alike, to remember there is more to life than CrossFit, and there is more to every individual athlete than their ability to work out.

6. We Are People, First and Foremost

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Before we are athletes, before we are amputees or paraplegics or anything else, we are people. So do not reduce us to just one thing and do not be content to think of us as two-dimensional beings with no depth of emotion or intellect. We are people just like you with hopes, dreams, and disappointments, who are chasing after our best lives and happened to find CrossFit along the way.

Interviews and blog by Meredith Sell

Main image: Krystal Cantu/Instagram