Throwing Down the Hammer (with Steph Hammerman)

I competed at Wodapalooza, and I was in my own little division. I had another athlete that was with me. Her name is Natalie Bieule. She is an amputee, but she decided that she wanted to go with the scaled women because she’s a badass.

I was like, “OK, that’s cool.” I ended up competing pretty much by myself. It was like this showcase, but people loved it. I went up to Guido afterwards, and I said, “If I could get 10 friends, or if I could get 10 guys and 10 girls to do this with me, would you let us compete? Would you let us have a division?” He said yes.

Welcome to the “BarBend Podcast,” where we talk to the smartest athletes, coaches, and minds from around the world of strength. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao, and this podcast is presented by barbend.com.

Today I’m talking to the athlete and coach, Steph Hammerman, better known online as StephTheHammer.

Steph was born with cerebral palsy. Since discovering CrossFit years ago, she’s been a prominent force in the space as both a coach to all and an advocate for adaptive athletes. In many cases, that meant leading from the front by being the first person with CP to compete at numerous prominent events in the fitness and CrossFit spaces.

In 2014, she became the first person with CP to earn a Level 2 CrossFit certificate. Our conversation focuses on Steph’s career in fitness, including some frank discussion of lower points and lessons learned. Including when Steph had to close her gym during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I do want to take a second to say we’re incredibly thankful that you listen to this podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to leave a rating and review of the BarBend podcast in your app of choice. Now, let’s get to it.

Steph, thanks so much for joining us today. We scheduled this podcast a few weeks ago. Actually, in the meantime, a lot has been happening in the fitness space, but one pretty big piece of news was that the CrossFit Games would be introducing an official adaptive division next year.

I’m curious if you had a heads up on that as someone who’s been involved in multiple aspects of the sport before, or did you find out with everyone else?

I definitely knew that something was coming. I didn’t necessarily know how they were going to make an announcement. We don’t really know all of the details that are going to happen.

It’s been such an honor to be able to be so deeply rooted in the community that people would ask our insights and opinions of how things would break down. It was very exciting for it to come out public. I’m excited to see where it goes from there.

It’s certainly a long time coming. You’ve been in the space and around the space for a long time now. How long have you been involved in the CrossFit community? Just so I have that straight.

Yes. I started doing CrossFit on May 3rd of 2012.

Oh, you have the specific date? That’s impressive.

[laughs] Yes. I specifically remember the first time I entered a CrossFit gym. It was such a special experience for me that it’s something that stuck with me this whole time.

My journey progressed rather quickly in the sense of making connections with people. I have this personality where I’ll just go up to anybody that’ll talk to me. I don’t care who you are, or how many followers you have, or what kind of clout you have, if you’re a nice person, I feel I could bring value to your life and vice versa. I want to be friends with you.

Going through this community very early on, I made connections with people that were just genuine friendship connections. Over the years, I’ve been able to build those into a more professional relationship.

At the end of the day, I’m so excited to see where this division is going and whether I compete in it or not, because I highly doubt that I’m going to. [laughs] There are a lot stronger people out there than myself. My ultimate goal was not necessarily to compete, but to help open doors for people that came after me.

I have to comment on just going up to people and starting to make friendships. Having lived in New York for a decade like I have, that’s the most terrifying thing in the world for me, is somebody come up and start talking to me randomly.

That’s just an East Coast thing.

I’m from Long Island. I grew up in New York. I’m from a big Jewish family. It’s part of my personality. [laughs]

You’re a very brave person. I live in Brooklyn. I still wouldn’t do that these days. In the age of social distancing, maybe that makes a little bit of sense. That [indecipherable 5:21] .

You never know who you’re going to meet. I challenge you to try to put yourself out there and meet three new people that you would never talk to in your life. You never know what you can learn from them.

We’ll set that aside as a challenge for David after this podcast. I’ll follow up with you on that. I will.

[laughs] There you go.

Let’s talk a little bit about…This is the Adaptive Division in the CrossFit Games. We don’t have all the information yet. We don’t know.

It reminds me of when they announced Masters and Teens Divisions. We didn’t have all the info. It was like, “Where does the Masters cutoff start?” At first, it was 40. Then it was 35. I’m sure it will evolve. Nothing is going to be perfect the first year.

When it comes to adaptive fitness competition, maybe not CrossFit branded, that is nothing new. That’s something that we’ve seen at events, some of the biggest fitness events in the world for the past five, six years, maybe even longer.

How has your involvement with those events as an athlete and an advocate evolved over the years? Do you remember what your first one was and how that began?

Of course. I actually competed at The Crush Games in 2013. It was August of 2013 that I did Crush Games. I fell in love with the idea of, again, putting myself out there. I was the first adaptive athlete, the first person with CP, doing what I was doing.

I went up to the owner, I guess organizer, I should say, of The Crush Games. His name is Mike Osuna. We are still, to this day, very close. Didn’t know him at the time.

I just went up to him and was like, “Hey, I know all of my scales for these workouts. If you wouldn’t mind, it would be really cool…I don’t have to compete in any division, so to speak, but I would love to be able to show people what I’m capable of doing.”

I sat down with him, and I sat down with a friend of ours. His name was Brandon Fulwider. Again, we’ve all stayed very close. We came up with this game plan. We contacted Rogue at the time. I told Rogue what I needed to make it work, and they built me a custom little rig.

It was the first time I ever met Kenny Castro, who’s Dave Castro’s brother, and one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet in your life. They just said, “Whatever you need, we’ll make it work.”

I did The Crush Games, and it went really well. That’s actually, funnily enough, how I became Steph The Hammer” I was doing a clean, and the workout was a max lift. I think my heaviest clean at the time was 36 pounds. For most people, that’s not a lot of weight, but for me, I was doing it from my knees. Dylan Maletsky was the announcer.

I was about to try to clean 42 pounds for the first time. I always feel like this moment was the ESPN top-10 moments. I had five seconds left in the lift, and the last second, I made it. He screamed on the microphone, “Steph The Hammer Hammerman,” and it just went nuts. From that point forward, I just loved the energy of being involved.

As they were getting ready for January for Wodapalooza, I got in contact with Guido. I was like, “Hey, I know you have no idea who I am. I’ve never met you before. I got your phone number from someone, and I would love to compete, just like I did at Crush Games.” He was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

I competed at Wodapalooza, and I was in my own little division. I had another athlete that was with me. Her name is Natalie Bieule. She is an amputee, but she decided that she wanted to go with the scaled women because she’s a badass.

I was like, “OK, that’s cool.” I ended up competing pretty much by myself. It was like this showcase, but people loved it. I went up to Guido afterwards, and I said, “If I could get 10 friends, or if I could get 10 guys and 10 girls to do this with me, would you let us compete? Would you let us have a division?” He said yes.

With the help of Chris Stoutenburg, who runs WheelWOD, we were very close, and he helped me program. He wasn’t at the event that year, but he helped me program. We created this division. In 2015, it was the first division. [laughs]

Your natural aptitude for dates is super helpful, by the way. When you ask most people when they started powerlifting, or weightlifting or CrossFit, they’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll give you a range of two years.” You’re like, specific day and “The first time I competed was this month, this year, and then this is the second time.”

I think though my fiancé, it’s frustrating for him because [laughs] I’ll remember all things. Certain dates, like we met on the 17th of November, so every 17th I do something. [laughs] I’ve always had an aptitude for dates.

It’s helpful here because we’re talking about the history of something that is still in its infancy. We were talking about the first time you competed in 2013 to fast forward over seven years later, and now we’re talking about seeing this at the CrossFit Games.

It didn’t happen overnight, but a lot of it was due to you putting yourself out there and you being bullied to showcase your fitness. That’s the first thing that whenever anyone competes, I don’t care if it’s weightlifting, or powerlifting, or CrossFit, Strongman, you name it.

The scariest thing is not the weight on the bar the first time you compete. The scariest thing for a lot of people is it’s the crowd. I remember my first weightlifting competition. I was like, “I’m OK lifting this, but I have to do this in front of people.”

Doing that in your own division, I can’t even imagine what that took, but also the excitement because all eyes are on you. When you hit a PR, it’s like everyone’s paying attention.

[laughs] Also, when you fail, it’s like, “Aah!”

I think too, what’s been so cool about the evolution of this, and I wrote this in the post that I wrote for…I didn’t mean for it to be picked up by CrossFit.

The one that got picked up was there are so many people now that do such incredible things. Yes, it’s cool to watch somebody with CP do their thing, but you don’t even know the amount of athletes with CP that can probably lift six times more than I can.

It’s cool to be the first or whatever and be this spearhead, but it’s really cool to watch other people shine. That’s what’s so special about our group of friends. In reality, that’s how it started.

It became this connection where I came in contact with Chris Stoutenburg. Then he was in contact with our friend Angel Gonzalez .Angel was out in Texas. Stouty’s in Canada, and then all of a sudden Kevin Ogar gets hurt. We reached out to Kevin. I remember reaching out to Kevin being like, “Hey, dude, I know, it sucks right now, but I want to be your friend.”

Not even a year later, we all end up in this space together, and it’s just magic. People look at us and they’re like, “Oh, man, it’s so inspiring,” or whatever. We look at each other, and we’re building each other up. We’re not necessarily inspired by each other’s everyday lives. We’re motivated by what everyone’s able to physically do

Show the world it’s not about these different abilities. It’s about what we can fucking [laughs] do together. That’s what is really cool. We’ve never once lost sight of the fact that it’s not a monkey show. [laughs] We’re not a circus act. We’re athletes that want to compete and want to have the opportunity.

Now that these athletes, like I said, it might not be myself, it may not be Stouty. It may not be the people that…We’re the I guess you’d say foundation, but we’re helping to push that forward, and giving people the opportunity to compete is really, really special. It’s nice to be heard.

I’m curious when along your journey of the past eight years, May 2012 to now, when you decided that you wanted to pursue coaching because I know that’s your profession these days. You’re CrossFit Level 2 or you’re Level 3?

I’m Level 2. I signed up for my Level 3, just I haven’t completed my Level 3 yet. My coaching happened very early on in my CrossFit journey. In 2012, I started CrossFit. I had graduated college a couple of weeks later, or I think that weekend later. I graduated in May 12 I think it was.

Again with the date. It’s impeccable.

[laughs] It’s so weird. It’s just in my head. I ended up going for my master’s degree in college student affairs. I wanted to be a higher ed professional. I loved student affairs, and I loved housing. I wanted to be an RA, but a head of the student body or whatever. That’s what I wanted to do in the beginning.

I got into my program, and I felt like nobody understood me. I was coming to my evening classes with grilled chicken and my chopped up vegetables and everything was weighed out, and I was doing my thing. I was doing good with my journey. I felt like nobody ever truly got me.

Then I had the opportunity to work for my Campus Rec. I was the first physically challenged individual to get a job working for the gym. At first, they didn’t want to give me the job. I was like, “Just let me prove to you that I know what I’m doing. [laughs] Let me prove to you that I can handle this.”

It was a lot of running around. It was 110,000 square foot facility, and they were so nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. Well, I did it. I really, really enjoyed my job. I got up very early. I did the morning shift, 5:00 AM shift, and then I would do the late evening shifts.

Little by little I started realizing that I truly loved being around people, and I loved talking fitness with people. Even the 65-year-old man that would walk into the gym at 5:00 AM and do his workout, it was nice to be able to have that interaction.

[laughs] I went to the dean of my college, and I was like, “Hey, we have to do this internship, right?” She’s like, “Yes.” I said, “Would you allow me to go do an internship at a CrossFit gym?” She’s like, “Well, let me think about it.”

She thought about it for a week. I was like, “Man, I really want to do this.” She’s like, “OK, if you can prove to me that there’s some correlation between Student Affairs and coaching, we’ll make it work.”

I met David Wallach — we call him Chef — from CrossFit Rubicon in Virginia. I ended up meeting him, and then Jason Sturm, who was one of his athletes but also one of his coaches. I went to visit their gym, and I fell in love with it.

After visiting their gym for a weekend, he looked at me and he said, “You know you’re going to be a coach someday.” I was like, “What do you mean?” I was like, “You really think I can do this?” He says, “Not only do I think you can do it, you’re going to work for me.”

Four months later, April in 2013, I ended up moving to Virginia, and I worked for him for four months. I actually failed my first Level 1.

That happens to a lot of people, by the way, like a driving test.

[laughs] I was the worst coach only because I was regurgitating information. I wasn’t actually learning, so I was just like, “Yeah, if I say this, it’s going to be right.”

I was making so many mistakes that at one point, Chef was like, “You’ve got to be yourself. Make your own shtick. Figure it out. You’re going to be great. Just calm down.” I passed my Level 1 and made some history with the school, and I just fell in love with it from there.

What is your does your coaching practice look like now? We’re in the age where a lot of people are coaching virtually. I know it’s a component of what you do, but what does Steph’s coaching look like now? What type of athletes do you work with and how many?

I had a CrossFit gym in North Carolina. Unfortunately, due to COVID, had to close it down. It was only two years old, but I was really proud of the community that we had built.

When COVID happened in March, I came up with this idea that I was like, “Hey, I can’t lose some of my members.” I was losing so many, and I was like, “How do I fix it?” I just created my whiteboard virtually. I did everything verbally, anyway.

I would be like, “David, show me how to do an air squat. You’re going to show Susan how to do it, and I’m going to talk you through it.” It just became so natural, because that’s how I did it anyway, that it just worked. We ended up closing Hammer Driven, and we started Staying Driven. It naturally came to become a thing.

What I didn’t expect was my members were sticking around. I’d still have probably eight or nine members from Hammer Driven. People from all over the world were hopping into my class, and 95 percent of my population now is adaptive.

That is impressive. How are people finding you? I know that a lot of folks have struggled in the transition. Unfortunately, you’re not the first person I’ve talked to who’s had to close a gym during COVID, but transitioning from, “OK, the gym’s closed,” to, “How do I build the audience online?” Where are these people finding you?

Honestly, I got out of my own way. A little tidbit that some people don’t know about me is I was super afraid of people with different abilities. I never wanted to be associated with them. I never wanted to be associated with any other people with CP.

I grew up in a very “normal,” able-bodied family in a normal, able-bodied community that I just felt like I never fit in. Then I found my CrossFit adaptive community, and I was like, “Hold on a second. These people are like me?” I found my groove.

When we started Staying Driven, my grandparents were the ones that said to me…They have an organization at NYU hospital that they helped build when I was seven years old. They started the Initiative for Women with Disabilities out of NYU hospital.

They came to me, and they said, “I know you’re running these classes, but these women have nowhere to go. There’s hundreds of them, and they have nowhere to go.” I was like, “OK, why don’t we just build a class time for them?” I built a separate class time for these women, and I learned very quickly what they were capable of doing.

I just started running classes, and then the word started getting out. Now we run individual memberships where you can join as an individual member. Let’s use a random organization. I don’t know, let’s just say WheelWOD wanted to sign up for a membership. They would pay a certain amount of money a month, and all of their members could come to a class.

It was a really interesting but fluid way of doing what I loved.

It sounds like a lot of basically word of mouth marketing which is the magic ingredient in everything in fitness that works.

It’s really cool. That’s a thing where you think about social media platforms. I have 23,000 people that follow me on Instagram. At first, that number seems like, “Oh, my God, it’s so important. I have to keep it up.”

Sometimes it can be really frustrating. You’re like, “Why am I not getting more or what am I doing wrong?” We put so much emphasis on the number of followers that we have. We forget that in real life, we’re actually affecting people’s lives.

That’s where it’s not about the number of people that follow me. It’s literally the number of people that are telling me every day, “Coach Steph, I learned how to do X, Y, Z because we started doing this eight months ago.”

At the end of the day, you’re just like that’s the coolest thing ever. It’s not about the 150 pounds on a bar. It’s about people learning how to stand up and sit down on their own or have a stronger core.

I’m super proud of the community that we’ve been able to build.

Where do you see yourself taking Staying Driven? What’s the next stage of Staying Driven I would guess?

My ultimate goal is that people find more confidence in themselves, and they realize that they can do more. Whether it’s COVID, or something else, there’s always going to be people that want to be functional. They don’t necessarily want to be competitive or stack themselves up against people.

My ultimate goal is to open the doors to as many people as possible. Just because the word adaptive is linked to sometimes people in chairs doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to use a wheelchair.

The person that comes in and they’re 350 pounds, and they want to have a day one. You’re going to treat that person differently than you would the person that’s been doing CrossFit for eight years.

That makes a lot of sense. We get caught up in following the CrossFit Games and in the media aspect of it. We get caught up in the elite. It’s easy to lose the sight of the forest through the trees.

99 percent of people who are using CrossFit as a fitness methodology, or any fitness as a methodology, aren’t going to compete most likely. Many of them have no plans of competing. What are you really producing this service for?

You’re not going to produce the next CrossFit Games winner all the time. They’re not going to walk into your gym. How are you helping people get a little bit better each and every day?

It seems I know, unfortunately, some coaches have lost sight of that. I know some are very in tune with that. What are some things that you do to receive feedback or have conversations with your clients and with your community outside of the normal sessions?

There’s a big misconception, I think because there was a rule in the beginning of the earlier CrossFit days that coaches shouldn’t be cheerleaders. We’ve heard that a lot. Coaches are not cheerleaders and vice versa.

But there is a fine line between supporting your athletes and being a straight up cheerleader. I truly make an effort — and all of my coaches do — to point out correction, but to also point out things that are amazing accomplishments.

Even the smallest of things for somebody that has…I’ll tell you a really cool story. I work with a little boy. He’s 11 years old. He’s nonverbal. He has spastic cerebral palsy. Let’s say he’s a little bit more…I say he’s very functional, but he cannot use his words without communicating with an external device.

When you initially see him, if you don’t have a background in knowing what the athlete needs, you could automatically push them to the side. What is so special about our community is that we never let that happen.

With LJ, one of the things that we worked on with him, I remember after our first class, I asked him, I said, “Hey bud, is putting on your shoes something important to you?” It took him a couple of minutes to respond to me, because he uses an external device. He said, “Yes, it would be very cool.”

I’ve spent multiple sessions with him just teaching him how to put his shoes on. It’s not necessarily because it’s my job, but it’s because I see potential in him.

As coaches, we need to remember that your athletes are people. Yes, there are that one percent that want to go the games, but the rest of your athletes just want to be better. They just want to be fitter people. They just want to be more capable of doing things for themselves.

I think that’s what’s really special about our community. What sets it apart is I take the athlete from never doing fitness ever in their life to realizing hey, I can do more. That’s what sets us apart. I don’t know if that was how to answer your question.

It was an incredibly illustrative example. You’re right. There’s this line between cheerleader and coach. In the early days of the CrossFit community, people wanted to take a bold sharpie and put it down the page. At the same time, it’s the coach’s responsibility to help people get better.

Encouragement or giving folks a glimpse into their potential is sometimes necessary for them to be able to take that next step or to hit that next level of self-exploration. I think it’s a good example. It’s a good example of that.

Sometimes it’s not intuitive. Sometimes it’s not about getting someone their first muscle up. Sometimes it’s about getting someone to come back consistently. You’ve been a coach for a while. You’ve dealt with this, trying to get members to make it a consistent thing.

I think too, it gives you the sense of if the people show up every day, you also know when they’re sandbagging. You also know when they’re not having a great day or that they can push themselves more.

Especially through COVID, I’ve learned that you can adapt to anything. You can take a can of soup and you can make it hurt. [laughs] You can take a pillow and you can make a real workout out of it.

It’s just getting out of our own ways that makes sense. The other thing that I’m super proud of is the staff and community that we did build. I really struggled with that in the physical location. I’ll be the first to admit it. Owning a gym was really, really, really hard.

I don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly, but I think that part of me thought…Everyone was telling me it would be an awesome opportunity to own a gym. It’s the greatest thing ever. It was great, don’t get me wrong, but it was very hard. I assumed Steph the Hammer is going to open a gym and everyone is going to come into it. That wasn’t the case. We struggled. We struggled really hard.

Doing this virtual thing, even though it was a shift, it’s been the best thing to ever happen to me, emotionally, mentally, physically. I’ve been through some shit. I don’t know. I think it’s helping me find my own purpose again.

Four years ago when I was diagnosed with cancer, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know where that was going to go and what I was going to do. I look back in it now, and I’m exactly where I meant to be.

Let me put it this way. I’m very glad that we were able to connect at this point, because during 2020, I scheduled a lot of podcasts. We do two a week at BarBend. It’s been a year where we catch people on…You have peaks and valleys, and we’ve caught people in valleys this year, and it’s been tough.

To hear that you’re in this renaissance of your own fitness journey as a fitness professional, it’s really nice to hear.

It’s nice to hear that out of something that’s difficult like closing a gym, you’ve been able to I don’t know if it’s reinvention or recentering, but it’s nice that you’re able to express this new-found, or re-found, rediscovered enthusiasm for something that you’re clearly very passionate about. That’s very cool. Thank you for sharing that.

You’re welcome. Like I said, I don’t know if I’m answering all of your questions.

Half of these aren’t questions. Half of these are like, “What do you think about this?” I think it’s a good time to be having these conversations. Right now, a lot of fitness is virtual.

Hearing about your experiences as a coach, helping people navigate that, helping a community navigate that that maybe a lot of our listeners haven’t thought of is really important. I think it’s really impactful.

I’ve been asked before like, “I’m thinking about opening a gym.” This is what I’ll say. For some people, it could be a great idea. I learned, and I learned some very hard lessons, that I’m a very good people person, but owning a four-walled business with a lot of overhead can be extremely difficult.

I learned a lot about understanding my own value and undervaluing myself because I did that. I did that very much so. Looking back at it, I learned a lot. If you’re looking to open a gym, just make sure that you understand what you’re getting into and your own value, and what your time costs and all that stuff.

If you undervalue yourself, people are just going to go with it. It’s not going to be malicious. It’s just that’s how it happens.

Steph, where is the best place for people to stay up to date with what you’re doing, as well as Staying Driven and where you’re taking that program next?

If people want to follow me on social media, it’s just @stephthehammer, just as it sounds. With Staying Driven, you can follow us on Instagram, @stayingdrivenfitness, or you can go to stayingdrivenlive.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you sharing a lot. We covered a lot of ground. [laughs] Thanks for that.

Thank you. I appreciate it.