In the Lab: Samantha Pugh on Training, Business, Injuries, and Chasing an Individual Season

Samantha Pugh’s setup tells you a lot before she ever touches a barbell.

There’s a full home gym, a bathroom built in because that was “a must,” cardio machines lined up, sandbags, stones, dumbbells, old jerseys from Granite Games, Wodapalooza, semis, and the Down Under Championship in Australia. There are keepsakes from Metcon Rush, belts hanging up, ropes everywhere, and enough details on the walls to make it clear this isn’t just a place to work out. It’s where a competitive CrossFit career has been built, one season at a time.

It is also very clearly Samantha’s space.

Her husband Alan jokes that there’s basically nothing in there with his name on it, and honestly, that tracks. The gym reflects exactly what her life looks like right now: disciplined, busy, a little chaotic, deeply committed, and always moving toward the next thing.

That next thing is a big one. After making the CrossFit Games as part of a team, Samantha is taking aim at an individual season again, with the Open, quarterfinals, Far East Throwdown, and NorCal Classic and online semi’s all on the calendar.

But the real story is bigger than a competition schedule. It is about how she trains, how she thinks through a hard piece, how she manages injury, and how she balances elite-level CrossFit with running not one but two businesses.

A Training Day In Samantha Pugh’s Home Gym

The whiteboard for the day looked simple enough at first glance, at least in the way CrossFit workouts always look simple right before they punch you in the face.

The session started with a 15-minute AMRAP of:

• 10 deadlifts

• 10 chest-to-bar pull-ups

• 10 hang power cleans

• 10 strict handstand push-ups

Then came five minutes of rest.

At the 20-minute mark, the second piece began. Every four minutes for 20 minutes:

• 15 calories on the Echo bike

• 15 thrusters

• 15 calories on the Echo bike

After that, there was a 6-8 sets of a clean complex:

• 1 power clean

• 1 hang power clean

• 1 jerk

The goal there was to build heavy, then finish with additional skill work.

Her programming comes from Brandon Luckett at The EMOM Company, and Samantha follows the broader EMOM programming rather than getting a custom athlete-only version. Her reaction to that is pretty straightforward: no special treatment, everybody gets their ass kicked equally.

How She Approaches Hard Conditioning Pieces

The second workout of the day was exactly what Brandon had warned her it would be: lungs and legs. No tricks. No mystery. Just suffering.

Samantha’s approach to that kind of workout is practical and disciplined. She does not come out hot just because the piece looks short enough to get away with it. She uses the first round to test the pace, then settles into something sustainable.

Her mindset is simple:

• Find a pace that allows her to keep breathing under control

• Recover quickly enough to attack the next set

• Avoid the kind of early redline that ends the workout before it really starts

On the Echo bike, she tracks cadence rather than wattage. For that workout, she targeted around 65 cadence on the first bike, then closer to 62 on the second bike once fatigue hit.

That detail matters because it shows how experienced athletes often simplify hard efforts. Instead of getting lost in too many numbers, they pick one metric they trust and use it to stay honest.

The workout hurt where it was supposed to hurt. The second bike was rough. The thrusters did their job. On her own hate scale, thrusters landed around a seven out of ten. Not the worst movement in the world, but pair them with burpees and the answer changes quickly.

That is one of the more useful takeaways from how Samantha talks about training: context matters. A movement is never just a movement. The feel of it depends on what came before, what comes after, and how the whole workout is built.

Why She Uses Grips For Some Gymnastics & Not Others

Samantha has a gymnastics background, and it shows in how she handles bar work.

For a long time, she did not wear grips at all. Now she uses them selectively, mostly for chest-to-bar pull-ups and ring muscle-ups. For toes-to-bar, she still prefers to go without them.

Part of that comes from being a former gymnast. In her mind, “real grips” feel very different from the CrossFit versions, and she has never loved the feel of the standard CrossFit grip. Even now, she feels like her natural grip on the bar is often better without them.

That goes against what a lot of people expect. Many athletes assume grips are always the better option. Samantha’s experience is a reminder that your background, hand strength, and movement history can shape what actually works best for you.

People still comment on it when they see her hanging from a rig without grips, usually some variation of: how are you doing this? Her answer, basically, is that she trusts her hands.

Training Through Injury Has Become Part Of The Routine

Samantha jokes that she apparently only operates off injury, but behind the joke is a real pattern. She gets hurt almost every year.

Recently, she had been dealing with a glute strain that made running and lunging painful. It had only been around for a couple of weeks, but enough to require modifications. In situations like that, she communicates with Brandon and swaps in extra biking when needed.

That flexibility matters for competitive athletes. The goal is not to pretend the issue does not exist. The goal is to keep training productively without turning a manageable problem into a bigger one.

Her most serious recent injury was a torn lat last year, which happened during a bar muscle-up. She felt it pop right in her armpit and could not hang from a rig for six weeks.

Still, she made it through the Open.

That part says a lot about her toughness, but it also says something about how elite athletes adapt. If one movement category gets taken away, they keep finding ways to compete with what is left. In her case, that meant doing what she could, even if the options were limited mostly to cleans.

What Being Sick Looks Like When You Still Have To Train

Even being under the weather does not completely stop the machine.

Samantha admitted she probably should have rested more after getting sick, but her default setting is pretty obvious: keep moving and figure it out. When illness shows up, she tries to train at a reduced effort, around 60 to 70 percent, and keeps her coach informed.

It is not glamorous, but it is realistic. There is a big difference between chasing perfection and chasing consistency. Samantha clearly leans toward consistency.

“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

That line lands as a joke, but it also captures the edge a lot of competitive athletes live with. They are always trying to find the line between smart restraint and losing momentum.

The EMOM Company, Team Success, And A New Individual Goal

One of the more interesting parts of Samantha’s season is how it fits into her larger competitive timeline.

She had considered retiring after the Games last year.

That might sound surprising, but she has been doing CrossFit competitively for nine years, essentially since she graduated college after gymnastics. She joined CrossFit right away, met Alan through it, and got into competition immediately.

Last year was her first full year under EMOM programming as part of a team. This year is her first full year under that system as an individual, and she wanted to give that a real shot before making any decisions about stepping away.

That is a meaningful distinction.

She made the CrossFit Games as part of a team, which was a major milestone and one she marked permanently with a “Keep Chasing” tattoo. The team had told Brandon that if they qualified, they would all get it. Samantha did. Hannah and Jordan did too. Josh, who has no tattoos, did not.

The tattoo means more than a team moment. For Samantha, making the Games had always been a goal no matter how she got there.

As an individual, semifinals had been the farthest she had gone. This season is about finding out what is still there when the focus shifts back to her alone.

The Season Ahead: Open, Quarterfinals, Far East Throwdown, and NorCal Classic

Samantha’s current competition plan is clear:

• The CrossFit Open

• Quarterfinals

• Far East Throwdown

• NorCal Classic

Far East Throwdown is a big marker because it is tied to a trip to Korea, which she described the way many athletes describe major travel competitions: nervous but excited.

She also recently completed the Asia qualifier, where a small setup note forced her to redo one of the workouts three times in three days. It was not because of a score issue. It was because Alan caught a detail that could have resulted in a penalty, specifically a bar bouncing over the tape line.

That kind of story highlights how tight online qualifiers can be. Sometimes the line between qualification and disappointment is not fitness. It is execution, standards, and paying attention to details when you are already tired.

And in her case, every redo actually got faster.

There was also a tiebreak situation in the standings where another athlete finished on the same point total. The deciding factor appeared to be number of event wins.

The Side Of Competition People Do Not Always See

Samantha’s life is not just training blocks, recovery, and event calendars.

She also owns a nutrition business, works with online clients, does personal training, and recently started a cleaning business that has taken off much faster than expected.

That business started only a couple of months earlier and gained momentum almost immediately after she posted about it on social media. From there, word of mouth did the rest. Deep cleans, biweekly clients, a couple of businesses, and enough demand that she is already thinking about eventually bringing on a second or third person.

Right now, though, she is still doing the work herself.

That means a day can include:

• A 6:00 a.m. training session

• Breakfast

• A second training session a couple hours later

• Lunch

• Then heading out to clean a house or business

On the day in question, she had a hair salon to clean after training, about a two-hour job. Not terrible, in her words. A deep clean, though, can take six hours, and there is no chance she is training afterward.

Still, she does not mind the work. She likes being busy, and by her own description she is an OCD person, so the cleaning side fits her personality.

Pricing was something she had to figure out quickly. Her approach has been to base it largely on square footage and compare rates against what other companies in the area typically charge.

That combination of elite athlete and working entrepreneur is worth paying attention to. A lot of high-level competitors are not living in a fantasy world where all they do is train. They are building things around the training, trying to make a life that works.

Not Ready To Hang It Up. 

Samantha was honest about being torn after last season. Part of her wanted to be done.

That feeling makes sense after nearly a decade in the sport. Competitive CrossFit is not just workouts. It dictates what you eat, what you do socially, how you travel, how you recover, and how much of your life revolves around being ready for one more test.

As she put it, when you are a competitor, your life is this.

And yet she is still here.

Part of that is because she is not ready. Part of it is because she wanted to see what an individual season under EMOM would look like. And part of it, clearly, is because the pursuit still matters.

That tension is familiar to a lot of athletes. You can feel the fatigue of the lifestyle and still love the chase. You can imagine a simpler life and still not be ready to let go of the thing that has shaped you.

The Support System Behind The Athlete

If Samantha is the one doing the workouts, Alan is very much part of the operation around them.

She describes their dynamic in a way that will sound familiar to plenty of competitive couples: she shows up and does the work, and he helps handle the harder logistical stuff around it.

That includes things like catching qualifier notes she might miss, helping keep the bigger picture organized, and being invested enough in the sport to know exactly what is at stake.

There is a reason so many good athletes have strong people around them. Not because they cannot do it alone in a technical sense, but because serious competition gets easier to sustain when someone else is helping carry the mental and practical load.

Life In A Gym Built At Home

Samantha and Alan have lived in their current place for almost three years, and the gym has been there the whole time. The back section was added later after they broke through into what had originally been a shed.

Now it functions as a serious training environment with room for strength work, cardio, gymnastics, and all the little bits of gear that collect over years of competition.

It is also personal.

The jerseys on the wall tell the story. The equipment is not decorative. The bathroom is practical. The whole setup reflects someone trying to remove as many excuses and inefficiencies as possible from the training process.

That matters when your schedule is packed. It is easier to fit two training sessions into a day, plus business responsibilities, when your gym is right there and fully set up.

A Competitor With Plenty Left To Prove

Late in the conversation, Samantha had one playful message for someone in the sport media world: Brian Friend is on her list for ranking her too low. The latest slight, in her mind, was getting placed around 80th out of 100.

There is humor in it, but there is also a real edge there. Athletes remember where people put them. They remember what expectations are attached to their names. And they absolutely use that as fuel.

That may be one of the clearest themes around Samantha Pugh right now. She is experienced enough to know how hard this path is, banged up enough to understand how fragile a season can be, and still motivated enough to care when somebody says she belongs lower on the list.

That combination can be dangerous in a good way.

What Stands Out Most About Samantha Pugh

There are plenty of athletes who train hard. There are plenty who have home gyms, coaches, calendars, and goals. What makes Samantha stand out is the total picture.

She is trying to chase an individual CrossFit season while:

• Managing recurring injuries

• Coming off sickness without really shutting down

• Running a nutrition business

• Building a cleaning business from scratch

• Handling two-a-day training sessions

• Planning for major competitions, including international travel

And she is doing it with the kind of blunt honesty that makes people easy to root for. If something hurts, she says it. If a workout sucks, she says that too. If she considered retiring, she is willing to admit it. And if she thinks someone ranked her too low, they are definitely hearing about it.

That honesty is refreshing because it strips away the polished version of competition and leaves the real one. The real one is messy, demanding, and often exhausting. It is also deeply meaningful to the people who choose it.

For now, Samantha Pugh is still choosing it.

She is still chasing.