Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 938 is my conversation with Ryan Crouser, the three-time Olympic gold medalist and world-record holder in the shot put — the first person ever to win that event three times. Ryan is also a serious fly fisherman, fly tyer, and public-land bowhunter. We get into how he trains at six foot seven and 335 pounds, the technique innovation he calls the Crouser slide, his regimented diet, and how fishing has helped him win gold medals.
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Ryan Crouser is a three-time Olympic gold medalist and world-record holder in the shot put — the first person ever to win the shot put three times at the Olympics. At six foot seven and around 335 pounds, he trains on his own five-acre property in Northwest Arkansas. He is also an avid fly fisherman, fly tyer, and public-land bowhunter who runs a YouTube channel mixing training with outdoor content.
Ryan balances raw strength with mobility and athleticism. His rule of thumb for being competitive at the U.S. level is the three-four-five-six: a 300-pound snatch, 400-pound clean, 500-pound bench, and 600-pound squat. His own bests are around a 352-pound snatch, a 425 power clean, a 550 bench, and a 725 back squat. He does a lot of flexibility and rotational work because throwing a 16-pound ball requires being a genuinely good overall athlete.
The Crouser slide is the technique innovation Ryan developed in December 2022 and debuted in 2023, breaking the world record that May. As one of the tallest shot putters at six foot seven, he is confined by the seven-foot ring. The extra lateral step shifts his center of gravity over his left foot and effectively makes the ring feel bigger, giving him more room to generate force without being pulled toward the toe board.
Ryan treats fishing as a mental reset that supports his training. As a professional athlete he can only train productively about six hours a day, so he sneaks away for half-day trips around Northwest Arkansas — trout on the White River, smallmouth, bass, and a strong striper fishery. He is primarily a streamer guy and a dedicated fly tyer who fishes flies he ties himself, having tied roughly 6,000 of them.
Ryan eats a tightly regimented diet to support five to six hours of daily training. In his mid-twenties he ate around 6,000 calories a day; now in his thirties he is closer to 4,400 to 5,000 depending on the season, and takes in roughly 350 grams of protein, much of it from wild venison he harvests himself. He eats to recover rather than to satisfy hunger and uses micellar casein before bed for overnight muscle recovery.
Ryan treats every competition as a standalone event, irrelevant to what he has done before. His motivation, the same one he had in middle school, is simply to be the best he can be on that day. He says if you walk onto the field knowing you did everything possible to prepare, you are very hard to beat — and even if someone beats you, there was nothing more you could have done.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 938 with Ryan Crouser is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and iHeartRadio. The video version is embedded at the top of this page.
I watched Ryan win gold this year and the time before that, and the thing that pulled me in was not just the medals — it was that he is a real fisherman and hunter who trains every single day, the same way I do. I found his channel by searching Ryan Crouser fishing, and his training looked nothing like what I expected from a powerful athlete: enormous amounts of mobility and flexibility work. I came into this one as a student, wanting to understand how the best in the world prepares.
Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page to hear the whole thing.
Ryan walks me through the balance between brute strength and mobility that throwing demands. He lays out the three-four-five-six benchmark and his own jaw-dropping numbers, including a 725-pound back squat. But what surprised me most was how much flexibility and rotational work he does. He is, in his own words, just trying to be a genuinely good athlete who can also throw a 16-pound ball farther than anyone alive. Listen to him break down the program.
This is the technique the Olympic broadcasters kept talking about. Ryan came up with it on a cold December night in 2022, just messing around in the barn, and within months he broke the world record with it. As one of the tallest throwers ever, he is boxed in by the seven-foot ring. The extra lateral step makes the ring feel bigger by shifting his center of gravity. He explains the innovation, and the surprising geopolitical history of shot put technique, in the episode.
Ryan can only train about six hours a day before it stops being productive, so fishing is how he clears his head and stays accountable the rest of the time. He fishes a lot of half-day trips around Northwest Arkansas, ties his own flies — around 6,000 of them — and leans toward streamers and mousing. He even paddled a kayak miles offshore to the Texas rigs in his college years. Press play in the YouTube player above to hear how he fits it all in.
Ryan's diet is the most regimented part of his life, and the part he likes least. He breaks down a day of eating — half a pound of ground venison and six eggs for breakfast, a pound of lean meat and rice at lunch, casein before bed — and explains why he never eats when he is hungry. He takes in around 350 grams of protein a day, much of it from deer he bowhunts on public land. Listen to him walk through it.
Listen to the full conversation: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · or watch in the YouTube player at the top of this page.
The day after talking to Ryan, the thing I kept replaying was his mindset on repeating. I have won fishing tournaments and always found winning the second or third time the hardest part. Ryan has won the most prestigious event in his sport three times by treating each one as a standalone and simply trying to be the best he can be on that day.
The other takeaway is how normal he is about all of it. A three-time gold medalist who ties size 22 midges, processes his own venison, and sneaks away for an afternoon of trout fishing. The discipline is extreme, but the love of the outdoors is exactly the same as everyone listening to this show.
Press play in the player above, or grab Episode 938 on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The Tom Rowland Podcast brings you long-form conversations with the most accomplished anglers, hunters, conservationists, and outdoor professionals in the game. Listen to every full-length Tom Rowland Podcast interview.
Ryan Crouser is a three-time Olympic gold medalist and world-record holder in the shot put, and the first athlete ever to win the event three times at the Olympics. A University of Texas graduate from the Pacific Northwest now based in Northwest Arkansas, he trains on his own property and developed the technique known as the Crouser slide. Beyond track and field, he is an accomplished fly fisherman, prolific fly tyer, and public-land bowhunter who shares his training and outdoor pursuits on his YouTube channel.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 938 with Ryan Crouser.
Tom: Hey everybody, and welcome to the Tom Rowland Podcast. We have a really great guest today, Ryan Crouser. You may have heard of him if you watch the Olympics — he's the three-time gold medalist in the shot put, the first person ever to win the shot put three times, and a world record holder. I wanted to talk to Ryan mostly because I know he likes to fish. He's got a great YouTube channel with outdoor content — he's a fisherman, a hunter, and he's got an awesome, well-trained dog that travels and hunts with him everywhere. Ryan also has a lot of knowledge about training — he's been at it since he went to school at the University of Texas, won his first Olympics four years later, his second four years after that, his third four years after that, and he's now training for a fourth, which would make history. So I wanted to talk to him about training, nutrition, fishing, and how fishing has helped him win some of these gold medals. Here we go.
Ryan: I'm Ryan Crouser, three-time Olympic gold medalist and world record holder in the shot put, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom: Ryan, what's going on man, how are you?
Ryan: I'm good, just hanging out at the house today, knocking out some media stuff and getting ready to train.
Tom: I watched you win the Olympics this year, and the ones before — three-time gold medalist, that is amazing. I saw you're six-foot-seven, 320 pounds — incredibly flexible, obviously incredibly strong. How did you end up in the shot put instead of some other big, powerful-athlete sport?
Ryan: I found my path on my own, growing up playing all sports — soccer, football, basketball, baseball. Track was actually one of the later sports I started, in sixth grade, because it was the first sport I could go out for and represent my middle school in — the 100 meters, high jump, long jump, shot put, discus, four-by-one, I was doing everything. I didn't focus exclusively on track until college, when I got recruited to the University of Texas to throw shot and discus. In the years between middle school and college I played football — I was actually quarterback my freshman year, the tall skinny kid — and basketball too, but I found success in the throwing events and it resonated with me on a personal level, because I felt like it was where I could judge myself well. That feeling of a personal best, where you put in the work and you can see, clean and simple, I'm the best I've ever been — that threw me in at a young age and continues to motivate me to this day.
Tom: What was it like going to your first Olympics? Were you still in college?
Ryan: I had just graduated, and it's a funny story — I finished my undergrad in 2015, but I've never been a fan of graduations, so I skipped my undergrad ceremony, which upset my mom since she and my dad were coming down from Oregon to Austin to watch. I graduated with my master's in May of 2016 and skipped that graduation too, to go to my first professional track meet. I made the Olympic team six weeks later, and I'd been a bit of an underdog going into the Olympic trials, then a bigger underdog going into the Olympics themselves. My preparation was going perfectly — graduating from college and then having the opportunity to be a true professional athlete, training every day instead of also going to class for five or six hours, made all the difference. I felt like a year's worth of progress happened in six weeks, and I had a surprise victory at the 2016 Olympics.
I've been a full-time professional track and field athlete since 2016. Our bread and butter is multiple meets, both in the U.S. and predominantly in Europe, since track is a much more popular sport there — anywhere from ten to twenty competitions over in Europe, maybe four or five in the U.S., revolving around the major championships, the Olympics every four years or World Championships every two years.
Tom: One of the things I was most interested in was that you like to fish too, and you've got some really good videos on your YouTube channel — just Ryan Crouser on YouTube. I watched your training video, and I loved it — you're doing a tremendous amount of mobility and flexibility work, which I wasn't expecting. Do you train differently than other powerful athletes?
Ryan: There's a balancing act in throwing — you have to be big and strong, since it's about throwing a sixteen-pound ball as far as you can, but there's also a level of mobility needed to use that strength. You have to be flexible, be a good athlete in general, be able to rotate, jump, and sprint. The rule of thumb for making it competitive at U.S. trials or U.S. championships — top twelve or sixteen in the country — is roughly a 300-pound snatch, 400-pound clean, 500-pound bench, and 600-pound squat. There are guys stronger than that too. For me, I'm around a 350 to 355 snatch, a 425 power clean, bench right around 550, and my best back squat is 725.
Tom: That's serious power, man. So I train with my dog every day too — what's the story with Coda?
Ryan: She's a two-year-old black lab, wired to hunt, and for whatever reason we've had a crossover into fishing too — she's channeled a hundred percent of that drive from bird hunting into fishing as well. She watches every cast and lets you know if you swing and miss on a hookset. She trains with me at the house every day and goes just about everywhere with me. My training facility is actually on my own five acres — a shop with a weight room, and on the backside of the property a throwing ring with a landing area.
I actually like training with other people — I have a couple of athletes who come to my house and train, so I get the intensity and competitiveness of training with others, but I don't have to worry about scheduling conflicts with a facility. I got gun-shy during the pandemic, when as a post-collegiate athlete I was so reliant on the university, and when it shut down I ended up training in my college coach's two-car garage for a full Olympic year. After that I realized I needed to be independent and insulated from whatever's going on at a university. I train super early in the morning — I've got three kids, and when they were growing up that was my time, otherwise it just disappears. My wife is a saint, she deals with me training in the garage every morning.
As an Olympic athlete, income mainly comes from two places — sponsorship, and meet appearance fees and prize money. It's a fragmented sport without the league structure of the NFL or NBA, so every meet is its own negotiation, which I have an agent handle. A few Olympic gold medals help, of course.
Tom: Did I see something about a partnership involving Coda?
Ryan: She's the breadwinner at this point — we partner with Nulo dog food, and it's been a fantastic partnership. As an athlete, nutrition has always been key to my performance, and I wanted to make sure Coda was getting the best nutrition possible too. Nulo's Fuel Incredible campaign works with athletes and supports their dogs through proper nutrition, and it's made a real difference — feeding her the highest-quality food channels her drive and her focus properly. On different foods she'd get erratic and moody.
Tom: How has your diet changed since your first Olympic medal?
Ryan: It's constantly evolving, partly because the science gets better and partly because everybody's different, and I'm different at 24 or 25 than in my early thirties. The big thing is caloric intake — my metabolism has slowed down and my goals have changed. At 24 or 25 I was eating right around 6,000 calories; today I'm still around 5,000, especially right now because I'm training to gain weight in the off-season general preparation phase, doing longer sessions and building work capacity, which burns a lot of calories. Once I'm in season I'll probably drop to around 4,400.
This year was the first year I've ever felt a little heavy — I got up to 340 and cut down to 333 or 335, and I think if I can be at 330 but a little leaner, that's ideal. I've always been underweight, both compared to where I think I should be and compared to the competition — guys like Joe Kovacs are six-foot on a good day and heavier than me at 335 to 340. I'm one of the tallest shot putters out there; most guys are 6'1\" to 6'3\" at the same weight as me. Being taller can be an advantage if you use it properly, since you have longer levers, but the ring is only seven feet, so it can also be a disadvantage because I can't sprint across it the way shorter, more dynamic guys can. If I line everything up right I can use the height to my advantage, but a mistake costs me more.
Tom: Is that why you came up with your technique, the Crouser Slide? I saw the announcers talking about that extra step during the Olympics.
Ryan: The goal is always to throw farther, but a large part of adding that lateral step was to make the ring feel bigger, giving me more room to work. It shifts my center of gravity out over my left foot, so the ring feels bigger than if it's right between my feet pulling me toward the toe board. I had a bunch of space on my right side I wasn't using, so I figured I might as well incorporate it — I took a shot in the dark in December of 2022, throwing in the barn on a cold Friday night just messing around, and it clicked. I started using it in competition in 2023 and broke the world record with the new technique that May.
It's actually a rabbit hole, the evolution of shot put technique — it gets into some geopolitical history. The East Germans and Europeans developed the glide technique as state-sponsored athletes who only competed at major championships, since that's what they were evaluated on. Americans, who are self-funded and have to compete a lot more, adopted the spin technique early, which led to bigger throws but underperformed at major championships. You're starting to see the Europeans get away from the glide and adopt the spin in the last ten or fifteen years. The technique has been shaped a lot by the political support systems of sport in different countries going back to the 1950s.
Tom: One of the things I noticed on your channel is that you use fishing as a way to get away from training and clear your head. How did you even start fishing?
Ryan: I've been fishing as long as I can remember — my dad has pictures of me in a backpack reaching for a smallmouth bass he's holding at six or eight months old, and pictures of me trying to hold up a trout while I was still learning to walk. I grew up in Oregon, which has really good smallmouth fishing, but salmon and steelhead were king. Idaho has good smallmouth in impoundments too, though I've never found much smallmouth in the rivers there — my trout fishing in Idaho has all been trout fishing. I actually started as a guide on the South Fork of the Snake River, near Jackson, for a long time, and I did a shot put competition in Pocatello, Idaho, one January, then went to Sportsman's Warehouse for warm clothes and fly fished the Snake in single-digit temperatures.
Tom: Do you prefer fly fishing or spin fishing?
Ryan: Tough call — if I'm fishing, I'm happy. I do a lot of fly tying, almost exclusively fishing flies I've tied myself, probably an hour a day almost every day. I love bass fishing too — anytime I'm on the water I'm happy. I love saltwater fishing as well, though we're a bit landlocked in Arkansas. When I was at the University of Texas, every weekend I could, I'd go out to the Texas coast in the summer kayak fishing offshore to the rigs, one to three miles out — the farthest I went was about nine miles, with the closest rig about a mile and a quarter out. I caught some kings, cobia, even a couple of mahi from the kayak.
Tom: Did your coach know you were paddling nine miles out in a kayak while preparing for the Olympics?
Ryan: Once I was fully in, in 2016, I couldn't do that anymore — that was mostly 2013 through 2015 summers. The biggest fish I caught from the kayak were some really nice cobia and kings, and sharks — a blacktip pushing maybe 70 inches, and a couple of big tiger sharks that I wanted nothing to do with, eight or nine footers next to a twelve-foot kayak. Cobia in the kayak, you just tire them out, get a good grip on the mouth, and kind of hug them until they calm down while they're in your lap.
Tom: In that bass fishing training video, where was that?
Ryan: That was at Lake Eucha in Oklahoma — I have a love-hate relationship with that lake, some really good fish over five or six pounds, but for every great day there are a couple of gray ones. To clarify, I'm from the Pacific Northwest but living in Northwest Arkansas now, about thirty minutes from Oklahoma.
Tom: You're having a great year in football too — I saw you were at the Texas–Georgia game.
Ryan: Yeah, they recognize Olympians in the first quarter, and I stayed down there for the rest of the game — not the one to have gone to necessarily, but it was a great atmosphere. The whole college football experience has changed so much in the last ten years — the lights, the video board, drone shows with fireworks going off the drones themselves. I think if I were in the fireworks business I'd be a little worried, because drone shows can do things fireworks simply can't.
Tom: You said track is a much bigger sport in Europe — what does a big international meet look like compared to what Americans think of as a track meet?
Ryan: It's a much bigger event over there — corporate groups get off work and go together, and a big meet will draw thirty, forty, fifty thousand people. An American thinks of a track meet as a Saturday that starts at nine a.m. and finishes at dark, but European meets are much more viewer-friendly, a fast two-and-a-half-hour run time with something always going on — races moving faster, plus two key field events running simultaneously, mascots, fireworks, much more of a fan experience.
Tom: What's on your fishing bucket list?
Ryan: Tarpon on the fly is at the top — I did that for so long as a guide in Key West. A permit would be right up there too, along with a GT, so Christmas Island or the north shore of Australia. I haven't made it to those yet — the farthest I've been saltwater-wise is Mag Bay in Mexico, and I've also been down to the Amazon for peacock bass on the fly, where I also caught arowana and a pretty good-sized redtail catfish. At Mag Bay we didn't get to fish offshore much because a hurricane was hitting Cabo at the same time, but we had a good time in twenty-foot-deep mangroves catching broomtail grouper and snapper. We don't have broomtail like that in the Keys, but we do catch goliath grouper around the mangroves, which is similar to how we fish for big largemouth with bass tackle down there — they're like baby goliaths that can be fifty pounds.
Tom: Do you have the time to take longer fishing trips while training?
Ryan: The fantastic thing about being a professional athlete is that you can only train productively for about six hours a day, but you have to be accountable the rest of the day, so I can sneak away for a fishing trip in the afternoon — mostly half-day trips within an hour of home. Being in Northwest Arkansas is great for that, with good trout fishing, smallmouth, bass, and a fantastic striper fishery. But I only take about two weeks off in the fall, so it's tough to talk friends and family into a trip to Australia with that little time — I'm just waiting until I'm retired, when I've got a whole list of trips planned.
Tom: What does retirement look like for you? Another Olympics?
Ryan: I'm all in through the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and then I'll be done — retiring after a fourth Olympics on American soil would be the dream come true.
Tom: Has anyone ever won four gold medals in the shot put?
Ryan: No — I was the first to win three, men's or women's, nobody had ever won it three times before.
Tom: I know we're about to run out of time, but I wanted to ask about the mindset of repeating. I've won fishing tournaments, but I've always had a hard time winning them twice. You've won the most prestigious athletic event in the world three times — what's the mindset for repeating, and how do you stay hungry enough to compete at that level for this long?
Ryan: A lot of it for me is treating each competition as a standalone event. You learn a lot from the process and being a veteran in the sport helps, but when you sit down and think about why you're doing this, it needs to be irrelevant to what you've done in the past — this is a standalone Olympics, standalone World Championships. What has motivated me is trying to be the best that I can be. I can control what I do, I can't control what the other guys do, so if I go in focused on myself, the same thing that motivated me in middle school, and I go out there and throw a personal best, I win no matter what happens. That mentality has made me successful year over year — if I walk out on the field knowing I did everything I could to be the best I could be on that day, you're not really going to lose, because even if someone beats you, there's nothing more you could have done. That level of confidence and preparation makes it hard to lose if you actually check all those boxes.
Tom: Do you like the process of preparing and training more, or the day of competition?
Ryan: Tough question, I like them both. You have to love the process, but nothing compares to that feeling of preparing for six, eight, twelve months and then walking out on the field with that blast of adrenaline, feeling like you can do anything. There's something about preparing for a long period of time, physically but especially mentally, that when you walk out there you just know you've got it on that day. You have to find that passion in the day-to-day, but nothing compares to walking out on the field feeling like Superman on the day of.
Tom: Right now you're eating five to six thousand calories some days. A lot of professional linemen, when they retire, don't want to eat as much anymore and lose a lot of weight. Do you foresee that happening to you?
Ryan: Oh yeah, the thing I look forward to most when the season ends is getting away from regimented eating. If you're feeling hungry in my training program, you're not doing it right, because that means your body is catabolic and you're eating muscle instead of recovering and gaining optimally. You never eat when you're hungry — you eat until you're full and then finish what's on your plate, which is pretty miserable. My cheat meal once a week is literally just skipping a meal. This morning was half a pound of ground deer and six eggs with two pieces of toast for breakfast, then yogurt and a protein shake before training, lunch is a pound of lean ground beef or deer with twelve ounces of rice, and dinner is whatever my fiancée is making for herself, since nobody in their right mind wants a pound of beef and a pound of rice for dinner every night. Before bed I do micellar casein protein in whole milk, since casein breaks down over about four hours, giving my body available protein while I sleep, which is a big part of recovery and muscle building.
At around 335 pounds I'm eating right around 350 grams of protein a day, a lot of it from wild sources — I just finished processing about 80 pounds of venison last night, which will get me through a couple of months. November is prime time for deer hunters, and I hunt mostly archery on public land here in Arkansas.
Tom: You're a fly-fishing, six-foot-seven, 335-pound bow hunter, fly tyer, shot putter, and three-time gold medalist — what else do you do? Play a musical instrument?
Ryan: No musical talent at all. It is ironic, though — my fiancée is in med school, and during her surgery rotation working on stitches, she's always been blown away by my hand dexterity from fly tying at a young age, saying I should have been a surgeon. You get used to tying size 22 midges and blooming olive dries down to a 22. I'm actually more of a streamer guy on the White River — if nothing's working there, you can almost bank on a midge, but I like tying big flies and throwing meat on heavy weighted lines, or mousing, which is my favorite.
Tom: Well man, I know you've got a busy schedule — I appreciate you coming by, and we should do a show together sometime.
Ryan: I'd love to. Every month I take three consecutive days off at the end of a four-week training block, so I might be able to sneak down to the Keys for a Saturday and Sunday.
Tom: Let's stay in touch — I'll get you my contact information. Thanks, Ryan, and congratulations on your third Olympic gold medal — I'm sure you'll go get a fourth. If you guys want to follow Ryan, check him out on YouTube — he's doing fishing, hunting, training, and throwing the shot put. Thanks so much, Ryan, we'll talk to you later.
Ryan: Thanks for having me.
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