CrossFit Coach Athena Perez Champions Scaled Fitness and Inclusive Training Methods

Athena Perez, known to the community as "Bean," brought eight years of hard-won coaching philosophy to The CrossFit Live Show on April 2, just three days after the 2026 Quarterfinals closed on March 30. Her central thesis: scaling should preserve workout intent, not dilute it.

The episode, archived on CrossFit's website, paired Perez's coaching conversation with a live WOD demonstration by Conor Murphy, a CrossFit Seminar Staff trainer and head of CrossFit Charlestown (Big Night Fitness) in Boston, Massachusetts. Murphy, a U.S. Navy veteran and CrossFit Games athlete (ID #32474), completed the daily WOD on camera, giving coaches and athletes a real-time reference for pacing, setup decisions, and movement standards.

Perez's credentials make her framework among the most institutionally validated in the scaled coaching space. Her "Working with Larger Bodies" seminar carries official approval from the CrossFit Certification Department for 8 CEUs of General Professional Development, making it one of the few independently created programs to earn that recognition from CrossFit's own certification arm. The curriculum covers the same ground she explored on air: how to build progressions that protect joints and breathing capacity while keeping the stimulus intact when loading or range of motion must change.

That framework carries particular weight for affiliates running competitive tracks right now. The episode aired two weeks before the Mayhem Classic in Cookeville, Tennessee (April 17-19), the first in-person Semifinal of the 2026 season. With the top 2,000 men and women from Quarterfinals now locked in, and Semifinals running from Cookeville through Paris on May 15-17, the immediate coaching challenge is getting athletes to the next stage without compounding injury risk. Adopting individualized scaling plans and rehearsing movement standards before competition windows are among the takeaways Perez's episode directly models.

Her own path threads through everything she teaches. Perez began sharing her CrossFit story publicly in 2018 and has spoken openly about navigating total knee replacements as both an athlete and a coach. She owns Scaled Nation CrossFit in St. Paul, Minnesota, and built Scaled Nation Training around a defined mission: improving the lives of athletes living with obesity by empowering their coaches through education and advocacy. Her book, "Lifting the Wait," documents that personal transformation. The Scaled Nation Podcast continues to push the scaled movement's practical role in functional fitness.

Murphy's live WOD rep bridged the episode's conceptual discussion with visible, in-box application. He has described joining CrossFit's Seminar Staff, the "red shirts" who run Level 1 and Level 2 certification courses, as a deliberate goal, wanting "to give to other people what they just gave to me" after leaving the Navy.

The 2026 CrossFit Games, the competition's 20th edition, runs July 24-26 at SAP Center in San Jose, California, with individual winners expected to take home $312,000 each, funded by 50% of Open entry fees. The pipeline from affiliate floor to Games podium depends heavily on the coaching quality built between now and then.