It’s kind of depressing to me. The idea that life is so miserable or unenjoyable that you need to dedicate time just to escaping it.

So, vacation is out. “Traveling” is in!

I just returned back from spending 2 weeks traveling in Italy, from hiking in the Dolomites to relaxing on the shores of Sorrento, with a couple stops to see some famous sculptures, artwork, and a former ancient civilization in between.

I am sad to report that unlike some people my entire personality will not be made up of this trip, and no I unfortunately did not get any tattoos to celebrate the occasion.

Instead, I kept a note in my phone about random thoughts that crossed my mind, and made an effort to write them down.

Without further ado, here are 46 thoughts I had while traveling abroad:

• when I turn my chair diagonal and cross my legs, the meal is over

• Smoking (cigarettes, vapes, nicotine) is the grossest and most unattractive thing a person can do

• Community is the key to both happiness and longevity

• Americas biggest disservice to its public is not building walkable cities

• The quality of ingredients is single handedly the most important part of any nutrition plan

• People love to remember the positive things people contributed to history but so conveniently forget the negative

• Dairy is a superfood

• Eat local, eat in season, and eat fresh

• Learn to say please, thank you, hello, goodbye and I’m sorry in as many languages as possible

• A smile is recognized the same in every culture

• A sign of intellect is self-awareness in a crowd

• An Italian espresso is infinitely better than any espresso made in the States

• Creativity does not run endlessly

• Boredom is a necessary part of growth

• The concierge at a luxury hotel is worth the price alone

• Ask for a restaurant recommendation, then ask the waiter for a food recommendation, let them pick the wine; sit back and enjoy

• Always let the elderly, then women, sit down on public transport before you do

• A tour is a 10x better experience than wandering yourself, and a private guide is 10x the experience of a group tour

• Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure as hell buys convenience

• Never count your chips at the table (and don’t look at how much you spent while traveling)

• COVID drastically changed the tourism industry (for the worse)

• The world needs people who wait in lines

• Dressing well invites better experiences

• Why do people who live by a beach, travel to places to visit the beach?

• Exercise was America’s (poor) solution to an inactive lifestyle

• I believe mineral water single handedly cured my exercise and alcohol-induced headaches

• Closed mouths don’t get fed

• America’s success (and freedom) is fueled by capitalism, be careful for wishing it away

• Without incentive for growth innovation becomes stagnant

• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day only if you want it to be

• Always get dessert

• Don’t spend less, earn more

• Recommendations are 100x better than anything you could research on your own

• Business cards for people is dead, business cards for businesses is very much alive

• Having headphones in cuts you off from reality; do so sparingly

• Love people, not brands

• Culture rules geography, not maps

• Not looking for something is often the best way to find it

• Posture is a reflection of attitude

• Experiences are meant to be shared, not hoarded

• Speaking multiple languages is a power-trait

• If there is any audible sound coming out of your phone in a public setting (aside from ringing), I hate you

• An exasperated Italian saying “Mamma Mia” could win an Oscar

• German cars are best driven on winding mountain roads

• Bidets are amazing

• The United States of America is the greatest country in the world

Ciao!

(I told myself I wouldn’t do that, yet here we are)

- Trainer 01

But not just any supplement company, I custom formulated and launched my own product.

Today I’m going to tell you what the product is, why I created it, and how it can help thousands of people perform better, naturally.

If you’re eager to check it out, you can do so here: www.feelnoetic.com

*but you’re going to want to read the article for your special TLP discount code at the end!

FOCUS+ by Noetic

Focus+ is a cognitive performance supplement designed to enhance focus, concentration, and mental acuity for up to 5 hours.

It is made from all-natural ingredients (organic when possible), contains NO CAFFEINE, and has 0 sugar. It’s gluten free, non-gmo, and vegan as well.

Each ingredient is included at clinically effective dosages that are supported by multiple peer-reviewed literature, and every ingredient included has a specific purpose. While I did come up with the initial formula myself, I consulted with a chemist and formulation expert to ensure there were no contraindications and that the product would achieve maximum effectiveness.

I am fully transparent with my ingredients and the dosages of course, and there is no proprietary formula. Here is what makes Focus+ the best cognitive enhancement supplement on the market:

You might notice that these ingredients are the exact same ingredients that I wrote about in last weeks email about cognitive enhancers. I’ve spent nearly hundreds of hours of research ensuring that these were the best possible all-natural ingredients I could have included to deliver the effect I was after.

Focus+ is a high-performance supplement. It’s best use is for those looking to gain a mental edge in whatever it is they do best.

For professionals: your busiest days, late nights, and most stressful meetings are supported by Focus+ to help you think clearly, process information faster, and prevent mental fatigue under stress. Because it contains no caffeine you can work late without worrying about whether it will disrupt your sleep or not.

For athletes: being physically athletic is only one part of performance, the other is your intellect when playing the game. For sports like golf, tennis, baseball, even traditional sports like football or basketball; how well you mange the skillful aspects of the game can be the difference between winning or losing. Focus+ supports game-winning mental acuity at the biggest moments so you can perform confidently under pressure. Because it contains no caffeine you can expect a calm focus without a rise in heart rate or anxiousness.

For students: You don’t need to be in high school or college to study. Cognitive performance is crucial to any activity that requires memory or learning. Hobbies such as playing a musical instrument, learning a new language, or any skill you’ve picked up recently and seriously devoted to improving: Focus+ supports you on an efficient learning journey.

Why I Created Focus+

Most of you might recall that 2023 was the year of Project Par; my journey to lowering my Handicap Index as a golfer as much as possible in one calendar year. I was treating my preparation like a professional athlete, and documented the entire process along the way.

Between Project Par, writing for this substack, running my performance training business, starting an HRV-Education Course, and still trying to maintain the rest of my lifestyle that I enjoyed… I was mentally exhausted.

I have a high motivation to put in a lot of work, and I’m extremely disciplined when it comes to effort. But I continuously felt like there just weren’t enough hours in a day to do all the things I needed to, and I was consistently finding myself producing sub-par work that I was not proud of for no other reason than I had difficulty focusing on so many different tasks throughout the day.

Being hyper-engaged in golf practice was mentally fatiguing. Building an educational content on HRV was draining. Writing week in and week out took a lot of effort. Meanwhile my training business was still growing and having to maintain 100% effort and attention to my clients was priority #1.

I would be a liar if I said I didn’t consider prescription stimulants (we all know the ones), but I wasn’t comfortable with the risks of tolerance abuse and dopamine hijacking that they could cause.

I knew there were natural compounds like caffeine from coffee and L-theanine from green tea that had been used for thousands of years for performance, and so I wondered what other natural herbs and plants had traditionally been used for mental stimulation but were not popular in our current society. So I started researching.

I was stunned by what I found. Herbs like ginseng and ginkgo biloba were proven cognitive enhancers, yet I had never heard of them. Bacopa monnieri and L-tyrosine are extremely effective at reducing oxidative stress and helping the brain perform under fatigue, yet they were nowhere to be found in products I looked at.

And so throughout this process of looking for a product that I could take that contained all-natural ingredients for cognitive enhancement, but also contained NO CAFFEINE, I realized there was nothing out there that could do what I wanted.

That’s when the thought ran across my head… “Well, I could do this.”

And nearly 18 months later, I did.

www.feelnoetic.com

My Promise to You

At first I was a little worried about how it was going to be perceived that I had started a supplement company.

“Would people think I’m a sell-out?

Will this come across as a cash-grab?

Will they still trust that I have their best health & performance in mind?”

And I spent many nights over the past year and half debating whether I was going to launch this at all.

But there were two reasons I decide to go through with it:

1. I launched this product for me, and people like me. I didn’t cut a single corner when starting this business, getting it made exclusively in the USA from one of the best supplement manufacturers in the US so there wouldn’t be a question about quality (even though it was much more expensive). All of my ingredients are standardized to the effective compound, and sourced organically where possible (Lions mane, for example). I consulted with multiple experts along the way, and am 100% committed to producing the highest quality supplement that is possible. For me, and others like me.

2. I don’t give a f*ck what others think. I launched this product with the intention to help people perform. It has helped me lock-in on the golf course, increase my output at work nearly two-fold, and improve my mood and mental energy along the way. I’ve been taking it consistently for over a year now as I tested sample batches from the formulation process, and have not come upon a single negative effect. I was spending over $300/mo to source each of these ingredients separately for my own cognitive function stack, and to be able to bring a product to the market for less than 1/3 of that is something I’m proud of.

And so my guarantee to you, as someone who supports my work and trusts me, is this:

I promise to never lie or make false claims about ingredients I use in products, where they come from, or how they impact human physiology.

I promise to never sacrifice quality for profit margins.

I promise to never sell something that I haven’t taken and tested myself extensively.

I promise to prioritize all-natural ingredients that can be used effectively, sustainably, and with no long term risk to health.

What’s Next??

It’s been a long journey for me to launch this venture, and is a main reason why I haven’t written as much over the past year.

For now, I’m focused on building this business. I’ll still be training and providing sports medicine in Miami at a high-level, and the growth of Noetic has a long road ahead.

There’s still some aspects that I’m not content with:

• This product is not 3rd party tested (yet), but that is priority #1 for me hoping to be completed by early- to mid- 2025. The process to be 3rd party tested and verified is long and expensive. While I have seen the testing quality results from sourcing of the ingredients, I am going to apply for NSF Safe for Sport credentials as soon as possible.

• I do use some small amounts of Stevia to sweeten the product. It’s not a lot, but continuing to test natural sweetening ingredients while balancing a flavor profile that’s not terrible is a difficult task. I expect to improve the flavor profile and the ingredients used to make that profile exponentially in the next 6 months.

• Eventually, I would love to fund clinical trials to measure the effectiveness of my formula. This is the holy grail of a product, to be able to PROVE, scientifically, effectiveness for a formula’s purpose. While I know what I feel when I take it, and have received nothing but awesome feedback from initial customers, being able to objectify that via cognitive performance improvements in a lab would be a huge goal.

My Thanks to You

As I’ve always said from the beginning of this newsletter over 2 years ago, as a subscriber to Train Like a Pro you will receive the most benefits from anything I do and/or create.

This is no different.

Thank you for being along this journey with me and thank you for trusting me to guide you in the direction of positive health and performance.

If you choose to purchase the product, please use code “TLP” at checkout to receive 20% off your first order.

www.feelnoetic.com

The only thing I ask is that if you choose to purchase the product, once you’ve had the chance to use it a couple of times, provide me with your feedback!! If you are willing to leave a 5-star review on the website, that would be appreciated greatly. And if you have any feedback, positive or negative, do not hesitate to write me. I know how I feel when I take the product, but knowing how others react and what they do and don’t like is essential for me to continue to improve the product to help the most amount of people.

If you have questions on the product, ingredients, whether or not it may be right for you, or anything else, as always, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here to help.

Feel better, Live better.

- Trainer01

Expectations come in many forms and from many people. They can be positive or negative.

What an expectation does is puts you into a box. It defines the playing field. Tells you what you should, or should not, be doing.

Certainly there are people who are attached to expectations and find them highly useful . In life though, the last thing you want to do is be constrained to a certain way of thinking.

If a child was presented a problem, say, a puzzle. And they were told, “solve this puzzle”, we could assume the child would put forth an amount of effort to solve the puzzle. They might fail the first few times or grow frustrated at unsuccessful attempts, but given enough time and encouragement the child would eventually become a conqueror of puzzles.

Yet repeat the same scenario and this time tell the child, “I EXPECT you to solve this puzzle”, well now we’re dealing with a different burden. The child may feel the pressure of being successful. They might get nervous or anxious of what the consequences might be if they were to be unable to solve the puzzle. They might associate their ability to solve the puzzle with their self-worth as a person. So they try their hardest. But with that pressure comes mistakes, and an inability to think clearly or creatively. Their first few attempts are unsuccessful, and this starts a negative feedback loop of feeling bad about themselves. They try a few more times with even less impressive results. Do they continue to try and swim upstream or do they crumble under the weight of the expectations and admit their defeat as a failure?

That might be a little extreme for a child to solve a puzzle…

But what if we aren’t talking about a child, and certainly not talking about a puzzle?

What if you are that child, and your goals and aspirations are that mystery?

Today I’m going to talk about how expectations may be holding you back, and how releasing yourself of those expectations may just give you everything you need to finally put that last piece in place.

Hang on, this is going to get deep…

What is an expectation anyway?

It’s the predicted outcome of an event as viewed by the person holding it.

If I expect you to show up on time to our meeting, what I’m really doing is assuming you will be on time because of either a positive or negative consequence associated with the event.

If I’m an employer hiring for a position, well then I expect the interviewee to show up on time or else I won’t be offering them a position. There is the expectation, and then the (negative) consequence.

If I’m an employee interviewing for said position, well I have expectations for myself to show up on time because I want to give the best first impression that I can. And showing up on time is a way to ensure I did one more thing correctly to give myself the best chance at the job offer. There is the expectation, and then the (positive) consequence; which we can also refer to as a reward.

Hidden in the underlying meaning of expectations is the consequences or rewards associated with them.

But sometimes it’s not so clear.

A teacher might have expectations of their students to do their homework at home. What’s the consequence of not doing it? A failure to learn the material. Which means the student won’t pass the test. Which means the teacher didn’t do their job.

So the expectation by the teacher of the students doing their homework comes from the teachers desire to do their job well. If the students don’t do their homework not only will their learning be inhibited, but the teacher will be failing to uphold the very reason they were hired!

When you expect something, you aren’t just merely predicting an outcome. The whole concept of an expectation is that there is an associated consequence, reward, or judgement derived from either meeting or not meeting that expectation.

This is why expectations are a curse.

If I am playing tennis against an opponent, and I have been practicing hard and training hard for the past 6 months, I may be tempted to believe that I’m expected to win.

But what if my opponent is just better than me? What if they had more talent? More access to resources? More time to train? Would I still expect myself to win? Maybe, maybe not.

But if I go into the match with this expectation, should I lose, I will have lost a lot more than just the tennis match. I will have lost the game of value within myself.

Why did I expect to win? Was it because I thought I had a work ethic that was worthy of victory? No, that’s much too simplistic.

The expectation of winning in competition is that you are better than your opponent. So by expecting to beat my opponent before I knew who they were, I was already assuming that I had been practicing longer, harder, and more frequently than them.

And what if I lose? Will I be disappointed that I did not win? Of course. But I will also have to deal with the consequences of the cognitive dissonant lies I fed myself.

Did I lose because my opponent was better? Or did I lose because I hadn’t practiced enough? Or because I did X, Y, Z…

By going into the match with expectations, I now have to weigh the result against my expectations and try and figure out what went wrong. But what if my expectations were not in line with reality to begin with? What can I learn then? Nothing.

Expectations are judgements applied to actions (outcomes), and nothing more.

While it’s good to be hesitant at judging and jumping to conclusions, it’s even better to avoid being judgmental about the outcome of an event. The mental dexterity required to hold an expectation and then have to re-form it once it’s been either validated or invalidated is a lot of work.

Like in the tennis example; expecting myself to win is judging myself.

• In the positive light: I am a winner. I am good. I have succeeded.

• In the negative light: I am a loser. I am bad. I have failed.

Both the positive and negative reactions are only possible if there is an expectation before the event starts.

Should I go into the match with a neutral attitude; one where I have no expectations of the outcome, I can rid myself of having to execute judgement. I am simply prepared to play to the best of my ability and to allow the outcome of the game to be determined by my effort.

Well, should I lose in that example there ARE no polarized reactions. I lost because my opponent was better than me today. That simple.

I did not lose because of some difficult technique I haven’t been taught yet. I didn’t lose because they practiced harder and longer and more frequently than that (although could be true).

Without the expectation, I can view the outcome for what it really is.

Just a point in time that demonstrates the spirit of competition.

There are 4 ways to view an outcome or event:

1. Positively

2. Negatively

3. Neutral

4. And not at all

We’ve already talked about how expectations force you into a positive/negative reaction.

And I mentioned how by withholding expectations you gain access to the third perspective, neutrality.

But what is the 4th? What does it mean to not hold a perspective at all?

Neutral and Not at all are very much like the colors, black & white. Where black is the absence of color, and white is the combination of ALL colors.

Being neutral is like the color white; it is understanding both the positive and negative judgements that may be held, and choosing neither. It is acknowledging that those judgements exist yet exerting control over not holding them.

Having no perspective at all is like the color black. It is the absence of any one perspective.

Hang with me here, we’re going to get existential…

The absence of perspective is not being devoid of perspective. It is the balance between holding no perspective at all, and holding every perspective.

A fine line is drawn between all or nothing, or is there no line at all?

Ok. If you’re sufficiently confused we’re ready to jump into some examples.

What is the difference between acknowledging the positive or negative judgements that can be tied to your expectations - choosing neutrality…

And holding space for all possible outcomes while acknowledging none of them, therefore taking on no perspective at all? (or every perspective)…

Back to tennis.

I learned my lesson about going in to a match with an expectation that I’m better than my opponent and should win.

For my next match, I’m much more cognizant of expectations. So this time I’m simply going to commit to playing to the best of my ability. Whether I win or lose, I will remain neutral, careful not to feed into positive or negative judgements about myself. I will use the information from the match (win/lose) in order to make changes to move towards a result I want.

AKA - if I lose, I will not be emotionally attached to the outcome. I will simply look at the facts as to why I lost, and commit to practicing to improve upon those weaknesses.

*plays match*

I lost. Bummer. I’m not upset!

I lost because my opponent had a much better forehand than me, and I couldn’t break his serve. Two very fixable problems.

And so I go back to practice my forehand, and I work to improve my service returns.

And so on and so forth does this process repeat as I continue to play the game of tennis.

Seems pretty… cold, no? It’s almost robotic. Input → outcome → analysis → output.

Play. Analyze. Practice. Repeat.

Is that how we should be living life??

Trick question… “should” implies there’s an expectation for how we live life… Remember: No expectations!

Is that how we want to live life? Like a robot moving from one analyzed outcome to another?

I can’t speak for everyone, but the monotony of that sounds very boring.

This is where the dimension of perspective #4 comes in: no perspective at all (yet every perspective at once). A bit paradoxical, I know, yet such is life.

What if I approached my next tennis match without expectations, without judgements, but with the consciousness that playing is an experience to be lived?

Instead of aligning my focus on the outcome, or focusing on not focusing on the outcome; instead of acknowledging positive and negative judgements and choosing neutral; instead of thinking of not thinking of feeling emotions and trying not to allow those emotions to affect me…

What if I just committed to the full experience of playing tennis?

What if I tried my hardest, gave it my full effort, and allowed the outcome to be just that… an outcome?

What if I neither accepted or denied the possibility of winning or losing, allowing both options to exist in balance with each other. One must happen, after all.

And when the match was over, and I had to come to terms with the outcome, I accepted the fate that occurred as a result of my decisions, both past and present.

I won or lost because of my practice, skill, and performance both leading up to the match and during it. The outcome was the outcome, and there is nothing I can do to change it now.

Of course being the competitor I am, and having accepted the reality of the outcome, I can move into using that experience to improve. Seeing where my strengths and weaknesses lie and how those attributes contributed to the context of the match, and then using that as feedback that will affect my future decisions.

Do you see now?

The difference between being neutral in expectations, ie: “I have no expectations for this match”, and having no expectations at all, “I am committed to playing tennis to the best of my ability” is a small but significant shift in perspective.

The first one is still allowing the expectation, or lack of expectation, to exert power over our mental state.

Whether you win or lose, you still feel the judgement of performance, yet you choose to ignore it and mentally overcome it.

The second one is seizing that power and allowing expectations to both exist and not exist simultaneously.

Whether you win or lose, you do not feel the judgement of performance, because you are living in the experience of the moment, of playing the match.

Once again, I know the paradoxical nature of this may be confusing. Or it may make perfect sense. That depends on your perspective…

With the woo-woo perspective stuff said, my message to you this week is this:

Be careful of what you expect from yourself, for your judgements may not serve you.

Be careful of what you allow others to expect from you, for their judgments may not serve you.

When you are able to rid yourself of judgments that result as a consequence (or reward) from expectations, you will be one step closer to accepting reality for the way it is.

And if you are able to reach a point where you accept reality for the way it is, you can return to living in the moment in its purest form. No expectations, just experience.

When you live in the experience, the outcome is irrelevant.

Without expectations, and without judgements, you are exactly where you are supposed to be and you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing.

Everywhere, everything, all at once. And none at all.

They are the same.

- Trainer 01

He’s an old student of mine when I used to teach seminars and often refers me clients when they have a particular problem.

It’s always a bit funny because he never tells his clients much about me or my work, simply that they need to “go see Trainer 01* - he will fix that”.

*no one calls me Trainer 01 in real life, although I think it could catch on. Will have to work on that…

After I’m done taking the health history intake, I like to ask the new client, “What do you know about me?”

And the response is almost always, “Uhh. Nothing really. Person X just said I needed to come see you and that you could help me.”

I always chuckle a bit, because it’s not lost on me how in the beginning of my career I used to be so concerned about making sure people knew who I was and what I was capable of. I had 2 degrees and a host of skills! People needed to know!!!

And yet no one really cares about your credentials or experience. They care if you can fix their problem.

And in that regard, my reputation precedes me. Not because I lobby’ed for it to be so, but because my work speaks for itself. When someone is referred to me they come to me with the trust of the person who referred them.

“If Person X trusts Trainer 01, then I will too.”

And sometimes, my new client knows almost nothing about me except for the fact that I can fix their problem. And really that is all they need to know.

Because indeed, I can fix their problem.

What ends up happening though, as such with the woman I saw in this case, is that as we finished the session she said, “Wow! I didn’t know you could do manual therapy! What else can you do?!”

And it kind of caught me off guard. I don’t really think in those terms anymore, of what I can do.

And so I told her, “Well, I can do all sorts of things. But what they are isn’t super important. What is important is that I have a lot of tools in my toolbox that I’ve spent many years perfecting. When someone like you comes to me with a problem, it’s my job to select the best tool for the job in order to help you in as quick and efficient of a manner as possible.”

You see, I don’t let my clients pick which tools I’m going to use.

You might be thinking, oh sure that makes sense. But you’d be surprised.

Many times people will inquire about my services but only for a specific tool.

“I heard you do cupping, can you do that to fix my shoulder?”

“I’ve been having back pain and I want to do a breathwork session with you to fix it.”

“I’ve been struggling with knee pain so I want to have you look over my exercise technique so that it goes away”.

But the problem with this is that’s assuming the client understands the intricacies of the tools and when they are best fit for a problem.

It’s essentially like me going to a restaurant and telling the Chef, I want the filet mignon, but I want you to cook it in at low to medium heat in a frying pan.

The Chef would be furious! What idiot wants a filet mignon cooked in a frying pan!?

Well it made sense to me, I cook a steak in a frying pan at home all the time. It’s not amazing, but it works. What’s the problem??

The problem is that by telling the Chef what tools to use I’m assuming I know how to do their job better than them.

The same way someone telling me they want to use cupping to fix their back pain is them saying that they are well-versed in musculoskeletal disorders and have already decided that cupping is the best modality to use.

It makes no sense.

I don’t tell Chef’s how to create culinary art, and clients can’t tell me which modalities to use to get them out of pain.

Let’s say I didn’t have confidence in my choice of tools, and succumbed to the clients request for which modality to use. Let’s say I used cupping on their back pain, and that it didn’t help with the pain.

Was it the cupping that didn’t work? Or was it me that is bad at the cupping treatment?

The client is going to think one of the two above, not that cupping never stood a chance to help in the first place.

So no matter what, the client leaves with a negative perception of my work. That’s not good!

Whereas if I simply tell them, “I understand that you’d like a cupping treatment, but if you’d allow me to perform an evaluation and choose the modality that I think would be most effective I can guarantee we’re going to get much better results. I can’t guarantee that cupping is going to work for your issue without giving due diligence to my process first.”

Translated by the Chef, “I understand that you’d like your filet mignon cooked in a frying pan, but if you’d allow me to prepare your meal in the way that I see best, I can guarantee you will have a much better experience.”

Yes Chef! Sorry Chef!

When I talk about skills and tools in this regard, they really don’t matter to the public, because the public isn’t going to have as great an understanding of them anyway.

The same way I don’t really care how the Chef cooks the filet as long as it comes out medium-rare and tastes like a slice of beef-heaven, my clients don’t care what tool I use so long as it makes their pain go away.

Of course there are the rare clients who are very well-versed in treatment modalities because they have tried many of them before and have been able to find one modality that is successful, then yes of course they can request that I use it. But in that case, why would I say no? If I know a certain treatment has worked successfully in the past, then no need to re-invent the wheel. I’m going to choose that same modality again!

And so, my message to you this week, is to trust the professional you are seeking guidance from.

If you go to a fitness or sports medicine professional, trust them to do the job with the tool they think is best. Unless you think you know more than them, be careful on demanding a certain treatment approach because you may very well be undermining their expertise.

And if you go to a nice restaurant, don’t tell the Chef how to cook unless you want to be escorted out.

I also want to highlight how important trust is in these client-professional relationships.

If my clients don’t trust that I can do what I say I can do (which is get them out of pain), then they have no reason to trust that I can choose the right modality.

As such, if you seek out a treatment professional do so on a high-trust basis. Getting a referral from a former client and someone who can vouch for the professionalism and effectiveness of that person is important, both for you and them.

A relationship built on trust is a high priority in all aspects of life.

Next time you have a filet, make sure to thank the Chef.

- Trainer 01

A coach is someone who you can trust to guide your development in a specific art, skill, or task.

While you may be tempted to think that I am only talking about athletic endeavors, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

A coach can be in any discipline, any industry, and regardless of which has the power to make an impact regardless of where they practice.

There are coaches for business, sports, education, dating, even communication. If there is a skill that can be practiced, there is very likely a coach for that.

Today I’m going to be talking about what qualities to look for in a coach, why you should consider one if you’re serious about improvement, and more importantly, why you shouldn’t look for a coach.

Let’s go!

Before you even think about hiring a coach you should be crystal clear on what your goals are and should have already started working to achieve them.

You don’t hire a coach and THEN set a goal. That’s like starting to cook a recipe and looking at the ingredient list after. Just doesn’t make sense.

In the perfect scenario, you don’t even think about hiring a coach until you’ve plateaued on your own accord.

Progression in any skill or art is based upon the internal drive of the participant.

That means that you, and your belief in yourself, is the sole biggest determinant of whether or not you become successful.

Let that sink in for a second…

So before we talk about when it’s the right time to hire a coach, let’s start by going through how to know when you’re not ready to hire a coach.

• If you don’t have an identified goal

• If you haven’t started practicing on your own yet

• If you are steadily progressing without one

• If you are not personally invested in your progress or accomplishments

• If you think that hiring a coach will be a shortcut to the learning process

• If you want to “speed up” your learning curve

Some of these may seem fairly obvious, but you’d be surprise at the ill-intentions some people will seek out a coach for.

For one, and one of the most common ones I see as a coach, you should not be hiring a coach if you believe that through the coach you will be afforded the opportunity to not put in the work and practice required to improve. A perfect plan isn’t perfect without consistency and dedication.

Imagine hiring Lance Armstrong to coach your cycling progress and then telling him you only have 3 hours per week to ride on the bike. He’d laugh in your face!

This is why before even thinking about a coach you must start on your journey yourself.

I know many people have the perspective that they will commit to the journey once they’ve hired a coach, and that having one will hold them accountable, but I’ve seen this approach fail time and time again.

If you do not have the discipline to pursue your goals without a coach, you will not have the discipline to pursue your goals with a coach.

Not only that, but any sensible coach will become very frustrated with your lack of self-sufficiency in pursuit of your goals.

A coach’s primary responsibility is to guide your development, not baby it.

While some coaches may be able to take your hand and walk you step by step through every little detail that you need to do to be successful, the most successful coaches I know (as well as my own approach) is highly dependent on the student having an internal common sense to make decisions for themselves and figure things out on their own.

For example, no coach wants to answer a text from you at 8am saying, “Hey coach, I just finished my workout for this morning. Should I eat 4 eggs or a bowl of oatmeal? How much salt should I use? Is 1 glass of water OK or should I have 2?”

Personally, this would be a huge red flag for someone in my coaching program. You are a fully functioning adult. Use some critical thinking to determine what you think is best and move forward.

Also, you handicap your own progress by not taking accountability for your own actions, even when you do have a coach.

A coach doesn’t do the work for you nor are they responsible for the outcome.

YOU are responsible for the work and YOU are accountable for the results.

I’ll say it again: A coach is a resource who is there to guide your development. They are not the conductor of the train. You are.

The coach is more like the manager that is there to deploy effective strategy, guide long-term direction, and step in if something is about to go terribly wrong. With those principles in place the coach will be much more effective than having to walk you through every little detail of living life.

Ok. Assuming the reasons to not hire a coach are clear, how do you know when you are ready to hire a professional mentor?

For one, when you have progressed beyond your capable knowledge level and access to information is scarce or otherwise inaccessible, a coach is paramount.

For example, if you are an experienced marathon runner who can finish a sub-3 hour marathon and have exhausted all your resources in order to make it happen, yet want to continue progression and invest the time, energy, and effort in order to reach an elite time of 2.5 hours, well, that is an excellent time to employ the expert guidance of a professional running coach.

It’s also advisable to turn to a coach when you simply do not have the knowledge required to progress but have already proven you have the consistency to practice.

Let’s say you take up archery as a hobby, and practice for an hour every day. You love the sport, you’ve learned a lot reading online and watching youtube videos, and are starting to develop a passion for it.

You have a goal of trying to compete in professional archery, but don’t know where to begin to make that jump from recreational hobby to dedicated craft. Well, this is another opportune time to seek out a coach who can streamline that process and tell you exactly what is necessary to make that jump.

In this sense the use of a coach is both extremely efficient and extremely useful because the coaches strength (knowledge) is your weakness. This has the foundation for a positive coaching relationship that can get you on track quickly.

When else is a great environment to seek a coach?

• If you have a finite goal in a limited amount of time and can’t afford to trial-and-error by yourself

• If the art/skill you are undertaking has severe consequences if done incorrectly (think diving [free/scuba/sky])

Hiring a coach at the right time in your journey is an important decision. Most people think that it is up to the coach to ensure the students success, but that’s not true.

It’s up to YOU, and by waiting for the right moment to hire a coach you will be taking an important step on to fully achieving your goal. It will make your work with the coach more efficient, it will foster a more positive relationship, and not to be understated it will save you money from wasted efforts before it’s necessary.

Ok. So you know when not to hire a coach, and you understand at what point in your journey a coach will make the biggest difference. The next question is: What should you be looking for in a coach?

The most important thing to understand and something I tell all my clients, that above all there is no ‘best’ coach. There is only the ‘right coach for YOU’.

Coaches aren’t robots, they’re human. And as humans they have personalities, tendencies, and faults just like you. And contrary to popular belief, coaches are people too - they have stuff going on in their personal life that may be challenging as well, which you’ll probably never know about.

Yes; experience, accolades, knowledge all matter when selecting a coach. But the most heralded and respected coach in the world is a terrible fit for you if you don’t have a personality match where you can communicate effectively.

This is something I see often, where people look to hire the “best coach” who has ample experience working with professionals in their field; but never pause to consider the fact that as an amateur, that coach is by far a terrible match for the person seeking coaching.

If the coach is truly wise, they will recognize when it’s not a good fit and decline to provide coaching. It’s nothing personal.

I can speak from experience I have turned away clients because they are not a good fit for my coaching style. This is not a negative statement. This is just saying that the way I coach, and the expectations I have of the people I coach, are bound to clash when certain characteristics are present. The awareness to recognize that saves both the coach and the student in the long run.

It’s very similar to dating in a sense that if partners can’t communicate effectively when disagreements and problems are present - that relationship has a long uphill battle.

It’s better to give yourself the best chance at success by ensuring that you and your coach will be able to work through problems together, and not compete against each other.

So before you start looking for the best coach in the world, rule #1 is:

Prioritize finding a coach that matches your personality and whom you will have positive communication with, even when problems arise.

The next thing you should look for is a coach who has experience coaching your skill level.

This is another often overlooked aspect of coaching.

I see this as well where someone who has never begun practicing the skill tries to hire a coach who has extensive experience with professionals in that skill. They think because they do it at the highest level that it will translate to doing it better at the lowest level. Not true!

For example, let’s say you’ve never swung a golf club in your life. You’re not going to go hire Butch Harmon to teach you how to swing. That would be ludicrous.

For one, Butch wouldn’t even accept you as a student, and two, you’d be paying $1500+ an hour (last I heard) for him to teach you something that literally every and any other instructor could.

It just doesn’t make sense.

If you’re a beginner, you should look for a coach who has ample experience working with beginners.

If you’re intermediate or at a moderate skill level, you should look for a coach who has experience taking you from intermediate to advanced.

And if you’re advanced or at an expert level, well then it makes sense to look for a highly regarded expert-level coach.

What is also overlooked here is you will very likely have to change coaches throughout your skill progression.

I’ve witnessed this myself in my time with players in the NFL/NBA.

A player will be loyal to a strength and conditioning coach who worked with them throughout high school and college, yet when they’ve gotten into the professional league this S&C coach doesn’t have the skills to continue the progression.

They were the perfect match for a high-school/college player, but a very poor fit for the now-professional athlete.

Eventually the player realizes this and will make the switch to a coach more suited for their level, but sometimes they are guilt-ridden by loyalty. I’ve seen players careers be sidetracked by a toxic relationship with a long-time coach who was clearly no longer a best-fit for an athlete. It’s a sad thing to watch.

As a coach I am very mindful of understanding what levels of ability I am most beneficial to, and will not hesitate to recommend another coach when a student is seeking something from me that I am not fit for providing.

On the other hand, as a student you should be aware of this difference in ability level too and should seek out a coach fit for your current level, while also being cognizant that if/when you progress enough, a coaching change is likely the best move.

Prioritize finding a coach who has demonstrated an ability to successfully coach other students that match your current ability level and/or the ability level you want to get to from your current starting point.

I don’t think any of the above points I’ve mentioned, or the points I’m going to mention, are any more important than the others, but these first two are certainly the most overlooked and as such I’ve placed a greater emphasis on. The following are more common criteria that most people consider when hiring a coach.

These have to do with the technical aspects of coaching experience, knowledge, and skill.

While it’s always great to have a coach who had achieved expert-level status in the skill themself, it’s not always necessary.

Some of the greatest coaches of all-time were poor athletes themselves, and some of the best athletes of all time make terrible coaches.

Bill Belichick, Greg Popovich, and Vince Lombardi are a few stand-out coaches that never played at the level they became famous for coaching.

Wayne Gretzky, Isiah Thomas, and Jason Kidd are a few all-time greats who’s foray into coaching went less than stellar.

We could cherry-pick examples all day, but the point is that achieving personal success at the skill you’re coaching is not a prerequisite. It can certainly help, or it could hurt, so keep that in mind when evaluating a coach.

Whether or not a coach had personal success at the skill they teach should not be a high priority on evaluating their ability as a coach.

With that out of the way, one of the most important things you should look for in your new coach is their track record of success, and who they were successful with.

This is likely where most people start, in that they look for a coach who has demonstrably proven that they can get the results you are looking for because they’ve done it with other people like you.

Of course there will be young coaches with great ability whom will ask you to take a flyer on them, and there’s nothing wrong with that (hell I was once that young coach!), but through and through working with a coach who has achieved success before is a sought-after characteristic and rightfully so.

You should not only look at their history of success, but the context of that success. Similar to figuring out if the coach is a good personality fit, you’ll want to evaluate the people they were successful with and try to gauge whether or not the student was likely to achieve success anyway or if the coach made a tangible difference in their progression.

This means doing a little research, and it’s not even unheard of to reach out to former students and ask them their experience. This is important because of course marketing materials only tell one side of the story, but a truly good coach will become apparent when talking to their students.

You should look for a coach who has a proven ability to achieve success with their students, and the context of their success should be in line with your current situation.

And finally, by far my #1 most important criteria when deciding on a coach:

You need to work with a coach that you trust.

Without trust, the entire coaching relationship is fractured. A coach cannot do their job if you don’t trust them, nor is it right for you to execute the plan of someone whom you don’t trust.

Without a doubt you need to have 100% trust in your coach to get you to where you want to be.

This doesn’t mean you never challenge them, or never ask questions about why you’re doing something or have feedback on how you both could be doing things better.

This just means when push comes to shove, and the coach makes a decision, you need to be able to respect and trust that that decision is in your best interest.

Speaking as a coach, we can be highly demanding of students. We can be tough and hard on you. What is perceived maybe as being rude or stand-offish is quite the opposite.

If a coach is tough on you, it means that they believe in you. It means that they know you can do better, and that they want to see you succeed.

It means that they are using every tactic at their disposal to motivate you and to challenge you, trying their best to bring out the best from you. Every coach has a different style, but when a coach is challenging you to improve, that is a great sign of respect.

If a coach is being hard on you, you should not take it personally. When you should start to worry is if a coach offers limited or no feedback at all. When they just watch you go through the motions. That means they’ve given up on you, and is the saddest outcome in a student-teacher relationship.

This is why trust is so important for both the student and the coach. Trust works both ways.

A coach can’t effectively guide your development if they don’t have the assurance that you are upholding your end of the bargain: putting in the work.

If a coach doubts that you are actually doing what you say you did, or if your effort does not match the requirements for progress, that slowly fractures the trust of the coach in you.

You are seeking out a coach (and paying them) in order to follow their direction. If you don’t do that, the coach thinks, “What the hell am I doing here? Why am I wasting my time with this person who will not do what I ask of them?”

Especially when a student complains of the work being “hard”… it can put a great strain on the relationship. As mentioned in the beginning, hiring a coach doesn’t make the work any easier. Far from it!

So to balk at the idea of hard work when prescribed from your coach, that is ridiculous.

Remember: A coach isn’t giving you difficult tasks to complete because they don’t like you or they want to punish you. However that idea got into the heads of students is beyond me, but it’s just simply not true. When difficult work is required to achieve results, than that is what will be prescribed.

You and your coach are on the same team working towards the same goal. But trust is the backbone of that teamwork and without it nothing else works.

Prioritize a coach you can trust.

Hiring a coach can make a tremendous difference in the outcomes of your journey when you’re dedicated to a craft.

If you pay heed to the things I’ve mentioned you will be best suited to find a coach that truly fits your personality and is equipped to specifically take YOU from your starting point to end point.

Regardless of who you work with, and for what reason, just remember that there is no replacement for hard work, dedication, and perseverance.

Without those there is no coach in the world that can give you what you want.

Good luck.

- Trainer 01

They are known to be caffeine, creatine, and sodium bicarbonate.

Let’s clarify some things:

1. “Ergogenic Aid” = a mechanical, nutritional, pharmacological, physiological and/or psychological tool used to improve performance

2. “Proven” = undeniable scientific evidence that the aid in question improves sport performance in most populations with little-to-no side effects

3. There are certainly many more legal substances that have ergogenic properties, but none of which have the conclusive validity in research across all populations at improving performance like our 3 main aids do

Today I’m going to be talking about creatine, what it is, how it’s useful for improving performance, and why I just recently started taking it.

Let’s rock.

Before we talk about creatine supplementation, it’s important to understand that creatine is a naturally occurring compound.

The average American diet gets about 1g of creatine through the consumption of meat and fish, and the body synthesizes the rest through other amino acids.

Creatine plays an important role in fueling our exercise because it is one of the main components for our anaerobic energy system.

When performing short, high-intensity exercises our body turns to the phospho-creatine energy system; Creatine Phosphate (which is synthesized by the body naturally and stored in skeletal muscle) donates its phosphate to ADP in order to quickly resynthesize ATP for use by the muscles.

This energy system is the main system used for exercise lasting approximately 10 seconds or less, but since there is limited storage of ATP and creatine phosphate in the muscles it is prone to rapid fatigue.

While there is a complex multi-factorial relationship as to why our muscles and nervous system fatigue, one piece of that is available creatine stores in the muscle.

When you complete a short burst of intense movement depleting that muscle of creatine-phosphate (which provides ATP), your ability to produce powerful movement is reduced.

With that said, the role of creatine supplementation is rather simple:

By supplementing with exogenous creatine you are increasing the available stores of creatine in the creatine-phosphate system, which would increase the speed at which ATP is resynthesized in the muscle and would also reduce the rate at which fatigue occurs.

This translates to you being able to work harder for longer in the gym.

Better training = better performance.

It’s that simple.

While creatine could certainly help improve game performance, the real benefit to its supplementation is being able to improve the volume and intensity at which you train leading to greater improvements.

More creatine = more ATP = more energy = more training intensity + volume

Cool? Cool.

I should also mention that more recent research has looked at creatine’s positive influence on cognition related to memory and recovery from a traumatic brain injury (TBI), although this research is not as conclusive and many knowledge gaps remain.

So why did I start taking creatine?

Because I want to be able to maximize my weightlifting for strength and muscle gain! With this goal, creatine is a no-brainer.

Let me walk you through my mental model on the use of creatine as it contrasts pretty greatly to much of what I see from other professionals.

It’s generally accepted now that creatine can be supplemented at 5g/day indefinitely with no contraindications and no side effects. Creatine is safe for your liver regardless of condition or medical history.

I still recommend using creatine in phases, somewhere in the 6-12 week mark. I’ll use my own training as an example to tell you why.

For most of last year while my performance goal was related to golf I was lifting 2x/week. Each were full-body workouts and the intensity was never above an 8/10 as I also had to balance cycling and of course golf practice. In this sense my weightlifting was auxiliary to the other activities I was doing.

While I could have been taking creatine then and seen some increase in performance, I wouldn’t have been maximizing its effectiveness. It’s like using 70% of somethings max potential. Useful, but not efficient.

This year my goals have changed, and I’ve been lifting 3x/week. I’m prioritizing muscle growth and strength and as such my volume and intensity has progressed greatly from the 2x/week lifts I was doing just a few months ago.

With this progression I’ve been able to get stronger and start to put on muscle mass in a way I’m happy with.

The gains are always easiest in the beginning though, and the more you lift the harder it is to get noticeable improvements.

Going from 0-1 is a lot easier than going from 9-10, if you know what I mean.

This is where creatine comes in.

Instead of accepting the slow, steady progression that comes from seasoned weightlifting, by strategically timing my use of an ergogenic aid like creatine I can use the performance-enhancing effects to maintain momentum through training plateaus and get really impressive performance improvements without any changes to my training structure.

A pointed example of this is in compound movements. At a certain body weight it becomes incredibly difficult to lift more without gaining mass. I can only bench or deadlift so much while weigh 165lbs, and knowing how difficult it is for me to gain weight I inevitably reach a weight plateau around a certain multiple of body weight.

Creatine supplementation allows for increased energy to continue to progress volume and intensity WITHOUT having to adjust other variables such as total body weight or muscle mass.

It’s a proven ergogenic aid that will allow me to lift more for longer and work through my current program until I have the ability to adjust my caloric intake to match.

Think of it as a very well-timed “power-up”.

This is the exact reason why I still recommend taking it in phases instead of continuous supplementation.

If you use your power-up too early you have no added benefit of momentum. Use it too late and you’ve missed peak efficiency.

But use it at just the right time and you will progress through sticking points with ruthless effectiveness.

It’s also important to note that the best time to use creatine is when your program consists of heavy weight, volume, or intensity as those are the attributes where the creatine-phosphate system can contribute to most.

If your program is in a maintenance phase or you are focusing on improving muscular endurance then the performance benefits of creatine are going to be negligible because it has limited contribution there.

But when you are lifting for max strength and/or power you are going to see and feel a huge difference in energy supply once you’ve raised your circulating creatine levels with daily supplementation.

So my plan is to be on creatine for the next 8-12 weeks while maximizing my strength program and once I naturally cycle out of the strength phase will discontinue supplementation in lieu of other areas of focus.

Sticking with the power-up analogy, if you are always using a power-up it no longer becomes an added bonus, it becomes your new status quo. You might be better than you would be without it, but you won’t be able to capture the synergistic momentum of using it at the right time, for the right purpose.

To clarify, I firmly believe that effective creatine supplementation should occur for a period of 6-12 weeks while participating in a program that emphasizes strength and/or power gains.

If done correctly creatine will contribute greatly to performance during training and its compound effects will be noticeably felt. Once the training program phases out of strength and power, creatine should be discontinued so that when the program does eventually cycle back not those phases it can be implemented again with the same effectiveness.

Some final notes on creatine usage:

• I take 5g/day in the morning because it’s both most consistent and easiest on my routine.

• Creatine supplementation needs to be daily, regardless of whether or not you are working out

• Loading phase is optional; I do not use a loading phase anymore

• I take creatine monohydrate as it is accepted as being best absorbed by the body

• Some people can experience GI distress when starting creatine. If this is you there are two recommendations, 1) switch to micronized creatine monohydrate and see if that helps 2) start with 1g/day and slowly increase dosage as tolerated up to 5g/day over the course of 2-3 weeks

• Whether the literature has accepted that creatine increases water retention in the muscle or not is irrelevant (unless you’re a bodybuilding/physique competitor) because you should always be prioritizing hydration anyway

I have no doubt that as scientific discovery continues there will be more benefits found in all supplements, but my core principles remain the same.

We should prioritize getting all of our vitamins and minerals from primary food sources and creatine is no different. Consumption of 5g/day of creatine can be done through meat and fish, although that is not something I want to prioritize and as such opt for a nutritional supplementation.

I believe any supplement that is taken should be just that, supplementary, and as such am always prioritizing sustainable usage. This is another point as to why I believe in using it in a cyclic fashion that corresponds with the appropriate phase of your training program.

I advise to prevent reliance upon any compound or supplement so as to encourage resilience. If you have to rely on creatine for your performance, you probably have many other gaps in your training structure.

All in all, creatine is a proven ergogenic aid that when used appropriately offers the potential for huge improvements in muscle mass, strength, and power development.

Use it wisely my friends.

Happy to answer any questions relating to creatine supplementation in the comments below.

Leave a comment

- Trainer 01

Is there even an agreed upon definition of “recovery”?

You have questions, I have answers.

But you’re not gonna like my answers…

For one, you never truly know when you’re recovered, and no, there is not an agreed upon definition of recovery.

So let me tell you how I’ve come to define recovery, how I judge when myself/my clients are recovered, and how you can use all this information to ditch the ice baths and saunas and start feeling better and performing better.

We start with the simple concept of training, which is that we undergo a controlled stress (stimulus) in order to elicit a specific response (adaptation).

But Stimulus ≠ Response. There needs to be another variable in that equation. What is it…

Is it Stimulus + Ice Bath = Adaptation?

No…

Is it Stimulus + Massage Gun = Adaptation?

No, not that either…

Oh, I know! Maybe it’s Stimulus + Zone 2 Cardio = Adaptation!?

Nope, definitely not that…

So what is it?!?!

Time. Time is the secret key to all successful training and is absolutely required for adaptation to take place.

But that’s only part of the story!

What you DO with that time is where the magic happens.

It’s better if I start with an example, and explain after.

Let’s use a basic strength-building program.

Our athlete, Jimmy, is training 2x/week for the purpose of getting stronger.

He trains on Monday a full-body workout, hitting all his compound movements and dosing his volume, intensity, and rest time appropriately. (Check out the articles on program design if you’re not sure what that means)

In an ideal world, he shouldn’t complete his next workout until Thursday. That gives his body, and the muscle groups that he trained, over 48 hours to restock energy supply (glucose) and regenerate any structural damage that occurred during training (micro-tears of muscle that encourage growth). Those 48 hours are where the adaptation happens!

But what if Jimmy didn’t feel sore on Tuesday? He felt great! So he thought, “Hey, I’m not sore, I don’t need to wait 48 hours. I’m going to workout again today!”

And he undergoes another stimulus (workout)… What happens?

Well, the first thing that happens is his 2nd workout is going to be far below optimal. Just because Jimmy doesn’t feel sore doesn’t mean there hasn’t been structural damage to the muscle fibers. It also is unlikely that his muscles will have replenished their full glycogen stores so he will be at a strength AND endurance deficit going into that second workout. It’s also a toss-up on whether or not his central nervous system has completely recovered from the previous days energy expenditure (knowing his HRV will tell us!). But he’s not sore so that’s OK! (/sarcasm)

If we extrapolate this idea of not allowing our body the TIME to ADAPT, then Jimmy will be theoretically working out every day, and getting worse all the while!

Without that time for the body to adapt, his body is constantly being STRESSED, without being given the ability to RECOVER.

Does it matter if between the 24h of back-to-back workouts Jimmy foam rolls, gets a massage, sauna’s, and ice-baths?!

Hell no it doesn’t matter!!!

Without TIME, Jimmy’s muscles (& nervous system) are not able to appropriately adapt to the stressors he placed upon it, and thus his body doesn’t adapt. It is performing, sure, but over time this cycle leads to decreased performance and injury.

No bueno.

Can you see why modalities can’t cause Recovery now?

Without the component of time, none of the “recovery” hacks actually do anything. The body needs time between stressors to adapt.

That time is when the body repairs tissue, replenishes energy stores, and otherwise grows stronger! No amount of technology or data can replace the time required for adaptation.

Ok, with that said, and I hope it’s clear, we can move on to the next piece.

What should you be doing in that time while your body adapts?

Should you be doing nothing? Lying still like a zombie? Locking yourself in a sensory-deprivation chamber until it’s time to train again?

No no, please don’t do that.

The two most important factors of what you do in the adaptation period are:

1. Sleep

2. Nutrition

That’s it.

Without at least 8 hours of sleep (or more if you’re in sleep debt), your body will not have the appropriate resources to efficiently adapt. This will slow down the regeneration process and will lengthen the amount of time necessary to adapt to training. (See the extensive series on sleep for more)

Likewise, without enough calories and requisite nutrients your body will not have the resources to actually regenerate and repair tissue. Making sure you are appropriately fueling your training and are getting enough macro- and micro-nutrients ensures your body has everything it needs to repair itself and adapt as quickly and efficiently as possible.

With this in mind, we can make a modification to our formula and say that a derivative of Time is Sleep X Nutrition.

Let’s update it accordingly:

Now that’s starting to look like recovery to me!

Ok, let’s come back to Jimmy.

He’s starting to understand that more workouts ≠ more results. He recognizes the importance of getting enough sleep every night and is doing his best to maintain a balanced diet while fueling his energy demands. He’s also being patient at trusting his coaches program, and not doing extra workouts because he feels good.

Great job Jimmy!

With consistency, measured in weeks or months (not days…), he is going to start seeing results. The longer he maintains his discipline, the better he is going to get.

He doesn’t need to do anything fancy, doesn’t need to take any supplements, doesn’t need to buy the latest “recovery” device.

All he needs to do is workout with the appropriate volume and intensity for his goals, give his body enough TIME between workouts in order to adapt, and fuel that adaptation with plenty of sleep and proper nutrition.

THAT, is recovery.

But, alas, I know that’s not good enough for many of you. You probably were hoping I had some secret about recovery that would speed it up and possibly even give you Wolverine-like regeneration powers.

While I do have many secrets, none of them is going to supersede the basic formula for recovery.

Until you master the foundation of training, of designing a program with adequate volume and intensity for your goals and giving your body the proper time, sleep, and nutrition it needs, none of the magic recovery secrets I have are going to help you.

NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE FOUNDATION.

The cool thing is, when you DO master the basics, and have a sustainable training lifestyle set into a habit, then there are a TON of things you can do to improve recovery.

But that’s a topic for another day. Until you have the basic recovery equation mastered, nothing else matters.

And so, my message to you this week is to evaluate how you measure up to the scientific law of Recovery (as defined by me).

Are you training with enough volume and intensity to elicit a specific adaptation?

Are you giving your body enough time between activities to allow for that adaptation to happen?

Are you filling that time with enough sleep and proper nutrition to give your body the resources it needs in order to actually recover?

If you answered No to any of those questions, then you know what your new priority should be in order to get the results you want.

Stop looking for magic recovery tools as if there’s some magical secret that once you know will be the key to all your progress. There is none.

Strap in, master the basics, and focus on being better than you were yesterday.

If you’re not sure about Program Design or Sleep, well then luckily you’re in the right place as I’ve got a host of articles on both those topics. (click here)

When you’re ready, leave me a comment or shoot me an email and maybe, just maybe, I’ll tell you my secrets to enhancing recovery.

But not until you’ve mastered the basics!

Remember, Stimulus + Time [Sleep X Nutrition] = Adaptation.

- Trainer 01

Why is February the greatest month?

Well, for one, it’s because every year my friends and I take a trip to Colorado to go skiing. I actually go snowboarding but some of my friends are skiers and I never quite understood if it’s proper to say “going snowboarding” or “going skiing”, so I just use them interchangeably.

Anyways, over the past 5 years snowboarding has become one of my all-time favorite sports. I only get to go one week out of the year (for now), but it’s a trip I look forward to for 365 days as soon as the last one ends.

We rent a cabin close to town, cook meals at home, go into town for a dinner or happy hour or two, and spend the majority of the day on the mountain and the rest of the night chilling and hanging out. It’s a perfect time.

I would love to tell you more about my trip, but that’s not what I’m writing about today.

What I want to show you, is how a highly active vacation leads to “recovery”, and would be the exact opposite of the influencer bullshit that has inundated the media-space over the last few years.

Here’s a screenshot of my 90-day rMSSD (an HRV metric), and my RHR:

There’s a couple things that stand out so I’ll address them first.

No I don’t track my HRV when I’m away on vacation or for personal trips. The reason is simple: when I travel I’m looking to disconnect and do my own thing, living life in the moment as it comes.

Some days I’m drinking alcohol, or spent all day doing activities, or am eating as much delicious food as I can. All these things of course will affect my HRV.

But what they won’t affect is my decision to keep the days planned activities or not. I’m not going to cancel a tour or a day snowboarding just because my HRV is low that day.

So if knowing the HRV metric isn’t going to affect my decision making, then I don’t take it all! I know my body well enough after tracking my HRV daily for over a year, and I’m not going to learn anything new about it by measuring on vacation.

The next thing I want you to notice is how my morning measurements compared the 1st day after vacation was over (today), vs. what they were before it started.

My resting heart rate measured 80 (!) the day of leaving, which is not a good sign at all. And yet it measured 50 (!!) the first day back.

Similarly, my HRV measured less than 30 the last day and nearly 140 (!) upon coming back.

And before I tell you why that’s a very good sign of me being recovered, what’s even more important is the context surrounding these numbers.

On my ski trip, I slept at > 10,000ft of elevation. I spent 4 days back-to-back snowboarding for 5+ hours a day, sometimes more.

I covered nearly 150 miles and 50k feet of elevation changes, while still working out one day and eating copious amounts of food, healthy and unhealthy alike.

I also drank a few beers, stayed up late, and otherwise did not subscribe to a consistent sleep schedule.

And of course the 4 hour flight and tons of time spent traveling to different cities before finally getting home for the 2nd half of the Super Bowl… it was quite a day!

If I had just told you what I was doing that week and not already shown you my HRV scores, you’d probably think I needed a vacation after my vacation!

How does that make sense then, that during a week of high-intensity activity with habits that would normally negatively effect my HRV, my resting physiology metrics are the best they’ve been in months?

Because everything you know about recovery is wrong.

This next part is going to dispel a lot of myths, and if you get personally offended then you should probably re-evaluate your beliefs before blaming me for tearing them down.

First off recovery is not something you can do. Recovery, literally, is the absence of activity.

The term “active recovery” is an oxymoron and although it has good intentions behind it, is not actually what’s going on.

There is also no physiological possibility of any acute treatment or modality that “recovers” you while doing it. There are however a few select modalities that can allow for better recovery to take place at a different time - if they are implemented correctly.

So what is Recovery then?

Recovery is this magical place where our body regenerates itself and its’ ability to tolerate stress.

You see our body has a very complex system for how it balances “go” and “stop”. The reason we can get amped up to run a race and relaxed enough to fall asleep is because of this complex interaction between the “go” and “stop” systems.

Technically they’re called the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and I’ve written about the intricacies at depth in the series on HRV (which you can find here) so we’ll keep it simple with the go and stop systems for now.

What’s important to understand conceptually is that both of these systems are running all the time. It’s not like driving a car where you’re either pressing on the gas or the brake and using them interchangeably to control the speed.

Think about the go-stop relationship in your body less of like 2 individual pieces, and instead think of them like a faucet pouring water into a bucket that has a hole at the bottom.

Filling up your bucket with the faucet is the stop part of the system, and the hole that empties that bucket is the go part of the system.

If the hole gets jammed and no water is draining, the bucket will overflow! Uh oh!

And if the faucet isn’t working, regardless of how well the drain is working the bucket will be empty! Another uh oh!

The goal then is to balance how much water is coming in to the bucket with how much is leaving the bucket.

Rephrased for humans, the goal is to balance how much energy you spend with how much energy you create.

If you are out-spending your energy you will be left with an empty bucket! Or if you don’t find ways to spend that energy effectively you will be left with an overflowing bucket.

The stop part of the system is what re-fills your energy supplies. When the parasympathetic system is exerting it’s influence (remember it’s not a one or the other relationship, it’s a balance between which one is flowing more, or exerting it’s influence more, than the other) then your bucket is being filled with water.

The rest and digest system is named for a reason, as that is where our energy is created. And when I say created, I mean turning the calories we get from food intake and converting them into powerful sources of ATP that we can then use to spend any way we see fit!

The go part of the system, the sympathetic system, is the hole at the bottom of the bucket. The bigger things we do that require more energy, the larger the hole is and quicker our energy-supply drains.

The fight-or-flight system is named for a reason too, and the actions and effects of this system (such as release of adrenaline in high-pressure situations) allows us to be ready for max-intensity moments at any moment.

The problem arises when either of these systems is too active for too long.

All gas no breaks leads to a crash eventually.

All breaks no gas leads to going nowhere.

But adjusting speed in tune with the road and accelerating or decelerating as necessary to stay in position - now that’s how you win the race.

Ok, back to my snowboarding trip.

I may have spent 4 days being way more active than I usually am. Snowboarding is a lot of work. But for me that activity was re-charging my energy supply, not expending it!

Being away from work, away from the city of Miami, having so few obligations and responsibilities, getting to enjoy the mountain environment and do one of my favorite activities with some of my closest friends - the things that you would assume are draining my bucket are actually FILLING it!

That’s what makes HRV such a unique and powerful metric. It is not a number that can be linearly extrapolated based on events alone. The context of those events is the most important piece!

Yes, poor sleep, nutrition, and too much high-intensity activity can lower acute HRV. But they pale in comparison to being in a state of pure peace, relaxation, and fulfillment!

The context of my trip, even though I was doing more activity, sleeping worse, eating less healthy… is that all those things were done in a stress-free environment allowing me to actually feel better than before!

With this context in mind, it’s actually quite easy to reconcile how my HRV was back to proper high’s and my resting heart rate was at new low’s for the past 3 months.

Ask your favorite influencer whether or not I “recovered” over that week and who know’s what answers you’d get.

PS. Please don’t take any advice from influencers…

They don’t even know what recovery is!

Recovery is a state of parasympathetic influence (the stop system filling up the bucket) that over enough time allows for regeneration of energy supply so that the body can be exposed to stress with positive adaptation.

(read that sentence again) ^^^^

Recovery does not just seclude itself to one part of the body either.

Physical, Mental, Spiritual well-being are all equally important for overall recovery.

High physical stress + low mental stress? Not recovered.

High mental stress + low physical stress? Not recovered.

Low mental + physical stress but lacking sense of purpose or community? Not recovered.

I could list a thousand different combinations to prove my point but I think you get the idea.

Recovery is a state where your body is truly in parasympathetic influence, which means a state where you feel safe, loved, calm, vulnerable, and free.

Only when you have alignment of all three parts of your being is recovery truly optimized.

It’s one reason that no sauna or ice bath could ever possibly be considered to improve “recovery”. The act of getting in either of them raises your heart rate! The opposite of recovery!

Now can those two things improve recovery at another time, like when you sleep? Sure of course it can. But so can a thousand other things.

What’s important is that you understand that recovery is not something you do.

Recovery is a state that can only be achieved by properly accounting for your stress, or controlling how much energy you spend, and by making sure you are doing things that make you happy and/or relaxed, ie. making sure your faucet is turned on and the water is flowing.

The real magic happens when you are able to find that thing that you can expend energy on, and in turn it makes you feel fulfilled!

That is where a pure balance is struck, a term we often call “passion”. You know, when you could do that thing all day for days on end and never get tired of it. Where it’s the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about before going to bed?

That passion is the incredible result of spending energy on something that gives you more energy in return! Magical indeed!

And so my friends, my message to you this week is to take a good hard look at what your perception of recovery is.

Would you have assumed that after 4 days of non-stop snowboarding I would be more tired than ever and have my “recovery scores” in the dump?

Or do you now understand that after 4 high-intensity days, I was actually recovering by being in a place of peace, both physically and mentally, by doing something I love with people I appreciate.

If you understand that, than you are well-equipped to work on finding what it is that gives YOU peace.

When you do, you’ll never need to think about the definition of recovery again.

- Trainer 01

But before I do. I want you to remember, I’m human too.

As a Trainer, one of my favorite sayings is, “Do as I say, not as I do”. Really it’s just a great line to spill when I get caught doing something I’ve told my clients not too.

But this time, I really messed up.

I’ve talked about the caffeine addiction epidemic before. Especially in the United States, where caffeine-spiked lemonades even killed a dude (RIP).

So I’ve come here to atone for my sins.

What’d I do wrong? What have I warned you against doing?

Abusing caffeine.

I broke my own rules and went on a 2-week caffeine bender. It was great. Well, great at the time. I knew it had to come to an end eventually…

And today is my day of reckoning.

What happens when you build a tolerance to a substance, and then stop taking it?

Withdrawal.

And what happens during caffeine withdrawal?

Headaches. Fatigue. Lethargy. Loss of motivation.

You might be thinking that I’m being dramatic, but I want to challenge your assumption.

If you’re a habitual caffeine drinker, when was the last time you had a 7-day break of no stimulating substances?

Better yet, when was the last time you had a 3-day break!?

Most caffeine-addicted people I know need their coffee in the morning. So much so it’s a well-adjusted meme on thousands of products.

“Don’t talk to me unless I’ve had my coffee!” ha-ha!

Think about that for a second… Someone’s mood, energy, and overall well-being is entirely dependent on whether or not they’ve ingested a substance.

If that’s not addiction, I don’t know what is.

Ok - back to my withdrawal.

I know I’ve got about 3 days to get through the headaches, 2 days to get through the fatigue and lethargy. After that it’s smooth sailing!

After the fifth day my energy levels and mood are completely reset, and I feel great again.

When that’s behind me, I know I’m good to re-integrate caffeine on a sustainable basis, which for me means 2-3 times a week. I’ve got few rules I typically try to follow:

• No caffeine 3 days in a row, or no more than 3 days in a 5 day span

• The closer to the max I get to the rule above, the more days I try and go without (2-3+ days)

• Because I dose out my caffeine, if I ever get above 250mg in a day it’s time for a tolerance reset

What’s important to recognize is why are you using caffeine?

Is it just a habit you’ve developed that you never properly evaluated?

Is it a social thing? Or are you acutely using caffeine for a mental/physical performance enhancement?

Do you “just like the taste”? Or are you secretly in love with the stimulating aspects?

Most people who are addicted to caffeine think they wouldn’t be able to function without it, and that’s partly true.

Like me, you’ll find that the withdrawal symptoms are not very fun at all. But you also underestimate your ability to withstand them. A shitty 3-days is worth every bit when you make it to the other side finding that you don’t need caffeine to sustain your energy levels.

Make it to the 5 day mark and see how your mood is naturally a bit better.

At the 7- or 10-day mark you can start to identify what other factors may be contributing to your fatigue; lack of sleep, meal timing, stress.

If you’re brave enough to go 14-days without that sweet magic bean juice, you’ll probably make a commitment to never have caffeine again you feel so great! Bold move cotton, no need to be that extreme about it.

Without a caffeine tolerance reset though, you never have the chance to truly evaluate where your body is at in terms of energy and fatigue. You’re constantly using a powerful substance to get through the day and at the point, the effectiveness of the substance itself is lowered because you’ve got so many confounding variables going on.

So my message to you this week is to take a good hard look at how you use the substances in your life, especially caffeine.

When used correctly caffeine is a powerful performance enhancement. It can improve cardiovascular endurance, strength output, mental alertness, concentration, and mood.

If used incorrectly, either in too high of doses or too frequently, can lead to anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, dependence, and a host of other issues.

If you use caffeine because you crave that mental alertness that it provides, but also can’t avoid some of the negative side-effects, there are so many more substances that could be of use to you. Natural ones.

There are so many different herbs, plants, and spices that can provide a cognitively stimulating effect that rivals or even supersedes that of caffeine.

Not to mention that each source of caffeine can provide different effects. Coffee vs. Tea vs. Yerba Mate vs. Gaurana vs. Yaupon vs. Cacao vs. Kola…

How many of you have even heard of some of these! All of them are natural plants and/or fruits!

While the concentration of caffeine does differ between them (if you’re looking for the strongest caffeine concentration, Yerba Mate is what you want), what matters more in my opinion is the synergistic compounds that are native to each plant.

In tea for example, the naturally occurring compound of L-Theanine provides the smoother, calmer energy amplification that is known to soften the jitteriness many people experience in coffee. Tea also has about 1/2 the caffeine of coffee, so that explains some difference as well.

In the future I’ll talk more about other cognitively-enhancing substances (all-natural of course!) that you can use to gain that mental edge you’re looking for, but in the meantime…

Mind Your Coffee!

- Trainer 01

After some light back and forth I started to really dig in to what his plan was.

Why did he want to start it?

What was his model?

What separated his business from his competitors?

What was his market? How does he know his market will purchase his product?

To me, this is standard procedure. When you think about starting a business, you don’t start with the one scenario that if everything works perfectly, you’re successful.

You work backwards from all the things that can go wrong, and if you get through that gigantic list, and have a plan or solution or an acceptable risk tolerance to those negative things, then it’s a green light. All systems go.

So it was only natural that I try and help him identify all these potential pitfalls. At least that’s how my brain works.

The devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

What I didn’t expect, was my friend to start taking things personally.

Now, this is someone I’ve known for over 20 years, so personally doesn’t mean our friendship was at a crossroads or anything like that.

But you know how when friends get defensive they start to get a little outlandish and then start launching some shots at you, etc.

I realized at that point that our conversation was no longer productive, and so it ended, but I had been wondering about why it was he got defensive over my questions.

Was it because I was questioning something that he was proud and excited about? Maybe making him realize that it wasn’t all rainbows and pots of gold like he thought?

Was it because he wasn’t really looking for advice or perspectives, and was just sharing his aspiration with a friend?

Was it because instead of blindly supporting him, I critiqued and criticized his idea in a way that I thought would be helpful?

I don’t know.

It was probably a mix of all those things.

I’m sure he might not have thought out the full business plan as much as I’d expected and I was probably a bit pre-mature with asking some in-depth questions on it. I can also relate to simply wanting to talk about an idea and instead receiving full-scale criticisms, even if they are well-intentioned.

I’ve learned to preclude some conversations with certain people with, “I’m not looking for advice - I just want to vent…” *initiates dramatic rant*

I also understand that the stage from having an idea to the stage of developing a formal business plan can be deflating.

When you have the idea, you’re looking through one lens that lines everything up perfectly, and at the end you see the light.

It’s an awesome experience and one that fills you with hope and energy!

But when you’re developing the business plan, you start to realize that your frame may be a little crooked. And the lens is cracked. And there’s now a door where the window was. And the light isn’t as bright. And some annoying dude saying he works for a bank keeps calling you and asking for money.

Suddenly it’s not so exciting anymore.

What you do next - is what makes an entrepreneur.

Do you allow all the problems that overshadow your idea to stop you? Or do you simply start focusing on solutions, one at a time.

Because the unfortunate reality is there is no perfect business plan.

There’s no perfect plan of any kind.

No perfect training program, no perfect diet, no perfect military strategy.

The closest you can get is maybe perfect directions to get somewhere in the least amount of time possible, but even that plan gets blown to shit when some doorknob rear-ends an old lady and now they’re both sitting in the middle of the road backing up traffic for the next 2 miles.

I’ve found that planning is an extremely helpful part of the process. First I plan, then I try to think about everything that can go wrong. What is the worst possible scenario?

Ok, got it. Now if that is what happens, is that an acceptable risk I’m willing to take?

Is there a way to mitigate that risk? Is there a solution?

And on that goes until I end up with a plan that I like.

But at some point, you have to transition from planning, to doing.

A still ball generates no momentum. You’ve got to start.

I know people that say to hell with all plans, just start first! That’s the hardest part after all. I think for some people, that certainly is the best approach. Remember, you’re not going to get it right on your first try anyway.

Might as well start, run into your biggest problems, and then slow down to identify the best course of action.

I’m actually a proponent of starting with no plan over spending infinity in the planning stage.

But likely the best answer lies somewhere in the middle.

And so my message to you today is two-fold: 1) if you’re having a conversation with someone, communicating your expectations from the jump can save you both some time and effort. If you’re looking for advice, say so. If you’re just looking to shoot the shit and toss some ideas back and forth, that’s cool too, just say so.

And 2) Spend time on making a good plan, but don’t get stuck in planning purgatory. It’s better to start without a plan than never start at all, but it’s best to go from planning to executing with ruthless efficiency.

Regardless of whatever the plan is, you’ve got to start somewhere.

- Trainer 01

Please welcome Dominic Worrell to the writer’s circle!

Coaches note: This article is written entirely by Dominic. It has been lightly edited for clarity to the reader by me. Some emphasis (bold, italics, etc.) has been added by me. Comments included by me have been delineated with the quotation box in green, such as this paragraph.

Contents:

• Background & Discovery of AT

• Education

• Early Career

• The Tactical Setting (Military)

• Life as a Tactical AT

• Future of AT

• Message to You

Background & Discovery of AT

I have a fairly stereotypical initial entry point into Athletic Training. I was a gym rat growing up and played every sport I could get my hands on. My dad was a volunteer firefighter/EMT and I was always around first responders. I enjoyed my high school anatomy class.

Not knowing what I wanted to major in, Athletic Training (AT) seemed like a good fit even though I had no real clue what I was getting into. I was actually told about accreditation for the first time ironically on a campus visit to a college without an AT program. I was a good student and could have succeeded academically in any pathway I chose.

I had no previous exposure to Athletic Trainers beyond one evaluation at a summer basketball camp and a half day of job shadowing in a PT clinic setting. Like many rural areas, we had no AT providing care at our school. We had a chiropractor who ‘covered’ our football games and had let me continue to play with a concussion even after reporting ongoing symptoms, which was wildly inappropriate even based on standards of care in 2003.

Education

I went to Trinity International University, an NAIA school in the northern suburbs of Chicago. I played football my freshman year but didn’t continue to play beyond that since I wasn’t exactly going to the League and wanted to focus on AT. I was stretched thin with 17-20 credits each semester in addition to football demands and then the 150 observation hours we had to get to apply for our program.

Little did I know at the time, that was my first exposure to the difficulty of balancing AT with other elements of life. We had an excellent CAATE-accredited program at a strong academic school, and we got a ton of hands-on experience from day 1. Our program, and my cohort particularly, were seen as the “smart kids” within the kinesiology/physical education realm. I was well prepared to transition from student to ATC. This was also around the time when the decision was made to restrict independent student travel. Having become a Head AT later on in my career, I completely understand why and agree that it was the right decision, however I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that I did develop a ton from being placed in those situations for a couple of years.

Since I had been at a small undergraduate program, I wanted to see the ‘big time’ for Graduate school and went to Michigan State, which had an accredited post-professional program. I had only looked at programs with GA positions offering a full tuition waiver plus stipend, and that set me up well by not adding any more student loans from that stage of my education.

At MSU, I picked up the valuable OMT skillset, which trickled down to us from the DO medical school. OMT/OMM is ‘osteopathic manipulative technique/medicine’, and the skills are commonly referred to as ‘muscle energy’ but are way less woo-woo than they sound.

My GA position included intercollegiate coverage (Field Hockey year 1, Men’s Soccer year 2) and teaching two sections of First Aid/CPR each semester. Like many people who did the GA thing, we traded two years of running ourselves ragged for not having to take out more debt.

I have mixed feelings about the GA model and the fact that it’s no longer available; it facilitated a lot of people getting graduate degrees for free/cheaper and served as an often much-needed transitional step into independent practice… but it also established early on to many of us that we needed to succumb to the overworked and underpaid mindset. Like many, our GA positions were classified as half-time, which is supposed to be an equivalent of ~20 hours/week. LOL. And some of the athletics-only GA positions were rated as quarter-time…

I was fortunate to attend two strong academic programs with excellent teachers, and had great preceptors and mentors along the way. I put in the work to take advantage of these opportunities and was prepared well to transition, both as a student to a certified and then from a GA into a full staff member.

Early Career

Coming out of my educational process in 2010, I knew I wanted to stay in college athletics but liked the smaller school dynamic better - it felt like you were less of a cog in a multimillion-dollar machine (which I can only imagine how that has changed in the last 13 years with the introduction of NIL and conference TV deals skyrocketing).

First was a D3 school in rural Viriginia. After three years getting my feet under me as a staff member, I was hired as Head AT/Director of Sports Medicine at 27 years old, mainly due to the support of my fellow staff members. They wanted me to get the job in order to keep building the strong operation we had established together. I also regularly taught courses and throughout most of my time working in the collegiate setting. I have always enjoyed teaching, both in the classroom and in preceptor roles. Lack of staffing drove me away from that job after one year as Head AT; we were promised another staff position after the school had continued to add sports and they ultimately refused to do so. As would become a common theme across the three universities I worked at as a staff member, the people I worked alongside were of higher quality than the institution and the positions deserved.

I went next to a Head AT position at a D3 school in Iowa with a CAATE-accredited program. This was somewhat closer to family and I liked the idea of working with an accredited program again. In three years there, I worked with our staff to bring both the clinical and academic programs up to appropriate standards. However it became apparent during my third and final year there that we had hit a ceiling of what we were going to be able to improve. Part of my frustration was the mindset of the students in our AT program.

I had come from an AT program I was incredibly proud of; we were challenged academically and held ourselves in high regard that it was a strenuous program. I still hold the field of Athletic Training in high esteem and want the profession to be seen in that light. By contrast, some of the students at the university in Iowa were happy with coasting and not being held to high standards; in fact it created friction that the freshman class outshone some upperclassmen because they came in with the understanding that we were setting the bar higher and bought in to what we were trying to build. I again left, hoping that I just needed to find the ‘right’ college to make it all work, and for me to find happiness and fulfillment professionally.

That took me to what would ultimately become my final collegiate job, a Head AT position at a D2 school in Austin, TX. I was drawn there because we didn’t travel very much, however that didn’t translate into the hours being any better than what I had fought at my previous two stops. We had a program with AT students which was not CAATE-accredited, but they could apply for TX licensure. Throughout some staffing changes on both the academic and clinical sides, it became apparent at the start of my last year that we couldn’t provide the type of clinical care that was expected - particularly considering the amount of practices that happened all throughout the day there.

When I brought these genuine concerns up to my supervisor (a former clinical AT now in an administrative-only role), I was utterly dismissed and no support was provided for me or our staff. I was shell-shocked at the lack of empathy, or even consideration of valid issues within our department. Walking out of that meeting it had become instantly and glaringly obvious that I needed a change. No part of me had really even considered leaving mid-year prior to that meeting. In the coming weeks, I would even have wandering thoughts of what other profession I could transition to, with no good answers. I have always loved our skillset and the career field of AT, but I had never loved a job.

Leaving a collegiate Head AT position mid-year is certainly not common, but I could no longer keep sacrificing myself for situations where I was not getting supported or invested in by the leaders above me. Even in that situation, it took reassurance from some fellow AT friends that I was justified in making the right decision to take care of myself and make my life better; the guilt in the back of my head was real about leaving the rest of the staff short-handed and causing any additional hardship for them or the student-athletes. After a little more than two years there and more than 11 years as a certified in the college setting, I took the leap with a major career change.

Tactical Setting (Military)

            I had previously talked to a couple military contracting companies at the same timeframe of my last job change between colleges, but neither of those opportunities worked out on the timeline I needed. This, combined with having a couple friends who worked with the military, led me to having a pretty good idea of what the military setting could be like as an AT. I also knew that the position I ended up taking would be a good opportunity based on the type of unit I would be working with. I have always appreciated the role of the military and first responders, so I knew that the tactical setting had the potential to be a great fit for me.

            In November of 2019 I took a job as a contractor working with an Air Force pararescue unit (PJ) (video- what is a PJ). This was fortuitous timing considering it would have been hard to make such a drastic change in the midst of all the uncertainty presented to everyone a few short months later. The process of getting hired was a whirlwind and mildly terrifying; because I’m hired through a contracting company, I didn’t get to speak with any of the military personnel with the unit I was going to work with. There was no on-site interview, no getting to check out your clinic in advance - just a few phone calls and go.

About a month after my initial conversation with my company, I was in a moving truck headed to Tucson, AZ, a city I had never even visited. To this day, I have still never met anyone from the corporate/leadership side of my company in person; they are a faceless entity three time zones away. I am a W-2 employee and all my human resource elements are done through my company, not the Dept. of Defense directly.

A quick note about the employment structure of AT positions with the military:

• There are a few GS (general schedule) positions, which is the most common term for when you’re a direct government employee; but the significant majority are still done through contracting companies.

• Some positions require a security clearance.

• There are no active-duty military positions as an Athletic Trainer in any branch, whereas with physical therapists there will be both active duty and contractors.

• There is continual hope of more AT positions transitioning to GS but that conversation ebbs and flows and there hasn’t been much movement recently.

• There would be a similar dynamic with public safety positions where you could be hired through a third party (contractor, hospital system, PT clinic, independent practice LLC) or employed directly by the municipality/agency.

• There are pros and cons to each, and I have heard some advocate for benefits of the contract model for ATs working in the tactical space.

• My two cents after 4 years immersed in this space is that a contracting company just takes a significant cut off the top ($$) usually without adding much value or benefit for either the AT/employee or the end-users.

The financial piece as a contractor can vary widely. There is a sizable range between and even within contracts. On the whole, I believe the salaries will be above average for entry level and younger professionals compared to the traditional setting. For those who are experienced or coming from more advanced positions, your results may vary. I made pretty much a straight lateral move in terms of salary going from a head position in Austin to my current contract.

One important thing to be mindful of is that negotiating and advocating for yourself is more necessary in this dynamic - working in the college environment my experiences were that we got our token yearly cost of living raises and that was pretty much it without a promotion of some sort. In the contracting world, there is more room for initial and ongoing conversations. While I haven’t gotten regular annual raises, I got one 2% raise after about two and a half years (after multiple months of conversations/negotiating), but then managed to get a 16% raise a year later when I had a competing job offer in hand. I also got my ‘CEU’ money increased, although that includes licensure, NATA dues, and CPR renewals, etc. so it still doesn’t go far enough to attend conferences without coming out of pocket.

Other benefits vary depending on the company as well, though all seem to have the standard offerings for full-time employees – health/dental/vision insurance, retirement plan, etc. – but the quality, price, or retirement matching options may be different. The benefits that come with GS positions are pretty solid, usually better than what you can get through a contracting company. PTO can be limited; I get 10 days total per year for sick time and PTO. That is beyond having ALL federal holidays off, and some other days/periods where the military grants their members some free leave when it makes sense - and while we don’t officially receive that, most local leaderships are good with teleworking and being available on an as-needed basis. No more Thanksgiving morning basketball practices and hosting a tournament that whole weekend…

After 4 years in the tactical setting, I am so glad I made the change. The work-life balance is as advertised, and the difference that makes is hard to even articulate. I am trying to remain balanced talking about the different positions I’ve been in, but honestly it’s hard not to disparage the traditional setting having come through to the other side. The analogy that I keep coming back to is that it’s like Stockholm syndrome: you don’t realize how bad it was to you and for you until you’re out of it. And to quote the stereotypical movie ex-con when the cops are closing in again, “I ain’t goin’ back”… and every AT or strength coach I’ve talked to in this setting has similar sentiments.

I am a huge advocate for AT’s in the tactical setting and believe it has the unique potential to create true win-win situations. They should mostly be good jobs for AT’s, tactical professionals can receive better musculoskeletal care (particularly populations that likely haven’t had similar levels of care previously), and it can create substantial cost-savings/decreased liability for the agencies. Recouping far more than the costs of a program/position should be fairly easy to achieve in most situations.

I have advocated locally through some non-profit work to try and start a program for local police and/or firefighting personnel; those conversations are ongoing. I won’t go into the full pros & cons list of the military setting here, but I have developed that and am willing to share with anyone who has an interest in exploring this setting. I have given a presentation to local first responder groups, am scheduled to speak at our state AT meeting this winter, and will continue to find ways to spread the gospel of Athletic Trainers caring for our first responders and other tactical athletes. I’m happy to chat with anyone who reaches out.

There are quite a few differences between the college setting and working with the military. Vastly distinct cultures, as you would expect. There is often a much longer time horizon in focus - there is less emphasis on the rapid turnaround from injuries because there’s no dynamic of getting back to play in the next game in a few days. We are typically more focused about getting people through a training course or an entire career of 20+ years, and in my unit I’m often working with experienced operators with extensive injury histories. I rarely tape and don’t do a ton of wound care (a lot of my Airmen are also paramedics, so I don’t get asked to kiss many boo boos).

Budgeting and purchasing is drastically different than the university world. Working with and through medical treatment facilities is something new to navigate. Public safety would have some of its own quirks, including a big piece of learning workman’s compensation procedures. I don’t want to go on with all the minutia here, but I’m genuinely always willing to speak to it more in-depth with other ATs.

The mindset of a practitioner in this setting is going to be similar in some ways and will change in others when compared to the traditional athletics model (see all caveats given at the start of the section below). An ankle sprain is still an ankle sprain, of course the anatomy and physiology don’t change just because you drive to work past armed security forces troops. Rehab still needs to be tailored to build a patient back to their specific high-level capabilities, some of those capabilities just look different. Separate career fields have varying demands, much like athletes in assorted sports all have unique needs. I have everywhere from office workers who still have to pass a fairly easy yearly fitness test, all the way up to the special warfare operators who have to be incredibly physically competent and able to perform for extended periods of time and in inhospitable environments. But just because we work with some capable individuals, doesn’t mean that the setting is intimidating or difficult to integrate into as a practitioner. There is a lot of frustration with the military healthcare system as a whole, but that can work to your advantage as someone who will take time with patients, listen, be hands-on, and explain what you’re doing for their recovery.

One of the more frustrating aspects in this setting is inconsistency getting the long-term compliance with a treatment/rehab plan. I do a lot of evaluations and especially if it doesn’t take someone off of duty status, it can be challenging to convince some to come in as often or for as long as they should in order to get to the maintenance or preventative stages. There’s less of an element of a regular coaches report to have the external pressure to keep them coming in regularly. And since we’re not a part of any official chain of command, there is no way for us to truly hold people accountable. The end-users also usually haven’t been exposed to the athletics model and that it can be normal if not preferable to seek care daily or even multiple times a day.

My ‘return to play’ decisions do have more gravity in this setting. The example I give is that if I clear a tennis player early for a shoulder and they have pain during the next practice, just stop practicing and likely no harm done beyond an annoyed coach. If one of my operators is in the middle of a freefall and can’t operate his parachute safely, there is no way to call a quick timeout. No substitutions are available when operating scuba gear 30 feet underwater. There’s no limited contact designator jersey in combat. This would translate to other tactical settings as well: there’s no asking someone high on bath salts to take it easy on a law enforcement officer. A firefighter who needs to pull a coworker out of a dangerous situation can’t be second guessing their capabilities in the moment. As much as sports are fun, it is rewarding to feel like you’re contributing to something bigger or more important.

Gaining buy-in/trust/rapport is essential with tactical athletes and word of mouth is going to affect how people perceive you substantially. That can either work to your benefit or be a detriment for people seeking the care that they need. Going to watch training events and jumping in when appropriate goes a long way for showing you’re invested in knowing what the population’s needs are. And while those at the upper levels of the military message all the politically correct things, there is going to be some dark and borderline inappropriate humor at the ground level: if you’re someone who is bothered by that, this realistically might not be the right setting for you. If you break trust in this setting or they get a sense that you don’t belong, it would be incredibly problematic to overcome that stigma.

I know I have a good relationship with my service members if they’re asking if a pregnant spouse can come see me for back pain. Or if they trust me to evaluate their young child when they’re worried about a possible fractured wrist after a fall. You also have to factor more life situations in when working with adults - schedule needs of parenting, the stresses of moving, they take vacation in the middle of a rehab, etc. I once kicked a PJ out of a rehab session so he could go nap - he had young infant at home, had been working a nights schedule, and was preparing to move to his next duty station; I knew that him getting rest was more important that day than a maintenance rehab session.

Life as a Tactical AT

The day-to-day experience and schedule will vary within the tactical setting, even within each branch of the military and down to the unique demands/mission of each unit. So while there will be many similarities and I will describe my dynamic, it’s not representative of all tactical jobs by any means. I work with the Air Force at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, AZ. Our program is part of the Human Performance Optimization initiative, designated as a higher level of multidisciplinary care for USAF assets with a greater demand signal. The unit I work with is the formal training unit for the pararescue community, which means that the Pararescuemen (PJs) and Combat Rescue Officers (CRO’s) come to us for their upgrade training at a couple different points throughout their career. We fall under Air Force Special Warfare and are part of the Guardian Angel program - the USAF’s personnel recovery assets. The PJs will also attach with teams from other services to provide them with medical/rescue assets. I’ve had SEALs and Marine Raiders come through one of our courses. I get to work with some badasses who have cool toys. My history-taking got considerably more entertaining!

My typical daily schedule is Monday to Friday, 7 am - 4 pm with a lunch break. From 7 - 9 am, I’m either out in the gym while our guys are working out or doing evals or rehab in the clinic/gym. The rest of the day is time in the clinic, documentation, occasional meetings. I will sometimes attend training events and have the opportunity to travel a couple times a year to go TDY with the unit. TDY is “temporary duty” and the military’s terminology for their training away from their home base or special circumstances away from the unit and their normal day jobs. Only rarely will they have night events that they ask me to be around for, and when it happens I always have plenty of notice.

There are no weekend responsibilities, although I will offer treatment availability in select situations (almost always when I’m already planning to come on base to workout anyways); to be clear that is 100% my willingness to do so and there are zero expectations or even requests for it. I also frequently have a chance to workout on the clock as long as I don’t have anyone that is scheduled to see me. In fact, working out around the members and joining some group workouts is a great way to build rapport. I’ve passed the Operator Fitness Test, but I guess my beret must have gotten lost in the mail.

Which brings me to an incredibly important point to highlight. Those working in this setting who are not in the military must strike a fine balance between showing that you belong while also respecting the boundaries that we have not taken the oath of service and that there is a distinct separation. Civilians working with the military is more commonplace than most would imagine, so it is not unusual to have a mixture of active-duty, GS, and contractors working side by side regularly. One thing that my coworker (S&C coach) and I have done well consistently is to negotiate that dynamic. Our unit accepts and includes us as a part of the group and we have shown ourselves to be invested in building and improving things much beyond what our contract requires. However, we respect the distinction between us and those who have made that commitment when appropriate.

In terms of providing on-site coverage, I am not expected to be the official medical coverage for dangerous training events. Because there are no active-duty ATs, at the higher levels where policy is set they seem to struggle with truly understanding what we do and our scope of practice. For my situation, there are always paramedics (either the PJs or an IDMT-P) identified as the medical coverage. But they know their limitations in the musculoskeletal realm and are happy to have that layer of coverage in high-risk scenarios as well. The uncertainty of the AT scope/breadth is also true of the medical group who tracks our credentials and sets some policies/procedures; I am embedded, which means that I work with one specific unit and my clinic is on-site at my unit. I have minimal interaction with the medical group proper outside of referrals.

The medical team I work with has a few moving pieces. We are a smaller unit, so other units may have more professionals that play a role. Through my same company, we have another contractor as a S&C coach. We have a dietitian  (contractor) who is shared across much of the base but has priority for the operators in the Rescue community. There are mental health professionals that we have access to through other Rescue units or the med group, and our unit hopes to add a dedicated GS social worker in the coming year. The rest of the personnel are active-duty. We have IDMTs, which are the AF’s medics. We also have a flight physician, who is currently from a primary care sports medicine background but an ER doc has previously filled that billet. Because we have the physician and IDMTs, I do very little on the gen. med side of the house.

There isn’t a teaching element here in the same way I was used to in higher education. I do stay fairly active with a public health messaging approach for our unit, but rarely in a classroom setting. There are lots of opportunities for peer and interdisciplinary learning. AT’s seem to be pretty well respected by other providers and there is really no AT-PT turf war. As embedded providers, the two professions actually operate very similarly day-to-day and with no billing dollars to fight over, it’s all about contributing to the same mission and the well-being of the members.

Documentation is a more substantial piece in the military setting for a couple reasons:

• The EMR is not optimized for outpatient rehab providers.

• Documentation in multiple systems is sometimes required.

• While good documentation should always be our standard, it is essential in this setting because of the back-end dynamics of the military members’ careers - for the purpose of getting an accurate disability rating as well as the potential to transition into VA care following retirement.

I have a love-hate relationship with documentation here: I appreciate having time to do it well since that hasn’t always been the case, but I don’t like how much of my time it takes up.

My Life Now

I’m in a much better place than I was just over four years ago. I am substantially healthier, both mentally and physically. On the physical front, it’s no longer having to compromise being able to both maintain some decent cardio and lift regularly. I can grocery shop and cook the way I want to. My sleep isn’t challenged by both early mornings and late nights, and no time on a bus or regular travel to disrupt my routine. As I get further from my 20s, I definitely don’t have the same capacity to burn the candle at both ends and still persevere for an extended period of time.

The mental health piece is even more important. If you’ve never had good work-life balance, it’s hard to even articulate in a way you can wrap your head around. We - and those around us - are impacted by it way more than we realize. Of course the amount of hours makes a massive difference; I think the even bigger piece for me is the ability to unplug when I’m not on the clock. I can choose not to answer my calls or texts from 3 pm Friday until 7 am Monday and no one will be upset. I can go hiking with my dog and not have anxiety about checking my phone for the first time in three hours. I can’t even have my work email on my phone!

Going above and beyond is appreciated as such, not the expectation day in and day out (and often results in a gift of whiskey or a 12-pack as a thank you). I can’t imagine not having regular weekends off anymore. I no longer constantly feel like I’m giving way more than I’m getting back. I don’t feel like I’m a disposable asset that will just get used up and then replaced when I won’t take it anymore. I can say no to things when appropriate. I don’t have to cater to the unrealistic whims of 18-22 year olds. I can take vacation time at any point throughout the year.

I have finally found somewhere to put down roots, since I’m in a job that I can see myself in for an extended period for the first time. I loved Austin and didn’t want to leave; however it became extra frustrating to be in a place that was a great fit for me but being unable to enjoy it and take advantage of all the things that I loved there. In Tucson, I bought a house as a single earner in a metro area *shoutout to 2020 mortgage rates*. I can regularly invest in my community; I’m a volunteer and board member with a local non-profit organization that supports health and wellness initiatives for local firefighters. I can dedicate time to the hobbies I enjoy. I have the bandwidth to start an independent practice as a side business - I know others have talked about that much more in-depth on this site so I would reference their writings as opposed to going into details about mine, especially since it truly is a side hustle for me (I left working 60-70 hour weeks for a reason so I’m not trying to inflict that on myself again). I can be a better friend, boyfriend, dog owner, community member…

Future of AT

The last 4 years stress-tested Athletic Training for reasons with which I’m sure most reading this are intimately familiar. The combination of the entry-level Master’s (ELM) transition and everything that came along with the pandemic being the most impactful in my opinion. There are ‘shortages’ of AT’s, particularly in the traditional setting. It seems that less AT’s are willing to accept the hours and pay, with the bulk of the change seemingly coming at the entry-level positions. I remain a skeptic that the ELM transition will do everything that it was hoped and messaged to be (that toothpaste is out of the tube so I’ll save getting up on that soapbox until we chat over an adult beverage at a conference).

So where do we go from here? And since this is the story of my journey, where do I want AT to go from here?

As I have navigated my AT educational and career pathway, I have continued to uphold high expectations for the profession and the providers within it. My opinion is that we need to continue to push to elevate from within; I think sometimes there has been a resigned attitude of settling or appeasement that has held us back collectively. First and foremost I hope to see some mindset and cultural changes internally. This will drive many of the more tangible improvements and increase our standing with external stakeholders. If we want others to respect us as highly-trained and credentialed healthcare providers, we need to act like it. Professionalism (dress, communications, messaging, etc.) needs to be more consistent. We have to stop spending bandwidth on water bottles and bench towels instead of medical care. We need to stop taking orders from coaches and parents. We need to stop allowing supervision from non-medical entities to dictate medical decisions/policies. We need to set boundaries and stop being available 24/7.

The biggest mindset shift I would like to see is a true re-establishment of a primary identity as healthcare providers. I think that mainly up to this point, the outside world and some AT’s have seen us as the people within athletics who happen to know something about healthcare. What we should be are members of the medical community who are best qualified to work with physically-active populations. The profession’s name is problematic in this regard but I don’t have a better solution to propose currently so I won’t add any more word-count to that recurrent debate here. These ideas are why I have always liked the term “clinic” over “ATR” and refer to the population under my care as “my patients” instead of “my athletes”.

A better-established role and footprint in the broader healthcare ecosystem would lead to my vision of a sustainable pathway forward for AT into the future. In the traditional settings, I like the idea of the medical model of employment & supervision even though I’m not evaluating it from firsthand experience. In my opinion, we need to go away from the practice of traveling with teams so much. I haven’t heard the traveling piece brought up much in the work-life balance conversations and would love to see some more productive and grounded discussions. I think we should push back on the culture of off-day (on weekends) treatments being expected.

I think we need to continue aggressively expanding into the non-traditional settings. Our skillset is so valuable and much of the world is just gaining awareness and/or access to it. While the military is ahead of police & fire currently, I think those public safety positions will increase substantially in the next 10-20 years. The growth potential there is enormous. AT’s in physician practice roles seem to be developing quickly. The industrial setting seems to be well-established and expanding. Independent practices are more prevalent than they were just a few years ago. These options will allow more people to realistically stay in the profession, while simultaneously pressuring the traditional settings to match salary and working hours expectations. We’ve also got to continue the push for being able to bill insurance.

Message to You

My message to the reader would be one of cautious optimism regarding AT and your role in it. There absolutely are settings and situations that allow us to thrive over the course of an entire career, but it may take some trial and error. And it certainly will take consistent advocacy to improve the different settings and the jobs within each. If I’ve learned nothing else in life to this point, it’s not to assume that you’ll stay on a certain pathway, especially for an extended period of time.

We were and we are the smart kids in class, don’t be ashamed of it! We collectively suck at bragging because we’re so used to being on the sidelines and in the background, both literally and figuratively. We’ve come a long way from the days of throwing ice and NSAID’s at everything, relying on passive modalities and spending a lot of our time taping. We also need to unashamedly practice at the top of our scope of practice.  

Obviously this differs state to state based on practice acts, but we should be advocating for more high-level skills to be included. If you’re in a state that is vague or allows your supervising physician to dictate your scope of practice - lean into the uncertainty and embrace the chance to learn and do more! I had to get comfortable with this on the business side of things, especially with some city regulations. AT and specifically independent practices of AT aren’t common/prominent/visible enough to have many specific guidelines, so it was a major growth point to learn how to leverage that to my advantage instead of being a hindrance or causing the whole idea to be a non-starter.

Throughout my AT career, I’ve had better coworkers and relationships than I have had jobs and bosses. The people - peers and patients - have never been the problem. The profession is fun and lets us work in some great environments. We work with and empower high level athletes, whether they be college/pro athletes and Olympians or military Special Forces operators. Our work can take us all over the country, if not the world. I’ve been on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at the bottom of a Titan 2 ICBM silo. But we have to remember that at the end of the day… no matter how much Nike dri-fit gear that you’re hooked up with… it’s just a job and that we all need something beyond that.

It’s cliché but at least notionally true: if you were to pass away, your job would probably be posted before your obituary. And while our co-workers and patients may value us, that doesn’t justify the marginalization of our families, friends, significant others, pets, communities, and most importantly ourselves.

Dominic can be reached at dworrellatc@gmail.com. Feel free to give his side business a follow on IG @catalystmovemed.

Today’s message is about emotions and how they can manifest in so many different forms. But before we get there, I have a story to tell you about one of my favorite topics: Goals.

I was at lunch yesterday with someone and we were talking about entrepreneurship as he was looking to make the jump himself.

He told me he set this lofty goal for the year to motivate him throughout the trials and tribulations of starting his own business. He called it a ‘stretch goal’, something that’s popular in goal-setting frameworks.

I found myself counseling him that setting such a stretch goal (he estimated the probability of accomplishing it to be < 5%) could potentially backfire…

T1: “If you fast forward one-year from now, and you inevitably don’t accomplish that stretch goal, how do you think you’re going to feel?”

P1: “Well… probably disappointed…”

T1: “Exactly. So why set yourself up for failure? Why set a goal that you know is only going to lead you to a place where you feel bad about yourself?”

P1: “Because it gets me excited! Knowing I have this stretch goal to accomplish is going to motivate me to get up every day and work as hard as I can. That’s the pressure I need to be motivated to succeed!”

I could see the excitement brimming in his eyes! A young entrepreneur in the making, ready to take on the world. It reminded me of myself at one point.

Setting a stretch goal to motivate oneself doesn’t always provide the intended effect. I know from experience. Like I said, he reminded me of myself, and when I used to set massive stretch goals for motivation I found that the type of motivation they built was a negative motivation.

It was a “You set this goal, and if you don’t complete this you’re a failure” type of motivation. That brought on more negative emotions, and more stress, and then I was stuck in this vicious negative cycle of not accomplishing a goal I never really had a chance at, and feeling bad about it the same time.

I didn’t want to swat this house of cards just yet though - so I continued to press him. And he’s a smart guy, he could tell the point I was trying to get across. And so he asked:

P1: “Do you not wake up every day excited to go to work? Are you not excited about your job?”

I paused for a second and thought…

T1: “No. Not really.”

Ah shit. I fell for his trap. Now I had some explaining to do…

T1: “Not in a bad way! No - I’m not actively excited every day I go to work…

…cont There is a lot of aspects of my job that are exciting, such as when a client makes a significant improvement towards their goal, or if I get a new client who is motivated and driven to succeed. Then yea sure, that’s exciting, but I can’t really say I’m excited about it. I’ve just learned over the years to manage my emotions when it comes to business.

If I was excited every day that means when opportunities fell through, which they often do, I would be exposed to the free-fall that comes after excitement. I don’t actively get excited in the same way that I don’t actively get disappointed when something bad happens.

By managing my expectations and not allowing myself to get too high, I also protect myself against getting low when things don’t go right, which is very often in the world of entrepreneurship.”

At this point I had a flashback to 2021. It was a vivid moment because I was back in the gym with one of my clients who is a successful entrepreneur running the #1 leading company in its industry.

I was asking him these very same questions I was now answering, and déjà vu was hitting hard because without realizing - I responded the same way that he had responded to me two years earlier.

He had told me how he doesn’t get excited, and he doesn’t get disappointed. He maintains an even emotional balance. Never too high, never too low.

At the time that sounded pretty depressing. You don’t get excited??

I even asked him - do you consider yourself happy?

And here I was at the table, when my conversation counterparty asked me:

P1: “Would you say that you’re happy in life?”

Like a wave crashing the spell of déjà vu came back to reality.

T1: “Hell yea I’m happy!”

At this point I was processing the flashback I had of my client years prior having the SAME conversation I was now on the other side of. I started to really understand my position much clearer now, and my clients’ old words finally made sense.

Entrepreneurship changes your way of thinking. Neither good nor bad, as most things, but just different.

You’re forced to recognize and discard your emotions. They do not serve you in business.

You must be logical, look at the objective reality, make informed decisions and calculated risks.

Any decision that is made purely off emotions is a dangerous one, whether you admit it or not.

And so I realized that learning to recognize your emotions for what they are, accept them, and the actively choose to make a logical decision in spite of them - is a great superpower.

And more importantly - that doesn’t mean you don’t feel those emotions. It just means that you are able to separate the process between feeling the emotion, and acting on it.

So am I excited about my job and my career? Yes - absolutely! I would not continue to do what I do if it did not excite me.

But does that excitement manifest itself in any other way than a feeling that I’ve learned to separate? Not really.

I am not fueled, or motivated by that excitement. It does not give me energy. It’s just a feeling, an emotion. If I allowed that excitement to give me purpose, to drive my motivation, then what happens when there is an absence of excitement? What happens when a client leaves or if I make a mistake and somebody gets hurt?

That means without that excitement present I would be prone to spiraling into negative feelings; depression, anxiety, thinking myself a failure. I would have a loss of motivation, lethargy. It would be entering the valley soon after the peak.

I would be riding an emotional rollercoaster.

As much fun as I have on real rollercoasters, and I do have quite a bit; I grew up with the largest rollercoasters in the world in my backyard - Six Flags Great Adventure in NJ. We had Kingda Ka - at the time it was the tallest and fastest rollercoaster in the world.

We had El Toro - the fastest all-wooden rollercoaster in the US.

And my personal favorite - Medusa - a thrilling ride of constant spins and loops and upside downs. I loved going upside down.

But as much as my body loves to be on a rollercoaster, my mind and certainly my heart don’t enjoy it as much. I don’t think anyone likes to ride the emotional rollercoaster. That’s one ride I prefer not to get on.

And I think that’s where there is a learning curve between a young entrepreneur, full of excitement and vigor at the possibilities of accomplishing their goals - and someone who’s gotten punched in the face every day.

That’s what I tell people entrepreneurship is like… waking up every day to get punched in the face. Over and over again until you figure out how to stop getting hit. And then eventually, if you’re lucky, you figure out how to punch back.

The former was the man sitting in front of me.

And don’t get me wrong - it IS exciting! The potential IS enormous! That kind of excitement DOES bring with it a sense of amazing energy!

But as is above - so is below.

To be excited, to think of the potential, to tap into that energy means you are exposing yourself to the equal and opposite amounts.

To acknowledge that excitement means you will be guided into disappointment at some point; to acknowledge the positive potential means you will eventually ruminate on what if things don’t work out; to utilize that positive energy means without it, you will feel empty.

I know from experience. I have felt the highs and lows in my career, and they were exhausting. The longer I’ve been in business, the more and more I have worked at managing my expectations and separating my emotions from my actions.

All things in life have a duality.

There would be no happiness if there were not sadness. We would not know the experience of joy if we did not also know the experience of grief.

If you have not experienced this yet for yourself, then I can certainly relate to the perspective that this approach is cold and mechanical. It can certainly appear that way.

That’s what I thought of my client when he imparted his wisdom on me at one point, although I didn’t understand.

But now I do, only because I’ve experienced the trauma those ups and downs can cause.

Remember - I’m not saying that we don’t feel emotions. That would be borderline psychopath.

What I’m saying is that in all great leaders, in all great persons of business, is an ability to identify your emotions and separate them from actions.

THAT, is a power that must be cultivated.

And that is why when I’m asked if I get excited every day to go to work… I simply say No, not really.

What I’m excited about is the direction I’ve lived my life. I may not get excited in the small day-to-day moments, but make no mistake, I am powered by a force much bigger than excitement.

I am living, and working, in cohesion with my Purpose.

Helping people achieve health and performance is in alignment with who I want to be.

How I live, how I treat people, how I give back, are all true to who I am.

Everything I do is evaluated not by a goal or by an outcome, but by one simple question, “Does this align with my Purpose?”

If the answer is yes - than I pursue it wholly.

If the answer is no, then I move on.

And so, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a passionate health and wellness advocate, my message to you today is not to measure your life by it’s successes or failures in some arbitrary goals; but to operate in alignment with your Purpose.

Are you riding the emotional rollercoaster every day? At the whims of material goods and bads?

Or are you emotionally aware and able to identify why you feel a certain way, and not allow that emotion to fuel your actions?

Are you able to make rational decisions in the face of adverse conditions? In highly charged emotional situations are you calm and collected - or do you lash out?

As a final note - no one is perfect. I am still prone to outbursts, I love a good rant when I’m feeling frustrated.

But learning to control my emotions is a lifelong journey that has no finish line.

I’m simply proud to be much more in control now than I was 2 years ago, and I am grateful that the people I lean on for advice are willing to share their wisdom with me.

I hope that the conversation I had yesterday will one day make sense to the person I had it with, just as I didn’t understand the words of my client until many years later.

Two resources that helped me on my journey as to these two points are:

• Purpose First Entrepreneur

• Emotional Intelligence 2.0

- Trainer 01

This is my reflection on Project Par.

Contents:

• By the Numbers

• Success & Failure

• Hidden Lessons

• Personal Reflection

• Final Thoughts

To read the introduction to the Project, see:

By the Numbers

“There’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

I set out on Project Par with an extremely in-depth framework of program design for both physical attributes and golf performance. I also had a detailed schedule, year long macro-cycle phase, and daily habit tracker. It was ambitious. A bit too ambitious.

I ended with just the habit tracker and a very loose form of workout tracker. I also didn’t keep up with my performance testing, but luckily the thing that matters, golf performance, is all well accounted for. Let’s take a look at the year by the numbers:

• 27 official rounds (and quite a few more unofficial)

• Starting Handicap Index of 22.4

• Final Handicap Index of 18.0

• Final score avg. 101.3

• Best score: 89 at Normandy Shores (9/8/23)

• Worst score: 121 at Dunedin CC (1/7/23)

• 282 hours of combined practice + play

• 7603 range balls hit

• 4570 practice putts

• 2531 practice chips

• 2183 swings on air

• 50 bike rides

• 96 hours on the bike

• 1130 miles ridden

• 77 resistance training workouts

• 8 yoga sessions

Whew.

And now let’s look at the same statistics visually. For the aesthetics, you know?

Wow. This is the first time I’ve looked at those numbers myself, and honestly a huge wave of gratitude just flowed over me. I was always taught not to count your chips at the table (poker, anyone?), and so I apply that to most things. Although I was tracking all of these things, I wasn’t tallying the running totals. I actually had no idea how many hours or sessions or anything really throughout the year.

I knew how hard I was working, and how much time and effort I was putting in. And not that I need any external validation, but it definitely feels good to see the objective numbers come out to demonstrate what the time investment really was. A few numbers that stand out to me:

• 282 hours of practice/play! Wow! To be honest, I thought it was going to be a bit higher than that. To think of the standard 10,000 hour rule, this year I only did 3% of that!

• 96 hours and 1100+ miles on the bike. I love that number. I was pretty disappointed that I lost 3 months of cycling due to my injury, but even so the effort I put in cycling was tangible. I enjoyed every minute of it and the improvement to my cardio definitely showed.

• 77 workouts. This number feels a little light, and it probably is considering I didn’t track this as closely as I could have. I average 2 workouts a week, sometimes 3 if I’m feeling good and sometimes 1 or less if I’m traveling. I’d probably estimate this number to be closer to 90 than 80.

• Best score: 89. I am most proud of this. Although the goal was of course to shoot Par, one of the more realistic goals I had for this year was to break 90. I remember everything about this round, where I played, who I played with, what it felt like when I tallied up the score at the end (remember how I don’t count my chips at the table? Yup that applies to everything) and found out I shot an 89. What a rush. And I also birdied 18 without even knowing what was on the line!

And now: A year in Swings:

Successes and Failures

I wrote about this a lot along the way, but most people don’t have the correct definition of failure.

Failure isn’t when you set an arbitrary goal, and then are unable to achieve it. Well, I guess technically that is failure, but it really isn’t.

Failure to me, and how I use it, is when you have stopped making progress. Or stopped trying.

So although I didn’t shoot Par, which was the goal, I don’t view Project Par a failure.

Quite the opposite really. I think it was a smashing success. I achieved one of the things that I desperately wanted (to break 90), I challenged myself to an incredible task and rose to the occasion every single day to meet that challenge, through the ups and downs of life. I was hindered by an injury at the end of September, but I didn’t let that stop me. I overcame that adversity to continue to practice and train and eventually get back to playing in a short period of time.

I had rounds over 105, I had a 91 on the scorecard. My average was over 100, but I ended the year at a solid 95.

My golfing ability is night and day to what it was when it started. I played over 30 rounds (a few unofficial) with some great friends and even my Mom and Dad a few times. I met new people, even picked up some business opportunities because of my frequent (and improved) play.

I developed a proper golf swing, which is still a work in progress. I gained around 5mph of club-head speed, and can drive the ball 280 yards on a good day now, (290 with wind 😏). I can talk at the same level of golf athletes when I’m working with them in the gym, understanding intimately their needs and the difficulty in improving at the game. I can relate to the effect of small, incremental improvements over a long period of time.

I developed an extremely consistent workout habit, of 2 times a week no matter what. I found a great balance between exercise and life, using golf as the happy activity in between.

I got in great cardiovascular shape, riding over 1000 miles on a road bike, peaking at 55 miles in one ride. Had I not gotten injured I’d still be riding today (fret not! I’ll work my way back on the bike in due time).

I never really said this at the beginning, because in truth it needed to be a silent motivator, but Project Par was about so much more than just golf. It was more than just physical capability, and way more than the importance of developing a structured plan or framework.

Project Par was about challenging yourself. About committing wholeheartedly to one singular goal. To not accept failure, to not give up, and to give it your full effort. It was to not let inconveniences, either big or small, de-rail you from that purpose. To overcome adversity, obstacles, and negative circumstances.

It was about realizing that it really doesn’t matter what you want to do, or be great at. It doesn’t matter if you become great at all.

What Project Par is about is trying, and trying your hardest.

In that manner, I could not be any more successful. I am proud of the effort I put in, and I truly did give it my all.

Yes there were some bad days where my consistency wavered and my output was low, but through it all every day I got up with the intention to get better, and made good on that intention.

No one is perfect, because there is no perfect. There’s only your ability to move forward in the face of doubt, or to succumb to it. And I moved forward with progress.

Hidden Lessons

There were quite a few things I learned along that way that I set out to learn, and just as many that I didn’t expect at all.

I learned how to swing a golf club, of course. But I also learned a lot about the mechanics of the golf club and how it interacts with the golf ball to produce flight. I learned way more than I thought about manipulating the club-face in order to produce the shot you want, and that every person creates shots and impacts differently.

I learned that the golf swing is very similar to exercise in the sense that there is an agreed upon “form”, but to that end because every individual is unique, there are limitless possibilities as to the best swing for every unique person.

I learned quite a bit about golf statistics and how it rules professional golf. I hate that the game is so predicated upon how far you can hit it, but there is ample data to back that up. I have my own differences in opinions in the value of distance for beginners, and especially juniors, but one special part about the game is that every style of play has the potential to win. See Brian Harman’s victory at the 2023 Open Championship.

I was pleasantly surprised by the impact of cardiovascular ability on my play. The more proficient I became on the bike the better my endurance became on the course, and in practice too. When I was at my peak of cycling I felt like I could play two full rounds back to back no problem.

And when I got hurt and had to stop cycling I noticed a very quick and significant drop off.

There was also a huge boost to my mental from cardio activity. Most of my life I had never liked endurance training, and always thought that ample resistance training would make up for it. But I had been wrong.

Cardiovascular health via endurance training is vital for complete wellness and performance. It had marked effects on how I felt mentally and physically with tangible results in my measures of resting heart rate and heart rate variability. Neither of which have fully recovered since being off the bike.

I also re-discovered how much I love learning new things. It was one of my original reasons for starting Project Par, but I’ve always loved learning. For much of my time in Miami I was learning how to be a great clinician, then how to run and manage a business, and my athletic and physical endeavors had taken a back seat ever since. But in the process of getting golf lessons, practicing on my own, getting out to the course to play and getting critiqued, I remembered how much I love being a student.

A very special thank you to my Coach, who all year has been the best resource I could ask for. He was patient, knowledgeable, and knew exactly how to communicate the things I needed in a way that I received it best. He would give me instruction in person when he was available, and was always willing to be on FaceTime at 10p at night with our shirts off figuring out if the feel matched the move or not. That may sound weird, but you golfers will understand.

One of the most unexpected lessons was in the benefits of having a singular goal. It’s not that it makes the time go by faster or that it makes the bad things better. But it gives a purpose to the negative events you go through.

Maybe an example is best. I’ve struggled with chronic back pain for almost 10 years now, on and off after having disc herniation surgery when I was in college. And many times when I would have an episode, or flare-up, that left me hobbling around (literally, hobbling), it would be quickly followed by a short term depressive bout. Put simply, it sucks to be injured and in pain all the time, even more so when I can’t do the one thing that brings me joy no matter what: movement.

Yet when I got hurt this year, as depressing as it was to think I had overcome the cyclical nature of re-injury, I found myself in a much better place mentally. I didn’t have time to be upset or said or wallow in self-pity. I thought of only one thing: I had a goal to reach. And I would not be letting this flare up stand in the way of that goal.

I immediately started on rehabilitation and recovery, doing everything in my toolbox to get back on my feet quickly. Luckily I’ve got a toolbox much larger than most people, and although it took me over a month to start to feel 80% better, I was back swinging a golf club in 2 weeks. I don’t think I would have had the mental fortitude to rehabilitate as quick as I did had I not had a singular purpose pushing me forward.

The power of goals is great. But that brings me to another unexpected lesson… that I’m starting to think goals are a little overrated. Ok hold on, let me explain.

I mentioned in the beginning that I had this big huge framework broken down into sections with objective markers to track every attribute and properly scheduled intervals to re-test them. It was a lot. It was supposed to be a lot.

I created my framework from goal-setting models used by massive corporations such as Intel, Google, Apple, etc. I thought if they used it, hell why wouldn’t I?

Well, I figured out the answer to that question is because it takes an incredible amount of time and resources to keep track of and organize all of that information. Huge corporations have in-depth systems and multiple people responsible for that data.

When you’re doing it all by yourself, it ends up being a lot of wasted time. Maybe not wasted, but certainly inefficient. And I realized this about half-way through the year when I stopped tracking most things except for golf statistics and daily habits.

As much as I had hoped to track all of these things for the ability to analyze them at the years end, I realized an analysis of information doesn’t help me reach my goal. It just helps me audit my performance when the Project is over. As just one person, I needed to be ruthless with my time and resources, and spending them on auditing, or preparing for an audit, was not a good use of time. So anything that didn’t directly contribute to me achieving that goal got cut.

That got me thinking about whether or not I set good goals? I used the SMART goal framework because I thought it was the best, and it certainly helped me clarify what exactly my goals were.

But I realized throughout this journey that if you are truly committed to progress, and I mean truly committed, then you don’t need a bullseye to aim for. You just need to point in the right direction, and start going. It’s not going to be a linear path anyway, so having failsafes and protocols in place don’t really do anything except take time away from getting closer towards the goal. In essence, too much planning; not enough action.

Now on the flip side of that is the idea that if you’re not 100% dedicated towards improvement, and if you don’t have extremely high levels of discipline, than having the framework and structure to fall back on can be the difference between moving forward and moving backwards.

I came to understand that I am more of the former and as long as I know I am directionally moving in the right direction, I am more than capable of putting in the effort to progress on willpower alone. That I have come to understand about myself, and I think everyone who develops their own Project needs to look at themselves in a similar manner and develop an honest reflection about their strengths and weaknesses.

Personal Reflection

The first thing that I want to say, is that yes, I am glad that this Project has reached it’s conclusion.

I was getting very close to being burnt out in the month of December. I knew it, and if you had been reading the weekly updates you probably knew it too. I wasn’t practicing at home, I wasn’t putting in a lot of range time, I was just a little worn out from all that Golf. Ironic to say, I know.

The reality is that 12 months of non-step effort is exhausting, no matter how well balanced you are. It wasn’t even the physical volume of training as much as it was the mental exhaustion and pressure of having a goal to reach. As motivating as it is to have that singular purpose, it’s also a little tiring to always have a strong urge to move forward, to progress.

By the end of the year I found that the pressure of constantly needing and wanting to improve was becoming a burden. Yes, I was disciplined enough to still practice when I could anyway, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel like a weight has been lifted off of me. I am no longer bound to a singular purpose, and that’s a little freeing.

I guess it’s sort of a Yin and Yang relationship, where one cannot exist without the other.

To go through life with no goals or purpose is one of being lost and discontent, whereas to always have a purpose is narrow and can be overbearing. The reality is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, where you can balance periods of goal-setting and progress with times of enjoying the moment and presentness. I don’t think I’ve found that balance yet, but I have certainly come to respect its importance and am much closer than I was last year.

I’m selfishly looking forward to the next round of golf I get to play where I am free from any goals or expectations. I don’t care what I shoot, I don’t have to track every shot and I won’t be writing a detailed report after. I will be back in balance with the game, playing for fun and motivated by my own performance with no external validation in sight. That’s going to be a great round.

I’m looking forward to re-directing my time and energy towards other goals, even if their time-frame isn’t as long. Personal and business goals that have been in check with my physical pursuit will get the attention they deserve.

I’ve also started Proyecto Español, which is my Project for 2024. It’s going to be a less structured and much less intense, but no less demanding, version of Project Par. My goal is to become conversationally fluent in Spanish, and using all the lessons from 2023 will help me in this new endeavor. I won’t be writing about it, won’t be tracking it, and won’t be making a big framework to follow. I’m just going to work every day to make small improvements at the language, and figure it out as I go. I’m looking forward to the new style and different type of learning this will require. Vamos!

I also want to take a moment to thank you. If you’re reading this right now that means you’re probably interested in my journey. You’ve probably read some of my updates, or at least kept a loose track of how I was doing. For the very few of you that have been following closely, your support means everything to me. Many of times when I was not feeling motivated, it was the thought in the back of my head that I had an obligation to do my best if for no other reason than not to let you down. And to those of you who reached out in some form or another to show your support, I am sincerely grateful.

I didn’t know what to expect when I decided to chase this goal in public, providing insight into everything I do. I thought it would feel a lot more vulnerable than it did. Especially in the beginning. After a while though it felt like no one was watching at all. Hell, save for the people who have commented or messaged, for all I know no one was watching!

That was kind of nice though, to stop caring about what other people thought or might think. Being able to do what I thought was best without judgement or fear of judgement. I guess that was a huge win in of itself, is that I was able to get back to just doing me. Being me. Not basing my actions on what other people thought was right, but what I thought was right. So much of our society today is predicated on acceptance, and far too often the line is blurred between doing something because we want to and doing something because we think others want us to.

Knowing where to draw that line and truly accept yourself as an individual is important, at least I believe it is.

I cannot emphasize how happy and proud I am of how I undertook this Project and how I performed within it. I’ve accomplished a lot in my life I’m proud of, but very few things were as clearly defined as this one. I always believed in myself, but when you set a goal and work to achieve it, and then you complete it, well it just feels good.

I know I have so much potential for other things. And not just personal accomplishments either. I know that my future holds a great deal of bringing positivity and change to others. Hopefully my writings of Project Par has convinced at least a couple people to commit to their health and wellness. If nothing else, maybe it at least showed that with hard work, dedication, perseverance, and a whole lot of effort, anything is possible. That one’s from Jesse Owens.

Final Thoughts

I’d be happy to answer any questions or have a conversation about anything related to Project Par. If you have questions or just want to chat, even if its about your own Project, feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an e-mail.

Overall, it’s been an incredible 12 months. There are things I can remember every detail and there are entire months that I can’t recall. Guess that’s just how time works, consistent and distorted all at once.

I’ll look back with gratitude and profound thanks on 2023, for many reasons, but it will always hold a special place for me in that it was the year I took up Project Par.

2024 is for Proyecto Español, but make no mistake, I plan on playing and continuing to improve at golf for a long time. I didn’t work this hard just to stop now. One day I will shoot Par.

It may not be for another year, or 5 years, or even 10. But one day I will. And when I do, I’ll look back at where it all started, with a goal to dedicate everything in my power to be as good as I can be. I’ll remember all the good times and bad, the tough rounds and the injuries as well as the first time breaking each big marker (90, 80).

At the end, my ideals will always be the same.

Aim for progress, not perfection.

Never give up.

Failure is a state of mind, not an objective result.

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

Always try your hardest, or do not try at all.

Thank you.

I want to take a moment and thank all 305 (yes, it just so happens the subscriber count matches the Miami area code. It was meant to be!) for being with me on the Project Par journey this year.

At the bottom of this email you’ll find the Week 52 update, the final one.

It’s going to take me a bit of time to run through all the data and journal logs that I made throughout the year to track my progress, but don’t worry, when I do there will be a comprehensive Project Par Year in Review to follow.

As for other things, I’m looking forward to getting back to publishing educational material for Train Like a Pro, something I haven’t had the time to do in the latter part of the year.

On deck in my drafts is a comprehensive research review on cold and heat modalities, a thorough write up of why “Active” Recovery doesn’t mean what you think it does, and a year-long review of my HRV data. If there’s anything you’re interested in that you think would benefit from my deep dive feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll see if it can be added to the list.

I also want to tell you about my 2024 Project!

Many of you have asked and I’ve been diligent about not revealing it until now. So here it goes…

Proyecto Español!

Es verdad! En 2024 yo quiero aprender español, pero no que un gringo. Quiero hablar español como que persona de español por realidad. En conversación, a trabajar, todo lo mundo que habla español, quiero hablar y entender.

That’s right! In 2024 I want to learn Spanish, but not like a gringo. I want to speak Spanish like a native speaker for real. In conversation, at work, anywhere in the world that speaks Spanish, I want to be able to talk and understand.

I’ll admit, I already know a little bit of Spanish as it is. At least more than most people that grew up in New Jersey and went to college in Ohio.

But I’ve never fully committed to learning the language fluently. I can get around, can understand bits and pieces and am always able to order what I want at restaurants, but I want to be able to meet a native Spanish speaker and have a fluent, candid conversation with them.

Before I talk about why I’m starting Proyecto Español, there’s something I’ve got to tell you…

I won’t be publishing or writing about it like I did Project Par.

I really enjoyed writing about my experiences and sharing them with you, but in honesty it also took a lot out of me. It became a grind to track all the things I needed to track, organize data, and then write up a weekly review. It started to become draining at the end and I found it took out just a little bit of enjoyment from the journey.

And so for Proyecto Español I decided that I won’t commit to a regular publishing of any material. I’ll still be sending out semi-regular e-mails with my thoughts on life, health, wellness, and performance, and of course will include little updates on my progress there. Train Like a Pro will continue to evolve!

With that said, why learn Spanish?

Well, let’s point out the obvious: I live in Miami.

Spanish is the main language of South Florida, I don’t care what you say. It is not only a huge personal benefit to be able to communicate with the majority of the population in their native tongue, but there are a ton of business advantages as well. I think it would be awesome to expand my coaching and training services to the Latin population and those who don’t speak English. I think it would be amazing to be able to translate some of my resources, including my writing into Spanish.

I also spent a fair bit of time in Spanish speaking countries over the past few years, Spain and Colombia. Being around Spanish speakers made me realize that Spanish makes up such a large percentage of conversations that I’m around, and I’m ignorant to it all! I would love to travel around South America more, and speaking the Native language is the only REAL way to do that.

Since I have a pretty decent head start of understanding a little bit of Spanish and knowing the basic rules, it won’t be like I’m starting from scratch trying to learn French or Mandarin. This should help reduce the learning curve a bit.

I knew after Project Par I didn’t want to challenge myself physically. I love the physical aspect of Golf and thoroughly enjoyed the training I put in, but it was time for something different.

I wanted to challenge myself in a way mentally that I had not been challenged before. And what better way than to learn a new language?

I have a lot of fun speaking what little Spanish I do in my life as it is. It feels like I’m a whole new persona. Maybe that sounds weird, but when I speak Spanish I say things that probably don’t fit my personality should I say it in English. Is that normal for people who speak multiple languages? I don’t know… but I enjoy speaking another language and want to take it all the way to become conversationally fluent.

There are some more, smaller reasons, like wanting to take my parents to South America and be their guide.

Compared to Project Par, this is also going to be a lot less structured. When it comes to physical development, I was in my domain. That is my job after all, developing a training and development program was what I do best.

But with this, I’m completely out of my comfort zone.

Combine that with the fact that I need a little time off from extreme goal-oriented production (just a few weeks! Nothing crazy…) and I’m going to have to learn how to learn a language! If you have any tips or recommendations here, I’d love to hear them.

For now, I downloaded Babble and paid for the premium version this morning. I’ll be practicing there daily until I figure out how to take on a more serious routine. I figured it’ll probably end up by getting a tutor, and of course doing my best to talk Spanish with the people I see every day.

I’m really excited to be taking on this new challenge and the lessons I learn with it.

Progress never stops, it may change directions, it may slow down, but there is only one direction in life and that is forward.

I’ll be moving from Project Par to Proyecto Español, and I can’t wait until the end of this year when an entire article is in Spanish.

In the meantime, thanks for being a part of my journey, I hope you’ve gotten as much value out of it as I did.

For those of you that have adopted the Project framework, I want to hear from you!

How did your 2023 Project go? What did you learn from it? And what’s on the slate for 2024?? Let me know!

Whatever it is you pursue, I just hope that you give it your 100% effort. There is no failure in trying, only in giving up.

- Trainer 01

Contents:

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

Habit Tracker

Not the most impressive final week, but hey, one range and one round, that’s still a decent week!

Training Log

• Resistance Train (Gym): 2

• Conditioning (Road Bike): 1

I got out for a 14 mile bike ride this week! It was amazing to be on the bike again, but judging how my SIJ felt afterwards I was probably a tad bit aggressive and should not have been out there. A bitter-sweet realization.

Skill Practice

To be honest going into this range sesh I thought it was going to be like, my best practice ever.

Silly me.

It was a good one, felt good to just swing loose and get prepared for the next days round, but trust me when I say there were plenty of terrible shots in here too.

Golf Performance

Not a bad way to end the year!

This was one of my cleanest rounds to date, and extremely fitting that I addressed 1.5 of my 3 worst scoring limiters.

• I hit 57% fairways (but only 4 GIR’s)

• I didn’t lose a SINGLE BALL to OB/Penalty

• I did have 4 three-putts

• I ended up in a green side bunker 6 times, but got up and down for par on one of them!

It definitely felt great to be in play the whole time, and although I did have some bunker trouble it wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as going OB would have been. A few too many 3-putts can be assigned to my lack of putting practice this week, and overall just had a very good day on the tee box.

I wasn’t hitting greens and didn’t pitch well, especially from the 80-110yd distances, but would have knocked off a few strokes there. That was the difference for both my sub-90 rounds is I was money from close range.

Wrap-Up

The best part about this final round wasn’t the score or how I played, it was who I played it with.

I got to play with my dad, who was a huge part in the start of Project Par in the first place, as well as one of my best friends who I played my first round of the year with to kick off the project!

Golf is a special game and I’ve loved committing myself toward improving over the last year. All in all I’d say it was an absolute success. A 95 to end the year isn’t so bad considering where I started!

Contents:

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

Habit Tracker

Presented without comment…

Good range time and two rounds, can’t complain about that. But I’m being extremely lazy about putting at home. End of the season blues. -1 for me.

Training Log

• Resistance Train (Gym): 2

• Conditioning (Road Bike): 0

I might get back on the back this week! Or I might just wait until the new year and start anew.

Either way as unfortunate as it was that I sustained an injury that sidelined my conditioning, I’m happy to be through the worst of it and almost back to 100%. It really sucked there for a good month or so.

Skill Practice

I’ll be honest, the range is actually a lot more fun the better your swing is. That’s an unexpected surprise…

Now when I go to the range I don’t feel like I’m opening pandora’s box hoping to discover something that will magically make my swing “click”.

A strange feeling, I know.

I go to the range and hit maybe 30 or so balls to warm-up and just get a feel for the club face, make solid contact, and groove my swing feels so that it feels comfortable rotating on plane.

And then I play games with myself. I try not to hit the same club more than 3-4 times in a row.

I pretend like I’m on a hole; Long par 4: Driver, short iron, chip. Par 5: Driver, 3 wood, iron, chip. Short par 4: Driver, short iron, chip. If I mis-hit a ball I hit it again.

It really helps me develop a rhythm of switching clubs and I actually felt a lot more comfortable on the course after a few range sessions like this.

I also worked on accuracy on my shorter irons (7-8-9), figuring out how much my standard deviation of movement is so I can start to take better lines. What’s more difficult on the course is trying to anticipate how the ball will come off the club face when it’s on an imperfect lie, which is most of the time. So I still miss quite a bit of GIR’s that I’m working on.

My swing has completely evolved from the beginning of the year, and I’m actually pretty excited to do a before and after of the change.

Golf Performance

I played two rounds this week, the bad news is neither of them were great. The good news is I lost the second scorecard so that one won’t be logged on the official handicap index. So it goes… (no, I did not lose it on purpose).

My biggest problem is the same it’s always been: Penalties, Three-putts, and not hitting greens in regulation.

It’s hard to score when you combine those three things, although I’m hitting the ball so much better.

My chipping has regressed a bit as I haven’t spent as much time developing feel on chips and pitches during practice, but my iron striking is vastly improved. Although I’m still missing greens so that doesn’t show up on the scorecard.

This is a swing I took on 18 from the un-recorded round. I’m getting after the ball so much better, but my back foot slipped and I compensated by turning my hands over too early so as not to push it into oblivion - ended up hooking this one into the water.

A shame too, it was going 300 on a frozen rope if the ground held up…

Wrap-Up

Not much to say here on the penultimate week. One week left, one round left (maybe two).

I’m foot off the gas now. Cruise control is on, I’m enjoying the ride, windows down hand out the window relishing how far I’ve come.

Contents:

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

Habit Tracker

Yea… my practice hasn’t been great lately…

Training Log

• Resistance Train (Gym): 2

• Conditioning (Road Bike): 0

I probably could get back on the bike, but no need to mess anything up now with 2 weeks to go. Unfortunately it seems the injury took out my conditioning for the last quarter of the year, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Lifting is going well so I’ll lean on that to finish strong.

Skill Practice

I’ve been having really productive range sessions lately, and since I’m not really working on any swing changes I haven’t been recording it.

What I have been working on is hitting the shot I visualize and changing clubs every 2-3 balls. I’m trying to simulate playing a round where you don’t get to hit the same shot twice, so what I’ll do after warming up is hit driver, a long iron, a short iron, and then a wedge. As if I’m playing a hole. Each time I’ll pick a target and make up a hazard scenario in my head so that I have some ‘skin in the game’ on the shot.

Practicing in this style is going to translate much better to the course vs just hitting the same shot over and over, but that style of practice was necessary for most of the year while I was still building repetition in my swing.

Golf Performance

A 98 at normandy from the back tees, I’m not super happy with it but not disappointed either. I could probably drop 5+ strokes if I moved up a tee, but to be honest I really like playing from this distance because not only does it challenge me but I feel like I have what it takes to perform, it’s just harder said than done.

I don’t mind slugging through the difficulties of these tees. This is where I want to play from and so I’ll endure what is necessary to learn how to hit these clubs and shots from this distance in order to become competent.

Overall my weakness continues to be missing greens and penalty shots, and sometimes 3-putts, but as I’ve known if I can limit the mistakes in those three areas I’m going to lower my score.

It’s just a matter of continuing to play and improve, no secret formula here.

Wrap-Up

I’ve got 2, maybe 3 rounds left in this year.

I’m really looking forward to playing and enjoying the fruits of my labor over the past year, and although I do want to play well, I’m really just satisfied that I worked as hard as I could for 12 straight months.

The results will speak for themselves, whatever they might be.

Contents:

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

Habit Tracker

Ok, I’ll admit it.

It’s been 49 weeks of dedication, commitment, and perseverance.

Sure I had a couple vacations sprinkled in, but all things considered I’ve been grinding my ass off since Jan 1st.

And I’m feeling a little burnt out.

Motivation is low. Thankfully I don’t need much motivation because I’ve built such a rock-solid foundation of habits, but without it the enjoyment is a little less.

I’m not quite invigorated by the idea of playing golf. I actually caught myself viewing it as kind of a chore… “Shoot I’ve got to play golf next week.”

I’m not exactly thrilled of these sentiments, but it’s important to acknowledge them.

That’s certainly one reason my practice time this week has been a lot less. Also Art Basel in Miami and one of my old college roommates staying with me for the weekend certainly didn’t help.

Nevertheless, there’s only 3 weeks left and I’m going to do whatever is necessary to finish the year strong.

Training Log

• Resistance Train (Gym): 2

• Conditioning (Road Bike): 0

I recently signed up for a gym that is more of a bodybuilding gym, for the sole purpose of having access to barbells and higher weighted machines for specific exercises.

I’m looking to develop my back and chest musculature a lot more (yes, purely aesthetic), but equal parts is I was starting to max out my relative strength on dumbbells.

Exercise variety is great, but if you’re looking to get strong and powerful you need to lift a lot of weight, and barbells are mechanically advantageous for loading as heavy as possible safely.

It felt great to back squat with some real weight (vs. a goblet squat) and I’m looking forward to the increased strength gains that will come of it.

I also am starting to think about taking a 5-10mile test ride on the bike here soon. The time is coming…

Skill Practice

The only practice session of my week was 2.5 hours spent at a beautiful short range facility at the course I teach fitness at. They’ve got 5 greens and over 170 yards of turf that you can hit from.

I hit about 80 short chips working low and high landings.

Then I hit about 100 balls with my 7-8-9 irons.

Then I went over and hit another maybe 50-70 balls out of the sand bunkers.

I really needed that short game practice and think I should be focusing on those skill shots a lot more now that my swing is repeatable.

Golf Performance

none

Wrap-Up

Overall, I’m a little tired and kind of looking forward to taking some time off from golf in the new year. Like my friend’s text message says, Pro’s have an off-season for a reason and I’m looking forward to mine.

Until then it’s double-down on the rocket fuel and doing everything necessary to make a strong final push to a 15 HI. I’m playing tomorrow so back to work.

Contents:

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

Habit Tracker

Not a great week for putting at home (and my round showed it) but 2 range sessions and a round on sunday is a good week of golf!

Training Log

• Resistance Train (Gym): 2

• Conditioning (Road Bike): 0

The best news in the past two months is I think I’m starting to turn the corner on my SIJ injury. My trigger (sitting) has practically reduced to no pain or uncomfortableness and I’m feeling very strong and mobile in the gym.

Although my goal was to be riding again by this week I’m certainly not going to push it.

I’ll continue to take it week by week nice and slow until I feel 100% confident I can get back on the bike without causing another flare up or set back.

If everything goes well by the end of the month I’ll be able to savor 40 miles in this beautiful Miami winter weather.

Skill Practice

I had the chance to have my first real trackman session this week which was awesome.

The academy I work with got a full indoor set-up and I got an hour to myself to practice and go all-in on the data the system provides.

I was really impressed with how much information it can give you and was salivating at the opportunity to use that data to better understand my swing. I know there are some people that swear by the advanced data and some people that don’t use it at all, but I think there’s definitely a ton of potential to use it effectively, within reason of course.

I also really liked how I could save the data from EVERY SHOT and send it to myself as a report. This is an example of just my driver (I hit every club).

Because of access to this data I was also able to build my first “club-card”, aka write down the distance I hit the ball with every club… and I was STUNNED at my distances! I was underestimating my carry distances by almost 10 yards per club.

No wonder why I don’t hit any greens!

I definitely would raise the priority on getting a trackman session early on if for no other reason than to get an accurate estimation of how far you hit your clubs so that you can play better on the course.

Below is some data from my swings with my driver, along with my best swing of the day (hello 292yds total!).

And here’s some recordings from the session. My swing is feeling, and looking, really good!

Club Card

Why not. Here’s my distances.

I took probably 10-15 swings with each club, and then recorded distance when I made square contact with the center of the face, my average miss on an off-center hit (mishit), and then my max distance when I cranked my swing speed up.

PW:

• 125-130 center face

• 120 mishit

• 135 max

9i:

• 148 center face

• 142 mishit

• 155 max

8i:

• 165 center

• 162 mishit

• 176 max

7i:

• 179 center

• 172 mishit

• 186 max

• 170 cruise

6i:

• 186 center

• 199 max

• 179 mishit

4i

• 202 center

• 194 mishit

• 212 max

• 195 cruise

5h

• 209 center

• 218 max

• 193 mishit

• 200 cruise

3w

• 222 center

• 237 max

• 201 mishit

• 209 cruise

D

• 253 center

• 260 max

• 240 mishit

Golf Performance

You’d think with all this practice and more data on my swing and distances I’d be primed and ready to go for a full 18 on Sunday. I thought so too!

Sike.

Crandon is a really tough golf course, and 15.5 penalty shots and plenty of flubbed chips does NOT make it any easier. Nor with the 3-putts.

The front 9 was atrocious. It is what it is.

But I was proud of my ability to put that behind me and focus on playing well on the back 9 and posting a 48 with a birdie (!) and par on the two par-5’s.

Having the longer clubs in my bag (3-wood, 5-hybrid) really helped me close the distance on those long holes and I think it’s going to make a big difference in my scoring ability on par 5’s.

Oh, I think I left this out… I got 3 new clubs!

I talked to my coach about needing better fairway clubs for my swing ability and he agreed, so we went to a local golf store with plenty of used clubs and hit some. He picked out a 3 wood, 5-hybrid, and Utility 4-iron that I hit really well.

Don’t ask me the lofts, or what a utility 4-iron is. I don’t know. My coach picks ‘em, I hit ‘em.

Wrap-Up

I’m not going to lie, my foot isn’t really on the pedal here. No amount of practice is going to close the gap for me these last 4 weeks of Project Par. I’m OK with that.

I’m going to stay in routine, not try and be a hero (by over-practicing or over-training), and just enjoy this final month of golf in perfect weather.

You are the result of the work you put in preparation. I put in 11 months of work, and this is where I’m at. No amount of work in these last 4 weeks is going to make a difference in the grand scheme of the year, so I’m going to trust in my abilities, try and squeeze another 4-5 rounds in, and go out and have some fun.

The modified goal is still to get down to a 15 HI, and I’m at a 17.9. It’s doable. And I’m going to keep working at it until Dec 31st.

Contents:

• Habit Tracker

• Training Log

• Skill Practice

• Golf Performance

• Wrap-Up

Habit Tracker

Training Log

• Resistance Train (Gym): 2

• Conditioning (Road Bike): 0

Had a set-back over the weekend. Spending 4+ hours in the car driving on Wednesday really did not do my SIJ any favors.

Skill Practice

Range session on Wednesday to try and get some feel back from the week off. No videos but a decent session to shake the cobwebs off.

It’s pretty crazy how quickly you can lose feel of the club with any more than a few days off from swinging.

So much of the swing really is just a habit/pattern that if you don’t give your body that stimulus as frequently as possible it will be very hard to make positive changes.

Golf Performance

There were a lot of good things about this round, and a lot of bad things.

Let’s start with the bad:

• 5 bunker shots - 0 were hit successfully

• 2 penalty shots into the water on the same hole

• Four 3-putts

That pretty much right there are all the strokes that bring me from a potential 90-round to the eventual 100 that I actually shot.

Now on to the good:

• 50% of fairways hit. My driver was HOT this day

• Par’ed both the Par 3’s on the front

• 1 birdie!!!

Overall my game is in a really good place. I’m swinging the club well, making good contact, and playing strong.

But I’m still having the same problems I had in the very beginning: shooting myself in the foot (more like the knee) with penalty strokes.

Getting into trouble in green side bunkers and not being able to get out cleanly was the biggest hindrance today. But going double-water on hole 8 was another just really poor lapse of both judgement and performance.

the 3 putts really hurt as well, giving up a par and turning two bogey’s into doubles, those are the kind of careless mistakes that just can’t be happening if I hope to post a good score.

Wrap-Up

Of course there’s a certain aspect to the game that you’re going to get into trouble, you’re going to hit some errant shots and you’re going to end up in a hazard.

The real key is not letting a 1-stroke penalty shot turn into 2 or more strokes. That’s one area I really do poorly in is I end up going on tilt when I hit a poor shot and I turn that one poor shot into 3 poor shots.

That’s how I end up carding triple or even quad-bogeys.

Playing conservative and calm are really key for me to maximizing performance, and I’ll need to get a handle on that if I hope to get to a 15 HI before the end of the year.

Pressure’s on, only 1 month left!