Welcome to Train like a Pro, a library of educational material that will teach you the science and concepts used by professional athletes to improve your health and optimize performance both physically and mentally.
Train Like a Pro gives you premier access to the information used to guide and develop elite athletes performing at the highest level. Broad overviews of best practices in health and wellness, training modalities, performance optimizations, and other essentials when it comes to physical and mental preparation, you will get a front-lines look at everything a professional athlete does, or should be doing, to ensure optimal performance at their craft.
How would I know?
This is my career. Guiding, educating, and training professional athletes. Or those that want to train with the same attention to detail, dedication, and quality of resources. Training like a professional athlete has nothing to do with BEING a professional athlete, it simply is a derivative for how hard you’re willing to work.
My Background
I am a Certified Athletic Trainer, which is a licensed sport medicine professional. I hold an undergraduate degree in Athletic Training and a Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology. I am the Director of Sport Medicine for sport-performance training facility in the USA, and work with individual clients 1-on-1 as an independent consultant. I’ve worked with players in the NBA, NFL, MLB, PGA, as well as professional Racing, Dancing, and various Olympic athletes. I’ve also worked with CEO’s and Executives at Public F500 companies, startup founders, investors, entrepreneurs.
So what does this have to do with you?
If you’re reading this than you’re the person who is willing to work for improvements in physical and mental performance.
You want to perform, both physically and mentally, at an elite level. You want to look good when you take your clothes off. You want to live with energy and vitality. You want to fulfill the human potential that you know you have. But you’re not entirely sure how to get there.
You realize that Health is Wealth, and regardless of how successful you are in your career without your health it will mean very little. You understand that sacrificing your health in lieu of extraneous work effort may not be the best approach. You believe that by taking care of your health, you can improve the efficiency at which you work, needing less time to accomplish the tasks you’re used to doing and completing them with better quality.
The health, wellness, and fitness field is more crowded than ever with the casual participant. The fitness influencer, the personal trainer, the moonlight wellness expert that bombards media with marketing-fueled content by providing ‘tips and tricks’ to achieve your goals.
That’s all fine and dandy if you aren’t seriously working towards a goal. There’s nothing wrong with the people mentioned above, they fulfill a need for the folks that lack motivation, desire, have no purpose on what they want to achieve physically. But that’s not you. You know exactly where you want to get to, and are willing to work for it. A bunch of tips and tricks written by an influencer isn’t going to help you get there.
If you truly want to tap into your complete human potential, there are no shortcuts. There is no a ‘12-week transformation’ program to follow. No one is going to take your hand and walk you through the process. As with all things in life, you are the only one responsible for what happens to you. You must put in the effort to learn and understand how the information I provide relates to YOU. How your situation, environment, and goals put context around the principles and concepts that govern performance.
The Journey
I want to be clear: this is not the easy route. This is not the quick-fix. This is the start of a journey on a continuous path to improve your health in a sustainable and evolving manner.
“The more you learn, the less you know.” - Albert Einstein
Through our interactions together you will learn about science, anatomy, and physiology. These are the building blocks to understanding the concepts that are required to build your own sustainable wellness practice. It is absolutely necessary to understand the foundational principles before beginning to apply them.
Think back to when you were a kid and you began playing sports. You may have played multiple sports or games, but there was always that one that you gravitated and grew a love towards. This is the one that you would look up videos on YouTube, read articles online, sneak away to practice on your own.
Let’s take basketball for example. You watched adults shoot hoops and easily make a shot. But as a kid it took all your strength to chuck the ball up and it barely made it to the rim. So instead you practiced dribbling the ball. First you just practiced bouncing up and down, learning to recognize the trajectory of where the ball would travel and then predict how it would come back up. Maybe you learned quickly, and started to dribble between the legs. Then if you were like me, you watched Ray Allen highlights on end until you mastered the between-the-legs cross, behind the back pull-up at the elbow. I practiced that move for hours a day until I could do it with my eyes closed.
But I didn’t start with practicing moves. It was years before I was competent enough to use that move in a game or competition. Where did it start? With dribbling the ball. Down, up. Down, up. On end.
This is the approach we will be taking. Learning the basic concepts that fuel an advanced knowledge of health, wellness, and human performance. The longer you spend on this journey, the more the information will build on itself. The point where you think you’ve learned enough and are ready to move on to the applications will never come. When you’ve gained a solid understanding of the concepts and principles, I won’t even have to teach you how to apply it. You’ll do that on your own, without guidance, and successfully. You’ll know more than 95% of individuals, and it's not a stretch to say that you will be more prepared to take care of your health than most practitioners that you seek help from.
Are you ready?
5 Pillars of Health & Performance
I organize health and performance into Pillars. While the most popular teachings of wellness are categorized into eight dimensions, I prefer to simplify them to five:
Physical. Mental. Sleep. Nutrition. Environment.
No pillar is more important than the other. None of them is above the others in a hierarchy, and there is no uniform answer as to which should you prioritize first. Their relative importance will change over time, and it will all depend on you. Your life, your body, your goals, your situation. This is why I cannot teach you a default program of improvement. Because as humans, as people, we are all unique. To sell you on the idea that there is one way to do things would be a lie. I could teach you a singular way of improvement, but that may not solve your problem, and certainly is not a sustainable option to preparing you for to take care of your health for the rest of your life.
This library is dedicated to unravelling the layers of each pillar one-by-one to build a common ground of understanding which will foster conversation. This is not a unilateral delivery of information. The best way to learn is to actively participate. Ask questions in the comments, reach out via email. Post your experiences for others to read so that we can discuss together. You will be able to learn from others’ as much as you learn from yourself.
As we are on this journey together I am going to help you sift through the noise to identify the strategies and processes involved in understanding context of your health, wellness and fitness. Most importantly you will learn how the systems of the body interact in applicable ways so that you can make the best decisions for your health.
I look forward to making progress together.