Machine Program: Chapter 1 Why am I Doing This
I remember sitting in my dorm room after tearing my ACL for the first time. My knee was swollen and stiff, to say the least, god forbid I try and bend it and I was in for a world of pain. Danillo Gallinari a small forward for the Denver Nuggets at the time, tore his ACL on the same night, I can recall watching the injury on ESPN that night & thinking at least I have a pro-athlete that I can monitor my timeline after. I wanted to follow someone else journey because I was in for a process.
I wanted to play in the NFL but at 5’6, 175 lbs. That may have been a stretch but I sure knew how to prepare like an NFL player. I always got my sleep, I put the right fuel in my body, I foam rolled before training, I stretched immediately after. I conditioned three times a week even in the off-season & lived my life like tomorrow was the NFL combine & I would be ready to perform. The only problem, I trained more for the sake of training & didn’t focus on skill acquisition nearly enough, a problem I believe many athletes have, mostly football players.
I couldn’t quite make sense of the fact I mishandled my own career but how many other athletes have made the same mistake. I suffered two more ACL injuries and while I can dive into all the reasons athletes get hurt or people fail to reach their goals, I realized I was living proof. I finally thought to myself. “I can build a business teaching athletes how to perform.”
Start a business? I was fresh out of college, my eyes set on joining the military, an opportunity to be a part of a team & learn about leadership. I could test my physical capabilities as well, not quite football, but close enough! I scored high on my ASVAB, 300 on my PT test, went for my physical and was disqualified because I had two ACL Surgeries. I was demoralized because at 23, I had my whole life planned out and a lot of it was driven by this military career I had committed to. The door closed before it was ever open & this was a blessing in disguise.
I was working as a sports performance coach at D1 Sports Training with a handful of current NFL players & a number of NFL hopefuls from power 5 schools. I was working as a lifeguard, coaching high football, and studying rigorously to become a certified strength & conditioning specialist, the gold standard in the strength & conditioning world. While grad school would follow, I would expound on my coaching experience, garnish real management experience & travel the world, I was able to learn a thing or two about business & earned my MBA.
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Pursuing an MBA initially seemed far-fetched because math overwhelmed me but when I learned accounting was the only math-driven class I would take, I thought, screw it, let’s go. My classmates were all working professionals, many of them were married with children, I was the youngest guy in the program. I was a football coach who often felt out of place, obsessing over learning everything there is to know about the business of sports & fitness. I crushed the program finishing with a 4.0 but it wasn’t about the grades, it was the knowledge I acquired.
I saw business models like the TB12 method reach the market, I was already into many of Alex Guerrero’s methods having read his book Balance for Life. The book discusses the demand for a heavy alkaline-based diet and how acidic foods lead to inflammation. Between reducing inflammation and avoiding weight training there were elements of his program that enamored me. While it’s not friendly to the masses as it is a niche-based modality driven by Tom Brady’s brand, the methods have some validity. Tim Grover, Michael Jordan’s trainer was another massive influence. Grover is a practical guy, who understands not only how to constantly test his athletes but motivate them. Grover’s use of isometrics and holds followed by progressions that lead up to resistance training are great ways to develop absolute strength. His subjects such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, & Dwyane Wade would agree.
In recent months I was floating on the web when I found Knees Over Toes Guy. This was the breakthrough for me. Here we have an athlete who had all sorts of injuries and was past the age of his physical prime. He created a system that went against the status quo to produce unworldly results. Doing any sort of squat with your knee over your toes is known in the strength & conditioning world is known as a cardinal sin. This was a theory I always questioned but KOT guy using a small selection of movements & obsessing over hamstring & posterior chain development, concepts I knew were the secret to the explosive power and injury prevention, I began to have hope.
I was still afraid to make the leap since my third and final ACL Surgery I never got back into it. I was burned out and I knew if I trained hard it would require more spending and maintenance and I wanted to move on with my life. Little did I know, evolving from what I last knew would be the only way I could ever truly move forward. Mid-summer of 2021, when walking in Chicago on vacation, I tweaked my knee crossing the street and told myself this will never happen again, I am going to get in the best shape of my life, once and for all. I want to take it where I have never taken it.
Throughout my years of training, I recorded a lot of my progress. I always wanted to create a documentary but didn’t know where to start. Today a large part of my profession is creating strategies and mapping out systems. I had this epiphany that with the rise of technology and the correlation between physical fitness & productivity what if I create a program & use as much data as possible to quantify my progress. While I was conflicted in what mode of training I would philosophically follow, none of that mattered if I didn’t establish what my needs were. So I examined my body & distinguished what my flaws were. I created a 30-day program in the ABEL app that I would follow with five pieces of equipment. Lastly, I purchased the Oura Ring to track myself & performance levels & a polar watch to track my heart variability, activity, and steps. This program started off as an idea & while I have fallen in & out of shape three times waiting for all my products to arrive.
After a month and a half of establishing my needs, getting in shape, building my program, the day has arrived. It’s 4:45 in the morning on Saturday, September 4th. I have already run three miles this morning and just completed my first strength training workout. I intend to teach people how to engineer their lives, transforming their habits and rewiring their behaviors to that of a well-oiled machine driven by high productivity… LETS THE GAMES BEGIN!
