our philosophy
DREAM BIG, TRI-HARD
To help you learn more about how we approach coaching and conditioning, we present our coaching and
conditioning philosophies. These are the things that we stand for and believe in:
Most athletes dream of the glory of accomplishment. Few revel in the development of the fundamental skills of their sport. An athlete should learn to love developing the fundamental skills of his/her sport because the fundamentals are the platform from which all great performances stem. We feel strongly that to maximize performance, you must learn or re-learn and constantly reinforce the fundamental skills of your sport. We condition you to build and continually reinforce the most fundamental skills of your sport first, gradually building to more complex skills, creating a depth of ability that will allow you to reach your greatest potential.
Yes, you need to work hard, in fact, very hard at times to improve. But in the long-run, athletes who have fun training for their sport reach higher levels of performance. We believe strongly that your training should leave you feeling excited, energized, happy, and looking for more! We strive to make your training fun for you, helping you to enjoy yourself, while you work towards your personal goals. In this way, you are always winning!
To succeed in endurance sports, you just have to put in the miles, right? Not really! We firmly believe that success in endurance sports is fostered through creating efficiency of movement. Simply stated, this means traveling as fast as you can at a minimum of energy expenditure. We like to employ methods of training, such as high quality strength/power training and sport specific drills, that teach you to move with greater efficiency, ultimately allowing you to go faster, not just complete the distance.
Oftentimes athletes think that because they exercise so much they must be healthy. This is not necessarily true! Far too often athletes actually live in ways that create dyshealth through their training patterns or lifestyle habits. An athlete should create an environment of tremendous health as a platform from which he/she develops their performance abilities. We believe strongly that you must first create a base of optimal health, then you may develop and layer the more complex aspects of performance. This foundation of optimal health must be continually maintained and built upon through appropriate training, eating, sleeping, resting, and other methods. There is life outside of athletics, and it is during that time that you live most of your life. We strive to help you learn to manage your life's stressors and create a health promoting, balanced lifestyle because this is the basis for optimal performance.
Far too often people decide what they are capable of based on what people around them have mentioned or the have been conditioned to believe. The reality is that YOU are capable of far more than you have ever believed possible! An athlete should believe that ANYTHING is possible and believe fully in himself/herself. We work closely with you to help you learn and focus your motivations, desires, and goals with the aim of helping you believe in yourself and in the tremendous potential that you have. You can absolutely accomplish things you believe right now are not possible. With patience, passion, and intelligent planning, anything is possible! We work to motivate, encourage, and support you on your quest for your goals. We also take care of the planning for you with a sound conditioning approach based on continual, gradual, systematic development based on science and experience.
There is not a situation that we cannot learn from and we continually strive to do so. We are humble enough to realize we do not know everything and we are constantly hungry for more knowledge and experience. Every bit of information we encounter is a candidate to teach us a new piece of knowledge that may help us make your performance greater or day brighter. We learn through our professional affiliations, our work with other coaches, our athletic experiences, our writing and speaking engagements, and through our experience with each person we coach. It is that evolving coaching knowledge and experience that we bring to you!
Our high-quality endurance sports coaching involves much more than providing you with a training plan. We also work to instruct, advise, and support you in all areas that are part of working towards optimal performance in endurance sports: sport specific training, cross training, strength/power training, nutrition, sports nutrition, recovery, mental skills training, equipment, and race strategy. We are here to help you engage in the most constructive experience possible as you work toward your goals, and this means going above and beyond simply delivering a plan for your training only. We also realize that you train in a real life environment and thus your response to training will depend upon numerous factors. We continually monitor your response to your training and your progress through frequent scheduled and unscheduled contact through which we monitor many physiological and psychological variables through scientifically-based performance field testing and other means. This allows us to continually adapt your training plan on a very frequent basis (day-to-day if necessary) in order to promote continual development and avoid plateaus in growth. We keep close contact with our athletes via scheduled, frequent phone consultations and email exchanges. Beyond our frequent, regular, scheduled interactions, we invite our athletes to contact us at ANYTIME! We are here to help you! We prefer to go far beyond simply creating high quality training plans. We prefer to work closely with our athletes, getting to know them, being there for them, and helping them pursue their goals. We hope it is clear that our coaching IS NOT "Online Coaching". At all times in working with us, you are working with Jason and Will directly and not anyone else, and you are never, ever, working with a database of information to provide you with a training plan. We view our coaching as mentoring, where we are here for you every step of the way on your personal athletic journey, to assist you and help you make your goals your reality. You will find our coaching to be among the most personalized endurance sports coaching available.
No given workout, training plan, or conditioning approach is right for every person. Although there are certain traits that we all share, each of us is a unique individual. Our coaching is based around the unique needs of each person with whom we work.
Nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without hard work. But sometimes this is taken too far in the endurance sports world where many people believe that "more is better". An athlete should train with high quality, knowing that the better he/she trains, the better he/she will perform. We STRONGLY believe that training with high quality is more important than doing as much training as possible. Training with high quality means that each training session and each day of your life is lived with a purpose, designed to help you constructively work towards your goals.