The black box training model that most of us follow is pretty much like a blender.

Its time for breakfast, and you want a smoothie. You scrummage through the kitchen and try to find anything resembling fresh or frozen fruit. The blender is loaded up, and spinning loudly as the morning sun crests through the window. You take a sip……its good. But why isn’t as good as the smoothie you made a few days prior. What specific things made the other smoothie better?

Most of us put as much forward thinking into smoothies as we put into our training plan. We throw a bunch of training hours in, and based on our success, we arrive at conclusions. Well, what really happened? Some of you may have gotten faster. But could you have gone faster yet? Some of you may have plateaued…..why? And a few of you may have even gotten slower…..a lot of people really want to know the answer to this!

Wouldn’t it be nice to know more than just “effort in = race performance out?” What if you could actually see inside the black box?

When athletes come to me for an analysis, my goal is to find their limiters. Everyone has them, but not everyone knows how to find them. Over the past decade, I’ve blurred the lines between sports medicine, lab analysis, and performance training. And I’ve done it by being specific. I take a hard look at the state of your body, and a hard look at your sport performance. My lab has fancy tools like force platforms and instrumented treadmills, and a real knack for understanding how these values actually impact your sport’s performance. I can see into your body in ways that no “trained eye” could ever hope to capture.  Specific measures = specific answers. I call it “opening the box.” It works. 

Over the next few posts, we are going to go through some examples on how this approach has helped others in the past. But if you want to know how it helps you, and want to look inside your own box, give me a call!