Engineering The Ultimate Athlete

How a Civil Engineer Ended Up Working with Some of the Best Performance Athletes in the World

We don’t typically associate engineers with athletic performance.

Engineers are often introverted problem solvers that have an inclination toward math and science from an early age. These types find comfort in the classroom and the lab rather than on the field of play.

Unfortunately, I never received this memo as a youth. My first love was football. I spent years in a century-old high school feeder program as a running back and kick returner primarily. I loved the structure of different plays and offensive formations. I also greatly appreciated how the different positions on the field contributed to the success of the overall play.

I took this mentality into my time as a track and field athlete, sprinting to conference championships in the relays despite relocating to another state a month before my senior year. While it was enjoyable having some success with a team, I always felt that I had more to contribute as an individual.

Since I did not perform well enough to obtain a scholarship athletically as an individual, I turned my focus to academics, where I stumbled through the engineering coursework at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago while moonlighting as an amateur sprinter/coach in the spirit of Bill Russell. It was an uphill climb from day one, but I felt I was mentally equipped for the journey.

Bridging Engineering and Athletics

Math was also on my side. My first course as a freshman in college was Calculus 3, aka Vector Calculus, where we learned about the magnitude and direction of force vectors. While the concepts were simple enough to grasp, I noticed that on the track these concepts had a little more gray area than I would have liked.

It was at that point I realized that physics and biomechanics were two different systems that needed to work in harmony for peak athletic performance. I spent the better part of a decade in college simultaneously completing civil engineering coursework and learning from various physical therapists, coaches, and athletic trainers about the gaps in my own force production.

Just like a Formula One race car, I started to recognize the body as a finely designed performance machine. I saw that I needed to be around other high performers in order to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.

While Chicago had a storied history in many sports, including track and field, the best performances seemed to always come out of the south. I decided that Texas was the best place to go to be around the highest caliber athletes. After I completed my education, I arranged to be mentored by a professional sprinter along with a small group of college graduates who had Division 1 championship experience.

The Leap to Consulting

It was in these practices that I learned the smaller habits of professionalism that go beyond basic brute force in the weight room, the subtle transitions that allowed pros to turn power into finesse, and the pinnacle of human performance up close and personal in a race setting.

This feedback was all I needed to make the jump to the next level of consulting. I didn’t have to win Olympic Gold to understand the asymptote of perfection that we all sought to approach.

In my mind, the world record was just a limit in a calculus equation. The resistance to achieving that result was purely bio-mechanical.

After a few years of competitive experience, I began my consulting business in the Dallas area. I worked primarily with executives out of a boutique gym environment, helping them with everything from simple low back pain fixes to rehabbing Achilles tendon injuries after surgery. It was my desire to take someone cleared from physical therapy back to their normal level of performance and then break that plateau as well.

Reaching Elite Athletes

Eventually, this caught the attention of track and field world champions, USA champions, NBA/NFL players, college athletes, UFC fighters, boxers, and even pageant winners and yoga instructors. Movement Consulting is what I named my service, since everyone came with a different set of restrictions and history.

Texas Movement Consulting had a very high success rate. After Covid reframed the fitness industry, I put all the basic principles of my philosophy into a digital course, Elite Secrets, which is now published on the Udemy platform.

To fortify this experience, I also spent another 3 years as an apprentice to a TPI level 3 golf instructor working with amateur and professional golfers in their offseason and preseason training. Learning the nuances of rotation and elevation in multiple planes gave me additional feedback on how to interpret and coach force production.