History Of Propel
I started writing training programs for myself and my hockey teammates as a teenager in 1995. Living in Central Wyoming, there was little to no access to training for athletes, let alone individuals outside sports. I picked up things from coaches and teammates in programs along the way. After 10 years of grinding out 10 reps or more, my mind was blown with a new concept: “Being jacked is cool, but being strong is for life.” I made it through my entire first year of college at 180 pounds on the same plan as before: 3×10, 4×12, bike, sprint, crunches, and shoot some hoops on the way out. Getting crushed on the pre-season team fitness testing, as most meat heads would admit, was soul crushing. I started training differently that summer, still self-directed but with a new outlook on volume and intensity.
UNDERSTANDING THE BODY
My focus now was 100% on understanding how the body works and I began that journey in chiropractic college. That was a wonderful platform, but left me asking about injury rehab and elite performance. And what about nutrition? Why was it that when I would eat right I could get huge and feel like a beast, but when I would get cheap with my food, I felt tired and got upper respiratory infections?
My questions led me to continue my education and earn my master’s degree in sports science and rehabilitation as well as multiple private sector nutrition certifications. Nutrition and human performance are so closely linked that they were a subset of study in the sport science portion of my master’s program. At no time along this path was I ever not entrenched in the gym. I had swapped bench and squat for banded external rotation and hip mobility drills, where my peers were all still chasing performance goals.
I watched a classmate in my chiropractic program coach his wife to a world championship in powerlifting, observing them every day as they ate and trained. I witnessed this woman squat 610, bench 400 and deadlift 520 in a competition in which my grad school linemate went 8 for 9 in his first competition. This couple taught me about Eastern Bloc training methods in detail, and we talked about rehab roadblocks and training tweaks that had to be made to continue to progress. This is where I was introduced to kettlebells. Goodbye bands, hello bells.
Once I added load back to my obsession for rehab, things came full circle for me. I began to see how a true performance model should look:
- Find and fix performance-limiting factors in the joint system.
- Take inventory of the nervous, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and digestive systems.
- Look at performance through the lens of did this athlete show up prepared to compete and not get the result, or did they not show up to compete at all?
This allows us to differentiate technical and tactical improvement versus a solution that may come from nutrition, performance psychology, sleep, medical, or physical preparation. Developing solutions in key areas that improve performance should be trackable and reproducible by an individual in almost any scenario.
PROPEL HP IS BORN
I grew up a hockey-loving outcast in Wyoming and had to travel all over North America and parts of Europe to gather the best information on health and human performance. This is where I focused on the concept of high-level personal empowerment. I want to give every person, from the high-level athlete to the frazzled parent to the health-conscious businessman from all across America a chance at accessing world-class information about looking, feeling, and performing better. The lens through which I see the world is that of health and performance for people who want a long, satisfying, and productive life. There is always room to improve and discover cutting-edge methods but, in the search for greatness, there are some paths that have been set by the great ones before us. Those paths should be available to every person with an interest in improving their life. I believe in empowering my clients with decision-making tools to take into the real world.