Transcription
I'm about to show you a rarely used method that I use to get on the national team in Triathlon and get in the top five in the world championships in just 5 years. And the crazy thing is, I started in my 20s. And when I started, I knew nothing about nutrition, or training strategy, or sports psychology. And the reason that I was able to catapult, you know, that top 1% of athletes in just 5 years was using this method that for some reason nobody ever seems to talk about.
I'm also going to show you what most athletes I work with today as an Elite Performance specialist do wrong and how to fix it. But to really understand this method, you need to know a bit of back story. You see, when I was 22 years old, my dad told me something that would change my life. We were riding home after a 24-hour, three-man bike race, too tired to talk. We turned on the radio. They announced that a guy that I used to bike with when I was a junior had just been selected for the Olympic Games after having spent the last 2 years partying at Uni. I completely forgot that my biggest dream when I was younger was to become an Olympian. So I looked at my dad and then I said, "Man, that could have been me." And with the weirdest look on his face, he looked right at me and then he said, "Why don't you just do it?" And I was like, "It's too late for me. I'm 22 years old." Again, he looked at me, then he said something that has stuck with me ever since. "If a 12-year-old starts today, do you think it's too late for them to go to the Olympics when they're 22?" And I said, "Of course not." And then he said something that would change the next 10 years of my life. He said, "Well, in 10 years, when that 12-year-old is 22 and you're 32, then you can go and compete against each other at the Olympics."
The next week, I showed up at the local Triathlon Club with the goal of becoming an Olympian. I didn't know how to run or how to swim, but I knew that I could learn. And the first thing I did was so powerful that it cut down the time I thought it would take to become a professional by more than half. It's also a step that most people have trained miss or even worse, they do it in a way that actually hurts the long-term performance. That thing is to reverse engineer my goal. Here's how I did it. First, I broke down the performance feats of the Olympic athletes. How fast they could swim, bike, run, how much they could lift, anything I could find. I wrote it down. For you, it might be something different. But for me, I needed to find out the physical capabilities of my future competitors. Then I wrote down my current abilities. And it's important to note that I didn't guess on each of every one of the things that I found. I took a test to see exactly what I was capable of doing. Next, I set a deadline for when I was going to achieve the things that they could do. I thought that the Olympics 8 years later was feasible, but as I did the next step, I suddenly realized that I could cut that time down to 4 years. You see, the Olympic athletes ran the closing 5 kilometers in 15 minutes or less. Now, my time at the time was 19 minutes or just under 19 minutes. So if I could just improve my closing 5K time with 1 minute every year, then I would be just as good as they were in just 4 years. I did the same thing with my bike time, my run times, and my strength.
Now, this next step is where I see most athletes go wrong. We are often told that if we want to be the best, we have to train like the best. But in my opinion, that's the completely wrong way to do it. If I had trained like the best, I would have never achieved my goals. But instead, I did what I'm about to show you, and that made me fly past all of my competitors. And people were even starting to say that I was this overnight success. You see, when I started training, I started with another guy. This guy also had a dream of going to the Olympics. And out of the two of us, he was clearly the most talented. He was faster and stronger than me in every aspect. And everybody seemed to think that he was going to be one of the great athletes. It didn't help that he was younger than me at the time. He was training just as much as the best in the world, which was around 30 hours per week. But I, on the other hand, was only training 10 to 15 hours a week, less than half. The reason for this was because I talked to one of the national team coaches and asked what I had to do to become one of the national team members. And he said, "Well, if you want to be truly great, you can't start working out hard because then you will burn out or you will become injured. So he said, you have to start where those people I have on my national team started, even though you're older." Instead of talking about age, he talked about training age. So when I started, I had a training age of zero. He also told me that if I wanted to be truly great, I would have to sacrifice all of my results for the next 4 years. No race mattered, only consistent training. I would start at 10-hour training weeks and then slowly build my way up to 30 hours. The most important thing was consistency, avoiding injuries, and avoiding burnout.
Over the next 2 years, the guy I started with beat me in everything. Every training, every test, every competition. But I stuck to the plan. Then, at the start of my third year, something happened. In what seemed like out of nowhere, I started beating him. And all of a sudden, I went from being like one of the last athletes at every competition to consistently ending up in the top 10. People were starting to take notice. And other athletes said that I just came out of nowhere, the overnight success. But that couldn't have been further from the truth. It was the years of small, incremental gains, and now it started to add up. In the following year, the guy that I started with got injured and stopped doing Triathlon completely. I went on to go on the national team and travel the world doing what I love. And the year after that, I beat all of the other national team athletes and became top five in the world championships at aquathlon, a swim-run event, the two sports that I had never done before just 5 years prior.
So here's the framework that worked for me. If you want to become one of the best in the world, you should not train like the best in the world right away. Think about your training age. If it's zero, then you start at zero. You see, progression is the key to getting better. So if you start with 30-hour training weeks, then where are you going to progress to? All of the people that I have worked with or raced against who tried to do this have all burned out or gotten injured. What I did instead was to work on the minimum barrier of improvement. As long as I was getting better, I didn't need to do more.
But there's one more thing that most people simply ignore. And without it, my chances of becoming a world-class athlete had been close to none. When I was 2 years into my career, I had to call off a date with my girlfriend yet again because one of our swim practices had been moved. She was getting annoyed at the fact that I always seemed to have school or competitions or training whenever we were supposed to hang out. So she called me up and asked, "If you had to choose between Triathlon and me, then who would you choose?" That hit me hard because I knew what I had to say. I told her that even though I loved her, if she asked me that, then I would have to choose Triathlon. See, I've lost countless of friends, missed tons of family birthdays, and I even missed out on my granddad at his deathbed, which I will regret to the day I die. But it just goes to show you that at that time in my life, I would burn all the bridges. There was no plan B. I was either going to become the best or nothing. I was going to become the best, period. Every single decision I made, what I ate, what I spent my time on, when I ate, when I slept, what I did every single minute of the day, was all based around this overarching goal of going to the Olympics. I took a sports science degree to help me understand the physiology and psychology of becoming a better athlete. I became a certified physiotherapist to understand my injuries and how to avoid them completely. I also became a trainer to better understand the dynamics of my own training.
So here is how to make the framework I used work for yourself. One, reverse engineer the performance of the athletes that you want to emulate or become or beat. And then, every single day, have a specific goal that aligns with what you're trying to accomplish. Two, find a trainer that has done it themselves and have helped other people do the same. Three, burn the bridges. But there is still one gigantic issue that most people face, and it's this. Even though you've just learned this powerful system to enhance your performance, if you don't have the skills to improve every single year, then you'll never become truly great. So to make sure you're equipped to take advantage of all the things that I just taught you, then you can watch this video right here where I'll teach you a simple system that I use with world-class athletes to make you instantly better.