An aspiring sports performance and health specialist who seeks to blend the lines between strength and conditioning and health I’m currently in my second year of college and receiving degrees in exercise physiology and psychology. I play basketball collegiately and have created strength and conditioning and skill development plans for multiple collegiate and high school programs.

I believes athletes are chronically overstressed, overtrained, and that the modern culture of athletics and sport performance has created unhealthy and debilitating standards for athletes to live up to, contributing to rising burnout and depression rates among athletes. Despite popular beleif, I believe athletes in the modern world are largely unehalthy, dealing with chronic dysfunctions that arise during or after their careers. By focusing on health and vitaltiy during sport training, Change Performance and I believe vitality can be restored among athletes.

How Did Change Performance Come About?

I had known I had wanted to work in the sports performance industry from a young age, always looking for ways I could get stronger, faster, and bigger since elementary school. Whether that was working at a university or starting my own business I had debated for several years until October of 2024 hit. All my life I had poured all of my free time into basketball and performance, running, biking, and eventually driving to the gym at any chance I got. Starting in elementary school I would spend hours in the driveway no matter rain, snow, or sun trying to improve and accomplish my goals because that’s what I was told. Work as hard as you can until you can’t anymore and you’ll reach your dreams, and while I think working hard is profoundly important, there is a limit. No matter how I felt for close to 10 years I drug myself outside, to the gym, or into the weight room to train for up to four hours a day, at least 5 days a week. 10 years I did this and for a while, it was great. I was stronger, faster, and better than all of my teammates and I was having fun. I was able to see my hard work paying off and it felt good. But as the years went on I began to plateau. I was chronically sick, dealing with fevers, colds, and illnesses that would attempt to derail me from training, I ended up on crutches 3 times with sprained ankles in instances I had no business spraining my ankle. I suffered through an entire year with knee pain that made it painful to walk, but I continued to push myself. I continued to train through illness, injury, and fatigue, and by this point I wasn’t seeing half of the results I had been. Some of my peers had caught up to me, and I was struggling physically and mentally throuhgout high school athletics. By the end of my senior year I was frustrated, dissapointed, and ashamed of the career I had had, but I got an oppurtunity to play college basketball and I took it.

Going into my freshman year of college I continued to push myself, training upwards of 4 hours a day preparing for my first year in college basketball. I moved in and started the season, within the first month I ended up with a severely sprained ankle that kept me out for 6 weeks because I slipped and fell in an individual morning workout. No feet in my landing space, no contact, not even a difficult change of direction. I slipped and ended up on crutches, and was forced to watch from the sidelines for 6 weeks for the third time in the last handful of years. When I was able to make my return I continued to push myself, finsihing out the last month of the season without cracking the rotation and feeling ashamed I hadn’t made something of my freshman season.

I entered the summer training harder than ever, waking up early to lift and shoot before playing live in the afternoons with plyometrics and trying to fit in a social life and a job to little avail. I came back up to school for my sophomore year completely drained. I was tired, irritable, and chronically dizzy often needing to sleep for up to 2 hours every afternoon just to get through the day, but I continued to train morning and night thinking more repititions was the answer and that I would have my breakthrough. The season started and I was a complete disaster. I was an emotional wreck, felt like I could barely move at practice, and was struggling to work up the motivation to make it to practice and my own individual training but I continued to “grind” it out waiting for the day my work would pay off.

After the first 3 weeks of the season I was sent to get a checkup at the local hospital before I could return to play after resting blood pressure readings in the trainers room that registered in at over 160/120. I was hardly functioning at this point, just making it through the day to get to practice and continuing to workout on my own before crashing. I reluctantly went to the checkup looking to get cleared as fast as possible so I could return to my routine and practice but was told my blood pressure was still too high and I wasn’t able to regulate it well enough and to go home, rest, and come back in a few days to try again. I spent the next two days wathching practice from the sidelines with blood pressures well above anything close to normal waiting for my next appointment when on the third day I was walking to practice and the result of up to 10 years of chronic stress and overtraining cauguht up to me. I was less than 10 steps from the door to the gym when the world started spinning and my heart rate skyrocketed sending me into an episode of dizziness and confusion.

By the time I could make it to the trainers room down the hall to get help I was already being told I was going to the emergency room with heart attack like symptoms. The trainer rushed me into the ER and I spent the next 7 hours stable, but unable to stand up without passing out before I was sent back home with my parents to rest. Over the next several weeks I had several episodes like this, days where I was unable to stand up without my heart rate skyrocketing above 160 beats per minute and blood pressure that continued to stay elevated. I was held out of any practices or games for the forseeable future, and for a few weeks wasn’t even able to travel with the team to away games because I was told I was a liability. For the first time in my life I was forced to sit down and rest, and I was a wreck.

The syptoms began to mediate after 6 weeks or so, and while I was still kept out of any competition, for the first time in years, I began to feel the beginnings of health and vitality slowly coming back. I had numerous hosptial visits over the course of the next 3 months as I returned from a severe overtraining that lead to adrenal fatigue and complete exhaustion. My body had given up and told me enough was enough. It was during these three months however that I began to realize I needed to make a change. The way I approached athletic and training was unhealthy much like numerous other athletes. I vowed to change not only my own mentality towards sport, but to be a part of the movement that will bring vitality back to athletics, thus Change Performance was created. I still have my own recovering to do, but I’m spending everyday learning how to recover, and how to prevent athletes from having to choose between health or performance in the future.