What Professional Sport Taught Me About Health — And How I Apply It Today
Some of the most practical lessons I’ve learned about health didn’t come from a clinical study or a single patient case. They came from professional sport.
Over the years, I’ve had a unique opportunity to experience high-performance environments from multiple angles:
as a former world-level athlete myself, as the family member of two professional athletes in two different sports, as a skating consultant to over 100 professional athletes, and as a manual therapist working alongside coaches, healthcare providers, and collaborative performance teams.
What became abundantly clear is this: nobody performs at a high level sustainably by accident.
Everyone Needs a Goal
In professional sport, nothing is vague. There is always a clear objective: win the fight, get drafted, finish the season injury free, make it to playoffs, return-to-play, make a title run. Every decision flows from that goal.
You might feel like this doesn’t apply to you, but your goal doesn’t need to be athletic. It might be to:
Prepare your body for pregnancy
Support a healthy delivery and postpartum recovery
Address pain while still maintaining an active lifestyle
Participating in a marathon
Prioritize movement around a demanding kids schedule
Avoid thoracic outlet pain and tech neck despite spending 80hrs a week at a desk
Recovering from an unanticipated injury requiring surgery
Wanting to maintain the balance and mobility needed to be able to play with your grandchildren
The specifics matter less than the clarity. When you know where you’re going and the desired outcome, it’s much easier to establish a plan and engage the right players in it to ensure you optimize your chances of getting there.
It’s about setting yourself up for success.
You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure
Elite athletes don’t guess. They test.
Take a combine for example. There is always a baseline—movement quality, strength, conditioning, recovery metrics. Those results are then interpreted in context: Is this average? Below expectation? Optimal for this athlete at this moment in their career?
But perhaps most importantly, there is always a why.
Why does this matter to you?
What does achieving this goal allow you to do, feel, or protect in your life?
This information is collected to rank players, predict future performance, and guide teams on who they want to take a chance on and where to invest their limited salary cap.
Without that “why,” data is meaningless. With it, testing identifies strengths and areas players need to improve on, and guides smart, individualized programming over time.
But there’s no reason this mind frame needs to be restricted to athletes. It just takes a bit more ownership in establishing your goals and recruiting the right team in your corner to help you get there.
It takes a village
In healthcare, we often see people drifting. They float from practitioner to practitioner, chasing symptoms without a bigger picture in mind. You feel like you’re slipping between the cracks, constantly repeating the same health history story to a new face, and question if you’re actually factored into the medical advice you’re receiving.
How well does the physician or therapist know you, your lifestyle, your needs, and what “health” or “optimal performance” looks like to you? How well do you even know your provider? Their training, background and how they approach a problem?
These relationships in healthcare are hard to come by, and unfortunately when they do sometimes the familiarity comes at the cost of best practice. You may stay with a practitioner because they know you, rather than because of the results they produce.
Or worse, you feel like you have to compromise one for the other.
No One Gets There Alone: The Power of a Team
One of the biggest misconceptions in healthcare is that a single provider should do everything.
In professional fighting, no athlete would ever rely on just one coach. There’s a reason fighters surround themselves with a team:
A coach focused on skill, strategy, and performance
Someone overseeing strength, conditioning, and output
Experts managing nutrition and recovery
Clinicians keeping the body functioning as a resilient, adaptable machine
And often one central figure coordinating the entire operation: a parent, head coach or manager
Each person brings a distinct lens, and the magic happens when those perspectives are aligned toward the same goal. Sometimes a problem is outside of one scope, or a practitioner gets stumped and benefits from a different perspective on the problem. This is where collaborative care comes in, and knowing where to sub out can be a sign of strength, not an admission of limitation.
This model isn’t unique to sport. Anything operating at a high level works this way.
Think of a touring artist and their team. A Broadway production. A professional sports franchise. A high growth startup. Success at the top requires excellence at every touchpoint and clear communication across roles.
Healthcare should be no different.
What I Aim to Provide for My Patients
My role is not to “fix” one isolated issue and send you on your way to figure out how to apply what we did to the rest of your life.
It’s to help you clarify your goal, understand where you’re starting from, current gaps, build a thoughtful plan that evolves as your body and life do, and be a continual resource (not a crutch) for you to come back to in order to maintain optimal functioning.
I aim to be part of your team and when appropriate, help you build one, so your care is cohesive, communicative, and directed toward something meaningful.
Because whether your goal is performance, healing, or longevity, you deserve the same level of intention and support that elite athletes receive.
And in my experience, that approach doesn’t just change outcomes, it changes how people experience their bodies and their health altogether.
