Hard Work Pays Off

Posted September 23, 2009 By: Duane Carlisle

Throughout the last 20 years, I have trained thousands of athletes in over 20 different sports and it has been truly gratifying, to say the least. Although, I currently work with professional athletes and I must say, it is awesome to help our players' improve their physical performance, for the most part, they are pretty much finished projects upon arrival to the National Football league.

Nevertheless, it is truly rewarding to actively watch developing athletes strive to reach their full athletic potential. I formerly owned Lightning Fast Training Systems, a sports performance company, that had the privilege to have trained over 1000 Division 1 scholarship athletes in over 14 different sports. It was an incredible feeling to share in the excitement of our athletes realizing their athletic dreams to play sports on the collegiate level.

I have 3 athletic boys who are ages 16, 12, an 8 and they play a variety of sports. Since, 100% of my time is focused on training our team, I allocate my off -work time to helping develop my boys athletic talent. First and foremost, I am a Dad first and their coach second ,which means we strive to have fun while getting better in the area of speed, quickness and agility etc. The most important athletic skills which are a staple of all of our workouts includes, but are not limited to ; speed development, balance training, and coordination.

I introduced my oldest son, Amir, to fundamental movement skills when he was 8 years old. He used to jump in the speed training workouts with my 8-12 year old group at LF. He played soccer, football, track, baseball, and basketball and seemed to never get enough. I believe being a multi-sport-sport athlete early in his youth helped him broadened his athletic skill set for football and basketball, which are the sports he currently plays in High School.

This summer, Amir was offered a full scholarship to play football in 2011 by Stanford University and has committed to attend. I was incredibly excited for Amir to realize his dream. One statement that Amir made to me in the aftermath of his committment was" Dad, I guess all the stuff we did over the years really did work because the coach said he really liked my quickeness". Thank God, he received validation that performance training actually works, otherwise, he would have looked back over the years and think...my Dad has us doing some really dumb stuff!!