How has your background in martial arts impacted your coaching?

Question

Dr. Mitchell Tanner, PT, DPT, CSCS · Answer

How has your background in martial arts impacted your coaching? So, I mean really it paved the path for me to be where I am now. I started coaching as a martial arts coach and eventually fell in love with sports performance and now rehab. And I think that really just showed me, one, how to communicate with athletes. It was my first exposure to working intensively with athletes and preparing them to compete at very high levels. And so whenever I went and took that to sport performance, it wasn't just the skill of martial arts, but the communication skills just from understanding what the goal is of high performance coaching. And so I think that that was a big piece. But also, as a martial artist, you can't always be feeling 100% when you compete. And that's true for a lot of athletes. And so managing injuries around competition is something that I think martial arts coaching prepared me well for. So whenever you have an injury and you still need to compete, right, because there's something on the line, there is an aspect of coaching where you have to pull back enough so that you can make some progress in your recovery, but you have to train hard enough that you are not ill-prepared for the task at hand for that competition. And so finding that sweet spot and weighing the pros and cons of rest and training to manage an injury is something that I think martial arts prepared me for well. And so ultimately, the integrity, the honor, the grit and indomitable spirit that martial arts teaches you carries over in a way that I want to help support all my athletes in those areas too.

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"How has your background in martial arts impacted your coaching?"