Stuart McMillan
ALTIS CEO
Do the Work
“First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do.” Epictetus How do we get comfortable with the uncomfortable? By leaning into the discomfort. Analyze high performers in any domain - sport, business, art, etc., and you will find that one commonality is that high performers don’t wait for inspiration - they simply ...
Embrace Change
Anyway - the point to all of this is to talk 'Embrace the Suck'. Next month, in an attempt to reduce my ‘limbic friction’ - i.e. to reduce the gap between intention and action - I will be running 5 miles, trap-bar deadlifting 100 kilos 100 times, and doing 100 push-ups - every day, for a month. This will be...
Limbic Friction
A few years back, I asked my buddy Brian MacKenzie if he could come out to Phoenix, and present at an ALTIS Apprentice Coach Program. He said he’d love to - but could he bring a friend? Seems he was working with this friend on some stuff around fear and breathing. I said - “absolutely! That sounds cool. Let’s do it!” Turned out that...
Embrace the Suck
“Embrace the Suck” The first person I heard say this was David Goggins a few years back. Goggins’ slogan is rooted in the assertion that we are - generally - pretty soft. As soon as something becomes overly challenging, we stop - we find a way not to do it, or an easier way to do it. We impose limits...
Top-Down or Bottom-Up?
How can we employ a Performance Therapy Methodology (systems thinking) in a team sport environment? I have been thinking about this for a few years now and our team here at ALTIS recently sat down to discuss it at some length. While I think I’m pretty confident in how this could be done effectively, we first need to understand the...
Working from Home
We are certain that you - like all of us - are effected by the coronavirus. Many of you are now working from home, or worse - may have potentially been let go from your job. Indeed, our own staff are now working off-site, unless we are directly interacting with the athlete group. It is a challenging time for us all, and...
I’m an idiot
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Francis Bacon I’ve got a confession to make. In my best of 2019 Book List, I included my good friend Dr. John Berardi’s book Change Maker. And I probably should not have. Here’s why. If you have read a few of my ‘best-of’...
Coach Stuart McMillan’s Best Books of 2019
I’m not a book critic, so I’m not going to give a critique, as I have occasionally done in the past. Rather, I will simply share a list of what were important books for me in 2019. Many of them have appeared on many other lists, and will no doubt be familiar to you. If this is the case - if many...
“Coach to the athlete’s solutions; not yours”
This is a saying that I probably repeat weekly in some way or another. It essentially means that each athlete has their own unique way of moving; that our jobs as performance professionals (in this case, coaches, therapists, and sport scientists) is to appreciate and understand athletes’ ‘movement signatures’, and train them in a way that best aligns to this....
Efficient – Correct – Optimal …. who really cares?
Do you think that you can tell how efficient an athlete is by watching them perform? If you ask most people, Paula Radcliffe had a pretty inefficient running style. Yet she has ran the fastest time of any female in history, in one of the most competitive events - the marathon. In each of her 20,000 plus steps, Radcliffe nodded...