My ideas are not my own. Some are copied, most are stolen, and all deserve due credit.

These teachers made a difference for me.

The Director Gave Me A Choice

The most important influence happened in the “middle” of my life. Kami White-Waden of the Texas Tech Rec Sports Fitness & Wellness Center confronted me with an option: continue meeting rec members in reserved rooms and get banned from the facility, quit running fitness classes without authorization, or join Fit/Well staff as a trainer. I took the third option.

Kami pushed me to my first fitness certification through American Council on Exercise, took me to my first conference (WOW! Fitness), invested in my ongoing professional development with a library of exercise science texts and a sequence for recommended reading, then she enabled my work by being a thoughtful boss, a friend to my young family, a second mother to me, and a constant voice of support.

Kami showed me how to be a professional in the fitness industry.

Kettlebells Gave Me Purpose

Then there were all the coaches who gave me more time than I probably deserved: Jason Marshall of Lone Star Kettlebell Club, Steve Freides, Prentiss Rhodes, and Karen McDowell-Smith, all from within the kettlebell world. They planted the seeds for my training philosophy by pulling me into the RKC organization, then into the StrongFirst organization. They coached me as an athlete, mentored me as a kettlebell instructor, and pushed for me to remember that strength has a greater purpose.

It was Jason who put me on to Pavel & Dan John’s Easy Strength, which rewired my entire training philosophy. I went through years of screwing things up for my athletes – too little work, too much work, too little variety, too much variety, too few sessions, too many sessions, too little communication, too much communication, and every other available mistake – but I kept coming back to Easy Strength and going deeper in its contents. Then, when a particular athlete had achieved every goal she came to me for, I called Dan John and he picked up.

That was a big moment. Dan’s work has been foundational to my understanding of athletic development, of sports psychology, and of hard work. Dan’s various book collaborations connected me to Josh Hillis, which shaped my thinking about nutrition and fat loss. Josh’s ideas moved me toward Dr. John Berardi of Precision Nutrition, who I met at a conference. Both men spent over an hour with me for coffee, sharing far more value than the $10 I paid for our time. But what I learned from them helped me coach athletes through nutritional challenges, emotional challenges, and the intersection of the two in the service of performance on the field – and overall health.

Broad Knowledge Gave Me Influence

It’s that talk about health that brought things back around and helped scale my business. Because I had a bit of expertise in how to take care of the whole person and because I had results to show for my athletes, I took on developing other coaches within Dane Krager’s business, Dane’s Body Shop. Doing so accelerated my growth in a way that defies words: 5 fitness instructors with deep knowledge of exercise science and movement theory now looked to me for the principles of designing and modifying training programs to serve our membership. I was driving the professional development of people who had been in industry longer than I had!

So, as always, I reached out to others to broaden my knowledge. Right next door to DBS, I met Kirby Sams, who continues to be a dear friend to this day. Kirby woke me up to the needs of the aging athlete – how we have to keep standards high, but also need to be wildly adaptable because what a person is prepared for on any given day is affected by many, many things. Talking to Kirby motivated me to take advantage of our Olympic weightlifting coach-in-residence Thomas Lower and one of the highest caliber athletes I ever knew personally, his wife Sam Lower. Well, it’s difficult to work with the Lowers, to work on weightlifting in Austin, or to be in fitness in Texas without appreciating Ursula Garza-Papandrea. She is a coach extraordinaire with experience that deserves volumes…and she ran events right in my city. So I attended those events, volunteered at those events, and went crawling for everything she had ever written or recorded.

Experts Taught Me Humility

I never interacted with Ursula directly. But I learned so much from her history of sharing. And her content pushed me to Greg Everett of Catalyst Athletics right about the same time I got tied in with David Braswell of Outright Training & Performance in Austin. So now I had a library of articles to catch up on about weightlifting and had an incredible athlete and coach to chat with every weekend. Reading Greg’s work brought me to Matt Foreman’s work, which brought a unique voice, a sharp wit, and a deep love of athletic development to my daily readings. Bones of Iron remains a favorite book and a template for how I choose to write.

But working with Braswell changed things for me. He woke me up to how much athlete development happens in track & field. I mean, I knew the sport was beautiful, I knew that the hurdles were magnificent, and I knew that great athletes were in track…but I didn’t appreciate how track builds athletes. So I spent more and more time with Braswell at meets and at community sprinting sessions. He inspired me to spin off my own sprinting session (which, incidentally, is how I met Asafa Powell during a practice session…best Saturday yet).

And all that time at track meets got me excited to try decathlon (thanks to Seth Brower for hosting the Texas Vs The World meets in San Marcos!), which led me to Kris Allison of Lone Star Pole Vault. He did a great job coaching me, but I didn’t have much time available to travel down to his facility. So instead of sending me off empty handed, he got me onto the idea of the basic, basic, basics (“sprint speed, carrying the pole, patience in the swing”), gave me the book Beginner To Bubka, and told me I had enormous potential if I kept chipping away at the slow process of developing speed and technique.

At this point, I’m running sprinting sessions with a heavy focus on technique, I’m in track meets and getting slowly better but not making any waves, and I’m deeply curious about sprinting. I had read Joel Smith’s articles on Just Fly Sports, got to Googling other contrarian thinkers about speed, and discovered Tony Holler. I talk about him frequently for a reason. Just appreciate for a second how it felt to join one of his early Track-Football Consortiums (after volunteering at a mid-week track meet), ask a thousand questions, then be invited to sit at a table with Stu McMillan of Altis and a bunch of other amazing people in the speed game then have them ask me what I was doing in coaching. Blew my mind – and demanded that I level up my thinking immediately!

Then Reflecting Gave Me Energy

Fast forward a few years. I’ve picked the brains of dozens of top flight minds in speed, power, strength, and athletic development, and now I’m in touch with two amazing hurdle coaches: Steve McGill, author of The Art Of Hurdling, which is the program I’m (mostly) following to return to the hurdle game myself, and Evan Gerish, who used to run a hurdles program right here in Colorado that one of the athletes I’m serving trained in. Steve might have had some influence on Evan’s teaching method, because they use a lot of common approaches to the sprint hurdles…and those approaches are supported by Tony Holler and his son Alec.

Which reminds me: Tony has hosted interviews with Dan John that reflect nearly everything I believe about training teenage athletes…and Dan and Ursula have honored a lot of common people in weightlifting who inspired me to take the barbell seriously yet realize it isn’t for every athlete…which is neat when I consider that Dan and Steve and Prentiss were all early parts of the RKC organization that got me thinking about what athletes need compared to what regular people need…which, in effort to earn my instructor credential from that org, is why I went to meet Jason Marshall to master my own kettlebell movements and appreciate how he trains regular people with “elite” methods…whom I found because Kami told me to bring something fresh to the rec…and the point of all this is that I stand on the shoulders of giants.

I Am A Product Of Good Coaching

I can’t possibly say enough thanks to all the names cited here, plus two dozen more who influenced me and continue to support me in ways that warrant pages more writing.

Coffee chats and phone calls and coaching sessions with these people are how I’ve become the coach that I am, in addition to years of trial and error with athletes who have trusted me. Reading their work, discussing their ideas, and following their programs gave me the understanding that I’ve developed about bodies, athletes, emotions, programs, and progress. Without them, there is no SHIFT Speed & Strength. Without them, there is no Coach Dunte.

So I’m grateful beyond words for all the teachers and coaches I’ve had since 2009. That’s 15 years of learning and growing while I do everything I can to help athletes learn and grow. Pretty excited about who I will meet and what I will learn in the next 15.

But more than anything, I’m excited about discovering more ideas to steal that could help me make a difference for YOU.