Most of you know me, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this, but, it’s been a while and please allow me to re-introduce myself.
I’m Michael, and I love golf (sorry, that sounds like an opening to a golfer’s anonymous
intro). I found the game in middle school, and promptly quit all other sports to try and play as much golf as possible. I then progressed fairly quickly, at which point it appeared a golf scholarship was a likelihood. I chose Rice University for the proximity to home, superb academics, and all that I thought the school would provide to help me excel athletically.
I attended Rice from 2007-2011, and went from averaging 75.5-ish shots per year in my freshman season (where I was named to the All-Freshman team in C-USA), to averaging 71 or so my senior year, when I was named Conference Golfer of the Year for the same conference (conference re-alignment is for all you young bucks out there, in my day, we stayed in the same for at least four years.)
While I‘m somewhat talented as a putter and wedge-player, I believe my greatest skill (leading to a four shot improvement over four years in college) is as an analytic. I thoroughly enjoy observing the game, asking questions, applying, analyzing and assessing, and then starting the circle all over again. It seems to lead to improvement as best as I can figure.
After college, I turned professional and promptly lost in a playoff to qualify for the US Open, however, by the grace of God, Tiger Woods withdrew and I ended up as the first alternate and taking his spot. That is an entirely different story by itself, and worth telling, but suffice to say, there is nothing cooler than competing in the biggest events in the field you have chosen to pursue.
I then began to work out really hard and without any delay, injured myself on a back squat. I remember talking to my wife, a fitness fanatic in her own right, and having a discussion about how we needed to learn how to train me, without getting myself injured. We began learning and haven’t looked back.
Whitehead Fitness is born out of that journey really. Who we went to and learned from, what we went and studied, and how it all applied to helping me pursue a professional golf career all ended up having an impact on how and why and what we do in our current gym with our current clients.
If you were to distill our vision down into its most simple form: it would be to train folks in ways that prevent injury as much as humanly possible 1) in the gym, 2) outside of the gym, and then 3) to help improve performance however much we can. Beyond those three, we would love for it to be more fun than any other kind of training you’ve ever done before as well, but we absolutely won’t sacrifice number 1 for any of those other goals.
I still get out to the course with some frequency, and enjoy working with high school and college players who want to take it to the next level a lot. I’m not sure what it will all look like over the next 5 years, but I expect the combination of golf, golf fitness, and golf performance will be our blend of brand.
If there are any questions you have, please don’t hesitate to respond to this blog because I would love to answer them!
-Michael
