It's Time to Learn What the Hell is Reflexive Performance Reset (RPR)

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a strength coach working 14-hour days pretty regularly (or maybe you’ve saved a bunch of the admin hours and are down to 10 hours thanks to TeamBuildr). You probably have a master’s degree, at least one additional professional certification, and spend a lot of your downtime (and you’d probably put that phrase in air quotes) figuring out how to be the best coach you can be. And you love it.

So before we go any further, take a second and acknowledge yourself. In a world that accepts mediocrity, you’re the exception.

To take it back a step, I should introduce myself. I’m Jeff Bramhall, and I’m the COO of Reflexive Performance Reset (or RPR) and we recently announced a partnership with TeamBuildr. It’s a perfect match because the coaches who attend RPR clinics and those who use TeamBuildr are driven to continuously improve through better tools and methods. For you this means if you’ve attended an RPR training clinic, you’re able to pull up our sample warmups on your TeamBuildr account, saving you even more time.

How To Program RPR Into TeamBuildr

So, what is RPR?

If you aren’t familiar with RPR training, it’s a simple system of drills that your athletes do to themselves that will help them feel, move, and perform better. In practice, that may mean the basketball player who spends 30 minutes foam rolling before a training session is able to get right onto the floor, it may mean the cross country runner who’s missing practice due to shin splints is able to stay healthy and set PR’s, it may mean that your football team dresses 100% of its varsity players for every game of the season.

I've been coaching football for 16 years. Since introducing @RPR_system this year, we had zero soft tissue injuries or concussions, and dressed our full varsity roster for the State Title game in Week 14. All healthy.

- Brad Dixon @coachbdixon

The explanation can get a whole lot more complicated, but the short story is that your nervous system controls everything your body does and RPR can help you move your nervous system from a survival state to a performance state.

Bold claims, I know. So why would you trust us? Well, it’s because we are you. The three founders of RPR; Cal Dietz, Chris Korfist, and JL Holdsworth were brought together by a common goal: to give their athletes the best tools possible to perform at their best. Sound familiar? I hope so.

The Story

The roots of RPR go back to a situation you may have experienced. In 2009, Chris, who is a world-renowned speed coach, owner of Slow Guy Speed School, and the founder of the Track-Football Consortium, had a once-in-a-lifetime kind of kid develop a hamstring issue that brought his sprinting career to a screeching halt. This situation was devastating for the athlete and Chris never wanted another kid who came through his program to experience that.

Through Dan Fichter, he came across a physio from South Africa called Douglas Heel and his program Be Activated. Chris brought Douglas to the States and began experimenting on himself and with his athletes and saw changes that were shocking. Chris then introduced Cal (founder of Triphasic Training and Director of Strength and Conditioning at the University of Minnesota), who in turn introduced JL (a world-champion powerlifter and owner of The Spot Athletics) and each of them had incredible experiences and results.

What they saw in Be Activated was a system that allowed a practitioner to immediately address root cause issues that limited performance and caused pain. What they all believed in, and ultimately created with RPR, was a system that would empower an athlete to make these same instant changes in themselves. As the performance partner of Be Activated, RPR is a system where you, as the coach, never need to touch your athletes. This means that you can use RPR training in literally any environment and see incredible results with zero risk of injury.

In the two years since we started running clinics, we’ve worked with organizations from the NFL and NHL to Navy SEALs. We’ve worked with national champion college programs, hundreds of high school coaches, and private training facilities working with everyone from youth to elders. Each one of those people who’s implemented RPR has been brave enough to try something different because they believed it would serve their athletes.

The two statements I hear more than anything else are “I don’t know” and “it depends.” These are from people on the forefront of strength and conditioning, injury prevention, and sport science and they know just how much they don’t know. This is the same framework that allowed RPR to come into being.

If we are truly doing the best we can with the information available to us, we no longer feel the need to know everything. There is a massive amount of freedom that comes from that. With this freedom, when new information is presented we get to use the lens we’ve curated and choose whether that information gets assimilated or discarded. If you look to the people who are further down the same road you’re on, you’ll see that the very best of them rarely speak in absolutes. They always leave room for context because they are always open to learning more.

By acknowledging that we’re doing the best we can with the information that’s available to us, and actively seeking out new information that helps us improve our actions, we can become the best version of ourselves - not only as coaches and athletes, but as people. We can be the exceptions.

If you’re interested in learning more about Reflexive Performance Reset exercises, head over to our website, Instagram, and Twitter. We would love to see you at one of our clinics. I’m always available by email and would be happy to hear from you.