A short YouTube monologue arguing that an athlete's most important asset is their "foundational game"—the portable, individual skillset built from three primary skills: balance, balls, and beats. The speaker emphasizes these skills are formed early in life through varied movement (play, school, family culture), criticizes the absence of coaching systems that develop them, and promotes the New Athlete follow-along program as a practical solution. Benefits are framed beyond physical changes: improved confidence and nervous-system (brain) rewiring, yielding a different lived experience and transferable athletic capability. Closing notes include an example (Marcelo), minor studio remarks, and a call-to-action to contact via Instagram or the New Athlete channel.
Chapters
Today's piece is about the foundational game and primary skills. I love this topic. It's one that isn't spoken about that much, isn't very well understood in sports. If you're into team sports in particular, or any kind of complex sport, it's the foundational game that you take with you wherever you go, regardless of what team you're on, who the opponent is, who your teammates are, your foundational game is who you are and as an athlete in that sport. Now, often we think about speed, stamina, strength, stretch as being the physical capacities of athleticism and an athlete. But most coaches don't really care that much about speed, stamina, strength, stretch. It's there and it matters to an extent. But the best athletes separate themselves through skills, and it's this foundational game that you take to wherever you go that matters the most. For that, the primary skills underpin the foundational game. Balance, balls and beats. You worked on them really hard in the first five, six years of your life. And even through your teens, you probably, even as you start to work more specifically on your, your foundational game in the sport you love, you probably still did more work on balance, balls and beats in a general way. By going to school, by being around siblings, and you're in a more diverse environment. And when that stops, your ability to progress, your foundational game decreases. And the areas that you just didn't happen to develop that much, whether you danced, whether that was part of your family culture or your schooling culture or not, makes a huge impact on who you can become as an athlete in many sports. And dancing is just one example. We need to continue to develop these primary skills. But how do we do it? There's no real model for it. There hasn't been coaches for it, There hasn't been a training system for it. It's too difficult to start. We've just begun to have the follow along system to make it much easier for anyone to be able to get into these primary skills and foundational skills. You could see the example with Marcelo, his ability, one of the greatest football defenders of the modern game, just how far he went with the primary skill of being able to juggle the soccer ball. There's other skills I'm sure that he didn't address that could make him even better. The players of tomorrow, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, will be significantly better than the best players of today's game. And New Athlete is about uncovering and developing those systems to build those foundationally better athletes. That and it's not just a superficial thing. When you do this, you might think, well, I'm not a professional athlete. I'm not gonna go anywhere with this. Why would I engage? But the thing is, within a week, you feel, okay, yeah, this is working. Within a month, you're like, oh, I feel different. I'm a different athlete. This belief in yourself and this shift in yourself is the thing that is most important and most valuable. And this is then a gift that you can give to your children, to those around you, to those you love. This runs much deeper than changing the structure of the body. This is rewiring the brain. And the brain is our primary interface. The nervous system is our primary interface with the world. So when you get into this and when you understand it, when you embody it, you have a different experience of life. A lot of pro athletes kind of get this. They feel very capable in their bodies, and it gives them more confidence and more joyful life. But when you do it across all areas, in the way that babies develop and children develop, it's even richer than being specifically good at basketball or something like that. We just put up a ring here. It's been getting a massive workout. We also took the floor out yesterday. A bit of a change of pace in here. Doing some cleaning as well. Probably give it a paint, but yeah. I hope you enjoyed this piece. If you've got any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me on ig. If you've got questions about the program, you can reach out to me or the New Athlete Channel. Appreciate your support. Hope you're doing well.
