3 Things I Learned From Training Aaron Gwin - a podcast by James Wilson - MTB Strength Training Systems

One of the best experiences of my coaching career was being able to work with Aaron Gwin at the beginning of his riding career.

I had a connection with Rich Houseman, who “discovered” Aaron at a local SoCal DH race. Rich called me and told me that I needed to start helping this kid because he was going to be great.

I had the chance to work with Aaron for about 3.5 years, before he was a sponsored rider and then through his time with Yeti. Aaron was actually the reason that the Yeti team hired me because he was impressed with what I was doing with him and wanted to make sure that I was the strength coach for the team.

Over that time he came and stayed with me to train and I had the chance to see him go from an unknown rider to the best American DH racer in a generation, getting 10th in his first ever WC race, finishing as high as 3rd in a race and placing 5th overall after just a few years of racing.

I learned some valuable things from working with and observing him and here are the top 3 things I took away from our time together.

Don’t make excuses.

• I worked with several “next big things” who never amounted to much of anything.


• One thing that I noticed was that they always made excuses for why they couldn’t do something I asked them to do.


• Aaron never made excuses and just did what I asked him to do.

Keep your emotions in check - never too high or too low.

• Another thing I noticed was that Aaron stayed pretty even keel with his emotions.


• You couldn’t tell from talking to him whether he had a great race or bad race.


• His highs were never too high and his lows never too low.

Staying injury free is more important than maximizing performance with your training program.

• Aaron had a bad shoulder from a previous injury when I started to work with him.


• The focus was on keeping the shoulder injury free during training and doing what we could to make it more solid.


• If you're hurt it doesn’t matter how fit you are and more good riders have been ruined by a bad training program than made great from some super hard, overly ambitious training program.

I hope you got something from these lessons as well. You don't have to be a pro racer to apply these things to your own training and riding.

Until next time...

Ride Strong,

James Wilson

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