Don Moxley: Sports Performance
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In fact, welcome to Trulyfit, the online fitness marketplace connecting pros and clients through unique fitness business software. Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast, where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101.
Meet Don Moxley: Sports Scientist and Exercise Physiologist
Steve Washuta: Interestingly, welcome to Trulyfit, the online fitness marketplace connecting pros and clients through unique fitness business software. Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast, where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s episode, I interview Don Moxley. Don is a second-time guest on the show — the first time, we spoke about HRV. He’s the founder of TrainRecoverWin.com, an exercise physiologist, a sports scientist, and a biohacker with real insight and wisdom. With a long career behind him, he’s here to pass on what he’s learned about recovery, sports performance, and winning. He also speaks to being introspective as an athlete — or as a coach, teacher, trainer, or nutritionist guiding others toward success. You can find him at TrainRecoverWin.com, or as Don Moxley, spelled M-O-X-L-E-Y, on Instagram.
Notably, with no further ado, here’s Don. Don, welcome back to the Trulyfit podcast. For those who haven’t heard you the first time around, give my listeners a quick update and bio on who you are and what you do day to day in fitness and health.
From an Ohio Farm to the Ohio State Wrestling Team
Don Moxley: As it turns out, sure. Thanks. My background is that I’m trained as an exercise physiologist. I grew up on a farm in eastern Ohio. When I was a decent high school wrestler, my parents said, “You’re going to college.” I had every intention of going back home and feeding beef cattle for the rest of my life. Instead I walked on to the wrestling team at Ohio State. I was decent — not good, but good enough to walk on. Once I made the wrestling team, I struggled with injury. I was a big weight cutter, one of those guys who’d cut from 230 down to 177. It caught up with me physically. As I looked for answers on how to compete, I fell in love with human physiology.
To that point, i also had an Ag Econ class as a sophomore that basically said, unless you inherit a farm, you’re not making a living on one. That made the decision easy. I changed my academic focus and finished my undergraduate work. After wrestling, I went to grad school to study exercise physiology and strength and conditioning. I’ve been in practice ever since. Along the way, I’ve been a professor for 25 of the last 35 years teaching exercise science. I’ve always kept a stable of athletes I work with directly.
Building a Data-Driven Program at Ohio State Wrestling
Don Moxley: Overall, from 2015 through 2018, I was a sports scientist with the wrestling program at Ohio State. We built a data system that harvested about three and a half million data points a season. It let us make good decisions based on what actually makes a difference. We took our team and broke them into three cohorts. One cohort was All-American or better. Our language to the team was that if you make the starting lineup, we expect you to become an All-American. That group had about nine guys ranging from sixth in the country to an Olympic gold medalist. A pretty interesting group. The second cohort had started for us but never made All-American. The third had never started, even though those athletes trained and worked out right alongside everyone else. With that data, we wanted to answer one question: what really makes a difference?
Don Moxley: For context, what actually moves an athlete from not making the starting lineup, to starting, to becoming an All-American? That was an incredibly informative opportunity for me. We made decisions based on the data, and I think that’s important as we look at things like Trulyfit. That’s what really makes a difference versus what’s just dogma, the residue of years of dogmatic practice. I tell this story: at my last teaching job, a small school in western Ohio, I taught an advanced performance capstone course. We were talking about training philosophies, and one student said, “Well, I’m a West Side guy.” West Side Barbell is a big powerlifting facility. I said, that’s great. But I told him: whether you’re West Side, or HIT, or whatever else, it’s the same as Baptist versus Methodist.
That said, you’re reading from the same book — you’ve just decided on certain practices that build your own sanctuary.
Meanwhile, those are dogmatic differences, not scientific ones.
A Career Built on Data, Not Dogma
Don Moxley: In particular, that’s why platforms like Trulyfit matter — figuring out what’s actually a differentiating factor. As my career evolved, I started training my first client, who went on to become a national champion wrestler in 1987. That was my first paid personal training gig. Shortly after that, I was doing work with the Chicago Bulls organization. I’ve worked my way through the field ever since to where I am now, doing a lot of consulting and helping athletes understand what really makes a difference. It’s not about my program; it’s about what the data says regarding what actually helps you achieve your goals.
Steve Washuta: Ultimately, i feel like there are a lot of psychological barriers too. People naturally gravitate, Don, toward what they’re already good at — as you may agree. You might be a West Side Barbell guy because your body type suits that kind of training better than, say, yoga. Or you might be a yoga person because you were born with the mobility and flexibility for it. That’s why data is so important. It removes that psychological barrier and just says, this is what you need, this is what your body is lacking.
Finding the Weak Spot: Kyle Snyder and the Cardio Factor
Don Moxley: In fact, what’s ironic is that my Olympic gold medalist, Kyle Snyder, is an amazing athlete. One of the things we identified in wrestling is that cardiovascular fitness is critical to an athlete’s ability to move from Group C to Group B to Group A. It’s the strongest predictor of success of the three groups. Kyle was an incredibly powerful athlete, but we still did a lot of threshold work. We used bikes I could program wattage on, doing what we called “two by fifteens” — fifteen-minute intervals at a given wattage, using heart rate as a secondary indicator to keep him in zone three. It was a great workout, but Kyle hated it.
Don Moxley: Interestingly, i told him, “Kyle, I know you hate them, but this is your weak spot. This is your opportunity to improve.” Our challenge as coaches is helping athletes recognize where their weak spots actually are. I have a model for this, Steve, and I’ll send you a graphic we can put in the show notes. I call it my performance pyramid. It has three sides — physiological, psychological, and skills — with ten elements total across those three sides. What I tell people is that when you look at those elements, you win on your strength. You lose on your weakness.
The Performance Pyramid: A Framework for Athletic Success
Don Moxley: Notably, you can be the strongest athlete in the world. If you don’t have the gas to get to the end of the competition, you’ll get beat. You can have great cardio, but without the right mindset, you won’t be able to compete. And if you’re a college athlete who doesn’t have the skills to get to class, turn in exams, and stay eligible, you don’t get a chance to compete at all. It doesn’t matter how strong you are or how good your mindset is without the basic life skills to get things done. When I work with an athlete, I go back to that performance pyramid. What are the ten factors, and where do we need to focus? You invest in your weakness and support your strength. But first you’ve got to figure out what the weakness actually is.
Steve Washuta: As it turns out, you’d think that would be easy to convey to athletes, but it’s not. There are so many different components you need to be good at in any sport. Take wrestling — I’m not a wrestler, but I follow it. How good are you from the bottom, or riding? How good is your sprawl, or your takedowns? If you can look at those things independently, you might realize, “I’ve done well this season except my single leg is weak. I can only rely on the double leg for takedowns.” We can break fitness and health down the same way. Cardiovascular components, overall strength, endurance, and so on. We just break it down categorically.
Overcoming a Wrestling Weakness: The Bottom Position
Don Moxley: To that point, let me give you a concrete example — my own. In high school I was a decent wrestler. I showed up, I worked hard. Once I quit cutting weight and started getting strong, I went from a guy who couldn’t get out of the training room to a starter. Just by deciding to stop cutting weight and train differently, I made a big jump.
Don Moxley: Overall, my first year as a starter, my record was six and twelve. Of the twelve losses, I was winning eleven of them when I got pinned. I couldn’t get off the bottom. That summer, I went to a wrestling camp in eastern Virginia called the Granby School of Wrestling, a bottom-wrestling school. I developed my bottom skills, and went from six-and-twelve to thirty-nine-and-nine just by eliminating that one weakness. I became unrideable and suddenly competitive at a national level. The ironic part: of those nine losses, seven happened in our home arena, St. John Arena. I basically couldn’t lose on the road, and I couldn’t win at home. A sports psychologist came to talk to our team, and he asked us a question.
Pink Elephants and Yellow Squirrels: The Sports Psychology of Home-Mat Anxiety
Don Moxley: For context, he asked, “How many of you would rather train than compete?” My hand went up. I loved to train, but competition was really rough on me. We figured out I was anxious at home because that was the only time my parents got to watch me wrestle. If your kid is walking in with a bowl of cereal and you say, “don’t spill that,” you can count on it hitting the ground about three steps later. That’s what we call the pink elephant — telling yourself not to think about something. I worked with a sports psychologist on this. He pointed out that when your parents are there, what’s going through your mind is “don’t lose,” and I’d lock up and lose.
Don Moxley: That said, he said you can’t will yourself to not think about the pink elephant. All you can do is replace it — what I call a “yellow squirrel.” My mindset became: I’ve done the work, I’ve lifted the weights, I’m as good as this person. Positive affirmations. I developed a mantra that ran through my mind before every match. Suddenly I didn’t have pink elephants anymore — my brain was full of yellow squirrels. I could get into flow, turn off that prefrontal cortex, and I had a very successful year. This is the model we keep coming back to: you have to figure out what the weakness is. Once you know the weakness, you train it and manage it — we call it constraint management. It’s a term you could study at Stanford, and honestly, that’s all we’re doing in athletics.
Turning Off the Thinking Mind: Flow and Instinct in Competition
Steve Washuta: Meanwhile, turning things over to your subconscious matters too. People overthink the process — you may have sprawled three thousand times in practice and no one can take you down. In the moment you’re overthinking how you’re dropping your hips as the person shoots. You can’t execute with your usual speed and position. I’m a golfer, and when I putt, I count to ten in my head instead of thinking about my stroke. I’ve seen the hole, I know where I want to hit it, I’ve had a thousand putts before. So I focus on counting and let my body hit the putt subconsciously. I’ve been doing that for the last year. It’s funny how you can trick yourself into becoming more successful in a sport.
Don Moxley: If you’re thinking during the sport, you’re losing. I saw an interesting Instagram post on this today. We spend all this time practicing to wire things in at the basal motor level. When you step onto the field or into the arena, it’s critical to wipe everything away, stop thinking, and just react. I think it’s a mistake for coaches or parents to tell an athlete to think during an event. If you’re thinking, you’re losing — you’ve got to get to where it’s wired in and you’re just reacting. That’s what great athletes do.
Why Overthinking Costs Athletes Games
Steve Washuta: In particular, i had a football coach who used to say, “when you think, you stink.” It wasn’t the most original line, but it made sense. You see this a lot when teams change their format too much. Take a team that always runs cover two and that’s basically all they do. Maybe there’s some cover two, some cover three, and then they switch to man coverage. It’s good to switch things up. The problem is your guys go from instinctually covering their area to suddenly thinking through a totally different process. As beneficial as switching things up can be strategically, you’re also putting a psychological load on your athletes, who now have to operate in a thinking zone instead of an instinctual one.
Don Moxley: Ultimately, the other side of that, Steve, is you’ve got to practice the transition. That’s part of preparing the team. It means the shift from zone to man happens automatically, and they’re not thinking about it. They just kick in a different, already-wired set of skills. If you’re going to make that switch, you have to practice it at a high level, many times. The transition itself becomes automatic.
Steve Washuta: In fact, that makes sense. If you think about all the lapses you’ve seen over the years in sports, how many of them come from a lack of practicing that transition? They had something else in place, but it wasn’t practiced to the point of becoming second nature. Everyone started overthinking once the coach or the situation changed drastically.
Stress, Presence, and the Psychology of Flow
Don Moxley: Interestingly, overthinking creates stress. I had a teammate who, when we started the HRV work at Ohio State, kept coming back to this idea. You only have stress when you’re regretting the past or fearing the future. When you’re present, you have no stress. That’s why meditation and similar practices are so valuable. Back in the early ’80s we called it visualization. As I prepared for a match, I wasn’t visualizing wrestling. I was visualizing a walk up a hill on the farm I grew up on, becoming present and letting go of the past.
Don Moxley: Notably, i wasn’t anticipating the future or thinking about winning or losing. Those mantras I used affirmed that I belonged there — that repetitive process matters. I’m a huge fan of the psychological concept of flow, from the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s one of the most important books I ever read. Steven Kotler has since written The Rise of Superman and Stealing Fire — excellent books too. It’s all about the process of disconnecting the prefrontal cortex. That’s where stress lives, where all those thoughts come from. That’s where meditation and visualization become valuable. When you have a great practice athlete who struggles in competition, that’s probably what’s happening. They can’t drop into flow, can’t get present enough to stop thinking and start reacting and doing what comes naturally.
When Practice Talent Doesn’t Show Up in Competition
Steve Washuta: As it turns out, you’d hope that gets addressed early — in your case, it was. We all know people like that. I was one of them in basketball. In practice, anyone could walk in and see I was the best player on the team. In the game, it just didn’t come to fruition. You could see that person wasn’t performing on the court like they had practiced. So much of that is psychological, not physiological — of course there are components of both. But at lower levels, unless you’re a top elite athlete with parents pushing you toward something, you don’t really have that kind of help available. For a general high school athlete, do you think that support should exist? Should schools be pushing kids to have someone like a sports psychologist to rely on?
Don Moxley: To that point, i think that responsibility comes with being a coach. But that’s a challenge, because a lot of times — what do we pay people to coach high school teams? Three or four thousand bucks. They’re usually teachers doing this on the side, and it’s rough. I don’t want to criticize coaches for not digging in enough. But what’s changed is that we now live in a time with resources like this. Can you imagine hearing a podcast on this subject twenty or thirty years ago? In my case, forty years ago?
Paying It Forward: Coaching Debts and Gratitude
Don Moxley: Overall, i was lucky enough to come across a great sports psychologist back then. It was an absolute blessing to me. I think that’s part of my responsibility now — like Woody Hayes used to say, you always pay it forward. You win with people, and you’ve got to pay it forward. That’s why we do what we do. Hopefully it catches on and puts people together who need to be together. But if your objective is to be the best you can be, it goes back to that performance pyramid. You have to address all ten elements, because whatever you skip becomes the weakness. You lose with your weakness; you win with your strength.
The Four Elements of Physiological Recovery
Steve Washuta: For context, let’s talk about the physiological side of that pyramid. From a recovery standpoint, what matters, and how do you measure it? And what’s the difference between someone like me, who runs four or five days a week, and an elite-level athlete? Do we all look at the same metrics, or should I not be as concerned?
Don Moxley: That said, no, you don’t look at the same metrics. The intensity you track changes from an Olympic athlete down to the average person just trying to increase longevity and improve their life. When I look at the physiological side of the pyramid, I look at four elements. Number one is movement: if I want to become a better athlete or a better human, I start by moving better. It makes no sense to add strength to poor movement. If someone can’t move well and I load them, all I’ve done is make bad movement strong. You have to fix movement first — that’s the base. Then you add strength on top of it, building your ability to recruit muscle fiber.
Don Moxley: Meanwhile, there are a lot of ways to do that. The third element is energy production. At the end of the day, the successful athlete is the one who can generate the most energy in the time they’re competing. If I’m in a seven-minute wrestling match and I can generate a hundred kilojoules more than my opponent, I have an advantage. You can build your ability to produce energy. Finally, at the top of the physiological side, I don’t call it recovery — I call it resilience. Recovery is part of the process of building resilience. We look at that entire physiological spectrum.
HRV, Oura Rings, and the Data Revolution in Recovery
Don Moxley: In particular, there are tools you can use to measure recovery. One I mentioned earlier is heart rate variability, or HRV, which is emerging in athletics through devices like Oura rings and now watches. There are other devices on the market too, frankly, that I don’t recommend. They’re basically just toys, not real tools. But you can get good tools that actually let you measure this. Some perspective: in 2015, to measure resilience and recovery with my wrestling team, I had a seven-thousand-dollar device that could only measure one athlete at a time.
Don Moxley: Now you can buy an Oura ring for around three hundred dollars. It’s an excellent tool everyone has access to. I went from measuring one person at a time to having a constant data flow across my entire program. Good comparisons between athletes and within each athlete over time. More data is always better. That’s how fast this is changing. In about a decade I went from a seven-thousand-dollar device measuring one athlete at a time to a three-hundred-dollar one, basically Moore’s Law playing out in athletics. But the challenge remains: is my data correct? Do I have a toy or a tool? That’s something we always have to sort out.
Getting the Warm-Up Right: Preparing the Body to Compete
Steve Washuta: Ultimately, what have you learned over the years about warm-ups? Let’s take wrestling, since that’s your sport — I remember watching wrestlers jumping rope right before a match. Others were stretching or doing something else entirely. For me, I’m optimal at about a thirty-minute warm-up at this point in my life. Ten years ago it was only about ten minutes. The older I get, the more warm-up I need for an optimal workout. It seems like such an important part of performance — making sure you haven’t overexerted yourself, but also that you’ve got enough left in the tank heading into a match.
Don Moxley: In fact, i think of it as preparing my metabolism for the challenge ahead. It’s a mistake for a wrestler to step onto the mat without a full sweat going. You want all of your energy systems turned on. If you’re a football player going out to play wide receiver or defensive back, your ability to produce maximal speed depends on energy systems that need to be activated first. You do a short — it’s an oxymoron — “slow sprint,” and gradually increase the speed.
Don Moxley: Interestingly, you’re slowly turning on those energy systems so that when the game starts and you run your first coverage pattern, all the energy available in your system is already accessible. To answer your question, I think most people don’t show up to the event actually ready. I got to the point where I wanted a full sweat going before I competed. I wanted everything activated so that from the first whistle, I was ready to go.
Genetics, Desert People, and Jungle People
Don Moxley: Now here’s where genetics come in, Steve. I have the genetics for picking up heavy stuff — I’m good at being powerful. But I had a teammate who ran the Columbus Marathon in two hours and thirty minutes. That’s a wrestler running a national-class marathon time. Bobby didn’t win matches in the first period. He’d drag you into the third period, into what we called deep water, and drown you there. That’s how he worked.
Don Moxley: Notably, we can have very different genetics. Even though you and I share the same DNA as human males, there can be a lot of differentiation. You may have more fast-twitch fiber, I may have more slow-twitch. This is important: we’re not all the same. We are the same species, but not identical. It’s a mistake for a coach to take one program and put it on every athlete. Genetically, some people are marathoners; we call them desert people. Others are very powerful; we call them jungle people. Jungle people move in three axes.
Don Moxley: As it turns out, the DNA we share is probably close to a million years old, depending on which paleontologist you ask. We only get real evolution through extinction events, which wipe out a chunk of DNA and leave an evolved set behind. But we haven’t had an extinction event in humans for a million years. In all that time, all we’ve accumulated is diversity — lots of it. That’s why one person thrives as a carnivore and another as a vegan, why one person leans toward cardio and another toward strength. Every advantage also creates a weakness. That’s where a coach or a program steps in to ask: where’s the weakness?
Why One-Size-Fits-All Training Fails Athletes
Don Moxley: To that point, i think one of the mistakes in sport is that we get hung up on our dogmas. I’m a West Side guy, I’m a high-intensity guy, I’m this, I’m that. Honestly, I don’t care what you identify as, as a coach. What I care about is that athletes need to adapt. I also care about how we can trigger that adaptation with the least amount of work, leaving extra energy for everything else they need. For athletes, the biggest challenges are training, competing, and staying healthy. Injury is what ends a career.
Don Moxley: Overall, injury is what causes you to miss your goals. So we have to use the minimum effective dose in everything we do. We’re asking a lot of these kids — the weight room, conditioning, the field, homework. And we’re probably over-competing them too, which is a whole separate issue. But that’s the challenge from a leadership standpoint. We’ve all been part of teams, Steve. On any team, there’s a group of athletes who excel, a group in the middle, and a group that can’t get out of the training room. What makes those groups different?
Don Moxley: For context, there are a lot of factors. Resiliency and stress matter, and there are supplements that can help. I also find the concept of stem cells absolutely intriguing. Some of it comes down to androgens — people with naturally higher testosterone levels have a competitive advantage. That’s the science behind muscle growth and remodeling. We can short-circuit that to a degree with stem cell supplements and similar things, which can create an advantage. But first, we have to identify it: why can’t this particular athlete get out of the training room?
Don Moxley’s Own Strength Training Education
Steve Washuta: Well said. There are always coaches who try to fit players to their model, and others who build their model around individual players. But ultimately, I think the athlete needs to take some autonomy. Like we just discussed, there might be a particular warm-up the wrestling team does in practice. A coach can’t design twenty-six different warm-ups for a big team. That doesn’t mean you can’t do your own warm-up in advance. Maybe you show up ten or fifteen minutes early and do your own thing because you know you need more.
Don Moxley: That said, that’s spot on, and it doesn’t just apply to warm-ups — it applies to your entire training portfolio. Back to my own example: we had a strength coach at Ohio State who came in around 1978. Our team went over and lifted, and it became clear to me pretty quickly that I needed more. I mentioned West Side Barbell. My teammate’s roommate, a guy named Kevin Akins, had the third-longest shot put throw in the world at the time, 72 feet. He was huge. One night at his apartment, he told me, “You want to get strong? I’ll show you where you get strong.”
Don Moxley: Meanwhile, he took me to Lou Simmons’s garage — the original West Side Barbell. That was one of my original learning spaces. I also had a mentor connected to the Nautilus Leverage group out of Cincinnati, which eventually became Hammer Strength. Arthur Jones invented Nautilus, his son Greg Jones developed Nautilus Leverage. Life Fitness later purchased it and turned it into Hammer Strength. So I was going down to Cincinnati to learn the high-intensity stuff, and over to the west side of Columbus to work with Lou Simmons. At the end of the day, Don Moxley developed his own program.
Owning Your Process: Skills, Nutrition, and Self-Sufficiency
Don Moxley: In particular, that program had elements of all of those influences. As an athlete, you have to own your process — like you said a minute ago. If you want to be great, you have to become an expert in yourself. You build that by consulting with people, reaching out, and talking, across the physiological, psychological, and skills side of things. You can be the strongest athlete in the world, but if you can’t get your grades, none of it matters.
Don Moxley: Ultimately, here’s one thing I found interesting with my college athletes. When they first arrive, they’re living in the dorms with access to the commons. Their food is prepared for them and they get a decent choice of food. So I just have to teach them how to pick the right food. But most athletes move into an apartment by their sophomore or junior year. If they don’t have the skills to cook or grocery shop, they end up eating pizza and wings every night because that’s what DoorDash brings.
Don Moxley: So the real skill question, once an athlete moves into an apartment, is whether they can cook for themselves. Look at big football programs right now. You’ll see incredible kitchens being built into their facilities so athletes have prepared food. It’s not in the dorm anymore — it’s at the facility, and it’s done very well. That’s one way to solve the problem, though not everybody has access to it. That’s the underlying skill: can you acquire the nutrient-dense food you need to support your physiology and build resilience?
Closing Thoughts and Where to Find Him
Steve Washuta: In fact, don, this has been great information. I’m sure we’ll chat down the road about other things related to recovery and fitness. I definitely want you to send me those ten elements — I might do a separate podcast on those. Can you let my audience know where they can find you if they have questions? Anything else you want to tell them?
Don Moxley: Interestingly, there are two best ways to find me. First, LinkedIn — just send a request to connect and mention you heard me on Steve’s Trulyfit podcast. I’ll send you a meeting link so we can set something up. Second, my website, TrainRecoverWin.com. It’s still young and evolving, but there’s information there. Those are the two best places to find me.
Steve Washuta: Notably, i’ll put all of that in the show notes. My guest today has been Don Moxley — thanks for joining the Trulyfit podcast.
Don Moxley: As it turns out, thanks, Steve. I appreciate the opportunity.
Steve Washuta: To that point, thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us — we’d love to hear from you at social@trulyfit.app. Thanks again.
Overall, https://modemethod.com/
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If you want to go deeper into the heart rate variability data Don references throughout this conversation, check out this blog: What is HRV? Don Moxley.
