Donnie Raimon needs no introduction in the world of performance. Donnie has worked in the industry for 20+ years and has helped the likes of NBA & WNBA superstars Lebron James, Chris Paul, Dwayne Wade, A’Ja Wilson, Kelly Schumacher, Tisha Penichero, Ruth Riley and more! Outside of basketball Donnie has also supported athletes in NFL, Boxing (Gold Medal), Premier League Football and... even several members of prominent Royal Family. When it comes to biomechanics and human performance, regardless of the sport or the activity, there is no discrimination!
Donnie is renown for his excellence in human biomechanics and after investigating the root cause of many athletes injuries and issues holding back their performance has resurrected many basketball athletes careers and improved their physical capabilities incredibly.
I was super lucky to be able to grab a little of Donnie's time and bring some insight into the mind and life of one of the worlds best. Athletes and coaches take notes, you're in for a treat!
(Donnie Raimon working privately with Lebron James in Cleveland. Image credit: Uninterrupted)
You’ve worked with a number of the biggest superstars and hall of fame athletes in the history of sport. Obviously each athlete has had varying personality traits and approaches to their craft. Does this change your approach to each individual, or do you bring the same persona and approach to all of them regardless?
"Great Question! I’ve been very fortunate that all of the people I’ve worked with over the years have chosen me to help them, so they put their full trust in me. I never had to motivate them, urge them to work hard or cheer them on. In fact, I often had to convince them to take their rest days. It’s a common trait I've seen amongst those at that level."
Has your demands, expectations and requirements ever varied as a result of the athletes resume, success and their personal overall impact on the team and organisation?
"Those things have changed with every athlete but not because of who they are or what they have done. It changed based of the reason they came to see me. If they had an issue right before the playoffs then we spent a significant amount of time together. If they came to see me after the season then we followed a more conservative approach. We didn’t just focus on the issue either, we also incorporated all the appropriate things we needed to optimise for the next season."
For coaches who currently work with professional athletes or aspire to work with professional athletes in the future, what advice might you have for them?
"I’m noticing a shift in the way of private training (meaning outside of the team) in that athletes are searching for private trainers that have multiple skills. The traditional team setting has a different person for almost everything the athletes need. Some of the team's support staff have become so large that the athletes see a different therapist or strength coach every day. This changes the athletes daily schedule based on the staff members availability. When the athlete has a private trainer, that one person has all of the information and is also available on demand to suit the athlete's schedule. This is very attractive to the athlete as he or she has many other contractual and business commitments outside of basketball. So to save time and streamline their days, athletes are looking for trainers that can speak the language of their doctors and can perform the soft tissue and massage work, or their favourite recovery modality."
Before you began your coaching career, you served as a U.S. Navy SEAL for 15 years. For all of us who have never served in the military and don’t know much about the life of a Navy Seal, how much of that past has affected your personal approach towards your career in coaching and also life in general?
"I think it has had a huge influence on everything I do. There can’t be any mistakes in the Special Operations community. It’s literally life or death! You have to be absolutely sure that what you are about to do is correct. And when you get good at that, it changes everything you do. You don’t believe anything without verifying that it’s proven and until you’ve tried it yourself in a controlled environment, only then do you apply it in real life. This has provided a great mindset towards coaching. There are a lot of people in our industry teaching things that have no business teaching. I don’t mean that as an insult. Most of them just learned the thing they are teaching, thought it was brilliant and wanted to share it with everyone. But it's often not true or not applicable to everyone. My career in training would have been far different if I hadn’t solved the issues of my clients, or if my advice in fact had led to a worse outcome!"
(Donnie Raimon working privately with Lebron James in Cleveland. Image credit: Uninterrupted)
What motivated and moved you towards taking on a new career in coaching after the U.S. Navy Seals?
"I woke up one morning, in a bombed out building in Afghanistan in 2001. I was 33 years old, I hadn’t showered or had hot food in two months, and the water bottle I had inside my sleeping bag with me was frozen. This was toward the end of our time there and we were exhausted! As fun as that was, at the end of my assignment in the unit, the Navy had decided that I was far more valuable for what I knew- than what I could do; and they wanted me to take on a teaching role instead of a war fighting role. At that time in my life that wasn’t an attractive option. Coincidentally, I also had a minor neck issue I had been dealing with that I could finally get addressed. While at the clinic they showed me the X-ray of my neck. As a field engineer in the Navy I immediately identified the sheer force at the area of my issue. The clinician asked me how I knew that. I explained what my specialty was and he then asked if I had heard of Biomechanics. I hadn't heard of biomechanics, so he advised me to look into it. I did and here we are!"
You have now been coaching for 20+ years. This is no small feat, that is a very long time in this industry. What changes (good and/or bad) have you seen in the industry during your time coaching, from the beginning till now?
"The access to information has exploded. Outside of a university library or physical textbooks, information was just passed down from coach to coach. So access to more information is a very good thing but not without its challenges. Outside of academia the vast majority of scientific information is still hidden behind very expensive paywalls. Universities spend an average of $12 million per year for their professors, researchers and PhD candidates to have access. Many people are unaware of this problem outside of academia and often have difficulty analysing data or recognising good information from bad."
You have delivered training to other coaches and professionals for a number of years now. I know first hand from having participated in your training, that it has added a wealth of knowledge and tools to so many coaches, who all have amazing things to say. What inspired you to do training/educating and what gaps/shortfalls do you see out there in a number of the educational options?
"When I left the Navy and decided I wanted to work in Biomechanics, I literally thought I was going to be working with 50 year old golfers with bad backs for a living. Turns out one of my first clients was a 7 foot 2 inch NBA player that had a knee problem for 3 years. I was able to find and solve the problem! After learning about all that he went through trying to find a solution, I was stunned at the level of care he received. I ended up with several more professional athletes and the story was the same. It became obvious to me that I had to teach people about Biomechanics. I never came up with my own methods or anything brilliant like that. I was just fortunate enough to learn the engineering side of biomechanics and followed the principles. It took a long time because most of the information we need as trainers isn’t in one or two sources, it’s all over the place and tedious work to put it all together."
The interest for many coaches to learn and understand Human Biomechanics has risen in recent years. As sporting talent and ability has advanced, so too has the pursuit of physical performance coaches to improve the athleticism and performance of their athletes. In the world of human biomechanics, where have some got it wrong in the past or even now in the present?
"This is a great question! In one of his books, Y.C. Fung, known as the father of modern Biomechanics, describes the reason he wrote his series of books on biomechanics was that there is a huge gap between the biomechanics course and books used in teaching basic or introductory biomechanics; and the courses and books used in teaching biomechanics to engineers, medical researchers, and clinicians like orthopaedic surgeons. In the latter case you find that many science and medical based universities biomechanics degree tracks are within the mechanical engineering program. It has been my experience that this distinction is not well known or understood. Mechanical engineering is also sort of an unsavoury thing to learn as there still remains a negative stigma around math, physics, and chemistry."
What can/should coaches in the industry be doing to ensure the information they are providing and the work they are doing on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis is both correct and up to speed with the latest research findings we have available?
"We need to poke around a bit in the world of academia and see how it operates. Knowing that free search engines like Pub-Med, Google Scholar, etc… only provide very small portions of the literature compared to a university's full suite of articles and journals. Publishers don’t give the good stuff away for free! We also need to identify trustworthy authors. Something that is personal to me is that the FBI reported in 2017 that there are 1000 fake Navy SEALs for every 1 real SEAL (Pretending to be SEALs when they aren’t). That’s a big number! The FBI also claims that more than 50% of PhDs in the United States are fake. Makes sense when put together with the spike in retracted papers. Poking around in academia and learning how it operates can protect us from inadvertently assimilating or spreading false information. Don’t trust anyone or anything. Not even me!"
You are watched by thousands of trainers around the world and unfortunately for all of us we don’t get to chat with you in person on a regular basis, although many of us would like to! What can we expect to see, hear and learn from yourself in the future Donnie?
"One of my favourite quotes from Alex Hormozi is, “People don’t trust you because you haven’t done anything to prove yourself.” Not sure if that is exactly right but that’s the gist of it. Everyone likes to brag about what they want to do or are planning to do, but it rarely actually happens! I’m working harder than ever on multiple projects. I’ll let everyone know what they are when they are tangible."
Thank you so very much Donnie for your time and your honesty in this short written interview and more importantly, thank you sincerely for your continued contributions and inspiring work in our industry. True legend!
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