PowerStrength Toughness

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to our athletes who have been training hard this past month. The last 4 weeks have been intense and our athletes continue to raise the bar. A lot is demanded of them and they don’t disappoint. I’m proud of the responsible, young adults they’re growing up to be.

A good representation of this was demonstrated this past weekend...



 Marcus Barissi, (8^th grade football player) has been training here since our doors first opened. Like a a lot of our athletes, Marcus never misses workouts. Going to PowerStrength has developed into a lifestyle. Anyways, the last couple weeks Marcus was having some health issues that caused him to break his routine and miss workouts. This caused even more pain and stress as he was fearful of losing the gains he has worked so hard to achieve.

Some of the PSTS Middle School training group- Marcus is second row, top right

On Saturday he came to the gym and toughed out his third workout of the week. I always take into account how our guys are feeling so we made a few changes to the intensity of the workout but Marcus still pushed the pace so these changes were essentially non-existent. Our athletes have adopted the mantra of never making excuses or complaining and they live this while they are training- Marcus is no exception.

Later that night, Marcus went to the ER and had his appendix removed! His weeks of having pain had developed into appendicitis, which he trained with less than 7 hours before. The pain of missing workouts must have been worse than the pain of appendicitis. In fact, when I spoke with Marcus Sunday night the first thing he said was how upset he was that he had to miss another week of training. Only the truly dedicated would be thinking about this as they’re sitting in the hospital hopped up on meds!

I’m not sharing this with you to talk up any one person- although doing this without making excuses was pretty tough on Marcus’ part. I’m sharing this because this is a great representation of the mindset our athletes are developing. If an 8^th grader doesn’t make excuses and commits to his training- why is it that some varsity and college athletes out there find it SO hard to do so?