Graham Tuttle - Growth Mindset

Player Intro

Graham Tuttle is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), and strength and nutrition coach. He works with multiple levels of athletes, emphasizing personal and athletic development. He develops content on Instagram to support athletes looking to move better and perform better, and is currently offering a free 4-week offseason training program so athletes can transition safely into their season. Find him on Instagram @grahamtuttle.cscs.

Graham was our first guest to do his interview via Instagram Live. Watch the video here, or listen to the audio here. The following text has been transcribed and excerpted, so his full answers are not written.

Gameplan

pD: Tell me about how you got to this point as a coach and athlete.

GT: I just recently found this picture of me as a freshman in high school, and I was so skinny and awkward, it was like, I couldn't do anything. 

So I always had bad eyesight, and true story, apart from someone that's actually blind, I've never met someone who's had worse eyesight than me. I'm +8.75 and +9, that's my prescription. It's real bad. So growing up, I always had to wear rec specs... so the bigger problem is that I didn't have depth perception... playing one of my favorite sports, basketball. But when it gets more than 3 on 3, the things that are moving, I can't.

So learning movement and the way your brain learns language are very similar, so the same way that if you learn a second language before you hit puberty, you can have that second language without an accent effortlessly. If you don't develop that skill by the time you hit puberty, it's always a second awkward language. And the same thing with movement; the earlier you start to learn jumping, running, sprinting, climbing, crawling, etc., your body starts to intuit that as very natural, which is one of the reasons I'm so big on kids playing sports at a young age.

So essentially I just grew up very awkward. I was too tall and lanky to be quick and explosive, not tall enough to be good at anything, didn't have the coordination. The only thing I could do was I could go in the driveway and throw the football with my dad. But... I played every sport growing up, soccer rugby, football, basketball, and I was good enough to not be sitting on the bench and never get to play, but I was never good or great. So I was always kind of awkward. 

So when you identify as being an awkward kid, I just kind of thought [being an athlete] was not for me. So I'd see people, and knew the kids who were athletic... and I was just like,

"Wow, it would awesome to be them," but I just assigned myself [as not an athlete]. So that mindset was kind of there until junior year of high school when I first went in and worked out.

It was the greatest day of my life: December 10, 2009. I took the SAT, and my friend invited me to go weight lift after. So we walked in the gym at the YMCA... walked past the machines and walked into the big weight room with smelly dudes and sweat and leather and metal. I was like, "Are we supposed to be in here?" 

So I know we did shrugs that first day, and I was so sore the next day I could not put a shirt on. It was the greatest feeling in the world, and that was the first time in my life that I was like, "I can actually change my body." You can develop confidence because when you realize that something can change, you realize it's not fixed, so that was the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. 

As I started to lift, I started to work my way down to shorter track events, was able to compete with the state team in the 4x400... it all came down to that shift. So the whole point is that I was super awkward, super uncoordinated and average, until I started that you can change this stuff. That transitioned to going to college, being on the rowing team, being able to compete in freshman year as a freshman rower. It was just a whole transition, and then I got into it for a career.

pD: Along this journey, what are some habits you've picked up along the way?

GT: Habit is an interesting thing, because it's just a repeated pattern. So... one of the things that I learned was testing things on myself. As a coach, how good I am is only as beneficial as how good I can help other people be.

My goal is to make athletes better than me

This idea of doing it yourself first and making sure it works, so instead of saying, "I'm gonna try and do this," it's like, "Are you walking the walk?" My whole goal is to make my athletes better than me... So if there is any change I wanted to see in an athlete or someone I'm working with, I always had to realize that if I wasn't able to demonstrate that ability... that [ability to demonstrate] directly correlates to their power to buy in and see a visual representation of what needs to be done. 

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The second part was being consistent. From a development standpoint... especially in a time when we see so much overuse injuries and ligament tears happening in sports, people aren't taking the long view. So you get kids... where their sport gets turned from a youth sport to a professional or semi-pro thing. [Coaches] get incentivized to get kids to do things year-round, so they lose this long view. Change doesn't happen overnight: muscle fiber change, ligament strength, bone remodeling, overall neuromuscular control, these things are long processes that you can't speed up.

I've got to be... authentic and consistent every day

So I've got to be able to do it myself... being authentic, and consistent every day. Because that's the only thing that matters in the long term, is consistency. In terms of the development of my  mind, and how I think about things as a coach, these things have changed every other part of my life.

pD: So those ideas of authenticity and consistency, how have those carried over to other areas of your life?

GT: There's this idea that, even in relationships, in personal development, in any learning, you can develop skills. Anything in your life is changeable: your brain, thought patterns, habits, responses to emotions, your physical body. All of these things are skills and affect your body in some way. 

Take that idea that everything is a moldable, formable, skill that you realize you start with the human body as a demonstration; you apply that to other things. For instance, in a relationship, I realized that communication is a skill. There are podcasts, people who do that professionally.

You also realize that there's so much more depth to the human experience... that we put so much pressure on ourselves. Kids who are overly stressed, at a loss where they break down and don't think about what they're doing, everything is two-dimensional for them... It's like Point A to Point B, which is true in a sense, but there's so much more depth and nuance to life... Part of this realization opens up a whole multi-dimensional environment and saying,

"There are different levels of things that are going to bring me great joy and growth."

So realizing as a coach that all these skills are there, and you open the doors to this stuff.

Nothing is fixed; you can change

So being a coach has opened up another element in realizing that nothing is fixed; you can change and become anything or anybody you want. 

So the biggest habit and takeaway is that mindset has allowed you to look and say, there's no such thing as failure anymore, it's just feedback. So anything you run into that's a friction or difficulty, you can... look and say, "This is a set of skills, and patterns. I can change that." And that has changed everything. If I change what I'm doing, I change my life.

pD: What's one of the major challenges you've overcome, in life or in sport?

GT: I've always tended to have a brain that is future-focused. Instead of thinking about what was, I think about what opportunities are there. So this idea of having an obstacle, in a certain way, I tend not to focus on the obstacle; my brain just tends to think of the path around it. 

So the idea of failure, there's no failure in life. Once it becomes part of your psyche, that does then open up the entire process of... flowing like water over or around obstacles; instead of taking a hit, you just absorb and roll in one direction. Being able to embody that mentally is really important because it doesn't mean you ignore things, it just means that you take them and... move around them.

Every obstacle informed the next decision

It's hard to name an obstacle in my life because every obstacle just informed the next decision. So even the eyesight, I didn't sit back... I moved this way instead, and learned different strengths. So I developed a strong base of conditioning, and the mental strength that comes with running or endurance sports.

So I've always been afraid of heights, including box jumps, or jumping over hurdles... I have this hurdle that I've jumped over in the past... And on the fourth notch, I notice this mental block, and I start to freeze. You either jump over a hurdle or you don't, it's very binary. So on the top notch, I got there and... I could not. Ten, fifteen minutes go by and I'm stepping and freezing every time, I'm hesitating. And when you hesitate and freeze, you can't make it. I would step into it and jump over it, I could stand to the side and jump and see my feet three inches over the hurdle. There's no question whether I could do it, but I could not force myself [over the hurdle]. 

And it was so frustrating because I physically, am completely capable. It wasn't a logical thought process, it just wasn't happening. I went to the mental process of, 

"What would I tell an athlete, and what would a coach tell me?" So I wasn't going to leave that room until I do this, and I sat there and fake jumped for at least ten minutes. I lowered my heart rate, broke it down, and stopped thinking about it as much, and did it.

Life presents obstacles and problems; if you're not seven feet tall, you might not make it into the NBA, and that's OK. That's a boundary, but the boundary is just something you move around. And a problem is something with a solution; you're either going to solve it or ignore it. 

Execution

Graham has shared a video of how to do the pop-up, a simple plyometric exercise that will build aggressive movement in athletes of all levels.