Who Is Matt Elam?

Born: Matthew Kaleolani Elam to parents Reid and Susan Elam. Matt was exposed to physical culture at a very young age. Matt's father, Reid Elam PhD., was a strength and conditioning coach at a major university when Matt and his older sister were growing up. Sufficed to say, being around the weight room, interacting with the athletes, and watching in awe as his father coached these sons of Hercules had a tremendous effect on the young lad. He vowed to be just like them when he grew up!

Matt began his physical training career at six years of age. It wasn't "training" in its typical sense – using heavy resistance apparatuses and so forth – but it involved the beginning implementation of kinesthetic awareness, which gives the body and nervous system the appropriate feel as to where it is in space or a given environment. Tumbling drills taken from gymnastics were employed. Medicine balls were used for base conditioning. Also, simulating the Olympic lifts (Snatch, Clean & Jerk, and their variants) were performed using old broomsticks and light make-shift bars.

Enter The Russian Scientists & Sport Experimentation

At the tender age of 12, Matt was ready to be experimented on. Now, please don't be misled by the previous sentence. In this case, "being experimented on" was a privilege. When Matt's father was working on his dissertation and coaching at a local university, his mentor had been working personally with a group of Soviet coaches and scientists who had brought a group of cyclists to America for training and competitive purposes.

Now, these male cyclists were the furthest thing from the norm or average when it comes to height and weight for elite cyclists. Keep inn mind that Lance Armstrong stands at roughly 5'10 and weighed in at 165 pounds while competing. These half dozen or so Soviet athletes ranged from 6'0 – 6'2 and weighed 220 – 231 pounds of rock hard muscle! In fact each athlete broke at least two pedals each while being tested at the University's laboratory. Many of them had to have their feet manually strapped on to the pedals because the turnover was so explosive while testing their "all out" power effort. Can you imagine how many Newtons (N) were being generated per each output…incredible!

When Matt's father's mentor inquired about how these athletes were able to get so incredibly strong and ballistic to a coach from the Soviet team, the man politely smiled and said: "Well, in Soviet Union, we try to account for many variables of the human capacity. I don't believe that you do this in America, yes?" The mentor appreciated the Russian man's hospitable nature but could cut through the crap of his politically correct answer. The Soviet coach/scientist was telling him that their approach was superior and the West was sorely lagging behind. In other words, Western training methods for improving one's ultimate potential suck! And he knew the Russian was absolutely right…they did suck.

So, Matt's father's mentor (Hey, this sounds a bit like: "My baby's Mama, I know.") picked the brain of these brilliant minds of physical culture to the nth degree. He figured that he had them there for a whole week, he would get at least four years of training knowledge out of them. Special note: he was very surprised at how willing and gracious these men were in sharing their expertise and experience with him. There is a reason for this. These men of the former Soviet Union had been exposed to more than a century's worth of data collection and anecdotal evidence from Russian and its neighboring countries. Essentially, the West and the rest of the world really, are more than a century behind the Eastern Europeans when it comes to methods of optimal training. So, they had nothing to lose by sharing with their more-than-eager-to-learn American comrade.

To make a long story short, the mentor continued to keep in touch with a few of the members of this group, even after the Soviet Union disbanded in the early 1990's. He was looking for a protégé to pass his knowledge on to. He deemed Matt's father as the chosen one and taught his father everything he had learned.

Now Matt's father turned around and taught Matt everything he learned plus his own experiences and scientific findings. This baptism by fire would forever change Matt's life and those around him.

Matt Becomes The Master

Matt Elam knew when he was just 12 years old that he wanted to get the most out of his body through the perfect approach to total conditioning of the body. Is there perfection or can there be perfection in an imperfect world? This is where Matt coined the phrase: "The brown belt approach to learning and training."

In the Brown Belt Approach, you are stuck between a lower ranking intermediate belt and the coveted black belt. You are hungry for that black belt. You train harder each training session; you attend practice more frequently because you want to achieve that black belt so bad that you can literally taste it!

Well, what happens when you've obtained your black belt? For many of us, we take a little time off to relax and recuperate. And when we return to the dojo (place of practice), we have a little more swagger in our step. Is this arrogance or confidence? We start to feel pressure to always be better than those who are not wearing black belts. If we are outdone by a lower ranking student, we often get angry, irrational, and even afraid. We become complacent in learning new innovative techniques. But even worse than this, we don't share certain techniques with our students because we don't want them to get the upper hand on us during sparring.

As a brown belt, you are never in a state of contentment, but rather, always in a state of learning. If you get beat in training, you accept it as part of the learning process and grow from it. This is the approach that Matt has taken and continues to take towards his training knowledge and coaching abilities. The closest one can get to total mastery is to be in a perpetual brown belt state of mind. Never be content with past performances or accumulated knowledge displayed by credentials behind your name.

ATLETIKA™ Is Born

ATLETIKA is the name of the training system that houses many different methods for accomplishing specific skills or physical results. This system is a culmination of the best that science and sport has to offer in the study of human movement (Kinesiology) and the exact motor behavior necessary to achieve elite levels fitness and function. The knowledge that Matt has obtained through learning Soviet protocols and other physical culture practices from his father are present in this system. Additionally, The real world experiences that Matt Elam has had as an elite athlete and martial artist is integrated into this system. And finally, the core knowledge gained from Matt's obtainment of a master's degree in Exercise Physiology is the glue that keeps the ATLETIKA system applicable, sustainable, and relevant to any person looking for a better way to train their body to its fullest potential.

A Touch Of Inspiration

What you may not know about Matt Elam is that he was born with a congenital eye condition known as optic atrophy. Optic atrophy is where the fibers of the optic nerve are deadened in some areas, which renders an individual legally blind – according to the standards of modern ophthalmology. Matt was first diagnosed to have optic atrophy at the age of four. His mother noticed that he was getting very close to the television when viewing his favorite shows. The doctors ran tests and found that he indeed had the condition that is typically passed down from the mother's mitochondria to the offspring. When tested using standard eye charts, Matt had a visual acuity of 20/400. Now, compare this to somebody who has a visual acuity of 20/20 and here's what this means.

A person with 20/20 vision can see an object that is exactly 20 feet away as if it were 20 feet away. Now a person with 20/400 vision sees that very same object that is exactly 20 feet away as if it were 400 feet away. The latter would view the same object as if it were 380 feet further away than the person with normal vision!

Because of this fact, the eye doctors wanted Matt to learn to use a can, learn to read brail, and perform other tasks that a person who was blind would have to do in order to survive in the world. When his father asked about sports, they said that there was no way that Matt would be able to protect himself adequately enough to participate in sports. Also, he would be a burden to the rest of the team as his performance would be poor and would hurt their chances of being successful.

But Matt's parents' never accepted this fate for their son, and he was blessed to have them and their "outside the box" thinking in his corner. Matt's dad began the great experiment – teaching Matt the ATLETIKA system as a small boy – never letting Matt know that he was any different than anyone else. So, what do you think happened?

You already know that Matt earned his master's degree in Exercise Science in the above paragraphs. But did you also know that Matt was a unanimous all district football player in the state of Texas his senior year? Some of the best football players come out of the state of Texas and Matt's division that he played in was one of the hot beds where all major universities recruit from. That honor meant that he was considered the very best defensive tackle for that highly competitive area. Matt was also a three year regional qualifier in the shot put – his best throw being over 53 feet – as well as qualifying for regionals in the discus.

Than it was on to college where he received a full ride football scholarship to the University of Hawaii at Manoa where he was a starter for three years. Matt was also the strongest player overall while at UH with numbers such as these: Bench Press 450 lbs., Barbell Squat 600 lbs., and Power Clean 363lbs. Not too shabby for someone who was told he would live a life of disability and sub-mediocrity, huh?

The point here is that we all have something that makes us imperfect. Whether you're: too tall/too short, too pale,/too dark, dyslexic, retarded, suffering from autism/Asperger's, suffering from ADHD, full of freckles, suffering form chronic bad breath, schizophrenic, too hairy/too bald, blind, def, mute, or stupid, we all have to cope with something that at first glance may seem to hinder our performance. The ATLETIKA system teaches you to maximize every neural-skeletal-muscular connection available to you to achieve things that you may not have imagined possible for yourself.

Matt Elam has done it, and he will show you how to do the same.

The Mad Scientist Emerges

Matt is his own guinea pig for all his training theories. Now, before he runs a client through anything (whether it's his training methods or someone else's), he will put that program to the test on himself first. If the curricula hold up, he will use them for his students. If they need to be tweaked a bit, he will make the corrections first before introducing them publicly. Because of his more than 20 years of testing, tweaking, refining, and re-refining, Matt accepts the title as: The Mad Scientist of Human Performance."

What you can expect to learn form Matt Elam University and from Matt "The Mad Scientist of Human Performance" Elam himself is the total manifestation of learned training protocols: shock training, Olympic strength development, free body exercise, gymnastic sciences, martial arts mechanics, restorative sciences, speed dynamic training, nutritional science, lactic acid-oxygen based training, natural training, and much more.