Episode 1: Potential, Breath, & Awareness with Michael Kraeuter
When you think about your physical performance and athletic potential, what comes to mind?
What’s the fastest time you can run?
What’s the heaviest weight you can lift?
How can you be the best competitor in your sport?
Everyone wants to be bigger, faster, stronger.
But when you look at the greatest competitors in any sport, there’s a lot more to their game and capabilities than just what’s displayed in their physical performance.
What if I told you that you’e missing a huge area of development when it comes to realizing your capabilities as an athlete?
In today’s episode I sit down with Coach Michael Kraeuter to discuss just that.
Michael has been coaching all ages in the sport of swimming for over 20 years, continually expanding on his studies at Rutgers University, and Exercise Science and sports. He is skilled in teaching yoga and breath work. And he has a knack for making complex simple, while making yoga accessible so it can help people develop their awareness and move better through life. He completed his 200 hour yoga, teacher training, science of stretching, yoga, trapeze, and yoga, breathing, teacher trainings, all through yoga body. He is also skilled in teaching kids yoga through cosmic kids yoga. Not only can he help you on the mat, but also off the mat as he is a certified human potential coach, as one of his students stated, Michael will lead you out of your comfort zone before you even notice it.
Here’s a brief overview of the episode:
[02:32] Michael’s background and how he got into swimming and eventually became a coach
[06:15] The inner critic and how we evolved with it
[14:28] What is truly potential in sports
[24:07] Embodied awareness and a cool study that shows how our body interprets things before our brain does
[29:53] Flow state in sports and performance
[34:07] Michael’s background in yoga and breath work and how he uses that when coaching swimmers
[51:41] What we can learn by watching infants and toddlers move and behave
[56:17] Michael answers some quick fire questions and why Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky are two of the greatest swimmers of all time (hint: it’s not because of how many Olympic medals they have)
