Dick Fosbury died just a few days ago. He was 76.
You probably don’t know him or the name, but the sport of High Jump owes almost everything to him.
And his story is a reminder to all of us who have to sell a service that conventional wisdom is often wrong; and just because things have always been done a certain way, doesn’t mean they should continue to be.
Dick’s story starts as a skinny white guy, who, in his sophomore year, failed to meet the entry requirements to jump at his local school meet. Needless to say, he wasn’t a genetically gifted athlete nor did he possess natural talent.
But, what he lacked in raw talent he made up for in lateral thinking and a willingness to experiment.
See, the rules of high jump were very simple: jump off one leg and clear the bar.
Up until that point, athletes would jump facing the bar, scissor-kicking over it and landing on the other side.
Literally everyone did it this way.
But Dick found this scissored, straddle-like approach hard to coordinate. His PB certainly indicated that.
So he experimented.
He’d try different approaches, with varying degrees of success.
But it wasn’t until the governing body provided a rule change, that his life would change.
This rule change was quite innocuous.
A crash mat was to be placed on the other side to reduce landing forces on the legs of the jumper.
While everyone else enjoyed the soft leg landing, Dick went back to the drawing board…
Trialling and tweaking different approaches until he finally came up with the now famous “Fosbury Flop.”
Instead of facing the bar, he would face away from it.
And rather than landing feet first, he’d land on his back and arse.
When local onlookers first saw his new technique, he was ridiculed and laughed at.
He was labelled the “World’s laziest high jumper”, and likened to a fish flopping into a boat.
But he persisted.
And by the time the Mexico City Olympics came around in 1968, he had gone from being the laughing stock at local track meets to the USA’s best prospect.
And now he had the whole of the USAs expectations resting on his shoulders, even though almost no one had ever seen him jump.
As jumper after jumper deployed the straddle technique, the pressure for Dick to conform rose.
But he resisted, and instead, committed to his ‘flop’ over the bar.
While the whole crowd laughed at hime when they saw him take off… no one could say a word when they found out how high he’d jumped.
That day, Dick Fosbury would set a new olympic record by jumping 2.24m.
And in that instant, he’d silenced the critics who had once mocked him.
Within ten years, his technique had become the new standard for high jumpers all over the world and since then, his strategy has been adopted by almost every gold medal winner ever since.
Which brings me to my point.
Everything novel seems ridiculous to start.
When we first launched our fixed-fee rehab program back in 2018, one such prominent physiotherapist (who also happened to lecture at a prominent university in Sydney) called us a “bunch of monkeys”.
What did we know about physio and rehab? Who were we to fix a fee and not charge by the session? How dare two strength coaches come in and devalue the physiotherapy profession in such a way?
At the time, all I could do was trust my gut and experiment with an approach that I was convinced would improve athlete outcomes, practitioner satisfaction, and business profits.
And it took a few years to prove it could work.
But these days, the counter-intuitive approach that was the butt of the joke is now fast becoming the new “gold-standard” for athlete care (not my words, that’s what people around the traps say to me).
A fixed-fee athletic rehab is being emulated all around the world.
Much like Dick’s “Fosbury Flop”.
In May this year, we’re teaching this approach to fixed-fee rehab as part of our ACL Mentorship. It’s your only chance to ethically “copy and paste” everything we do in our rehab program that grossed over $1,000,000 in revenue last year (from 4 physios), and put our brand on the map worldwide.
During this exclusive experience (just ten practitioners per intake), you’ll also learn the details of our coveted ACL rehab process, which most practitioners agree is one of the most complex injuries out there to rehabilitate.
Plus, by learning how our system works with ACL rehabbers, you’ll learn how to apply the framework to everything else — like achilles ruptures and even shoulder recos so it will easily become the most valuable up-skill experience you’ll likely ever have.
Because when you do the ACL Mentorship, you don’t just learn our approach to ACLs, you learn our whole philosophy and system for rehab, too (plus, the business model side which makes the whole thing work).
So if you’ve ever wanted to know how to:
1. Charge $180+ per week for 1 x 30 minute consult
2. Provide unlimited rehab training in your practice or facility so you get the outcomes you’ve always wanted for your athletes and patients
3. Massively enhance buy-in so they shout your name from the rooftop
4. Have more google reviews than you know what to do with because it’s now so easy to over-deliver…
5. Improve the practitioner experience so you can attract a higher quality team…
6. All the while filling your pockets with profits while making your athletes feel like they’re getting a bargain…
Then check out the mentorship while spots still last.
To my knowledge, there are only a couple of spots left and we mean it when we say once it’s sold, it’s sold.
Interested? Hit the link below to find out more and prove the critics wrong.
– Karl Goodman
