About Me

Hi!  I’m Dr. Denise Wood, CSCS, USAW2 and I’m excited to help you Build Better Athletes Faster.  With over 50 years of combined experience as an elite athlete, sport performance coach, and research professor, my goal is to help you speed up athletic development and outperform the competition.

As a self-coached athlete, I struggled through my fair share of mistakes that slowed my progress, until I made two decisions that boosted my performances and forever changed how I coach athletes.

First, I began to surround myself with people who knew more. I trained with top US Olympic weightlifters, like Phil Grippaldi, and a former Soviet coach. I learned correct lifting technique, specialized exercises, and Eastern European methods that boosted my speed, explosive power, and coordination for sprinting, jumping, and throwing.

Second, as I continued to compete, I learned why these techniques worked so well by studying motor (movement) learning in graduate school. Applying these principles, I creating sport-specific training programs for D1 athletes with legendary coaches like Terry Crawford (track and field) and Pat Summitt (basketball) at the University of Tennessee.

After grad school, I spent four years as a fitness program director in physical therapy, then became a research professor for adult students in teacher education, exercise and health sciences, applied nutrition, and management. And, I also began to coach again in public schools.

I am currently the Director of Sport Science Curriculum and Instruction with USATF Coach Education and a member the National Committee for the Accreditation for Coaching Education.

I want to help more athletes break through barriers and rise to their full potential, so I created Build Better Athletes Faster.

Over my career, I’ve seen youth athletes to Olympians benefit greatly from these cutting-edge techniques, and I’m confident they’ll be game changers for you, too.

Please check out my blog, downloads, and courses (coming soon) for exclusive tips and tools that will help you advance to the next level faster!