Many athletes never transition to the world of coaching; of those who do, even fewer make a transition from coaching to academia, and again, even fewer from academia to the private sector.
Chris Frankel, who has done all three, with a lifetime of accompanying experiences and lessons learned on his unique journey, was the obvious choice to lead human performance innovation at BeaverFit.
One of Frankel’s strongest skills is “being able to walk into any environment – whether 5th grade PE, with professional athletes, at initial entry military training, or in a room full of PhDs – and have a relaxed conversation without having to code switch too much. It’s the same challenge, different environment,” he said.
Frankel, who holds a doctorate in physical education with an emphasis on sports and exercise science, jokingly calls himself a “mediocre athlete” with a “dismal athletic career,” but it’s clear his early influences helped shape the trajectory of his path to success.
Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, Frankel attended Sidwell Friends private school where he ran track, and played soccer, football and basketball. He continued as a college athlete at Hiram College, Ohio, as part of the Presidents’ Athletic Conference championship football team and a standout in track and field.
Unlike most athletes his age, Frankel also became closely involved with coaching these sports. Through summers spent under the wings of influential coaches such as Eddie Saah, recognized by the Washington Sports Hall of Fame for 16 consecutive youth baseball championship wins, and Dan Riley, former strength and conditioning coach for the Washington Commanders, Frankel developed an appreciation for the art of coaching and gained experience working with athletes at all levels – from middle school softball to basketball players en route to the NBA. He recalled that “learning the back-end of coaching was fascinating, because being just the player or athlete is so much different than understanding how to manage everything together.”
In his mid-20s, Frankel moved to Los Angeles where he took a job at an upscale fitness club, and eventually a personal training gig at Gold’s Gym. He became immersed in the world of elite bodybuilders and their coaches, continued doing 5Ks and track meets, and worked hard enough at basketball to be able to play on the A court at Venice Beach.
“If anybody asked what made me successful, it was just trying to be a sponge of everything,” he said. “I spent 90% of my time assuming I’m the dumbest person in the room. What can I learn from every athlete and every coach? What can I learn from every person I’m working with? And 10% of the time, I put pen to paper and action everything I’ve learned up until that point.”
The Los Angeles scene took its toll after a couple years, so Frankel relocated to a quieter life in New Mexico, met his wife and began his master’s degree at the University of New Mexico. He entered the physiology and statistics-oriented exercise science program as a sociology undergrad and was big-timed by his peers once they realized he wasn’t from a science background. “And with the chip on my shoulder, I thought, not only am I going to do well in this class, I’m going to do better than all of you,” he recounted.
He earned his master’s and went on to pursue a doctoral degree. What he didn’t expect at the time was that it would take 23 years to complete, as he raised a family and continued to work multiple jobs in the fitness, coaching, and high performance training industries.
Frankel and his wife Georgia have five children, including two who were adopted, and a son-in-law, and are known for their big hearts as they frequently open their home to others facing hardships such as unemployment, family issues or financial difficulties. During the recession in 2009, they had 12 people living under one roof.
“The time it took to earn my PhD turned out to be a blessing, because it forced me to stay on top of the science for 23 years, and be able to have conversations with a bunch of PhD propeller heads as we went to conferences or as I sat in on lectures,” he said. “At the same time I was still coaching, so I had two different worlds of showing up, coaching, training, and also learning about what’s going on in the deep physiology side of things.”
During part of those two decades, Frankel worked as a trainer for professional golfer Notah Begay III – and went from knowing nearly nothing about golf to accompanying Begay on tour and during private practice rounds with Tiger Woods. Frankel continued to be a sponge, soaking in every experience and opportunity.
“This role with Notah helped me realize that all these things I know about strength and conditioning and coaching – it’s not sports-specific. I could take it anywhere I wanted to go, and layer on top all the stuff I was learning in school,” Frankel said.
From there, Frankel took a job in the commercial fitness industry with TRX and helped stand up their training and education side of the business. Through a twist of fate, his 13 years working there led him to cross paths with fellow TRX teammates Alex Roodhouse and Michael Taylor, before the two split off to found BeaverFit North America.
Through their respective roles, Frankel and Taylor were involved in the early stages of the Marine Corps High Intensity Tactical Training program, and thus began Frankel’s exposure to training tactical athletes. “I thought – from a teaching, coaching, and programming standpoint – not only how do I train the end users in the tactical population, but how do I train the coaches to then turn around and coach these tactical environments?” he recalled.
When he decided it was time for his next challenge and a change of focus, Frankel reconnected with Taylor and joined the BeaverFit team under one condition: he wouldn’t be standing up a training and education program there. Taylor agreed to bring Frankel onto the product team, but within a year it was clear: there was a training and education gap that needed to be filled – and BeaverFit had the drive to fill it.
“These 17 to 24-year-old men and women are coming into the service and going out with non-combat related, chronic injuries,” Frankel said. “How can they can be better exposed to world-class coaching and physical education that will not only enable them to be prepared should they ever go to combat, but more importantly, to get through their entire military career and get out without a knee, back or shoulder injury that then impacts them being able to interact with their family or take other jobs?”
Human performance is how the human interacts with their environment to achieve a particular outcome given the things they have access to, and that’s what Frankel does best. As he builds out the BeaverFit training and education platform, he explained, “it’s about helping our end user, but also starting to have a bigger influence on the health and wellbeing of our country – which is not only a national security issue, but a public safety and public health issue.”
“And, yeah, it looks like we’re just manufacturing steel and bumper plates, and teaching people how to do sit-ups and push-ups, but there’s a team mindset that we’re walking into a much bigger mission, and that it makes it exciting to do this every single day,” he said.
As BeaverFit continues to develop proven capabilities to optimize the readiness and lethality of the Human Weapon System, people like Frankel are looking not only through the lens of product development – but the accompanying technology, knowledge, training and education – which earned him the title of BeaverFit’s Head of Performance Innovation.
Frankel has no plans to retire anytime soon, and joked that even if he won the lottery tomorrow he’d likely continue what he’s doing. “At the end of the day, family is the most important thing to me. Everything I do spins out of a need to make sure we’re creating a legacy that they can look back on,” he said. “My goal is for BeaverFit to be the last place I ever work.”
