The workout hack taking over pro sports

During Women's History Month in March, theScore is publishing stories that illustrate how women in sports lead, inspire change, and navigate their careers.

In the game of inches, even the smallest edge can decide everything. That's why Denver Broncos linebacker Alex Singleton has developed a reputation among the organization's strength coaches for being the "guinea pig" when it comes to new workouts. He'll take any opportunity to find an advantage.

"Anything that you can do to take your game to the next level, I'm willing to try," Singleton said.

Four years ago, it was hot yoga. "Some guys on the team were like, 'Dude, you go to hot yoga? That's the lamest thing I've ever heard,'" Singleton remembers. He's also tried Pilates and almost any strength training ideas his coaches can offer. But through the years, none of them had the impact he'd hoped for.

"In the weight room, it's only strength," Singleton said. "Then a lot of coaches will say the best thing you can do is stretch for two to three hours a day on your own - but no one ever does that."

Singleton has spent six seasons in the NFL. He played for the Eagles from 2019-21 and the Broncos since 2022. Before that, he had a three-season CFL stint with the Calgary Stampeders from 2016-18. He wanted something that would offer both strength and mobility training. Last offseason, he found it. He was introduced to a workout method called True Movement by a strength coach for the Broncos, and he's been hooked ever since.

He credits it with helping him become the strongest he's ever been and speeding up his recovery from ACL surgery after a Week 3 injury last season. He's even helped his wife use the platform in postpartum recovery after the birth of their first child six weeks ago.

The Broncos are so impressed with the results that they've become the first NFL team to partner with True Movement to bring its founder to their team facility one week a month, starting in April and running until the end of next season.

"People believe in Pilates, they believe in yoga, they believe in strength training - but they've never done it together. And not in male-dominated sports," Singleton said. "Your hips and your lower abs, groin, glutes - those are ready to work together. The second you can turn that switch on, which True Movement does, it instantly fires at a whole new level."

Though it doesn't have a lot of public recognition, True Movement has been steadily building a devout following of professional hockey and football players. Its next phase of growth could propel it into a household name.

True Movement, which was founded in Edmonton in 2012, has mostly grown like many of the best things do - through word of mouth. The company has quietly been developing a reputation as one of the best-kept secrets of hockey players who spend their offseason in the area, as well as football players on the CFL's Edmonton Elks. That's how Singleton first heard of it - the strength coach who used him as a test subject was Korey Jones, a former Edmonton Elk who used the platform locally before moving to Denver.

The method involves a proprietary machine with a triple spring load and split carriage that allows athletes to build strength while holding positions that are impossible in a squat rack. That translates to training that more closely simulates game-day scenarios.

"The game of football is so unpredictable with your movement, you're moving out of every different direction," Singleton said. "With the platform, I'm able to train in all these different planes. Whether its single leg, double leg, feet elevated, foot rotated out, butt rotated in, hip rotated out, hip rotated in, all these different planes that you'll have to play in. So, you're not just training in just a bilateral squat, you're able to get a full range of movement."

For most of its existence, the company operated out of leftover space at the back of a local law firm near Edmonton's downtown. "We actually got evicted because too many hockey players were using the parking lot, and they didn't care when they would get parking tickets," founder Erin Baker said. That eviction didn't bother her too much - after taking on an equity partner, she's built a state-of-the-art facility while pivoting to a franchise business model that will launch this fall with the debut of the company's first American location in Chicago.

The $20,000 platform is also quietly being introduced across the continent in pro locker rooms and training facilities - like Prentiss Human Performance in Stamford, Connecticut. "When athletes go back to their teams after the summer, they miss having access to the platform, so some of them have bought their own or have worked with their team to get one," Baker said.

That's similar to Singleton's case. After his surgery, he moved his True Movement platform from his home into the team facility. The players and staff have been so impressed with it that they're partnering with Baker to train the rest of the team on the device and program workouts during her monthly visits next season.

The steady growth, with relatively little attention paid to marketing the product so far, has Baker dreaming big. She envisions the platform eventually becoming as ubiquitous as a squat rack. "In the beginning, it was almost like no one wanted to be first to try it, and now it seems like no one wants to be last," she said.

"Everybody's looking for the Holy Grail, but this is actually the answer," said longtime hockey agent Gerry Johannson, CEO of The Sports Corporation. "You're talking about trying to keep your pro athletes healthy - there's no downside to this. And when you think about the investment people are making in their athletes, this is completely worth it."

Johannson has been sending his clients to Baker for years, but became especially convinced of the platform's merits after Baker worked with Golden Knights goalie Adin Hill to help him build strength in his groin and hips after years of repeated injuries. After integrating True Movement workouts into his offseason plan last summer and continuing with a platform at the team facility in Vegas throughout the year, Hill has been able to make it through this season without injury and signed a six-year contract extension with the team in March.

"I've been in hockey for probably 40 years now. I've watched every training evolution - from roller blades to running stairs. This is the most important development in training I've seen in my lifetime," Johannson said. "Think about the money in sports. Think about how much athletes make and how much they're worth. What does it cost to keep them healthy? This is a no-brainer for a team or an athlete to invest in."

The platform's success is in addressing one of the biggest challenges for elite athletes: overuse injuries. "These athletes are always in the same position," Johannson explained. "It can start to be a little bit of a maze to figure out what's going on. That's what happened with Adin. We had many doctors look at him and try to figure out what it was. Nothing ever seemed to work."

Goalies are ripe for overuse injuries because they hold the same position for so long, but Baker explains that the platform also helps skaters in all positions. Hockey players are typically thought of as having big glute muscles that power their strides. "They might have somewhat bigger glutes, but they also have lordotic pelvises," Baker said, referring to a posture where the pelvis tilts forward. "When we go in and train them, we find their glutes don't fire properly because of that. Plus, when they're strength training, they're typically pushing weight up and down, which doesn't necessarily correlate to firing forward on the ice."

In those cases, Baker programs athletes' workouts to activate their glutes by pushing and pulling weight horizontally. "It teaches you, even though you're going forward on the ice, you still have to think about keeping the back ribs wide. For a lot of these players, if they don't do that, they're going so fast when they hit the ice that there's a tendency to just let their ribs lead the way, or their chin. As soon as you do that, you slip into a lordotic tilt, because you have to offset."

Some of the shifts in movement patterns are subtle, but they have a major impact. "The magic is in the details," Baker said. "Even shifting a quarter of an inch changes whether your glutes help you or your quads. Your body is working more efficiently, and you're not using the wrong muscles to get there."

For athletes like Singleton, one of the upsides of the platform is how quickly the results begin to show. "That was the most shocking thing to me," he said. "It's not one of those things where you need six-to-eight weeks. Give me two weeks and you'll completely notice a difference."

While True Movement has been a hit with professional athletes, Baker intends to expand its reach to users of all abilities. Her flagship facility in Alberta is open to the public for daily full-body conditioning classes, and her franchise plans would eventually expand the company to include 1,000 locations across the continent.

"We work with everyone from 11-year-olds to elite athletes to 85-year-olds with hip replacements," she said. "The sports side is actually a small part of it; most of our classes are for the everyday person who doesn't want to live with pain and wants to stay strong without putting more compression on their joints."

Baker believes the approach works for anyone because of the very design of the platform itself. "We were very aware when we launched the brand that we didn't want it to be a cookie-cutter way to train," she said. "We're not Pilates or yoga or CrossFit. We train movement. We help restore posture and increase mobility, which leads to performance."

Jolene Latimer is a feature writer at theScore.