From Beauty to Performance

Cross pollination for Innovation

Over my career I worked across multiple sports.

Tennis. BMX. MTB. MotoX. Football codes.

One thing I noticed:

Cross pollination looks like Innovation.

Or maybe,

Cross pollination IS Innovation.

I had to learn bench press mechanics when I was training an elite powerlifter.

Later, those lessons underpinned how I coached upper body strength in skinny tennis players.

Concussion and TBI research made me think differently about creatine long before most performance coaches started discussing “brain energy.”

Then gut health research started influencing how I thought about recovery, illness resilience and athlete availability.

Recently I’ve been reading research on ingesting hyaluronic acid (HA).

(Context: It’s a key ingredient in our Collagen Beauty Boost and, yes, supplementing with HA has been shown to “inhibits skin wrinkles and improves skin condition.”)

Not from sports science journals.

Beauty research.

Most people hear “hyaluronic acid” and think:

• skin care

• wrinkles

• cosmetic clinics

But as you know, skin, fascia, tendons, ligaments and joint surfaces are all connective tissues.

And in high performance sport, connective tissue quality matters.

So the question is, if oral hyaluronic acid improves skin hydration and tissue quality… Could there also be implications for:

• tendon resilience?

• joint tolerance?

• fascia quality?

• load absorption?

• recovery capacity?

To be clear, I’m not I saying “oral HA prevents injuries.”

I’m saying this is how cross pollination starts.

In most cases (an ideal world?) it would be:

1. Curiosity

2. Research

3. Application.

But at the pointier ends of human performance it’s:

1. Curiosity

2. Application

3. (…. and years later) Research.

There is growing evidence that injectable HA may help in certain tendinous conditions including:

• Shoulders

• Tendons

• Patellar tendons

• Sport-related tendinopathies

That does not automatically mean oral HA does the same thing.

But it may be enough to justify curiosity.

Particularly when thinking about:

• older athletes with years of accumulated loading
• athletes transitioning surfaces (e.g. from clay court to hard court)
• high tendon-load environments (e.g. volleyball or basketball)
• connective tissue recovery during dense competition blocks

Maybe the next useful performance idea is hiding in another industry entirely.

And maybe I should get our Collagen Beauty Boost HASTA certified : )

Chat soon,

Grant