performance / athletic-roots · article
performance/ · 2,036 w · 9 min · ✎ dialogue

Athletic Roots

Jason's sixteen-year career in competitive gymnastics is not just biographical backdrop — it is the primary source of his frameworks for coaching, performance, and emotional regulation. The coach-athlete relationship he experienced under Levon Karakanyan became the template for the coach-client relationship he now practices professionally. Principles learned in the gymnasium — about conviction, pacing, courage after failure, and physiological self-management — show up directly in how he works with founders and executives.

The Biographical Arc

Jason started gymnastics at age six in his mother's gym and spent the next sixteen years inside the sport, ten of them at the national competitive level. What is notable is not just the duration but the early constraint: he was kept from competition for two full years while building foundational physical capacity. This deliberate postponement — building without performing — was itself a lesson that he now applies in coaching contexts. You don't rush into the arena before the foundation is solid.

The progression:

  • Age 6: began gymnastics in mother's gym
  • Held from competition for two years while developing capacity
  • US Junior National Team
  • Stanford University on an athletic scholarship
  • NCAA National Championship captain — achieved after five reconstructive knee surgeries on his left knee (ACL/PCL reconstruction, 2007–2010)
  • 15 years in tech startups (YC companies, product leadership roles at Etsy and Meta, TED speaking)
  • Full-time executive coaching from 2023 onward

The five knee surgeries are not a footnote. They are evidence that his career was built through genuine adversity — not simulated hardship but the real recovery, the real setbacks, the real rebuilding. His left knee still carries residual effects: VMO firing irregularities, reduced stability at partial bend, a slight asymmetry from years of compensation. The physical record is permanent. So is what it taught.

The arc from physical performance to cognitive and emotional coaching is not a departure from gymnastics — it is a direct transfer. Build capacity before performing. Face fear with preparation, not delusion. Accept failure as data. Trust the process over the timeline.

Levon Karakanyan: The Formative Coach

Levon was Jason's high school gymnastics coach, an Armenian national team gymnast who competed through the collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually made his way to the United States. His biography alone — navigating one of the great institutional collapses of the 20th century while continuing to compete — signals something about what kind of person he was.

His coaching style was intense by any measure: high physical demands, direct correction, leading by personal example rather than theory. He was known to yell. But what redeemed the harshness was genuine investment in each athlete — not in the abstract, but specifically, in each person's development. Jason identifies this combination as the mark of a real coach: demanding standards held together by demonstrated personal care.

What Jason learned from Levon:

  • Seeing potential beyond self-perception. Levon consistently held a higher picture of what athletes could do than those athletes held of themselves. This is the fundamental stance of coaching: the coach's ceiling is the client's floor.
  • Meeting people where they are, not where others are. Levon did not compare athletes to each other. He compared each athlete to their own previous ceiling and asked them to go one increment beyond. This made progress feel personal rather than competitive.
  • Holding high standards while showing investment. Levon's demands were non-negotiable, but athletes knew the demands came from belief, not contempt. The difference between pressure and cruelty is whether the person applying it actually cares about your development.

Levon also offered Jason one of his most useful observations on coaching as a profession. When Levon himself became a coach, he found that the hardest thing was patience — the gap between what he knew and how fast he could transfer it. A master practitioner can see the skill fully formed; the student can only absorb it one layer at a time. Athletic work ethic, he demonstrated, transfers domains: he became a single-digit golf handicap using the same deliberate practice principles he applied to gymnastics. The method generalizes. The patience required to teach it does not shorten just because you've mastered a different field.

The Physical Courage Story

At the US Olympic Training Center, Jason had a training moment that became one of his most-used coaching stories. His coach Levon called out an instruction — Jason heard "perfect" (the Yurchenko with a full twist) when Levon said "piked" (the safer, tucked variation). Without fully realizing the disconnect, Jason went into the vault approach and attempted a skill he had never done before. He crashed. Hard.

Levon's response was immediate and deliberate: before leaving the gym, Jason had to perform the successful, tucked version. Not the thing he'd just attempted. The version he knew.

The reasoning embedded in this response is the core of what Jason now calls the physical courage framework. After a failure, you do not push harder toward the thing that broke you — you re-establish confidence at the level you know. The goal is to prevent a mental block from forming. Physical setbacks can calcify into psychological ones. The way to stop that hardening is to end the session with a success, even a smaller one.

The exact same pattern shows up at the elite level. Simone Biles, widely considered the greatest gymnast in history, experienced "the twisties" at the Tokyo Olympics — a frightening disconnection between what the body knows how to do and what the mind can track in the air. Her withdrawal from events and eventual partial return (starting with simpler skills on a few apparatus) was not weakness. It was precision. She was doing exactly what Levon taught: rebuild from what you know, in sequence, without skipping steps.

This framework transfers directly to professional coaching. Founders and executives who have experienced major failures — a missed raise, a fired team, a product launch that cratered — often face the same temptation: push harder back toward the thing that failed, to prove it wasn't a real failure. Jason's counter-move is the same as Levon's: first, re-establish what you know you can do. Rebuild confidence at a level that is genuine, not aspirational. Then move up.

Conviction as a Gymnastics Concept

One of the most distinct things about gymnastics, compared to most sports, is that conviction is not optional — it is a safety requirement. In basketball, overconfidence produces a missed shot. In gymnastics, performing a skill you don't actually have conviction in produces physical injury. You need to believe you can do it, and you need to be right.

Jason has written about conviction-building as an eight-step process drawn from how gymnasts actually learn skills:

  1. Watch others perform the skill. Zero conviction.
  2. Do drill work breaking the skill into components. Still minimal conviction.
  3. Months of strength, conditioning, and flexibility work. Low conviction.
  4. Perform with heavy spot or safety belt. Low-moderate conviction.
  5. Perform with light spot, using a landing mat. Moderate conviction.
  6. Perform completely alone in practice. Moderate-high conviction.
  7. Perform as part of a full routine. High conviction.
  8. Perform at a major competition, when it matters. Very-high conviction.

This is eight steps. Each one is genuinely distinct. And athletes can regress — Simone Biles' withdrawal shows that high conviction is not permanent; it can be disrupted by stress, by accumulated pressure, by the body sending signals the conscious mind doesn't want to receive.

The coaching application: clients who lack conviction in a career move, a new company direction, or a leadership approach are not failing at believing hard enough. They are at step three or four. The answer is not motivation — it is the next genuine experience that earns the next level of certainty. Conviction is built, not willed.

The 26th Mile Philosophy

The marathon metaphor — and its gymnastics parallel — captures several related ideas about long-arc performance:

Pacing. Beginners go out too fast and burn out. Marathon runners who blow their first miles collapse before the finish. Gymnasts who peak in the gym don't always peak when it matters. Mature performers pace themselves across the preparation window, not just the performance moment.

Underestimating complexity. Jason connects this to Kahneman's planning fallacy: we consistently underestimate how hard complex projects are. The second half of any serious project — a company, a training cycle, a career transition — is almost always harder than the first half anticipated. Building margin into the plan is not pessimism; it is accuracy.

The final sprint. Elite performers separate from good performers precisely in the last mile — or the last round, the last quarter, the last month of a project. The question isn't who has the most energy at the start. It's who has enough left, and enough will, at the end.

External accountability as legitimate tool. Jason has used a $100 bet with a friend to finish a marathon, not as a trick but as an honest acknowledgment that commitment devices work. Using social accountability is not a weakness in motivation — it is deploying available tools strategically.

Injury recovery requires the same relentlessness as achievement. This is often the overlooked half of the sports metaphor. Jason's five knee surgeries make this concrete. Recovering from physical setback demands the same discipline as building toward a goal — arguably more, because the emotional resources are depleted by the injury itself. Professionals who've experienced major career injuries (failed ventures, sudden layoffs, public failures) face the same dynamic: recovery is not passive, and it doesn't unfold on the timeline you want.

Emotional Regulation: The Gymnast's Hidden Skill

Gymnastics is unusual among sports in the psychological demands it places on emotional regulation. In team sports, a single missed play is absorbed by the team's continued motion. In gymnastics, missing a skill means a steel bar is coming at your face, or you're landing in an awkward angle at full speed. The stakes of emotional flooding are immediate and physical.

This is the foundation of Jason's approach to emotional regulation for founders and leaders: the body and brain are not separate systems. The prefrontal cortex — all the strategic thinking and decision-making — rides on top of a much older limbic system. When stress floods the system, rational function degrades. This is not a character failure; it is architecture.

Jason's emotional regulation toolkit, developed from gymnastics training and refined through coaching:

  • Baseline practices: Sleep, nutrition, hydration, movement. These aren't soft recommendations — they are the long-game inputs that determine your regulation floor. An under-slept, under-fed person has a fundamentally lower capacity to regulate.
  • Breathing. Slow exhalation activates the vagus nerve and triggers the parasympathetic nervous system — the counterweight to fight-or-flight. The simplest version: when coaches shouted "breathe" at a kid writhing on the gym floor, they were activating a physiological recovery mechanism, not just offering comfort.
  • Progressive muscle relaxation. Flex and release each major muscle group in sequence. This gives the adrenaline somewhere to go. The body is primed for action; if you aren't going to run or fight, you can deliberately discharge the physiological readiness through voluntary muscle work.
  • Music. Familiar, emotionally positive music occupies the auditory system and removes visual stimulation (with closed eyes), narrowing the cognitive load at exactly the moment when mental bandwidth is most scarce.

The meta-principle: emotional regulation is a biological problem, not a willpower problem. You address it at the biological level first — then the strategic thinking becomes accessible again.

Thread · 0 replies+ add reply
no replies yet — be the first to write back to this article.