Pro athletes, Olympic contenders and sports enthusiasts alike are familiar with the town of McKinney. A number of pro basketball players and NFL favorites from not only the Dallas Cowboys, but also the Seattle Seahawks, New Orleans Saints and the Miami Dolphins, all train at the Michael Johnson Performance training facility (MJP) in the city about 30 minutes north of Dallas.
“The draw for athletes is simple,” said Brian Abadie, the training facility’s High Performance Coordinator who works with elite and pro athletes. “They are seeking a place that will help them truly realize their full potential. We utilize some of the most advanced training technology and science to guide us on how to help our athletes achieve success.”
Abadie said the programs are created based on the analysis and assessments of each athlete and are then implemented into intensive training programs.
Johnny Quinn, a past U.S. Olympian bobsledder who is now a professional speaker and entrepreneur said, “The Michael Johnson Performance Center kept my athletic career alive. I became a professional football player at age 22, but kept getting cut and needed a place to train to keep me in high performance shape.”
In his third year as a professional football player, Quinn said he hit a major stumbling block, blowing out his knee. With a long recovery time anticipated, he said that due to the Michael Johnson Performance’s incredible staff and knowledge, he was medically cleared in under six months.
Even though Quinn’s football career was over, he didn’t let that stop him — he then started bobsledding for Team USA.
So where did he go to train? MJP, of course.
“At age 30 — when in the world of pro sports, people call 30 old — I became a United States Olympian,” Quinn said.
That’s Quinn’s story, accomplished following his training at the Michael Johnson Performance training facility. But, the training facility is not limited to just athletes in the United States.
Abadie said that MJP has worked with a number of athletes from around the world including Europe, Azerbaijan, UAE, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as other Caribbean islands, China and Japan, to name a handful.
“At the end of the day, everyone is out there training,” Abadie explained. “We say the tide raises all ships, as that is the 'training' everyone is doing, but if you need to catch the reigning Olympic champ who is .05 seconds faster than you, doing the same training year after year you will never catch them. You must do the little things better than the rest, and we pride ourselves on being able to find those thousandths of a second. It’s called the ‘.001.’”
Michael Johnson Performance is in its 10th year now and has trained thousands of professional and Olympic athletes from around the globe. In fact, on any given day, there are 20 to 50 professional athletes coming through the facility headquarters, but there are also programs for non-Olympic and pro sports aficionados, too.
“The major U.S. sports here at our headquarters are just a glimpse of who is exposed to MJP, and our training isn’t just for the elite and professionals, as we trained athletes as young as five years old this summer, and as old as 40-plus years,” Abadie said.
So if you want to train alongside the likes of Grant Fiorentinos, DeAndre Elliott, Darius Jackson or Jay Ajayi, you can do it in McKinney.
“Human development never stops — the goals just change as you get older and retire from sport,” Abadie concluded. “Michael Johnson’s mission of being able to help every athlete is a real dream of his. Not just the ones in McKinney, Texas, but all over the world.”
Michael Johnson Performance is located at 6051 Alma Drive in McKinney. Learn more about the training facility here.