7’s Rhett Lewis works out with Mike Boyle

So what does it take to be an Olympic athlete?

Mike Boyle, widely considered one of the top experts in sports performance training, might be the perfect person to answer that question.

Boyle has been training Olympians for years and says the real pleasure comes from seeing the fruits of his labor.

“It is fun, it’s nice when you can actually watch and think, ‘Wow, I had something to do with some of this.’ That’s a pretty cool feeling,” Boyle said.

Even in Olympic training where athletes have a certain specialty, Boyle utilizes the same core principles. However, the big difference with Olympians is the length of time spent in training.

“We’re talking about Olympics. Hockey conditioning is different from football conditioning because a hockey shift is going to last 45 seconds, while a football play is going to last five to seven seconds. That’s going to be different. But how we got a hockey player faster or a football player faster, to me, would not be drastically different,” Boyle said.

Boyle has worked with numerous Olympians, including the 1998 US women's hockey team that took home gold in Nagano.

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