Latrice Lewis

Latrice Lewis is a sports and performance psychology consultant in Atlanta who competed for Team USA in handball before she ever studied the mind.

Brad met her through the strongwoman side of the sport, after SALTYmf had done some work with Pro League Network around strongman, and she came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about how she ended up in the psychology of performance. She and her wife Emily run Team Bernhardt, a private gym outside Atlanta. Emily competed for Team USA as a thrower and was one of the first women in Georgia pulling together the equipment to make strongman happen at all.

She works with several sports teams at Georgia State University, and she tells them talent stops mattering at that level because everyone in Division I has it. The skills she teaches are specific and unglamorous. Imagery first, which she did for years as an athlete before she learned it had a name, and which she wants detailed enough that a player can hear the sneakers squeak. Then self-talk, because an athlete at the free throw line repeating don't miss is pouring all her energy into the miss. She holds individual meetings so each person can work a skill their own way, and she keeps athletic journals with them as proof of work already done. She takes athletes from about twelve up with no ceiling at the other end, and she has worked with musicians, business people and military.

The injury is what turned her toward the work. She hurt her back badly competing for Team USA in the Dominican Republic, and about a year of physical therapy later she was still struggling, so the team's athletic rep sent her to Doug Hanks, a sports psychologist registered with the USOC. She only found out how well known he was when his name kept turning up in her textbooks. The body kept adding to the bill. Five knee surgeries on the left knee, surgery on an elbow, shoulder problems she still carries. When it ended she hit the part she now warns her athletes about, because her whole identity had been athlete and she had to work out who else she was. She asks every young athlete the same question now. What else do you like?

She benches 235 and pulls 405, and says she does it so people can see what a body with that much mileage on it can still do. The gym has had members as young as six and others in their sixties, and she and Emily hold Strongwoman Saturdays because two women in a private room can teach another woman how to spot a lift without anybody making her feel small about it. Latrice reminds them she started out barely benching 55. Next month she is entering the sandbag games in Valdosta, mostly because the trophy looks good.