The Marinovich Training System

My dad was many things, including a training genius. I couldn’t fully appreciate it until decades later, but I was lucky to learn from one of the best.

Marv’s high bar for everyone in his life began with the man in the mirror. He played football at USC as captain of the 1962 national championship team. Then he was drafted by both the NFL and AFL when they were separate leagues. Choosing between the Rams and the Raiders was an easy decision. Marv detected another near genius in Al Davis and established a relationship lasting decades. After leaving the NFL, he returned to the Raiders as the league’s first sports and conditioning coach. When Al’s son and the Raiders’ current owner, Mark Davis, said, “Todd was born a Raider,” he wasn’t kidding. Having spent my formative years traipsing around their facility, I had the team in my blood and nature.

Marv possessed superhero strength; in his twenties, he squatted over a thousand pounds multiple times and performed a bevy of other weight-lifting feats. Yet he felt misled by conventional wisdom. Bench-pressing heavier weight didn’t help him on the field; it had the opposite effect. After three years, overtraining ended his NFL career prematurely. This turned his inner campfire into a conflagration. He was compelled to answer two age-old questions in sports: How do you get the most out of an athlete? And could a nonathlete become one with the proper training?

As Marv perfected the methods of Marinovich Training Systems, a name not coined until much later, I benefited but sometimes paid the price. His garage laboratory became my dojo at age seven—yes, you got that right: I was in second grade. Timmy, my imaginary friend, was spared, though. He got to stay in my room and play with G.I. Joe while I popped my cherry doing Russian getups.

The garage was all grit with nothing on the walls but decades-old white paint inching toward a Coventry Gray. There was no fancy equipment in the space—that candy-ass shit turned Marv into a mad hornet. Machines were forbidden in the sanctum because no motion in life was that uniform. Instead, the garage was full of hidden, multifunctional gems. I spent hours on balance boards, juggling and twisting into awkward positions, mimicking origami folds with my body while reciting my multiplication tables. Why work the body and not the mind too?

It was a game, at least for the first few years. The multipronged challenges were original, and Marv’s brilliant mind was hard to dismiss. Sure, he was a strength coach by trade, but he was also a creative genius and a self-taught scientist​.

If you want to learn more, here’s the link to https://www.marinovichbook.com.