GMAP Instructor Profile: Thomas Twitty
If you haven’t met ETRAK founder Thomas Twitty, there are three things you should know about him:
Thomas has been fascinated with human performance - especially golf performance - since high school.
He has been a business owner and performance coach since 2013. He understands the desire to help athletes reach their goals but also understands the frustration of “feel vs. real” - helping an athlete accurately understand and correct movement patterns.
He can do a mean impression of just about anyone.
Thomas grew up in Birmingham and played multiple sports through high school. He then played football at Furman University while studying Human Performance. Thomas always wanted to be a professional athlete and knew football wasn’t his route, so when not at football practice, he was on the golf course applying his studies there to optimize performance.
After graduation, Thomas went to Jacksonville State University to pursue a Master’s in Human Performance and served as Director of Football Performance. While at JSU, Thomas created a smart spreadsheet system to quickly evaluate athletes and prescribe accurate training loads for each person (the earliest stages of the ETRAK system).
After grad school, Thomas moved back to Birmingham and started Pure Performance, a sports and fitness training facility. Since the beginning, every client has received an evaluation, regardless of background or goals. “Quantifying the problem has been critical since day one… Over the years with evaluations - like any system - you start seeing patterns. And when you see a pattern you think you may be able to predict what’s going to happen based on chronic patterns.” - Thomas, 2022
Then, Thomas decided to create an app that would use evaluation data to prescribe custom workouts. He started “YouTubing, reading, praying, and practicing coding” (Thomas’s words) and built the first ETRAK Pro training app to collect evaluation data and prescribe custom workouts for each athlete.
Over time, Thomas learned that evaluations worked but they were only as reliable as the tools used to collect evaluation data. He wanted to create a tool that gave the best data possible. With a Birmingham-based engineering company, Thomas created an IMU wearable that provides accurate, precise movement data in real-time, in every plane (ETRAK Phoenix).
Thomas and the ETRAK team spent several years testing the ETRAK system in different markets - physical therapy, workers compensation, sports performance, and more. During this time, Thomas was also using it with local golfers to assess and train movement patterns both with and without a club. In 2015, Thomas was introduced to Mississippi-based golf coach VJ Trolio. (Read about VJ here.) After seeing the impact ETRAK could have on golf, Thomas began gathering feedback from instructors and tailoring the ETRAK system to fit the sport of golf.
“I realized that if you trace energy, you find motion. If you can correct and optimize motion, you can enhance a skill. If you can enhance a skill you can affect the outcome. And if you affect the outcome, it changes people’s lives. So now, the ETRAK team is using our tools to teach golf instructors how to quantify, understand, and affect human motion in the golf swing and to give clear, custom workout prescriptions to get better results.” - Thomas, 2022
The ETRAK system is three parts designed to help teachers better understand the relationship between body (performance) and swing and provide custom training protocols:
Golf Movement Assessment Professional (GMAP) Certification Courses
ETRAK Phoenix wearable device and ETRAK Analytics software
ETRAK Pro training application
We are so excited to work with teachers who love the sport and want to push their understanding of human movement to get better results for each of their athletes.
Ready to join us for a GMAP Certification course? Click here to learn more.
