Jake Foster is the Head Coach of Mayhem Performance Coaching. Over the past several years, Jake has worked individually with hundreds of current and former athletes across multiple sports who are trying to improve their performance or reclaim the fitness they lost after ending their careers. Before working with Mayhem Performance, Jake was the co-owner of Vital Fitness, a gym in Lakeland, Florida, the founder of Comeback Athlete, and the Personal Training Director at CrossFit Goose Creek. 

After graduating with a degree in Political Science and playing college football at Taylor University, Jake pursued his dream of becoming a teacher and academic. While working towards his graduate degree in American Government, Jake began to compete in CrossFit and was a part of a team that eventually made it to the Southeast Regionals in 2017. Unfortunately, Jake tore his labrum and could not compete for the rest of the season.

While sidelined with an injury, Jake began coaching other local athletes who wanted to compete in CrossFit. He quickly realized he could combine his passion for teaching with his love for fitness and competition. Jake dropped out of his graduate program, eventually quit his teaching job, and committed himself to studying the science of sports nutrition and performance training. He has accumulated over 300 hours in coaching mentorship programs and has acquired certifications through Opex Fitness, Precision Nutrition, and more. 

Jake resides in Nashville, TN, with his wife and two sons. He enjoys training in his garage gym, running, reading anything training-related or the Wall Street Journal, and watching his Tampa Bay sports teams continue to win more championships.   

What makes you passionate about coaching?

I actually never wanted to be a fitness coach. My dream was to be an academic. I wanted to change the lives of the students that I got to teach. It wasn’t until I hired a coach when I competed in CrossFit that it opened my eyes to a different way of coaching. He coached the whole person. Not just my workouts, not just my nutrition, but he would talk to me a lot about my lifestyle, my beliefs, my stress, and my recovery. Through that coaching experience, I realized I could marry my passion for fitness, sport, and education and use that to teach and coach athletes in CrossFit to live out their fullest potential. I genuinely believe that’s my calling from God. The people I’m coaching are the lives I get to impact. I thought I would be doing it in a classroom, and now I get to do it in a gym.

What aspect is your favorite part?

It would be hard to choose just one, but it’s hard to beat the joy when an athlete accomplishes something they never thought was possible in training or competition. 

When an athlete communicates how much you helped them, how does that make you feel?

It makes me feel like I made the right move leaving my previous career… Jokes aside, it always confirms that I am living out my calling as a coach. 

How do you see potential in an athlete, and how do you help them unlock it? How is that exciting for you?

An athlete’s potential is hard to judge. We have years of testing data that we can use as coaches to compare athletes. But data can’t judge the intangibles that make a good athlete. You can’t measure work ethic, grit, confidence, humility, etc. At the end of the day, I would rather coach someone with the intangibles than work with a gifted athlete who has all of the numbers but none of the heart.