Phil Briceno

Dad/husband, Aggie, Twins fan, aspiring drummer, softball player, MTG, enjoys lifting heavy things, hiking, diy, cooking, builds websites, believes in humanity

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

Great show last night by Dorothy, @STPBand, and @godsmack at The Junkyard in Denver. It's hard to beat a good rock concert.

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

Concert season in Colorado! Great show last night @lakestreetdive and @jackjohnson

[Drew DeBiasse @DrewDeBiasse]

The word he couldn’t find is feel. The modern game has slowly buried feel.

Feel is internal. Analytics are external. And when athletes become overly dependent on external information to understand their performance, they can gradually lose connection to the internal information that actually allows them to perform.

Performance lives in the body. A hitter has to feel timing, tension, rhythm, balance, and where the barrel is moving through space. A pitcher has to feel his delivery, his release, his tempo, how the ball is coming out of his hand, and what his body has available that day.

Those things are incredibly difficult to fully capture on a screen. Analytics can tell you what happened with extraordinary precision. They can identify patterns the athlete or coach might never recognize on their own. They can help inform preparation, development, strategy, and decision-making.

But information about performance is not the same thing as the ability to perform. When every swing, pitch, movement, and outcome is immediately followed by numbers telling an athlete what happened, you run the risk of teaching them to look outside themselves for answers before they ever learn to look within.

Over time, that can create a huge gap between what an athlete knows about their performance and what they can actually sense, adjust, and execute. The athlete can become incredibly informed about their own performance while becoming less connected to the experience of actually performing.

The best use of analytics should deepen an athlete’s understanding of themselves, not replace it. Give them the information. Help them understand what it means. Then help them connect that information back to what they actually felt, because eventually the athlete has to step onto the field without a dashboard and they need to be able to trust something inside themselves.

—

P.S. I train pro athletes, teams, and executives. I write about the intersection of somatics and performance.

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

A legend

[All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies]

RIP TIM CURRY.

While filming the “Hiya, Georgie” sequence in It, Georgie actor Tony Dakota stopped and said “Tim, you’re scaring me.”

Curry replied: “Gee, I’m so sorry, but that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”

[Stephen Punwasi 🏚️📉🐈☃️ @StephenPunwasi]

Fun fact: in 🇨🇦 + 🇺🇸, ~80% of grain-based foods have glyphosate.

It’s largely considered safe due to a study in 2000 that found it caused no DNA damage, reproductive harm or cancer.

It was recently retracted. Turns out it was ghostwritten by Monsanto.

https://t.co/jl68JEIbz7

[James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp]

Everyone obsesses over the wrong purchases

Forget the Rolex.
Forget the Porsche.
Those don't change how you feel on a Tuesday morning

The two things that will fundamentally alter your quality of life:

Sleep quality and where you live.

Sleep isn't about the 8 hours you're unconscious. It directly affects the other two thirds of your life.

Longevity, happiness, attitude, productivity, all of it flows downstream from how you wake up.

And environment?

I live in Southern California. Have a terrible day, step outside, 75 and sunny. Instant reset. This matters more than you think.

A great mattress is probably the best dollar per minute of your life you'll ever spend.

Where you live is the other one.

People budget for status symbols that impress strangers and neglect the two things that deeply affect how they actually feel every single day.

Those are the investments that actually change your life.

The rest is just…decoration

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@LordXarRahl Helluva game. One more series!

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@Twins @LordXarRahl World Series game 1 preview in the books

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@DrewDeBiasse Those are good insights. What techniques are the most helpful for teens when it comes to teaching them how to recognize the fruits of their labor? I assume the most simple way is to acknowledge plays in a game situation that demonstrate skills they have been practicing.

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

"Reps without intention eventually become noise." I notice this a lot with youth sports. As coaches we have to realize that things like just doing more grounders is not always going to be helpful. We have to be willing to take a step back sometimes. I admit it's not easy though.

[Drew DeBiasse @DrewDeBiasse]

Overtraining is a gateway to overthinking.

Trea Turner recently said he took nearly 1,000 swings over a three-day stretch while trying to work through his struggles at the plate.

Yesterday, he skipped his usual pregame hitting routine entirely and didn’t swing the bat until the game started. He finished 4-for-5 after taking just seven swings all day.

A lot of people are framing this as baseball being unpredictable. I think it reflects something much more common in elite performance.

When athletes lose trust in their access, they often try to compensate with volume. More reps create the illusion of control. More swings feel productive because effort is visible and measurable. But eventually the nervous system stops benefiting from the work and starts drowning in it. Energy depletes, intentionality fades, and athletes begin thinking through movements that are supposed to remain relational, adaptive, and felt in real time.

This is one of the biggest blind spots in modern performance culture. Training is supposed to sharpen awareness, not bury it. At a certain point, excessive volume disconnects athletes from the very instincts and rhythms they are trying to refine.

I once received a phone call from an MLB player who was dealing with chronic pain, anxiety, poor sleep, and inconsistent performance. During our conversation, he mentioned that he was taking around 1,000 swings per day. When I asked him what he felt he was actually getting from those swings, he couldn’t give me a clear answer outside of “getting reps in.” He had completely lost connection with the intention behind the routine. What originally may have started as disciplined preparation had quietly turned into compulsion.

I told him that for the next two weeks he was only allowed to take 20 swings per day maximum.

Two weeks later, he called me back and told me his chronic pain had significantly decreased. He was sleeping through the night again. He felt more settled defensively and more fluid at the plate. His execution improved because his nervous system finally had space to recover and reorganize instead of constantly existing in a state of overload.

The most important part of the conversation came when I asked him what he learned from the experiment. He told me that he rebuilt his relationship not just with what he was doing, but why he was doing it.

Reps without intention eventually become noise.

High performance is not built through compulsive volume alone. It is built through intentionality, presence, recovery, and the ability to remain connected to the work while doing it. When athletes lose that connection, overtraining often becomes less about development and more about managing anxiety through repetition.

Sometimes the fastest way back to clarity is reducing the noise enough to feel the game again.
—

P.S. I train pro athletes, teams, and executives. I write about the intersection of somatics and performance. Ring the 🔔 to join the community!

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

Stopped at Dunkin Donuts so my daughter could use a gift card...on the way out the guy asked if we wanted a free donut. Said they were closing soon and figured he would offer. Donuts are cheap, so not a big deal, but it was a nice gesture. It's nice when people are nice. Be nice.

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

We were lucky enough to meet Royce at spring training last year and he was so nice to my kids. He took his time signing autographs and talking with us. Definitely left an impression and made us bigger fans.

[MLB @MLB]

You have to hear about this special connection between Royce Lewis and a fan 👏

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@MissouriMTG El Five or Linger for interesting food options and a nice atmosphere. Ros Siam for great Thai food in an old Victorian home. Jose Oshea's for good Mexican and great happy hour margaritas. New Terrain for beer and pups.

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@DrewDeBiasse Mind over matter

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@LordXarRahl

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@DrewDeBiasse Yeah, not a good look

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@LordXarRahl

[Drew DeBiasse @DrewDeBiasse]

Victor Wembanyama has been unanimously voted Defensive Player of the Year.

At only 22 years old, he becomes the youngest player ever to win the award.

Last season, a blood clot forced him to confront his own mortality and snapped everything into perspective.

The first thing he did was not hit the gym. He went inward, traveling to China and Japan, training at a Shaolin temple, practicing Chan meditation, and seeking stillness in cultures built on presence and gratitude.

“It makes you understand lessons that nothing else could have made me understand,” he said.

His instinct was clear: work in before you work out.

In a world obsessed with distraction and noise, stillness is the hardest sell. But those who choose it come back different, more grounded, more expansive, more free.

Wembanyama’s preparation this season was relentless. His conditioning and defensive mastery were world-class. But all of it rested on the foundation of that inner work.

His curiosity keeps pushing him into meditation, new training methods, new cultures. Always learning, always expanding.

The lesson is bigger than basketball: everything you need is already inside you. The challenge is having the courage to go find it.

Athletes should not wait for a health scare or a career-threatening moment to discover this. Inner work builds the resilience to face anything, injury, adversity, or pressure, with grace and presence.

Here’s to Wemby dominating on both ends and continuing to redefine what is possible.

—

P.S. I train pro athletes, teams, and executives. I write about the intersection of somatics and performance. Ring the 🔔 to join the community!

[Phil Briceno @philbriceno]

@LordXarRahl Well, they did their job game 1, let's see if they can keep it up