The Beginning

Hi! I'm Matt Belair, author of Zen Athlete. For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply curious about what humans are capable of, what I am capable of, and the power we possess within our minds and bodies. As a child, I began training Martial Arts and continued to explore this passion into my teen years. Before long, I realized that the fundamental purpose of Martial Art is to cultivate the power of the mind, body, and spirit.

I began deepening my practice and self-exploration with the help of my mentor Bruce Lee, who taught about self-expression, dedication to your craft, pushing past your limitations, and achieving your highest potential. This led to my experimentation and research into meditation, visualization, psychology, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), hypnosis, sports performance, development of intuition and psychic abilities, astral projection, the law of attraction, and every other rabbit-hole imaginable, all in relation to attaining peak performance.


The Journey

As a lifelong martial artist, I moved to Whistler in my early 20's and began sharing these techniques with my students. I became a professional snowboard coach and traveled much of the world training professionals, national team athletes, and anyone that would suspend their disbelief to maintain an open mind.

After 8 years of snowboarding, I was more than ready to continue my education. I planned a trip that would take me to Nepal, where I would study with monks to learn about meditation and enlightenment. Next, I was off to Thailand to train with professional MMA fighters, learning practical fighting philosophy and testing myself against the best in the world. My final visit was an unforgettable experience at a Shaolin Kung Fu Academy high in the remote mountains of China. Here, I trained with 34th generation Shaolin monks - real life super-humans who are actively engaged with doing the impossible, including breaking stone with every limb of their body, demonstrating true mastery of mind, body, and spirit.

The lessons I collected during these experiences are timeless, possess extraordinary power, and can grant unparalleled performance when applied with mindful consistency. They are the blueprint to achieving the impossible. My passion for human performance and sharing this little-known knowledge has taken me around the globe, training athletes in countless different disciplines, all to similar effect. My life mission is to popularize the mental game of sport and fuse it with the philosophy of martial arts, which is the development of mind, body, and spirit, to help all athletes in all disciplines achieve their highest potential in sport and life.


Zen Athlete Philosophy

For over 30 years, I've experimented with hundreds of mental sports training techniques and paid countless thousands of dollars to receive coaching, lessons, and knowledge from world-class individuals in fields like personal development, consciousness, the mind-body connection, and the art of mental control. Zen Athlete is my compilation of this knowledge, focusing on effective techniques for sports psychology and human performance. This information is as powerful as it is proven, leading myself and countless clients and athletes to levels of performance they had only dreamed were attainable. Achieving your highest potential, performing your best, and transcending your limits are all processes that start within, with personal development and then self-actualization. History's greatest athletes and intellects have always affirmed that peak performance is mind over matter, and they left a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow.

Zen Athlete embodies the secrets, strategies, and training tactics of history’s greatest athletes. A problem most elite athletes face is that the high-level performance of extreme sports is so ridiculous to achieve that getting even close to the "elite" level can be difficult and downright dangerous. Well there's good news! World-class athletes have found ways to avoid critical errors and common pitfalls by mastering The Mental Game of Sport. Listen to an interview with any elite athlete or coach; you'll almost certainly hear them say that sports performance is largely mental. You'll often hear athletes talking about "getting in the zone", "visualizing the run", or "getting focused", but very few are trained to do it. You’re going to learn how to unlock every last ounce of your athletic potential and progress your skills extremely quickly, all in a safe, replicatable manner. Talent alone can take you far, but proper instruction and training are vital to avoid hitting a skill-ceiling or even worse, a tree!

Being a Zen Athlete is much more than becoming the greatest athlete you can be. Our approach involves teaching you how use your sport as a tool to develop your mind, body, and spirit. Zen Athletes can achieve more than they ever thought you were capable of, and know how apply those lessons to their everyday lives. They use sport as a tool to elevate their consciousness, smash their limitations, and increase their performance across the board. Ultimately, they find a direct path to the realization that their potential is infinite, and their only limits are within.



Coaching Services

I have worked with both amateur and professional athletes in a wide range of different sports around the world for the last 8 years. Brodie Carmichael landed the worlds first front flip heel clicker and front flip superman on his motorcycle only a few short weeks after we began training. He credits his world records to our training and now he shares this knowledge to youth across Australia. 

When your safety is on the line, a strong mental game is mandatory. The training you'll receive is truly unique; this isn't your every day, Wheaties box motivational bull shit. Best-in-class athletes must be dedicated to pushing their limits, expanding their consciousness, and transforming themselves, and they are the individuals this training is best suited for.

The tools and strategies you will learn will help take you to take your abilities to new heights, increase your performance, and unlock your true potential. That's just the beginning of the coaching experience, as many athletes' personal lives dramatically change for the better as the mental work naturally improves your behavior and life. The final step of the process is a spiritual, transcendental, out-of-body meditation experience that will leave you forever changed. Dramatically improved performance is simply a pleasant by-product of an elevated consciousness and a balanced of mind, body and spirit.

Coaching, training, and seminars are available for individuals, teams, and organizations. Contact me below for a free consultation or to ask any questions. I look forward to hearing from you!

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Zen Athlete

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