The Summer Retreat Is Over
15 days in a village in Montenegro.
15 footballers.
Pros from Russia, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia, Scotland, America, Denmark and Thailand.
All of them flew across the world for one reason: to recover, re-engineer their athleticism, and go back to their clubs next season built different.
This was my first in-person event. It was stressful. There was a lot going on, and almost no time to post on Instagram or anywhere else.
But it was worth every second.
Some of these guys have been my clients for 4 or 5 years, and this was the first time I got to shake their hands, look them in the eye, and train them in person.
Some of the players told me they learned more in 1 hour with me in person than in 6 months to a year online.
That's the difference details make.
If you're doing push-ups and barbell back squats, you aren't building anything. You're breaking down your natural biomechanics and wasting your career.
In person, every nuance gets seen and every detail gets fixed.
Why a Village and Not a Hotel?
We stayed at Montenegro Village in Sotonići, near Lake Skadar.
Look one way and you're in Montenegro. Look down the lake and you're looking at Albania.
Cabins for the players. A restaurant run by a local family. A training studio surrounded by trees.
Very few people. Very quiet. Some of the best sleep of your life.
No EMFs. Grounded all day. Birds in the morning, bugs chirping at night.
If you've lived in a city your whole life, this is what real living feels like. And this is where you ACTUALLY recover.
Nature isn't the backdrop for training. Nature is the training.
A Day at the Retreat
Here's what every day looked like:
Three sessions a day, and nobody got tired. Not once in the whole trip.
Everyone played at their best and executed everything we asked of them.
Do the same training in the city and the guys don't recover anywhere near as fast. That's what Nature does. You get more done in less time.
More isn't better. Better recovery is better.
Days 1–5: The Five Phases of Fascial Integration Training
From Monday to Friday, we took every player through all five phases of Fascial Integration Training.
Same system as Total Footballer, just compressed into five days, in person, with me watching every rep.
The Root Protocol
Your feet are your only connection to the ground. So that's where we started. We remodelled every player's feet:
- Toe Retraction → the toes learn to pull back instead of gripping.
- Forefoot Expansion → the ball of the foot spreads, creating one sharp contact point with the ground.
- Extensor Tendons → the tendons on the top of the foot get restructured.
Think of a sword. A sharp sword is more dangerous than a dull one because the force is concentrated. Your foot works the same way.
Then we woke up the plantar fascia, the sole of the foot between the ball and the heel. It's packed with thousands of touch receptors. Your brain uses them to absorb force, read the ground, balance, and know where you're standing, where you're going and how you're landing.
A dead foot means a blind brain.
Fascial Loading
Next came ankle stiffness. This is where the body shifts from a muscular loading pattern to a fascial loading pattern. When it clicks:
- No heel strike when you run.
- No ankle collapse.
- Safe knees. Safe ankles.
- Glutes that turn on unconsciously.
That last one matters. You can't force your glutes to fire with bands or gym exercises. They have to work on their own.
Train the fascia and the glutes take care of themselves.
Spiral Drive
We taught every player to move in and out of the hip hike, and in and out of anterior and posterior pelvic tilt. Your gait cycle needs ALL of those ranges of motion.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a liar, and they're trying to convince you that you have some kind of "condition."
You don't. Your brain just has a limited set of positions it can access, usually because of old trauma or dysfunction. Give it more options and more information, and it takes more control.
The result: no more tight hips, better glutes, and you run like the best athletes on the pitch.
Midline Mechanics
Phase four started with the breath. How well can you inhale and exhale? How relaxed can you stay under stress, load and pressure?
Then core activation, which is where the football world gets it completely backwards.
They tell you to brace your core. They tell you squeezing your abs is good for performance. All it does is make you slower and give you pubalgia and sports hernias.
Bracing your spine is great for a barbell back squat. It's terrible for running. Running is unilateral. You move side to side. If your spine is braced, you literally can't.
Your core muscles should switch on and off naturally, based on what your feet are doing. That's how fascia works.
Your midline runs from your tongue to your anus. It's the first thing you had as an embryo, and your whole body grew out from it. Train it after the first three phases are built and you unlock rotational power and almost endless stamina, because your body recycles force from your feet all the way up through your torso.
Stamina isn't built with cardio. It's built by wasting less force.
Athletic Mastery
The last phase brought everything together: coordination, rhythm, and dynamic, explosive movement. Then we took it to the track and pushed every player to their maximum output.
Almost every footballer is untrained at max output. When was the last time you actually ran a full 100m sprint during a season?
You haven't, because in a match you always have to run again. You've got 90 minutes plus extra time to play, so you never truly hit 100%. That leaves your hamstrings, and every muscle that tears during sprinting, untrained at the exact speed where they're most vulnerable.
The offseason is when you fix that:
- More sun: UV light feeds your fast-twitch fibres and boosts vitamin D and testosterone.
- Stronger tendons: they handle force far better in summer than in winter.
- No matches: you can finally sprint at 100% without having to save anything for the next run.
You don't get faster by running at 80% for 9 months. You get faster by running at 100% for 8 weeks.
Speed is a skill. And the offseason is where you train it.
Day 6: Kotor and Tivat
After a five-day block, 5 AM to 9 PM, everyone had earned a rest day.
So we took a trip to Kotor and Tivat and spent the day at the Monte Palm beach club in Tivat.
Sun. Sea. Great food. A real offseason.
Day 7: Matchday at OFK Petrovac
On Sunday, OFK Petrovac let us use their stadium for a few hours.
They play in Montenegro's first division and finished third last season, which put them in the Conference League qualifiers. Huge thanks to the club.
We played rondos, then 5v5 with keepers for an hour and a half.
Five days re-engineering how they move, and then the players got to put it straight onto the pitch. Then we spent the afternoon at the beach.
The Game is the greatest teacher. Everything we train has to show up there.
What the Players Said
On the last day, I sat down with some of the guys to get their honest feedback.
“This week was literally one of the best in my whole life.”
Things changed pretty quick, from being muscle driven to now just feeling effortless on the pitch. After a game I feel fresh for the next game instead of being dead for two days.
“This is 10 times better than what I thought.”
Everything from the professionalism to the training to the schedule. We always got better every single day.
“The biggest difference was in my energy.”
Seven days in nature, grounded all day, the sunlight on our skin. We went through all the phases, which gave me a better understanding of my body.
“After these 7 days here, I feel more natural.”
Players go to hotels and these things, but here is nature. We eat healthy food. We train, we sleep good, we go to the sunrise. — Amir
Straight From the Group Chat
And here's what the guys posted in the group on their way home.
That's What an Offseason Should Be
- Five days of world-class recovery and training.
- One day exploring the country.
- One day of all-out football.
We're the first people in the world to run a summer retreat for footballers that's built around performance, output and quality.
It's not about content for Instagram. It's not about burning calories. It's not about looking good for your personal photographer.
This is where we make footballers.
See You Next Summer
To every player who made the trip to Montenegro: thank you. Meeting you in person, shaking hands and seeing who I've been working with all these years is priceless.
We'll run this retreat every summer, and it'll get better every year. If you want to be an elite footballer, spend your offseason with us, and come back built different.
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