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Education & Academics

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

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Education & Academics

After graduating high school with honors and scoring in the 99th percentile on the ACT, Michael accepted a full-ride academic scholarship to study at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. While there he received several other academic honors, and graduated Summa Cum Laude with degrees in Neuroscience, Business Administration, and Portuguese, with an additional emphasis on Exercise Science. After achieving a perfect, 100th percentile score on the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test), he received offers from multiple top-tier medical schools, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Michael ultimately accepted a 90% tuition merit-based scholarship from the Mayo Clinic – the #1-ranked healthcare organization in the world, and the most competitive medical school in the nation with just a 1.6% acceptance rate. There he began his medical training in earnest with a focus on preparing for an orthopedic surgery residency and a sports medicine fellowship. On top of the rigorous Mayo Clinic curriculum, Michael engaged heavily in medical research geared towards sports medicine  and athletics, including partnering on multiple research projects with world-renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. John Tokish - head surgeon for multiple professional sports teams. Michael is also always seeking to learn more in areas outside of healthcare and business. He speaks five languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Hawaiian) and is currently studying Chinese, with a life goal of becoming fluent in 10 languages.   

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Michael is a relentless creator and innovator. Between his sophomore year as a pre-med student at BYU and his second year of medical school, he started three formal companies – each in separate industries - and lead each to over $1 million dollars in revenue during their first years in business, without taking on any outside funding and while simultaneously maintaining a demanding academic schedule. He is currently running two companies that he founded: Litiscape - a medical risk-screening software and insurance company, and TradeAngel - a global ecommerce marketplace and all-in-one fulfilment channel for bulk product transactions. Michael's ventures have received many awards, including winning the Entrepreneurs' Organization's Annual GSEA Pitch Competition (pictured right), as well as being selected for a live TV feature by AMC (pictured bottom left). His success has led to wide recognition, including being invited to join the Marquis Who's Who for Entrepreneurship, and as a 2021 Candidate for the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. In addition to building businesses, Michael is constantly finding other ways to innovate. For example, during his first year of medical school, he co-designed plans for a novel "Smart Port" medical device, which he used to win the annual Surgical Entrepreneurship Hackathon put on by MIT in Silicon Valley (pictured top left), and later secured a provisional patent on. It was in part this drive for innovation and always finding better ways of doing things - together with his medical education and 15-year personal training experience  - that led him to develop all of the novel weightlifting techniques, science-based fitness strategies, and new products that are featured in his "Dr. Gains" programs!  

Athletics, Fitness,

& "Dr. Gains"

Athletics, Fitness, & "Dr. Gains"

Michael has been an avid multi-sport athlete since he was 3 years old, excelling in basketball, football, soccer, volleyball, and track (high jump & hurtles). He was a starter for the basketball and football teams for Davis High School, taking second in state (6A) in both sports his junior year, and continues to play competitive sports to this day. Michael started weightlifting 6 days a week when he was 14 years old. From the very beginning, he was intent on studying exercise-science, including the anatomy and biomechanics behind each lift and the various strategies and nuances in targeting each muscle, in order to optimize his physical fitness and athletic capabilities. Others soon began coming to him for tips and advice, and so he started informal personal training before even entering high school. As Michael's training and experience continued to grow throughout college and into medical school, he developed the unique ability to take new, academic knowledge of physics, physiology, neuroscience and anatomy, and apply it physical fitness and weightlifting. Combining that with his capacity for innovation, he started creating new and better ways to train, and developed dozens of novel techniques.

Yet, due to his perpetual participation contact sports, Michael was constantly getting injured - many of which became chronic and even required surgery, including a torn labrum in one shoulder and a rotator cuff impingement with biceps tendinitis in the other. Not wanting to undergo months-long recoveries, yet understanding that his normal weightlifting routines would only aggravate his injuries, Michael started developing hundreds of new techniques, modifications to common exercises, and even completely novel lifts that would allow him to continue to train and build muscle while not only avoiding aggravating existing injuries, but actually rehabbing them and strengthening the joints to prevent any future injury. Then, after becoming frustrated with the lack of high-quality and scientifically accurate content he saw among "fitness influencers", Michael decided to share what he had with the world. What you can now find and benefit from in the "Dr. Gains" programs is the cumulative result of all of Michael's unique and extensive experience, personal training, scientific education, and creative ability. Additionally, his experience and success managing people as a business owner gives him the unique ability to understand his clients’ wants and needs, and to convey his knowledge and training material in a way that they can understand and implement in their own lives. Rather than just telling them WHAT to do, he teaches them HOW and WHY they're doing each exercise, empowering them to customize the content in his programs according to their specific situations and goals. There's truly nothing else like it in the industry! The Dr. Gains programs are so comprehensive and effective that Michael was made a Certified Personal Trainer Instructor by the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM-CPT), and his Gains Without Pains program was awarded the highest number of CPT continuing education credits possible!

  

Personal Life

Michael is a devoted husband to his amazing wife, Eliza, and together they have three beautiful children - Kaya (age 5), Eli (age 2), Koa (5 months). They are active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. After his first semester at BYU (and before meeting his wife), Michael served as a full-time missionary for his church for two years in Brazil, teaching about Jesus Christ and His restored gospel. Michael's family heritage comes from Hawaii, and they love to visit there as often as they can, but they currently live in Utah. In his free time, Michael loves to play sports (including a recently-acquired addition to pickleball), read, go hiking and canyoneering, perform the Siva Afi fireknife dance, and spend time with his family.  

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