Bryant Sharifi is the Co-Founder of Perform For Life – Perform For Golf in San Francisco, California and Oakland, California.
I started Perform For Life in 2010 with the idea of taking a holistic approach to fitness training and education. Sharing local gym space at the time, I worked with individuals from all sports from the start and strove to make them better athletes. This comprehensive process would ensure that they’d have all the essential components of fitness, like flexibility, strength and power, and even if these specific traits weren’t a huge aspect of their sport, being better in each area would improve all aspects of their lives.
By 2013, I decided that I wanted my own facility and my own team to implement the programs I already had in place, and initiate some new ones for my ever-growing clientele. Though prevalent today, there weren’t many privately-owned boutique fitness studios in the Bay Area at the time, and golf fitness, for that matter, wasn’t as huge a component of player development and game improvement programs as it is today.
When we opened the facility in 2014 and put a team in place, we started seeing more and more interest from golfers who sought our fitness and training services. So, I decided to take up the game myself, and also get TPI-certified to better serve my new demographic of customers.
I was a college football player at Western Washington University, where I attained a degree in Exercise Science and Kinesiology, with a minor in Sports Psychology. But with that experience being several years ago, I needed to find a new competitive outlet, and with an increasing number of my clients playing the game, it was a logical choice for me.
I always wanted to use my degrees to address the mental and physical sides of athletics and training, and few sports challenge both facets of performance like golf. In fact, I work as a strength and conditioning coach with college athletes in soccer, baseball and golf at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, and direct a strength and conditioning program at a local high school, where I work with 26 different teams.
The same desire to help people is what’s gone into the growth of my business over the past 13 years. Our team started modestly in 2014 with two interns who were recent graduates of the kinesiology program at the University of San Francisco. They soon built upon their kinesiology degrees with Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association, which is the gold standard in strength and conditioning. This is a requirement to be a certified strength and conditioning coach and to be able work with athletes at the college level, and is now a prerequisite to working with us at Perform For Life.
In 2016, we started Perform For Golf as an offshoot of our larger umbrella company Perform For Life. During those early years, our primary golf clients were 30-50-year-old golfers who were trying to get their handicaps down and break 90 for the first time, as well as some local junior golfers. It wasn’t just about hitting the ball farther, but about playing the game without injury. By helping our clients attain good posture and a solid foundation, playing without injury, playing more and playing longer would become our primary focus in helping them maximize their enjoyment in the game.
Since the pandemic, we’re seeing a lot of young business and tech professionals playing the game like never before. These individuals are in their 20s and 30s. They’re working from home and they want to play golf. This is where our business transitioned a bit more towards increasing athleticism among our golf clients. Although still very important, our golf focus was no longer solely about injury prevention, playing more and playing longer, but it was also about playing better, maximizing their skills, setting goals and putting a plan in place to achieve them.
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