"Long story short, my body was destroyed and I ended up being forced to take a year off my board."
My name's Matt Beare, I'm the founder of The Daily Push and a skater since 2001.
The TDP project was born out of a shitty situation. Back in 2015, my body completely shut down. I'd recently got back from a year travelling in South America — a trip I started looking like a human and finished looking like a goat that had been stranded in the desert for months with no food.
Due to the lack of spots and crew, I hadn’t skated anywhere near as hard as I had for 13 years before, but on top of that I’d also stopped eating meat with no knowledge on nutrition, making it almost a year without protein.
As soon as I got back, I was hyped to skate and I planted my little twig legs onto my board and got back into it hard; skating as I did before my trip. Well, shit started to hit the fan; my body was struggling and giving me signs that it still felt like a malnourished goat. But as a good old stereotypical skater, I kept pushing it for months ignoring all the shouts from my body telling me to stop.
At the end of a sweaty summer session, I bent down to pop a frontside flip. Little did I know it would be the last descent into a frontside flip I would experience for the next year. My back popped and I fell to the floor.
Fast forward after a week of being in bed unable to move I was diagnosed with two protruding discs in my back. Around the same time, I saw another doctor that diagnosed me with patella tendonitis and a hip impingement that ended up needing surgery. Long story short, my body was destroyed and I ended up being forced to take a year off my board.
During this time, it occurred to me that I probably could have avoided most of these problems if I was educated on how to take better care of myself, so I started googling. After failing to find anything related to health and skateboarding, other than some random online doctors recommending that you probably just don’t do it, I realised there was a hole in the skate world.
It hit me that many skaters spend unnecessary time off their boards, just like I did, because of the lack of knowledge in our industry — made worse by the way our culture looks down on things like taking care of yourself.
Well, “fuck that” I thought, and The Daily Push was born. My initial goal with the project was to create a resource for skaters where they could find all the information they need to avoid time off their board. As it progressed and I saw how everything I was applying was changing my skating and making me skate better, I started making it about performance too.
Now my goal has evolved to bringing health & performance knowledge into our community, but also incorporating literally everything and anything that promotes progression within skateboarding and life in general.
Almost every single day for the years I've been developing The Daily Push I’ve studied hard, reading up on everything I could about health and wellness, along with studying any performance topic that pro athletes, other than skaters (!), are already applying to feel and do better in their sports (even though this is starting to change these days as more pros come out of the of the health closet).
In 2016, I decided I needed to officially lock in my knowledge and get some qualifications, which lead to me becoming a certified personal trainer through the National Strength & Conditioning Association (NSCA), a Pn1 nutrition & lifestyle coach with Precision Nutrition and a biomechanics specialist with Pinnacle Performance. Since then, I’ve worked in gyms and with skaters directly in Barcelona, Spain (where I live) and around the world (online).
Today, I'm continuing to train skateboarders here in a gym in Barcelona, along with coaching online as a skate performance coach, hitting everything from training, nutrition, recovery, to mindset.
I'm also still studying and skating almost every day, so I can continue to update my knowledge and make sure I'm bringing the best information I possibly can into the skate world, and to keep moving towards the goal of creating that ultimate resource I set out to create.