The Concept
The concept for the Competitive Edge was born in the mind of Chip Smith, founder and president of CES. For three decades now, Chip Smith has been developing his proprietary training system. As one of the few Americans in the 1980s to be invited to participate in post-graduate studies at the world-renowned Soviet Sports Institute in the former Soviet Union, Chip was exposed to training techniques that set his imagination spinning. He noticed that training in the former Soviet Block was based upon the principles of resistance and over-speed, applied on a sport-specific, movement-specific basis. At the time, training methodology in the west was based upon general conditioning and general strength training. These were believed to be the exclusive technique to building better all-around athletes, while the only sport specific training was limited to “practice”. In the west, an athlete practiced the specific sport or position, but without specific training aids or attention to building explosiveness in the specific movements required to execute that movement in competition. Even more importantly, western methodology operated under the assumption that genetics played an exclusive role in human athletic potential, and that athletes natural speed and explosiveness could not be greatly altered or enhanced by any training technique. In short, an athlete was born “fast” or “slow”. Speed and explosiveness were not viewed as a learned skill. But when Chip saw the training techniques being implemented behind the Iron Curtain and the results they were achieving, he began to realize that speed and explosiveness can be learned. This revelation was the beginning of The CES System.This proprietary training system doesn’t just create better athletes, it creates better players. Regardless of the sport, The CES System addresses specific movements required by a sport in a specific position, and enhances the athlete’s ability to execute those movements by making them faster and stronger within those specific movements. Moreover, Chip has implemented mental training techniques, which increase an athlete’s reaction time within each movement. There is no other system in the world that even mimics this methodology, and is the reason why professional athletes by the hundreds have flocked to CES to enhance and expand their performance curve.