Anthony ‘Star’ Geoghegan: The Carlow-based therapist to Olympic champions and NBA superstars shares his methods

Anthony ‘Star’ Geoghegan’s client list reads like a who’s who of world sport. Over the past decade the Carlow-based therapist has worked with everyone from Olympic champions to NBA superstars like LeBron James. Yet while he’s a key cog in the wheel of Irish sport, he’s also outspoken about its failings and failures

Two-time high jump world champion Blanka Vlasic with Anthony ‘Star’ Geoghegan at the Realta Clinic in Carlow in 2013. Picture: Donal Glackin

The phone call comes from Hawaii, bang on cue, at 5am local time.

Anthony ‘Star’ Geoghegan is already up and into his day, his chief job this week to make sure all is right with Patrick Cantlay’s body ahead of the PGA Tour event in Maui.

Over the last decade, the Irish therapist has worked with an A-list cast of sporting talent. Champion sprinters, NFL stars, top-10 golfers: they’ve all made their way to his Realta Clinic in Carlow, searching either for an edge in performance or a cure for their pain — sometimes both.

Antonio Brown, wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, calls him the “crazy Irishman”, a description Geoghegan says is accurate. But if there’s a touch of madness to his ways, an increasing number of sporting titans see method in it. It doesn’t take long to realise why he can divide opinion.

“It’s going to be horrible to hear this and it breaks my f***ing heart (to say it): Irish sportspeople train harder than the best sportspeople in the world, but they don’t train correctly,” says Geoghegan.

If you pick the best 20 athletes in the world and the top 20 hard trainers in Ireland and pick the Olympic champion on hard training, the Irish would win all the gold medals. That’s a compliment, yet people think I’m having a go. I’m not, I’m just being f***ing honest.”

Geoghegan has spent time with LeBron James and Usain Bolt; he’s worked extensively with Olympic champions Justin Gatlin, Angelo Taylor, LaShawn Merritt, and high jump great Blanka Vlasic. He’s treated many a GAA star — Richie Hogan, TJ Reid, Diarmuid Connolly — along with a horde of Irish athletes.

Yet while he’s a key cog in the wheel of Irish sport he’s also external, known for raging against the machine, one he believes is fundamentally flawed.

“How many sports surgery clinics are after popping up in the last 20 years? How many new sports scientists are after coming out? And why have we such an epidemic of injuries? How can we have faster running tracks, better running shoes, bigger gyms, bigger sporting arenas, and more injuries and poor performances?

“People are afraid to ask because you’re upsetting the system, but if I sat down in front of the Government I wouldn’t give a f*** who I’d offend, because I have nothing to lose.”

His frustration is forged through experience. Traversing the globe over has given him a window into the world’s best. How they live. How they train. While he admits there are exceptions, he believes many in Irish sport can do better — from physios to doctors, teachers to students, coaches to athletes to parents.

“In Ireland they are coming around a little but the wrong people are listened to,” he says. 

The organisations are being given money left, right and centre. You can’t tar everybody as there’s a lot of good coaches getting no money, but if you’re not part of the gang, you’re f***ing nobody. I was lucky; I made it so that I didn’t need a gang. I’m just who I am.”

A Star is born

So who, exactly, is Star Geoghegan?

Let’s start with the name. Growing up in Carlow, athletics and hurling were his twin passions, the latter once earning him a player of the year award. The priest who handed it out announced to the room that this young man was a star of the future, and Geoghegan’s peers seized on that tag. He’s been Star ever since.

He was a handy hurler, a solid sprinter, but bereft of true top-level talent.

“Good at f***ing nothing, but committed to everything.”

He never sat his Leaving Cert, but in the years that followed he got a varied education that would guide his profession. He studied sports injuries in UCD under Dr Noel McCaffrey and went to Strathclyde University in Glasgow to learn biomechanics. He went to Ulm University in Germany where he studied cadavers, “cutting up dead bodies to learn the muscles”, and he also did a massage course to learn hands-on therapy.

“But the best thing is learned experiences,” he says.

He’s been treating at his Carlow clinic since 1997, and in the last decade his reputation has gone global. That began after Irish sprint hurdler Peter Coghlan put him in touch with Atlanta-based agent Paul Doyle, who manages a team of world-class athletes. Olympic long jump champion Dwight Phillips was one of his first US clients, and soon the Jamaicans and several other Americans wanted him on their side. Geoghegan has been working with some of the world’s best ever since, and what he sees in Ireland is not a lack of desire, but a lack of guidance.

“There’s a lot of good athletes around and they’re trying their best, and they’re the guys I’d like to give a hug because 70% of what they’re doing is wrong. The system is not there to get their body maintained and then their functional training is not there to coincide with their professional training.”

He believes similar issues exist in GAA outside the very top teams.

If you asked Antonio Brown to do seven laps of the football field, he’d call his union representative and go on strike. Now, if you ask him to do calisthenics, depth jumping, agility work for three hours, he’ll do it, but 70% of GAA people are not fit enough to do it.”

There is, of course, another factor at the top end of sport that could affect the lay of the land: Doping.

Geoghegan has spent many years around the world’s top performers, particularly in athletics, so I ask him what his impression is of the extent of the doping problem.

“All I’ll say to you is whoever has the best scientists gets the best performance,” he says.

So there’s an implication there? “You know yourself. A lot of people have a lot of things going on but you’ve got to ask yourself: how much does drug performance help towards an ordinary Joe Soap? It’s still the hard work and technical correction that’s far superior to everything else, but everyone will use drugs as an excuse. ‘That’s why he’s better than me, he’s using drugs.’ 

“It’s bullshit. The statistics prove it’s a big issue, so it’s going on, but where and with who? You can’t really say. It is high, and everyone sings a different tune.”

Over the years Geoghegan has treated athletes like Justin Gatlin, among others, who served doping bans, so I ask him if suspicions about clients have ever affected his professional choices.

“Absolutely,” he says. “Because if I know people are doing it and if they get caught, they could blame me so I get out of there. 

If I thought someone was using drugs I’m gone, because at the end of the day, they’ll say ‘this fella put cream into me’ or ‘he asked me to drink this or that.’ They won’t use it on this Paddy because I’m too cute; I’ll watch everything and I’ll nail them to the cross if I think there’s things going on.”

Joint venture

The first time I interviewed Geoghegan, back in 2013, it came as a surprise to learn of his deep spirituality. Something about the blunt manner, the regular cursing, didn’t scream man of God, but it’s there alright, simmering beneath the surface, guiding his outlook.

“I’m a Christian and the reason I am is I’ve been in the doldrums growing up, I’ve had shit in my life and I’ve found peace in prayer,” he says. “I thank God every day. I’m not holier than thou, I like the craic better than the next fella, but I do have great belief. I believe God gave me a gift and I use it.”

When someone hops on his treatment table, Geoghegan often goes looking for the source of pain far from the injured site.

“If you come into me with a tight hamstring and say you did it sprinting? You never got injured sprinting; you got injured because there was something wrong and it (emerged) when you were sprinting. You have to address the cause.

“You could pull your hamstring in the Olympic 100m final and go to a physio and they say, ‘oh, you pulled that because you’re weak,’ yet you broke the world record the week before so how the f*** were you weak? What will they send you to do? A rehab session of strength. 

“You might have a hip shift, your joints might be stacked incorrectly, you could have been doing a squat and one of your facet joints locked up in your spine and now your hip is gone so you have neural tension, and that’s what pulls your hamstring.

“My job is to come in and assess all their stacking: Get it right and these lads’ performances don’t suffer. That’s why I’m successful, not because I send you to the gym, not because I’m great at massage. I do a little bit of everything but the most important thing is joint stacking.”

It’s a term he often repeats, saying it’s “the way the top people in the world train.”

What does it mean?

“You have hundreds of joints in your body and if they’re stacked incorrectly, then you have problems. Why build strength onto dysfunction? That’s what’s being done and why there’s so many surgeons and new theatres popping up. 

“Look at any athlete who goes to the top sports scientist in the world. The first thing they’ll do is stand them against the wall and use a laser and if their ear isn’t over their shoulder, if the shoulder isn’t over their hip, and if their hip isn’t over their knee, their knee not over their ankle, they’ll fix that, and 60% of pain disappears. Who teaches that in academia in this country? Nobody.”

Geoghegan has done several open clinics in recent years, showing athletes, coaches, and therapists his ways, and he’s often been challenged at them by sports scientists.

“They tore strips off me, but I said: ‘Look, you didn’t tear strips off me because of my opinion, you tore strips off me because of what you were taught. Academia is where it starts. If they’re being taught monkey ideas, then the students go off and teach monkey ideas and we’re all teaching monkeys to become monkeys. If it’s not working, why?

“Nowadays with physiotherapy, 70% will sit you down, tell you this session is going to cost €60, they’ll ask you 40 questions, they’ll look at you, tell you to go away and do an exercise programme and they’re not going to put their hands on you. That’s the methodology they want. 

Will you be going back the second time? You will like f***. But the answer to the whole thing, the most important thing in your body, is union movement. The best remedy for pain is better movement and that comes back to joint stacking.”

As an oft-injured athlete in a previous life, I found myself on Geoghegan’s table, and I remind him that both he and Gerard Hartmann, the physical therapist from Limerick, inflicted a level of pain I hadn’t felt elsewhere. He cautions that such practices can’t be applied without major experience.

“It’s a very, very skilful application. If you compress a blood vessel or compress a nerve you’ll have poor performance, so you have to have the skills to get rid of these tight adhesions without doing it. 

“That’s why I’m against foam rolling. Muscles are multi-directional so if you compress a blood supply within a tight muscle, rolling makes you feel good because it numbs the nerve so you’re desensitised and feel it’s amazing. But the blood supply and nerve supply is compromised so the muscle performance is problematic, so you have to use your hands. The only way you learn is constant practice. You don’t always get it right.”

He reserves a special dislike for the word flexibility — he prefers mobility — and laughs at those who talk about core strength.

“Core is a buzz word, a crap word because there’s no such thing. If you build a skyscraper you need pillar strength going up the whole thing. Your spine is your pillar, and I work on pillar strength. If that’s good, the athletes’ rotational axis is very good so their breathing movement and their ribcage is able to move freely. If your pillar is wrong, you’re in trouble.”

He believes it all starts with our feet. Geoghegan recalls watching a renowned surgeon speak to a group of elite sportsmen at a performance centre in Florida.

“He brought in 20 guys and told them to take off their shoes. Half were wearing runners that were wrong and half were wearing orthotics they didn’t need.”

The surgeon threw all the shoes and orthotics into a bin and instructed everyone to go home barefoot, and start wearing old shoes around the house on the wrong foot for a few hours each day.

“That’ll strengthen up their proprioception and their ligaments, ankles, tendons get very strong so they’re able to be stacked correctly and their performance will get better. Whereas in Ireland, they give you orthotics for €300.”

Given the insight he has into the world’s best, I ask Geoghegan what, if anything, they do differently.

“Any of these guys are one thing: True professionals. They put in the effort and the most important thing they do? Rest. They’re lying in bed, playing their computer games, after training. The best have their therapists coming to their house.”

At one stage Geoghegan found himself at the home of LeBron James. “I helped him with his physio, showing him some stuff he can do for his ankles. He says to me: ‘Star, I’ll give you a thousand dollars for every session you treat me.’ I said I haven’t got time but I showed his therapist how to do it. LeBron spends one million a year on his body, and that’s the way it is.”

Golfer Patrick Cantlay pictured with ‘Star’ Geoghegan ahead of a tour event in Mexico.

Geoghegan’s entry into golf came through a link with agent Jamie Farrell, and in recent years he’s done work with the likes of Jason Day and Tommy Fleetwood, while he now works full-time with Cantlay.

“I don’t just work with them, I live with them. I see when they get up in the morning, what they have for breakfast, what they do for their body preparation, mental preparation, their training. They all train so hard, and then (do) the maintenance after it.”

Even at the highest level, a lot comes back to common sense.

“Everyone who’s good has their own personal physio, they get their treatments at home and they don’t carry these stagnancies into the next day. Your body should be recovered for performance and the most important thing is training the nervous system.

“You see a guy kick the ball the wrong way near the end of a game: His nervous system is fatigued so his proprioception is gone. Good athletes don’t neglect proprioception. Golfers use sleeping masks to cover their eyes, they’re using spatial awareness and focusing on where they’re tense, where they’re tight, and their efficiency of movement is amazing. A lot of basketball players will throw it with their eyes closed, sensing where the ball is going, training the neuro-receptors so it becomes part of your autopilot.”

Geoghegan has followed the trend of those in field sports hurrying into gyms, trying to get bigger, stronger, but he believes many are putting the cart before the horse. 

“Never train strength onto dysfunction. Get the function right first and then train performance. American athletes will tell you: Weights make you bigger, stiffer, stronger and slower. Why would you go into a gym if you have a hip problem, a short leg, and someone tells you to strengthen up the hip? You’re strengthening on the dysfunction. Get the stacking correct first and then you can do it.”

The next generation

Along with being a therapist, Geoghegan is an entrepreneur, one whose work has made him a wealthy man. He now has seven physios working at his clinic, and many years ago he designed speed boards — with a flat plane in the centre and two diagonal slants on each side — upon which athletes do exercises that force the ankle joint into increased flexion.

“I’ve a company in America that makes them there now and they sell 5,000 boards a year. I have top Olympic champions endorsing them, and everything we’re doing is science.” 

A physio from Liverpool FC recently visited Carlow to learn how to use the boards and took a few back with him. “Yet,” says Geoghegan, “you get a local soccer team and they wouldn’t be interested.”

He has three key ambitions for 2021.

“I want Cantlay to become world No.1, which I know is going to happen. Then I have three athletes from America I do a lot of work with who want to win Olympic medals, and I think they will.”

His third goal is to start a clinic aimed specifically at children.

If you have a son and you want him to be the next Tiger Woods or Usain Bolt, you’ll do anything for him, so why not do it correctly? You can bring your child, get them assessed, I’ll charge them €30 and give them a programme for a month. After a month, if they don’t improve, you don’t have to spend any more.”

His methods evolve all the time, and Geoghegan’s latest focus is calisthenics, using body-weight exercises that work on “strength, balance, stability, mobility, and control”.

He intends it to be at the centre of his clinics for young sportspeople.

“I believe calisthenics is the way forward for children, that with any child between the ages of 10 and 16 we can stop the training, see if they’re stacked correctly, and let’s build a foundation for a beautiful house. That’s what I’m going to do: Give back a little bit of what I’ve got in the world.”

Beyond his work with global stars, it’s a cause that’s always been dear to him: To get the physical foundations right for the next generation, then watch as they climb towards the sky.