Welcome to Eli Bremer’s Winning with Shaklee

Welcome back faithful blog readers. It has been a while since my last post for which I apologize. As I forge ahead with a new season, there are some changes that will be coming to my blog. The biggest change is that I will be adding a new feature at least once a month called Winning with Shaklee. This is the first installment of my new feature so please keep reading to learn more about it.

Shortly before the 2007 Pan Am Games, Shaklee and I forged a partnership that would allow me to use their entire product line to enhance my athletic performance. The past two years have been a fantastic alliance between us that has been mutually beneficial. I chose Shaklee because of the quality of their products and their commitment to excellence. As I have expanded my usage of Shaklee products over the past few years, I have only become more impressed with the quality they produce.

My first contract with Shaklee ended a year after the Olympics. Our relationship has been great for both of us, so we began talks to extend my contract with them. During the course of our discussions, we decided it would be beneficial to expand the relationship between us. This is largely because of a substantial opportunity for joint marketing between “EliBremer.com” (my blog) and Shaklee’s massive family.

As part of my new relationship with Shaklee, I will periodically be writing a blog dedicated to my analysis and usage of Shaklee products. In exchange, Shaklee will be promoting my blog to nearly 750,000 new readers in the Shaklee family. Needless to say, I am extremely excited for the opportunity to expand my blog viewership to such a large and engaged audience. Blogging has become a big part of my athletic endeavors and a chance to share my experiences with tens of thousands of people. So with that said, I would like to introduce my first installment of “Winning with Shaklee.”

The beginning of a great relationship

Growing up, my family was fairly in tuned with health and nutrition. My mom has a PhD in human nutrition and my parents have always been into an active outdoor lifestyle. I’m the youngest of three boys in my family, and my two older brothers quit competitive sports around the time of high school. I was the butterball of the family and the last person you would expect to become an athlete. But around the time I turned 15, I decided to turn my dream of becoming an NCAA athlete and Olympian into a chance at reality. I started swimming twice a day and running as well. Soon, I became a standout athlete in high school and was an NCAA recruit in swimming and running.

As you become a better and better athlete, you start to pay more attention to the things that drive up your athletic performance. It was during this time that I started to take my personal nutrition much more seriously. Swimming 7-8 miles a day, I could no longer rely on my meals to provide all the sustenance I needed. So I started to look at sports drinks as a method to deliver nutrition mid workout.

Having a mom with a doctorate in nutrition quickly paid off as she was able to research the major brands on the market. After reviewing the most popular “sports drink,” she concluded that it was not much better than sugar water. Then we turned to some of the more sophisticated drinks. These were better than convenience store brands but still lacked some important elements of nutrition needed mid workout.

A family friend, Karla Kroeker, was a Shaklee distributor and suggested we research Shaklee’ Performance. She gave me a sample to try. I was immediately impressed with the drink, and my mom was equally impressed with the contents of the drink. Unlike other products which were formulated largely for taste and to drive up sales at convenience stores, Performance was developed to fuel the human body during endurance workouts.

Soon I was buying large quantities of Performance and its sister product Physique for workouts and recovery. My ability to sustain large workloads and intensity in practice went up noticeably as did my performance. My coaches noticed a marked improvement in my athletic ability. I demanded a lot out of my body, and I had found the products that enabled me to train to my fullest ability.

Twelve years later, Shaklee signed me as their first of two 2008 Olympians. They were also my first professional sponsorship and that meant a lot to me. Not only did it enable me to drastically expand my product usage (now virtually everything in my house is a Shaklee product), but it also symbolized the culmination of a relationship that started over a decade earlier. Shaklee had enabled me to become a good athlete, and they wanted to be a part of my Olympic experience as well.

So as we head into the 2012 Olympic cycle, I am proud that my relationship with Shaklee has grown to new levels. They are my first sponsorship of this quadrennial, symbolic of the fact that they were also my first sponsor ever. Furthermore, my wife and I recently decided to become Shaklee distributors after many of our friends have asked how to order the products. I take my reputation seriously and only endorse companies and products that I thoroughly believe in.

In my next Winning with Shaklee blog, I’ll explain some major concerns with supplement and health companies, and why I trust Shaklee products with my reputation.