WHAT IS SALTUS?

At Saltus Athletic Academy, our vision is to foster a collective passion for Canadian sports and to cultivate a culture of tradition and excellence in competition by providing gifted athletes with the necessary environment to develop the athleticism and talent they need to reach their full potential. We aim to provide a high-quality, results-driven, collegiate-style training experience that develops class after class of physically and mentally tough, well-rounded, fundamentally-sound athletes.

Since we launched Saltus Athletic Academy, we’ve received several questions about the company name, and how we came about it. In short, the Saltus name and identity evolved from our vision of the type of athlete we wanted to create.At Saltus, we are dedicated to challenging the trending athletic development model, which is based on specificity and year-round competition. This provides a poor, diluted version of both strength & conditioning and skill development, and starves the athlete of valuable training time that could be better utilized to develop speed, strength and explosive power. Since we feel young athletes do not focus enough on quality strength training, we wanted to create an environment where we simply make athletes stronger and tougher than their opponents. An easy way to imagine this is to think of the Spartans from the movie “300.” These soldiers are born into a culture of hard work, toughness, and physical prowess that dominates their opponents. Likewise, we wanted to take a small group of athletes, and turn them into a robust group of well-drilled, mentally and physically tough athletes that would dominate their weaker competition.

Using this as our foundation, we started brainstorming words that captured the essence of our athletes, words such as power, grace, explosiveness, and flight.  Sticking with our Spartan theme, we eventually found the Greek word “Saltos,” meaning to leap or to jump.  This seemed very fitting because we primarily work with speed/power athletes, and there’s no better simple expression of athletic power output than the jump.  Moreover, you can also extend the scope of this concept, and think about an athlete jumping or leaping in celebration after victory.  We were initially settled on Saltos, but after researching the correct Greek spellings, we came across “Saltus,” which is the Latin iteration of the word.  Since Latin is the origin of several of the world’s languages, we felt “Saltus” would be a good metaphorical homage to traditional strength and conditioning.  Further, since Latin is the language of science, we felt this best represented us as a strength and conditioning company that prides itself in scientifically proven, evidenced based training.

The name Athletic Academy was specifically chosen for a number of reasons. Firstly, the term “academy” brings to mind an educational entity.  In contrast to other boot camp or “high intensity” styles of training that merely put athletes through the motions of a workout, at Saltus, we want to educate young athletes on the fundamentals of strength training.  That way, when they “graduate” from our program, they are empowered with skills that they can use and apply for the rest of their lives.  Moreover, similar to a military or police academy, we wanted to create an environment that promotes brotherhood and camaraderie, while having a reputation of developing dozens of physically and mentally capable individuals in every recruiting class.

There you have it, that’s the story of our company origins and how we came up with the name Saltus Athletic Academy. A great big thank you to all our athletes, families and friends who have supported us so far.  We’re just barely two months old, but the ride has already been an exciting and fulfilling one, and we can’t wait to share what else we have in store for the future!