I’m Luigi Passaro Barbieri, a professional footballer, and I’ve played across six countries. The biggest thing I’ve learned along the way is that what surrounds your training matters almost as much as the training does.
It went undiagnosed for two years while I kept playing on it, making it worse. When a specialist finally found it, he told me I’d likely never jog again, and certainly never play football. I was given three options. I chose the one that meant ten to twelve months of complete inactivity, with no guarantee it would work.
It worked. I’ve gone on to play senior football in Germany, Italy, Greece and Spain, and I’m still competing today.
That experience changed how I think about my body, and it has stayed with me ever since. I’ll tell the whole story properly soon, because there’s a lot in it that I think would help people.
The best workout. The best programme. The hardest week. Far less attention goes to what happens around it — mobility, activation, injury prevention, sleep, nutrition, and what’s going on in your head when you walk onto the pitch.
Longevity in your health, not just during your career but long after it, depends almost as much on how you take care of your body through prevention and recovery as it does on your training. The same goes for reaching and holding your highest level of performance. I’ve seen it in my own career, and I’ve seen it in every player I’ve been around at the top of this sport.
Everyone knows the saying: it’s better to prevent the problem than to fix it after it’s already there. Most of us still train as though the opposite were true.
Alongside playing, I work as a mental performance coach. Consistency, focus and confidence under pressure are the obvious parts, but a lot of the work sits in the places people talk about less — managing setbacks, handling frustration, staying steady through the weeks where nothing goes your way, competing for your place without it eating at you, and getting the most out of the talent you actually have. It’s encouraging how much more openly this side of the game is being discussed now than when I started, and it deserves every bit of that attention.
But I don’t think of it as a separate department. The player who is calm and clear in his head recovers better, sleeps better, and gives more attention to the small things that keep him available. The player who feels physically ready walks onto the pitch with a different kind of confidence. It goes both ways, constantly.
That’s what LPB Performance is about, and it’s why the tagline is what it is.
Preparing the body properly before you ask it to perform.
Staying available, season after season.
Confidence, consistency, managing setbacks and getting the most out of your talent.
I’m really excited about it. I know what it has done for me across my own career, and I believe it will genuinely help a lot of players — especially the ones who don’t have access to the staff and the setups I’ve been lucky enough to have.
More on that soon.
I’m posting about all of this on Instagram — the reasoning, the research, and what I actually do myself.
Follow @lpb.performance