Physiologist and Arkansas native opens laboratory for peak performance.
Benjamin Stone doesn’t quite know what to call himself. At the most essential level, he works with people engaged in athletic activity, motivating them to do better. So you might say he’s a coach.
But he’s also a scientist, one who can analyze the byproducts of metabolic systems to figure out how efficiently a person’s body is working and how that efficiency could be improved to meet a specific goal.
“I call myself a physiologist. That can sound fairly pretentious, but it’s a better description than just ‘coach,’” said Stone. “Yet you can have all the science in the world, but if they’re not motivated, all that training is kinda worthless. You gotta get in their heads.”
That he said this amidst a west Little Rock laboratory filled with gadgets and gizmos intended to gauge what, exactly, a person’s body is doing while it’s working, complete with an entire wall covered in chalkboard paint and graphs and charts of things like fatty acid oxidation rates, only drives home the point.
You could say the lab is the heart of his operation, called Sigma Human Performance, but, like the coach label, it’s not quite right. There’s another lab recently opened in Arizona. And, frankly, in this modern age, Stone’s office is technically wherever his phone is. Thanks to Cloud-like information flow, the data he needs to do his work can be accessed from anywhere.
You might think, with all this accessibility and technology that the humans Sigma helps perform are the highest tier of athletes, the professionals who make their living beating out the best in the world at what they do. That wouldn’t be quite right either.
“They’re people you see every day. Not high performance athletes, but high performance people,” said Stone. “They’re not professional athletes, and they have no intention of ever being one.”
That’s not how things started, and that’s really what was intended. But that’s the way it is, like so much else for Stone.
A native of northeast Arkansas, the 28-year-old grew up in Vilonia, where he said the choices of pastimes were to be a rodeo cowboy or blow things up. He chose the latter, and it meant a childhood not free of some bouts of trouble. But it was never trouble that interfered with school, as Stone moved ahead in grades and ended up graduating at age 16. It made for some … interesting challenges.
“I’d tried out for football, but they said, ‘This kid can kick, but if he got hit, he’s going to die,’” Stone laughed. That led him to cross country, which turned out to be significant later in life when he turned to endurance training.
Meanwhile, his academic interests were piqued by biology, thanks to a teacher who years later would end up embroiled in a scandal with a student. Though not condoning the teacher’s later actions, Stone said he was still a defining influence in his life.
“If not for him, I don’t know where I’d be right now,” he said.
Where his life ended up going was to the University of Central Arkansas, where he found himself always younger than classmates, including the senior he roomed with his first year who introduced him to mountain biking.
“It was kind of a handicap, to be honest,” said Stone of always being younger than his peers, including being mistaken for his fraternity brothers’ little brother. “I was always awkward around women and, of course, I had zero athletic ability. I was really good at being a nerd.”
Maybe, but smarts set him on a quick course through college. Graduating before he could legally drink liquor, he ended up opting for post-graduate work at Exeter College, Oxford, where he earned the equivalent of a doctorate degree in human physiology by age 23.
Then came the inevitable question for those leaving university: Now what?
Even then he thought about coaching — strictly coaching. But it didn’t go over well with the parents.
“They basically said I’d spent a quarter million dollars on education to start at what, $14,000 a year? Well done.”
So instead he returned to UCA, this time to teach. And he loved it. Still does. But coming directly from the British system, he proved to be “a bad fit for all the right reasons.” The atmosphere of American academia, he said, just didn’t fit the open forum discussion style he’d fallen in love with at Oxford.
It also happened that around that time a friend had approached him about developing a training element to an existing retail cycling business. It was researched and written and floated amongst several affluent members of the global cycling community, and everyone seemed stoked about it.
“We’d gotten this incredibly robust plan together … we figured there was no way they could say no. So I’d already quit my job. I was 26 at the time and full of piss and vinegar.”
Then the plan was rejected in favor of staying retail-oriented.
“I was freaked,” said Stone. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Finally, the partner in the plan, still convinced of its success, suggested Stone try to launch it on his own. He went to the people it had originally been prepared for and, with their permission, tweaked it to fit an independent business model and set out, cashing in his teacher retirement for start-up funds. Sigma was born.
“Things just happened freakishly easy,” said Stone of starting out. “Whenever I needed to make a decision, the path just laid down in front of me, and I would network with the right people at the right time.”
Ultimately where that path has led is to a point where all the interest points of Stone’s life — the teaching and the training and the science — all meet. His staff includes not just himself and other coaches, but nutritionists and a consulting biostatistician as well.
“When you do the right thing, things tend to work out for you in a certain format. And I feel like I’m doing the right thing.”
Primarily that’s helping people reach their goals and using emerging science and technology to do it, not for reasons of vanity or self-importance, but for simple improvements in quality of life. Maybe the goal is a 100-mile bike ride. Maybe it’s only shedding weight — not to look better (though they will) but to avoid a heart attack by age 50. Either way, it’s not the work Stone thought he’d do, but it’s what he’s found most rewarding.
“I educate people who are motivated by the right reasons to undertake severe change in their health and lifestyle. And aesthetics just isn’t it. That’s not it at all.”
