Dr. Michael Lardon is one of the premier mental performance coaches in the world, with clients in more than a dozen professional and Olympic sports. His athletes have won major golf championships, Olympic gold medals, Super Bowls and World Series titles, among other achievements. He is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego and a Consulting Psychiatrist to the United States Olympic Teams at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA.
In addition to his private psychiatry practice in San Diego and work with elite athletes, Dr. Lardon serves as consulting specialist with high-level executive and military clients in the world of peak mental performance. His books, Mastering Golf’s Mental Game (2014) and Finding Your Zone (2008) are considered to be two of the most influential research-based sport performance books published. Dr. Lardon has appeared on the pages of Sports Illustrated, the New York Times and Golf Digest, and has been interviewed on networks such as ESPN, CNN and the Golf Channel. He caddied on the PGA Tour for his brother Brad in the early 1990s, and their odyssey through the 1993 PGA Tour qualifying tournament was chronicled in John Feinstein’s bestseller A Good Walk Spoiled.
After a career as an internationally-ranked junior and professional table tennis player, Dr. Lardon earned a degree in psychology with honors from Stanford University in 1984, and a medical degree from the University of Texas in 1989. After completing his internship in internal medicine at UCLA in 1990, he spent three years in the University of California, San Diego’s psychiatry residency program and another two years as a clinical and research fellow in UCSD’s psychopharmacology and psychobiology program. In 1993, Dr. Lardon won the Judd Research Award at UCSD for brain research on peak performance in athletics, and he has published and spoken as a national expert on the subjects of peak performance in athletics and business, performance-enhancing drugs and the treatment of mood disorders.
A native of New York City, Dr. Lardon lives with his wife and three children in San Diego.