Will King-Lewis, MD — Sustainable Performance Physician
Hi, I'm Will, and that's my wife Maud.
She is the most important decision I ever made. Not the Navy, not medicine, not this. Maud. I have come to believe that the three biggest determinants of a life well-lived, beyond the family you are born into which nobody gets to choose, are your spouse, your home, and where you put down roots. Getting the first one right made everything else better.
The Decade Behind the Work
Board-certified in Family Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians, I've spent the last decade as a Battalion Surgeon embedded with Marine infantry in the field, as a Surgical Platoon Senior Medical Officer, and most recently as Senior Medical Officer aboard USS BOXER — responsible for the health of 3,500 sailors and the leadership of a 108-person medical department, the largest warship medical department in San Diego.
That career has lived at the intersection of performance, resilience, and human longevity. Not in a lab. At sea, in the field, and in the places where the cost of underperformance isn't a missed quarterly target but a sailor who gets hurt.
So what happens when leaders don't have a system is not a theory to me. I've watched — and at times caused — what happens when people are handed motivation instead of process, confidence instead of evidence, and inspiration instead of a framework that holds up under pressure. When accountability is deferred, standards are assumed instead of stated, and the basics get skipped for the complicated, it rarely ends well. I know, because it has happened on my watch too.
That decade produced a kind of knowledge you can't get in a corporate wellness program: what happens to human performance when sleep is non-negotiable, when leadership fails at the team level, when stress is chronic and recovery absent, and when the difference between a working system and a broken one is a decision made at 0200, under pressure, with incomplete information.
Why I Built SustainablePerformanceMD
The performance space needed someone in it who faces a professional consequence for being wrong. Not another coach. Not another framework built on a podcast and a supplement deal. A physician — with a fiduciary obligation, and enough operational experience to know the difference between what sounds right and what actually works when real pressure is applied.
That obligation is the whole foundation, and it has its own page: [My Fiduciary Standard]. The short version — I'm bound to your best interest, and I'd hold that line whether or not a license required it of me.
This is fiduciary performance coaching: a board-certified physician's standard, applied to people who were never going to walk into a hospital system for this kind of help. Executives. Military leaders. Operators. Anyone who has to perform consistently under real pressure. It can be for anyone. It is not for everyone.
What a Sustainable Performance Physician Does
The title isn't a marketing designation. A Sustainable Performance Physician diagnoses before prescribing, applies peer-reviewed evidence before recommending, acknowledges uncertainty instead of projecting false confidence, and treats the long-term sustainability of your performance — not the short-term result that makes a good before-and-after photo — as the outcome that matters.
The goal isn't a peak that burns out. It's a floor that keeps rising. That's what sustainable means here. Not comfortable. Not easy. Durable — built to hold under real pressure, for the rest of your life. It's also how you recover from burnout and moral injury, and keep them from coming back.
How It Works
SPMD maps your performance across the five 5P Performance Domains — Physical Readiness, Prefrontal Operations, Psychological Flexibility, Personal Systems, and Procedural Competency. The free Leak Assessment identifies your primary DRAINS, the CLEARS matched to them, and the first MOVES to start today. From there, the Fundamentals Toolkit, the six-week Performance Protocol, and Precision Coaching go as deep as your situation needs. You'll find all of those under Work With Me.
The Receipts
Most of this industry asks you to take their word for it. Here's mine, and here's where to check it.
Fellow, American Academy of Family Physicians (FAAFP)
These aren't here for credentialing's sake. They're here because the training and accountability structure that produced them doesn't stop applying when the setting shifts from a clinic to a coaching program.
What does not carry over is the relationship. The people I treat are my patients. You are not, and this is not medical care. What crosses over is the standard: diagnose before prescribing, read the evidence before recommending, say so plainly when the evidence is thin. The rest stays in the clinic where it belongs, and the disclaimer page marks exactly where that line sits.
Same Standard, New Chapter
That's the whole pitch. No origin story about finding my passion. No before-and-after photos. Just a physician who has led teams in some of the hardest environments on earth, built a framework that works, and wants to help you use it.
When this chapter ends, Maud, our two goldendoodles Poppy and Boomer, and I are planning to put down roots in Texas. New chapter. Same standard.
If that sounds like what you've been looking for, start with the free Leak Assessment — or email me directly at will@SustainablePerformanceMD.com. Every email gets read and answered personally.
You can also connect of follow me on LinkedIn.
SPMD assesses performance, not health. SPMD is not medical care.