Mara Smith is a certified athletic trainer and certified strength coach from Massachusetts. An avid knitter with a family history of yarn shop owners, teachers, and exceptional fiber artists, Mara combines her love of all things yarn with her athletic training skills. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in athletic training from University of Delaware and earned her Master’s degree in Sports Management from California University of Pennsylvania. As the owner and creator of the Massachusetts-based company Precision Athletic Training LLC, Mara is an advocate for the profession of athletic training and uses her knowledge of the human body and injury prevention to help both athletes and non-athletes feel and perform their best. She has worked with internationally competitive figure skaters at The Skating Club of Boston and has been a part of the Children’s Hospital Boston’s figure skating medical team for close to 15 years. She has provided care and treatment to elite athletes at events like the US Track and Field Championships, The Radio City Rockettes and Nutcracker Performances, World Synchronized Skating Championships and World Figure Skating Championships. Mara uses her manual therapy skills to help her local knitting community with aches and pains. Most recently she began online training for both athletes and non-athletes and teaches a weekly online Stretches for Stitchers class. She has been honored to teach with Virtual Knitting LIVE, local yarn shops, and to the audience of the Down Cellar Studio Podcast. Mara loves to attend fiber festivals and seminars and enjoys sharing her knowledge of the human body with other fiber artists. She lives in Dunstable MA with her husband, Kevin, their 2 sons and dog Lucy.