Just Fly Performance Podcast

Today’s podcast features track and S&C coach, Matt McInnes-Watson. Matt is the owner of Plus Plyos, an online coaching platform that provides plyometric training programs, courses, and systems for coaches and athletes. His initial coaching experience was as a track coach for jumpers and multi-eventers, which led him to work as the lead S&C coach for Itchen College Basketball in the UK. Matt teaches and delivers seminars around Europe and the US, while working with athletes from football to figure skating, using his expertise in jumping and plyometrics to enhance performance. Plyometrics, in the general sense, are as old as time. How we have classified them and integrated them into training for sport started with track and field, and now is branching out more and more into team sport. Within both track and team sport, we have aspects of specificity, rhythms, coordination and integration that we can consider to really hone in our plyometric efforts on the ultimate progress of the athlete. For today’s podcast, Matt covers his background as a soccer player, and the role of swing leg dynamics in kicking, and in its link to jumping. We talk about various plyometric combinations from the perspective of direction, height and distance, and how this factors into common exercises like bounding and hurdle hops. Extensive plyometrics in team sports, especially in season, is a debated topic we cover, and we finish with Matt talking about the origin and implementation of the “deep tier”, or full range plyometric exercises. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and Exogen wearable resistance gear. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for free (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 2:36 – Matt’s background in soccer, and his introduction to jumping and track through basketball 11:42 – Single leg jumping in light of locomotion and the gait cycle 14:25 – The usage of the swing leg in a soccer kick, and how that fits with a single leg takeoff, or a bound 21:38 – How Matt looks at plyometrics for the sake of team sport development as opposed to track and field 31:52 – Matt’s take on high hurdle hops, and bounce-combos, in bilateral plyometric execution 42:00 – Thoughts on how much team sport athletes need to do extensive, high-contact volume, plyometrics, in light of their team sport demands 52:54 – Matt’s development and integration of “deep tier” plyometrics for athletes Matt McInnes-Watson Quotes “A big thing for me was speed on the ground in my takeoff, I went from .22s, to .17s when I jumped my best” “In terms of my abilities to pick up skills with my feet (a background of soccer was a huge help)” “It saddens me when you get a basketball player who cannot jump off of one leg” “One of my favorite combos is 2 forward, and 1 back, I think the real pinnacle of athletic movements is 2 hops forward 1 hop back, or 2 hops forward, 1 hop upward” “Especially for basketball players, lighter extensive work is hugely important for ankle rolls, if they have a history of ankle rolls” “I play with those (multi-lateral) rhythms with team sport guys, not so much with track guys” “You can’t hide in movements that are (inherently reflexive)” “(Deep tier) paired with the rudimentary stuff seems to be a recipe that is working really really well for us” “The deep tier is such great fun; there is a therapeutic side to achieving that full range of motion’ “There’s a safety net of providing a regular stimulus (with deep tier, stretch range plyos)” “So I play with a variation of deep tier, called a double dip, so when you drop down, you drop again quickly, and you pop out of it, and it plays with passive reflexes at the bottom ranges” About Matt McInnes-Watson Matt McInnes Watson, MSc, is the owner of Plus Plyos, an online coaching platform that provides plyometric training programs, courses, and systems for coaches and athletes. Matt started off as a track coach for jumpers and multi-eventers, which led him to work as the lead S&C coach for Itchen College Basketball in the UK. Since then, Matt has been teaching and delivering seminars around Europe and the US, while working with athletes from football to figure skating, using his expertise in jumping and plyometrics to enhance performance. Matt also now runs his own podcast - "Hop on the Poddy" and continues to work on delivering high level education on plyometrics and dynamic movement.

Today’s podcast features guest Mark Hoover. Mark works for SimpliFaster in a coaching and technical consulting capacity and is the Director of Athletic Performance at Metrolina Christian Academy in Indian Trail, North Carolina. Coach Hoover started his career coaching football at both the high school and NCAA levels. After spending nearly 20 years in the dual role of sport coach/strength coach (including 11 years as a head football coach), he made the transition to full-time strength and conditioning in 2015. Mark is a growth minded coach who is continually evolving his training process. Mark is continually evaluating his program based bettering one’s abilities on the field of play. The qualities it takes to be a weight room warrior are not the same as the fundamental speed and decision-making elements happening in the game itself. As an individual who was better in the weight room than he was in sport, Mark has dedicated his own process in a different direction for those athletes he works with, doing what he can to ensure that they are adept movers, in addition to being strong and robust. On today’s podcast, Mark talks about his approach to building game speed, rehearsed vs. problem solving agility movements, the role of basketball in overall movement development, and we finish with a brief chat on the role of the 1x20 strength system in Mark’s program. This show delved into some really important concepts of athlete development, and although it primarily discusses work done with high school athletes, the concepts are helpful for those on all levels of performance. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and Sprint Acceleration Essentials. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for free (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. To learn more about the Sprint Acceleration Essentials course, head to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 2:13 – Mark’s original athletic journey, and how it has shaped the coach he is today 10:34 – What Mark would change in his own athletic journey to help himself become a better overall athlete 17:28 – Mark’s evolution in game-speed development, and how he has incorporated this into his training programs 22:44 – Training “fundamental” game speed, and agility movements, versus letting athletes purely self-organize in reactive game speed situations 37:07 – How to know when “fundamental” game speed training is linking into organic game-speed ability 41:32 – What sports the “planned” agility type work is most applicable towards, such as football on offense 53:25 – Sports that may need game-speed training more than others, and the “roll 90 test” that helps Mark find what athlete’s reactive speed deficits are 1:00:00 – Mark’s take on the edges of the feet, as it pertains to agility and game speed movement 1:03:59 – Mark’s usage of the 1x20 strength training system, and how he has used it and progressed it in his coaching Mark Hoover Quotes “As it turns out, the only time I was a star on that football field was when I was in that weight room” “If I could go back, I would convince my younger self to play every sport possible” “When people talk about mental toughness, it’s very task specific” “We don’t do a whole lot of A-skips, or things, we do a lot of where we partner up, and one person stands an arm’s length behind another one, and one person has to hop hop squat, and it has to be a variable squat, on one leg, on two legs” “This is probably blasphemy, but I would say (game speed agility/movement) is more important to master than squat, bench, deadlift” “We still, even as we progress the drills, build in those basic, “feel” cues, and then when they take it over into the reactivity stuff, they know” “That is probably the toughest concept of the whole thing, is showing them here is how fast you can run, but here is how fast you run to stop and separate effectively, and juke” “We try to get our guys to play football, at a basketball speed” “In most sports, basketball is actually the goal, if we can get our guys to move like basketball players, they are going to be really good at football” “Kids can get lost in 5x5 basketball, but not in 3x3 basketball” “I wish I had a gym where we could lower the basketball rims, so we could have a slam dunk contest. Imagine the stimulus of a 3x3 basketball and a dunk contest!” “It’s crazy to me that people will say I’m going to spend 4 of my 5 days lifting weights, and then 1 day running around… if you want athletic ability, maybe think about flipping that” “Where they are in that central nervous system place where they are smiling and laughing and moving, there is going to be a big imprint there” “We are really trying to get rid of the pivot, where you get on the big toe and pivot and push through the toe” “(after some time using the 1x20 system) I’m looking around the room… these guys are jacked”

Today’s podcast features track and speed coach, Chris Korfist. Chris has been a high school coach in track and football for 3 decades with close to 100 All-State athletes. He is currently the sprints coach at Homewood Flossmoor high school in Chicago, owns the "Slow Guy Speed School”, and has consulted with professional sports teams all over the world, including the NFL, MLB, NBA, and Rugby League. Chris has been a favorite podcast guest on this show and is constantly evolving and innovating his methods. Sprinting is a simple, yet complex topic, and one that requires a continual analysis of mechanics, exercises and training models. There are many ways to train athletes, and with this in mind, it’s important to understand the “first principles” of any training system. With many first principles taken from the brilliance of the “DB Hammer” training ideals, Chris has steadily evolved his training system, year over year, to the place where it is today. This past season, Homewood Flossmoor won the Illinois state track championship, and won the 4x100m and 4x200m dashes on their way to the title. Chris’s adjustments to his speed training models worked well, with some athletes chopping off a second or more off of their 200m times from the previous year. On the podcast today, Chris starts by talking about his mental training approach, and some unique mental training elements of this past year’s team. He then gets into the main changes he utilized this past training year, including reducing the speed endurance component of the work, and replacing it with some potent “AN2” bracket (30-40 second) specialized training for the sprints. Chris also goes into how he would specialize the exercises for sprinters of different archetypes (stompers vs. slicers) and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and Exogen wearable resistance gear. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for free (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:40 – How the state track meet went for Chris’s team this year, including a 41.03s 4x100m time and a state championship 7:08 – Updates on mental strategies for racing, and building mental highlight tapes for athletes prior to meets 20:49 – Some main changes that Chris made this year in his programming that proved successful in the team’s state championship performance 30:12 – Using the 1080 sprint for slow-speed iso-kinetic hamstring work to improve the injury resilience factor of the muscle group 33:53 – The specificity of the “AN2” (30-40 second) bracket of work for the special exercises that Chris’s athletes were performing 41:15 – “Stompers” vs. “Slicers” and how to train the weakness of each athlete 47:10 – Water bag training and the role of the trunk/core and arms in sprinting 49:33 – Hip flexor training and strength in speed development, and usage of the hip swing exercise 54:19 – How to use primetimes and flexed leg bounds in speed development 1:01:04 – Training frequency throughout the year, and how this was a lower frequency year for Chris’s athletes 1:06:49 – Final thoughts on working strengths vs. weaknesses, and when to stop trying to bring up weaknesses in a training year Chris Korfist Quotes “(The highlight/motivational videos for the kids) It’s just this constant feedback that you are all of that” “This year, instead of goals, I had them focus on telling their story” “Our self-talk this year became a story: This is where I came from, this is what I did, this is where I’m going; Tying in history and tying in stories to your self talk is really powerful, because as humans we all want a story” “You figure out what motivates that kid, and then you push that button when you need to” “I knew if we showed up to practice and did the exact same thing we did before… doing the same thing for a kid that’s coming on for their 3rd year, how much better are we going to get if we just do the same stuff?” “We were not a great force team (in looking at the 1080 data), we can get out and really go, but we don’t have a lot power coming out of the hole, so we spent the whole first part of the season pulling” “You put a LILA (Exogen) sleeve on one leg, and swing that sucker for 40 seconds, and don’t move your torso, you’re gassed, that’s a lot of work” “We did 1x23 second run, and 1x150, and that was the extent of our speed endurance for the entire season… and I had 2 guys that ran under 21.5, and that was a second improvement for one and over a second improvement for the other” “That was another big change we did, was on our off days (only recently have I become a core person) we would hold for 20,30,40 seconds, and can you breathe and hold those positions” “We started extending feet stuff out to 2 minutes” “Indoors, we’d be doing mostly all slice drills. When we went outside, we would do the old DB Hammer box jumps for “stomp

Today’s podcast features strength coach Kevin Hollabaugh. Kevin is a strength coach working at the New York Yankees Player Development Program, and is also the owner of Pro Force Sports Performance in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has been working in strength and conditioning since 2009. He previously served as the director of baseball player development, and also currently an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati. Pro Force SP happens to be only a few miles from my home in Cincinnati, and I’ve enjoyed spending time there to play ultimate frisbee games with pro baseball players, as well as observing the data-points and training process on the 1080 Sprint with Kevin and his staff. It's important to check your training process with some level of numbers and quantitative feedback to go with the qualitative process of coaching. Amongst other training tools, Kevin has two unique machines that allow him to pin data to athletic movements, on the level of the Proteus motion and 1080 Sprint. This show isn’t so much about those technologies and data points specifically as it is how Kevin has used the data to refine his speed and rotational training methods over time, how he now looks at training given those data-sets, and how it has evolved his programming. In this episode, we’ll also talk about the Ultimate frisbee game variation that ProForce athletes love so much (as well as myself), balancing force vs. elasticity in swinging/throwing and sprinting, training weaknesses vs. strengths, and more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and Exogen wearable resistance gear. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for free (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:12 – The makings of the “Ultimate Frisbee Soccer” game that the ProForce baseball athletes (as well as myself) enjoyed playing immensely 15:26 – How Kevin started ProForce and his background as a coach 19:41 – The data-based backing of Kevin’s training and exercise selection process 27:09 – How the Proteus rotational training machine is helping Kevin to refine his core training programming 33:19 – The balance of training an athlete based on their strengths and weak-points, as per rotational power and linear speed in particular 41:14 – How to apply medicine ball training and rotational power to an athlete who relies heavily on the stretch shortening cycle, versus “concentric” muscular contribution 46:09 – How Kevin’s approach to speed training has been impacted by working with the 1080 Sprint machine and the associated data 56:53 – Kevin’s next steps in his coaching future Kevin Hollabaugh Quotes “It’s funny the evolution a simple game has taken, and how it can define the training in an off-season, but that’s kind of what it’s morphed into” “(In frisbee) you get those (high pressure) opportunities that you don’t necessarily get in sport that are more low key” “We’re all taught, here’s the way to teach speed, here’s the way to train core, and then you get on these pieces of technology (and data-based feedback) and you realize, “that didn’t translate”” “If you are struggling with the concentric strength and are good at strength shortening, we are using a heavier load (with medicine balls), with the proteus we are using a heavier load” “One way (to build concentric-start rotational power when you are mostly elastic) would be starting with static starts on heavier loads (with medicine balls, etc.)… by keeping it at a light weight you are just going to be able to whip it which you are naturally good at” “When there are increases in their hitting load, their pitching load, we back off on the medicine ball rotations and do more work on their non-dominant side” “I didn’t need to do 7 drills in a speed session (being able to dial in on what the athlete needs makes is simpler/more to the point)” “We used to teach a lot of kids to stay narrow when they accelerate, but then you look at the guys accelerate on the 1080 with good data points (in regards to stride width)… you are like oh crap!” “We don’t do a ton of marching anymore, that’s more like a low-level warmup exercise… we don’t do PVC pipe stuff anymore with the PVC overhead march, skips, etc. I still do running with PVC pipes from time to time” “It’s about choosing drills at what an athlete needs to get better at, it’s not a one-size fits all approach” About Kevin Hollabaugh Kevin Hollabaugh is a strength coach working at the New York Yankees Player Development Program, and is also the owner of Pro Force Sports Performance in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has been working in strength and conditioning since 2009. Kevin is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, and was a Graduate Assistant at the University of South Florida. Keven started ProForce Sports Performance in a small spin cycle classroom in 2014, and it and has grown it to two Cincinnati

Today’s podcast features David Weck and Chris Chamberlin of WeckMethod. David Weck is biomechanist, and the creator of a number of inventions that work key characteristics of human locomotion and movement, including the BOSU Balance Trainer. David started the WeckMethod as a project to inspire and educate individuals on the importance of optimizing's human balance through locomotion as he works to make “Every Step Stronger” for everyone. Chris Chamberlin is the Head Coach and Director of Education for the WeckMethod. Chris has over 15 years of coaching experience and a lifetime of personal practice in movement efficiency that has earned him recognition as a leader in innovative thought in the fitness industry. Chris has both a creative approach to multi-planar training, as well as impressive “raw” strength levels in the traditional lifts. If you browse the internet, you will easily see a lot of “functional” training exercises, designed to catch eyeballs, that build neither strength, nor functional ability. The key in the effectiveness of any movement beyond a basic strength exercise is in its patterning, and closeness to the key characteristics of human locomotion, swinging and throwing. When you find movements that allow your body to truly feel more of what it uses in these core human patterns, you can then “port” that movement into the scope of your core strength and speed training. At the end of the day, whether you like the BOSU Ball or not, David’s keen observations of the core components of human movement have played a substantial role for me in how I observe the twisting, side bending and general locomotive mechanisms of the human being. Chris Chamberlin has taken David’s observation and creativity, and put his lens of practicality onto the total process. On the show today, David and Chris talk about how the WeckMethod helped Chris’s big-lifts to get even better, tool usage as an essential aspect of human movement, primal movement patterning in respect to training volume, bending and twisting integration into more traditional strength methods, concepts on the foot, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To learn more about the Sprint Acceleration Essentials course, head to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 2:40 – The origin story of David and Chris connecting and training, and how David’s methods impacted Chris’s movement and strength 6:18 – The uniquely human element of using tools, from a training perspective 18:22 – How Chris’s background as a carpenter (as well as his family background) has impacted the say he sees human movement in light of physical work tasks 27:43 – The role of using variability in training to achieve a greater impact to the movement tissues of the body 34:41 – How the Weck Method tools and ideas can build into, not only one’s rotational movement flow and ability, but also one’s physical strength 54:22 – Thoughts on the inside edge of the foot and the outside of the foot as it pertains to athletic performance 1:21:33 – Digging into the idea of “every step as a rep” regarding the body in balance 1:36:58 – How to integrate coiling work, into linear work, through the scope of a session, and Chris’s “4:1” ratio David Weck and Chris Chamberlin Quotes “I had instantly set a 40-45lb PR in my overhead bent press, just from learning a drill from (David) in a meeting that was meant for running faster” “To the extent possible, we want the tool to be the teacher, we want to do less with words, and what we want to do is get someone to feel it so they understand it implicitly, rather than us trying to explain something, taking a lot of time” “We distilled (our method) down to sticks, stones and ropes” “That became our foundation is the manipulation of the fundamental tools, and humans are fundamental tool users…. It’s the user who defines the utility of the tool” “I notice that (when we switched from hammers to nail guns) they started getting a lot of shoulder issues, from not using the body in the same way” “I particularly don’t like to do big phases where we’ll build up to peak performance, I want to constantly be at a high level of performance, a lot of it comes from being a carpenter… you had to be ready for it every day and you didn’t know exactly what you needed to be ready for” “We build a lot of volume through patterns, and we vary intensity” “One of the things about volume is you build “man strong”, “tendon/connective tissue strong”… we always look at, how can we optimize connective tissue, and that is fascia on the fundamental level” “They (non strength-sport athletes) were using the tissue, but they were challenging it in a different way so they didn’t get good at things in the gym, and it allows for the accruement of more volume and repetition” “The Weck Method logo, starts with gravity, up an

Today’s podcast features strength and performance coach, Ethan Reeve. Ethan is the director of strength and performance for MondoSport USA. He is the former president of the CSCCa, and has 44 years of experience coaching in college and high school ranks. In addition to decades in NCAA athletic performance, Reeve was a SEC champion wrestler, and was the head coach of the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga wrestling program from 1985 to 1990, achieving 5 Southern Conference titles in 6 years. In the process of strength and conditioning/physical preparation; we can never get too far from the process of physical education and routinely observing the core qualities of athleticism An interesting element in sport performance, and sport coaching in the past decades is that, compared to the pre-2000’s era, there are less coaches now who have physical education backgrounds. Perhaps, this is because, as the industry moves forward, physical preparation/athletic performance has swung more towards the quantitative aspects, than the “art” form of the process. Maybe it’s that most strength and conditioning jobs are working with high school or college athletes who are “further” along in their athletic development. Maybe it’s how the role and funding for physical education has been devalued over time. Despite all of this, as I get older, the more and more I realize just how much physical education has to offer, not only young athletes, but also the thought process in working with more established ones, and I believe physical education, and multi-sport coaching principles (such as wrestling in the scope of today’s show) should be far more common-place in athletic development conversations. On today’s podcast, Ethan talks about his blend of the principles found in physical education and wrestling, and how these funnel into a sports performance training session. He speaks on how he views physical training through the eyes of a wrestling coach (of which he was a very successful one) and the learning environment he looks to set up in his training sessions. We discuss “belly up” speed training, key ground-based training movements, and other important principles of building a total athletic development program. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and Exogen wearable resistance gear. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for free (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 2:57 – Ethan’s journey physical education and wrestling training, and how that blended into his strength and conditioning practices 6:10 – The importance and correlation of integrating basic physical education movements, into sport performance training 12:41 – “Belly Up” movements transitioned into sprinting, for athletic development 19:31 – Examples of blending physical education principles into track and field and sport performance training settings 23:16 – Ethan’s take on how to be a better student of learning and teaching in one’s sport coaching process 35:10 – The importance of the total environment in the learning process for athletes 41:00 – How to use the 80/20 or 90/10 principle to help determine one’s core principles and focus in practice 46:19 – The intersection of what wrestling and track and field has to offer in terms of general physical preparation 54:42 – How Ethan views the role of the weight room from middle school, up until college in training 59:12 – Calisthenic, gymnastics, and rolls that Ethan feels great athletes can do well in the movement section of training 1:03:13 – Gymnastic, tumbling type work, and its impact on athlete mobility Ethan Reeve Quotes “(In physical education) We were taught dance, and rhythm, as well as lifetime sports” “We had ropes we climbed, we had pegboards, we had tumbling mats, rope skipping was big, just a lot of good human movement; I wish we will had that structured movement for the young kids” “I think the eye of the coach is still the best way to do this” “If you want to be able to move, you have got to be able to bend, and if you can’t move, you can’t help us” “When you start doing tumbling, the fluid in your ears gets jumbled up, but when you do it every single day, you get more athletic… when you can do it without getting dizzy, you can orient yourself quicker” “Our best wrestlers were those that could be in a wrestling stance, get their chest belly to the ground, and then get back to that stance the most quickly; those tended to be our better wrestlers, something about getting down to the floor and getting back up…. We did a lot of speed work getting up from the belly” “Every 9-15 minutes out of a 60 minute lift, I would spend on athletic movements” “When I walked into a weightroom, I approached it like teaching wrestling” “The term in wrestling is that champions come in pairs” “If you are going to teach and coach, the first thing you ne

Today’s podcast features coach, writer and educator, Dan John. Dan is a best-selling author in the field of strength training and fitness, with his most recent work being the “Easy Strength Omni-Book”. He is known for his ability to transfer complex material into actionable wisdom, has been a many-time guest on the show, and is one of my single greatest influences in the way that I see the process of coaching and training. As I grow older, coach more populations, and see the field evolve, I view and value Dan’s process and wisdom in new and even more meaningful ways. One of those tenants of Dan that means more in each coming year is that, at its core, our training and movements are simple… it’s just the years and years of consistent, dedicated immersion in training to fully bring out that simplicity, that “trip up” many people. So often, we get caught up in the hacks, the shortcuts, and the “3 tips for X” within the social-media fist-fight for eyeballs. On today’s episode, Dan talks about a few important concepts that any coach or athlete needs to come back to over and over again in their process, including the power of “compression”, the power of less, and the power of withholding. Dan speaks on this as it relates to cold track seasons (right before the 80 degree conference meet), and how it relates to the spark of coaching intuition that can happen in an environment deprived from one’s typical tools, and even how it can apply to our movement biomechanics. Dan also gets into the nuts and bolts of “snapacity” (snap + capacity) that defines the core of athletic movement (elasticity and the work capacity to sustain it), and the related key muscle actions he calls “The 3 P’s”. Throughout the talk, Dan highlights the simple and core principles that drive training progress over time, as well tying in concepts on philosophy and personal growth that transcend training itself. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs, and LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance Training Gear. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:01 – An update on how Dan’s track season has been, speaking on the upsides of the “compressed” format of his season based on weather 7:25 – Why “compressing and expanding” is such a critical element of one’s athletic performance, as well as life itself 12:13 – The importance of effort-level in human movement, and not “over-striking” a hammer against a nail 18:11 – The “3P’s” of muscle action; on the level of “Point, Poke, and Snap” as applied to explosive sport movement 29:41 – The importance of myth, story and tragedy in sport, life, and re-inventing ourselves” 35:01 – How sport movement, such as the discus or hammer, is like a symphony in nature, and how “over-trying” and imbalance of fluid effort reduces ones results 46:38 – The application and training of the critical athletic trait Dan calls “Snapacity” 1:00:09 – The simplicity, yet patience that the sport of track and field requires in athlete development Dan John Quotes “We often say, “what you compress, expands”; that is probably one of the greatest truisms of my coaching career. If I go into your gym and eliminate 9/10 of the equipment, then I find out how good of a strength coach you are” “Sometimes taking things away is what makes you great” “If you hit (the hammer too hard into the nail), it’s going to be worse….you’ve explained track and field, football, and every sport I’ve ever done in my life” “The 3 P’s (of muscle action), point, poke, and snap” “I teach discus throwing, javelin throwing that “you are a bag of rubber bands” and what we want to do for elite performance is get you to a place where we stretch those rubber bands, and then the important thing is, we release it, crappy throwers, crappy hurdlers, crappy jumpers, try to “add” a little more, when it’s too late” “When you pull the arrow back, you don’t “push” the arrow forward, you let it go, elite performance is letting it go, it’s letting the muscles “snap”” “I’m always amazed when people think isometrics are new” “It’s really hard to make money pushing sleep, fasting, protein and veggies” “That’s why I like working with special operations guys, they are at a place where they know that simple is best” “I talk to my athletes about stories (myths), when my athletes have a bad day, I quote Don Quixote to them… I also quote Chumbawumba” “(In writing down my top 10 worst and best things that happened to me in my athletic career) all my worsts were followed by all my bests” “When you find tragedy, go through it, breath out, because something better is coming around the corner” “I think of symphonies as the way you throw a discus; lots and lots and lots of individual pieces, you blend them” “Koji really specializes in getting rid of the excessive movement. When you break the fl

Today’s podcast features Mark McLaughlin. Mark is the founder of Performance Training Center, and currently works as a physical preparation/strength coach in the Lake Oswego school district. Mark has had a diverse sporting history as a youth, and has been active in the field of physical preparation since 1997. Mark has trained over 700 athletes at all competitive levels, from Olympic to grade school athletes, and has worked with organizations such as the NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA universities, high schools, and youth sports. The field of sports performance makes a lot of pendulum swings. We go from over-conditioning athletes to denouncing conditioning. From static stretching, to not stretching, to reconsidering stretching, to name a few. In the process of the swings, we do trend upwards (such as saving athletes from over-conditioning based practices with poor motor learning tactics). At the same time, I don’t believe we ask ourselves often enough if we are letting the pendulum swing too far. What I’ve found is that for every rule that seems to be created, there are instantly going to be athletes, or entire training groups that break that rule. The only way to understand it all, is to constantly be expanding your viewpoints. We need to look at the broader mechanisms of biology, psychology, motor learning, and the long-term developmental principles of athletes to really gain wisdom in our guidance of athletes and individuals to their highest potential. On today’s podcast, Mark talks about the polarity of his physical preparation process, on one end, giving the kids a dynamic pedagogical, free play-oriented training experience, and on the other, using technology to assess biological readiness markers and preparation levels for their sport. Mark finishes the show speaking on aerobic readiness as a recovery marker for explosive sport training. No matter where you are on the sport training spectrum, be it sport coaching, motor learning or purely physical development, there is a lot to be learned from Mark’s broad spectrum of knowledge in this episode. This show connects physical preparation with a depth of true sports development Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 2:57 – The diversity of groups that Mark works with, from football, to alpine skiing, to dance and many places in between 10:38 – Thoughts on fluidity and rhythm in the development of athleticism and even within injury prevention 17:16 – The use of gymnastics in athlete robustness and development 22:25 – Mark’s thoughts on helping to train kids in light of motor learning and a regular lack of general physical preparation 28:03 – The role of “economic constraints” in creativity and sport development 40:05 – The benefits of multi-age/multi-grade education, as well as athletic development and play possibilities, as well as a discussion of the Norwegian sport model and the success of Erling Haaland 49:16 – Mark’s system in terms of delaying intensive training stimuli in an athlete’s long term development 55:16 – The role of aerobic training in Mark’s system for team sport athletes, in capacity building and recovery 1:01:27 – “Zone 0” training in Mark’s system, inspired by the work of Landon Evans 1:05:37 – How to determine if athletes are in a resting sympathetic, or parasympathetic state for their training and workouts Mark McLaughlin Quotes “In dance, their events last two minutes, but their heart rates hit 200… there is a psychological driver of heart rates” “I actually use our dance team to teach our football players how to dance; sport and movement is rhythm” “Training with music is a big thing, gymnastics is a big thing, dance; I mean there are simple dance movements in the warmup that we do with all of the kids, and it is going to force them to learn a new skill” “Durability equals availability” “Ronaldinho grew up playing barefoot, and his dad said it was to improve his touch, but really, they didn’t have money to get shoes for him” “The first 30 minute of each (training) day is free play… then they come in and we start the formal session” “I have training sessions where I don’t speak for 4-5 minutes” “I let them be creative, because coaches want them to be creative on the field” “Wearing felt boots taught him to move at different speeds, and anticipate the opponent differently; these economic constraints made him the player he was” “When people say I have to run a 4.5s 40 yard dash, or get strong to do this, I think that’s such a narrow look at things; human performance is so much more than that” “When they would select teams, he would make sure he was on a team with less talent, so he would have to play on another level to win. I made kids play football and catch with their off hand… keep makin

Today’s podcast features podcaster, and educator, and physical preparation coach, Angus Bradley. He coaches out of Sydney CBD, and co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar. Angus has a wide-spanning knowledge base from both in and outside of the strength and conditioning field, with a focus on inter-disciplinary over-arching principles. He works with a diverse crowd from strongman to surfing and everything in between, has been a 2x previous guest on this podcast, and runs regular mentorships for strength coaches and personal trainers. Part of the fun of running a podcast, and seeking education from a wide variety of coaches is the ability to create links and connections between different fields of thought. When we can observe multiple training camps saying similar things about the gait cycle, squatting, or breathing, we can level up our total coaching and training perspective. On today’s podcast, Angus talks about learning from fields outside of fitness, to become a better coach and overall student of life. He also talks about links within the field of fitness, such as the positional and rhythmic relationships between Olympic lifting and sprinting. A main talking point on today’s episode is Angus’s approach to training “early stance” in a physical development world where so much is devoted to training that ends up focusing more on “late stance” in the gym. Angus shares his thoughts on how he approaches late stance type training, how he uses more “mid-stance” to train the knee, and also gives his thoughts on how good Crossfit boxes get a lot of trainees stronger than many strength coaches would often like to believe. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and the Elastic Essentials Online Course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:20 – The importance of having hobbies outside of training, fitness and S&C 18:53 – The use of creativity and intuition in training vs. pre-planned, systemic stimuli 27:50 – Thoughts on “knees behind toes” type exercises, and their benefit in physical preparation 41:52 – The links between rhythm in weightlifting, and rhythm in sprint acceleration 51:31 – Thoughts on more dynamic versions of training early stance and associated negative shin angles 1:01:59 – Angus thoughts’ on pushing knees forwards into positive angles during training 1:11:33 – Angus’s take on some of the mechanisms by which good Crossfit boxes can elicit such substantial strength gains in their population, as well as the importance of doing larger overall GPP workloads Angus Bradley Quotes “If it’s a true principle, it’s something that applies to things outside of the fitness industry” “A lot of systems sort of have this transition from a scientific underpinning, and once we have useful heuristics, it turns into more of an art form” “That stereotypical prescription of 3x10, 4x8, I’ve been pulling back on, not going full Yessis 1x20, but doing things like 2x8, 2x12, 2x6, just two hard work sets. One thing we take for granted is just attention span” “Pretty much every sport at some point, you are going to have a big powerful negative shin angle” “Exposing both of those contexts (knees over and behind) toes in a loaded sense (is important)” “Yes, working negative and positive shin angles, I’ve created the perfect system” “It’s a relative negative shin angle, when people can plantarflex themselves into a squatty squat… otherwise it’s just a knee bend (if you dorsiflex yourself into the squat), that’s one of my take-aways from a gait-based approach to squatting” “Both of these systems that have essentially no relation to each other; this is what I like, getting around at all these fitness systems, and seeing what are the common threads here; there are a lot systems sort of preaching things that line up with triple extension, it’s not quite that, it’s proximal to distal extension, it’s delaying knee extension, or using the body as a whip” “That’s the missing link: timing and rhythm” “Weightlifters at the start of the second pull, look exactly like sprinters in mid-stance” “Reverse lunges, you can get great negative shin angles there” “Whenever I’m trying to play with the gait concept in an intricate sort of way, I’m typically doing stationary, especially if they can’t wrap their head around it” “(In RDL’s) it’s hard to get a true early stance, you will pronate; because you are pushing your thorax into the ground” “The way a lot of people train is chest up, shoulders back, everything is being driven forward… it’s not a bad thing a lot of athletic stuff happens on the toes, we’re just missing this entire other section (negative shin angles) here” “Adding in RDL’s as a secondar

Today’s podcast features Dr. John Cronin and Joe Dolcetti. John Cronin is a sport scientist with a physical education and coaching background, who after getting his Ph.D, has spent most of the last 20 plus years at Auckland University of Technology. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed papers on speed, power and strength, along with having the opportunity to train a variety of athletes and teams, ranging from youth development to world champion level. Joe Dolcetti has had a 35-year career in high performance sport coaching, science, and conditioning training across the globe. As an inventor, he has developed, and launched Exogen®, the world’s most advanced wearable resistance. All in all, Joe has worked with many of the world’s top sporting programs including the NBA, NFL, NHL, Major League Baseball, the English Premier League, UFC and many others. Sports performance training is making the shift from the classical “1RM” powerlifting mindset, into athletic speed development. This is great, but there are still many holes to fill in the athletic equation. We may obsess over bar velocities in the gym, but the gym is dominated by many force-oriented levers while sport is uses many speed-oriented levers (third class), such as limbs swinging in space. At some point we must expand our training awareness beyond the what (basic force) into the where (placement), and in the process deepen our understanding on how the body produces high speed sport movement. On the show today, John and Joe get into their journey of high velocity resistance training for athletes (such as wearables including vests and ankle weights, and then sprint sleds). We’ll talk about the differences between training “stance” phase of movement, and aerial elements, and how the latter is a missing piece of training the force-velocity curve. Finally, we get into the development of the Exogen system of wearable resistance, and how it encapsulates principles of high speed and specific training adaptation. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs, and LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance Training Gear For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:25 – John and Joe’s journey in exploring various wearable and external resistance training methods and how it led them to where they are now in their view of wearable resistance 16:00 – John Cronin’s early research and findings using weighted vests in pursuit of improved athletic performance 20:00 – Effects of sprint sled training versus weighted vest training 23:52 – Philosophy of training “stance” versus training what is happening in the air in athletic movement, and the implications of stance-based vertical force not being the holy grail of sprinting and athletic movement 35:35 – Lever systems, angular velocity, and ankle weights 42:18 – The principles behind the Exogen wearable resistance gear, and how it trains the angular momentum aspect of loading to improve athleticism 1:04:33 – Final thoughts on training sport speed through a focus on wearable resistance and angular velocity training Dr. John Cronin and Joseph Dolcetti Quotes “That’s where we’ve gone the last 6-8 years, unpacking that limb loading” “Where you put load, in many ways, is more important than how much load you are putting” “The one thing I’m confused with is the parachute, I tried them and just thought these are better for jumping out of an airplane” “(Training with a weighted vest) the vertical ground reaction forces will stay pretty much the same) when you put that mass on, you don’t jump as high, the center of mass displacement is compromised, and the (vertical) effect stays pretty much the same” “The weighted vest gives absolutely nothing in terms of horizontal force production in running” “You get a lot more horizontal force production with sleds (vs. weighted vests)” “What you are doing in the air is really really important (in sprinting) and that is something you don’t get with the sled” “Great for overload in the stance phase with the sleds, but the airborne phase, it goes missing” “Any sort of externalized load is working at the point of ground contact, but if you are a sprint coach, 90% of your work is what they are doing in the air” “S&C is kind of ground contact, what’s going into the ground… everything the coach is doing is what’s happening in the movement, with the ball, in the air” “It’s the kinetic energy of the movement that really really counts for things; it’s mass x velocity squared… we’ve shown a 120kg squat, the kinetic energy around the hips is exactly the same as a 500g load being moved by a fairly good sprinter, moving a light load really quickly” “Most of the work we are doing is in the grams and ounce range… in traditional resistance that would be 5-10lb… light is definitely the new heavy” “I was going

Today’s podcast features coaches Dan Back and Tim Riley. Dan Back is the founder of Jump Science and is a coach at Xceleration sports performance in Austin, Texas where he trains both track and team sport athletes. Dan has been a guest on episodes 263 and 337 of the podcast, speaking on sprint and jump topics. Tim Riley is the Director of Sports Performance at Kollective in Austin, TX where he supervises all pro, collegiate, and youth athletic development. Tim currently oversees and conducts strength and conditioning sessions for NFL, PLL & AVP athletes. In the quest for improved athletic qualities, we often look at things in isolation. We look at the most powerful training means, right now, to help us to achieve better performance. For the best results, however, we need to broaden our view of training, and understand the qualities at the bottom (early athletic development) and the top (maximal strength and force training) to maximize potential. We need to understand all of the iterations of skill and strength that come before the sprint, jump, throw, agile moves, etc. you see on the field, and how everything works together in the grand scheme of training. On today’s podcast, Dan and Tim speak on their own early athletic experiences, the critical “base level” abilities explosive athletes need for a better vertical jump (as well as general explosive movement), where and how maximal strength work fits into the long-term development equation, warmup and game-based concepts, assessments, and more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs, and LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance Training Gear For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:30 – Dan and Tim’s early sport and training experiences 12:30 – Dan’s take on track and field speed and abilities within the scope of team sport performance and two leg jumping 18:00 – The potential of mass-amounts of calf raises to have a negative impact on speed later in life 23:30 – Core general physical preparation methods in athletic performance, such as grappling, hurdling, racing, tag, etc. 27:30 – Discussion as per the pyramid of jumping and jump preparation 37:00 – How Tim and Dan view the warmup process, considering more of a traditional warmup versus more of a game-oriented warmup 51:30 – Dan and Tim’s assessment process for athletes, and looking at macro-type assessments (performance driven) vs. more micro-level assessments (joint based or more discrete movements) 1:04:15 – Thoughts on how strength training can transfer more easily, given an appropriate base of explosive movement training and skill Daniel Back and Tim Riley Quotes “I can see (the martial arts drills) in my daughter’s ability to fall and get back up (in other sports)” TR “When I first started getting obsessed with jumping, my standard workout was 2 sets of 100 calf raises 5 days per week, and looking at myself in my 20’s I was a great jumper, but I wondered why my maximal velocity was so bad, and I really wondered about some of the negative influence of all those calf raises as a teenager, vs. what if those are all sprinting contacts instead?” DB “I saw these kids at 4 and 5 years old, 6 and 7, and the bulk of their training is broad jumps for distance, bounding for distance, jumping from one mark, and landing on one foot, climbing up wall” TR “Jump in a way that’s fun and do it consistently for years… and that should come on top of a base of more variety; and that’s where running, agility, interacting with other people and the ground that should be in the movement variety skill” DB “The best athletes were already really explosive, fast, powerful, good movers before they touched a weight… or took weight training seriously” TR “The most dynamic play-makers are people who have had exposure to a bunch of different modalities, and then they get strong” TR “A basketball hoop in the shallow end of a pool is the most fun” TR “I’m starting to get some things in from a workout standpoint, in the warmup” DB “Why that dynamic warmup is really useful; it’s a double edge sword with them getting better at the test, but isn’t that a good thing, if they are getting better a squat, a hinge, a lunge, a single leg hop” TR “With the micro-assessment, watching the warmup is as far as I take that generally” DB “Weightlifting should be a tiny-tiny fraction, if at all, for youth athletes, and you really want to focus on those explosive components first” DB “You eventually learn, they very well may add 80lbs to their squat and jump like an inch higher, there’s just not any guarantee of transfer when you don’t have that base, that background of athleticism, variety and development” DB “You can’t replace a childhood of athletic activity with a 6-week jump program… you need that diverse background and years of jumping,

Today’s podcast features Adarian Barr and Jenn Pilotti. Adarian is a former college track coach, a multi-national movement consultant and educator. Adarian has been a huge mentor to me when it comes to the integrated workings of the body in a variety of sport and movement skills and has had many appearances on this show. Jenn Pilotti is a movement coach, author and educator who has been studying the principles of movement for over 2 decades. Jenn’s movement disciplines include running, dance, soft acrobatics, and aerial arts. Jenn regularly lectures and teaches workshops for movement educators and curious movers. She co-authored "Let Me Introduce You”, along with Adarian Barr. Training the feet is a lot more than going barefoot a little more often. In sport movement, and locomotion, we have collisions of the feet into the ground that need to be managed skillfully. There is nuance to the “force production” into the ground. Great athletes can manage collisions extremely well, in regards to the specific sport skills they are being called on. They also have the tissue adaptation that matches the pressure they need to output within movement. In today’s podcast, Adarian and Jenn discuss their process when it comes to the operation of the feet in locomotion, and important distinctions that need to be made on account of points of pressure within the foot. They chat on the differences between sprinting on account of collision management, as well as vibration, talk about the balance of sensory work and outputs in movement, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs, LILA Exogen, and the Elastic Essentials Level II Seminar, July 14-15 in Cincinnati, Ohio For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:38 – How Jenn and Adarian got connected and Jenn’s early learnings from Adarian 8:05 – How Adarian’s process on the foot impacted Jenn, and how she integrated it into her running 14:04 – Looking at learning from the “hard” and “soft” side of movement, and how sensing the body fits in 17:26 – The origins of where Adarian started with his sensory approach to movement 27:46 – Principles of inputs and outputs as they relate to athletic movement 34:25 – Usage of the lateral aspect of the arch of the foot 38:19 – Pressure management and barefoot sprinting on a track 43:19 – How athletes manage shorter or longer collisions in their sport movement 50:30 – How to explore pressure as it relates to movement 58:01 – How to optimize and integrate foot pressure in the gym Quotes from Adarian Barr and Jenn Pilotti “I focused on keeping the pinkie toe long, and reaching it a little away from the foot; and it created a very different impact away from the ground… and I had like a 3 mile chunk where my mile splits were within 8 seconds of each other; and I’m not working any harder” “A lot of people just do and they don’t sense, or they just sense and they don’t do… we need both” “The body awareness you gain from the softer side just makes doing so much better” “Whenever I was drinking out of a glass (instead of a plastic cup) my hand doesn’t get tired; that started taking me down this whole feeling, sensing, imagining road” “In early track, I didn’t feel it. I might jump well, but I didn’t know why I jumped well. When I left Colorado I was struggling, because I was only jumping 51 feet, I left Colorado I spent a year training myself.. the first track meet I went to, boom 53 feet. What happened? Now, I can feel this. “You want to feel the impact as you run, take time to feel the impact so you can learn what to do with it. If you never learn to feel it, how can you even think about doing something with it” “Understanding how pressure relates to input was a light bulb moment for me” “If you understand pressure and how to direct pressure into the foot that’s on the ground, everything changes” “The input is the output” “It’s not the force you have to deal with, it’s the pressure” “If you run flat footed, it’s the same amount of force, but the pressure is different now” “You feel you are faster, something significant has changed, and I understood that it was how I was pressurizing my system and it started with my foot” “In ice skating you have to create enough pressure to turn ice into water” “With sprinting, because it’s such a short amount of time in contact with the ground, you can have unwanted vibrations, that’s not a good thing if you are a distance runner” “The easy thing to do (to integrate pressure) is to train your feet on firm surfaces… in a gym setting it’s easy to use soft surfaces; something like an Airex pad is going to teach your foot to respond slowly” “Your (foot) will work harder on the clay brick than the cement brick” “It’s a fine line, how can I push to the edge of elasticity and not break? If you l

Today’s guest is neurology expert, consultant and personal trainer, Scott Robinson. Scott is an Applied Movement Neurology Master practitioner and has worked successfully with all levels of neurological complexity in his time training and coaching a wide variety of clients. Scott is a specialist in dealing with a variety of neurological issues, such as weakness, pain, range of motion and trauma to the emotional systems, amongst many others. Scott is a former Taekwondo athlete and has more than 20 years of experience in Applied Movement Neurology. The element of training and performance that truly defines who has achieved their highest potential, is the mastery of their mental and emotional state. The state of the mind, the way we drive attention to what we are doing, how we affirm our actions, and how we light up our neurological system all play a large role in the training results we get, how we enjoy the process, and ultimately how we grow from it on multiple levels. On today’s podcast, Scott Robinson talks about the power of self-affirmation and mental reinforcement in the roles of training and rehabilitation, as well as how novelty plays into those affirmations. He also gets into visual training methods that link with physical training outputs, warmup methods to improve the neurological quality of the session, working with one’s subconscious mind, harnessing the placebo effect in training, and more. Today’s episode is brought to you by LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance, Lost Empire Herbs and Strength Coach Pro. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:36 – Scott’s shoulder injury he sustained mountain biking, and some methods he used to dramatically accelerate his recovery 14:07 – Getting into the “infinity loop” concept of walking and focus, and how eye position drives neuromuscular activity 17:00 – Mental techniques like self-reinforcement, “Gauntlet 40’s” and the role of novelty in drawing the attention of the brain into a higher state 20:18 – Methods that can be used early in a training session to maximize learning later on 32:36 – Moving eye-based ball movements that individuals can use to improve their warmup component 38:12 – Thoughts on athletes and individuals who may need more vs. less neurological intervention and special exercises in their training program 42:49 – Scott’s take on yelling “I am the Greatest!” before an explosive effort, or similar self-affirmations 59:45 – Ideas for athletes whose subconscious mind blocks or sabotages their conscious mind in their game and athletic performance 1:09:24 – Thoughts on music’s impact on the brain in terms of its tempo and impact on emotions 1:16:50 – Considerations on self-judgment of elements within the training session Scott Robinson Quotes “The first words that came out (when I saw my son after I broke 2 ribs and separated my shoulder) were 'I am fine'” “I had a greater output of strength in 3 months than before I had the injury” “The things that I did were holding gratitude all the way through the injury… and through the process making sure I was keeping the whole system fired up and stimulated and looking to make new connections around the musculature” “My filler exercises were all of the kinds of activities that were going to drive increased attention, increased alternates, that sets the stage for neuro-plasticity, so that when you come back to whatever you are doing, the brain is ready to make new connections” “If you want to get the best out of yourself, you have to set the conditions in the mind so that you get the best result” “Depending on the eye position you use, you can target specific fibers” “The only brain that changes itself is the brain that’s paying attention… novelty is key” “(To enhance learning) use something along the lines of mobility flow; we tap on my favorite brain area, the supplementary motor cortex which literally pulls together all of the parts of the body that are going to be required for what the motor plan is going to be” “If you are doing a mobility flow that you have done 1000 times before, there is a program for that so it’s not going to have the same effect” “In neurology, anything you can do that’s an effective level of stacking, then you are improving things, you are potentiating the drill” “Horizontal (eye saccades) you are going to fire up more of your extensor chain musculature, and the vertical one you are going to fire up more of your flexor chain musculature” “I’m a big fan of stacking controlled articular rotation through the spine, particularly through the cervical spine” “You can get in a quadruped, bounce the ball, and catch it with the other hand (to get the visual response more involved in conjunction with a physical task)” “(My son) only needed a belief (prior to a race)… That is not w

Today’s guest is track coach Ryan Banta. Ryan has over two decades of experience, is the author of the Sprinter’s Compendium, and is a MTCCCA Hall of Fame Coach. He is a frequently appearing podcast guest and writer on many popular track and field, and athletic performance platforms. His teams have achieved substantial success, including winning the 2022 girls Class 4 Missouri State Championship. One of the beautiful things about working with human beings is that there are multiple ways to train athletes towards their highest physical potential. Different coaches achieve success with different training parameters and exercise selections, mannerisms and personal styles. At the same time, there are also some core philosophies to the entire process of training that are foundational to progression, and can make training more understandable. Some of the over-arching principles that are helpful to study are those of core training cycle setup, training the “ends” vs. the “center”, and principles of progression and variety in a program. By better understanding these core ideas, we can have a better idea of where we are starting, and where we are heading in a program. On today’s show, Ryan gets into the core philosophies and principles of the Critical Mass training program in track and field, which is a broad-spanning path of development from freshman to senior that incorporates a span of abilities ranging from hurdles to the 400m. Ryan then gets into his speed training philosophy, taking a “centrist” path to speed, and how that differs from going “ends to middle”, or taking a block-based approach to a training season. Ryan goes extensively into concepts around his 14-day speed training cycle, how he adds variety into his program, how he utilizes resisted sprinting, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs, Strength Coach Pro, and the Elastic Essentials Online Course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:35 – How Ryan’s recent track seasons have been coming along, and some of the recent successes of his track and field group 14:40 – The core components of Ryan’s speed training blocks and cycles, particularly his 14-day training cycle 24:18 – How Ryan includes the hurdles early on for his freshmen athletes, to help set up their skills throughout their high school career 42:15 – Ryan’s take on a balanced an athletic approach to 400m training, and his approach as they progress through high school 46:29 – Philosophy of going “ends to middle” vs. being more of a centrist in training 54:38 – How to avoid staleness over time while using a “centrist” system that is regularly training all main athletic qualities, and how to use constraints and novelty to improve one’s sprinting technique 1:03:50 – Ryan’s take on Tony Wells training system 1:12:16 – Ryan’s take on sled training and resisted sprinting Ryan Banta Quotes “I never build my sprint program around 7 days, we need to go 14 days” “Throughout the program, I believe in resting the system, but not necessarily resting the athlete” “I like to start in the middle, so I am going to start in the 200-400m area in my training, and then play with systems below that (100-200 focused days), and above that (more 400-800m days)” “Monday we might do max velocity and acceleration, Thursday of week do I am going to have something like looks like that again, but in the meantime there are going to be other sessions where those qualities get ticked off of the box” “You are either race modeling or competing every Saturday; competitions are your best practice” “I think that hurdles, by far is one of the best things. Our distance girls at the end of every one of their aerobic runs does hurdle mobility, our sprinters hurdlers and jumpers every Wednesday does hurdle mobility. We teach them to bounce, they don’t just step over” “This is the point of the critical mass system, I want to make decathletes, I want my athletes to be good at everything” “I want to make sure I’m honoring the athletic experience by stimulating them like they are a heptathlete, like they are a decathlete” “Running 24x200’s is an abuse of a developmental athlete” “I have two days in a 14 day micro-cycle where we are going really really fast and then two competitions” “With short-to-long the psychology is that I don’t want to go run a 150 now, while my philosophy is lets rip the bandaid off on all of those things” “You flip flop the key performance indicator workouts the following week; I have a week that’s built around speed, a week that’s built around power, a week that’s built around endurance, and then a recovery week” “We’ll do a fly 10,20,30 with different variations of movement, f

Today’s guest is athletic performance coach and consultant, Sam Portland. Sam has had a lengthy career in professional sport, and is the creator of “Speed Gate Golf” and the Sports Speed System. Sam provides mentorship and education to coaches, athletes and teams looking to further progress their abilities. His combination of skills ranges from physical coaching, to sport coaching, athlete psychology and beyond. With the impending AI and technological revolution, we must ask ourselves questions regarding the nature of coaching, training and progression in athletics. On one hand, we have numerical outputs and data points relative to an athlete’s abilities, workloads, and suggested training routes, and on the other we have the social-emotional and intuitive elements that are much more human by nature. In a sense, what is the most human about coaching itself is the “conversation of training” that happens on multiple levels within any training session. For today’s podcast, we cover the types of intensity and mentality that go into playing various sports (such as Rugby vs. American Football), Sam’s take on sport training technology, such as force-velocity profiling, an athletes “speed age” and how athletes progress through each level, and finally, we’ll get into the 5 types of player archetypes that range from bodybuilder, to sprinter, and how coaches can identify and optimize training for each unique athlete they train. This is a show that highlights how having experience and skin in the game, not only training, but also playing the game Today’s episode is brought to you by LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance, Lost Empire Herbs and Strength Coach Pro. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:29 – Sam’s experience working with, and playing American Football in Europe 8:00 – The types of intensity that is present in different types of sports, such as continuous sports (rugby, soccer) vs. interval sports (American football) 18:12 – Sam’s thoughts on Force Velocity profiling and technology in speed and game-speed training 30:41 – What Sam values in a speed and game-speed training program as opposed to a more data-oriented, mechanistic approach to speed 37:15 – Thoughts on heavy sled training and heavy resisted training in general 44:06 – Sam’s take on “Speed Age” in athletes, and how he looks at speed training progressions over time 59:13 – The importance of complexity and psychology in the process of coaching, and the conversation that happens between coach and athlete 1:06:50 – The 5 archetypes of athletes Sam categorizes and considers through the sport and physical preparation process 1:18:18 – Approaching the “games player” archetype in particular from a physical preparation perspective Sam Portland Quotes “With American football, one of the toughest things was that the play wasn’t building in front of me (like Rugby), the play was building behind me” “How do people become successful coaches? It is intuition, and it is getting reps on the field” “Nothing’s changed in the last 30 years, it’s the experience of the coach that creates the change, and we should do that by playing, 100%” “In part, the strength and conditioning problem is that everyone wants to develop speed, but they start in the gym” “I got more guys that run over 21 miles per hour, just by doing long accelerations, and specialized developmental exercises that I stole from Verkhoshansky” “I believe we are in the tech age… you remember when the first computer came out, we are literally there” “Movement is a conversation… everyone watches a wave break, but they don’t watch the magic that happens when it builds” “I had an athlete who could squat 250 kilos, and that was great, but it didn’t translate. Someone like this I’ll use a stable to unstable continuum. The most unstable thing you can do in moving is over-speed maximal velocity. On the other side is a slow, deliberate wall squat, acceleration type drill” “We increase instability and add velocity in order to nurture that conversation” “Big guys struggle to find knee flexion in early acceleration, because they are so big” “In my coaching, I’m never trying to acquire more information about what I’m doing, until I know what information I have can do” “People are very attracted to shiny things, not the simple, consistent things” “You’ve got 4 levels of speed age: Learning to sprint, training to sprint, sprinting to compete, and sprinting to win” “We’ve got physical capacities, we’ve got technical capacities and cognitive capacities” “If we can’t find rhythm, timing coordination at sub-max velocities, how the hell are you going to find it when putting your foot to the floor” “So if slow, heavy sled walks are working, do them until they stop working” “I had a prop, a big prop forward, and he would literally

Today’s guest is Jeremy Frisch. Jeremy is the founder and performance director of Achieve Performance Training in Clinton, Mass. He has been a multi-time guest on the show on the topics of youth and long-term physical development, game-play, and the integration of all these things into a greater training philosophy. Jeremy is one of my biggest influences in how I see and connect the child to scholastic to adult continuum of sport development and performance. As much as coaching is prescriptive on the level of exercises and progressions, it is even more intuitive in nature. So often we seek the exact exercises, drills, and cues that will help athletes to achieve more specific strength or a better technique. These are helpful in key situations for athletes, but we must also build and understand a bigger picture (by coaching in many different sport situations and developmental stages), which helps us break into more expansive ways of seeing the picture of athleticism. On today’s show, Jeremy gets into how his work from the spectrum of youth training, up to adult fitness has improved his general ability to coach and implement creative solutions for athletes. He’ll cover important developmental steps in early childhood that lay a foundation for improved abilities later on, and then get into games, field size and game speed elements of sport. Finally, we’ll finish off the show with a chat on concepts of creative and engaging training, as well as a take on how the traditional strength and conditioning type mentality may serve some athletes well, where others may find more confidence in their game and sport skill abilities. Today’s episode is brought to you by LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance, Lost Empire Herbs and Strength Coach Pro. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:33 – How Jeremy runs his adult fitness classes in comparison to his youth and scholastic training sessions – How Jeremy views game-speed, in young athletes, and as they move through maturity 28:11 – How a child’s strategy and disposition based on formative years leads to the type of athlete they become later on (i.e. offensive, defensive, hustle/grinder type) 37:42 – How to manipulate field sizes and playing spaces in sport development 47:44 – Using creativity to make training more engaging for the athlete, and how to keep the game-like nature of movement in training 53:22 – Jeremy’s thoughts on the traditional strength and conditioning mentality working better for some athletes vs. others 1:05:37 – Aerial ability and training, and how it relates to general athleticism Jeremy Frisch Quotes “We replaced box jumps for adults, with step-up jumps” “That’s what I tell younger coaches who walk through our doors, you might not love it, but realize that the group you are working with is going to make you a better coach down the line” “When a baby is born, you have an opportunity to put a baby in an environment to be a competent mover… and that’s floor time, belly time” “The floor is the child’s neurological workshop… when you put the baby on the floor, or in a playpen and you just leave them alone, they are going to figure out how to lift their head, push off the ground, reach and move” “The great thing about a crash mat is that it (gives safety) so now kids are going to try a million different ways to land” “If you set up those early years in life for them to become a competent mover, then you have a great foundation to build on later on” “Let’s say you get some kids and put them in basketball, and they are OK, but you put them in soccer in that wide open space, they see the field and understand soccer more than they do in a closed space” “That transition leaving baseball into football, they might be like, I don’t know if I want to play this year, I always get that thing, but 2 weeks into football they are like, this is the best, I’m glad baseball is over” “Well play a game of tag with the kids, but make the space really small, which puts the priority on change of direction; then we’ll expand the field and put more priority on speed and hard stops” “I can only do so many hurdle jumps in the summer before I need to turn the hurdle jump into a dive roll and sprint” “I miss covid because you had to be outside with athlete, and you had to get creative; I would put medicine balls and sticks in my truck” “We’d start linking exercises together, and we found kids really enjoyed putting those pieces together, and set by set changing the activity we were doing, and it made training a lot less monotonous and a lot more fun, and they really would focus more” “I have a high school (football) group that comes in every day and they just lift for 2 hours… they just want to lift, and I can’t get rid of them, that’s all their mindset is.. if I took them and told them th

Today’s guest is Cody Bidlow. Cody is currently the head track & field coach at Arcadia High School in Phoenix, AZ, and a coach at EliteU working with NFL combine prep athletes. Cody additionally owns SprintingWorkouts.com and the ATHLETE.X brand, where he runs educational content on speed and power training to a large audience. He was an all-conference sprinter at Grand Canyon University, and continues to train and sprint competitively. I’ve had a lot of sprint and speed training shows as part of this podcast series. Speed training is an important aspect of both track and field and team sport. Additionally, the principles of training speed, pushing a human being to the limit of a skill they have been using their whole life, requires an integrative and thorough process, the principles of which can carry over to any athletic pursuit. For today’s show, Cody shares insights on motor learning concepts in sprinting, the consequence of overemphasizing sprint motions or strength training, the role of longer, more metabolic sprinting on total speed development, ideas on “impulse” strength in the gym, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by LILA Exogen Wearable Resistance, Lost Empire Herbs and Strength Coach Pro. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:37 – Cody’s athletic journey and how it has impacted him as a coach 9:36 – Questions Cody has asked in his own training journey that have helped him as a coach 16:47 – The type of sprinter that Cody is, and his learning about his own training response 24:41 – Why “over-projecting” in sprint acceleration can be a problem, and how that wasn’t the most successful strategy for Cody 28:09 – Experimenting at the “poles” or extremes of a sport skill, in order to find a better middle point 32:24 – Rationale and context of various sprint drills and exercises, and how to connect technical movements with a higher intensity sprint 36:03 – Using longer sprints, and “more work” in the 15-40 second bracket of training to help one’s overall speed and power abilities 47:33 – Principles on the maximal amount of longer running that Cody would put in a program 51:07 – How the mental and emotional elements of competition can enable better performance in longer sprints 59:59 – The “finisher” mentality in speed and power training and the complimentary impact of a metabolic element in a program 1:06:27 – A discussion on general and specific elements in the weight room for sprinting speed 1:15:41 – Over-pushing in sprinting, in light of the principle of “impulse” 1:17:19 – Cody’s take on the “push” type cue Cody Bidlow Quotes “Something led to that (sprint) position, that might have been a timing issue, that might have been a posture issue” “For me, if I do a bunch of deep squatting, I get super slow, for some, it might make them faster” “I’ve leaned in more to trusting intuition, and not outsourcing to other people as to the right way to do it… you have to trust in your own ability, not just rely on a famous coach that said what to do” “In learning to become better at speed endurance I’ve had to learn things like, not forcing stride frequency but letting stride frequency occur, locking in my posture” “In acceleration, one thing that disrupted me for a long period of time, was purely focusing on projection, and the big shapes idea” “By finding (movement) extremes, it opens up your abilities and gets you out of stereotyped movements, and that’s when progress stalls” “You aren’t doing a drill because it’s going to make you faster, you do a drill to work on one small feeling, and then we take that (feeling) into the sprint” “I think that there’s a skill development aspect of longer runs, simply by virtue of having more steps, you are doing more reps of the specific skill” “There is something to be said about including longer sprinting in your training, just don’t go overboard with it” “It would be unwise to overlook that a great number of athletes who compete at a high level do a significant amount of longer sprinting in some form” “Most of the time, I look at the longest they are going to run (for their race), and then I shorten it up just a little bit” I’ll just finish (an acceleration session) by 1x150, or 1x90, so that way I’m incorporating speed endurance through a longer portion of the year, but the dose is not very high” “If we can build up a huge volume wins in practice, feeling good in practice, that’s what’s going to lead to feeling good in competition and being able to express their abilities” “What do you want your body to remember, the fastest rep, or the slowest rep?” “You get a lot out of doing 1 rep (of a speed endurance run, like a 150m)” “Last year I was (really strong in the deep squat) but was running slower in acceleration than I had in multiple years” “I b

Today’s guest is Austin Jochum. Austin is the owner of Jochum Strength where he works with athletes and washed-up movers to become the best versions of themselves. He also operates the Jochum Strength Insider which is an online training platform for people trying to feel, look, and move better. Austin has a diverse athletic background, from being an All-American lineman and MIAC indoor weight throw champion, to regularly pushing his movement capabilities to new levels in arenas such as rock climbing, dunking and slow-pitch softball leagues. An interesting thing about the “athletic performance” field is that traditionally, it doesn’t work on things that are highly “athletic”, as strength training protocols can be some of the more controlled elements in the entirety of an athlete’s training regime. This control and scalable nature is often reflected in the way that rudimentary plyometric, speed and agility protocols are carried out at scale, as per the same nature as a controlled and measurable strength regiment. Having a controlled strength stimulus for an advanced athlete who is already a master of their sport skill is a helpful tool for managing tissue strength and balance, but for developing athletes going into “sports performance” programs, the ability to improve one’s skill building ability in a meaningful, athletic, problem-solving and creative manner is often lacking. In today’s podcast, Austin goes into the breakdown of finding low-hanging fruits of athletic performance in athletes and the philosophy of creating “skill-building addicts”. We get into self-learning concepts, over-coaching, and then the nuts and bolts of his weekly flow of movement and game-speed building methods. We also finish with a lightning round that covers a variety of topics and ideas Austin is working on right now in the training space. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro and Lost Empire Herbs For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:53 – The processes by which Austin shifted his typical, controlled warmup process, into a more dynamic training experience 7:32 – How Austin doing athletic things himself has had a strong impact on his coaching 11:13 – How Austin assesses an athlete from a global perspective, as soon as they walk in the door of his training facility, and how he challenges athletes who can’t handle losing, or haven’t won much in their sport experience 24:31 – The role of confidence gained from the gym, vs. having confidence in one’s sport abilities 31:48 – How Austin looks at how much time he would spend on gym strength vs. play based skills vs. perception work for athletes, based on need 41:15 – How athletes perceive difficult and challenging situations in their environment, and how to break athletes out of their typical athletic, problem-solving world-view 50:23 – Cues, coaching and creating a training environment that helps athletes to self-learn 1:02:03 – Austin’s weekly training setup, including games, speed and strength work 1:09:17 – Austin’s 5 greatest tools in developing movement and agility 1:13:34 – The training topic that interests Austin the most right now 1:17:14 – What “fast” means to Austin 1:18:06 – What Austin thinks about the term “arm care” 1:19:26 – The gnarliest isometric hold Austin is doing right now Austin Jochum Quotes “What makes them athletes is destroying movement challenges” “The worst athletes in the room could A-Skip, and the best athletes in the room could A-Skip” “If it looks pretty, it’s for you, it’s not for them” “I’ll put a guy who is easily triggered by losing, on a team that he knows he is going to lose. The goal is to level the athlete up and challenge them… the athlete who has only been exposed to winning” “I’ve never seen an athlete get more confidence in their pass-rush moves, who didn’t have a pass rush move, by lifting more weights” “I have yet to have a college football player come to me who doesn’t know how to produce force” “What most people need to do is what they are bad at, but nobody wants to do that” “I want to create addicts of skill acquisition, and you really need to create an environment around that” “A person that suffers from trauma, one of the worst things that happens to them is they don’t play any more, and when you don’t play you can’t imagine, and when you can’t imagine you can’t move forward at all” “Go ask a great athlete what they are imagining in their head” “I’m not going to take that (lifting) drug away from them” “If you have students that you’ve created to not ask questions, then that automates your life as coach. They aren’t asking questions and that’s super easy for you” “As soon as my coach started to pay more attention to me, he gave me more cues, and as soon as he gave me more cues, it made me a worse thrower” “I like a

Today’s podcast is a Q&A episode with Joel Smith. Joel is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance/track coach in Cincinnati, Ohio. He hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and in 2021, released the integrative training course, “Elastic Essentials”. Questions for this podcast revolved around high velocity and oscillating exercise concepts, acceleration and sprint development, training arrangement, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials Online Course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Topics: 3:47 – CNS “firing rate” and trainability. 14:18 – What differences between tension release OC ISO and rhythmic ISO, and when to use one vs. the other? 20:27 – What phase of training is ideal for using overcoming isometrics? 25:47 – Can a reduction in bodyweight allow for someone to be more elastic? 28:02 – Thoughts on non-linear periodization for max sprint work. 33:23 – To what age can one sustain high level explosive athleticism, assuming one stays active? 40:45 – It is really necessary to be fully recovered for every jump training session, or is fatigue needed to induce adaptations? 53:43 – Thoughts on internal and external cues in teaching acceleration. 58:33 – Giving athletes variation from intensity in regards to MaxV work. 1:04:51 – Drills for delayed knee extension out of blocks, but with a focus on projecting the hips. 1:09:59 – 3 training books I think we should read that are often left out of typical answers. 1:15:46 – Take on mental prep/race execution for track athletes. About Joel Smith Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance/track coach in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and in 2021, released the integrative training course, “Elastic Essentials”. He currently trains clients in the in-person and online space. Joel was formerly a strength coach for 8 years at UC Berkeley, working with the Swim teams and professional swimmers, as well as tennis, water polo, and track and field. A track coach of 15 years, Joel coached for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club for 7 years, and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault and multi-events on the collegiate level, working at Wilmington College, and the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, along with his current work with master’s, high school and collegiate individuals. Joel has had the honor of working with a number of elite athletes, but also takes great joy in helping amateur athletes and individuals reach their training goals through an integrative training approach with a heavy emphasis on biomechanics, motor learning, mental preparation, and physiological adaptation. His mission through Just Fly Sports is: “Empowering the Evolution of Sport and Human Movement”. As a former NAIA All-American track athlete, Joel enjoys all aspects of human movement and performance, from rock climbing, to track events and weightlifting, to throwing the frisbee with his young children and playing in nature.

Today’s guest is Richard Aceves. Richard is an innovative movement specialist with a diverse athletic background. After a mountaineering near death experience at an early age, he worked his way back to health and training capacity, eventually working towards becoming an elite powerlifter, professional GRID athlete, and has experience in a variety of strength and movement practices. Richard is a coach, mentor, education and pioneer in the world of movement in context of the human experience. There are always going to be pendulum swings in any profession, and sport performance is no exception. On the level of conditioning, success in sport is more about skill, tactics, speed, confidence than the adaptation acquired from grinding out tough conditioning sessions. At the same time, there is a mental, physical and emotional gold that can be found, when the body is pushed to its limits. Using physical exploration and stressors with purpose can provide a far fuller and more rewarding experience to each individual, allowing them to level up in new ways that go beyond sport, into life itself. On today’s podcast, Richard covers his near-death experience and injury that kickstarted his journey into the inner aspects of human performance. Throughout the episode, Richard covers the physical, mention and emotional aspects of training, and how training can be modulated to address each of these important elements of both athletic ability, and our human experience. Richard goes into his warmup process, and breaks down the dynamics of a “good” and “poor” conditioning session, and how to better facilitate the conditioning process. Being able to get into the “present-minded” state is one of the most important elements in both training, and in life, and Richard goes into this concept heavily in this episode. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro and Lost Empire Herbs For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:25 – What sparked Richard’s journey in mental and emotional states of training 12:28 – How the mental and emotional elements of coaching make it far more than regurgitating information 17:06 – The importance of specific mental emotional preparation to meet the demands of one’s sport 27:23 – Richard’s take on the survivor ability of the human body, and how he views the purpose of the warmup 35:48 – How mental state impacts one’s learning and adaptation in training 44:11 – Defining the physical, mental, and emotional elements of training 52:03 – Physical, mental and emotional components that go into the warmup process, as well as in more skilled sport movement, and Richard’s take on why pickup basketball is such a fantastic warmup process 1:02:08 – A practical example and explanation of how Richard takes his group through a training session, as well as the applications of music Richard will take on for the session based on the training type 1:14:44 – Links between muscles and related emotional states within muscles 1:24:00 – How Richard uses timers or songs to help keep pace in his training sessions 1:28:18 – What Richard considers to be good vs. excessive and poor conditioning Richard Aceves Quotes “We all understand that your best performances are when aligned emotionally” “We cannot pretend that performance at any matter, is a purely physical standpoint, it is mental, but it’s not mental only; the emotional component is the communication between the physical and the mental in order to have the emotional expression” “All training needs to have a combination of physical, mental and emotional stimulus” “You cannot perform at your top percentile, without safety and confidence” “When you put people through training sessions, how much is being done by the athlete, versus being “survived” by the athlete” “Athletes want to show you that they can complete any task possible, they are amazing at surviving anything” “I’m trying to get awareness and blood-flow into these muscles, higher neural connections to these muscles… and then we can apply it to the skill” “For me, the exercise is the byproduct, the center part is the stimulus” “In order to achieve the proper stimulus, you need to be connected to that person” “We have this hierarchy of the nervous system, where you stop trying to be creative at your sport, and are only focusing on objective means, then you are no longer getting better” “You do need some data point, but that needs to be balanced out with intuition, with presence, curiosity and creativity” “For (physical training elements) I will always select low skill exercises, such as sleds, because the mind will always quit before the body. If I use a low skill exercise, I can push the intensity, and you’ll quit, and I’ll ask, why did you quit?” “You’ll understand you are having a great emotional workout when you

Today’s guest is Nick DiMarco. Nick has been the director of sports performance at Elon University since 2018, and is a leader in the realms of high-performance ideology. He is both a former professional athlete (NY Jets and Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker in 2014), and has a Ph.D in Health and Human Performance. In addition to being well versed in the intuitive aspects of athleticism, Nick is skilled at applying logical models to a high-performance training environment. He has been a guest on multiple episodes of this podcast, speaking on the physical preparation process with a focus on American football. In the preparation of an athlete, all roads must ultimately lead towards the specificity, chaos and decision making of the sport itself. The days of putting outputs on a pedestal (such as a squat max or “canned” SAQ score), are still with us, but integrative coaches are seeing the higher-links within the total training equation, and the win-loss column. Ultimately, a good sports performance program never loses sight of the ultimate goal, which is to prepare players towards their sport as well as possible. If you caught the recent episode with strength coach, turned football coach Michael Zweifel, this message likely hits on an even deeper level. On today’s show, Nick gives an overview on the Elon football team’s performance over the last few years, and the integrative factors that contributed to their recent success and low injury rates. He gives his evolving take on the important elements to cover in preparing players for the speed and movement demands of the game of football, including acceleration, maximal velocity and agility/change of direction. In this episode, Nick goes in depth on his weekly speed and strength training format, talks about the metrics he measures, gives his take on deceleration training, and much more. Nick’s ideas are both cutting-edge, and incredibly pragmatic, useful for any sports performance coach. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro and Lost Empire Herbs For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 2:41 – An overview of how the last season went for Elon football 4:50 – What strength/sport coach interactions need to be prioritized for the high performance model to be maximally effective 12:47 – Nick’s updates or thoughts on the game-speed agility model that in the last several years 23:19 – Psychological aspects of perception-based game-speed training for Nick’s athletes 28:54 – Nick’s weekly offseason training format, and his balance of more traditional “tempo” running, versus more specific sprint conditioning for his players 40:18 – What metrics Nick measures and gives feedback to the players on 45:38 – How Nick looks at things like “deceleration training”, relative to chaotic change of direction 51:23 – Nick’s take on the agility categories (mirror, dodge chase, score) in context of other sports, such as court sport 53:57 – Where Nick recommends sports performance coaches to expand their knowledge base, in regards to the breadth of the field, as well as the sports they are working with 57:42 – How being a father to young children has impacted Nick’s athletic performance process 1:02:18 – If Nick had to pick between wearing a shmedium polo shirt, waving a towel, or warming up with jumping jacks on the whistle, which would he pick, and why? Nick DiMarco Quotes “We had very low injury rate for us, and I think strength coaches want to pat themselves on the back and say that was their job, but it goes hand in hand with our head coach, he does a great job with his practice design, and doing everything to maximize our weekly layout, keeping guys at healthy and fresh as possible” “Anything that is physical related, we should try to inter-twine with the sport coach as much as possible” “You can do a great job in the weight room for your portion of the year, but if you pass the baton, and you are no longer involved, (sport coaches) hammer the guys with volume, and every day is physical contact, you are going to have injuries and issues no matter how your offseason went” “Early on I valued (general speed) too much… (now being more specific) we’ve had more of a reduction in our injuries and we are giving them the exact stress they are going to feel on the field, appropriate doses, and that is the best agility work they are going to get” “We’ll hit our 8 vector tempos, so it’s in different directions instead of just being linear” “You don’t want to replicate a garbage scenario for the sake of it being specific” “Psychological stress is an element you need to have in your conditioning in some way… there’s a lot more that goes into rest than just standing there” “Monday our max velocity day is more rate of force driven. Tuesday we will hit some linear tempo with a decent

Today’s podcast features Henk Kraaijenhof. Henk has several decades of experience as a performance coach in a broad array of sports. His coaching credentials include working track athletes such as Nelli Cooman (former 60m dash world record holder), Merlene Ottey, and Troy Douglas as well as elite team sport competitors. His specialties are physical and mental coaching, stress and stress management, technology, and the methodology or training. In addition to world-level performance, Henk’s coaching has also bred longevity, as Ottey and Douglas ran world class times in their 40’s. In the current coaching age, it’s easy to think that because we are doing “new” looking drills, have increased our data collection, and have created various technical models of sport skill, we have a massive edge on what athletes were doing 50 years ago. At the same time, general trends in injury rates and performance markers should have us thinking twice (for example, Bob Hayes running 9.99s in the 100m in 1964 on a chewed up cinder track). At the end of the day, it is more “core” elements of training philosophy that stand the test of time, and help us to better understand the needs of the athlete in front of us. On today’s show, Henk digs into speed training through the decades, and how many perceived “new school” elements, are actually much older than we think they are. He talks about how he approaches “technical models” of sport skill (sprinting specifically), coaching the current generation of athletes, and where our modern world is heading in general on the level of technology. He talks about the skill of patience in our current coaching environment, and shares some key philosophical ideas on the nature of coaching track and team sport athletes, and what we can learn from nature itself. Finally, Henk gives his views on his own current technology use in his coaching role. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro and Lost Empire Herbs For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:18 – What prompted Henk’s return to coaching sprinting, and key themes he has brought from his learnings in the hiatus 16:58 – Henk’s take on coaching sprint technique, technical models, and a “no system” approach 24:31 – Where and how Henk looks to make changes in an athletes training, and mistakes he made in the past listening to other coaches and opinions 31:44 – Henk’s take on the current generation of athletes from his perspective, as well as the role of technology in modern society in general 38:08 – Philosophy of the role of sport in modern society, and what Henk really values in the process of athletic training and performance 50:16 – Autocratic vs. democratic forms of coaching, and impacts on performance 54:54 – How much technology Henk uses today in coaching a single athlete, versus coaching multiple athletes as a younger coach 1:05:42 – Henk’s view of nature in training, and both observation Henk Kraaijenhof Quotes “One difference is that you can film everything now (vs. 2004), everything has become more focused on data processing than before; the smartphone took away a bit of the human aspect of it” “You see a lot of people trying to hit the track really hard now, you see a lot of hamstring injuries, after this trend came” “You don’t have a frontside (mechanic) without a backside (mechanic)” “If you go against your natural preference (in sprinting) you might be in trouble” “We are lousy jumpers compared to the flea, the cat, the monkey” “Most coaches fall in love with their own school” “Why do you think it could be better if you change it; why is it not the most optimal way the athlete already chose?” “Patience is one thing that is readily declining” “I’m much more positive about the younger generation than most coaches” “Technology was our slave, and now we have reached a tipping point where we are a slave to technology” “Sports is life in condensed form” “I would never exchange one of my athlete’s silver medal for a gold medal, but pay the price of being mentally or physically wrecked by my workout, that’s not a price I am willing to pay” “Coaches are driven by the tendency to control, and the anxiety that an athlete doesn’t do enough” “There is always more risk involved in working on limitation, versus working on things that come naturally for you” “I can see how the workout is going to be when she enters the track” “At the end, you will see that old school becomes new school” “Monitoring without consequences is useless” “For athletes I don’t know, I would do more testing” “Technology has its limit in usefulness for us, now we have to be useful for technology” “We forget that philosophy is a foundation, it’s not the product of your training or going through the motions” Show Notes Bruce Lee, “No System” and the “Punch That Throws

Today’s podcast features movement focused strength and performance coach Julien Pineau. Julien is the founder of Strongfit, which started as a gym, and is now a full educational program for coaches and fitness/movement enthusiasts. Sports have been a part of Julien’s life since he was young, and he has athletic backgrounds in a variety of areas from competitive swimming, to mixed martial arts, strongman, and more. In 1993, Julien began his coaching career as a conditioning and grappling coach for the MMA gym where he trained and in 2008, he opened his own gym that focuses on strongman training. Julien has a fascinating ability to visualize and correct proper human movement patterns, and has worked with athletes from a wide variety of disciplines. He is a man on a journey inward as much as he is outward. The current world of training seems to exist on a level of “exercise proliferation” much more than it does digging into the main principles of human performance and adaptation. Coaches often times have their own favorite exercises and drills, and have athletes perform them to “technical perfection”, citing the ability to hit particular positions as a marker for program success. On today’s podcast, Julien Pineau goes into the fallacy of training athletes based on one’s preferred exercise selection, or technical positions, while rather viewing training on the level of the “human first”. Julien views training on the level of the entire athlete, and has exercise principles starting with the “inner most” human mechanisms. He gets into his ideas on internal and external torque chains extensively through this show, and describes how to fit muscle tensioning patterns to the needs of athletes in the realms of speed, strength and injury prevention. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:14 – Women’s work capacity and ability to adapt to chronic stress, relative to men, with the crossfit games competitors as an example 6:36 – How strength training setups may be modulated for females versus males in terms of extending work out over a longer period of time, versus more dense packets of work 9:16 – How one’s perception and attitude in a training session is a critical aspect of adaptation 11:27 – The importance of tension over position in strength and athletic movement 17:20 – The pros and cons of social media in athletic development 21:18 – The innate movement pattern element of sandbag training and its role in facilitating hamstring activation 23:17 – The origins of Julien’s thoughts on internal and external torque chains 33:51 – Squatting patterns in light of internal and external torques, and how sandbag lifting fits into the squat and hinge pattern and muscle activation 46:34 – Links between internal torque/external torque and sprinting, and practices in the gym that can lead to issues over a long period of time 54:19 – Olympic lifting and external torque, as it relates to block starts or sprinting 1:05:32 – Types of athletes who may be external torque chain dominant 1:07:56 – How the external torque chain fits with more sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system elements, while the internal torque chain fits with more parasympathetic elements 1:23:43 – How various body types will impact one’s squatting technique, with relation to internal and external torque 1:27:08 – Upper extremity sport (such as swimming) concepts in relation to internal and external torque production 1:32:06 – How to determine how an athlete’s body wants to squat, and how to tap into an individual’s squat technique Julien Pineau Quotes: “We always knew women needed more volume than the men, but the question was, how far are we pushing this?” “Men are very good at acute responses; in terms of constant stress women can take almost anything” “Winning matters… if every time you went into a workout you felt like you lost, forget the hormonal levels, you are not going to be successful in the long run” “Go to the world championship and you will not see two people squatting the same way, but they are squatting world records. The tension is the same, the position is not” “(As a coach) the less I gotta talk, the better we are doing” “Are you making them squat a barbell because it makes you look good, or because it’s necessary for the athlete?” “The position that comes to them is their position, not mine” “So you are supposed to create strength externally rotating to the outside, but how about rotating to the inside? Have you ever seen someone punching throwing his fist out (externally rotating)?” “It seems to me that either you go towards that (hara/center) point, or away from it, there seems to be two torque chains, one that goes towards the

Today’s podcast features Seth Lintz, a pitching performance coach, based out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Seth was a second-round pick in the 2008 MLB draft, carrying a maximal fastball speed of 104mph. Known as the “Pitching Doctor” on his social media accounts, Seth has trained over a dozen individuals to break the 100mph barrier in the past 2 years, using a progressive training system that combines a priority on neuro-muscular efficiency with intuitive motor learning concepts. Of all the high velocity activities humans can do, throwing a ball at high speed is the “fastest”, and is a truly special skill worth studying. Within a high-speed throw comes critical use of elasticity, explosiveness, levers, and fine-tuned coordination of one’s movement options. Seth is a coach who has a very high-level, innate feel for all of the factors it takes for a human being to achieve extreme throwing velocities, connecting elements of physical performance with skill acquisition, while integrating the all-important role of the mind. On the podcast today, Seth shares details from his early immersion in throwing mechanics, gives his take on the mental elements and kinesthetic, feeling-based elements of throw training. On the training end, he talks about the ability to “surge” and change speeds within a movement, the use of different training speeds, from super slow to over-speed, and developmental aspects of throwing with different weights and objects. Within the show, many connections are made to sprinting and human locomotion, and this is an episode that coaches from baseball to track, and in the spaces in-between, can find helpful in their process. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:34 – Details of Seth’s early start as an athlete, and his study of frame by frame pictures of Nolan Ryan and Pedro Martinez 11:49 – Thoughts on using visual references and positions in early athletic performance training, versus letting athletes build their technique off of instinct 20:50 – The mental element, and mental picture needed for an athlete to break velocity throwing barriers 24:26 – The critical skill of being able to feel in one’s own body, what a coach is trying to communicate visually 32:57 – Discussing the importance of different utilized speeds in high velocity training, from over-speed to extreme slow, and associating feeling with various velocities 39:22 – How athletes having too much awareness, or watching too much video of their throw, can actually present a problem in the learning process 44:42 – Tempo and “surges” of velocity in a fast throw 53:07 – Using different tools, weighted balls, and objects in nature to help an athlete connect to the feeling of intention in a throw, and the developmental boost that comes with it “Whenever I look at my throw now, I try to look for the kid in my throw” “With intent, your body will find its most efficient way to produce power at that given time” “Humans are infinitely capable at birth, and that moment is when the limitation process begins. Everything they see from that moment forward is limiting them from what they believe to be possible” “For humans, throwing is an evolved skill for both hunting and safety (fighting)” “What your body is doing, and what you feel like it is doing are often two different things” “A mental picture is not a single faceted thing, it is your mental relationship to throwing, because when you have a mental picture, it gives you a feeling too… it should at least” “Anytime you are planning, you are slowing down… that’s the job of a coach, how to get you as a student to be aware of the change that needs to be made, yet deliver it in a way that you can attach that adjustment to being in a more efficient position without planning for it… that’s a skill” “The kids that can feel the way that you look, and then they can put that into their movement; man, that’s when you have a kinesthetically aware athlete who can make progress really fast” “Mechanizing your movements and being afraid of a bad position, that’s not it either” “The feeling when you can make that crossover from picture to feeling, you can use it in your actual throw, because the throw is not a position, it’s a bunch of positions woven together” “In training, all speeds matter” “I see guys going through extreme slows all the time, and it doesn’t actually look like their throw; but it’s very revealing as to what their mental picture is of their throw, and what they are trying to do to create power” “Perfect mechanics start with intent, and emotion, and unadulterated form is purely thoughtless” “I don’t discuss with them what their mental picture is for the throw; I have them do things that g

Today’s podcast features strength coach, Zach Even Esh. Zach is the founder of the Underground Strength Gym, and has been a leading figure in creative and adaptive strength training means. He is also the host of the Strong Life podcast and the creator of many educational resources in the realm of human strength and performance. As the world moves forward, the world of training has become an interesting place, accelerated by the changing club sport scene, technological advances, social media, and more. At the same time, the actual human being performing the training hasn’t changed, and human beings have far more nuances to them than simply being based on the same concepts that a machine, such as a car, does. In many ways, human beings are being trained less and less like actual humans, and more as machines. Cones and ladders have replaced playing basketball or soccer. “Speed Training” has replaced running track, playing other sports, or racing friends on the playground. This isn’t to say that our collective intelligence hasn’t created a substantial leap forward in understanding training frameworks, but at the same time, increased intelligence doesn’t automatically equal understanding how to create the richest possible environment for an athlete. On the show today, Zach speaks on the importance of imperfect, and chaotic elements in training. We talk about how these elements are not just important with respect to the chaos of sport, but also in the level of how we are meant to adapt to training in general as human beings. He talks on the power of a nature-based training system, his menu-based training days, as well as what we can learn from training that “breaks the rules” or would be thought to create “sub-optimal” adaptations. Finally, Zach hits on the important elements of community in the world of sport, and the modern plague of business that has enveloped the schedules of kids, as well as society in general. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:23 – The branding of “underground strength” versus “speed” when it comes to marketing, and what sports parents are familiar with in performance 8:07 – What a ideal world of play and movement would (and does) look like for a uyoung athlete 15:48 – The nature of preparation based on nature and chaos, versus things needing to be neat 28:19 – How kids are doing more now days, with more coaches, yet accomplish less 38:13 – Keeping training as “rich” and dense as possible, so athletes can spend less total time in training, yet hone human qualities to a maximal level 42:13 – Zach’s menu-based workout system for his athletes 48:01 – The power of nature based, variable training to improve an athlete’s power outputs and general adaptation 1:10:23 – The value of community in one’s training environment as well as the value of training equipment with a history behind it, and the inspiration of using that “He’s playing soccer… that is speed and agility” “Sport has no absolutes, so when they are training, I want their body to feel comfortable in awkward positions” “That’s something software hasn’t brought to the table, kids learning how to compete” “My gym is located across the street from the park, so we’ll warm up with a game of ultimate football, and how do you get to the park? We partner up and you carry kettlebells or a heavy medicine ball; then we’ll segue into jumping and hand walking and crawling then we do a 5-point game, and then carry everything back” “We carried to the park, played, and carried back.. and they don’t even realize we are training” “Never before have I seen, and worked with kids who are so busy, yet achieve so little” “They played medicine ball dodgeball with a 6lb med ball, and I thought someone was going to get killed, but I just let them do it” “Let them do it wrong at least some of the time… so they have fun, so they are excited to train, and when I look back to those garage days, they worked a lot harder because of it” “They say 'I can’t deadlift heavy, put on my song!' but what about when you play football, and they are making fun of your mom, what are you going to say?” “You don’t want to train to be a workhorse, you want to train to be a racehorse” “What’s a little heartbreaking is kids always have to leave right away… they used to hang out and talk. Our football players, we didn’t use to do speed and agility with them because they used to play basketball at the local park” “We are always in a rush, and it kills the experience of sport” “If the kids want to do 7 or 10 deadlifts, go for it. They don’t think it’s bad, so

Today’s podcast features coach Michael Zweifel. Michael is the special teams coordinator, defensive backs coach and co-defensive coordinator for the UW-La Crosse football team. He is the former owner of the “Building Better Athletes” performance center in Dubuque, Iowa. Michael was the all-time NCAA leading receiver with 463 receptions in his playing days at University of Dubuque. He is also a team member of the movement education group, “Emergence”. Michael is a multi-time appearing guest on the Just Fly Performance Podcast, speaking on elements of sport movement and skill, ecological dynamics and more. It is interesting to consider our current format of sports performance training (strength coaching sessions in the weight room, sport coaching on the field, and a substantial degree of separation between the two), and if our current model will be the same one seen in 20 or 50 years in training. Michael has always been in both the strength and skill side of athletic performance, but has recently moved to a skill-side only element, in his move to football coaching at The University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse. For the show today, Michael talks a bit about what led him to close down his private-sector sports performance business, and move into only football-coaching. He’ll chat on the sport movement and ecological dynamics principles that he took with him into that football coaching job, and his vision for the strength program that would fit within his sport coaching role that is quite different than the norm in college sports. We’ll also chat on maximizing the transfer in speed work for sport, and the chaotic nature of adaptation and performance in sport, versus a more linear sequencing in traditional S&C settings. This show is one that will stretch our thinking regarding a lot of current beliefs and practices, and makes for a great conversation in the high-performance dynamic of sport. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:13 – How and why Michael moved from being a strength and physical preparation coach, to being a sport coach, coaching NCAA D3 football 7:51 – Michael’s counter-industry theory on use of the weight room for his football population 21:06 – How Michael’s motor learning background while he was working in the physical preparation field prepared him to coach football in the NCAA 24:08 – What a typical practice looks like for Michael’s training group 26:57 – Michael’s thoughts on general versus specific agility drills for athletes 35:46 – Thoughts on linear vs. variable patterns of adaptation in athletics and sport, versus a strength and conditioning setting 46:37 – Michael’s take on speed work that moves the needle the most, for team sport athletes, specifically football in this case “My issue with strength and conditioning is that we are all doing the same thing, so how can you separate yourself? To have a competitive advantage you can’t do what everyone else is doing” “You can accomplish those adaptations/results (tissue resiliency) without ever setting foot in a weight room” “The only tools (for my d-backs) I guess I would use would be a sled, a med ball, and a band, or a weighted vest” “I think coaches would be a lot better if they had to require 6 months of getting out of the weight room, and finding ways to get those similar adaptations without relying on a barbell that we are normally comfortable with” “In order to improve an athlete’s movement, they have to be put and placed in context, or an environment that retains a lot of variables they see in sport, which is live human bodies” “Do the activities you are having your athletes do look, feel, behave, like sport” “I’m constantly trying to keep those variables, rep without rep, representative task design, manipulating constraints” “For my individual training periods, we are always partnered up” “In ecological dynamics there are different time-scales for how people adjust to these drills (it’s not a purely linear progression)” “I think general agility games are super beneficial, and we did that all the way up through high school. But once you become more specialized in your sport, then the training has to become more specialized” “That’s more fun to me where week in, week out you are constantly having to change and adapt” “Athletes taking risk and adapting within movement, that’s what we should be rewarding” (For speed training for football players) “Find or create an activity that looks, feels, and behaves, like football” “You want to train max velocity, open up space, and open up time, to allow athletes to interact with that space and time” “I think it involves getting out of the weight room and studying the sport more… getti

Today’s episode features strength and performance coach DJ Murakami. DJ has over 15 years of experience in the coaching realm, and has a wide history of movement practice which includes work in bodybuilding, Olympic lifting, rock lifting, movement culture (such as Ido Portal), rock climbing and more. DJ has created training courses such as Chi Torque, the Predator Protocol, and others, and mentors coaches and fitness enthusiasts through his Human Strong training organization. In today’s strength and fitness world, it’s almost easier to tell individuals the things they shouldn’t do than what they should. Given all of the existing systems in strength and performance training, we can create excessive and robotic training programs that take us far from the core of our humanity, and therefore our potential to enjoy, connect with, and adapt to the work we are doing. DJ Murakami is a coach who has studied a massive number of systems and methods, as well as having trained, himself, in a large variety of movement and strength expressions. Through it all, DJ has acquired knowledge on how to make training as effective as possible for each individual without over complicating and over-coaching the process. On the podcast today, he shares his athletic and coaching background, and then goes into how his coaching has evolved into what it is today: a system that prioritizes the “quest” of those he is working with, within each session. He also shares his knowledge of the internal and external muscle torque system (created by Julien Pineau) which can not only simplify the way we look at exercise selection, and the purpose of various movements, but also gives us an effective way to help athletes and individuals embody and understand muscle tensioning in the scope of their athleticism. DJ is a wise coach who walks his talk on a high level in addition to his powerful training insights. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:32 – The systems and schools of thought DJ has gone through in his career as an athlete and coach 12:51 – DJ’s athletic background, and how his movement practices have helped form his coaching intuition 15:03 – How DJ structures and runs a session now, given his evolution as a coach, and how to allow them a “win” and a positive experience in the training session 20:56 – DJ’s take on coaching and influencing technique as an athlete moves forward in training 23:22 – Making things task oriented, and putting meaning and problem solving into the movement 29:54 – Using things like sandbags as opposed to using barbells in training 32:40 – The concept of internal vs. external torque chains in human movement and strength training 43:47 – Principles behind “chi-torque” and communicating principles of tension to the individual “The best seminar I ever took as far as gains after that leveled me up, was a Jon North seminar…. it was pretty much pumping us up all day, to fear nothing. I hit a bunch of PR’s” “Can you bias someone’s movement output without making it a cognitive task; I think that’s how we learn is stories” “I think people would be surprised at how much (changing mindset) before going into an experience will change things” “I made the mistake of over-coaching early on, no-cebo’ing people, and not building relationships… I learned the hard way of failing and figuring out that working with another human being and not fixing a car in the shop” “Create the least amount of cognitive barriers as possible (to training)” “The goal is always success, let them win at the workout” “With naming an exercise comes a baggage, a history of how they are supposed to do it, pain associated with doing it… that’s our industries fault of no-cebo’ing people to a big extent” “If you want to be successful on Instagram, just tear apart and bash something” “If I want someone to create more internal torque in pressing, I’ll just change the implement, like a sandbag” “Mind-muscle connection gets bashed a lot, but I think that’s really important on an experiential level” “A stone is a strength riddle, there is no metric to a stone, it’s about the task” “I like things that are a little more self-governing, than a barbell, in terms of ways you can do it” “Picking up a weight inside your hands with that false grip compression, is very natural, probably the only way we picked up things if you go back far enough” “If you are creating internal torque you are creating force towards the middle, kind of like compression” “With the torque model, it doesn’t go off of position or even rotation” “The tension in the musculature is what is defining the torque” “A yoke carry is a constraint that is always going to produce external torque” “Wh

Today’s episode features Kyle Waugh. Kyle is the owner of Waugh Personal Training and hosts the podcast “Waughfit Radio”. He started in fitness and rehab as a track and cross-country athlete and transitioned in his early 20s to a gym rat riddled with injuries. Kyle worked through his injuries, and after being told to never lift again and get surgery, he is now robust and pain free through the process of good training and movement. Kyle is a holistic movement and fitness specialist focused on optimizing the human experience. He looks to bridge the worlds of physical therapy and fitness together and get people living their best life, and is certified in both strength and conditioning and as a physical therapy assistant. We live in a world that is absolutely loaded with information. If you have an athletic performance need, or a pain/injury issue, you can instantly get hundreds of articles and many experts telling you what you should or shouldn’t do to improve. Based on the nature of information and marketing, most of us tend to be presented with more bells, whistles, and overall complexity than what we truly need to reach our next level in training or rehab. Wisdom is gained through personal experience, and Kyle has achieved that in spades, overcoming physical pain that would wake him up throughout the night, to becoming strong healthy and robust, while learning from some of the greatest minds and systems in the industry. On today’s podcast, Kyle goes through his athletic background, and how he got into, and out of pain in his own training. He’ll go through his own common-sense approach to overcoming movement limitations and how we need to “earn our complexity” in training and exercise. He’ll also cover the important idea of being “nocebo’ed”, or being told things are wrong with us may not be true, or matter in the grand scheme of our recovery, but if we believe it, can limit our progress. Later in the show Kyle gets into his favorite progressions and exercises in the scope of getting strong, while limiting negative adaptations, and how he moves through the ranks of movement intensity without getting overly complex. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:52 – Kyle’s athletic background where he competed in both cross country on a decent level, and track and field sprints and hurdles 7:45 – Unique, task-oriented workouts that Kyle’s old track coach used to have him do for his running work 16:07 – Kyle’s history of injury and pain, and being “nocebo’ed” by professionals in terms of what was wrong with him 23:29 – Kyle’s take on how he approaches exercises as perceived “silver bullets” in relation to the entire process of becoming a better athlete, or getting out of pain and being injury free 34:56 – How to take on an injury or athletic issue when the simplest solution doesn’t seem to be working for them 42:25 – How Kyle approaches heavily loading people who have a history of pain and injury, and how he sets goals for individuals in rudimentary strength exercises to set up for higher level strength exercises 51:06 – Kyle’s thoughts on heavier loading movements that have a high reward with a lower amount of risk from an injury and pain perspective “My coach would have you pick up a frisbee and throw it while running distance, time you, and have a reward for who did the best (a Gatorade)” “When you are moving, you are able to learn better” “As my (bro lifting) progressed, I thought that was going to make me faster, and as a year and a half progressed, that made me extremely slow” “I kind of had to say, “I don’t care about the pain”… your body learns how to be in pain after a while, so a lot of this pain, I had no actual tissue issues 5 years later, but my body was expecting pain, so that realization was game-changing.. am I actually hurting anything? Is it a tissue being hurt or damaged, or just my brain being concerned” “You shouldn’t chase after silver bullets; (David Grey said) these little things do exist, they can improve your performance a good amount, but they are just a foothold… make sure everything around it is moving with it” “When you are in pain, you are in debt; you need to build up your strength to break even, when you have enough money built up, you are a more robust resilient human” “Earn your complexity” “I’m trying to make someone a more resilient human, that’s the end goal. Anything we do that’s more complex should supplement that process, to become a more resilient human. Humans can run far, run fast, lift heavy stuff, and handle stressful events” “I’ll use a visual component to a breathing drill if someone really needs that, but you better believe I am going to load them up” “I do

Today’s episode features Dan Back. Dan is the founder of “Jump Science”, as well as the creator of the popular “Speed.Science0” page on Instagram. Dan coaches at Xceleration sports performance in Austin, Texas. He works with team sport athletes, as well as “pure output” sports, such as track and field, and dunk training. Dan reached an elite level in his own vertical jump and dunking ability, and has been helping athletes run faster, jump higher and improve overall physical performance for well over a decade. I first met Dan in my own time at Wisconsin, LaCrosse, where I was working on my master’s degree in applied sport sciences. One element of human outputs (sprinting, jumping, throwing, etc.) that I’ve found fundamental over the years is the idea of one’s strength/structure determining their technique they use. I found very quickly in my early track and field, as well as team sport ventures in jump and sprint technique, that getting an athlete to exhibit the technique you were asking for to surpass their old personal best almost never happened. Athletes would generally be using a technique that amplified their physical strengths and structure, and if you asked for a technique that took them away from that, performance would inevitably decline. At the same time, many coaches will approach sporting skills without regard to pre-existing strengths/structure, and that sport technique is a singular factor that relies only on a mental “computer program”. On today’s show, Dan gives his perspective on how athletes strengths (or weaknesses) show up in their sprinting technique, and how sprint technique will differ from one athlete to another as such. He’ll go in depth on building elasticity, plyometrics, building up an athlete’s vertical force capacities, give his take on sprint drills, and much more. Dan has a practical style, where his experimentation is backed by data, and results. This show is a deep dive, not just into important principles of performance, but also practical nuts and bolts on how to get more out of one’s athleticism on a high level. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:13 – Dan’s journey in training, as it started more so in jumping, and moving much more into sprinting and speed training over time 11:05 – An anecdote of an athlete who took .4 seconds off of his 40 yard dash in a short period of time via power training and high-density single leg bound/hops 16:56 – Single leg hopping and ability in explosive athleticism, and how to determine single leg elasticity, as well as considerations with single leg RSI as a high-transfer test to athleticism 26:42 – Dan’s take on sprint drills, in terms of their transfer to sprinting, and their value as an extensive plyometric 35:29 – The experimental nature of training athletes to their ideal sprinting technique and ability 41:40 – Sprinters different strategies to solving the problem of sprinting as fast as possible 57:50 – Elastic vs. inelastic sprint athletes, and how looking at where athletes are strong is going to have an impact on their sprint technique 1:02:40 – Dan’s thoughts on training team sport athletes in light of sprint training technique 1:09:15 – Dan’s thoughts on how to go about the process of developing vertical force in sprinting, as well as how to integrate speed oriented gains in context of a total training program 1:21:20 – Thoughts on the use of tempo sprint training as an elastic stimulus to get an athlete “bounce” “Even with those jumping athletes, I am using speed training” “If you do have a lot of squat strength built up, that does give you some level of durability” “Even moving at walking or slow jogging speed in single leg hopping, it requires you to get off the ground faster, and I’ll use that as my evaluation” “There is definitely a connection between single leg RSI and sprint speed” “Single leg hops for distance can get very sloppy, so I’ll say do 90% of the distance you could do, and keep it smooth… I only do the actual distance with some athletes” “Teaching an athlete a sprint drill generally has no impact on their sprint mechanics, so I’ve moved away from hoping for that… I view them more as contributing to your elastic training volume, and with that in mind, that cuts down a lot of drills that I use” “The two main (sprint drills) I use, are the track style butt-kick..I just call it the high-feet drill, and you use high tempo and add (horizontal) speed to it progressively… I will use that to try and plug that into sprint mechanics a little bit, it doesn’t connect from everybody” “We want high feet, even

Today’s episode features Tony Holler. Tony is the track coach at Plainfield North High School with 39 years of coaching experience in football, basketball, and track. He is the originator of the “Feed the Cats” training system that has not only found immense popularity in the track and field world, but the team sport coaching world as well. Tony is the co-director of the Track Football Consortium along with Chris Korfist, and has been a two-time prior guest on the podcast. Tony’s ideas of a speed-based culture, and rank-record-publish are making large waves in the coaching world. It's been said that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. In the coaching world, the desire to be “well-prepared” for one’s sport can easily lead to an excessive amount of conditioning and overall training volume done too early in the season, creating ground for injuries to happen. It’s extremely easy to just “do more”. It takes wisdom and management of one’s coaching validation to start the journey of doing less. On today’s show, Tony goes in detail on his evolution in his “Feed the Cats” coaching system, from the pre-2008 period where he had no electronic timing, to some of the worst workouts he had his athletes do before that critical year-2000 split where he removed things like tempo sprinting (the t-word) from his programming, and centered his program around being the best part of an athlete’s day. We’ll get into how Feed the Cats is working into team sport training and “conditioning”, and then go in detail on Tony’s speed-training culture built on love, joy, and recognition. Tony will speak on the “art of surrender” in goal setting, his X-factor workouts, and much more in this conversation of almost 2 hours. When you are speaking to someone like Tony, the two hours flies by, and you have a spring in your coaching step afterwards. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:49 – The “worst” workout that Tony administered to his sprinters before the year 2000 when “Feed the Cats” started, and Tony’s thoughts on those kids who “survived” that type of training 11:38 – Thoughts on the “Feed the Cats” system as a “base” system for a college sprint program that will likely have more volume and intensive training means 18:49 – Psychological elements of Tony’s program, and the counter-intuitive elements of “not training” for things like back-to-back races at the state championship meet 24:49 – What Tony did for “feed the cats” iterations before his first timing system in 2008, and what the original “feed the cats” workouts were from 2000-2007 31:41 – The idea of being more “sensitized for speed endurance” through an off-season based on feed the cats 35:50 – Joy and love as a foundational force of speed training in the “feed the cats” system 39:36 – Some other elements of Tony’s early “feed the cats” days compared to now, and what he has cut out of the program 48:27 – How to use wrist bands with 20-24mph engravings to reinforce team culture and motivation 57:00 – Tony’s experience of moving FTC into a team sport space, and stories from team sport coaches 1:06:50 – Thoughts on using sport itself as conditioning and essentialism in sport training and conditioning 1:23:05 – Transcending older programs, thought processes in programming, and surrendering to the results 1:31:36 – The present-mindedness of training, and what it means to train like a child 1:36:11 – If Tony’s arm was twisted, would he put in one of the following: A 20’ meeting prior to practice, 6-8x200m tempo, or weightlifting, in his FTC practice 1:40:15 – Some nuts and bolts to Tony’s X-factor workout for the day “(The worst workout I ever administered before FTC) We ran 48x100 on 20-minute rest, the next week we did 24x200s, and the fifth week we ran 12x400’s”… how did we not get people hurt? “I say that the most elite athletes are “coach-proof”… us high school coaches are forced to look at coaching the group” “Paul Souza said “don’t do everything, leave some stuff for us (college coaches) to do (on the level of speed training)” “Speed grows like a tree, and you have to play the long game. And the only way you play the long game successfully is if kids love what they do” “As I get older, I realize that sometimes the obvious is the wrong answer” “If you see a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident” “If my sprint coach became “40-based” I would get every single wide receiver, defensive back, running back, maybe even linemen, come out for my team because of the connection with football. I was willing to under-train my guys in order to “out-athlete” the other team… what I thought was an under-training situation was actually a fantastic

Today’s episode features Danny Foley. Danny is a performance coach and Co-founder of Rude Rock Strength and Conditioning. He is well known for his investigation into fascial training concepts, and is the creator of the “Fascia Chronicles”. Danny has spent the previous six years as the head strength and conditioning coach at Virginia High Performance, where he specialized in working with Special Operations Command (Naval Special Warfare Development Group) personnel. Through his work at Virginia High Performance, Danny has become very proficient working with complex injuries and high performing athletes within an interdisciplinary setting. The complexity of the human body, and how it moves in sport, will never cease to amaze me. Humans are “cybernetic” organisms, or “systems of systems”. Each system is connected to the others in the body. Perhaps the epitome of that idea of inter-connectedness, as it refers to movement, is on the level of the fascial system, which is the web of connective tissue lying below the skin. The fascia is laid out in both linear and spiraling lines, which fit with the demands of athletic movement on the linear and rotational level. When we see the way the fascial lines form in the body, or consider the principles of tensegrity in various architectural structures, or a dinosaur’s neck, for example, there is an instant and powerful connection that forms in regards to how this system must help power our movements. At the same time, it’s easy to take things to extremes, as the fascia clearly needs muscle to create pressure and pull. For today’s episode, performance coach and fascial training expert, Danny Foley takes us into an informative deep dive on what the role of the fascia in movement is, how to understand when relatively more muscle or fascial dynamics may be at play in powering movement, and how to train in a way that can tap into the fascial system to a greater degree (although as Danny clearly mentions, the two systems are inextricable). This was a really informative and practical conversation that offers a lot of insight to any coach, athlete or human mover. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:56 – What got Danny interested in the role of fascia in training in the first place 10:00 – To Danny, what the difference between “functional” and “fascial” training is from a terminology perspective 15:42 – How we might train differently because of the existence of fascial lines in the human body 22:47 – Danny’s thoughts on older athletes return to “functional training” after doing more intense training in their high-performance years 26:25 – Discussing some propositions regarding fascial training, and what may or may not be true in regards to what really engages that connective system 32:07 – Looking at how to adjust the “dial” between more connective tissue/fascial oriented training, and more muscle-oriented training methods 40:34 – How to actually measure improvement in regards to the quality of the fascial system 50:14 – More information on the unique connective characteristics of fascia, such as sensation and proprioceptive elements 54:12 – Thoughts on balance training in light of the fascial systems 1:01:48 – Why the absence of predictability is extremely important to the training process 1:16:34 – A summary of what defines fascial oriented training vs. more “muscular” oriented training “When you are working with (special forces) you realize that a lot of conventional stuff isn’t conducive to that personnel” “If it weren’t for (the marketing factor), I would just say connective tissue instead of the fascia specifically” “To me, fascial training is no different than just saying “we are training”” “It's very important to start by saying that the two systems (fascia and muscle) are inextricably linked…. It’s like separating the aerobic and anaerobic systems” “We can adjust training parameters to train more of the fascial system, or more of the musclo-skeletal system” “The more external stability is, the more we will have a muscular based effort; the lower the external stability is, the more fascially driven the movement is going to be” “We’ve seen human success stories over the years from many different training strategies” “For the most part, I’d say 80% of what we are doing (for training) is reasonably the same thing” “We’re seeing records being broken over and over again (such as combine testing) but at the same time, we are seeing a linear rise in soft tissue non-contact injury rates” “The more the joint moves, the more we are going to get musculo-tendonous contribution… straight leg pogos are going to be more of an elastic movement” “It’s not a matter of doi

Today’s episode features Christian Thibaudeau. Christian has been a strength coach for 2 decades, is a prolific writer and author, and has worked with athletes from nearly 30 sports. Christian has been a multi-time guest on this podcast, and is the originator of educational systems such as neuro-typing, as well as the omni-contraction training. I am unaware of another strength coach with the extensive knowledge of training methods that Christian does, and I’ve taken a small book’s worth of notes from our various podcasts together thus far. For an athlete, a strength program is only as good as it can 1.) help them to prevent injury and stay robust and 2.) help them to improve their specific speed and power in their sport (and a possible 3. Of building needed size and armor). When we talk about strength, we need to know how specifically it can plug into helping develop power, and one of the best ways to do this is in light us using complexes. Last time on the show, Christian spoke in depth regarding power complexes and their neurological demand, versus using more “simple” strength training setups and methods. In this episode, Christian goes into the distinct nature of power, and how to optimally use pure strength methods as potentiation tools in the scope of a training complex. He’ll get into his own use of overcoming isometrics in the scope of complex training work, how to progress complexes over the course of training cycles, speak on the “Gunthor complex”, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:28 – Concepts on training “seasonality”, and having a different emphasis on training in each season of the year for the sake of longevity in performance 6:34 – The importance of “de-sensitizing” and “re-sensitizing” athletes to a particular training stimulus for continual training gains 17:24 – The nature of over-training from a brain and body perspective 22:36 – Thoughts on the adaptations that come from a high-frequency training stimulus 26:07 – Training complexes in light of adrenaline, neurological load, and over-training 35:50 – Discussing the multi-stage “Gunthor” complex, and how to warm up for strength complexes optimally 42:18 – Strength work, as it relates to power outputs, and strength in complexes to build power 58:46 – “Descending” vs. “Ascending” complexes, and the role of each in the scope of power development “I have changed my view bit on the impact of strength work on power development; I think the role of strength in power development is over-stated. I think it is important, but not as important as we once thought” “The one thing I hate with the current trend with the evidence based crew is that it took all of the fun out of discovery, and made it very bland” “It’s the calcium ion buildup that causes muscle damage (not “torn” muscles)… muscle damage is fixed pretty quickly” “Hardcore overtraining mostly has to do with the over-production of adrenaline and cortisol” “The more pressure you put on yourself to perform, the greater the cortisol response. You need that high adrenaline level to get amped up. That’s why a competition, even though there’s very little volume compared to what you are doing in training, is a lot more damaging from a muscle recovery standpoint, because the adrenaline is so high, that it de-sensitizes the beta-adrenergic receptors” “If you are the type of person who needs to psyche themselves up to train, then you will crash very easily” “The more effective the training methods are (neurologically intense), the less volume you do” “The more exercises you have in a complex, the less sets you should do” “The complexes are my favorite performance method of all time, but people tend to overdo them” “Strength work is general, where power work is specific” “Someone with a very very strong neural drive can recruit all (moderate and fast) twitch muscles simultaneously” “The high-tension exercise serves only the purpose of amping up the nervous system for the following exercise or exercises. One complex I really like: overcoming isometrics all out, 90 degrees knee angle, followed by a plyometric exercise” “With the Olympic lifts (for athletic power), I use a lot less weight, and I prefer the power snatch to the power clean” “Every neurological complex only works for 4 weeks; you’ll get super-fast results for 3 weeks and after that, it tops out” About Christian Thibaudeau Christian Thibaudeau has been involved in the business of training for over the last 18 years. During this period, he worked with athletes from 28 different sports. He has been “Head Strength Coach” for the Central Institute for Human Performance (official center of the St. Louis Blues). His s

Today’s episode features strength coaches Kyle Dobbs and Matt Domney. Kyle Dobbs is the owner and founder of Compound Performance, has trained 15,000+ sessions, and has experienced substantial success as a coach and educator. Kyle has an extensive biomechanics and human movement background which he integrates into his gym prescriptions to help athletes achieve their fullest movement, and transferable strength potential. Matt Domney is the Head Coach at Compound Performance. He is a competitive powerlifter in the USPA, 275lb weight class, and in addition to powerlifting coaching, has years of experience in general population training.. High-intensity training is a fundamental component of athletic performance. For a long time, “strength and conditioning” was (and still is) based largely off of the (very intense) powerlifts. Training that is more athlete-friendly on the level of exercise selection and rep ranges has become more popular in the last couple of decades, and pendulums of corrective movements and exercise selection have swung back and forth in the process. Powerlifting itself is generally the most polarized expression of how we express strength, and although sport is much different than powerlifting, the pure intensity of the efforts within the sport (are) lend to a key facet of our human nature. To understand the “middle ground” better, it helps to understand the poles well. In this case, the poles of the powerlifts on one side, and then low-level corrective exercise on the other are helpful to consider when we are to make an efficient, effective and practice program for the athlete standing in front of us. On the show today, Kyle and Matt talk about variability within heavy strength training methods, look at the balance of high outputs in sport play vs. the gym, speak more into corrective exercise in the scope of higher intensity work, and then give their take on movement screens, warmups and more. This was an exercise with a lot of wisdom that offers a great perspective on how to make maximal use of training time and efficiency. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:24 – A discussion of the variables within a powerlifting program, versus a team sport training program 11:18 – Variability in higher rep sets, versus when to use a heavier, more “powerlifting” oriented approach to developing force in athletics 14:30 – Looking at innate force outputs in sport, and then what type of strength training would be an ideal pairing (heavier force output lifting, versus more or a 1x20 style pairing) 19:14 – Kyle and Matt’s take on the balance of “corrective” work and hard work 27:45 – The importance of facilitating changes with a greater load in the system athletically, as opposed to low-load correctives 39:29 – Corrective movements in the realm of powerlifting vs. corrective exercise for lower intensity activities such as running 46:16 – How compressive exercises can be highly “functional” for some athletes, such as narrow intra-sternal angle individuals who need to experience those ranges of motion under load 49:24 – Kyle and Matt’s take on movement screens, and the difference in screening individuals between powerlifting and athletes who require more tasks 59:45 – Thoughts on approaching the warmup given the main movements of the training day “I am probably going to use a lot of bilateral sagittal lifts if I want to improve force output (for team sport athletes), not because I want to improve the skill of the lifts (squat, bench, deadlift), so I will probably use a trap bar. I might use a different squat variations. Squatting to me is largely based on morphology” Dobbs “With a trap bar deadlift, you can do each rep slightly differently and still complete the task. If you want to give someone more degrees of freedom, giving someone a trap bar deadlift and not caring if it’s hingy or squatty or more of a hybrid between each one is going to be a significantly more useful variation in a way that you can drive output” Domney “Task completion is different than a specific way to complete a task” Dobbs “How much max effort jumps does an athlete take in the course of a basketball game? Not a lot true max effort” Dobbs “In my experience working with gen pop and athletic populations; most people when we start talking about the need of corrective exercise, they just are not very strong…. they get stronger and the issues kind of correct themselves” Dobbs “The breathing drills are effective in the right context, but they are not effective in every context” Dobbs “One thing I see in powerlifting with people who do a lot of correctives; once we get back to actual training, the issues flare up again, or people

Today’s episode is a Q&A with Joel Smith. Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance/track coach in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and in 2021, released the integrative training course, “Elastic Essentials”. Questions for this podcast revolved around maximal strength training needs in jumping and sprinting, testing protocols for youth athletes, speed training setups, sprint hardware vs. software, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, and Lost Empire Herbs For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Interested in the December Seminar in Cincinnati? Visit the Applied Speed and Power Training Seminar page for more information. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:49 – How to approach jump training when one already has an extremely high squat to bodyweight level 15:27 – What I would use in the realm of testing for youth performance training 32:23 – How much strength is really needed in sprinting and sprint training 38:06 – What to notice and feel when in top-flight sprinting 43:47 – What my winter training would look like for sprint track season in high school 49:03 – How to balance drills and sprinting in one’s practice 53:26 – Looking at shin drop vs. shin collapse in sprinting 59:01 – Principles of how I lay out my warmups in training 1:03:36 – My experience with skateboarding and scootering to improve jump let dynamics 1:06:01 – Thoughts on Jefferson curls 1:06:37 – Thoughts on using conditioning as punishment in training 1:12:00 – The biggest thing I’ve been learning in my last few years of coaching About Joel Smith Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance/track coach in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and in 2021, released the integrative training course, “Elastic Essentials”. He currently trains clients in the in-person and online space. Joel was formerly a strength coach for 8 years at UC Berkeley, working with the Swim teams and professional swimmers, as well as tennis, water polo, and track and field. A track coach of 15 years, Joel coached for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club for 7 years, and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault and multi-events on the collegiate level, working at Wilmington College, and the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, along with his current work with master’s, high school and collegiate individuals. Joel has had the honor of working with a number of elite athletes, but also takes great joy in helping amateur athletes and individuals reach their training goals through an integrative training approach with a heavy emphasis on biomechanics, motor learning, mental preparation, and physiological adaptation. His mission through Just Fly Sports is: “Empowering the Evolution of Sport and Human Movement”. As a former NAIA All-American track athlete, Joel enjoys all aspects of human movement and performance, from rock climbing, to track events and weightlifting, to throwing the frisbee with his young children and playing in nature.

Today’s episode features Lee Taft. Lee is one of the most highly respected sport speed coaches in the world. His methods come from wisdom accumulated not just in sports performance, but also in physical education, sport coaching, as well as observing changes in athletes between the 1990s, into the modern day. Lee has been a three-time guest on the podcast, a mentor to many high-level coaches, and has incredible wisdom on the level of sport movement. In a world of specialists, athlete’s processes of mastery can start to become “atomized” (my new favorite word). Many modern athletes have a sport coach, a skill coach, a strength coach and a speed coach. At the end of the day, an athlete only has so much time, and all training is only as effective as it can be integrated. Training effectiveness is also magnified by the level of which the athlete’s learning process can be leveraged. Hand holding athletes through skill acquisition, or playing games on early levels to win, rather than to learn skills, create early ceilings of performance. What we need in the world of sport is an intuitive, interconnected model by which to better let flow the natural abilities of an athlete. To do so, having coaches like Lee who have experience in so many facets of movement, across a wide age group, multiple sports, and multiple decades is crucial. We need to understand movement and motor learning in sport if we are to truly understand speed in sport. On the podcast today, Lee details his process in terms of sport skills, constraints, and then when to step in and “connect the dots” on the level of external speed and strength development. Lee talks about his use of sport itself as “the screen” for athletes, developmental principles of sport skills, and assessing “hardware” vs. “software” limitations in athletic movement. He also detailed his own process of sport development with his own children, and finishes with an important discussion on how we can change the developmental sport system for the better through travel-ball alternatives. Lee is a sage in the world of sport, and we all can become better through his teaching. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:28 – What Lee currently does in his own sport and movement practice 12:43 – If Lee could design an optimal environment for an athlete to develop through what that development would look like 17:34 – How Lee worked natural, simple speed development into the flow of game play with his own children 24:58 – Lee’s thoughts on the training environment athletes are developing skills and speed in 36:21 – Lee’s triage of games, constraints and more focused speed drills, in athletic development 44:36 – Some key things Lee is looking for within a game that Lee uses to assess an athlete’s movement potential 52:24 – Lee’s thoughts on “hardware” vs. “software” in athletic movement, and how he integrates “roll and reaches” to help develop the ability to level change 1:02:07 – More specific instances and practical examples of the effectiveness of speeding up a skill 1:10:35 – Lee’s take on a new model of developmental sport, and how more of the pure form of community and competition can be implemented as an alternative to the travel-ball model “I like doing a lot of stuff with reaction balls and d-balls (in my own training)” “(visual/perceptive/reactive work)creates the stuff that goes beyond the athlete, the athletes who things really quickly and moves, and I don’t think we develop that now as much as we used to when kids had more free play” “I can tell you to run from this cone to that, to that, but you’ll never do that in a game” “What we need to get more of; I love competition, competition is a good thing. Little toddlers compete for a toy, 7 year olds compete for the swing set… we’ve got to use that” “When you take 30-35 kids and you talk to them a lot, you lose them, so I get them in a game right away” “My model is, let them play, find opportunities and guide, and then let them play again” “With them, it wasn’t about a speed training session, it was about playing a game” “summary feedback is “what did you think”, “how did you feel”?” “A frisbee is great, because if you can teach the kid how to let it get air, the kid can learn how to run and track it” “The greatest athletes have the ability to adapt and adjust to their environment, they adapt really really well” “Growing up in the 70’s we had a lot of sports we just made up” “Let’s say we are watching this team play, and the missing link is some kind of quickness component, or speed component, or a lack of strength, now we get a little more into the nitty-gritty, because if you or I have the tools to be able to solve the pr

Today’s episode features Rett Larson. Rett is a physical preparation coach with an extensive and diverse background. He has worked internationally with the national volleyball teams of Germany, Netherlands and China. Rett has also worked with professionals, down to athletes of all ages, having prior experience as Velocity Sports Performance’s director of coaching in California. Rett is a student of movement, having studied not only the top minds in sports performance, but also in general movement training such as taught by Ido Portal and in the scope of physical education. The evolution of sport is one of integration, and not separation. Currently, the “silos” of sport coaching and then all of the “supportive” services (such as S&C) don’t tend to have much interaction with each other beyond a conversation. The fact of the matter is, that when an athlete hits the field (or court) of play, they are operating within all facets of their humanity. Their physical, tactical, technical, emotional, social and deep psychology all impacts their performance on the field. The ”sport-warmup” may be the one place, in all of an athlete’s training, where the maximal amount of silos can be integrated. Athletes can use strength, physio, games and sport-constraint oriented methods to not only prepare them for practice in an enjoyable way, but also form a “melting pot” of all aspects that make an athlete. On the show today, Rett Larson takes us through his evolution as a coach, and how his warmups and training has evolved over time. He covers the highest transferring abilities he sees from the gym and warmup sessions, that are embodied by the best players on the team. Rett also covers the important interaction that must take place between the physical preparation coach and sport coach, to create buy-in, and move the warmup process forward. After listening to Rett speak on his approach to training athletes, it’s hard to think differently about our own process towards the evolution of our athletes and training programs. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:23 – What Rett has learned from other cultures, traveling and coaching abroad, that he has been able to integrate into his coaching repertoire 17:45 – The role of maximal strength training across various countries and cultures, and how to utilize data to help coaches understand what really matters in transfer to on-field performance 24:13 – How to design weight training sessions from a perspective of being able to “level up” regularly 27:43 – How Rett’s approach to the warmup process has changed over the years, and main factors that led him to where he is at now 34:49 – Rett’s athletic background, and its influence on him as it may pertain to his coaching 45:00 – The main box that Rett is trying to check in his warmup process for team sport, the “thermogenic” box 53:06 – Scripted vs. unscripted elements of the warmup for Rett’s work 56:04 – How exercise done in more of a “game oriented” state may not register the same way as more formal training, and how play or challenges can allow for more physiological work to be done 58:42 – How Rett incorporates and considers rhythm and dance-oriented components into his work 1:03:46 – A sample pre-sport warmup session that Rett utilizes with volleyball athletes 1:15:24 – What Rett has learned from Ido Portal in the course of training and athletics 1:25:03 – How Rett communicates with sport coaches to optimize his initial warmup process for the athletes “The coach is telling me, my girls are stiff legged on defense, and so what if I constrained them under the net (for the warmup)” “I told the coaches, please pick out who your best 5 volleyball girls are… and they were the weakest (squatters) on the team… then I had them jump as high as possible with 40kg on the bar, and 6/8 of the best in that test were our best players” “When I am designing their sheets, I always have their personal best on the sheets so they have something to go for; it’s all about that gamification of the weight room” “I wanted there to be weird stuff on the floor every time (when athletes walked out for the warm ups). I wanted to figure out all of the ways to accomplish a movement task” “My warmup doesn’t just have to follow this small list of activities that look like skips and crawls, that I could make my head coach happy if my warmup looked more like sport training” “I went from getting 7 minutes to warmup a team, to 20 minutes to warm up a team, because my coach stopped seeing that my warmup time was at the expense of his volleyball training ti

Today’s episode features John Kiely. John is a senior lecturer in Performance and Innovation at the University of Limerick. In addition to his current work with doctoral and Ph.D. candidates, John is a frequent keynote speaker, and has extensive athletic performance training and consultation experience. His coaching, consulting and advisory work includes numerous sports such as rugby, soccer/football, track and Paralympics. In his time as an athlete, John won multiple titles in kickboxing and boxing. John appeared years ago on episode 113 of the podcast. Training is much more than simply putting together a series of sets, reps and exercises, but invokes the “totality” of a human being. This totality includes not only the body and mechanical forces, but also the mind and one’s environmental influence. In other words, your training results are a factor of both your program, perceptions and environment, and the roles of the latter must not be minimized. On today’s show, John will cover training on the level of placebo and nocebo effects, the impact of an athlete’s beliefs and perception of the training session, coaching practice to engage the mind, as well as the idea of a “screen for beliefs” when starting a period of training with an athlete. This is an awesome episode that really helps us understand the fullness of the processes involved within adapting to a training stimulus or program. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:51 – What John means by the idea: “The worth of a training program is not contained in the prescription” 15:06 – Looking at training on the level of placebo and nocebo effects 25:28 – How to ethically and optimally leverage the placebo effect in coaching 33:18 – What type of intellectual participation is ideal for athletes in the course of a training day 46:23 – How perception of the training session is going to have a substantial impact on how an athlete will adapt 52:57 – Program repeatability and novelty elements in training 58:27 – John’s take on a “screen for beliefs” in athletic coaching “From a practical perspective, going back to the 40s and 50s, (the great coaches) were good communicators, inspirational, they were able to get ideas and perspectives out of their heads, into the athlete’s heads” “Some great coaches have really average programs, but the key is that the athlete buys into them” “It’s important what people’s health behaviors are, but what’s really important is how people believe their health behaviors are” “How can I screen an athlete for their beliefs” “What (removing perception of threat) allows you to do is release more resources (to training)” “So all placebo is, is I’m taking a cue from the external world, I’m believing the future is a little brighter, and I can release more resources” “Releasing resources can be thinking, thinking demands energy, it demands cerebral blood flow” “Even a coach’s facial expression, if interpreted as negative, has a negative effect on athletes… I need to be conscious that if I give negative signals, it is going to affect the training” “We have made the assumption that you can predict training outcomes, but the evidence is completely against that” “It’s what athletes are paying attention to, and how they are interpreting those signals” “If you want something to hurt more, think about it more” “The reality is, it is not the physical act that activates the stress response, the stress response is activated by your perception of what is going to happen, and how your body needs to prepare for that” “All of my set of thoughts and beliefs are wrapped around this training session, in relation to my purpose and my objectives. If it’s not clear, then resources are not going to get allocated that freely, I am not going to have an adaptive response” “I think of training, rather than a prescription, but, “how do I design the process”?” “You can’t be looking for the optimal program, it’s what’s the most pragmatic program” “Traditional periodization doesn’t factor in: “What does the athlete think”, it doesn’t screen for athlete beliefs” “Giving an athlete an exercise they don’t believe in is fundamentally self-limiting, it’s a waste of energy” About John Kiely John Kiely is a senior lecturer in Performance and Innovation at the University of Limerick. In addition to his current work with doctoral and Ph.D. candidates, John is a frequent keynote speaker, and has extensive athletic performance training and consultation experience. His coaching, consulting and advisory work includes numerous sports such as rugby, soccer/football, track and Paralympics. In his time as an athlete, John won multiple titles in kickboxing and boxing. Follow J

Today’s episode features Jamie Smith, founder and head sport preparation coach of The U of Strength. Jamie is a passionate coach and learner, who strives to help athletes incorporate the fullness of perceptual, social and emotional, elements in the course of training. Jamie has been a multi-time guest on this show, speaking on his approach to training that meets the demands of the game, and settling for nothing less. The further I get into my coaching journey, the more I understand and appreciate the massive importance of stimulating an athlete on the levels of their physiology, their emotions and social interactions, and their perception of their external environment. Coach Jay Schroeder had his term called the “PIPES”, referring to the importance of a training session being stimulating Physiologically, Intellectually, Psychologically, Emotionally and Spiritually”. I certainly agree with those terms, but they could also be re-ordered, as per today’s conversation “Physiologically, Individually, Perceptually, Emotionally, and Socially”. (Individual referring to individual autonomy). On the show today, Jamie goes into how he “stacks” games, play, perception & reaction type work onto more traditional training methods, for greater “sticky-ness” to sport itself. Through today’s conversation, he’ll get into concepts of variability in training as it relates to sport, driving intention and learning through a training program, older vs. younger athlete response to game play with potentiation, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:30 – How Jamie infuses “play” into basic exercises and warmup movements 21:50 – How infusing meaning into movement improves intention, immersion and movement quality 49:00 – The role of play in helping infuse natural variability in athletic development 33:38 – How the goal of play and variability changes through a training week 43:17 – Menu systems and autonomy within the scope of games and training sessions for athletes 49:39 – How Jamie’s approach to “High CNS”, max velocity days and how layers of challenge are added on, as athletes grow and mature 1:02:53 – What gym work and warming up looks like for Jamie’s athletes when those athletes are already playing their sport a lot outside of the weightroom (and how to help use social/emotional elements to create a more restorative stimulus) 1:15:34 – “Sticky-ness” of skill in training, created by blending “training” with gameplay “Play hits those missing pieces of the strength and conditioning model” “Game play can create athlete driven approaches to movement and strength and conditioning” “We teach them for the first few weeks, just so they have a general understanding, “what is a crawl”… but once it gets to the point where they understand what it is, lets layer on challenges” “A big thing with the gameplay, is we never repeat the same thing twice in a row” “I believe in exposing them to a wide range of situations so they can see what works, and what doesn’t work” “It’s all about intent, and when you add intent, it changes everything” “(With play) I’m talking about focused variability, having a purpose” “They are trying to solve a problem while getting pushed, shoved, knocked off balance; I call that kind of “sticky strength” qualities” “On the low CNS days I am looking at the gameplay, the emotional side of things, the social emotional side of things” “The social-emotional does have an immediate impact on (performance), it does influence the strength, the speed, the power qualities” “You’re working with a 7th, 8th, 9th grader, you are going to see way better speed qualities emerge when that kid is trying to evade a trailing defender, compared to doing a band-resisted acceleration from one cone to another cone” “If you’re in 11th grade, 12th grade, college, we are going to do our flying 10’s, you are going to hit that one rep (you have one opportunity) we are going to record it, and after, we are going to put that in an environment that is going to allow you to express that as well; after that we always put them into a contextual situation” “Who is the individual in front of you, and what are the missing pieces” “The input needs to be thought of, and managed, just as much as the output” “In season, there is so much stress put on these kids so that, all I care about is that, when they leave, they feel better” “If it’s “im exhausted, my dog died, I crammed for a test”, it’s definitely game based, long duration isometrics, exposing the foot to a ton of tactile information, and that’s about it” “If you look at a whole year, and are doing the same thing over and over again, you are not pushing learning, you are not p

Today’s episode features sports performance coach and sport scientist, Joel Reinhardt. Joel joined Stanford Football’s staff as the assistant sports performance coach and applied sports science coordinator in 2022. Prior to Stanford, has spent time at UMass and Nicholls State working in sports performance and sports science roles. One of the great things about the sports performance/strength & conditioning field is that it is interdisciplinary in nature. Within the field itself, we have the elements of anatomy/physiology, biomechanics, pedagogy, team culture & coaching, training arrangement, and long-term development. We also have the integration of sport science, which quantifies the complex nature of the ways players are loaded in their sport. When the nature of this load is understood; many relationships can be noticed between a football practice week, for example, and the way a track sprints or jumps coach may set up their training week. The more areas we see training loads and adaptive trends, the more we can understand the dynamics of the human organism, and how to facilitate the training environment. On today’s show, Joel Reinhardt goes into his role in helping to build out the work-loads of football players at Stanford through his sports science role. He’ll talk about what specific training weeks look like, how the strength training complements those weekly micro-cycles, and then primary pitfalls that can happen in loading athletes throughout a training week. Without good integration of sport volume, and weight-room volumes, athletes are almost always going to end up doing more total work than what they need, and that’s why conversations like these are so valuable. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 5:16 – Recent job updates, and Joel’s role at Stanford University as a sports coach and sports science coordinator 8:01 – Joel’s role in building the workloads for sport practice at Stanford 18:01 – How Joel draws out football practice loads, and how it relates to track and field loading patterns 26:53 – Specific weekly microcycle loads Joel helps facilitate for football practice 36:14 – How Joel looks to complement football loading volumes with strength training 49:10 – “Pain points” and practice elements that could lead to a greater incidence of injury 1:00:22 – Thoughts on “conditioning finishers” at the end of a practice period “I wanted to be very intentional about not coming in and being the person who was saying “you need to do less”” “My role as sports science coordination is utilizing the data to help guide our planning on the front end to play as much football as we possibly can while still being healthy for Saturday” “You want to understand what (practice) scenarios relate to the physical outputs that you are wanting to track; and start to influence where those fall within a week, within a day, within a month” “Day 1 is more constrained by the type of drill they are in, and Day 2 is just playing ball, there is a lot of open scenarios, and it ends up being very game like; that second day is the most open” “The third day is most volume, most time on feet” “That second day is where you expect to see the highest intensities” “It’s not black and white; all this happens on this day, all of this happens on the other day” “In camp we lifted once for every 3-day cycle; we lifted on day 2, the highest intensity type day. In season we lift Monday, Wednesday, Friday” “In terms of when they lifted, in the racks, during camp, it was only twice a week, but how often they worked with the sports performance staff, it was every day, just in small doses” “If you get those big rocks in place of the sport practice and how we are managing that load, you can get away with peeling back in other areas and not losing those higher level qualities, because they are not getting drowned out by excessive fatigue” “The level of detail to predict those total volume loads; the only piece of information you really needed was total time on feet; to predict intensity you needed a bit more granular detail” “In camp, if the daily volume was in a normal range, 4 practices in a row created an un-sustainable well that these guys fell into” “Knowing we were not going to practice 4 days in a row, it gave us more wiggle room within those 3 days” “I boil it down to, "Is this going to effect the number of team football reps we are going to be able to execute before our first game'” About Joel Reinhardt Joel Reinhardt joined Stanford Football’s staff as the assistant sports performance coach and applied sports science coordinator in 2022. He will oversee Stanford’s sports science and data tracking for Cullen

Today’s episode features movement coach, inventor and innovator, Adarian Barr. Adarian has been one of the absolute biggest influences on me in my coaching, as well as my own personal movement and training practices. You will be hard pressed to find an individual who sees movement in the detail that Adarian does, while also having the experiential and coaching knowledge to back it up. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from working with Adarian is improving my understanding of how joints work in the scope of human motion. From the first time I met Adarian, I remember him discussing the spiraling actions of movement to take the slack out of the system, and how he prefers discussing movement on the motion of joints, rather than muscles. I remember working on what happened when my joints were in flexion, rather than trying to resist, or “punch” my way through movement, the results of which were numerous post-university sprinting bests, and a quantum leap forward in the way I coached athletes. “Stiffness” is a commonly discussed term in the world of athletic movement. Athletes are generally instructed to “be stiffer” in their lower body to jump higher and run faster. The truth of the matter though, is that in motion, there must be something in the body that deforms, and the ultimate stiffness is a limb in a cast. On today’s podcast, Adarian takes us through what he considers true joint “stiffness” to really be, when it comes to human motion and movement, and throughout the discussion, creates the grounds for better terminology on the level of the coach, when we speak about joint deformity, stress and strain, in the scope of sprinting, jumping, track and field, and beyond. This is a podcast that will powerfully impact your mindset on the nature of plyometric exercises, sprinting motions and constraints, and how athletes move ideally in their sport. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:50 – Adarian’s background in his college studies in the realm of music and athletic movement 10:30 – What “ankle stiffness”, or being “stiff” in the context of athletics, means to Adarian 24:20 – The dynamics of strain passing through joints in movement 26:30 – How much strain exists in various joints throughout acceleration and upright sprinting 36:00 – Horizontal and vertical forces in sprinting, in relationship to levers and friction 39:40 – Long to high bounding and hurdling dynamics 44:20 – How to train an athlete who needs to get up off the ground more quickly in regards to strain and quickness 55:40 – How stress and strain fit with the biomechanics of sprinting, using straight leg bounding as an example “Stiffness to me means you aren’t moving very well, you aren’t moving fluidly… it’s not a good term… at some point in time, it means that joint’s not moving” “If there’s movement at the ankle joint, how can it be stiff?” “You got to get things to work together in pairs” “How we operate in the air, is different than how we operate on the ground” “Any type of force is stress. The strain is resistance to that force… that’s how I engage in these things; the stress, the strain and the amount of deformity I get” “Class 1 low strain low resistance, lots of movement at the ankle joint; class 2, very little deformity, very little movement at the ankle joint” “At the start, things have to fold up, at top-end, things don’t have to fold up as much” “At the start, the first thing I have to do is get to a class 2 lever, but it doesn’t take much strain to resist that force, since there isn’t a large amount of force yet” “Once I get going (in a sprint) the stress level starts to go up, so the strain level (need to resist at the ankle) goes up” “The good triple jumpers have a whole lot of resistance at the ankle joint, and not a lot of resistance at the hip joint. The not so good triple jumpers have a lot of resistance in reverse ways, a lot of resistance at the hip joint, and not a lot of resistance at the ankle joint” “If I try to dorsiflex the foot as the shin is coming forward, I am resisting, now we got some strain going on” “When we go back to levers, we have two things going on, perpendicular and parallel. The greater the perpendicular, the greater the parallel can be” “I need this vertical, perpendicular, to create friction (against the ground which is the horizontal)” “Don’t base horizontal (force/projection/etc.) on the shin, because horizontal is friction” “The more you press down, the more friction you get, which allows me to dictate the direction I want to go” “Where the hip is when the foot comes off the ground will dictate what direction you are going to go” “If I do a straight leg bound, I want the deformity

Today’s episode features biomechanics specialist, David Grey. David is the founder of David Grey Rehab, where he works with clients from all walks of life. David’s specialty is assessing his clients gait cycle in depth to develop a plan to help restore the movement or movements they struggle to perform. David has learned under a number of great mentors in the world of human movement, athletic development, gymnastics, Chinese martial arts, and biomechanics, and is an expansive thinker, blending many elements of human movement together in a down to earth way we can all resonate with. Humans absolutely love to categorize things, and put things in boxes. For those in their initial learning stages, this can really be helpful to the learning process, but at some point, we need to see the grey, or continuum-like nature of things, and how training interacts on its different levels. When we put things in the box of simply being a “corrective” exercise, for example, it loses touch with many of the helpful principles of training and overload that come in more “standard” training exercises. When we can see things from an expansive viewpoint, we can start to gather the wisdom regarding how different pieces of training work together. On today’s show David, puts many things together in regards to good functioning of the kinetic chain for not only knee health, but also better movement. We talk about the muscles of the lower leg, where he stands (and how he has changed) on the level of more “bodybuilding” oriented training methods, keeping things simple in exercise progression (and how putting “corrective exercise” in a box is a bad idea), sensory awareness and fatigue contrasts, and finally, a ridiculously good summary on how David approaches knee rehab and health from a multi-factorial perspective. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:48 – David’s experience in his United States tour 11:56 – Discussing the muscles of the lower leg, and their importance in movement 21:16 – Simplifying some exercise methods that improve hamstring calf interaction 25:30 – Where muscles sit on the “joints act, muscles react” end of the spectrum in the sense of simply training a muscle to alleviate joint pain or optimize the kinetic chain 36:10 – How to keep things “simple” in a rehab and “corrective exercise” space, and the “sensory to intensity” scale 41:55 – David’s use of “fatigue contrasts” in training and working with longer-ground contact plyometrics 57:27 – David’s current multi-lateral keys to knee training and rehab as he sees it and summarizes it “With movement, you can talk about it all you want, but they need a chance to experience it and feel it” “Even with slower running, the soleus has a lot of load going through it” “If you think going for a jog is easy, it’s easy for a lot of muscles, but it’s not easy on the soleus” “The gastroc has a lot of pre-activation before the foot hits the floor, the soleus has very little. But when the foot hits the floor, the gastroc cools down and the soleus goes through the roof” “A muscle like the soleus and glute max takes time to produce force, because of the shape of the muscle, but they are way stronger… there are other muscles that can contract quicker, but they are not as strong” “Those types of (roller bridge) exercises open you up to a lot of sensation” “Before full body strength work, that’s where we start to isolate a lot of muscles (for those who have inhibited muscles)” “I use the foam roller bridge as a test; if someone can’t hold that for 5 seconds, I look at them and say “your hamstrings should be stronger” “I’m moving more towards the bodybuilding side of things with just getting the muscles working” “I’m a big fan of drop jumps; especially in rehab because it’s very structured” “I like to think of the scale of sensory to intensity; that’s what we are working towards” “I will use fatigue contrast; it might be something like we do some leg extension, hamstring curl, calf raises, and then I do the hop, and then it feels better. If you bring those tissues to quite a bit of fatigue; the brain or nervous system has to figure out a new way to bring those muscles together” “When we get into plyometrics, it’s important to work with short ground contact times, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work with the spectrum of other joint ranges and ground contact times” “We don’t just think of movement from slow to fast; you can have faster movement through a large range of motion in certain areas; you don’t have to wait for all the parts of your body to catch up as well” “With a k

Today’s episode features Jarod Burton. Jarod is a human performance specialist, chiropractic student, and health coach. He got his coaching start working with Brady Volmering of DAC baseball, and has spent recent years coaching, consulting and running educational courses in the private sector. Jarod focuses on engaging all aspects of an athlete’s being, providing the knowledge for the individual to thrive in their domain. In the world of coaching and human performance, the road to success is often thought of on the level of do “A”, in “B” amount, so you can accomplish “C”. The focus on typically on numbers, exercises, and (often) a linear cueing process for those said movements. We are so quick to judge programs entirely based on numbers and exercises. What we don’t consider often enough is the complex factors surrounding the volume that is administered. There are elite athletes who have won gold medals and set world records who do a lot of volume that would “crush” other athletes (think the athletes that survived the Soviet or Bulgarian training systems, or modern-day athletes, such as Karsten Warholm, the 400m hurdle world record holder). We need to ask ourselves, “what is the difference, or elements, that allowed the athlete to tolerate that?”. Is it that their musculo-skeletal system was somehow just “better” than the other trainees, or are there other additional elements to consider? The more elite coaches I’ve had the opportunity to work with, the more I realize that good coaches intuitively key into the mental and emotional state of the athlete, as well as the physiological management. On today’s podcast, Jarod chats on managing high training volumes, work capacity dynamics, the critical role of boredom/interest in training, athlete self-discovery, and much more. This is a podcast that causes you to ask questions, and gives us a new and interesting perspective on the dynamics of training. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:10 – The nature of Jarod’s training experiment, where he only performed extreme iso holds and dunking (in his quest for a higher vertical jump) 9:45 – Thoughts on the process of assessing athletes, and drawing out physical and emotional weak-points 12:15 – How “obsessive” or “unreasonable” training, such as bounding every day, could actually be a powerful performance tool, and how we actually classify fatigue in training 28:45 – How to manage higher volume training so athletes don’t get injured or decrease their performance 42:30 – The role of self-discovery and creativity in athletic performance training 45:36 – Thoughts on mixing game like activities with specific training outputs (such as a 10m fly or dunking a basketball) 57:28 – Mental associations, boredom/interest, and training principles 1:05:55 – Jarod’s thoughts on the “Easy Strength” mentality on weights and barbell training “As I was holding the isometrics, I was creating the reality of: “what would it feel like as I dunk”” “How do you meet an athlete where you are at in their current state; how do you expose them, and how do you draw out they creativity within them” “The more awareness they have, the more ability they have to create. The goal is for them to be the captain of their own ship” “The amount of volume that kids or athletes experience in a game is 5 to 10 times the amount of actual stimulus that we even give them in the training aspect; I follow along with the idea that the training must be more intense and strenuous than the actual activity itself” “The biggest thing, regardless of how you train, is whether the athlete buys into what they are doing… it comes down to, how does the athlete see it, how does it fit into their reality currently, and how does it fit into the reality that they are trying to create” “I found research papers back to the 1930’s that DNA, teeth, vertebra, your skin, is all run off of piezoelectricity, so this crystal form” “I learn that the muscles behave like water, so if I want to learn about fatigue, I need to learn about water” “I can take somebody; they are sprinting; and maybe they start slowing down and feeling fatigue, but all of a sudden they play football; and I roll a football out as if it’s a fumble recovery, and then they jump back up again…. Now I can manipulate how the body is being fatigued or not by including different scenarios that are either going to peak their arousal or cause them boredom” “I look at a lunge; and I look at how somebody compensated within a lunge, then I take a video and those same compensations that are showing up in the isometric are showing up when you sprint” “The center focus of my training as well, is to challenge the athlete

Today’s episode features performance coach and breathing specialist, Leo Ryan. Leo is the founder of Innate-Strength.com. Leo has studied from many elite personal training, physical therapy and breathing schools including Dip. Buteyko Method, Wim Hof, Oxygen Advantage Master Instructor, Fascial Stretch Therapist, Strength and Conditioning Specialist and Pilates. Leo previously appeared on episode 219 speaking on many elements of breath training for athletic performance including nose vs mouth breathing in training, breath hold time as a readiness indicator, and more. The use of one’s breath for training and overall well-being has become more and more on my radar with each passing year. From my foray into the endurance end of the competitive spectrum (Spartan Racing in 2019), to understanding the role of rib cage expansion in movement biomechanics, to breathing for energy and recovery, to the training practices of the old-school strongmen, in each year of my life, understanding and training the breath becomes more substantial. On today’s show, Leo Ryan returns to dig into the role of breath training, and its role in recovery, both within the workout itself, and in day-to-day recovery from training efforts. We often talk about having an adequate “aerobic base”, but for some reason, the actual core of that aerobic base, which is “breathing”, is rarely considered, and Leo goes into making capacity workouts even more effective through breathing mechanics, physiology and rhythm. Leo will also cover the role of CO2 and CO2 tolerance in human and athletic function, rhythmic aspects of breathing in athletic performance, and then some dynamics on breathing in the scope of strength training sessions. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:57 – Thoughts on Irish Dancing and athletic performance, from Leo’s perspective residing in Ireland 13:00 – Getting deeper into the role of breathing and breath-work in helping athletes recover from intense workouts 27:00 – The state of world health and strength on the human level, in the scope of modern society 32:00 – How one’s breathing throughout the day can dictate one’s recovery from training 41:27 – The specifics of Leo’s breath training that helped his training group to drastically improve their recovery in a 10-day period 46:00 – The dynamics of breathing rhythm on health and performance 52:20 – Controlled exhale dynamics and the importance of CO2 tolerance in athletic development 1:05:40 – Thoughts on breathing in the scope of heavier strength training, from a recovery and pressure dynamics perspective “There is a lot of footwork, a lot of high kicks, and a lot of fast feet (in Irish dancing) so for improving your speed for sport, it’s absolutely incredible” “Paul Chek said it beautifully that “every summer has its winter” and if you don’t take your winter, winter is going to take you” “The breath is a phenomenal window into how your whole body and mind is working; and then you can use the breath to upregulate or downregulate the system as needed” “(After over-using coffee) when you have your morning coffee, you are just getting yourself up to baseline” “The breath is a beautiful guide to rebuilding your baselines, and making sense of where you are in the world” “My idea of breath training is restoring your breath back to baseline” “They ran (12 minutes max) their way first; then they trained for 10 days in nasal breathing and breath techniques, and then they ran it again; and they ran it my way. What I found was a 1-2% performance improvement, but I found a 40% recovery improvement” “I found the real genius in training your breath is not to get faster, but to recover quicker” “Breathing, as you are there (not training) should be subtle, imperceptible, not noticeable (you don’t feel the hairs on your nose move)” “The yogic structures brought me into imperceptible breathing, of the subtleness” “Butyeko relies very much on balancing out CO2 in the body” “You need CO2 to help oxygen get into your cell, you need CO2 to help cellular health, but you don’t get that because you are in a vicious cycle of getting rid of (CO2) without realizing it (by routine over-breathing)” “I found the idea of restoring the diaphragm, the muscles of the chest, and the exhale, to be let go, is really important” “Is your diapraghm supple, and can you use it well, can you use your upper chest well, and can you let go of your exhale?” “The likes of the Wim Hof and the rhythmic breathing are very very powerful techniques for feeling emotions” “(Regarding breathing) There are the mechanics, the physiology, and the rhythms” “If you exhaled every time your left foot hit the floor (in running)

Today’s episode features strength and track coach, John Garrish. John is the director of athletic development at North Broward Preparatory School in Coconut Creek, Florida, and the school’s head track coach. John was recently voted the 2022 National High School Strength Coach of the Year by the National High School Strength Coach’s Association. John appeared previously on the show discussing his speed training approach in episode 182. The symbiosis of track and football is often discussed in the process of training, and importantly so. What is talked about less, are some of the specifics of what track has to offer, not just in the sprints, but also in events like triple jump, that can enhance an athletes speed, power, elasticity and overall movement profile, in their other sports. John was a hammer thrower in his college years, as well as a former football player. The hammer throw is, of all the throws, the one that requires the greatest symbiosis and harmony with the implement. The triple jump (bounding) requires a tremendous symbiosis with the ground, and how one interacts with it. You can easily see John’s experience and intuition of track and S&C concepts emerge in his progression of bound, skip, hop and overall elastic training with his athletes. On the show today, John covers thoughts on hand position and “elastic/rigidity” vs. “muscular” sprint strategies in athletes as they move from youth to high-school levels. This sets the stage for his talk on his galloping, skipping and bounding progressions, and how he keeps movement quality and velocity at the core of the progression. John talks about how he keeps the training fun and intentional, and how he changes emphasis as athletes move from middle school, to high school years. This show is a beautiful fusion of team sport S&C, and track and field concepts, and can be used to help any athlete develop more fluid, dynamic power outputs on the field of play. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:50 – What a typical workout looks like for John, and how he does bounds, skips and gallops himself to be a better coach in those movements 8:29 – Thoughts on hand-position in young athletes vs. older athletes, the use of rigid, splayed fingers, and how that rigid-open-hand strategy might change, as athletes get older 28:36 – How John evolved skips and gallops from elementary school, into their middle and high school years 37:21 – John’s take on more traditional extensive hops, in light of his use of skips, gallops and hops 44:37 – Different constraints and emphasis of skips and bounds are that John utilizes in his scholastic and open-large group training sessions 54:07 – How to give athletes balance in their skip and gallop profile without diminishing their “superpower” 1:00:59 – John’s thoughts on when to get bounding in the mix for athletes, and how to progress it 1:15:17 – Using backwards single leg hops for athletes, its benefits, and potential link to being able to bound forward for distance “I felt that unless I at least had the comfort of the ability to demonstrate, or perform these movements (bounds, gallops, skips) myself, then I felt there was no way I could verbalize it to my athletes; or find lesser cues, or a tactile cue to get the athlete to feel it as well” “Some of the fastest girls I’ve seen at track meets do display that splayed hand position (when sprinting)… but as they progress in middle school you see less dominance of that hand position” “It’s an opportunity of our students to experiment with something, and then come out of that experimentation with the ideal (technical) model… of how they are going to sprint to the best of their ability” “The best triple jumper I ever coached was a near 48 footer in high school, and he just did some really really weird things that presented itself in his hand (positions)” “Testing some of these things (hops, skips, gallops, etc.) are the ideal way to put yourself in the athlete’s shoes” “The most important thing about skips and gallops, is that skips and gallops are fun. I’ve never seen an athlete skip race against another kid and not have a smile on their face” “Skips, gallops and hops we use throughout the year. The traditional hops in place; that is a good way to prepare the feet, ankle and shins for these skips, gallops and hops… where I use (traditional hops) is at the end of the session, closing the envelope, and accumulating that volume, not taking away from other things we want to do” “When we are doing skips with the middle schoolers, it’s in class, it’s more dexterity based a

Today’s episode features strength coach and biomechanics educator, Katie St. Clair. Katie been training general population and athletes for over 20 years, and is the creator of the Empowered Performance Program. She is one of my go-to sources of knowledge for all things biomechanics, and the finer details of human movement. She previously appeared on episode 279 of the podcast, speaking on biomechanical facets of running, lifting and athletic movement. Humans explore movement in a variety of ways as they grow from youth to adulthood. We skip, run, sprint, throw, bend and twist with substantial variability, all through the medium of self-learning. For some reason, as soon as weight lifting enters the picture, variation tends to go by the wayside, and a rigid bilateral (or even unilateral) method of moving that is pasted onto all athletes, is applied. Human beings are complex, we differ from one another, not only in our builds and structures, but also in how our bodies have compensated and compressed in particular ways over time. In this sense, our weightlifting programs should offer at least some room for each individual to learn more about the nuances of how each lift might be set up, or tweaked, in a manner the athlete could be optimally responsive to. On today’s show, Katie goes in detail on staggered-stance squatting and deadlifting, and how it can be leveraged based on the asymmetrical nature of an athlete’s body. She also gets into detail on single leg lifting, and how turning into, or away from the leg being worked can emphasize various elements of the exercise. She finishes by touching on hinging, posterior compression, and the link between high, rigid foot arches and what is happening upstream in the body. Throughout the conversation, Katie highlights how each of these lifting variations can be utilized to bring the athletic body into greater balance, where needed. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:22 – The ideology behind staggered stance squatting, and how it can fit with athlete’s natural asymmetry 10:35 – What types of individuals would be the best candidates to give a left leg back, staggered squat to, in training 15:35 – The role of biofeedback in exploring squat and deadlift stance 25:00 – Thoughts on doing the stagger in a squat or deadlift one way, vs. both ways with athletes 31:06 – How to set athletes up, in a high-performance training program, to help them learn more about how their bodies work in a manner that will help them for a lifetime 44:11 – Single leg squat training with a turn at the top of the bottom to bias various elements of the gait cycle 48:30 – How to improve one’s pistol squatting on the left leg if an individual lacks the ability to internally rotate their left hip 58:25 – Katie’s thoughts on narrow and wide ISA’s, and how to look at deadlifting and hinging from that perspective 1:10:49 – Where to start with someone with high arches, or “banana feet”, and how the pelvic floor plays into that 1:21:38 – Using the pigeon stretch for clients with posterior compression in wide ISA’s vs. narrow ISA’s “Because of our natural asymmetry and organ position, the pelvis starts to turn to the right” “There are so many ways that the body is clever about maintaining that forward motion” “I used to do drills where I would reset my pelvis more back to the left, to get myself in a good position, and then go squat, but it still didn’t feel right….(but instead) In adding load and pulling my left foot back and sensing the outside of my left heel and inside of my right heel; just that little tiny maneuver, it’s just a game changer. I use it on all my squats” “If somebody doesn’t have issues with squatting, I don’t mess with (putting the left foot slightly behind)” “(Reasons to add in the staggered stance left-leg back squat) If every time they squat, it irritates some area, or if they have a big shift into the right, or as a repositioning activity for people higher in their training age who don’t want to do breathing drills’ “A regular deadlift with a barbell, sometimes I’ll take just a tiny step back and off-set that” “Doing a split clean where athletes can create more sensory awareness naturally, because they are not in a bilateral stance, is super useful” “(After giving a large group different variations of an exercise) I’ll say, on this last set, pick which one felt better for you” “When you have athletes who are stronger and more resilient, you might not need all of this (biomechanics) stuff” “You can’t go where to already are, if you are shoved forward” “Creating stiffness is good if you already have a lot of suppleness and laxity” “In a split squat, if the left side i

Today’s episode features performance coaches James DiBiasio and Collin (CT) Taylor. James and CT work at T3 performance in Avon, Ohio, and have a progressive approach to athletic performance training, encapsulating strength, movement, athleticism in a holistic manner that fits with the progression of athletic skill, and leveling up one’s abilities as a human being. James and CT were both college athletes in baseball and football respectively, and CT played arena football after his NCAA years. In addition to their coaching, James and CT have been running the “Cutoffs and Coffee” podcast since 2020, having interviewed nearly 50 different guests. It’s been enjoyable to see more elements of chaos, risk, perception/reaction, and overall athleticism, emerge in the sports performance process in recent years. Humans are the species on this planet with the greatest overall dexterity of skills, and yet, this dexterity is rarely leveraged in the average “training program” to a shade of its potential. “Training” is something that is traditionally heavy on data, but low on chaos, and yet, sport, as well as the array of FLOW inducing human movement practices, are quite the opposite. Yes, we still want to perform movements that improve the strength of muscles and tissues, while increasing capacity, but at the same time, we also want to give athletes challenges that allow them to expand their athleticism. On the show today, James and CT get into how they have incorporated a variety of athletic skills, flips, and calisthenic movements into their training, how much their athletes enjoy it, and how it links to dynamics on the field of play. They chat about how to leverage principles of intuition and chaos in the training day, and even week, speed training constraints, and finally, James and CT finish with an insightful view on the role of “difficult” training routines, and higher volume capacity-oriented training sets. This was a fun podcast with a lot of take-aways, and highlights the ways that the field of athletic performance training is expanding and evolving. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:58 – Who wins the “bang energy” drink quantity competition between James, CT and Will Ratelle 6:49 – How James and CT use calisthenics, flips and tricks to level up their physical abilities 13:02 – How training movement skills and a variety of abilities has inspired the linking of these various flips, tricks and skills with traditional athletic performance 26:15 – How risk becoming involved in a skill changes the dynamic nature of that movement 36:00 – How James and CT look at training in its ability to prepare an athlete for working with other coaches, or situations where the work may be unpredictable 38:36 – How James and CT’s evolved training programs are perceived by parents and other coaches, and how they have gained trust over the years 43:05 – Moving through an “intuitive warmup” into a more programmed primary strength training session, and how a powerful warmup with a lot of “human” elements can make the strength training portion much better 52:31 – Changing the environment and the drill to get an outcome vs. trying to coach and cue excessively 1:04:07 – How to put difficult/capacity training exercises in context, and how to utilize higher volume training to athlete’s advantage “We’ll play around on the bars when we are in a training session with athletes, we’ll goof around and do different warmup styles, front flips and rolls, exciting and non-normal movements that can pique curiosity, and maybe after the training session, those kids will pull out the mat again” JD “That’s another way to get immediate buy in (the ability to do muscle ups, flips and tricks) because they know we are exploring training and we are training just as hard, if not harder than these kids are, and it can leave the 4 walls of the weight room” CT “I tell our young coaches to train like your career depends on it; and that doesn’t mean, “increase your back squat”” JD “There is an addicting feeling that first time you go to try something you are not sure if you can do; the amount of nerves that you get, and the physical response that happens in your body” CT “If we are only working hard in the same direction all of the time, the diminishing returns are going to happen really quickly” JD “We have your traditional speed work which is a traditional day for acceleration, then we have small sided games, and open games” JD “Our small sided games could involve med ball tag, 4 on 4, 4 on 1” JD “Kids come with a lot of tension, and one of the first things I do is make fun of them, or make fun of me; and they see the guy in the coach bucket cap doe

Today’s episode welcomes back coaches Cal Dietz, Dan Fichter and Chris Korfist in a truly epic multi-guest podcast. The amount of coaching and learning experienced between Cal, Dan and Chris is staggering, and they have been influencing the training practices of other coaches since the early 2000’s. Speed training is always a fun topic, with a lot of resonance to many coaches, because it is the intersection of strength and function. Training speed requires an understanding of both force and biomechanics. It requires knowing ideas on both cueing, and athlete psychology. Since acquiring better maximal velocity is hard, it forces us to level up on multiple levels of our coaching, and that process of improvement can filter out into other aspects of performance and injury prevention. On the show today, fresh off of their recent speed training clinic collaboration, Cal, Dan, Chris and I talk about a variety of topics on speed and athletic performance, including “muscular vs. elastic” athletes, the importance of strong feet (and toes), reflexive plyometric and speed training, as well as the best weight room exercises and alignments that have a higher transfer point to actual sport running. This was a really enjoyable podcast to put together. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:50 – Who wins the quality sleep award between Cal, Dan and Chris 5:45 – Looking back on elastic vs. muscular athletes in light of the DB Hammer era, relative to now where we are talking more about wide and narrow ISA athletes 15:42 – Thoughts on athletes who do better to train with weights above 80% of their lifting max, and then athletes who do better with less, and how to train these athletes year-round 19:12 – Dan’s take on altitude drops, and how much athletes can progress into drops, or be more responsive to it than others 22:25 – The reflexive nature of things like dropping, falling and “plyo-soidal” oriented over-speed training 33:00 – Some different strategies Chris sees in sprinting on the 1080 with elastic vs. muscular athletes in mind 40:21 – Foot and toe strength, athlete function, and the role of the nervous system 50:05 – Thoughts on foot positions in light of weight-room work, and its link to sport speed 54:38 – How stronger athletes can manage a wider step width in a sprint start, vs. weaker athletes 1:03:58 – How athletes work off of coach’s mirroring of a movement 1:07:55 – Cal, Dan and Chris’s favorite single leg training movements for speed and athletic movement, particularly the “Yuri” hip flexor training movement 1:18:10 – Moving past “barbell hip thrusts” in training into standing or 45 degree hyper type versions “I think the elastic component boils down to altitude drops” Fichter “Everyone is going to deal with that collision in a different way, sometimes it is going to have to do with tendon length, or isometric strength” Korfist “Isometrics correlated a lot closer to increasing power, after an isometric block with my throwers, than it did my sprinters” Dietz “The throwers produced a lot more force above 60%, the runners produced a lot more force below 60%” “I can give you examples where something works for my athletes, and then 16 weeks later, it might make them worse, and that’s the art of coaching” “Is the hormonal/global response (from lifting heavy weights) going to outweigh the negatives?” Korfist “We’ve trained a lot of people without jumping at all, just landings” Fichter “I tested a kid with some reflexes that were off, and as soon as we implemented some overspeed work with the 1080, those reflexes turned on” Dietz “I’m not pulling them any faster than they can run, but it changes the way they run, because it gets into this “I have got to be perfect, or I am going to get hurt”” Korfist “The one freak almost dislocated my thumb (when I tested his toe strength)” Dietz “If you can tie the foot and hip together, you are going to have a much more bulletproof athlete… we spend so much time on the knee, the knee is just a hinge joint” Korfist “Some of the best female athlete that I have come in raw, have been kids that have been Irish dancing” Korfist “Rhythmic motions heal your body” Fichter “I had a kid that loved static stretching; I hate static stretching, but it seemed to work for him; so if he liked it, go for it” Korfist “In the strength phase, our stance is wide, and then we go with a mid-stance in the power phases, and we go in a narrow stance on the glute ham, in the speed phase” Dietz “Really weak kids have very narrow starts; really weak kids cross over when they start; I don’t think you can have that width if you don’t have a really strong foot” Korfist “The brain knows exactly where to

Today’s episode features Pat Davidson, Ph.D.. Pat is an independent trainer and educator in NYC. Pat is the creator of the “Rethinking the Big Patterns” lecture series, is a former college professor, and is one of the most intelligent coaches I know in the world of fitness and human performance. As an athlete, Pat has an extensive training background including time in strongman, mixed martial arts, and many types of weightlifting activities. He has been a guest on multiple prior episodes of this series. The human body is quite complex, as is the potential array of training interventions we can impose on it. To ease this process, and help us to direct our focus, it can be helpful to categorize means and methods. We have spoken on this podcast often about compression, expansion, mid-early-late stance, and other biomechanical topics. Outside of these ideas, training can also be, simply, considered in light of spending more, or less time on the ground and in contact with objects. On the podcast today, Pat shares his thoughts on a new idea in categorizing athletes and training means, which is based on that contact with the ground and deformable objects. This goes beyond muscles, and into the sum total of a variety of muscle, joint and pressure system actions that deal with more, or less points of contact for an athletic movement. Within this system of “high ground” and “low ground”, Pat goes into exercise classification, as well as an explanation why more “aerial” exercise, such as movements involving a level of balance, are as popular as they are, based on the ground/aerial spectrum and links to athleticism. Pat also gets into the role of the feet, particularly in mid-stance, on the tail end of this enlightening conversation. This talk really helps us see a number of training means in a new and helpful light. Pat and I had a long and awesome talk here; based on some logistics with production and time, we’ll be jumping right into the meat and potatoes of our talk. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 4:10 – How the number of movements and skills involved in a sport can impact the training concepts 6:17 – How sports can be “more grounded” or “less grounded” 22:32 – The links between good movers, and their ability to move when the amount of “ground” is reduced for them 30:36 – How far to take and maximize “high ground” activities, in light of other athletic activities 38:31 – The link between “low ground” athletic activities and “functional training” methods 49:00 – Single leg vs. bilateral training in terms of being “high ground” or “low ground” 1:01:04 – How being in hockey skates/rollerblades, or sprinting in track spikes make movements “higher ground” 1:05.45 – Pat’s thought’s on addressing mid-stance in light of “more ground” or “less ground” 1:16:56 – The role of mid-stance in transitioning to “forefoot rocker”, or up onto the ball of the foot “The more stuff there is outside of you that you can push against, and the less deformable that stuff is, the more “ground” (type of athlete) that is” “The low ground athletes are like half-pipe skateboarders, snowboarders, olympic divers, acrobats” “High ground individuals; a powerlifter is the highest ground I can think of, weightlifters, bodybuilders, interior linemen in football” “If you look at the characteristics of low ground and high ground athletes, they tend to be very different from each other” “The 100m is an instructive thing, where it’s changing in ground as it goes throughout the race” “I basically, in the rethinking the big patterns model, without realizing it; the progressions are based off of removing influences of ground to the person” “As ground goes away; you have to create your internal ground, your fluids and forces you can distribute to create the right pressures to move off of” “A barbell is tremendous grounding” “Feed more ground to the exercise, and the person has a higher probability of being able to do it right” “The higher ground, easier to learn exercises, would also be good choices for driving a hypertrophy stimulus” “Functional training to me just means a bias towards “low ground” exercise selection” “I think psychologically, some people trend towards lower ground movements better” “I think that once the lower load bearing foot is kicked out laterally, that is the most challenging stance (from a low-ground perspective)” “You are going to have an easier time doing the higher grounded version (of an exercise)” “Ice skating is lower ground; you are standing on butter-knives on top of ice” “The higher homunculous areas are sm

Today’s episode features track and sport performance coach, Jeff Howser. Jeff has been coaching track and field since 1971, and was himself a 6x ACC champion, named as one of the ACC’s top 50 track athletes of all time in 2003. Jeff was a sprints and hurdles coach at Florida, UCLA, NC State, Duke and UNC before his time as a speed and sports performance coach, back at Duke University. If you caught the classic episode on oscillatory strength training with Sheldon Dunlap you may have heard Sheldon mention Jeff as a source of his oscillatory rep training knowledge. In addition to a number of elite track and field competitors, Jeff also trained the top high school 40-yard dash runner in history, who ran a 4.25 second effort. In the world of speed training, many folks gravitate towards the “neat, packaged” training methods that are easy to understand and copy, such as sprint skip drills (A-skips, etc.). Unfortunately, these drills don’t transfer to speed in nearly the capacity that we would hope for. As Jeff says “I’ve never seen anyone skip their way to being fast”. True speed is a little more complex, as it involves horizontal velocity and rotation, but is still, simple at its core given the self-organizing ability of the body. In his decades in track and field, Jeff has seen numerous pendulum shifts in how speed is coached, and has experienced a wide variety of training methods. As Jeff has said, we often go to clinics and seminars to be fed the same information with a different coat of paint. The “dark side” of the moon represents what we haven’t seen in the world of performance, and this episode is an epitome of that. On today’s show, Jeff goes into how sprint training has changed in the last 50 years, what he does, and doesn’t find helpful in speed development, a variety of sprint and speed training constraints and self-governing drills, oscillatory lifting and power development principles, and much more. This show blends several important elements of biomechanics, strength and program philosophy that are impactful for any coach or athlete. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:57 – Jeff’s background and story in track and field, and his transition to university speed and strength coaching 8:29 – What track and field/speed coaching was like in the 1970’s, and how it has progressed since then 16:17 – What is the same, and what is different in training team sport athletes, and track and field athletes, in regards to their sprint technique 23:55 – Mistakes Jeff seeing being made in synchronizing the strength and speed components of a program 26:25 – Discussing the role of oscillation training in power development for the athletic program 33:22 – Running a periodization model on the level of “syncing and linking”, going power first and building strength on top of it 39:56 – Jeff’s thoughts on the “canned” (mach) sprint drills that are very popular in training 43:16 – “Down-the-Line” sprinting, and how this benefits athletes and emulates aspects seen in elite sprinters 50:25 – Why Jeff uses “flat footed” running as a sprint constraint, and how this can help substantially once they go back to “normal” running 51:50 – How and why Jeff started using “groucho” runs, which are similar to “squatty runs” 1:01:33 – Details of Jeff’s training of an athlete who went from 4.45 to a 4.25 40-yard dash and ran the fastest high school clocking of all time “Back in my day (in the 1970’s) I was actually taught to stay on the ground and push as long as you can, as hard as you can… I had to change my philosophy, I used to coach the way I was coached; when the evidence is there, you can make the choice, you can do it correctly or not do it at all” “We put 2x4’s down instead of stick drills, because people would really reach out in stick drills” “About 3-5% of team sport athletes actually run pretty well” “Team sport athletes are “frequency freaks” (in regards to their stride frequency as opposed to length)” “The braking phase (of sprinting) in field athletes is way too long” “The problem with team sports (and speed) is we don’t get them consistently, and often enough to do a good job” “It’s really easy to build a garbage truck in the weight room” “The type of strength you develop is more important than the absolute strength itself” “The numbers driven coaches just care about “are my kids getting stronger” without any regard to what kind of strength it is” “Obviously strength is the basis of power work, but a lot of power work can be done without a lot of strength behind it” “If you take that (static catcher position) and do some bounce work with it, and do it at some different angles, you’ll be surprised at how fast you get strong” “(Oscillatory training

Today’s episode features sports psychologist, Simon Capon. Simon is a hypnotherapist, Master NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) practitioner, as well as the author of the book “It’s Time to Start Winning.” Since 2006 Simon has worked with professional athletes, using variety of techniques including skills from NLP and hypnotherapy. He has inspired athletes, footballers and numerous others to achieve national, international and world titles. Simon’s philosophy is simple, create self-belief and your behaviors and actions will change and so will your results. Simon previously appeared on episode #198 of the podcast, speaking particularly on the link between body language and mental state in athletics, as well as managing the emotional brain for performance. As Logan Christopher puts it, we are always “mentally training” whether we think we are or not. If we do nothing dedicated to improving the processes and habits related to managing the mind well, we will simply revert to the default programming. By focusing on the role of the mind, we can improve our motivation, consistency, clutch performance, physical abilities, as well as find a greater sense of purpose and enjoyment in each training session. In this show, Simon speaks at length on methods to stay in the present moment, how to use particular strategies to engage the sensory systems of the body, turn of the judging mind, and get into FLOW states. He discusses the role of visual focus (peripheral vs. narrow) in sport, linking higher purposes and emotions into our movement/training, as well as a “process oriented” approach to goal setting. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:45 – Why spending time on a cell-phone between training sets takes one out of the present moment, and what to focus on between sets instead 13:15 – The link between modern lifestyle technology use, dopamine addiction, and the negative brain chemistry momentum generated by continually checking one’s phone 16:45 – Principles that lead to the “unconscious” flow state in sport performance 19:45 – Strategies on how to get into the FLOW state in sport 25:45 – The “Know-Nothing” state and how to use one’s senses to get into FLOW states 31:45 – How one’s visual field adjustments factor into one’s sport skill performance 35:45 – Principles of non-attachment and over-trying in sport 38:45 – “Chunking” a long and demanding task into smaller parts to improve mental focus and resilience 45:45 – Digging into purpose and higher emotions in the course of difficult training sessions 61:00 – Balancing process vs. outcome goals “Wherever you are, be there…. (if you are on your phone) we aren’t really present in the gym” “Energy flows where focus goes… wherever you are, put your heart and soul into it” “It’s not just about the gym, it’s in other areas of your life as well” “(In an athletic flow state) There’s no internal dialogue, there’s no judgements, there’s no thoughts” “We can’t always keep (the critical inner voice) quiet, but we can keep it occupied” “(Widening your field of vision, noticing your breathing, using all of your senses with your internal and external environment) allows you to play your sport freely…… it comes from a technique called the “know-nothing state”” “Mental focus follows visual focus” “Every time you go to the table, your job is to execute the strategy (not to “win the game”), it’s to be at your best, and if you are at your best, winning the tournament will most certainly happen” “Purpose is one of those things that we often under-estimate” “We all have an ego, but when you can channel it so it has a contribution to other people, then that’s great” “If a goal doesn’t excite you, it’s probably not worth having” “The next part of (goal setting) is monthly standards, and weekly and daily tasks” “Consistency (in the process of goal setting) is the main word” Show Notes How to Find Balance in the Age of Indulgence: Dr. Anna Lembke (Author of Dopamine Nation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEfkx3DsXjs About Simon Capon Simon Capon is a sports psychologist, NLP Master Practitioner and NLP Trainer, as well as a Hypnotherapist. Since 2006 Simon has worked with professional sports men and women. He is committed to his clients achieving the goals and ambitions they strive for. Simon has the ability to make huge psychological changes in an astonishingly fast time. He uses a variety of techniques including skills from NLP and hypnotherapy. His beliefs are that everyone has the resources to change the programmes they run in their minds so they become focused, confident and generate total self-belief. Many clients including established professional sports people have battled for years to overcome the psychological