Just Fly Performance Podcast

Today’s show is with Angus Ross. Angus is a senior strength and conditioning specialist with High Performance Sport New Zealand, with a particular interest in track and field athletes. He has worked with a number of sports at an elite level within the NZ system, including sprint cycling and skeleton in recent years. Angus has a PhD in exercise physiology from the University of Queensland, and is also a Winter Olympian in his own right having competed at the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games. Angus has been a two time previous guest within the first hundred episodes of the podcast. In the time since we last talked, Angus has traveled the world and has spent time with some leading edge strength coaches, such as Jerome Simian. His curiosity and angles of looking at performance training has made him a truly enjoyable guest to have on this show time and again. One topic I’ve heard in the world of training is “the spinal engine”. I have been working extensively in the last year in the realms of getting the ribs and spine to work alongside the hips more effectively in sprinting, throwing, jumping and overall athletic movement. When Angus told me he had been doing a lot of research into spinal engine work over the last few years, I was excited, and when Angus actually went into the details of it all, I was truly inspired. Angus’s work connects so many dots in regards to concepts I’ve been thinking of on my own end. On the show today, Angus speaks about his take on spinal engine theory, rhythmic movement, sprint (and iso hold) asymmetry and how some athletes may need to take advantage of the movement of the spine more than others. He also talks about long and short hold isometrics, and proprioception training. This was a phenomenal chat with lots of immediate ideas for any athlete or coach. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:15 – Spinal engine theory vs. a leg spring model 11:26 – How the mobility of spine and ribs can benefit you as an athlete 15:42 – Resources and inspiration for exercises and drills to improve spinal mobility and range 19:09 – A discussion on asymmetry in sprinting 21:43 – Benefits of looking at data & the role of intuition and feelings in martial arts 24:58 – Rhythm in Athletes: What you can learn from trying martial arts and other rhythmic sports 32:17 – Who can benefit from spinal engine theory? 34:21 – Asymmetrical training & What Angus learned from training with Jerome Simian 48:38 – How and why to use long duration isometrics in training 54:03 – Static stretching before sprinting & Pros and cons of extreme iso holds 57:11 – Insights on short isometric holds 1:01:07 – Thoughts on proprioceptive training: Weight lifting, joint proprioception, and utilization of balance and stability “The concept (of spinal engine theory) is that if you laterally flex a lordotic spine, is that it induces an axial torque and a rotation of the pelvis” “When you look at things through the spinal engine lens, it’s really very different to the leg spring model.” “It begs the question: Should we be training lateral flexion per say and is range of motion a critical factor?” “Most of our elite runners are short trunk, long legs and that’s what we say is the normal, but if you don’t have that, can you compensate by becoming a different style of runner and using what you do have to facilitate your ability to try and relate?” “You need the hardware to be able to run that software and if you can’t get them in those positions…you’re gonna give them coaching cues all day long and it won’t do them any bloody good because they can’t get in those positions anyway.” “I’ve found the lateral drills to be fantastic with helping people eliminate crossover running.” “I have this feeling like, the people who really generate that asymmetry and really work the spinal engine, you can’t help but think that they have an innate sense of rhythm… and I don’t think you can generate that whip of momentum change in asymmetry without some rhythm, without some ability to sense your body.” “My working model currently is: Probably everybody can benefit from [spinal engine] to some level. Some might find it more advantageous than others.” “There’s some recent papers… that have shown there really isn’t any objective effect or positive effect in people that are more front-sided or more rear-sided. You run with what you’ve got, I guess, and it doesn’t seem to be this dramatic effect that maybe we’ve been told to expect from these sprint training models.” Show Notes Kevin Mayer 100m Dash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wip9pNj6Fi4 Quadratus Lumborum Training Methods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDgUP2k_TKI About Angus Ross Angus is currently employed by High Performance Sport New Zealand in a power physiology and strength and conditioning role, pri

Today’s show is with Conor Harris. Conor is a strength & conditioning coach specializing in biomechanics and movement quality. He is the founder of Pinnacle Performance in Portland, Oregon where he trains all levels of athletes and general population clientele. He has worked in a wide variety of environments such as D1 Collegiate Baseball, EXOS, High School, and private performance training facilities. If there is one big element that is infiltrating modern training and performance right now (at least I hope it is), it is the attention to the quality of movement, and the particular impacts that doing one type of lift (say rear foot elevated vs. front foot elevated split squat) will have on an athlete. So often, we just move through a variety of movements in a training program, without really thinking about the experience that those training methods are actually giving to that athlete’s body. Conor Harris is a young coach who has really zeroed in on the impacts of various movements on an athlete, and how those movements fit in with what an athlete is missing (or on the flip-side, is already strong in) in their gait pattern. At the end of the day, every training movement we utilize should come back to how an athlete moves, or intends to move, in their sport. The training we use should have the capacity to fill in any needed “gaps” in a movement profile that may be pre-disposing an athlete to pain, or injury. On today’s show, Conor will take us through concepts of late vs. early stance dominance in athletes, and how split squat variations will preferentially engage those stance dynamics for the purposes of injury prevention, or enhanced performance. We’ll get into how squatting with heels elevated, or hinging with the toes elevated, can benefit the athlete through rotation of the leg bones, and finish with some great ideas on how to help restore internal rotation to athletes, as well as some big rocks of athletic glute activation. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:20 – Elements that help athletes pronate in the gym with more “common” exercises 12:40 – How to differentiate between a “late stance” and “early stance” dominant individual 19:20 – Why the sport of basketball emphasizes “late” stance more than many other sports 23:00 – Ideas on when to actually intervene with an athlete if you suspect an imbalance or movement inefficiency 38:00 – How foot position in a split stance exercise impacts rotation and joint dynamics 45:30 – Thoughts on split squatting with a (hard) balance disc in the front foot 49:15 – Conor’s big rocks in helping to restore an internal rotation deficit in athletes 56:00 – How to squat for maximal glute activation, via stretch-loading the glutes “Your joint positions, your tests all reflect that you spend a lot of time in late stance; a basketball player is a perfect example, someone who is constantly on their toes to be athletic. These people often present with a certain foot presentation where their toes are pointing away from the midline of their body” “If you strike the ground and you don’t have that nice heel reference then it is going to be more difficult to get your heel forward, if you are starting in the position where you can’t get the pronation to resupination” “Anything that drives the knee over the toe a lot is going to allow for that internal rotation of the tibia to occur, as well as pronation of the foot. That heel elevated split squat can be a really good way to do that” “When I think of a contralateral load, I think of that as a reference to find your heel or midfoot. An ipsilateral load is better to find mid-foot to toe-off. If I wanted to find that earlier phase of pronation I’m a fan of using that contralateral load (it will pull them in towards the midline of their foot)” “A lot of times, these narrows (narrow ISA) will be biased towards heel strike, originally” “Think of how often a basketball player needs to be on their heels, it’s not very often” “When we run, it’s more of a mid to late stance transition” “Let’s say this person does need to find more of that heel strike mechanics, that will help restore more of the variability in their body as a whole” “Let’s say they can’t hinge very well; take that heel wedge, and flip it around, so now their mid-foot and fore-foot is slanted upward, that can help them hinge backwards, and now you are providing more internal rotation to that hip” “Let’s say you have someone who is bilaterally extended on both sides, what that person is really trying to do is create an internal rotation, force producing strategy” “Getting them back on their heels can give them something to (internally) rotate to” “As you get deeper in the squat, you need some level of internal rotation and pronation of the foot (to reverse and push upwards)” “Tr

Today’s show is with athletic performance coach, Dan Back. Dan Back is the founder of “Jump Science” and is also a coach at Xceleration sports performance in Austin, Texas. 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 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. When it comes to sports performance training, the two “KPI”s we are routinely searching for, are undoubtedly sprint speed and jumping ability. Improvements here are harder to come by than simply improving a barbell strength exercise that is brand new to an individual. On top of this, the higher velocity the movement, generally, the more difficult it is to improve. This is where there is a big difference in simply knowing information about training, and spending time talking to coaches who have been working hard on this skill themselves for years, and then have transmitted that knowledge into working with others. Dan is a coach who really embodies what he is teaching on a regular basis. On today’s show, Dan talks about how his plyometric programs have changed over the years, where his plyometrics volume has shifted, volume in performing variations of various sport jumps, as well as in submaximal plyometrics, where big rocks like depth jumps fit in now. Key elements Dan looks at when coaching speed that fit with reactive abilities RSI, Strength/speed alternation, and knowing that you aren’t losing too much “explosive or maximal strength in the pursuit of speed Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:41 – Dan’s evolution as an athlete and coach & how he became interested in sports performance 9:52 – Making jump training a sport: Is low rim dunk training the most effective for young athletes? 14:10 – Sport jumps vs. “Fun” jumps & How have your views on plyometrics evolved over time? 17:24 – Filling in the gaps in athletic history 20:01 – What staple plyometrics do you use in your training besides jumping? 25:34 – Building up from small, quick, easy movements 31:05 – Are there plyometrics Dan don’t use anymore? 32:38 – How Dan utilizes sprinting, warmups, and other exercises in athletic training 39:51 – Measuring RSI in sprinting and how to “reverse engineer” RSI from a “sprint first” perspective 46:33 – Dan’s approach to elimination and reintroduction of strength training and how to ensure one is not losing their maximal or explosive strength abilities when working on speed “I love [low rim dunk training] and I do think there’s a superiority there compared to just trying to touch the rim or touch the back board. One, because it’s just more fun. Two, to have success in the training, but then also there’s just this component of it’s not like a workout.” “Having that fun and even that creative, ideas-based, like oh I’m gonna try this dunk or I’m gonna try to dunk off one leg or whatever… having that fun, creative environment definitely makes a difference for the motor learning side of things and the motivation side of things.” “Hurdle hops are good but this is like a complimentary, forced development exercise. We want to have the base be not plyometrics, but the base be fun jumping and hopefully even diverse fun jumping.” “I believe in jump technique, I don’t overdo it… Sometimes if they don’t have those key skills, it’s like you’re kinda getting strong and not realizing any of it.” “Nowadays, really I would say sprinting is the plyometric that I have gravitated the most toward trying to make sure that is included in an athlete’s overall workload.” “I’m basically trying to get people to move with less effort and just kind of bounce off the ground.” “I want to just get them to a point where I like how it looks; where we have decent posture, decent relaxation, which is subjective obviously but… if we have an athlete do a 60-meter sprint with 90% effort, we’re hoping we can be not gassed after that. We want this to be pretty easy, pretty repeatable, like you could go do it again two minutes later.” “You don’t want to chase the RSI by doing two foot plyos and getting your squat up, you want to chase speed, sprint a lot, and because of that you have this lightness on your feet, and then you do the RSI test without having to even train it and now you’re just better at it.” “I don’t want to have to alternate between strength training and non-strength training, it’s more of something that just comes out of necessity.” About Dan Back Dan Back is the founder of “Jump Science” and is a coach at Xceleration sports performance in Austin, Texas. Dan reached an elite level in his own vertical jump and dunking ability, and has been helping athletes run fa

Today’s show is with strength coach, Graeme Morris. Graeme is a performance coach that consults for a variety of team sport and combat athletes including world and Australian champions in Muay Thai. He is also the head strength and conditioning coach for the AFL umpires and has previously worked in rugby league for 6 seasons. Graeme has experience learning from many leading coaches, and has integrated it into a balance that he sees fit for his own training populations. There are so many topics in the world of sports performance in regards to speed and strength. I often get a lot of questions on how I end up integrating much of it into a practical training session. At the end of the day, seeing the art of how coaches take information, and use it practically with athletes helps tie the content in the many conversations I have together. On today’s show, Graeme takes us into his own integration of the two most common interests of performance coaches: Game-speed and strength/power development. Graeme speaks on his usage of closed versus open agility work, and lateral speed development, linear speed, and “robust running” ideas for team sport players. He also goes into his strength methods for athletes, how “specific” to get in the weight room, and particularly how he gets into various oscillatory strength methods to help his athletes maximize their power outputs, and finally, some ideas from training combat athletes. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:15 – Graeme’s mentors and influences on his sports performance philosophy 5:45 – Graeme’s take on closed vs. open agility training for his athlete populations 19:00 – Talking about linear speed drills, “switching”, mini-hurdles, and more in the development of speed for team sport athletes 27:45 – A discussion on working in small vs. open spaces and its impact on how an athlete’s muscle groups and energy systems are impacted 30:45 – How Graeme’s role as a strength coach fits into game speed, in respect to the coach’s technical/tactical plans for the team 35:15 – The story of “never go full Bosch” and Graeme’s approach to more “specific lifts” in the weightroom 40:30 – Where Graeme stands on the 1x20 lifting spectrum 43:00 – Graeme’s experience with oscillating lifting reps for a variety of athlete populations 58:00 – Working with Cal Dietz’s “reflexive trimetric” training method 1:04:00 – Core foot training movements that Graeme utilizes in his programming “If an athlete doesn’t have multiple tools to begin with; it’s hard to select the right tool… I look at shuffle positions, crossover step, basic backpedaling. We are starting in a closed scenario, maybe resisted to slow it down a little more” “When you look on social media, you always see the best athletes…. It’s always great to see what people are doing online but they are always putting the most talented athlete; people are afraid to show the least talented” “When players reach where I am trying to get them to (from a linear speed perspective) then I will sprinkle in robust running methods… I find people will skip that initial step and go right into (robust running)” “I think you can get a lot of game speed in your technical/tactical drills” “In defense we are trying to take away space from the competition, in attack, we are trying to create space… you know these guys, you know they are not quick, but they always seem to have time on the field” “We need to have these drills that are executed at game speed, or above” “When you are working in a short space, that is going to put more stress on the calf, groin and glute area. When you work in a more open space, that is going to put more stress on the hamstrings, and it’s often more aerobic” “It doesn’t take long to develop the strength that you are after; but developing speed with young athletes (is critical)” “Every day I was working on the farm, or playing sports, that was my original training mate” “85-90% of my training is proven methods, but I always like to experiment with the other 10%” “When my fighters are going into training camp, those eccentric loads are so high, I use oscillating training methods to freshen them up” “I use oscillating movements more for accessory movements at the end (of a workout) (i.e. start with banded hex bar deadlift, then go down to split squats for speed)” “I’ve used that on team sport scenarios where you have timed sets one day, you have oscillating movements on another day” “If you don’t have to run into brick walls, then you can use more of these oscillating movements (and less maximal strength)” “A lot of foot stuff will depend on how your hips move… I’ll probably address the hips first” Show Notes Cal Dietz’s Reflexive Tri-metrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw6epBVpRYM View this post on Instagram A post shared by Graeme Mor

Today’s show is with biomechanist Gary Ward. Gary is the author of “What the Foot” and founder of “Anatomy in Motion” (as well as the “Wake Your Feet Up” and “Wake Your Body Up” courses). Gary is known for solving unsolvable pain in minutes, not months, and his passion for the foot hugely influenced his interpretation of human movement. Gary’s foot wedges and training system have had a massive impact on my approach to training athletes in a single leg setting, and between Gary’s influence, and that of running coach Helen Hall (a student of Gary’s), my approach to gait, running and the foot is forever changed for the better. Gary has been a previous 2x guest on this podcast, speaking on the topics of human movement principles, pronation, “duck feet” and much more. In my ever-running interest in the foot and lower leg, and its role in human movement, I have been very interested in the role of the rear-foot in the past few years. Initially, I found that I was able to rid myself of plaguing Achilles tendon issues by mobilizing my calcaneus bone, which tuned me into the importance of looking beyond “foot stiffness” as a cover-all in lower leg performance. From there, I’ve become increasingly more interested in the role of the rearfoot in not only injury prevention, but also athletic performance situations. On the show today, Gary Ward is back to take us on a deep dive into concepts of forefoot-rearfoot opposition and the role of the heel bone in pronation, supination and gait mechanics. He’ll go into how a well-functioning rear-foot plays into the gait cycle, and how this also works with the ability to get into the ball of the foot well in athletic movements. Gary will give some practical examples on how to check one’s rearfoot function, and we conclude the show getting into some nuts and bolts of squatting mechanics in light of 3D human movement. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:37 – A recap on foot opposition, and how the twisting and spiraling of the foot works into human movement 22:03 – Gary’s take on how rearfoot mobility and foot opposition plays into the ability to get to the ball of the foot well in athletic movement 37:39 – How pronation and supination changes as ground speeds increase from walking to sprinting 49:10 – How to check for limited range in the rear foot, and how to get the rearfoot moving 58:52 – How the body will compensate upstream if it is getting too much or too little movement in the foot 1:04:12 – How arch height in barbell squatting impacts the athletic result of a barbell lift, and if the arches should flatten in a barbell squat 1:10.09 – Squatting and effortlessness in human movement “The rearfoot is the calcaneus and the talus” “When the calcaneus moves down, the navicular moves up” “If there was a midfoot bone, I would say the cuboid is a midfoot bone… out of the 26 bones, we’ve got one midfoot bone. Otherwise, what we are really looking at is the forefoot opposing the rearfoot, and it does it in all three planes” “The lowering of the arch is an opening of the joints at the base of the foot” “If you roll pressure towards the inside edge of the foot, then you will initiate an eversion in your rear foot, but if I take the 5th metatarsal head off the ground, then what you lose is the opposition” “There’s only one way to get the shin forward, and keep the heel on the ground for too long, and that’s to maintain a pronated foot position” “If your foot does not pronate at the time it is supposed to, then the body will continue to pronate the foot until it reaches the amount of pronation it needs” “You do need to get that (calcaneus) eversion to get into that toe rocker of the push-off phase” “The eversion you are looking for in the rearfoot, should happen the moment where you get the tripod on the ground” “The focus in the industry is always towards the stiffening side” “95% of the muscles in the foot are actually supinators, so we have to pronate in order to stimulate 95% of the muscles” “What interests me is not how much pronation, but the quality of the pronation… the quality of pronation will always be most optimal when the foot has a resting position of neutral, so everyone who does not have that resting position of neutral will always be compromised to some extent” “The pressure change when you pronate, will move anterior, and medial (forward and towards the big toe)” “Placing a finger, in front of the calcaneus in the back of the arch, you should feel pressure on that finger when someone bends the knee” “I get it nearly every week at least, people are in context with Achilles issues, Sever’s disease, bumps on the back of the heel and they are always on the level of the TCJ, and it’s simply too much talo-crural movement and not enough rear-foot accompaniment” “More length in the p

Today’s show is with Scott Robinson, neurology expert, consultant and personal trainer. 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. Scott previously appeared on episode #188 of the podcast, and on the last show, talked about inhibitory factors of the nervous system, the importance of belief systems on training, fascia and foam rolling, and also how to optimize novel motor response in a training session. The role of the brain and nervous system in an athlete’s performance is of absolute importance in the role of training and competition. We must regularly draw neurological links between the two, instead of living in the isolated environment of the exercises or drills we are teaching or coaching. By understanding more about what makes elite athletes tick from a body-mind perspective, we can really dial in on how to optimally set up each and every training session and competition preparation. In this podcast, Scott gets into ideas on a “neurological checklist” in the midst of training or competition for athlete to utilize. He also talks about dopamine and reward in athletic training and performance, “celebration” as a neurological learning tactic, the importance of intention setting in coaching and athletics, 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 www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:30 – How to get further into the “present moment” in training or competition, and how to go through a mental checklist to get in the ideal mental zone 15:30 – How celebrating one’s performance can draw the brain’s attention to desirable outputs 32:30 – How to build up dopamine and reward responses in athletes, via celebration or intermittent rewards for athletes 44:00 – How to set intentions as a coach (or athlete) to help maximize one’s effectiveness and gain new insight on a situation 1:01:50 – How celebration of performance is a characteristic of an elite athlete, and how to practically put celebration into day to day training “If you are trying to learn a new skill, the first thing the brain will do is search its’ memory-bank and look for relevant data… when it finds some relevant data and it believes it can put together a movement from memory and experience, that may not be what you are looking for” “When I changed the focus and got the brain to acknowledge the errors and correct, there was a very different result, and to me, that is your present moment awareness” “The brain hates an open loop, it hates loops that are unclosed” “What you are doing (when you celebrate) is draw the brain’s attention to a desirable output” “You can celebrate with a fist pump, but you want to make it novel, you need to create attention” “Attention, urgency and alertness are the 3 keys for neuroplastic change…. Add emotion to things and it’s like a fuel source, it supercharges the moment” “You don’t “build” strength, your nervous system grants you strength” “If you have access to 100% of the nervous system, then you can see maximal strength” “The brain also receives dopamine for a “near-win”… gamblers brains can’t tell the different between a win and a near-miss” “You can withhold the celebration, you can withhold the reward, and then the brain will look to solve that problem by giving more, by increasing the output even further” “If you are actually prepared to play with some of these (withheld reward) outputs, the scope for improvement is enormous” “If we set a clear, coherent intention, then the brain is going to work to adhere itself around that…. Maybe we just have silence for a while… but then the words come, because the subconscious is figuring it out” “Whatever the intention needs to be… set that, and then give yourself space for it to come out; your subconscious will be working away, and the information will come to you” “If you look at yourself as a training variable, it means I need to keep myself in good mental and emotional shape” “Thought is an energy, and energies maintain fields…. all of us are walking around maintaining thought fields, and they create an atmosphere of belief” “The coach has a big influence on (success) not just out of the instructions they are giving, but also on what’s given off (from a thought-field/culture/atmosphere perspective)” “We just need to make it OK to celebrate… when (they) score a goal or put together a good passage of play, I encourage them to show me their celebration” About Scott Robinson AMN Teaching Faculty

Today’s show is with sports performance coaches Nick DiMarco and Keir Wenham-Flatt. Nick DiMarco is the director of sports performance at Elon University. He is a leader in the NCAA University coaching system in the realms of high performance ideology. As a former professional athlete (NY Jets and Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker in 2014), Nick is well versed in the intuitive aspects of what it takes to be a high achieving athlete. Keir Wenham-Flatt is a strength and conditioning coach and educator. He has a background in American football and experience within professional rugby for nearly a decade in five different countries: the U.K., Australia, China, Japan, and Argentina. Keir is the founder of the Strength Coach Network and Rugby Strength Coach, and has been a prominent figure in coaching education. Both coaches have been prior guests on the podcast, speaking on topics ranging from perception-reaction and training transfer, to mental resiliency. The art of preparing athletes in team sport goes far beyond strength development, and even linear speed. Knowing which elements of physical preparation are the “lowest hanging fruit” for each athlete, and how to appropriately progress them through their careers is a trademark of an experienced and thoughtful coach. Many athletes in college football will barely improve in speed versus their high school abilities, especially after their first year of college strength training. On the show today, Nick and Keir will get into the finer points of off-season and pre-season training for American football, and how to place players in training priority groups based on need, such as strength, speed, or body mass-composition factors. They also speak on how to utilize auto-regulation to make the process of maintaining (or improving) performance factors as quickly as humanly possible. Finally, topics of specific conditioning means and methods to meet the demands of the game are discussed in depth, and particularly in how collision sports differ from contact sports in this regard. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:15 – Off-season and pre-season training emphasis in American football physical preparation 16:36 – Nick’s different programs and “buckets” for various needs of his NCAA football athletes 22:11 – How to auto-regulate strength, power and speed markers once an athlete already has the pre-requisite levels of maximal strength for their sport – Thoughts on the demands of long-drives and the extreme ends of game speed-endurance and its impacts on how coaches should go about a conditioning program 48:24 – Keir and Nick talking about the “Robustness Bucket” in working with athlete populations 56:10 – How Keir and Nick steer training into reactive game-speed oriented tasks as the pre-season nears “Why do they break in camp? It’s not from a lack of exposure to heavy weight-training” Wenham-Flatt “Ask yourself, “What do you get most tired doing, what do you do most often, what is tied most to the outcome of the game?” that is the stuff that you need to be a master of, and robust to, in context of your position” Wenham-Flatt “With regard to the developmental stuff, where-ever possible, the answer would be auto-regulation; if you are auto-regulating every set in a target ability, you are hitting the maximum productive value of that session” Wenham-Flatt “There are anthropometric barriers to entry you must clear as you if you want to thrive in your position, and they go up, as the levels go up” Wenham-Flatt “1RM barbell strength is going to transfer to explosive movement to a point, and it’s lower than people think” Wenham-Flatt “I think one of the reasons most athletes make a lot of progress early on, and then stall out later in their career, is that there is really no change in the means that are applied to them” DiMarco “We’re going to do explosive pin squats for sets of 3, until you drop by .1 seconds average velocity, and he did 14 sets. But when he went back down to New Zealand and tested his max, it had increased by 45 pounds” Wenham-Flatt “You would be surprised just by how much some athletes need, and just how little some athletes need” Wenham-Flatt “In the early days of experimenting with this at London Wasps, I had one guy do 3 sets, and one guy do 17 sets (with a .1 drop-off in squat speed)” Wenham-Flatt “Fly 10’s: if a guy runs a PR on a first rep, he is going to shut him down” DiMarco “Putting a cap on it, for the (sprint) speed work is helpful… but set a bar speed, and I’ve squatted 90% of my max 30 minutes in a row” DiMarco “I’m not huge on the actual use of repeat sprint ability within the training session; we’ll do a lot aerobic work and tempo based stuff early on, we’ll do speed on the other end of the spectrum, and those two things make people very good as re

Today’s show is with sports performance coach, Jeremiah Flood. Jeremiah is the owner of Flood Sports, a sports training company in Southern California whose mission is to facilitate the development of mindful and adaptable athletes. Jeremiah is a former NCAA D1 defensive back at FIU where he earned his B.S. and M.S. in Exercise Science. After becoming a CSCS and working with Women's Volleyball and Soccer at his Alma Mater, He found the sport of Rugby, spent some time in USA rugby academy and garnered a professional contract. Jeremiah looks to enhance the soft skills, such as decision-making and confidence in training the speed of both the mind and body in training. Strength is a relatively easy quality to develop in athletes, while speed on the other hand, is a more complex, but in many ways, more rewarding venture. In the realm of athletics, “speed” is multi-factorial, and just because an athlete is fast over 20,60, or 200 meters, does not mean that they will be equally as fast in the speed of a game. Game-speed involves complex decision making processes, mixed in with emotional management and confidence under a variety of stressful conditions. To be skilled in facilitating means to improve game speed requires a holistic and dedicated approach. On the show today, Jeremiah takes us through his unique approach to building the speed of the mind and body. On the physical level, we talk about his approach to testing and training linear outputs, such as sprinting and jumping. On the mental level we get into the facilitating of the development of self-awareness, confidence and specific reactivity in athletes as it pertains to sport, and how speed and power can be blended with mental elements. Finally, Jeremiah gives us some great “nuts and bolts” talk on how a daily training session unfolds under his process. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:55 – How Jeremiah pivoted his training as a result of the covid-19 pandemic 7:30 – Training athletes when there’s no official tournaments or competition 10:08 – How to play “Gatorball” & why it’s a great game for young athletes to play 15:05 – Why blend cognitive development with physical development? & Jeremiah’s experience evolving as a college athlete 17:52 – How Jeremiah gives feedback to athletes on self-talk, self-reflection, and having a routine 22:32 – Jeremiah’s thoughts on working with an athlete who doesn’t seem motivated to formally “train” or do particular exercises or drills 27:17 – How often is pure speed the limiting factor for athletes to reach their goals? 33:06 – Basic “game speed” principles and practices 37:25 – The duties of a strength coach for high school and middle school athletes 40:48 – Jeremiah’s approach to testing athletes’ performance 49:44 – Toughness & the significance of doing things you don’t want to do 57:05 – Neural-perplexity: Challenging an athlete’s cognitive load and speeding up the brain’s reactivity 1:02:42 – What does an average training session look like for Jeremiah and his athletes “If I could go back in time, I would loved to have had a physical preparation coach who not only could’ve helped me in my physical abilities, as I loved, but also to tie that in with the mental and emotional, perceptive and reactive, all those elements that, holistically speaking, can help us maximize our outputs in the games we play.” “When I was transitioning from college football to rugby, it’s obviously a huge difference in skillsets, perception, action as far as catching, keeping your eyes ahead of you and passing… it really forced me to build that ability to scan the field. I didn’t have that when I first tried to play rugby and I thought I could just use my speed and physicality, but in rugby everyone has that, so I had to find a way to differentiate myself or just evolve myself.” “I was working with these kids… and I just started implementing things based off feedback from parents that there was a disconnect between speed training, performance training, [and] their actual game.” Questions Jeremiah gives his athletes to reflect upon and talk about: “What are my goals? What do I enjoy about sports or about the game I play? What do I want from this? What are my strengths and what are my weaknesses?” “My job [as a strength coach] is to put a smile on kids’ faces and you’re going to be happy because you’re getting stronger and because you’re getting faster but you’re also going to have fun and play games that may have a lot of relevance to your sport, or maybe they don’t and it’s fun because it’s just a game and you’re generally enjoying moving your body and reacting!” “We time every time we’re at the field… and during the pandemic, we brought the Vertec to the track. Honestly, it was really up to them… We don’t really put that much

Today’s show is with sport movement expert Adarian Barr. Adarian has been a many-time guest on this podcast, and has been my primary mentor in the world of sport movement and biomechanics. Adarian has many years of coaching experience on the college, high school, club and private level of track and field, as well as in private sports training and movement analysis. There is a lot of talk in sports performance circles about “absorbing force”, as well as being able to “decelerate” in order to “accelerate”. Although it is certainly helpful to speak outside of concentric/pushing muscle actions only in athletics, a key point is that sport movement is much more than simply accelerating and decelerating things. Moving outwards to another layer of awareness, sport is much more about re-directing momentum than it is abruptly stopping and starting it. Many top experts in speed training now are putting much less emphasis on deceleration, and more on change of direction. Change of direction concepts can be taken into much more than just running, however, but can be looked at in jumping, throwing, and pretty much any sport skill an athlete will undertake. When we look at the dynamic work we are doing in training from a “collision” perspective, it helps us to appreciate athletic movement, and movement transfer to a higher degree. On today’s show, Adarian Barr talks details on setting up and managing collisions in sport movements, as well as lots of plyometric considerations. We finish off the show with a brief chat on how this applies distinctly to the foot and sprinting from a timing and lever-based perspective. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:13 Adarian’s take on training landings and a criticism of “snap down” exercises to train landings 14:44 Why it takes guts to hit a big collision in sport, and Adarian’s top collisions for athletic performance ability 21:35 Discussing the “ultimate” collision in sport, the javelin-throw final step 31:13 Considerations on setting up, and managing collisions in sport 34:30 Thoughts on using small boxes to manipulate jump takeoffs in track and field 40:25 Low rim dunks in basketball, in respect to collision management 44:55 Adarian’s thoughts on if “landing training” is a good idea for athletes 46:25 What plyometrics actually transfer well to setting up and managing collisions 53:40 Squatting and folding up in context of plyometrics and sprinting 1:01:13 How we can get to the ball of the foot at an optimal rate in sport movement “There is something people don’t understand about collisions; the impact force at the feet is not the same as what is being transferred to the rest of the body” “I’m not trying to absorb (the collision) I’m trying to manage (the collision)…. We are not taught to manage the collisions, we are taught to absorb. If you are practicing to absorb collisions, you had better be strong” “There’s very little times where you are going to come to an abrupt halt in a landing (like a snap-down)” “When I chew my food, I do a plyometric” “If you want to build up that (collision management ability) teach everyone to triple jump” “What do athletes do better than anybody else, they manage collisions better than anybody else, because they don’t have fear” “As soon as you have fear in the equation, all of a sudden, you can’t manage the collision and you have problems” “People miss, more than anything, is how you set up the collision; and snap downs don’t teach you to set up the collision” “Two things to know: 1. How do I set up the collision, and 2. How do I manage the collision” “When the (cricket bowler) takes that big leap (4 steps out from the plant), that’s where it all starts” “Landing is the least of my worries when it comes to plyometrics” “The most difficult thing with plyometrics is asking “what am I stretching to shorten”?” “One thing about tissue tolerance is, is your tissue tolerant to folding up?” “When I do a plyo, and I jump and land, to me, when I hit the ground again, I am going to stretch something, and I am going to stretch it to end range” “Play should be the greatest form of training” “A skate board activity fits the definition of a plyometric, so why not do it?” “Part of collision is managing that ground-reaction force, at the foot” “If the ankle locks up at the right time, and the ground decides to push me back, then I’m going to take advantage of it” “It cracks me up when people talk about positions and shapes… you need to feel the position; and I’m thinking, no, you need to feel when the ground is about to do something to you, and what are you going to do about it” “I’m doing a start and I got my hands fixed in (this) position, well then my feet are doing; they are fixed in (this position) too, well then when my foot hits the ground it’ll be too stiff, th

Today’s show is with Sam Wuest. Sam is the head coach and manager of Intention Athletic Club based out of South Florida. A licensed acupuncturist and former collegiate track & field coach specializing in the jumping events, Sam owes much of his unique perspective to apprenticeships with Ukrainian Olympic Hurdle Coach Olex Ponomarenko and several master acupuncturists as well as his continued education within Daoist Gate’s martial arts and meditation programs. Sam has been a writer of some of the most popular articles on Just Fly Sports, on the importance of rotation in sprinting, jumping and sport jumping movements, such as dunking a basketball. Sam is a holistic, outside the box thinker who has been able to blend several unique worlds of thought into his own process of training integrated athleticism. So much of our modern thought on sports performance comes from “Western thought”, which focuses largely on forces, muscles, and things that can be easily quantified in training. You’ll often hear things like “producing the most force in the least time” or “maximal stiffness” as common pursuits in athlete training. It’s not that these ideas aren’t important, but what we don’t consider is the other “side” of training that involves things that are harder to quantify, such as timing, fluidity, connectedness of the body and mental-emotional factors. On today’s show, Sam gets into the fine points of posture and expanding joint positions, what it means to train an athlete from a “fascial” perspective, and how his influences from the martial arts have made a major impact on how he goes about training athletes. He also closes with a bit on how to balance a training program from a philosophical perspective of “yin and yang”. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:42 - What can martial arts teach us about movement quality? 10:39 - Why we talk about fascia & What “fascia” means from a performance perspective 13:55 - Why focus on postural cues in athletes? 17:34 - The role of contractile elements in the body & The importance of timing in jumping 21:21 - Posture, the long spine, & The Alexander Technique in relation to athletic performance 31:53 - Fascial stretching & coming back from an injury 38:03 - Engaging the anterior of the body & Internal vs. External cueing 42:04 - Martial arts drills, mobility exercises, and mindfulness techniques Sam uses to expand the long spine and the tensegrity system 58:29 - The yin and yang of a training cycle: What a week of training for Sam’s athletes looks like 1:10:02 - Why you should finish your day with a parasympathetic cool-down “All these different movement styles, martial art styles… especially the ones that say they’re internal, you’ll see that they’ll use the body in a different way because they’re not trying to use them in the same way as an external martial art… because you’re using different sections of your body in a particular way and you might be mobilizing different things that I think, in strength and conditioning, we don’t often assume can or should move.” “When we talk about the fascia, it’s adjusting one area of the body to check the tissue length in the other area of the body. So when we talk about tendon strength versus maybe muscle strength, we’re talking about adjusting big muscle strength in the gym, usually if you see a body builder… their biceps are not big all the way through the upper arm.... Whereas someone who has more of a tendon or even elastic structure… you’ll often see that the muscle is almost more spread out because the tendons and the connective tissue at the joint level has also developed.” “A lot of the little postural adjustments are to adjust the tensegrity... they’re to adjust the little bits of the system so instead of just having to contract a muscle more, we could actually sometimes even lengthen, just slightly, something around a joint or spine or on the mid-section of the body and by creating that little bit of length, we add that sort of elastic, and maybe we can say fascial, strength. Sometimes we can actually get stronger not just by contracting harder but by lengthening, just naturally.” “The more lift-dominant programs seem to have more of the folks that started to stack up injuries, even if they weren’t on the spine. I don’t think it’s just the lifting, I think it’s maybe something of the mentality but also I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there aren’t that many ways that people have in their standard coaching/strength and conditioning toolbox to really open that up… Everybody knows how to compress something… but pulling it apart is a little bit more nuanced.” “That’s sometimes what I’ll do, unbeknownst to the person I’m working with, when I’m trying to work somebody back from an injury and I want them

Today’s show is with athletic performance coach and hamstring injury research specialist, Johan Lahti. Johan is an S&C coach (CSCS) at R5 Athletics & Health in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. on a multifactorial approach for hamstring injury risk reduction in professional soccer under the supervision of Professor JB Morin and Dr. Pascal Edouard via the University of Cote d’Azur. Johan is a practitioner who truly has a hand in both the worlds of the art and the science of athletic development. Hamstring strains are not only one of the most common muscular injuries in sport, but also will be more likely to happen once an athlete has had this issue in the past. The human body is a complex organism, and as easy as it can be to pin the cause of an injury to one source, we most always take a broad and holistic approach to these issues. Johan recently did a fantastic explanation of his hamstring injury prevention methods for a Simplifaster interview, where multiple causes and solutions to hamstring problems were addressed, such as running technique vs. hamstring strength training, mobility and hamstring risk, pelvic tilt and more. In today’s podcast Johan and I chat about an athlete’s strength vs. their raw technique when it comes to lifting, and what resistance training exercises have the greatest impact on the hamstrings from a prevention standpoint. We talk about running technique and hamstring injury, mobility and flexibility, and proprioception, and cognitive demand, all related to hamstring injury risk prevention. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:31 - What inspired Johan to research hamstrings & His greatest mentors 8:05 - Strength vs. Running technique in hamstring injury prevention 12:43 - Factoring in ultra-specific hamstring training, like Nordic exercises 17:57 - Efficiency in hamstring research and technique 19:59 - Running mechanics: Correlations between on-field running techniques and hamstring injury 23:25 - Factoring in sports that require holding something in your hands while running, like a field hockey stick 24:55 - Stretching and strength training in hamstring injury prevention and mobility/range of motion 32:07 - If you just do max velocity sprint work, will your hamstrings organically get better at end range? 36:48 - Fascicle testing & Sprinting vs. Isolated exercises 42:48 - The best protocol for preventing hamstring injury and keeping hamstrings healthy 44:43 - Lumbopelvic movement measurements & Sprint mechanics 50:41 - Starting at a young age: Building better postures and movement in sprint techniques 53:12 - Thoughts on posterior chain training “Looking at the hamstrings particularly, it is amazing, not only the sagittal plane or the front to back, but also the rotational component of this muscle group and how it works to help us perform as athletes is absolutely amazing.” “Let’s say if you’re doing a squat, a force plate can read a specific Newton output but they can produce that force by different strategies so… the end result is the same in terms of Newtons, but are they technically producing strength for different tasks even though it’s defined as a squat? So that is really interesting and I think that should be discussed more. That’s why I don’t like to separate strength and technique… but evidently it needs to be done in terms of research.” “It’s difficult to answer that question of ‘what is the optimal exercise?’ I think if you’re ticking those boxes, then you could argue that some exercises are doing enough if you have other exercises ticking the rest of the boxes.” “There’s so much money going into hamstring research, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone picked [time efficiency] up as a research topic… because time is of such high value.” “We can create these great protocols in the lab, gold standard equipment, but then what’s the use if teams don’t have the budget or time or resources or facilities to conduct these tests? So there needs to be a lot of technological advancement that we can get… with less testing, a good idea of what’s going on. That would be the end goal.” “There’s supportive biomechanical evidence for lengthening the angle of peak torque in the hamstrings with range of motion training… additionally, that your range of motion is moderately correlated with how much mechanical strain or lengthening past optimal length takes place during sprinting.” “We shouldn’t just consider the hamstrings, we should consider other muscles that influence the hamstrings that modeling studies have shown that muscles that basically can pull contribute to lengthening the hamstring... and the hip flexors are the most famous for it.” “Right now, it seems that there are benefits of increasing both of it, fascicle length and pennation angle, dependi

Today’s show is with James Wild. James is a coach, an applied researcher and a performance consultant. Currently, James leads the speed program for Harlequins rugby men’s team and is Head of Performance for England Women’s Lacrosse. He also leads modules in skill acquisition and strength & conditioning at the University of Surrey. James is in the final stages of completing a PhD in the biomechanics and motor control of team sport athletes during sprint acceleration and is the author of “Strength Training for Speed”. When it comes to speed, it’s always helpful to look at things from both the perspective of the coaching eye and applied biomechanics, and then on the other end, from more raw perspectives of strength and data points. When we look at both the qualitative and the quantitative, we can get a fuller total picture of what it takes to maximize an athlete’s speed potential in a manner that sticks over time and gets results. James is not only great with sprinting data points, but he has also been in the trenches coaching athletes for 20 years with many high level athletes, and his combination of the data, as well as in the art of coaching offers valuable insight for any coach. On the show today, James and I talk about his process of building an acceleration profile for athletes, rate vs. stride-length dominance, foot vs. hip dominant strategies in sprinting, resisted sprinting, minimal explosive strength standards for sprint performance, and more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:38 - James’ main objective with his PhD work 6:30 - The results of James’ sprint acceleration polls on social media 9:53 - The effects of acute, verbal interventions on sprinting improvement 13:34 - How to analyze and experiment with athletes’ sprinting using continuums 17:45 - How to allow athletes to experience continuums 23:47 - Running with low knees vs. high knees & Variability in performance 27:11 - The importance of incorporating experiential nature into training 29:05 - Key markers and components of acceleration profiles & Cluster analysis 34:58 - 4 main strategies for sprinting & Exploring athletes’ reliance 39:36 - The quickest way James has facilitated change in sprint acceleration performance 44:46 - The role of technical changes vs. improving strength qualities 51:51 - 3 strength measures & Single leg jump in place test 55:56 - Analyzing hip and foot-dominance in athletes 1:00:12 - How does DRF help project horizontal force or convert force to a horizontal acceleration? & Using a sled to train “It’s certainly not been my experience that there is this one size fits all, classical model [of sprinting] that we can shoehorn everyone into and that they will run faster as a result.” “One of the things I do will be to longitudinally track their spatial/temporal variables and try and look at essentially what it is that they’re doing when they’re running their fastest. So, it’s this concept of finding out the athlete’s reliance.” “If I’m working with an athlete for the first time or the first few sessions… whilst I’m collecting that data, I want them to experience what it feels like to move along that continuum of greater step length or greater step rate so that by the time I’ve finished some kind of analysis and have an understanding of where their reliance is at… they’ve got prior experience now with adjusting according to that continuum, so it just makes coaching a lot easier.” “They’re never gonna sprint the same way twice in a game, really, so they need to be able to adapt to those novel situations… they’re never going to produce exactly the same step… there’s going to be variability in everything they do, so sometimes exploring that variability is quite important.” “You’ll never find a single strength quality that’s going to be repeatedly related to sprint acceleration performance across all athlete groups.” “Some of the regression analysis I’ve conducted; big hip extension torque, single leg reactive strength index, and peak power during a squat jump, for example, those three measures combined seem to consistently relate to a reasonable amount of variation in sprint performance.” About James Wild James is a coach, an applied researcher and a performance consultant using a blend of strength & conditioning and biomechanics techniques with skill acquisition and motor learning principles to help address sports performance problems. He has worked with coaches and athletes across a full spectrum of abilities over the last 20 years, including medal winning teams and athletes at major international competitions. Currently, James leads the speed programme for Harlequins rugby men’s team and is Head of Performance for England Women’s Lacrosse. He also leads modules in skill acquisition and strength &a

Today’s show is a Q&A with Joel Smith, answering your questions on training and human performance. It’s great to see what’s on everyone’s minds from a training perspective, as well as be able to synthesize thoughts on each question. On the Q&A today, we have a wide range of questions, but the focal points are things like speed training for athletes new to training, coaching speed in a manner that doesn’t cause negative compensations, isometric training, weightlifting, and even swimming. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Podcast Questions/Topics What is a simple way to recover from an ACL and meniscus injury and surgery? Programming/training strategies for more strength and muscle driven athletes when limited access to weights? Still worth transitioning to more elastic training style even if they thrive with more longer GCT and joint angle strategies? Which is more spiritually demanding: 5 minute lunge or 3 minute scap hang? Your favorite workouts for speed development (mainly for athletes new to track) What’s the purpose of eccentric loading for speed and jumps? How do you like to teach hip extension? Thoughts on hang power snatches? Best cues or general approach to single leg jumping off the non-dominant foot. Vestibular training assessment, your take, valuable resources for that etc. Can we do extreme isometric lunges every day? What’s the best way to get athletes to always train with intent? What are some things you’ve found that can help your athletes give more. In terms of their efforts and intent during a workout to get the most out of every session. The balance of hypertrophy and RFD in throwing and swinging sports. In a conversation on pronation, Gary Ward mentioned he would not advise powerlifters to pronate under load, but he would for anyone else. If running and jumping causes more force than weight does most of the time, why would he recommend it for that but not for lifting? Specific foot exercises for high arches? Suggested protocol for rehabbing Achilles tendinopathy? Gary ward’s wedges, suspension drop. How to incorporate rhythm in training? How do you structure a warm-up for elastic/max-speed sprinting? Games into drills into progressive efforts? As a coach, what are you looking at in real time when an athlete is performing, say acceleration? What is the mental process in your head to make your job easier? Optimal level of stiffness and compliance in athletes. Assessments and training. Is coaching dorsiflexion a double edged sword? Does cueing it too persistently result in athletes losing that nice shin angle too early during drive phase? Some drills for jumping technique? Weight room training, plyos, etc as it pertains to high school mid distance- XC. Also, good resources. Coupling load - plyo exercises for post activation potentiation. Do you differentiate between swimming techniques the amount of heavy strength training that they do? Elastic Vs muscular athletes (a backstroker vs a breastroker for example). I found that normally, simultaneous technique athletes are more muscle driven, comparing to the others. I would like to know your thoughts on that and the effects that too much heavy barbell has on the rhythmic component of the swimming technique. About Joel Smith Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and trains athletes and clients in partnership with Evolutionary Fitness in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and trains numerous 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 post-graduate professional swimmers, as well as tennis, water polo, and track and field. A track coach of 11 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. Joel has coached 2 national champions, multiple All-Americans and school record holders in his time as a track coach. In the realm of strength and conditioning, his programs have assisted 5 athletes to Olympic berths that produced 9 medals and a world record performance at Rio in 2016. In 2011, Joel began Just Fly Sports with Jake Clark as a central platform to promote information for athletes and coaches to reach their highest potential. In 2016 the first episode of the “Just Fly Performance Podcast” was released, now a leading source of education in the sports performance field. The evolving mission of Just Fly Sports is focused on teaching athletes to realize their true, innate power, and achieve the highest joy in their training, competition, and in the community. Joel has also spent

Today’s show brings on coaches Andrew Cormier and Joel Reinhardt. Andrew Cormier is a sports performance coach at the University of Massachusetts, working with the men’s lacrosse, women’s soccer, and softball programs. Joel Reinhardt is the Assistant Director of Sports Performance at the University of Massachusetts, working with football and women’s lacrosse. Together, Andrew and Joel run the sprint-jump-throw.com website, as well as the Sprint Jump Throw Performance Podcast. Speed training, on the surface is a very simple venture. High quality sprinting efforts in a fresh state is key to getting faster. For track and field this is quite simple, but for team sports, this becomes more difficult, since it’s harder to control fatigue, as well as address the many facets of speed displayed in the course of a game, compared to a simple linear sprint race. Andrew and Joel are two young coaches with a view on speed training for sport that blends “Feed the Cats” ideologies, into their progressive system that seeks to eliminate the noise from an athlete’s regimen. On the show today, Andrew and Joel talk about a speed-based model that they utilize in their team sport preparation, running technique and options in the course of game play, and their model of cueing and instructing athletes. Andrew and Joel have taken on an approach to “rank-record-publish” in speed-based training that gives athletes unique motivation in regards to improving this critical component of athleticism. Throughout the podcast, we also chat about the role of visual field, perception and body language in the development of game speed, as well as diversity in running “options” that high level athletes display. We finish this chat with Andrew and Joel’s take on the utilization of tempo in resistance training, and how much we really need to rely on the weight room for power if speed-based ranking systems are being utilized outside of it. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:05 Andrew and Joel’s history in working together as coaches and how their podcast came together 11:05 How Andrew and Joel are building a “feed the cats” model of speed development in the context of team sports 18:35 How to replace linear-extensive tempo and long runs with more coordination driven, locomotion-complex style running for field sport athletes 27:50 What KPI’s Andrew and Joel are looking to boost throughout the year in regards to team sport physical needs, and how maximal sprints are ranked-recorded-published 39:35 How to work with athletes who are regularly in the last places in speed-based measurements 42:20 How Andrew and Joel consider change of direction ability in their training regime 57:55 Approaching running technique in light of the needs of team sports and the various types of running that may be present in team sports 1:09.20 Ideas on approaching bar tempo in a weightroom setting “It’s prioritizing the high speed components of the game, and then filling in the cracks elsewhere” Reinhardt “If we are trying to build some sort of physical stimulus, we always go back to “how can we build this playing lacrosse” Reinhardt “Instead of (traditional tempo or a long boring run for soccer players) now we are throwing a bunch of different movements at them (such as gallops)” Cormier “In season we only supplement fly 10’s (for field sport athletes)” Reinhardt We track (fly 10’s) as soon as we are done tracking it, I rank them, send it in the group message, put it top to bottom, color code it, green to red, mark PR’s on there, and they get all excited about it… the slight shift in language even within the team, instead of girls asking “how can I get in better shape” they ask, “how can I get faster” Reinhardt Team average we put 1.5 mph on their (lacrosse) average max velocity, in season, over 14 weeks (Reinhardt) “With female athletes, I’m not too worried about introducing more tone to the system” (Reinhardt) “They are doing some sort of high intensity lacrosse (and therefore change of direction) almost always, I’ve been working with them almost 2 years now and I have not done a single change of direction drill. (Reinhardt) “(Instead of change of direction drills) I do strictly intense plyometrics in multiple planes, and then say, “just play your sport” Cormier “We are going to start doing sprint training where now we are going to stare at a point off to the side, but we are going to run in a straight line, and you are going to learn to track being in a good position and the only thing we are changing is the actual physical demand” Cormier “(In regards to Cal Dietz’s work, neural perplexity, and attention management) What correlated most with the guys who went to the NHL was the guys who were able to do math while they were skating” Cormier “For me, a lot of the weight room ba

Today’s show brings on Ryan Banta and Derek Hansen. Ryan Banta is a coach with more than 19 years of experience and the author of the Sprinter’s Compendium. At the high school level, Ryan has numerous state champions and finalists, and he is a frequent contributor to many top platforms in athletic performance. Derek Hansen is an International Sport Performance Consultant that has been working with athletes all ages and abilities in speed, strength and power sports since 1988. After a long career as a university strength coach, as well as track and field coach, Derek now serves as a performance consultant to numerous professional teams in the NFL, NBA, MLS and NHL, as well as major NCAA Division 1 programs throughout North America. Both Ryan and Derek were very early guests on this podcast, and I’m happy to have them back to discuss a subject that I think has a lot of far reaching implications into one’s total performance program, which is “tempo training”. Tempo is an age old method of sprint training, and generally refers to repeated, submaximal sprint efforts, such as 8x200m, or 5x300m, on relatively short rests, with limited recovery. For team sports, it could mean running a series of shorter, but more numerous sprints, on incomplete rest intervals. Pendulums swing in all fields, and the sports performance field is no exception. As with many tools, tempo has been abused by track and team sport coaches alike to the point where athletes do not make beneficial adaptations in power or maximal speed, so a reversal (such as what we see in systems such as Tony Holler’s) was well warranted. It’s always important view training constructs from all sides, and talking with these two wise coaches is important to gain a greater understanding of this element of training, and its proper use. Derek and Ryan get into the usefulness of tempo running for both physiological and technical adaptations, and then get into appropriate training prescriptions for track and team sport alike. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 7:42 – A Question: “If you were running a sprint program for building absolute speed, would you pick strength training or tempo running outside of your short sprint practice?” 10:25 – The benefits and misconceptions of submaximal (60-70%) effort running 18:03 – Experimenting with volume and intensity in tempo running 24:12 – Building structure and capacity through circuits vs. submaximal running & Safe training for injured athletes 31:30 – Flooring/surface dependence for tempo running and circuits 33:47 – The significance of the type of athlete in volume in tempo running 40:51 – Implementing tempo running into team sport training 46:28 – Why coaches and trainers have moved away from tempo training in their sport preparation 50:23 – The role of specificity in tempo training 52:49 – Speed development in tennis preparation and the role of tempo sprint training 54:46 – How Derek prescribes tempo volumes in track and team sports 1:00:55 – Incorporating muscle dominance and intervals in tempo running & Making it relatable to the athlete 1:08:10 – Final advice on tempo running “Basically [tempo running] is just running with incomplete recoveries at a submaximal pace and, as we all know, this method is very frequently abused by a lot of coaches.” “Working at different velocities obviously gives you some flexibility around the effect you’re going to have in terms of energy systems and building foundations around the athlete.” “A tempo run with short recovery allows for the body to use that hydrogen ions or lactate as a fuel. It allows the body to increase its ability to buffer the waste so that you’re not necessarily using that workout to get better at your absolute efforts, but you’re supporting the body to be able to withstand those absolute efforts.” “The BCDE workouts are critical when you do have somebody injured and then you also have to take in the nature of where is the injury located and what are they capable of doing? Not having that stuff set up ahead of time is, in my opinion, pretty dangerous.” “If I have a compressive athlete, then yeah, my length of my efforts is going to be shorter, my intensities are going to be lower, and it’s going to look much more like a high-low day, but I don’t take that stuff out because I feel like there’s a lot of value there.” “It is a complicated process of going through each sport and understanding how much of what tempo work they need based on what their practice or their game is fulfilling versus what you could provide. It’s not easy.” “I would rather work with, what I feel comfortable with, is the minimum effective dosage of everything and then build a more robust athlete through repetition and maybe an increase in volume as you move through the season as opposed to st

Today’s show brings on Eamonn Flanagan. Eamonn is the lead Strength & Conditioning Consultant with the Sport Ireland Institute where he manages the S&C support to Ireland's Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Amongst other areas of expertise, Eamonn is a leading coach in both the science and practice of jump training and plyometrics, has a PhD. in Sports Biomechanics and previously worked in professional rugby over a decade. Plyometrics and jump training is a common, and enjoyable training topic, one of the reasons being that leaping ability is generally a sign of superior athletic ability. Jump training goes far beyond simply being able to dunk a basketball or reach the top-10 of a highlight series however; as it’s also a useful predictor of various athletic qualities, and if those qualities are actually being improved (often times, we see a lifting related quality improve without moving the needle on important jump related qualities). The data-based approach to jump monitoring can come across as mundane, but Eamonn approaches it from a practical perspective that represents his coaching intuition, as well as that of his sport science abilities. On today’s show, Eamonn talks about what stiffness is, and isn’t in plyometrics, and what makes a good athlete from a plyometric and reactive perspective. We talk about plyometric progressions, and some points of intent Eamonn looks for in plyometric activity that most coaches overlook. Eamonn also talks about the fallacy that coaches can get into when jump testing, and how the test can no longer “be the test” when you use it too often. He also covers what “stiffness” really is in plyometrics, single vs. double leg metrics in jump testing, and how to optimally manage jump testing history in uncovering puzzles of injury. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 05:55 – What drew Eamonn to jump testing and plyometrics in sports science? 08:50 – How Eamonn experimented and learned all aspects of plyometrics simultaneously 09:37 – What does the ideal athlete looks like from a plyometric perspective? 12:20 – How to go about training an athlete’s jump-based weaknesses and the idea of a “minimal reactive strength” 19:07 – Stiffness and reactive strength in the context of jump testing 28:12 – Determining what jump tests to use with certain athletic groups & what tests to use for an explosive short-burst acceleration athlete 40:55 – How often concentric jump testing could or should be done 44:47 – Eamonn’s four phases of plyometric for improving raw metrics & the role of finding relaxation in training 51:58 – One of the biggest mistakes strength coaches make in plyometric training 56:59 – Insights into single leg vs. double leg reactive strength testing & the importance of record-keeping in sports performance and training “When we’re talking about jump testing… I like to keep things pretty simple. So, while I might have access to tools like force plates, when I think about jump testing, I’m more thinking about incredibly simple metrics and I’m more thinking about a variety of different jumps rather than these incredibly in-depth metrics from a single jump.” “I think the beauty of looking at athletes’ plyometric ability is that, for me, there is no one way to do things, there is no ultimate because ultimately, what it’s about is performance. It’s about outcome… and there is an infinite number of ways to achieve that.” “In terms of addressing weaknesses… if you feel that there’s really some areas there where it’s not so much a weakness as a real deficiency, then I think you want to get after that.” “The device you use to measure, as well as the surface on which you perform the tests, can be quiet variable in terms of their impact on the output.” “It’s about not putting too much importance on a single metric or a single test and it’s also about not just looking at the number at the other end of the test but what you’re seeing with your eyes at the same time. These reactive strength tests can be quite useful, quite meaningful, but you want to be looking at them alongside the sporting outcome, the speed scores, the concentric only jumping, the countermovement jumping…” “There shouldn’t be a standard battery that you just use with everybody. It’s got to be about, what is the problem in front of you? What’s the questions that you’re trying to answer?” “One of the most important things, when you think about frequency of any test, is that the more often you test, the less influence you’re going to have from just noise… whereas if you test very infrequently, let’s say once in week 1 and once again in week 12, the relative effect of any noise in those tests is quite high.” “The exact problem that I’ve definitely had… is that coaches come from more of a strength background th

Today’s show brings on Angus Bradley. Angus is a strength coach and podcast host from Sydney, Australia. He coaches out of Sydney CBD, and co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar. After focusing primarily on weightlifting for the first half of his career Angus finds himself spending as much time “outside of his lane” as possible trying to identify the principles that transcend all human movement. Like many guests on this show, Angus has been well-educated in the compression/expansion training ideals proliferated by Bill Hartman that are pushing our industry forward. Angus is frequently sharing next level knowledge from his social media platform and podcast, and he works with a diverse crowd from strongman to surfing and everything in between. I’ve always been trying to “figure out” weightlifting in context of athletic performance. There are coaches with a lot of different opinions on which lifts athletes should do, and some elite sports performance professionals have athletes do little to even no traditional barbell work. In my own journey, I found myself a much more powerful, but slightly less elastic athlete in my mid-20s after 12 years of loading my body through squats, Olympic lifts and the like. On the flip-side, I’ve had athletes who I honestly believe would struggle to achieve their highest peak without some solid help from barbell work. Rather than only assigning more, or less lifting to a particular athlete, I enjoy knowing the binding principles of barbell work and different body types. In my search for answers, Angus Bradley is a huge wealth of knowledge. He is highly experienced in weightlifting methods and has a deep understanding of the principles of compression and expansion in a variety of exercises, and in determining strategies based on body type. On the show today, Angus talks about squatting and hinging from ribcage and pelvic floor perspectives, the importance and impact of pressure management in how “strong” athletes are at various lifts, and how to train and manage various body types in light of preventing un-wanted compensations and shape changes in the body. This is a podcast I wish I had listened to myself, 15 years ago. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:30 Breaking existing paradigms in the performance training industry, and how Angus thinks of the “necessary patterns” of squat, hinge, push, pull for training athletes 12:45 How a squat differs from a hinge from a pelvic floor pressure management perspective 17:00 A re-hash of “expanded” vs. “compressed” types of athletes, as well as a chat on compressive strategies in the big lifts 28:15 The compressive strategies by which athletes actually lift increasing weights in training vs. an increased activation of relative motor units and other factors that tie more readily into athletic performance 44:05 How to look at an athlete who wants to increase vertical jump in light of an athlete’s pressure management strategy 52:30 Some rules of thumb in navigating the day by day process of adding weight in strength training without piling on compressive compensations in athletes 59:15 The errors we have made in posterior chain training, and how to address the posterior chain in context of compression and expansion strategies 1:05.45 How an athlete becomes “quad dominant” and how to work with that in light of pressure systems “The S&C world has always looked to powerlifting, and said, “well you are the squat guys, can you tell us how to squat?” “But there is a certain kind of quality that we are trying to capture when we prescribe a squat or a hinge…. it’s no longer about where the bar is on your body, but what is the muscular strategy at the thorax and the pelvis” “The two different opposing strategies as I see them when it comes to the thorax and the pelvis, it doesn’t squat, it doesn’t hinge, it just compresses and expands” “What we look as a squat is pure vertical translation of a pelvis… and then hinge is pushing the pelvis back, horizontally in a straight line” “When you reach parallel, the femurs are about as IR’ed as they are going to get in that squat” “The squat is an expansion dominant strategy…. the hinge is just the opposite” “The deadlift is a pure compression movement” “If you have a narrow ISA you have a “blown up soccer ball” in your ribs”” “Supination is the inflated ball, pronation is that ball as its mushing into the ground” “As you are descending (in a squat) inhaling can really facilitate those hip flexion mechanics by expanding the pelvis” “People who can’t throw their guts back up (at the bottom of a squat) will lean forward… you don’t want to do that in a squatty context because we are not practicing falling forward there” “The laying down of more muscle tissue over time is more compressive in nature

Today’s show brings on Jamie Smith, founder of the “U of Strength”. Jamie Smith has coached a variety of athletes from the novice to elite skill levels, including several NHL, NBA and MLS athletes. He has been a prior guest on the podcast, as well as having done an extensive webinar for Just Fly Sports, speaking on perception-action topics and building robust athletes in a manner that transcends simply getting them “stronger”. As long as I’ve been in the sports performance profession, I’ve realized just how important it is to look at every way you can impact the performance of an athlete, on the levels of strength, speed, mentality, perception, decision-making, special-strength, and more. Jamie is the epitome of a coach who is truly passionate about making athletes better at the sports they play through a comprehensive approach. In the modern day, a comprehensive approach is truly important, since we relate athlete response to that of a machine. Athletes are so heavily coached, scheduled and instructed, that they rarely get the autonomy and creative license they need to reach their own optimal performance. Coaches also tend to mis-place their actual role in the process of working with athletes, and don’t allow athletes enough ownership and say in the training process to the point where they will struggle in achieving their ideal training result, overcoming stressful competition situations, and even in life beyond sport. Last podcast, we went into the perception-action component of making a well-rounded athlete, and this episode we get info full-circle development by means of training variability, the use of nature and natural surfaces, menu systems and athlete autonomy, competition, long-term athletic development, and more. Jamie takes the art of the coach as a guide seriously, and in the world of over-coached and robotic athletes, Jamie is a beacon of light for young athletes looking to reach high levels of not only performance, but also self-efficacy, confidence and life-preparedness. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 04:23 – The benefits of training in nature for young and older athletes 12:02 – The importance of conscious risk-taking in training 13:23 – Thinking about a child’s future in sport, and how training in nature will impact it 17:30 – Improving happiness in youth sports by incorporating fun and playfulness 24:11 – How to integrate nature into training athletes 28:37 – Thoughts on coaching as a dynamic partnership 33:51 – The role of observation in coaching and focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses + A big misconception of coaches 44:53 – What a training session looks like for Jamie’s athletes, and the art of using menu-systems 56:07 – Competition options in older athletes 57:45 – The role of athlete interest and collaboration in the results of a training program “At the beginning of every day, me and my assistant, I brief him and we go over what the objective is, what we need to improve on as coaches or as a whole, as a program, and one of the things we talk about is who can say the least amount of words.” “A lot of people, to wake up the feet, would roll with a sensory ball or spikey ball, shit we did isometrics, we did different gate patterns walking up and down, walking tall, walking in a tunnel… completely barefoot walking through the rocks.” “The big thing I tell athletes is: we want you to become comfortable in uncomfortable situations.” “[Barefoot training is] not great if you’re on a wood floor or a totally flat floor where there’s zero sensory information coming in. It’s really not a whole lot better than being in shoes, to be honest. You have to have these little sensations or irritations and you combine that with different weights.” “The whole idea of safe uncertainty… I think that’s something that is ignored and I think is one of the most powerful things that we can give an athlete.” “There’s more to this sports performance realm that the sets and reps and perfect form on a back squat or how high you jump.” “When you look at the physical, the psychological, the emotional, and the social and you understand that those four are connected and you can’t leave one of them out, it’s a pretty powerful stimulus for athletic development.” “When you have autonomy and you enjoy what you’re doing, everything gets better.” “We should go with the strengths. Yes, there’s going to be weaknesses and there’s going to be a time and place for that, but I think instead of going right to the weakness or right to the error, let’s go to the strength and what the athlete’s good at. That’s a strategy I have with new athletes.” “Children are not just miniature versions of adults but they have definitive needs for play and self-expression and autonomy. This athlete you have in front of you… is not just the pr

Today’s show brings on elite physiotherapist David O’Sullivan. Dave has worked as sports physio with England Rugby Union in the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan and with England Rugby League in the 2017 Rugby League World Cup in Australia. Dave is the founder of the ProSport Academy and now teaches his step by step pro sport approach that he uses with his own sporting and non-sporting patients in private practice to therapists all over the world. Dave’s mission is to empower people to restore control through their body and minds so they can truly live. He has been a mentor to some well-known coaches/therapists such as previous podcast guest, David Grey. Knee pain and lower limb injury prevention are important topics. Nearly every coach (and clearly therapist) will deal with either preventing or treating these issues with their athletes. I enjoy learning about how to prevent knee or Achilles tendon pain, but I truly enjoy these conversations when we can take these principles of performance and scale them up to modes that can be used in late rehab or full-scale performance training. In today’s talk with Dave O’Sullivan, we’ll go into the basic muscle firing patterns that set up the baseline for performance in any bridging activity. Dave will get into the importance of the Soleus muscle as a lower-body lynchpin, and how to optimally coordinate this muscle, along with the hamstrings in a spectrum of bridging exercises with specific cues for the feet. We’ll take this all the way to how Dave utilizes jump training methods and drivers, along with foot cueing, to help athletes achieve a seamless and confident return to play. Whether you are a therapist, strength coach or track coach, this is an information packed and truly relevant episode. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:00 Discussing the systems that have influenced Dave the most in his career as a physiotherapist, and how he has synthesized them into his current system 12:20 Dave’s thoughts on the spectrum between basic rehab, and high performance return to play methods in the actions of the foot 22:40 How Dave wants the foot, and mid-foot to engage through various squatting actions, including the “split slouch” exercise 33:10 Mid-foot supine bridging drills as a regression for athletes who cannot tolerate proper load standing on the hamstring and soleus muscles 43:30 A discussion on cueing the mid-foot and how to cue the foot in rehab exercises, versus dynamic movements such as running or sprinting 50:30 Comparing low-hip position hip bridges with standard weighted hip thrust exercises, as well as the role of heel vs. mid-foot pushing in glute bridge work 1:01:30 How to know when to move athletes past supine bridges and slouches pushing through the mid-foot, and into more advanced work 1:08:45 Using “drivers” to help athletes with various jump landings in a return to play situation 1:17:00 When you actually do want to have athletes push through the big toe, versus when to leave it alone “When they go into the real world; the stress and movement, there is so much stimulus going into the nervous system, it’s so much different than being in the physio room doing 3 sets of 10 or a breathing exercise” “I just want to put load on these tissues, and let the system self-organize” “When that foot hits the floor, the soleus (muscle) is the king…. if you had to have one muscle for knee pain, that’s it…. the soleus takes between 6 and 8 times the bodyweight” “That’s an awareness to me that a lot of athletes have skipped, the mid-foot… athletes who stay on their heels or on their toes miss that mid-foot” “The interesting thing with the mid-foot and the soleus is that the soleus has to work with every other muscle in the lower limb” “When you squat, on the way down I want the weight through the heel, and on the reversal, on the way up I want it through the mid-foot/fore-foot” “If you keep the knee straight, that makes it harder to get onto the mid-foot” “It is so much harder to relax than to contract; that’s important for people with consistent pain” “Those top-down cues (squish oranges through the midfoot) are good, but ideally what we want are bottom-up cues where we don’t have to cue them… I wouldn’t have an athlete “squash oranges” running” “By the time that foot hits the floor at that speed (sprinting) the brain and nervous system has a strategy in place, and it’s not caring about turning a muscle on, it cares about not falling over” “We don’t want the bum to come too far up in a single leg bridge, because if you do you are going to start using your back; the lower the bum is the more you are going to use your leg” “I think a lot of those people that got more (EMG in glutes) through the heel… if they did the mid-foot bridge, I’m confident they would cramp in the hamstring

Today’s show brings back Rafe Kelley, owner of Evolve, Move, Play. Rafe has experience with dozens of movement styles, playing many sports, including gymnastics, learning dance, exploring parkour and studying many forms of the martial arts and MMA styles. When it comes to human movement, and the story and history behind our movement, Rafe is my go-to expert. Rafe’s students have ranged from world-class parkour athletes, to MMA fighters, to untrained grandmothers. He has been a two time guest on this podcast, and offers knowledge from a source that is largely un-touched by mainstream strength and athletic development. On previous shows, I have talked with Rafe about our movement roots, structured vs. unstructured training, play based training, and emotional and cognitive links between play, performance and adaptation. Episode #174 was one of the most transformative episodes I had done in terms of how it immediately impacted my work in my own group training sessions afterwards. On this show, I wanted to tap into more of Rafe’s knowledge of human movement in terms of his experience with martial arts, fighting and modern dance. The sports performance industry talks about force a lot, but it is critical to look at the best athletes in the world on a level comparing to them with dancers, instead of powerlifters, to get a fuller understanding of the required timings and rhythms. Today’s podcast is a wonderful experience in discussing the deeper movement qualities that really make elite athletes and how we can consider those qualities of rhythm and fluidity in our own training designs. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:20 Discussing complexity in training, and how to get more work and effectiveness in a shorter period of time 13:49 Quantifying fatigue in basketball and parkour, and concepts on how risk increases session fatigue, and extreme depth landings in parkour 23:34 Philosophy on movement quality in the martial arts, parkour, and athletic movement in general, and questions on if Rafe takes time out of parkour itself to spend time on movement quality 35:53 Rhythmic qualities of movement in athletics, and how to improve athletic performance from a rhythmic perspective 55:16 Points on the use and relationship of dance and ethnic dance styles, to athletic performance 1:00:08 Animal forms and flow in training and human movement “The neurological fatigue associated with a parkour session is not simply associated with how many approach runs did you do, or how big were the jumps. It was more associated with how much risk, or how threatened your nervous system was by the jumps that you were taking on” “One of the master-keys for re-covering the capacity of my lower limb was tibial rotation drills” “When you are working with a novice athlete, a lot of times the answer is just that they need to do the thing more. But when that doesn’t fix it, you have to ask, “why isn’t self-organization working”.” “If I initiate a punch, I want that punch to land, and I want my hand to be hard, and my body to be hard as the punch lands, but any time is it hard before it lands, is slowing me down, and wasting my energy…. how sensitive is the foot when it is hitting the ground” “The timing of force production is massive; it’s the harmony of the body as its hitting the ground; the ability to find that moment. You have do (purposefully) do things, to get (timing)” “I think of it, kind of like music. Every set of movements or a solution to a problem is like a set of beats. You can have an optimal set of beats, or you can have noisy extra beats that aren’t contributing to the harmony of the piece” “What (Josef) talked about the first time I talked to him was: “When an athlete has their rhythm, break their rhythm… make them find it again”” “So often, really great athletes have a dance background, and fighters tend to do well in dance, and dance often exists within fighting circles” “I think that, for me, you get the same benefits, and it’s more interesting (than basic crawling) by doing modern dance ground work” “I found that dancing an achy body part, fixes it… when there is something I am studying in my body or trying to release I find (that) to be particularly useful” Show Notes: David Belle Jumps and Landings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x98jCBnWO8w Isreal Adesanya Dance and Fight Methods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6QL3ue1Tag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJs7pbWK8ms Athletic African Tribal Dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0H85tj1yU About Rafe Kelley Rafe Kelley is the owner of Evolve, Move, Play, a business designed to use movement practice to develop more resilient and embodied humans. Raised by two yoga instructors, he was a basketball player and gymnast (and gymnastics coach) in his teens. Rafe started in the martial a

Today’s show brings back guests Kyle Dobbs and David Grey for an epic meeting of two biomechanical minds. I’ve learned a lot from both Kyle and David on and off of this podcast. Both David and Kyle’s prior episodes have been in our all-time top-listened shows, and I’m excited to get them together for a show. Kyle Dobbs is the owner and founder of Compound Performance which offers online training, facility consulting and a personal trainer mentorship. He a leading expert in integrating complex movement principles into physical training methods for multiple human disciplines. David Grey is a biomechanics specialist based in Waterford, Ireland. He is the creator of the “Lower Body Basics” programs, and has learned under a number of great mentors in the world of movement, S&C, gymnastics, mobility, martial arts, and biomechanics. One element of human performance I’m always looking to become better versed in is breathing, posture, pressure dynamics and how these elements impact our movement and performance potential. From lifting, to running, to changing direction explosively, how we “stack” and align our pressure centers and body structures makes a big impact on how well we can perform those skills and be free of injury. On today’s podcast, Kyle and David go in depth on rib cage dynamics, breathing and pressure management in context of crawling and running. We’ll also touch on posture, training the frontal plane, and finish with some talk on the feet, plantar fasciitis, and thoughts on coaching preferential foot pressures in movement. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:05 How Kyle and David look to explain and sequence breathing work within the course of a session 15:05 Ways to observe groups in crawling and locomotion exercises, and how to observe links between those movements and rib cage and breath action 23:50 How Kyle and David address the reciprocal action of the ribs seen in locomotion in breathing and breath work 32:35 What you might see in a crawl or squat that shows that an athlete is compressed, as well as compensation patterns that lead to stiff lumbar spine actions 39:55 How a “ribs first” mentality is critical when it comes to posture and spinal alignment 45:55 Discussing the frontal plane in athletic movement and how muscular strategy switches to respiratory strategy as one moves from lifting to sprinting to distance running 55:25 Training the breath in various exercises outside of ground-based positions 1:06:25 Advice and ideas on dealing with plantar fasciitis in athletes, as well as dynamics of calcaneal motion and how it fits with the rest of the kinetic chain 1:15:25 Thoughts on preferential pressures on different portions of the foot for athletic movements “I will ask my clients to do a toe touch, squat, range of motion, and then we’ll try a positional breathing drill that makes sense in my mind, and if we re-test, it should be better… if it’s not better we are doing the wrong thing” Grey “Your body, from an autonomic position, is going to prioritize breathing over everything else” Dobbs “If you are already in an extended position, and posteriorly compressed in that position, then you don’t have any more extension to actually be able to leverage, so we talk about getting more of a neutral posture, more flexion so that you actually have a larger bandwidth to drive extension when needed” Dobbs “When you look at a 90/90 breathing position, you flip it over and put someone in a crawling position, and it’s basically a 90/90 with a reach up into the sky” Grey “If we can get the rib cage moving, and get people to feel their body and be aware of their body, the breathing can be the result of that sometimes” Grey “The amount of people I’ve had who have never taken a full exhale, ever, is pretty high” Dobbs “If someone is exhibiting compression strategies, you are going to see it in all of their movements…. I can probably guess what their ISA is like from that, and what their gait looks like” Dobbs “When you get a good eye, the table test is really more for the client than you” Grey “If I cannot get expansion through the right side of my rib cage, I will not be able to get my weight over my right leg very well” Grey “Just get them into positions, and get them to breath, and it will happen without those million, billion cues, you know?” Grey “Driving air into the posterior thoracic, will allow for the rib cage to retract back over a pelvis, especially if we can find heels and a little bit of knee flexion, which will allow for a relative posterior tilt, which will get us back to neutral, and again, neutralize that lumbar spine back into its natural curvature” Dobbs “People who can’t (use breath to drive movement into the ribs) they’ll fake it by just flexing and extending through some parts of their spine…. inter

Today’s show features Cal Dietz. Cal has been the Head Olympic Strength and Conditioning coach for numerous sports at the University of Minnesota since 2000, has worked with hundreds of successful athletes and team, and is the co-author of the top-selling book “Triphasic Training”. Cal has a multi-time guest on this show, most recently appearing in episode #168 (one of our most popular episodes of all time) on single leg training methods alongside Cameron Josse and Chad Dennis. Cal’s ideas on complex training (French contrast and potentiation clusters) have made a huge impact on the formulation of my own programs and methods. French Contrast as a training ideology and method has probably been one of the most consistent elements of my training for many years now. Cal is never one to sit still, and has recently made further advances in his complex training sets as they relate to our neurological and technical adaptations to these movements. On today’s show, Cal talks extensively about his new methods in complex training for improving sprint speed. As Cal has talked about on previous episodes, even bilateral hurdle hops have the potential to “mess athletes up” neurologically, and so Cal goes in detail on how his complex training sets are now adjusted to address that. Ultimately, Cal has formulated his gym training for the primary purpose of improving sprint speed and sprint mechanics. We will also get into Cal’s take on block periodization, and how Cal uses 5,10 and 20 yard dash markers to help determine an athlete’s primary training emphasis for the next block of work. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 05:10 – Breaking a lot of eggs to make a cake: Training Cal and Joel has utilized in that past that may not have worked out so well for the athlete in the process of growing as a coach 12:52 – Cal’s experience with various methods of training + How he trained his son during covid-19 19:56 – Using running and speed to assess athletes, and creating the required adaptations 25:53 – What led Cal to utilizing block method training and block overloads 29:51 – Interpreting and discussing maximal velocity as a training lynchpin 31:45 – Using squats + Examples of “sprint-centric” exercise sets Cal uses 41:34 – What Cal’s working on: Optimizing exercises for your athletes as individuals + Exercises that are best for your brain 43:09 – Quad-dominant vs. Posterior chain dominant athlete assessments + Cal’s 5-10-20 tool 50:45 – The 5-10-20 tool simplified 54:00 – Exercises Cal would assign for Joel, as someone who needs isometric strength? + The best single leg exercise for building leg strength “Usually I had a download (de-load) week and then I’d change the exercise. Then, I started changing the exercises in the download week so the volume was low… that matched the following week so they didn’t get sore starting with the higher volume… I found that when I implemented a new exercise, that’s when they got sore.” “I trained an agonistic muscle with an antagonistic muscle… so what happened was, it didn’t cause a compensation pattern and it kept the global neurological sequence of the nervous system in the right pattern the whole time and it optimized it.” “Running is one of the greatest assessments of any athlete.” “I call it global neurological sequence, it’s just the order and sequence your body moves.” “Max velocity is an indicator of potential in the nervous system, let’s be honest.” “I would start my first set with my quad-dominant athletes at the rear posterior chain exercise and then cycle through everything, which is actually better, Joel, for my weight room functioning.” “I was able to create a tool off a 10-20-yard dash that told me what their weakest link was in training. So, it’s an indicator of what they need for the next two to four weeks in training.” “At what point are we wasting biological resources by doing stuff we don’t need to in the weight room?” “The best single leg exercise for leg strength I’ve ever seen… is a single leg rack deadlift… it will make athletes so strong.” Show Notes: Single leg rack deadlift https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HhqZo-dlgw About Cal Dietz Cal Dietz has been the Head Olympic Strength and Conditioning coach for numerous sports at the University of Minnesota since 2000. He has consulted with Olympic and World Champions in various sports and professional athletes in the NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, and Professional Boxing. During his time at U of M, he help founded and chairs the Sport Biomechanics Interest Group with its purpose to explore the physiological and biomechanical aspects of advanced human performance encompassing the various aspects of kinesiology, biomechanics, neuro-mechanics and physics. Dietz has also given numerous lectures around the country, as well as publish several scientific articles and dozens articles on training. Most recently, Dietz co-authored the top selling book,

Today’s show features Jeremy Frisch and Calin Butterfield. Jeremy is the owner and director of Achieve Performance Training in Clinton, Mass, has been a multi-time guest on the show with all-things youth and creative training, game-play and long-term development. Jeremy is not only a strength coach, but also has skin in the game as a youth sports coach, and provides an incredible holistic perspective on the entire umbrella of athletic development. Calin Butterfield is the high performance manager at U.S. Ski & Snowboard. He worked for EXOS for about 8 years as a Coach across all different spaces including Phoenix, Dallas, SF at Ft. Bragg, Adidas America, and the Mayo Clinic. Calin and Jeremy are working together now on concepts related to long term development of ski and snowboard athletes. So often, we have our “standard plyometric battery” in performance training, but we cling to these fundamentals hard when we would be served well to be observing jump training and movement in a variety of mediums to create ideas for our plyometric progression. Studying athletes in sports that demand fast reactions, impactful landings, high risk, and rewards for creativity have a lot to offer when it comes to looking at our own training designs for the athletes we serve. Together, Jeremy and Calin will talk about their collaboration together with skiing, the use and progression of games with young athletes up to college level, plyometric progressions and advancing complexity, and how the natural warmup process in ski and snowboard (terrain park) can give us ideas that we can port over into how we can prepare athletes for sport. There is a lot of great information in this podcast that can be useful for sport coaches, strength coaches and skiiers alike. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 05:25 – The background of Calin and Jeremy’s careers and collaboration 08:30 – How does gameplay fit into a sport like skiing? 16:42 – When people tend to peak in skiing and snowboarding and how this fits into proportion of game play at different ages 24:18 – The power in connecting to the outcome and having multiple avenues to get to that outcome 27:02 – Attrition from training + creating enjoyable training experiences for kids 36:48 – How autonomy and feedback in the warm-up process changes as athletes get older and the reality of “perfect landings” in plyometric exercise 41:52 – The relationship between landing variability and chronic sport landing overload 45:57 – Reducing training down to information + plyometrics and progressions in skiing and snowboarding 48:03 – Long-term development in skiing and supplementing with traditional land-based training 52:37 – What it looks like to build an athlete up in high-adrenaline sport training 55:22 – How the aerial nature of skiing and snowboarding have an impact on Jeremy and Calin in their training process “[Skiing is] an early engagement sport, technically, like there’s skills that you have to learn from a sliding perspective, but that oftentimes turns into really early specialization and spending too much time skiing.” “The mentality of most of the athletes that make it to a high level in ski racing or free skiing… is intense, it’s almost like dare devil, formula one… The game aspect and how it translates into sport, I think, is very much on the physical side. I think the mental side is completely unique.” “What we try to do… is really just force environments that get them to explore their bodies, their joints, how to maneuver around certain objects or other people, and really just try to get the out of their comfort zone and using games, it’s a lot more fun for them.” “We so underestimate the difference between a child and an adult and keeping people in flow states. I just think that’s such a mistake that’s proliferated.” “The stuff that we do with younger athletes… that’s their workout, like that’s their session for the day… when they get older, we take what those kids did and condense it to the warm-up.” “Then they’ll go into more high-intensity stuff, where we’re doing plyometrics… but even now I’m trying to get away from your traditional, perfect landings… I want these guys jumping off boxes and spinning in the air and landing, trying to get as creative as we can there because… I don’t like these perfect ‘stick the landing’ things all the time.” “[Kids] hate doing things over again because that’s old news. That hop and stick is old news, dude, let’s add some more! The more you can give them, the more you can layer pieces on top of each other, the better for them. I think they’ll enjoy training more and be more apt to give you better effort.” “When they’re excited about their workout and the things they’re doing, they’re going to have more intent, they’re going to put their effort into what they’re doing more and you’re going to get a higher level of training effect.” “Once an athlete is ab

Today’s show welcomes back coach Bobby Stroupe. Bobby Stroupe is the Founder and President of Athlete Performance Enhancement Center (APEC) and has directed human performance systems for nearly 20 years, working with a full range of athletes from youth to professional. In my search for higher-transfer, holistic methodology in sports performance training, I’ve met few coaches who have covered more bases than Bobby Stroupe. On our last show, which aired just over a month ago, we talked about several of Bobby’s “unorthodox” methods in training speed, power strength and more in light of athletic needs, and I still had about half of the questions left on my own list to ask him. Bobby is back on the show to cover the rest of the questions we missed last time. He will discuss his influences and how he got to where he is today as a coach, including some of the mentors and coaches that have influenced the way he trains. Bobby explains how he incorporates heavier strength training into his sessions and how his single set mentality is a huge impactor on performance (and a defining factor of great athletes). Finally, Bobby shares his views on upper body training, as well as training the foot and the relationship between the two. In the middle of the show, Bobby gets into the “8 factors” by which a strength coach can impact an athlete, which was such gold! I hope you come away from this show as excited as I was about coaching my next training session. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 04:41 – The story behind DJ Stroupebob 06:01 – How Bobby differentiates himself and his unorthodox training system from other coaches 07:30 – Influential mentors and coaches Bobby has learned from + Lessons learned from studying animal movement and mastering gravity and space 14:49 – How much time do you spend on heavy-weight lifting versus other types of training? 19:52 – Lifting is like a drug + Metrics Bobby measures and pays attention to 23:17 – From 7-day cycles to 14 or 21-day cycles in assigning the frequency of heavy strength work 24:42 – Bobby’s thoughts on the single set mentality 29:20 – How to get improve your athletes’ single set mentality, especially for overly analytical athletes 31:19 – Applying Parkinson’s Law to athletes 34:36 – Ideas on partnering with sport coaches and incorporating sports specific movements in training 37:01 – Having a holistic influence to make our value seen: 10 ways coaches affect athletes 40:27 – Bobby’s perception of other successful coaches + How to expand your coaching capabilities 43:35 – His approach to and evolution with upper body training for athletes + The relationship between the feet and upper body 46:11 – How do you use weighted gloves, clubs, maces and other training tools? 50:25 – When you should not use weighted balls and gloves 54:12 – Complexities in training the foot + Basic foot functions to see before elevating training 1:01:43 – What is a driver? “There’s no doubt that knowing what gets your athletes going is part of your job.” “You can do high-level, max strength work and have minimal volume on that in the course of an entire training curriculum over time and still get incredible results with a little less of some of the effects of overdoing strength training that you really don’t want… strength training is more effective when it’s not overdone.” “You can see how these different animals with their physiology and their climate and their environment approach tactical movement strategies and technical movement strategies… and for me, in watching that, I think you can learn a lot about how to utilize gravity as a resource instead of relying on strength.” “If strength is what you do most, your body is going to want to solve problems with the concept of solving strength and weight at that speed of movement.” “We found [the single set mentality] to elevate performance physically and psychologically.” “I don’t like the term strength conditioning coach. If all I did was strength conditioning, then that would just make me sad… Those two attributes don’t affect every play and they don’t affect the culture of everything else. What I look at is, we affect performance on a high level.” “I think people in our position should be valued as assistant head coaches, should be valued as assistant athletic directors… Here’s 8 ways we affect every athlete: mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, nutritional, creative, tactical, technical, mechanical, and neurological.” “I love that you can break up those movements into different positions that are going to help with stability, then those things can turn into skillful movements that require a combination of mobility and skill, technically, and strength.” “Your body needs exposure to different types of resistance; internal, external, distal, proximal… variation is yo

Our guests today are Justin Moore and Michael Camporini. Justin is a master instructor and the professional development manager at Parabolic Performance and Rehab. Justin has been a popular guest on the podcast many times in the past, discussing advanced biomechanical principles in regards to things like breathing, positioning in strength training, and much more. Michael Camporini, "Campo", is a sports physical therapist in Phoenix, AZ, and previously worked with athletes of all different levels and ages with experience as a strength coach at Parabolic. He has completed internships with Resilient Physical Therapy and IFAST, as well as completing a clinical rotation with Bill Hartman. You may have heard me speak on the drawbacks of doing too much strength and barbell training many times in the past. Unless we have some ideas of the exact, negative structural changes that happen with excessive barbell lifting strain (and how to reverse them) we might potentially live in a world where heavy weightlifting is some sort of bogey-man we can’t quite define the effects of. This is important because some athletes need heavier training, while others do not. Recently, Justin Moore (who has a long history of heavy strength training) had a significant knee injury that occurred while demonstrating a skipping exercise (he had injured his knee multiple times in the past), that led him to reach out to Mike Camporini to help him create an intervention program, which led Justin to playing flag football pain free and moving extremely well. On the podcast today, Justin and Campo talk about the intervention, the issues Justin had from years of too much lifting strain, and how they reclaimed his range of motion and athletic ability. This podcast goes into many concepts of human function, stretch shortening cycle dynamics, compression versus expansion, defining what “stiffness” really is in context of sport skill, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:35 Justin’s history of knee injury, and his athletic pursuits that contributed to not being an optimally functional athlete 21:35 How Justin would approach taking compressive lifting away from an individual, and what might warrant the need to avoid bilateral lifting in a program 30:35 What KPI’s in terms of range of motion are Justin and Campo looking at for field based athletes who need to run, jump and change direction 40:55 Thoughts on lifting strategies that produce excess stiffness in an athlete’s system, and how stiffness and stretch-shortening action can be specific to athletic action 52:25 Why being overly “stiff” in a standing vertical jump will negatively impact jump height and resiliency and topics on being “expanded” vs. “compressed” 1:13.45 Some of the tests and corrective strategies that Campo and Justin went through to help fix some of Justin’s faulty mechanics 1:24.35 The use of yielding and oscillating work to help improve the quality of Justin’s movement strategy “Those elements, those compressive training strategies that you do over years to build the strength, to build the muscle. Those lead to structural changes and certain biases that you need to give time to create any adaptation in the other direction” Moore “When we look as an individual’s situation, we say, what does this person need to reach their goals, where is their endgame, and then we establish things we need to track and we don’t want to lose” Campo “There is a stretch shortening cycle in Olympic lifting or Powerlifting, it is just going to be different compared to throwing a baseball” Campo “How he is behaving and creating these motion deficits is also influencing how he is absorbing energy, or can potentially absorb energy within his elastic tissue…. that amount of stiffness is necessary for trap bar deadlifts” Campo “Imagine a trap bar deadlift, where you are squeezing every ounce of your body from toes to hands, that’s the kind of strategy (Justin) was generating (that was contributing to his issues)” Campo “He has a greater bias of external rotation, all the way down, because of the position of his acetabulum. In order to absorb force, to bend a knee, it needs to demonstrate internal rotation” Campo “You need muscular stiffness to elongate that tissue and to allow energy to be stored within that tissue effectively, and all athletes are trying to do is titrate that stiffness within the musculature to take advantage of the elastic energy that is absorbed within that soft tissue. That is why (stiffness) is highly specific to what activity you are trying to do and who you are as a person” Campo “You have to find internal rotation somewhere, in order to move through space, and apply force to the ground. The question is, where are you doing that?” Moore “If you create a situation where your conne

Our guest today is Steven Kotler, best-selling author and renowned Flow-State expert. Steven is the author of 9 best-selling books (3 of which are NYT Best-Sellers), which include The Art of Impossible, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman (Rise of Superman was my initial introduction to Steven’s work) and others. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into 40 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications. Steven is the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He has been involved in a number of extreme sports, such as surfing, downhill mountain biking and skiing, and has learned (and participated with) from a number of the world’s greatest athletes in this arena. One element of athletic performance that I’m adamant about pursuing is the idea that we must get outside the known field of “athletic performance” and into other fields of human performance to maximize our service to the athletes we train. We can only grow so much without “getting outside of the box” of our typical field education and integrating more global concepts of human performance. In this podcast with Steven Kotler, we discuss numerous elements of neuro-biology and flow as it relates to goal setting, burnout, skill progression, career progression, and much more. This was a podcast that truly integrates many concepts coaches (hopefully) are familiar with, and helps us to understand them more fully from a biological perspective, as well as one we can also integrate into our daily lives. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 5:50 Steven’s favorite extreme sport memory in his years of working alongside many elite athletes 10:10 How risk of injury (or death) impacts a sport from multiple perspectives 14:35 Goal setting for athletes, with a perspective on general biological principles 25:50 Motivational factors for athletes across their career, and why some athletes may burnout 34:55 How solving multiple problems at once is a key to getting more flow out of mundane activities 41:40 Clarifying how coaches can disturb progress in regards to mastery as a motivational tool 45:30 Challenge-skill balance in sport training and optimal progression models in regards to flow states 53:25 The importance of social support networks in facilitation of flow and athletic performance 57:10 How to manage flow with strength work, and how having one big flow day can impact the next few weeks of your training 1:02.50 How to manage the “dial of flow” in regards to daily practice “I always say, “If you can’t get seriously injured, it’s not really a sport” and I know a lot of people who play tennis or golf would disagree with me, and I’m happy for the argument… I do think it’s a different game when that is the stakes” “The interesting thing about peak performance is that, it doesn’t matter if you are going after capital “I” Impossible, or you are trying to improve your tennis game, or you are trying to be a little better at work, the biology is the same, the tool-set is the same, and how you get there is the same” “(In extreme sports with potential mortal consequences) On the inside, it doesn’t feel like that, it feels like progression in any other sport” “We live in a reality that is shaped by 2 things, our fears and our goals” “For sure you need 3 levels of goals in your life… Mission levels goals (I want to be a great runner), high-hard goals (1-5 year step, run the New York Marathon), then you need clear goals, your daily to do list” “Clear goals are one of the pre-conditions that lead to flow” “Properly set high-hard goals will increase motivation by 11-25%” “The biggest driver for humans is meaningful progress towards meaningful goals” “We get hooked on sports because they produce flow, and we tend to excel in the sports that produce the most flow as practitioners” “What is the greatest distinguisher of those freshman students who come in with a secondary activity that they love, that they are still going to be committed to when they leave (as a senior)… and it’s the amount of flow it produces freshman year” “One of the keys to keeping athletes in their sports is making sure their sports continue to produce flow for them” “Flow follows focus, it shows up when our attention is in the “right here, right now”” “I always tell people that peak performers are too busy to solve problems one at a time…. I look for things I’m already doing and find “how I can crank them up more”” “A long hike in nature resets the nervous system” “Whenever you have a clear goals list, every time you do something, you have to cross it off the list” “When you look for people who score “off the charts” for overall well-being, life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, they are the people with the most flow in t

Our guest today is Nicolai Morris, strength and conditioning specialist with High Performance Sport, New Zealand. Nicolai is the lead S&C with the New Zealand Women’s (Field) Hockey Team (Blacksticks) as well as coaching an international elite high jumper. From Nicolai’s athletic career origins as a swimmer, she has honed her eye for movement through a wide range of land and sea-based sports and athletic situations. Nicolai has previously worked with New Zealand Rowing in the elite and U23/Junior pathways as well as, multitude of sports in her role as strength and conditioning specialist at Sydney University including swimming, track and field, rugby, rugby 7’s, water polo and soccer. She also worked as the Head strength and conditioning coach for the Australian Beach Handball team and the NSW Women’s State of Origin team. Nicolai is a ASCA Level 2, Pro-Scheme Elite coach, and a Masters in Strength and Conditioning with over a decade of coaching experience. We talk on this podcast often about going beyond simply looking at, and emphasizing weightlifting maxes for athletic performance improvement; moving into some of the finer biomechanical details of speed, jumping and athletic technique. At the roots of all technical ability in sport is baseline human ability to sense and coordinate ourselves in space. Although we have had good conversation on the importance of developing body control and coordination in regards to training children, it’s not often we speak on how to integrate gymnastic and coordinative ability into training with mature athletes, despite the fact that there are so many “poor movers” on this level, whose base line functioning often leaves them pre-disposed for injury. On today’s podcast, Nicolai speaks about her transition as a swimmer to strength coach, as well as a deep-dive into the role that gymnastics and rough-housing work plays in the developmental process of her athletes. She also speaks on building buy-in and belief from her athletes (and team management/head sports coaches) from a female perspective, and we close out the show with a brief chat on blood flow restriction training (BFR). Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 3:40 How Nicolai went from a swimmer to a physical preparation coach 7:45 How Nicolai incorporates gymnastic work and general work to improve movement quality across sports and age groups 21:00 Progressing gymnastic work based on their ability and sport needs 28:05 Correlations between gymnastic movement ability and some of the best athletes Nicolai has worked with 31:15 How Nicolai integrates gymnastic and movement training into her own regimen 36:10 Integrating roughhousing work into training, and differences between genders in this type of work 51:25 Buy in/attitudes of males/females vs. coaches in working as a female 1:01.40 How Nicolai made a big impact with a team by focusing on the needs of her team versus traditional coaching expectations 1:05.40 Nicolai’s experience with blood flow restriction training and the benefits for middle-distance energy system athletes “If a squat would make all athletes Olympic champions, then we would have more people who squat well performing at a higher level… we have to get that transfer and that connection” “You’d ask people to say “what’s the coolest thing you can do into the foam pit”, and they’d do backflips, and gainers…. they’d push their body to a place that it had never been before” “My main 3 gymnastics elements that I use are tumbling, hanging variations, and handstand variations, and depending on what athletes I got, it has a higher relevance… I’m in hockey right now and it has more relevance for my goalies” “The only thing that took my shoulder pain away was gymnastics, hanging and handstand work” “In terms of hanging, I start with dead hanging, and some people can’t even do that” “I think as a human race, we have lost the ability (to hang and do monkeybars)” “In contact sports, like rugby, you have to be good at (roughhousing) work, you have to know how to move your body, and what ways to grapple, because you are making contact” “If you have that natural base of a lot of roughhousing when you are little, it makes it a lot easier when you get older” “I haven’t had too many females balk at doing (roughhousing) but it needs to be integrated at the right pace” “My style is a bit different, really showing I cared, like I turned up when I didn’t have to, I really wanted to know about them as a human, which is what we all should do as coaches. That made such a difference for them and we had such a good relationship between me and the squad. We ended up doing something that had never been done and being undefeated champions, and it made such a difference” “For me the feeling I get with blood flow restriction is the exact same I feel a

Our guests today are Mike Guadango and Alex Brooker. Mike and Alex (“Brooker”) met when Alex interned for Mike at DeFranco’s gym a decade ago, and they now have a podcast together, “The Mike and Brooker Show”, in addition to their coaching careers. Alex is the owner and operator of Pathfinder, a private training service focused on performance psychology and physical preparation for professional athletes. In addition to traditional schooling, Alex is now pursuing his PhD in Self-Hypnosis at the University of Bern. Mike is currently a Coach, Writer & Owner at Freak Strength. He has been mentored by coaching greats such as Buddy Morris and James Smith, and started his career working at DeFranco’s gym. Mike has coached levels of athletes from many different professional sports to Olympic medalists to pre-pubescent athletes, as well as consulting for high caliber athletes and coaches worldwide. As an ever-optimistic individual, it’s important for me to have conversations with those who have a different way of looking at what actually works in the world of sports performance. In the coaching world, it is extremely easy to have worked with an athlete who has achieved a high result, and then rationalize the factors that led to their success. It is very easy for us all as coaches to think of our own training as highly optimal, but a question to ask is how often and effectively we truly challenge our reasoning? In looking at training closely, it is helpful to fully understand the power of belief, as well as placebo effects in not only training, but also pain science and rehabilitation. Understanding human adaptation to training and rehab stimulus requires, not only an understanding of the body, but also of the mind. In today’s podcast, Mike and Alex “Brooker” talk about how they have evolved themselves as coaches, moving into the realms of hypnosis/mental training, acupuncture and rehabilitation. We spend a lot of time chatting about the power of belief and the ability of the mind to supercede a “poor” training program, and how the fundamentals of adaptation style can be seen in rudimentary rehab. Finally, Mike, Brooker and I spend some time discussing some training points such as play, competition in training, and training transfer. This was a fun show with speakers of 3 clearly diverse viewpoints, which always makes for great discussion. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:15 Mike and Brooker’s moves into more alternative forms of human performance, and a philosophy of when to move on from hair splitting in strength training methods 15:00 Thoughts on a system that prioritizes play and autonomy as a substantial shift in a positive direction towards the sports performance industry 32:30 Thoughts on whether or not gym training should carry mental, emotional and physical elements of what is required of a person in their sport 46:25 How and why our interventions in strength, performance or pain reduction actually work, and how much we really know about these mechanisms 55:55 How Mike and Brooker diverted from the traditional routes of strength, performance and data in athlete performance training 1:05:30 More on Mike and Brooker’s “skill stacking” in their human performance pursuits 1:13:10 Mike and Brooker’s use of high-transference exercises to athletic performance 1:15:30 In 10-15 years, where do Mike and Brooker picture themselves “Even if there is a difference between the two (exercises), and transferability, how much of a difference is it really?” “15% of who you are as an athlete, you actually have some type of control over” “The more high talented people you work with, the room to improve them in the gym gets smaller, but the room to F them up gets higher” “If we are in a sport, it seems the person who can assess the situation and execute on it as quickly as possible is the one who wins. How can you do that without playing games and being in certain situations?” “If the games are not (helping athletes better understand positions they are supposed to be in) then you are just spinning your wheels” “If you can make these guys feel good in the workout, you can yield a positive adaptation later on” “Competition breeds success, as long as it doesn’t make these kids crumble, I’m all for it” “I don’t think intensity during training is necessary” “Placebo works, when people know they are taking a placebo, it still works” “As times goes on, I get really careful with what I believe in” Brooker “I’ve seen guys get better doing horrible shit, things that should hurt them… if you believe (it is going to help you) who am I to doubt you” “I have guys that, when I work on them, they feel better. I have people who, when I work on them, they don’t get better no matter what I do, I don’t think they want to get better” “It’s not unusual for peo

Our guest today is Patrick Coyne, coach and owner of Black Sheep Performance in Cincinnati, Ohio. Pat started helping clients of all levels reach their fullest potential after his career as a 4-star high school football recruit ended in college due to injury. Pat started Black Sheep Performance in 2018 on the side of a house in Cincinnati, OH. Within 3 years BSP organically outgrew itself, working from renting gym space, to a barn, to a state of the art 11,000 sq. foot training facility. Pat has mentored under some of the top coaches in the nation, is a progressive thinker, and gets great results with his clients in his fast-growing business. When I moved back to Ohio in July, I connected with Pat shortly thereafter and have gotten several training sessions and conversations in with him since then. Pat has a training style that fuses many of the elements I consider essential: A great environment, room for exploration/creativity, competition and reaction, as well as an integration of modern speed training methods, such as those taught by multi-time podcast guest, Adarian Barr. As such, it was only a matter of time until Pat and I sat down together and recorded a podcast. Two of the big things that Pat and I are both passionate about are being life-long learners and then looking at (and experiencing) the holistic effects of things like the training environment, athlete autonomy/creativity, and the effects of music, rhythm and reactions on performance. On this podcast, Pat and I go into his background as an athlete and coach, his thoughts on structured vs. unstructured/open training, his progressions on speed training, rhythm, timing, how he challenges athletes on a holistic level, and some deeper discussion on the evolution of the human/sports performance industry. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 5:30 Pat’s medieval gear in his gym, as well as his background as a top-ranked high school quarterback, and his transition into strength and conditioning 11:15 What Pat believes held him back from being successful on the college level after being very successful (and physically fit and gifted) in high school, and what he would tell his younger self from his place now as a coach 16:00 How Pat uses games and a holistic approach to connect dots in his training programs/process 27:40 Ideas on how structured versus unstructured training, as well as the importance of being in the moment without expectations, in the training setting 46:50 How Pat’s speed training process has changed over his years as a coach 54:15 A chat on rhythm and timing in coaching speed and athletic movement, as well as using musical beats to time up various training movements 1:04.00 What Pat sees as the evolving purpose of the profession of a strength coach and the deeper purposes of training and coaching in the physical realm 1:14.15 Three things that go into Pat’s mind before each training session that tell him “this is what will make a great session” “(To my younger self) I would go and spend time doing everything that I didn’t want to do” “You have these training sessions which are comfortable and build people up, and it’s very ego driven to where you have your athletes feeling to where they crushed the day, and there is truth in that. But.. how uncomfortable did you make your athletes in a healthy way, in a safe environment, to where they could fail, to where you could see how resilient that athlete is becoming” “I want to see the full human being first, then we can smack the weights” “I feel like you make the most progress when you are having fun… why does a kid make progress so fast. Why do we throw that out when we are working with a pro athlete?” “They may have got their asses kicked, but what they are going to remember at the end of the practice is that the coach might have let them have some fun” “It’s your job (as a coach) to be a facilitator, you’re literally a catalyst, it’s your job to pull out from the athlete what they need, not to force (your markers) on them, because you are ego-driven” “The gym is the perfect place to be more resilient as a human, and a lot of that is games and not structuring everything in your workout” “What I do a lot of times, is I’ll sneak videos when they are playing a game, and I’ll show the positions they are hitting, and I’ll show the kids and ask them “why are you not hitting that in training?” “I’ve seen the point where fun and open chain (more games) does more damage; people who might need the structure to feel good about the session” “Seeing an athlete run completely wrong, and smoke everyone in my facility…. well, there goes everything I know” “Let’s work on falling first, and then all of a sudden you see athletes start to feel and they find their own way of running…. they are figuring it out, I am not over-coach

Our guest today is Bobby Stroupe, founder and president of Athlete Performance Enhancement Center (APEC). Bobby has directed human performance systems for nearly 20 years. His coaching ranges from youth athletes to some of the top names in multiple professional sports, including first round picks, as well as Super Bowl and World Series champions. Bobby is well-known for his work in the physical preparation realm of Patrick Mahomes, quarterback of the recent Superbowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs. After doing 235 episodes of this podcast, and opening up my eyes to more and more of the performance space, I’m always excited to find those coaches who are spearheading creative and effective training methods in athletic performance transfer. When I recently watched Bobby Stroupe’s presentation at the recent “Track Football Consortium” regarding his methods in working with Patrick Mahomes, I was like a kid in a candy shop, viewing training methods that replicated many time and space requirements of sport play without being mechanical or contrived. Bobby is not only a holistic and open minded coach, but he is also an incredibly thorough and detailed thinker. There are so many points of carry-over in what Bobby does, I believe that studying his work is essential if we are to reach the point of getting our training to truly transfer to the field of play. Bobby achieves this transfer in a way that still pays homage to traditional principles of force development and human performance, but is able to add in the tri-planar and chaotic nature of what athletes will encounter in sport. On today’s podcast, Bobby gets into a variety of his “unorthodox” training methods, including locomotion complexes, tri-planar plyometrics and strength training, complex training, long-term development, and athlete autonomy. Again, with the interest of transfer to sport in mind, any aspiring coach should be familiar with the work of Bobby Stroupe and Team APEC. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:15 What Bobby and I have learned about coaching from being fathers of young children 11:00 Bobby’s take on working with athletes from a young age, and how his team approaches long term athletic development 21:05 Bobby’s thoughts on being able to follow elite athletes for an extended period of time, as many professional athletes have been working at APEC since they were quite young 23:25 How human locomotion is taught using “locomotion complexes”, triplanar and scalar breakdowns of basic motions such as skips, caraocas, and gallops 36:40 Multiplanar jumps and how Bobby will complex these movements in with more static strength training means 46:35 Using different body alignments in strength training movements, as well as Bobby’s work with lunge matrixes using different foot positions 56:26 Bobby’s background with therapeutic education, and how that has impacted his work as a strength/physical preparation coach 1:04:00 Bobby’s take on the efficacy of technology for training athletes “What we want kids to say is, APEC is so fun we went up there and played for an hour and I wish I could come every day” “If someone comes up and tells us what we want them to do with their kid, we tell them that generally, it’s not a good fit” “Typically, middle school, with what we do, the girls are fairly dominant by the time they are in 7th grade” “We want to educate the individual on what makes them unique, what are their gifts?” “You will not find more variance than (coaching 40 middle school kids in one session) that in any training situation” “The number one rule of locomotion is “you do not restrict an athlete in space”” “There’s no better way to (calibrate) than letting the body move through space on its’ own with tension relationships” “I’ve even incorporated locomotion between heavy strength sets to make sure that the body applies those types of things to movement, which is our priority” “If you have an athlete who can do the caraoca pattern forwards and backwards (backwards is very difficult) and increase the circumference of the space they are taking up, that is a highly coordinated athlete that is going to do special things in space” “Anything that you can do with a kid that’s effective, is going to be effective for a professional athlete. But anything you do with a professional athlete is not going to be effective for a kid. So if there’s something you believe in that’s in your core curriculum for youth development, then you have to make sure your professional athletes get some exposure to that, because at your core, you are a human being” “If I’m going to take the time to do something that’s more human performance based, but not practical in a game, then I’m always going to cross it with something that is more multi-dimensional so that the brain and the body understand

Our guest today is Rob Assise, track coach at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. Rob has 17 years of coaching experience, and has been a regular speaker and writer in the realms of track and field, plyometrics and speed training. He previously appeared on episode #95 and #196 of the podcast. One of the more fascinating ideas that I’ve been working with over time, as a coach, has been the idea of using a “long-burst” training movement of around 10-30 seconds, to help improve the power output of “short-burst” movements, such as a jump or short sprint. Dr. Mark Wetzel spoke about this in depth on a recent episode and his take on it has confirmed things that I’ve seen anecdotally for some time, as well as read up on years ago in the mysterious “Greatest Sports Training Book Ever” by “DB Hammer” with the “AN1” and “AN2” bracket systems. Rob has taken those bracket systems and has done some creative training work with them recently, where he has also infused “infinity walks” which Dan Fichter talked about on a recent episode, into the mix. Rob talks about that today, as well as ways that this concept can be taken creatively for track and field athletes. In the second half of this show, Rob and I talk plyometric concepts, and how to build bounding and plyometric training “from the feet up” and “from ground contact times upward”. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:35 Catching up with the struggles of being a high school coach in this period of history 9:50 How Rob has been creating workouts with complementary energy system brackets (i.e. a speed-endurance energy system work recovering a sprint system, and vice versa) 18:50 Ideas on how to optimize track and field events based off of game play and opposing energy systems 28:35 How Rob has observed warmup preferences and tendencies based on an athlete’s neurotype 31:35 Rob’s take on teaching bounding and bound progressions, as well as ideas with bounding with different foot strike emphasis 50:05 Using power metrics in conjunction with bounding using the Muscle Lab Contact Grid, as well as contact time based bound teaching ideas 56:55 How Rob manages contact times for depth jumping, hurdle hops and traditional plyometrics 60:40 How Rob’s thoughts on speed training have evolved over the last few years, as well as “bleed” versus “blast” methods in working flying 10 sprints “A typical thing we’ll do right off the bat; we’ll do an altitude drop, something intense, then they’ll go into doing something like a speed Russian lunge for 30 seconds, and then they’ll go into doing an infinity walk, or crawl or carry, for about 90 seconds, and then they’ll do something to failure, like hanging from a bar or doing a cross-crawl superman or something like that; something that falls into one exercise recovering another” “One thing that might be overlooked the most on the infinity walk is the vision component” “I’ve thought about the idea of, do a couple of (high or long) jumps, then go to a basketball court and play 3 on 3 real quick (and then come back to do more jumps)” “We would just give athletes at the start of practice on a Friday an option to do whatever they wanted to do in the warmup. The type 1’s would always do something where they were competing. The Type 2’s, it would depend who they were hanging out with. The type 3 would literally go through the same warmup they would go through every day… if you just give athletes 10 minutes and watch what they do, it tells you basically what they are” “We work heel to toe on a low intensity (to teach bounding)” “I think you have to rotate through the ball of the first metatarsal when you are doing the lateral bound; you are also getting more of the lateral sling involved with it” “Any time you can hone in on a specific body part and get them some body awareness, that’s helpful, because athletes are really lacking in awareness these days” “The first couple of weeks we’ll do light barefoot bounding, so they can get better sensation, so they can feel the heel” “You are going to see more of a forefoot contact for .2 seconds and below, and anything that is above, you are going to get more of the heel involved” “(The shift onto the ball of the foot in jumping) That’s the moment of truth” About Rob Assise Rob Assise has 17 years of experience teaching mathematics and coaching track and field at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. He also has coached football and cross country. Additional writing of his can be found at Simplifaster, Track Football Consortium, and ITCCCA. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected] or Twitter @HFJumps.

Our guest today is Dan John who is a strength coach, track coach, master’s track athlete, best-selling author, and all around sage of wisdom on all-things strength training for athletics and life itself. Dan’s work has been profoundly impactful on my coaching, and training practice. The older and more experienced I get as a coach, the more I find his reduction to the essentials, as well as global thinking, extremely valuable. Dan appeared on podcast episode #96 with one of my favorite conversations since the start of this podcast series. If you’ve been around elite coaches and athletes for long enough, you start to realize trends that go beyond the sets, reps and training prescriptions that work their way into the results that are being achieved in competition. Elite athletes are strong enough for their sport, as well as being (hopefully) adequate in general physical measures, but they also tend to have elite levels of relaxation and tension management. Many times, the best competitors carry a different outlook on competition itself. For today’s show, Dan covers ideas on the art of “letting go” and achieving better performance through superior relaxation and tension management. He also gets into some of the creative coaching practices he utilized for his throwers, such as playing unique games, “range” throwing, constraint based turns in the circle, and super-setting kettlebell work with throwing. Finally, other important elements, such as the importance of being “deprived” of a good training environment, and elastic athletic performance are addressed in this conversation with a strength and track legend. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:00 Things Dan thought was under-appreciated or went under the radar in the original “Easy Strength” book, (and a discussion on the idea of what is truly important in training, and not digging too far into details until basic standards of performance are met) 13:00 The usefulness of games for track athletes in regards to their overall conditioning with a level of specificity to their sport, and examples of games that Dan would play with his track athletes 17:00 The power of not having expectations in having one’s highest performance 24:00 Thoughts on the “right amount” of effort in one’s skills and events in competition 0:36 The art of deprivation, etc. in regards to training equipment or commonly used exercises 45:00 A chat on the integration of kettlebell training into athletic movement 50:50 The art of relaxation in throwing, sprinting and even weightlifting exercises, as well as a unique coaching system for varied tensioning in the athlete’s body during lifts “I coach the hands and feet, I try to make them like mini-trampolines (a lot of bounce to the hands and feet)” “The shoulders and the hips, I use the old Chinese medicine term, the “4-knots” tight enough to stay on, loose enough that you can un-string them” “We as Americans have this love affair with these dressed up fancy programs on a spreadsheet… and it’s all crap… until they are throwing over 200,210 (feet) we don’t have to worry about the small details” “With my throwers, we do almost zero conditioning, but on Friday’s, we always play a game” “When you have no expectations, you let things happen (specifically in context of track and field throwing)… life at its highest end.. it’s effortless” “It’s the art of practicing letting go… I think that a true meditation might be as good as (that extra little bit of conditioning) because practicing letting things happen, especially in track and field (is important).’ “Track and field is nothing but “bows and arrows”. When you high jump, you turn various parts of your body into a bow and arrow, and if you synchronize it enough, you rocket over the bar” “I think that’s our job, to make the complex simple” “If you are doing farmer walks and throwing 40lb hay-bales for a couple of hours a day, you have pretty much covered your GPP” “You can’t have “leakage” when you are carrying a couch up the stairs” “Depravation increases capacity… by not having anything, you’ll be a better coach because you have to out-think” About Dan John Dan John has spent his life with one foot in the world of lifting and throwing, and the other foot in academia. An All-American discus thrower, Dan has also competed at the highest levels of Olympic lifting, Highland Games and the Weight Pentathlon, an event in which he holds the American record. Dan spends his work life blending weekly workshops and lectures with full-time writing, and is also an online religious studies instructor for Columbia College of Missouri. As a Fulbright Scholar, he toured the Middle East exploring the foundations of religious education systems. Dan is also a Senior Lecturer for St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. His books, on weigh

Our guest today is athletic movement specialist Lee Taft. Lee is one of the most highly respected game speed development coaches in the world, and has taught his methods around the world. Lee combines an extensive knowledge of sport movement and physical education means and brings this into the physical preparation space in a meaningful way. Lee has appeared twice prior on the Just Fly Performance podcast and has been a great source of practical ideas and knowledge on speed development for me over my years as a coach. One of the big things I find more and more coaches looking for is ideas on the long term development of an athlete. By the time an athlete gets to high school, let alone college and the pro’s, the vast majority of the “ground-work” has been done in regards to the speed and reaction abilities of that athlete-specific to their sport. Unfortunately, there are many pitfalls for young athletes, who miss many critical windows of early development for a variety of reasons. This podcast is all about the development of speed from a young age, how velocity rules training (even if technique is “ugly” early on) as well as some varied topics on Lee’s take on warmups for training and sport, as well as thoughts on vision training and low-box training for athletes. Whether you work with youth, or established athletes, or are a sport parent, this is essential information. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:10 What coaching athletes in the private sector was like in the 1990’s, as well as the state of athletes in that time period, versus the 2010’s and beyond 10:40 Some of the big rocks that have caused young athletes time to get taken up, and increase pressure and strain 15:40 Fun games and warmup ideas for athletes 28:55 How Lee designs his warmups and creates a competitive situation with reactive tracking work 32:30 How Lee links his warmups to the rest of his workouts, and how he will utilize games that fit with the greater theme of the session 35:10 Key performance indicators that Lee looks at in regards to how well his game-speed training is transferring 45:40 Some things that are doing a disservice to athletes early on in their development of game-speed, etc., and the importance of maximal velocity training for young athletes, and how skill development can come along gradually 57:00 Advice for an athlete in their warmup for a sport game (versus warming up for a practice) 59:55 How Lee looks at vision training from a “raw” perspective 1:09.10 How “low-box” training works and how Lee uses it in his performance regimen “Back then, it was really common for parents to say “Lee, we need something for our kids to do, what do you got? Now days, it’s the opposite” “We talk about ACL’s now, like we talk about drinking water… it was this big news (back in the 1990’s)… mentally kids are not absorbed in any one process, because they can’t” “I could get results quicker back then (in the 1990’s), just through sound training, because (the athletes) had more to give me. Now, you take one step forward, you take another step back” “Sometimes I don’t want then thinking… just go play, react!” “I love soccer related things for athletes that don’t play soccer, it’s tremendous for the groin and adductors, especially when they aren’t used to doing it” “Kids don’t know how to read spin (on a ball) unless they are exposed to it” “Days vary, because if I sense the athletes are fatigued, tired, bored, upset, we play a lot… I’ll sprinkle in teaching while they are playing, but that will be the bulk of the workout” “We’ve put them in situations where they have to make good decisions, and that’s how I judge (KPI’s for game-speed transfer)” “When I teach athletic movement skills, whenever possible, I think athletes have to be taught to react and go full speed so that their central nervous system adapts to the speeds and limb control that they need” “If younger kids are taught to move fast, and then we just slide in technique, they are going to be OK… I think young athletes need to be taught to do things really fast, as long as they are safe, let them go and clean up the mess as you go” “If we want the clean, we have to accept the dirty, we want to let the ugliness happen… most parents and most coaches are not patient enough” “I’m ok with them being ugly early in the foundation, to establish speed in their brain… go fast, you’ll figure out how to control your speed because we are going to get more exposure to it” “When we would warm up for a game (such as basketball) we would warm up with the ball… if we do skips, we are doing it dribbling” “I used to do a lot (of low box training) with 4 and 6 inch, I do a lot more with a box the height of an Olympic plate” Show Notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpgTGWHhJpc Low box training example About Lee Taft Lee

Our guest today is Dan Fichter, owner and operator of WannaGetFast, a sports performance facility in Rochester, New York. He is one of the leading experts in applying clinical neurology into athletic rehabilitation and sport performance applications. Dan has been mentored by a variety of elite coaches, therapists, and neurologists, and has trained numerous professional athletes and Olympians across a variety of sports. He has been a multi-time guest on the podcast, with one of the most popular episodes of all-time being a joint discussion with Chris Korfist on “DB Hammer” training methods (an old-school classic). It’s somewhat of a “woke” term to mention the nervous system in training, as Matt Cooper said on a recent podcast. Although it is easy to pay homage to the nervous system as the ultimate controller of training results, it is much more complicated to actually observe and specifically train the CNS. This is where people like Dan Fichter are awesome resources in regards to being able to take the complex inter-disciplinary work on the subject, and tie it into simple methods we can use in our own practices. On today’s show, Dan runs through a wide swath of nervous system training topics, centering on isometrics, as well as their role in light of long term athletic development, crawling and the nervous system, infinity walks, as well as his keys to a good warmup from a neurological perspective. There was a huge amount of practical training gold in this episode. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 7:00 The top 3 things Dan learned from Jay Schroeder that have stuck with him over his years as a coach, particularly that of isometric exercise and intention 13:30 How isometrics specifically help create a condition for the body to solve a functional problem 20:30 How Dan’s exercise distributions have been altered over time (isometrics, bodyweight and traditional lifts) 27:00 Where Dan fits on the “5 minute hold” to shorter isometric hold spectrum 31:30 Questions on, “are isometrics alone enough to help an athlete overcome their injuries” 34:45 Crawling and links to neurology, as well as why it’s important to crawl in an extended posture position and the head up 39:45 How sensory stimulation precedes motor output in athletes, and the importance of stimulating athletes on a sensory level 47:00 The power of infinity walks in empowering an athlete on a neurological and sensory perspective, and how this can tie into, and be complexed with, other athletic skills 54:45 Things that Dan finds essential in the warmup process for his athletes 56:25 The electrical ramifications of tapping the heel in an athletic movement “As Jay says, “everybody is fast, and everybody is strong, they just can’t display it”” “Every step you take, the body finds the easiest and safest path, to complete the task” “When it comes to neurology, you have to hit it perfect, and when you hit it perfect, magic things happen” “Jay used to say this all the time “water will find the crack”” “One of my most favorite things I’ve learned from Jay’s was “quick style” exercises; my favorite exercise is a towel curl press, where they curl (the towel) up, they press it over their head, they pull it down, and then they extend their triceps, so there is everything about upper body movement in one exercise, and as Jay says, it’s recovering you while its training you” “When you get into studying the brain, it’s a flexion/extension synergy” “When you trace a complex movement, your cerebellum lights up like it’s nobody’s business” “For a 10 year old, I have them hold isometrics as long as they can… the younger you are the longer we’ll hold it. The older you are, the more developed you are as a mover, we are going to start weighting things, we are going to start shortening times, and making contractions more intense” “Your proprioceptive maps get compromised as you get older… my son when he was 6,7,8 could hold lunges for ridiculous periods of time, as he gets older it, as he picks up little bumps, he can hold less time” “It’s not anywhere in the literature, “I rock to recover”, just think when a baby is crying and sympathetic is going nuts, we rock to recover them” “Part of crawling is picking your head up to activate your extensor chain, because we are born in a flexed position” “What starts (shoulder range of motion) is the tactile stimulation in your hand.. if we lose that tactile stimulation, that is going to jam everything up” “People think, “I need to get strong, I need mobile joints”… you need sensory input!” “When you see someone do an infinity walk (figure 8 walk), and then do your skill, you are like “whoa, what just happened there?” “I hardly ever go back into the weight room during in-season training, one of those stations is always infinity walks;

Our guest today is Dr. Mark Wetzel, chiropractor and neurology expert based out of Nashville, Tennessee. Mark has been a guest on the show several times before, speaking about the physiological and neurological elements of the training method of “extreme isometrics” as well as the fantastic results that he achieved from using the method with a high school baseball team. Isometric holds of all sorts have become very popular in training in recent years, and for good reason. Where typical “up and down” lifting is a bit of a shotgun approach to performance, isometrics can isolate very specific elements of our physiology, and allow us to devote the body’s resources to these specific elements, rather than a wider array of general elements that we find in more traditional strength methods. One of the things you may remember Mark talking about on previous shows is the idea of “cycling through the energy systems” while performing a long isometric hold, and if one can make it through all of these energy systems, then a large benefit can be derived by the athlete. In recent conversations with Mark, he has been taking this further by teaching me how training maximally in one “energy system bracket” can optimize your performance in another “energy system bracket”. For example, most people in track and field are familiar with the idea of feeling more “warmed up” to do an explosive jump after running a 100 or 200-meter dash maximally. In the team sport world, playing a pick-up game of basketball is often a better warm-up for explosive jumping than doing basically any sort of “traditional” warmup that you might find. On the podcast today, Mark and I dig into these concepts, as well as reinforcing many important elements of the isometric hold itself, such as breathing, intention, posture and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:05 Why do an “extreme isometric” for 5 minutes, instead of just 2-3 minutes in length 17:40 What Mark sees in the midst of fatigue in an extreme isometric hold and how this resonates with what happens in sport and life itself in uncomfortable circumstances 26:00 The role and sequence of breathing in isometrics and exercise in general and how it contributes to one’s results and recovery from other bouts of training 33:00 Staying in a parasympathetic state, and letting the body choose when it wants to go sympathetic 35:00 The role of intention and focus in isometric lunges and beyond 43:50 Thoughts on the idea of using one energy system to recover another, and how a longer duration burst can improve a lower duration burst and vice versa “The last 2 minutes (of a 5 minute extreme isometric) is when you can really tap into that Cori cycle” “When we lose focus during (those last minutes of an extreme isometric lunge), we have to restart the (energetic) process” “It’s not so much like, I need to grunt it out and hold that 5 minutes because it’s going to make me better at what I’m doing. It’s more about how much can I stay focused and how much can I hold the intention of what I’m doing in that 3-5’ window is going exponentially make you more successful at whatever you are trying to accomplish outside the isometric” “When you talk to yourself (positively) you release dopamine; and dopamine is going to help you hold on (to the isometric) slightly longer. Changing how you view yourself is going to help you hold on to that isometric” “When visual people start to suffer (in an isometric) their eyes start wandering… if you are an auditory person, you are going to yell a lot, and if you are kinesthetic, those are the figety ones” “Isometrics will teach you to keep calm through real life situations” “Exhaling longer than you inhale gets you more CO2 tolerance… if you are a stressful or anxious person, your body cannot tolerate CO2 very well” “When I do my isometrics, I try to breathe in for 4 seconds, out for 8, every single time” “You can trick your brain to think you are staying calm and collected by using slow breathing” “It’s about letting the body decide when you need to be in (the sympathetic state) versus amping yourself up for it. We know that staying in that state for long periods of time is not good for anything” “If you can hold onto an intention you can keep acetylcholine from breaking down” “When you stand erect, you will actually release serotonin while being in that position” “Every time you do an isometric, you need to ask, “what is my intention behind this isometric” “We have 4 systems, the initiation of muscle contraction (ATP), we have the anaerobic, followed by the aerobic, and lastly the Cori cycle. Every time you enter one of the systems, it recovers the previous system” “When we train, we train to recover and we don’t train to strain” (Jay Schroeder) “The harder I gave effort i

Our guest today is cricket fast-bowling coach and overall motor learning wizard, Steffan Jones. Stefan is the last “dual pro” between rugby and cricket, and is an ex-cricketeer turned coach. He is one of the world leading experts in regards to not only fast-bowling training, but also topics such as training individualization, motor learning and the process of reaching the highest possible level of one’s sport skill. Stefan has worked with many of the world’s leading organizations and athletes in his work in the sport of Cricket. He has written much about his own training process in the many articles that he has put forth on Just Fly Sports, which essentially amounts to a medium sized book. His synthesis of his motor-learning model he calls “The Skill-Stability Paradigm” which is applicable to any sport skill you can imagine. On our last podcast together, we went heavily into the specific strength needed to throw a cricket ball at high speeds, and some of the specialty methods used to train that strength, such as isometric training and isometric-skill complexes. This podcast builds on that episode by covering the means by which Stefan uses variability to further the training effect, and explore the possibilities of a sport skill to their highest potential. Topics today include: A chat on how Adarian Barr’s teachings on collisions factor into fast-bowling The role of training variability in skill building The role of fatigue in variability, “second generation” French Contrast Robustness How extreme-isometrics and stretch loading means can play a role in helping athletes to higher levels of skill on their sport, in conjunction with the necessary maximal power and elasticity needed. This is an awesome show for any coach or athlete interested in training, and goes well beyond cricket itself. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:00 What Steffan has been busy with lately in regards to his coaching, and how he tests his ideas on himself first prior to integration with athletes 7:45 What one thing Steffan is using now as a coach that he would “train” his former self with as an athlete 17:45 Maximal rigidity in limbs in athletic movements versus a more “controlled collision in training” 24:45 The role of general strength means in Steffan’s program 31:30 How extreme isometrics and stretch-loading impacts proprioception 36:30 How Steffan measures outputs and drop-offs in fast-bowling and isometrics 40:50 How Steffan adds variability into his training and exercise sessions 50:30 The “Two-Minute Drill” invented by Jeremy Fischer and how that can utilize fatigue to help athletes increase the amount of elastic elements in the movement 57:00 Thoughts on “second generation” contrast, and some of Steffan’s samples for using this method to improve the skill of fast-bowling “Technique underpins everything, you cannot run away from poor technique” “The fascia does determine the success of a skill that does happen as fast as a skill such as quick bowling does” “Adarian said, it’s not about deceleration (on front foot contact) it’s about controlling the collision and maintaining momentum, and that to me, shifted my mindset” “For me, concentrics, there’s no purpose for training sport. Sport happens too quickly for a concentric contraction” “For me, isometrics should be the number one exercise. Alex Natera is doing some good work and the skill stability feeds off of that” “I always have some sort of number when I’m doing isometrics” “Cognitive fatigue only affects submaximal work; cognitive fatigue doesn’t affect high intensity work” “Same but different, medicine ball work in my same drop and block position. My one intent with my speed gun is to throw the medicine ball as hard as I can” “Give me 4 (5) methods that I have to use with my fast-bowlers: Isometrics, whether that’s general, specific or skill-stability, wearables, LILA ball-bowling, and small isolation exercises as well… and fatigue is another one, isn’t it?” “We shouldn’t be afraid, because it is really important, and we should produce anti-fragile bowlers” “Monotony of repetition is motor learning’s worst enemy” “(In regards to training on the hard surfaces) Charlie Francis said about it, that you de-sensitize the tendon, because it really doesn’t have to work that hard because of the hard surface” “Try the two-minute drill with occlusion cuffs on, that is an awesome drill” About Steffan Jones Steffan Jones is the former Somerset, Northamptonshire, Kent and Derbyshire fast bowler who forged a career out of getting the best out of himself physically. He is an ex-pro cricketer of 20 years and is the last dual pro between rugby & cricket. Steffan is recognized as a global Fast-bowling performance expert. Steffan is currently one of the small number of people in the

Our guest today is Adarian Barr, athletic movement coach, inventor and performance consultant. Adarian has been a mentor to me for almost 5 years, and opened up my eyes to the movement potential of the human body, how to observe it, and coach it more optimally. He has been on this podcast for many prior episodes, and has recorded a number of webinars for Just Fly Sports. The best way I can describe Adarian is that he just sees things that nobody else does in human movement, and creates a wonderful groundwork for us to creatively express those principles in our own training setups. One of the biggest realizations, that I’m still regularly checking in on the implications of in my day to day coaching and athletic life, is how, when the joints and levers of the body are working optimally in “3D”, we tend to need much less barbell strength than we think we do to reach our highest speed performance potential. Not only this, but when we only operate in “2D” and don’t use our levers well, we need more weight room strength to be better athletes in that 2D paradigm. One thing that Adarian does not post about often is weightlifting. Part of this is because the world of coaching is very hung up on “force” as a binary entity in human movement, and we need more education on joints and movement, rather than how to split hairs on lifting sets and reps. Adarian’s eye for movement does go well into the weightlifting world, however, and was can learn a lot from his recent observation in the area. On today’s podcast, we dive into the Olympic lifts in particular, and how they can either foster athleticism, or suppress it, based on the lever systems we use in the execution of the lift. We get into this, and much more, such as the feet, torque, the drawbacks of hinging in the weight room, crawling, natural learning and much more in this in-depth episode. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:00 The redundancy of “coaching up” natural-skill-based human strength movements 16:45 Adarian’s history with weightlifting as a football player and track and field athlete 24:50 Deconstructing the Olympic lifts in regards to what transfers to athletic speed and what does not 33:40 Good and poor “class 1” levers of the foot 41:25 Thoughts on the initial stages of the pull off the ground in athleticism 45:25 Using the hands more effectively to change the emphasis of exercise to the body 50:10 Full catches in the Olympic lifts, foot pressure and internal rotation, and how these can be optimized for athletic transfer 57:10 Why Adarian is not a fan of hinging from a foot loading perspective “The feet are pointing out for a reason in (natural) squatting, because the calves are rotating them” “A lot of people equate lifting to athletic ability, that the lift makes you athletic. The biggest thing is when I see the levers…. Some people when they (Olypmic) lift to get strong, I see them shrug, then they do a plantar-flex, which is a class 1 lever, then they catch the bar. That’s not going to transfer over (to athleticism) they are probably just going to get stronger” “What do they say, look at the (lift) numbers he is doing that’s what made him fast. No! He can do those (lift) numbers because he is fast!” “I used to think (Olympic lifters) were bumping the bar with their hips. What do you actually see? When they hit the bar with class 2 (foot position) it bumps them backwards (class 2 being advantageous for athleticism)” “If the Achilles (tendon) isn’t working, you will be quad dominant or hamstring dominant” “There are two “class 1” motions, there’s inversion/eversion, and there is plantarflexion dorsiflexion. Those ones that use inversion/eversion are going to really do something… that reflexive class 1 saves the day” “That’s the beauty of the brain, it’s not going to let you hurt yourself… I’m trying to crash the plane (and let the brain save me)… It’s weird that people don’t let the brain work” “Everything is rotational, the direction is linear, but the movement is rotational” “Once the calves twist, the arches (of the foot) set with you. As I try to squat down, move the calf out of the way, and if you move the calf out of the way, everything else is going to work out below that” “One of the foot’s jobs is to sense movement, where you are in space and time, and how much load is on the body, but it can’t do that until they have been pressurized, in a sense” “Once you put the thumb down (in exercises) things start to change” “People crawl like a robot… once you rotate that calf, shin angles change and you don’t have to lift your butt up to get your leg through…. Just as I would rotate the calf to do a lift, I would rotate the calf to crawl, because I want pressure on the foot to tell me something” “Where is the information in the lift coming from,

Our guest today is the owner of SOAR fitness in Columbus Ohio, Mike Kozak. Mike previously appeared on podcast #184 and has written several articles for Just Fly Sports. Notably, Mike has mentored extensively under Adarian Barr, and frequently posts the exercise and training progressions based on Adarian’s work. Speed is always en vogue in the world of athletics, but something important to understand is that running and moving right not only will make athletes faster, but also make them more resilient and robust, reducing injury rates. When we move as nature intended, and then amplify that in our training, we can make the most out of free-energy return systems. When we simply “produce more force” and muscle our movements, we may gain some speed in the short term, but we can do it at the cost of higher risks of injury and a lower total athletic ceiling. Mike has experience, not only with Adarian Barr’s methods, but he also has worked closely with elite physical therapists who have extensive knowledge of advanced methods such as PRI and the work of Bill Hartman. On today’s podcast, we are looking at the nuts and bolts of Mike’s performance program “from the ground up” starting with how he addresses the feet and an athlete’s posture, and then designs drills and tasks from that standpoint. We also touch on elements further up the kinetic chain, and how this can impact how we look at the entire athletic system. This was a fantastic, practical episode that features many important elements that we need to be addressing in the training of our athletes to fully integrate the feet, hips, spine and posture. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:30 How adjusting to outdoor workouts with no weights due to COVID restrictions created a unique and effective training environment for Mike and his athletes 16:55 How Mike does not have a formal strength and conditioning background, and how his own experience as an athlete, as well as his physical education experience, formed the base of how he now trains athletes 22:20 Staples of Mike’s program that he learned from Adarian Barr, starting from the level of the foot, and how he works his way up the kinetic chain 27:15 How Mike works on dorsiflexion (or doesn’t) and how he emphasizes the action of the foot as a second class lever in athletes 40:35 How Mike teaches the foot working as a second class lever to improve the efficiency of the Achilles tendon, as well as the preservation of kinetic energy 53:00 Ideas on the transverse arch of the foot and how this applies to athletic performance 58:00 How the feet relate to what is happening upstream in the kinetic chain (hip internal rotation, expansion, compression, etc.) “The start of our session used to be foam rolling, honestly just to take attendance (we don’t do that anymore). Let’s use the start of our session to do something these kids never do” “To me, level 1 is, do you have any idea what your feet are doing, and most kids do not… if I can get kids to now understand the tripod, not be a toe gripper, and then can I effectively get them on the inside edge (unless you are over-pronated)” “The main thing I try to get across to my kids is, “shin’s going down, heel’s coming up”” “If they (the athlete’s) do it already, I don’t have any reason to fill their minds with information they don’t need.. they are already there!” “If the shin keeps moving forward, and the heel stays down, you are staying in first class, you are just stretching the Achilles. If you are someone who has a lot of dorsiflexion range, then your athletic posture has to dial you into a start stance that gets that heel to pull up faster” “A person who has less dorsiflexion range may strike (in acceleration) with a little more vertical tibia, and that heel is going to come up faster” “The swing leg is tied to the impulse of the stance foot, if the swing leg is not in position to catch the impulse (coming up from the stance leg on the ground), your body is going to get desperate and do something else” “A lot of kids who don’t run well start to extend the knee before the hip extends (in swing phase)” “If you are stepping too far back, and that heel comes down and the knee straightens, that is the mechanism for an Achilles tear… we don’t want the Achilles to be stretching and loading at the same time, and that’s where heel taps come in” “We don’t want our kids moving forward with a straight knee, and the heel down” “In the simplest terms, I want kids to understand, that’s where they need the pressure (the transverse arch of the foot)” “A front-foot elevated split squat biases us more towards early and mid-stance, and a rear foot elevated split squat biases us more towards late stance” Show Notes Usain Bolt Sprinting (Barrel Chest, Foot as a Second Class Lever, and Shi

I’m happy to welcome Dr. Pat Davidson back to the podcast. Pat is an independent trainer, consultant, author, and lecturer in New York City. He is the author of MASS and MASS2 and is the developer of the “Rethinking the Big Patterns” lecture series, as well as an upcoming book on the same topic. Pat is one of the most intelligent individuals I know when it comes to human performance, and communicates his knowledge in a manner that makes it easy to understand difficult concepts. He has been a guest on episodes #88 and #122 of this show as well speaking on topics such as an educated approach to movement screens and re-evaluating the “big lifts” in light of athletic performance. That combination of intelligence and communication is paramount for the topic we’ll be tackling today, which is pressure systems and their correspondence to our movement patterns. That sounds kind of complicated, but in reality, it’s as simple as looking at the dynamics of a bouncing ball, or the lungs expanding with air. Pat has extensive experience learning from leading organizations and individuals in this area, such as the Postural Restoration Institute and Bill Hartman. The ability to look at the human body as a pressure system is important because it helps us link what is happening in various gym exercises, as well as what we see in particular athletic presentations (internal vs. external rotation for example), and then look at how that fits to an elastic (tendon and static spring) based strategy of movement, and a more muscular strategy. In addition to a discussion on pressure, Pat also discusses his take on having a “strength score” for athletes in the weight room that normalizes performance metrics based on things like limb length and height. He also gets into ideas on how to “de-compress” the athlete who is compressed in a manner that may be negative to their overall performance. This was a really smart show with some powerful principles for any athlete or coach who wants to navigate the weight room without harming elastic power outputs. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage Timestamps and Main Points 4:40 Pat’s history of athletics and his recent thoughts in regards to normalizing weight room outputs across a variety of athletes with different heights and levers 30:40 Implications of athletes who “over-lift” in dynamic outputs and what physiological elements are playing a role in diminished movement abilities 35:30 Expansion and compression rules in regards to the movement of the human body 44:30 From a rib-cage perspective, what happens when the body becomes too compressed from a front-to-back perspective that often happens from excessive bilateral lifting 51:00 My personal journey in barbell squatting and Pat’s analysis of my tendencies towards compressive forces that allowed me to retain my elasticity well (and how I ended up hurting that elasticity later on) 1:12.10 How to work with athletes with substantial anterio-posterior compression to get into becoming more elastic and robust “Who measures the distance (of a lift), nobody measures the distance. It’s half of the equation of work” “You get punished in many ways, in the reward system of the weight room. If you go full range, and have to use less weight, that’s a “punishment”. If you have to do less reps, that’s a “punishment”.” “You are going to want to make progress so much (in the weight room) you will lie to yourself (by subtly cheating lifts)” “You can recognize people that have done a tremendous amount of strength training; it’s visually obvious. Watch wrestlers or bodybuilders go out for a jog. The whole body turns like a refrigerator” “Movement goes older than biology, it’s pre-biological. In-organic physics precedes everything” “That’s the original rule of movement, things have to accept, or yield this incoming matter, and that’s a good lesson to apply to every other part of that body. That’s the original rule of movement: Things are either moving into something, occupying it and expanding it, or something is compressing something out of it” “When I’m externally rotating a femur or a humerus, that’s expansion. When I’m supinating my hand or my foot, that’s expansion” “Compression is internal rotation, pronation, dorsiflexion… it’s all this compression strategy that we use to squeeze things with… ultimately you can be too biased towards one side versus the other” “The deadlift is kind of like a lower body bench press” “I want a rounded ribcage, because a rounded ribcage will roll like a ball through space” “If you get an athlete who looks like me (short, squat, wide) and you feed them a ton of these exercises that are going to compress anterior to posterior, and expand medial to lateral, you are going to make me run like a 2x4 that’s jerking and halting through space” “If I get an athlet

Today’s podcast features speed and strength coach Brandon Byrd. Brandon Byrd is the owner of Byrd’s Sports Performance in Orefield, Pennsylvania. Brandon is an alumni of the University of Pittsburgh and has learned from elite coaches such as Louie Simmons, Charlie Francis, Buddy Morris and others. Brandon’s unique blend of rotating training stimuli, and his competitive, PR driven environment has elicited noteworthy speed, power and strength gains in his athletes. If you follow Brandon on social media, you’ll see the regular occurrence of sprint and jump records from his athletes. Brandon has some of the highest-output training out there in his ability to cultivate speed and strength. I always enjoy digging into the training of elite coaches, into the nuts and bolts that drives their systems. Some of the running themes on this show have been ideas such as the rotation of big training stimuli from week to week (such as in EP 190 with Grant Fowler), the power of resisted sprinting (EP 12 and 63 with JB Morin and Cameron Josse), overspeed sprinting (EP 51 with Chris Korfist), and then the power of competition and PR’s (EP 135 with Tony Holler). This episode with coach Brandon Byrd truly brings all of those elements together in a way that gets some of the best training results you’ll find. On today’s podcast, Brandon goes into the core of his system, and how he rotates his sprint efforts based on the needs of the athlete, to get the most out of their system. He also goes into his background with Westside Barbell, and the elements he learned from Louie Simmons that go into his training, as well as strength pre-requisites he carries for his athletes to optimize their readiness for the strength and speed program. (Note that when Brandon is talking about fly 10’s he is talking yards, not meters) Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage Timestamps and Main Points 5:00 Brandon’s main influences in athletic performance and speed training 11:30 How principles of West-side Barbell training show up in Brandon’s sprint training system 22:45 How Brandon rotates uphill and downhill sprinting to blast personal bests in speed 29:30 How Brandon uses wickets in context of his speed and sprint training 39:30 Concepts in using resisted sprinting, as well as jump training in Brandon’s program 45:20 More specifics on how Brandon rotates and progresses his speed and sprint training throughout the training year, and also how he modulates this for stride length, vs. stride frequency style athletes 58:50 What Brandon’s weekly sprint setup looks like for athletes 1:07.20 The power of “PR”s in Brandon’s system and how that feeds into his entire training session “Once you can control 90% of the force-velocity curve, you can create great athletes” “I don’t think the FMS is a great thing, because when you are sitting statically and not under high forces or high loads, everyone is going to look great, but once you are high speeds in sprinting, or high loads in lifting, you are going to see some weaknesses” “I believe your technique in sprinting is determined by your weaknesses… once you fix their weaknesses, then it is easier to fix technique” “Glute, hamstring, and opposite QL, those must fire explosively and fast, and they all must be strong… when I start an athlete, the first thing I do test is that QL” “In my gym, if you can’t do so much in a 45 degree hyperextension, I can’t put a bar on your back” “The body is scared to go faster… it hates change, so you have to force change by changing modalities… regular sprinting can’t do all those things (in context of using uphill, downhill and resisted sprinting to help break barriers)” “65-75% of the kids I get are heel strikers; they have to run forefoot on a sled, so that right there corrects their mechanics” “If they can break one of those records (uphill, downhill, flat sprinting) once or twice a month, they are happy” “I believe overspeed hacks the golgi-tendon complex” “I want my whole gym competing (team and track athletes) so I use yards (in sprint distances)” “When I look at film of my timed wickets, you can see the recovery (leg) go faster” “In my hurdle hops my guys get off the ground in .15 seconds” “If they are gliders (longer striders) we will do more downhill with those kids, I used to wait until the end, but now I feed it in every week or two weeks” “If they are short striders, I believe the resistance of the hill, that posterior chain will give you more power (they do downhills too), but they will be more on the hill and the sled” “The sled is good because it limits the soreness, if I was regular sprinting, I’d have to be more careful (because I have to be careful of competing against resources from training heavy in the gym)” “Sometimes we’ll do a sled, and then we’ll rest about 5 minutes, and do a downhill”

Today’s podcast features Grant Fowler and Kevin Foster. Kevin Foster is a former NCAA DI javelin thrower training for the 2021 Olympic trials. He is the owner of the Javelin Anatomy Instagram page, a regular writer for Just Fly Sports, and was the guest on episode #164. of the podcast. Grant Fowler is the owner of Fowler Fitness in The Woodlands, Texas. Grant works as a private training and online performance consultant and specializes in program design and injury prevention. Grant is a different thinker who has a distinctive “non-linear” and adaptable style to his training program design and previously appeared on episode #190 of the podcast. In one of my recent chats with Kevin, he mentioned how his training for javelin had exploded in his time working under the GPP programming of Grant Fowler. As we chatted about on episode #190, Grant has a rotating-PR version of training for performance, and uses a unique non-linear style in his work. Kevin’s strength and athleticism reached new levels using this method, and so on the podcast today, we dig into some of the specifics and philosophies that went into building Kevin’s training program. In addition to Kevin’s training for javelin throwing, we also get into some great discussion on mobility training, training holism and reductionism, general strength and capacity, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage Timestamps and Main Points 6:20 What Kevin Foster has been learning in regards to the importance and specifics of what a general foundation should look like for an athlete, and the negative aspects of skipping this type of work in favor of maximal power work too soon in a system 12:20 How much mobility do athletes really, truly need in their programs? 14:20 The possibility of looking at training “too” holistically, and never doing any specific isolated work to approach weak points 24:20 Ideas on time spent actually working on one’s maximal strength capabilities, and then how rotating those movements fits into continual progress with less effort 33:20 How Kevin’s training progress exploded while utilizing Grant’s training system in regards to lift strength and short-approach javelin throws 41:20 How Grant structured Kevin’s training program utilizing a rotation of maximal effort lifts, and any adjustments that have come in since last program 56:20 Ideas on individualizing workouts on a day in favor of athletes being able to make PR’s and create incremental progress 1:00.35 How to taper in a program where you have a non-linear progression 1:04.50 Kevin’s take on getting the needed general tools to achieve the highest specific mastery in sport, and considerations on where too much focus on maximal strength could potentially be a drawback 1:15.50 Grant’s two favorite recovery modalities for athletes “We go straight into these programs that revolve around powerlifting and Olympic lifting, max vertical jumps, velocity-based training, this that and the other, but we ignore the foundation of isolated joint mobility, getting your hips moving, spine moving, spinal segmentation” Foster “There are some people who look at training, almost too holistically. There was a point in time when it was almost too reductionist” Fowler “I think that stretching goes hand in hand with relaxation, and too many athletes have the ability to turn off their muscles. Relaxation is the single most under-appreciated elements of athleticism out there right now” Foster “We maximal strength train people for 20-30 minutes, maybe at the most, and in-between that we are doing a lot of other things” Fowler “When I go in the gym, it’s easy to pick an exercise, pick a rep scheme you haven’t done in a while, and that’s pretty much it” Fowler “A lot of people aren’t ready to train that intuitive, so you have to structure things more in the beginning, but a lot of people should get to that point (of intuitive training where they are responsible for a number of training decisions)” Fowler “You always had an opportunity to hit a new best (PR in training by means of variation), I think there is something pretty powerful about that” Foster “If you have a little too much variability with your big lifts, and those high-stress exercises, if you haven’t been exposed to that stimulus in a while, so we cut back the variability in some of the higher intensity stuff (in a taper period)” “If you are not scared of that 5-minute lunge anymore, week after week after week, then I think you are a better athlete for that, you are more confident and you can channel that energy” “My big takeaway has been always maintain that level of general strength and structure, and always have that in order to funnel into the specific work I am doing” About Grant Fowler Grant Fowler is the owner of Fowler Fitness in The Woodlands, Texas. Grant works a

Today’s podcast features Dr. Michelle Boland and Dr. Tim Richardt, speaking on the topic of exercise categorization and classification, as well as the process of selecting and integrating gym training movements based on the specific needs of athletes and clients. Michelle Boland is the owner of michelleboland-training.com and has several years of professional experience as an NCAA DI strength coach working with nationally ranked teams, and a wide variety of sports. Michelle is a leader in the integration of concepts rooted in the work of PRI and Bill Hartman into practical sports performance application. Michelle has appeared previously on this podcast on episode #108 speaking on functional performance training based on PRI ideals and more. (You can grab Michelle’s “Resource Road Map”, a compilation of the best resources in the fitness industry for free at michelleboland-training.com/resource-road-map) Tim Richardt is a physical therapist and CSCS who has been a competitive runner and strength training junkie since the age of 14. Tim has an awesome blend on knowledge on all things running, rehab, gait, and strength training principles. Tim’s personal journey through injury and rehabilitation, including 2 hip surgeries, has given him unique insight into effective long-term resolution of overuse injuries among endurance and strength athletes. In traditional strength and conditioning and fitness models, we tend to have things like “squat”, “hinge”, “push”, “pull”, and perhaps several other movements, based on our preference, when working with athletes. Although the “old-school” classification certainly serves to facilitate a general balance of forces and muscle groups, we can improve our process even further by understanding how the human body works in gait and dynamic movement, and then reverse-engineer our exercise selection from there. When our movement execution processes can match gaps, or reinforce strengths in running, jumping, throwing and sport movement technique, we can eliminate guess work and give our clients, and/or ourselves, greater results. On today’s show, Michelle and Tim speak on the evolution of their training processes and how they classify movements in the gym. We get heavily into running as a specific example, and how to reverse engineer training movements based on run technique. We also finish with chatting on how Michelle and Tim continue to integrate the “big lifts” into their programs, and what adjustments they have made in the versions of those lifts that stick with them in their training schemes. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage Timestamps and Main Points 5:20 Michelle and Tim’s recent modes of exercise and training and what they have learned from them 9:20 How Tim has been incorporating “one arm running” into his training and coaching routines 15:00 Tim and Michelle’s journey of evolving the lifts they utilized 20:50 What role do the big lifts still play in Michelle and Tim’s program, in light of other evolving categorizations 35:15 What starting point do Tim and Michelle go from when constructing a strength program for performance (for running specifically) 45:50 Adjusting the lifts in a program based on biomechanical running goals of the athlete 58:40 How a performance-driven session for Michelle goes in light of the big lifts and a modern idea on exercise classification “We need to get out of these gross (exercise) categorizations that have really come from other sports (powerlifting, Olympic lifting)” Boland “There is a difference between fitness and movement” Boland “I think there is a huge benefit to bilateral lifts because we can hit them as a high intensity stimulus and maintain that over time, and then use split stance, frontal and transverse plane activities as movements that will keep them healthy over time” Boland “We say the word “squat” but there are so many ways to squat” Boland “The first thing I want to see (in regards to determining an exercise program) is what their running looks like” Richardt “An individual (who is too vertical, and doesn’t generate horizontal force) might do really well with a rear foot elevated split squat to be able to fall, and “propulse” correctly. Conversely, if someone is falling forward too much, it might be worthwhile to elevate the front foot” Richardt “You are going to have to take that whole stack (head, thorax, pelvis) and orient that forward, to give you a much more advantageous position to push from. If that goes too far, then you lose the ability to create enough vertical force to support yourself, and then you are a series of un-supported falls in space” Richardt “How I view exercise categorization is, you need to pick two extremes, and then fill in buckets in between” Boland “Are we dealing with someone that is maybe, “overly concentric” and doesn

Today’s podcast features personal trainer, massage therapist and musician, Charlie Reid. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for 8 years of my life brought with it the opportunity to meet and learn from many wonderful and knowledgeable coaches and trainers. One of those that I met was Charlie, who I met at Pat Davidson’s “Rethinking the Big Patterns” seminar. Charlie and I later were able to both spend time at Kezar stadium learning sprint and movement philosophy from Adarian Barr, while having plenty of conversations on training. Charlie is one of the smartest and wisest coaches that you may not know. His base of knowledge is massive, as well as the range of those coaches and systems he has spent time learning from. If there is a system of thought out there in the world of movement and human performance, there is a good chance Charlie has experience with it. Charlie is not only a strength coach, but also a certified massage practitioner, and spent years as a professional musician. On the podcast today, Charlie helps us “zoom out” our views on things like stretching, corrective exercise and motor learning. At the core of our chat today is an extended discussion on the redundancy of the term “corrective exercise” and how to look at the body in a manner that leaves us wondering what truly needs to be corrected. We also get into a learner-centered approach, and how facilitating that approach may differ from working from novices, up to more advanced athletes. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage Timestamps and Main Points 5:50 What Charlie learned from a silent meditation retreat, and what he learned from that in regards to exercise and the body 9:50 The relationship between long isometric holds, fatigue and heart rate variability 17:00 Charlie’s experience with the Egoscue method, and what good could possibly come from holding a passive stretch for such a long period of time 23:20 Ideas on Feldenkrais and the body’s ability to heal itself, as well as teaching individuals to help themselves as the highest order priority in coaching 36:05 Charlie’s take on corrective work and rehab based on a learner-centered approach versus a structured approach 48:05 How being a massage and body-worker has helped Charlie to acquire a better understanding of the body and how to train individuals 57:20 How Charlie puts together a rehab/training program based on common principles and concepts 1:01:20 Where respiration and breathing has landed for Charlie and how he integrates it “As soon as we get the slightest bit of discomfort, we cringe up, and tighten up, instead of softening around the pain” “I wonder if you could look at someone’s HRV score, and correlate that with their ability to tolerate long isometrics” “Two of the most common reasons why bodies get better is novelty and graded exposure” “Feldenkrais never told you what to do, you got to come up with your own solutions, that is the highest level” “When you give constraints for a beginner, maybe it’s better to create more structure first” “The consumer really drives (which coach) gets the dollars, and that’s really frustrating (in light of a “position driven” versus “learner driven” approach to training)” “I’m less and less a fan of “corrective” exercise, it’s kind of a popular word, I know language is important, but I don’t know if we are correcting anything. They are low-force, inner directed mindful exercises to generate some awareness around something” “I’m always asking the questions, say you are doing a side-clam for your glute medius, but show me where that goes, show me where that’s eventually going to lead to” “I don’t love the term “corrective exercise”, it’s all just gradations of movement” “I will do quote-on-quote on corrective exercises if I have to; but only if I have to” “Anything that has a name like a “fascia blaster” I am probably not going to subscribe” “If you are feeling the need that you need to foam roll 30 minutes before the workout, maybe let’s talk about what’s going on, and maybe we can save you some time” “Foam rolling and doing low-level exercises is no guarantee that you are going to avoid injury; I’d rather you go home and take a nap” “I start there with all my people, learning how to get a rib-cage stacked over a pelvis” About Charlie Reid Charlie Reid B.S., CSCS, CPT, is a movement educator, coach and massage therapist based out of San Francisco, CA. His passion lies in helping others realize their physical potential through training smarter and learning to move their bodies in the most efficient way possible. He believes that physical health and well-being can be distilled from learning to master one's own body through guided discovery and consistent practice. When he's not coaching one-on-one, teaching workshops, or hosting seminars in the Bay Area,

Today’s podcast welcomes coach Ty Terrell. Ty is currently an NBA physical preparation coach and has a wealth of experience ranging from training athletes out of a garage, to coaching high school basketball, to being mentored by some of the top professionals in the coaching industry. Individuals such as Lee Taft, Bill Hartman, and Mike Robertson have fostered in Ty a unique and powerful perspective on blending gym-training methods with athletic biomechanics and outputs. A running theme of this show has been using gym training methods to cater to the organic manner by which athletes live and move, rather than working against it. In a recent episode, #220, Kyle Dobbs talked about “hingy, knees-out squats” and the cascade of negative effects these brought out in the athletic population. Personally, I had loads of elasticity in my teens and early 20’s, but I slowly started to lose the “elastic monster” by starting to train “by the book” according to current strength and conditioning methods and protocols. This show (and podcast in general) is about winning that elastic power back. Ty Terrell starts off by sharing some of the key points he learned in his beginnings as a coach under Lee Taft in regards to training athlete speed and movement. From there, we transition into all things squatting, and the load-unload, “expand-compress” paradigm that has come out of the work and ideas of Bill Hartman, and how this relates to athletic movement on the court or field of play. We finish with some practical ideas on how to make trunk and core training highly transferable, and represent the movement principles we want to embody in our total-body athletic movements. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:00 Ty’s start with Lee Taft, and some cornerstone teachings he has learned from Lee that have kept with him in his coaching 10:45 How to use bands and resistance to create lines of force on an athlete that can help them use joints better, or get into desired athletic positions 23:45 Approaching elite athletes versus youth in regards to training their sport movement ability 34:00 Questions on general versus any sort of specific skill movement training for a professional athlete 41:45 How athletic movement works in light of the expansion and compression of the pelvic floor, and the body in general 57:30 The effect of overly “hinging” every lift, and how a state of anterior tilt reduces aerobic capacity and even muscular compliance and elasticity 1:06.30 Reflexive core training and experiences to help athletes train their trunk and pelvis in a manner that reflects load and explode paradigms “When I started, it was important that Lee made me be a coach first (before the standard “textbook” learning)” “As long as you have forward momentum, it’s OK not to be perfect today” “Those are the three things that you are looking at in a single motion in athletics: Can you achieve the position, can you produce the force you need to in the time you need to, and can you do it in the context of the situation” “If you get a 10-year old, they are pretty compliant. They don’t have years of physical stress to let compensatory strategies come into play” “With the younger kids, you don’t necessarily have to focus on power to improve power because they are just improving everything” “It’s the simple stuff (the pro athlete) doesn’t do well (such as a basic squat pattern), because they never had to… I’ll say this, it’s the fundamentals that save pro athletes” “How many times can you do near-max efforts before your body can’t handle it, and says, “I need to cheat somehow”” “The number one thing I find (the NBA population) needs is the ability to squat. When I see someone who can squat, I can see someone who can maintain proximal control of their pelvis” “If I want to load something… I want to be able to squat, to expand” “Exhale is propulsion, it’s output” “If I’m going to do a cut and push right to left… if I can’t squat down, my push angle is going to be too vertical” “The inhalation, not only physically moves the pelvis backwards into a posterior tilt, so I can reach greater degrees of hip flexion, and so I can get depth, but it also expands the pelvis when you do that, and it creates that posterior weight shift that allows you to sit down” “Our industry (strength and conditioning) tries to find ways around faults (making things more of a hinge than a true squat)… maybe if your purpose is powerlifting, but if you want to demonstrate full excursion of moving, you need to be able to squat well, I call it squatting in a phone booth” “A lot of Olympic lifters, once they get the bars past their knees, the hips have to come forward” “When you are constantly in an anteriorly tilt position, an exhaled position, you tend to be less aerobically fit systemic

Today’s podcast welcomes back coach Christian Thibaudeau to the podcast. Christian has been a strength coach for nearly 2 decades, working with athletes from nearly 30 sports. He has written four books and has pioneered multiple educational courses, including the Neuro-typing system, which goes in-depth on how to train athletes in the weight room (and beyond) based on their own individual dispositions. Christian has been a 4-time prior guest on the podcast, and is a true wealth of information. Our recent episode, #208, had lots of great information about the topic of adrenaline as an over-training marker, as well as how to manage this hormone in the course of programming and the workout session. One thing that I had hoped to cover on that episode, but missed out on due to time constraints, was to get into Christian’s take on using the 3-muscle phases (concentric, isometric, eccentric) in training athletes. Emphasizing various muscle phases in training is certainly nothing new. My own training design for athletes is often based on a hybrid of 14-day squat cycles, along with elements of the “Triphasic Training” system. Christian has been using rep-style emphasis in his programming for two decades, and has loads of practical ideas and training examples that can help us get a better understanding of these methods. You won’t find a more comprehensive episode out there on training using various contraction types than this one, as well as how each type fits into the individual characteristics and response of each athlete. Finally, although not required, I’d recommend you check out episode 77 with Christian, which is a tremendous overview of the 5 different types of athlete according to their response and preference to training means and methods. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 7:20 Why Christian is not going to write a book on golf training 14:05 Christian’s views on “alternative” forms of training, i.e. bodyweight, gymnastics, macebells, etc. 18:05 How the emphasis of “omni-reps” change when working with athletes vs. general population, and those simply interested in increasing strength and muscle size 24:20 How to approach hypertrophy training for athletes in regards to the neural intensity of exercises 30:35 Using all three types of muscle contractions in the same training week, versus using a single-mode and changing it every 2-3 weeks 39:20 Why you don’t need to train all three types of contractions to the same degree, in advanced athletes, versus novice and intermediate athletes 49:50 Particular phase of contraction methods that are most effective in regards to the three phases of muscle contraction 58:20 Dosage of advanced lifting methods in regards to adrenaline and neuro-type of the athlete 1:22.20 How plyometrics can complement or replace other phase-training methods in the process of the training cycle “I have a lot of respect for strength coaches working with rotational athletes, it’s a very big challenge” “Sometimes we do pure isometrics, but most of the time we do stato-dynamic contractions, which means we include pauses at various positions of the rep” “With average people just wanting to look better, I moved more towards a body-part, antagonistic split (chest-biceps one day/quad-hamstring another day); the main difference is that with average people who just want to gain muscle, we train all three contractions in the same workout” “The reason (for not doing all three modes of contraction in the same workout) is that athletes do other stuff than lifting; they are going to be sprinting, doing conditioning and practicing their sport. You want to keep neurological resources available you do not want to burn out your adregenergic receptors. People who just want to gain muscle; they don’t have that limitation normally” “If athletes, if I want to include isolation work, it would be on the 4th workout of the week, I call the 'gap workout.' So if an athlete needs more size, we might do hypertrophy work there using very low stress exercises” “For athletes, trying to increase hypertrophy using big compound lifts, I think, is stupid. When you want to add more tissue to your frame, don’t use more neurological stress” “You don’t have to make every single exercise functional in the training of an athlete, you must ask yourself why you are doing the exercise” “It will always be better to put emphasis on all three types of contractions, then just doing all reps normally” “Fast neural adaptations are gained in two weeks, but they are also lost in two weeks; you would need to stay with a certain type of contraction longer than two weeks for maximal results, in my opinion” “Slow eccentrics has been shown to increase activation of the motor cortex, which facilitates motor learning, and also improves co

Today’s podcast features coach and consultant, Kyle Dobbs. Kyle is the owner and founder of Compound Performance which offers online training, facility consulting, and a personal trainer mentorship. Kyle 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. He reaches thousands of coaches regularly through his Instagram account where he offers practical movement solutions in the gym to help people get stronger in context of how we are meant to move as humans. One of the topics that I am most passionate about in training is in regards to why in the world athletes can increase their strength outputs in the gym, but become slower and lose elasticity in things such as jumping in the process. I tend to see athletic outcomes of barbell strength tools as a sliding scale of increased performance due to increased power outputs and increased tissue strength, and then potentially decreased performance due to the body adapting to the needs of moving a heavy external object, and being coached to do so in a way that works against the gait cycle. This topic of the gait cycle and squatting/lifting is what this show is all about. In today’s episode, Kyle goes in-depth on all things squatting and the gait cycle, and offers real-world solutions to help athletes lift weights, as per the needs of one who needs to sprint, jump, cut and hit. Kyle also lays out helpful ideas on how to restore internal rotation abilities in those athletes in need of this vital element of movement. At the end of this show, you’ll know the crucial mechanical differences between back squatting and front squatting, powerlifting squats, and Olympic squats, that make a real difference on our biomechanics and transfer to athleticism. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:00 How doing manual labor and playing one’s sport through high school led Kyle to being more athletic than improving his squat and deadlift in college and becoming slower 7:00 How starting running again after spending years training primarily lifting and gym training has gone for Kyle, and what goes through Kyle’s mind in his run training 12:20 Thoracic dynamics, breathing and run performance concepts 24:15 Kyle’s evolution in the big axially loaded lifts, and their relationship to gait and reciprocal human movement 32:20 Internal and external femur rotation mechanics in squatting, and how hinging-squats have a negative effect on internal rotation capabilities for athletes 39:50 Distinguishing between “good” knees in, and “bad” knees in during a squat, based on adduction and internal rotation mechanics 46:30 Kyle’s taking on intentionally squeezing the glutes at the top of a squat 50:35 Reasons that you usually see Olympic lifters knees “clicking in” when coming up from the bottom of a squat, versus what you tend to see in a powerlifter 1:01:35 General principles in exercise selection and execution regarding squatting with athletes 1:04:50 Functional coaching points in unilateral training exercises 1:06:50 How to restore femoral internal rotation in athletes who are lacking it “I’m someone who for the last 5 or 6 years has done almost exclusively weight training, so getting back into unilateral reciprocal and trying to find femur IR, has been fun” “I think more about respiration (when running)” “As someone who has been doing a lot of bilateral, kind of more supinated based lifting, it is hard for me to get “inside edge” without consciously thinking about it” “What I get when I’m too (thoracically) extended, is I get a diaphragm that is more eccentrically oriented, and doesn’t really have as much of an ability to ascend and descend… I’m in more of this inhalation based pattern” “When you prioritize muscular integration, you are almost always going to sacrifice respiration mechanics” “Variability is not my friend (in the powerlifts)” “If I’ve got somebody who has good elasticity and good work capacity, but they have a strength deficit, that’s where I might need some bilateral lifting, just to give them a global stimulus, and give them more hypertrophy or more tissue development” “If I’ve got somebody who is extremely strong bilaterally, but they are short on coordination, work capacity and running well, then I need to get into more unilateral based work and need to get them balanced over one leg” “The actual rotational requirements of the femur and requirements of adduction change when you’ve got two points of contact on the ground rather than one” “When we run, we need forward translation of the knee. We need a knee that goes well over the toe, especial

Today’s podcast features performance coach and breathing specialist, Leo Ryan. Leo is the founder of Innate-Strength.com. He has studied athletic training, health and breathing since he healed himself of asthma in 2004. Leo has achieved a prolific amount of education in human performance and breathwork. He has attained multiple diplomas and certificates from many elite personal training, physical therapy and breathing schools including Dip. Buteyko Method, Wim Hof Instructor, Oxygen Advantage Master Instructor, Fascial Stretch Therapist, Strength and Conditioning Specialist and Pilates teacher. Leo’s love and experience for health and physical performance has seen him research more than 70 breathing techniques, mentor with coaches to Olympians, UFC Fighters and World Champions. Breathing is truly on the top of the totem pole when it comes to our day to day health and well-being (we take around 20,000 breaths per day). It has a massive impact on our mental state, as well as the physiology of the body, in addition to its implications for athletic performance. We can run longer, recover faster, and gain enhanced mind-body states through simple breathing drills, as well as becoming more educated on the topic. Today’s show was longer than average, largely because the concept of performance breathing is so expansive, and we as a coaching community, generally don’t approach it in much depth. Often times we are just told to belly breathe, or nose breathe, and leave it at that. In this show, Leo covers all aspects of our breath, including nose breathing versus mouth breathing for performance, breathing as a readiness assessment, performance versus recovery breathing, diaphragm release techniques, and much more (including his experience in running a marathon, and recovering from it extremely well, despite ZERO run training). This is yet another “staple” episode, as it truly covers this intersection of health, well-being, and athlete performance in the topic of the breath. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:30 Leo’s story of running a marathon on zero run training through optimal breath work and breathing techniques 16:30 Training repeat versus short sprint ability with nose versus mouth breathing 19:30 The importance of an aerobic base for the majority of athletes, and how breathing plays into this base 24:30 Why breathing and breath training is so under-appreciated by many coaches and individuals in training 29:30 How Leo uses breathing as a readiness assessment as opposed to HRV 43:15 Leo’s battle with asthma, and how that led him to studying breathing and breath for athletic performance enhancement 53:10 What people should be able to do with their breath, and “hardware” issues that could hold back the ability to breathe well 1:00:20 Breath training in context of a typical gym session with Leo 1:05:00 The link between breathing, adrenaline, and recovery times in training 1:15:00 Tensioning the body through breathing for improved power application 1:23:30 Methods to restore the function of the diaphragm “If I really wanted to perform in marathon, and hit a PB, and I trained for it fully, I wouldn’t mouth-tape (nose breathe)” “We know that pure mouth breathing will burn more sugar than nasal breathing” “Unless you are a pure power sport like Olympic weightlifting, a powerlifting type sport, you do want a decent aerobic base to you” “The benefits of breath training is all about recovery; for me, it is the main recovery modality, it’s where it all starts” “You don’t want oxygen just in the blood, you want it in the cell” “There are psychological aspects to breathing as well” “I only use HRV now with people who are not tuned into their breath” “There is a huge role for CO2 to play in anxiety, performance anxiety, and panic and fear” “You should have patterned in nose-breathing at rest; that should be your daily breathing pattern. If that’s not happening, then you’ll have a higher sympathetic drive, and that’ll have the knock-on effects of a high sympathetic tone versus a higher parasympathetic tone” “(Belly breathing only) is a weak technique, in my opinion… it can work, but it can take a long time to acquire only a diaphragmatic breath by just saying “belly breathe” or placing blocks on the stomach” “For the respiratory warmup, I will bring breath-holding into the general warmup phase. I will bring in 4-6 strong breath holds. Holding the breath through the nose has a lot of strong effects” “If it was pre-competition, I would have them hyperventilate; I call it supraventilation, which means, breathe more than normally. Maybe 5-10,15 breaths to dump CO2 out of their system so now they are more fresh and ready to go from the first whistle” “What people don’t realize is that breathing plays a critical role in emotion

Today’s episode features performance coach and nutritionist, Matt Cooper. Matt has been a multi-time podcast guest and writer on Just Fly Sports, and trains athletes and individuals out of his gym in Los Angeles, California. Matt is a bright young coach who has encapsulated many of the training concepts from top coaches, nutritionists, and human performance specialists, into his own system which keeps the athlete operating in proper neurological and fascial harmony. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed observing in the work that Matt is doing is his incorporation of the work pioneered by Marv Marinovich and Jay Schroeder, into his own training design. The combination of proprioception, reaction, and neurological emphasis is something that creates explosive and adaptive athletes, with a priority on the function of the body, rather than a priority on lifting a barbell max at all costs (and when you respect the nervous system in training, you tend to get improved lifting numbers without the neurological cost that comes from hammering away at bilateral sagittal plane lifts). Recently, a few arenas of training that Matt has been working through that I found particularly intriguing, were his thoughts on training the fascial system, as well as a recent article of his defending proprioceptive training, when we define its role in the training process correctly. For today’s podcast, Matt talks about the role of the fascial system in human movement, as well as its importance in regards to training in light of exercise selection. Matt also talks about proprioceptive training, its role in light of the greater training process, and practical exercises for training both the proprioceptive and fascial systems. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:15 What training the fascial system means to Matt 16:15 Methods to engage the fascial system appropriately in training 24:45 Reasons that barbell squatting can cause neurological irritants to high-performance athletics over time 37:35 Training movements that can improve tensegrity in the body and fascial function 46:15 How Matt programs Olympic lifting and Keiser/Supercat machines, in respect to the feet and fascial dynamics 53:15 The value of proprioceptive and dynamic balance work in training and performance “The fascia being well-wound together is not just an injury prevention concept, but the fascia being well-woven together like a basket, that actually helps store, transfer and release elastic energy effortlessly” “(In a powerlifting squat) the athlete’s fascia has to revolve around the bar path” “If the fascia is adapting around these big compound movements, and they are the centerpiece of our training, then we are sort of adapting athletes neuro-myo-fascially to be sagittal movers, and not everything else” “You can do corrective exercises in a way that get the neuro-myo-fascial segments of the body well-orchestrated” “The main emphasis of our training is one that respects natural biomechanics” “You are setting off a completely different muscle firing pattern by having someone squat off the heel; and the heaviest load is going to happen at the joint angle that is most compromised” “The engine of the car in humans is a lot more horizontal, it’s push-pull; this is the engine that really drives the car, and if you really (axially) stack the body, chances are you are not going to see that turn into more fluid movement” “If I’m doing a little too much sagittal lifting, the movement is too much about the bar and the bar path, and the athlete has to mechanically adapt around that load” “I’ve been having my guys do Olympic lifts, pretty much all off the forefoot” “The bread and butter should not be the pure sagittal linear lifts, that’s kind of my stance” “There is a case to be had that proprioceptive training is, more of a feedback mechanism than anything” “Doing proprioceptive exercises might be a way to get an athlete to feel parts of the body they might not have previously utilized” Show Notes Matt’s addendum to ideas on facial work in compound movements versus machines “In addition to the neuro-myofascial element, the athlete also has to create proprioception and engage stabilizers on some of those big compound movements that maybe would not compliment them for sport. What we should be trying to do as coaches is reinforce stabilizers, proprioception, and fascia in a way that respects the demands of the sport, whereas if you take something like a Keiser squat or a heavily loaded Super-cat squat, you’re not going to have the consequence of creating the wrong code of stabilizers, improper muscle firing patterns, not-necessarily-ideal proprioceptive maps, and unwanted neuro-myofascial connections” Supercat training for a more athletic strength stimulus and fascial adaptation V

Today’s episode features performance coach, author, and speaker, Brett Bartholomew. Brett is the founder of “Art of Coaching™”, which works with corporations in the financial and tech sector, medical professionals, military, as well as professional sporting organizations to enhance their leadership ability through improved communication and understanding of human behavior. Brett is the author of the best-selling book “Conscious Coaching”, and has spoken worldwide on performance and communication topics. Brett has served as a performance coach for a diverse range of athletes, ranging from youth to Olympians, those in nearly every professional sport, as well as those in the U.S. Special Forces and Fortune 500 companies. Coaching is a rapidly evolving field. Strength coaches must grow in a multi-disciplinary manner on a variety of levels to stay competitive and serve athletes better. Sport skill coaches cannot simply use the same rigid cues and drill sets and methods that their coach used on them. Rather, a thorough understanding of human learning and psychology, a more holistic model must be found to facilitate the optimal technical and tactical development of the athlete. Brett Bartholomew has evolved greatly in his time as a coach, and his diverse coaching background has given him the means to see a large problem in the field: A lack of education, skills, and emphasis in general on communication and understanding of human behavior. Being a better communicator means acquiring better buy-in, more effort, and more enjoyment on the part of those we are coaching, and there are a lot of means by which we can improve in this arena as coaches. On today’s show, Brett talks about why communication has been under-emphasized in coaching (despite its importance) how improving in this area can improve athlete outputs, as well as practices and exercises that coaches can utilize to improve their own leadership and communication abilities. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:30 Key moments in Brett’s evolution as a coach, and his drive towards an emphasis on communication in learning 11:45 Why communication is under-emphasized in most coach education programs, and why coaches are often blind to their own coaching communication abilities 20:40 Concrete outcomes of better communication on the level of the coach and athlete 26:10 How improving one’s communication can help one’s evolution as a coach and leader 38:00 Impression management in life, as well as in the coaching profession 44:10 Types of activities that can make a coach better in a chaotic environment “Most leaders at companies at high level organizations are making decisions with less than 70% of the information that they need” “Athletes are people first… you have to show varying levels of yourself, building buy in requires you to get on the level of other people” “Why do we think we are so good at communication when so few people get evaluated (in communication)” “We think that just because we value getting information a certain way, that other people value that way as well” “When the foundation of coaching is communicating with others, and knowing how to translate literally and metaphorically what you mean to broader audience, and you can’t do that, something has gone wrong” “You need to be able to tune your message into different frequencies” “If you are a better communicator, you are going to get more out of people” “Success with high performance environments is not just about managing an athlete’s training, it’s about managing the athlete themselves, and their environment” “There’s 5-6 forms of various impression management tactics people use, and once you know them, you can’t help but see them everywhere. It’s not about are they right or wrong, it’s are they managed skillfully and ethically” “Coaching and communication and leadership is a non-linear thing… the only way to fight chaos is to become more adapted to chaos” “If you don’t put skin in the game, I don’t know that you are going to improve” About Brett Bartholomew Brett Bartholomew is a performance coach, author and keynote speaker. His company, Art of Coaching™ works with corporations in the financial and tech sector, medical professionals, military, as well as professional sporting organizations to enhance their ability to lead more effectively through a better understanding of human behavior, persuasion, and power dynamics. His book Conscious Coaching: The Art & Science of Building Buy-In, was named, The #1 BESTSELLER IN SPORTS COACHING ON AMAZON The #8 BESTSELLER IN BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP AMAZON TOP 100 BESTSELLER ON AMAZON Prior to his work in the leadership space, Brett served as a performance coach for a diverse range of athletes across 23 sports worldwide including those who compete

Today’s episode features coach Paul Cater, speaking on his holistic approach to athlete training sessions. Paul has pioneered a way of training that makes the session a heightened experience on multiple levels, versus a scripted “to-do” list. Paul is the owner of the Alpha Project, a gym in Salinas, California. He has worked with a wide variety of athletes, from those at the highest professional level in pro Rugby (London Wasps) and pro Baseball (Baltimore Orioles), to local youth sport athletes, as well as those in the general population in a wide variety of age ranges. Paul has lived and trained athletes internationally and has a wide swath of cultural experience. He has been a “partial episode” guest of the podcast on episode #197, where he discussed the art of story-telling in the training session, as well as a return to the importance of sprinting as a cornerstone movement in his years of coaching. Paul has also written a number of impactful articles on Just Fly Sports over the years on the level of taking the “robotic” elements out of sport preparation and bringing in a holistic, thoughtful, aware, and “human” form of coaching. Of all the individuals who have had an impact on my coaching and training, I don’t think I can say anyone has had more of an impact on how I run my training sessions than Paul Cater. Paul has taught me the art of bringing life and energy into a training session, and as well as using a combination of training methods and environment to be completely in the moment of the training itself. Through my own observation of, and training with Paul, I have gained insight that can make a training session really come to life in the same manner that sport, or a powerful life experience, does. On the show today, Paul will talk about his philosophy on the flow of a training session, and how his unique model presents athletes the opportunity to grow on multiple levels (awareness, vulnerability, rhythm, variable work modes, etc.). He’ll get into the “nuts and bolts” of awareness practices, music selection, rhythmic development, and much more. This is a unique and essential episode, and one that has the potential to really transform one’s coaching practice in a positive way. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:35 How life-threatening situations can create unique mind-body physical stimuli 11:05 Looking at the rhythm and flow of a training session, and how all pieces must work together to create a more optimal session 24:20 How Paul invokes awareness with his athletes at the beginning of a session, and how he helps them turn on a switch to enter the training state 32:05 Vulnerability in a training session and how it contributes to the total development of an athlete 38:40 Rhythm development, and the creative usage of music and dance elements in a training session 58:55 Other key elements Paul works to incorporate in his training session 1:02:05 How the workout changes and filters into the primary strength training element of the training day “These kids, it’s like they are adrenaline junkies, they have to have this massive hype, or musical element (to train)… creating an experience of a deep introspective state, all the way to the collective experience of competition, there is a whole spectrum there” “You have to create a natural awareness of rhythm, and melody, tuning, so to speak, at the beginning of a session” “Are the kids going through quiet time, before the hype time. It’s hard to sell rest time” “That’s what’s going to limit injuries going forward is knowing athletes beyond a data point or a typical analytic. It’s a courageous path, I think, to really have a comprehensive program at any level” “I try to impart on everyone who walks through the door that they are not just a number, I want to give them identity” “If I could give objective feedback to individual awareness, I’d do it” “I’m adamant that the music selection has to be on point from the start of the session. There has to be a safe feel, I don’t think there should be fight or flight when you walk in the building. These kids are already on high alert” “That’s the beauty, teaching athletes to react, and to be calm and collected before and after that” “The greatest expression of breathing, and elasticity in the hip and torso and shoulder is just sprinting, for a sustained period of time” “Teaching the athletes to match and mirror and work within rhythm, and dance, is maybe the training outcome in general, and then we just put increasing stress around those rhythms of that day, in the weight training” “I really think a coach needs to meditate and link in to the point of the whole session” “(Regarding music in training) I really try to eliminate words in the first 15 minutes… I find melody that works on a 4 count that people can ma