Just Fly Performance Podcast

Our guest for today’s show is Katie St. Clair. Katie is a strength and conditioning coach out of Charleston, SC who has been training general population and athletes for over 20 years, and is the creator of the Empowered Performance Program. She is passionate about helping everyone reclaim movement and find joy and reduction of pain using sound biomechanical principles alongside proper breathing. Katie has embarked on a journey of learning and combining that knowledge with her love of athletic movement, as well as her passion for empowering female movement professionals, with the intent to elevate the entire industry standard. In my last few years as a coach, I’ve become more and more aware of the underlying physical and structural characteristics of athletes that work to determine biomechanics that show up when they perform various sporting skills. I’ve really enjoyed having a variety of coaches on this show who have gone in detail on the biomechanics of the human body, (the pelvis, ribcage, breathing, etc.) and then have linked that up with what we might see in athletic movement, such as sprinting and jumping to name a few. Katie is an expert in human performance, and the fine details of human movement. On today’s show, she takes us on an approach to forward pelvic tilt, breathing mechanics, abdominal function, the feet, proper squatting, plyometrics and more that comes from a perspective of the underlying function of the human body. Katie helps us understand the “inside” mechanisms that are so often leading to compromised movement seen on the “outside”. So often we have athletes who just can’t seem to “find” the right joint motions in their movement, and this is when we need to have the ability to go a level deeper in our coaching, or our ability to know when to “refer out” to experts better able to cater to those areas. The more you know from “the inside out”, the greater the bandwidth of athletes you can serve in your efforts. 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 4:45 – What led Katie into working in fitness and performance 10:15 – Katie’s “inside out” view, of helping athletes acquire better technique via changes on the level of the thorax, pelvis and rib-cage 15:45 – The art of coaching humans in a manner that helps them self-organize and learn to move effectively 18:45 – How being biased, or stuck, in anterior tilt impacts one’s ability to move, and how to help athletes get out of that position 25:45 – How to use inhalation and exhalation to neurologically reinforce supination/ER and pronation/IR 42:15 – General primers on how to start working with breathing and breath for clients 45:50 – Ideas on how compression can drive expansion on the opposite side of the body, and ideas on “functional” abdominal muscles 49:50 – Katie’s view on building strength at length with the abdominal wall 55:50 – Why some athletes (particularly female swimmers) often have a lot of spinal extension patterning in a pushup movement, and then what to do about it (if it is even a big deal in that group) 1:00.05 – Hypermobility as systemic laxity, versus adaptations that can lead to acquired hypermobility in the limbs via proximal stiffness 1:05.35 – The dichotomy between accessing the heels, and then moving into the forefoot in the process of squatting 1:14.50 – Dynamics of “no-toes” squatting and what it can do for athletes, and how it zeros in on the mid-foot 1:17.50 – The balance between being able to keep the heel down and pronate, and then get off the heel to make the foot a second class lever, in squatting and even in running/jumping 1:29.50 – How to help people who struggle to yield to gravity be able to do so, and achieve better glute activation in the process “I realized I was looking at everything from the outside in, instead of from the inside out…. I would see these patterns all the time, but just coaching it didn’t change it, I had to alter the mechanics of their thorax and their rib-cage and pelvis to be able to create the change that was necessary” “(Athletes) are creating compensations that are really genius” “The trees, the way the rocks are, the seashells… (nature) gives you an appreciation for what the human form is” “The foot diaphragm and the thoracic diaphragm are going to alter the ability for the foot to do its’ thing too” “You have to have enough expansion to create compression…. if you don’t have enough range you are going to compensate to get it” “They do need to learn the fundamentals of getting the diaphragm to dome up, both the pelvic diaphragm and thoracic diaphragm, and to use the breath to leverage that position” “If I can use the breath, then I can create a neurological change in the brain” “If I am on my heels, that is going to generate that internal rotation, the increase in all the curvature… now

Today’s show features Dr. Chris Gaviglio. Chris is a current senior strength and conditioning coach for the Queensland Academy of Sport, working with Olympic-based sports and athletes. Chris has been involved with elite sport for over 15 years working across multiple Olympic sports and professional football in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Chris provides applied sports science projects for the athletes he works with, particularly in the areas of salivary hormones, passive heat maintenance, blood flow restriction training, warm-up strategies, and power/strength development. I don’t often do shows that center around a piece of training technology, and the main reason for that is simply accessibility. If a training tool costs thousands of dollars, it isn’t something a large proportion of the athletic, and even coaching population can rationalize having in their training arsenal. The nice thing about blood flow restriction training is that it is available at a relatively low price point, with common units starting around $300USD. Other setups using squat wraps, for example, can be done basically for free, but I would recommend using an automated system for the safety and precision of band tightness (see show notes regarding safety considerations and contraindications to BFR, such as concussions or deep vein thrombosis). Blood Flow restriction training has been a training tool that has been on my radar for a long time. After seeing the results that a high-level Olympic swimmer I worked with got from them, and then hearing some results from Nicolai Morris having a 1.5 second drop in the 100 freestyle of a swimmer as well, as well as several of my coaching colleagues using the method, I knew that there was absolutely something to BFR that I needed to get further into. In using the AirBands from Vald performance myself, I continued to realize how beneficial this training stimulus is to our physiological response. For today’s show, Chris takes us into many topics of BFR, including its mechanisms and many benefits. As opposed to methods of mechanical stress (such as plyometrics, sprinting, heavy strength training methods) which tend to dominate this shows podcasts) BFR is a physiological stressor, and through this discussion, we can gain an appreciation for the contrast of physiological stress to more mechanical means. Chris finishes the show talking about how coaches and athletes can integrate BFR training, and gives many anecdotes and points of research, on how BFR can improve strength and speed recovery. Finally, our sponsor, Simplifaster is doing a Blood Flow Restiction cuff giveaway (Vald Airbands) so if you would like to get in on that, until November 11th, you can sign up for a chance to win a free pair of cuffs at bit.ly/freebfr . 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 – Chris’s experiment during quarantine using lighter, or minimal weights in an at-home training setting 17:00 – Discussion on using lighter implements and bodyweight in developing one’s athleticism 20:30 – What blood flow restriction training is, and where it originated from 27:00 – How the metabolic stress from BFR creates beneficial responses, similar to high-load lifting 35:25 – What BFR definitely helps with, and what elements of performance it is not as helpful for 41:25 – How BFR can help with creating “mild to moderate” doses of lactate – Using BFR style work in warming up for a training session 53:10 – If there are any similar places in sport where athletes will experience situations similar to what is created with BFR means 57:00 – How to get as close to BFR as one can in a gym without any sort of cuffs or wraps 1:00:00 – Anecdotes on how to integrate BFR in performance and rehab based situations 1:10:00 – Where to get started for those interested in BFR “BFR is a metabolic stress” “BFR is a method of strength training with the addition of pressure” “What is BRF doing, we are partially restricting blood flow, and what that allows us to do is you are actually restricting the venous return of the blood from your muscles, so the blood flows freely into the muscle, but you are restricting it coming back out” “The first (benefit of BFR) is an increase in concentration of metabolites” “The second (benefit of BFR) is (anabolic) hormonal response” “The third (benefit of BFR) is intramuscular signaling, we are talking here heat shock proteins, myostatin, mTOR pathways” “They had two groups, they did not lifting, but one used heat sheets to heat the muscles and the second had none, and the group that used heat got stronger…. BFR can also stimulate this” “The fourth (benefit of BFR) is intracellular swelling, or “the pump” The fifth (benefit of BFR) is muscular recruitment, our slow twitch fibers tire out earlier than normal, and our fa

Today’s show features Frank Forencich. Frank is an internationally recognized leader in health and performance education. He has over thirty years of teaching experience in martial art and health education. Frank holds black belt rankings in karate and aikido and has traveled to Africa on several occasions to study human origins and the ancestral environment. A former columnist for Paleo Magazine, Frank is the author of numerous books about health and the human predicament, including “The Exuberant Animal”, the book I read that originally led me to Frank’s work. We live in a time where early sport specialization and pressure has led to burnout and high injury rates amongst athletes, but the “rabbit hole” to a dis-satisfaction with sport and movement in general for so many, goes much deeper than that. As much as we fall prey to the stress-laden, year-round competitive schedule that leads athletes to higher pressure situations at younger ages, we also have “forgotten” our roots as athletes, and more importantly, as human beings, in so many senses of the word. We miss out on both training results, satisfaction and longevity by failing to study our ancestral nature. On today’s show, Frank Forencich goes into many important elements of our humanity that can help athletes not only recover and train better, but also help increase enjoyment of the training process. These elements include human biorhythms, dance, play and exploration, getting in the dirt, benefits of training in nature, purpose driven movement, and more. This podcast was truly important on the level of helping us use the principles of nature that define who we are, to help us in training, and far beyond. If you bring drums into your gym, or for your workout after this episode, PLEASE let me know. 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 – Key trends seen in the animal kingdom, in physical movement that humans should pay attention to our own movement practices 11:50 – “Effortful striving” in human training versus more of a purpose-driven approach that is characteristic to non-human animals 20:30 – What the idea of “dancing being the original PE” means to athletes and all-human 28:20 – How play and exploration influences how we adapt to movement and training 33:50 – Frank’s thoughts on when to specialize in a sport, or movement practice 35:20 – The difference between the “jungle animal” and the “desert animal” and what this means for humans, training and moving in context with their environment 38:35 – The impact of bioregion on movement practice 40:40 – The impact of training in nature, versus training in an indoor gym setting, and then the “Bio-Philic” need of humans in regards to connection with nature 45:45 – Jim Thorpe’s primal and natural training methods 48:20 – The importance of getting “in the dirt” and actually connecting with dirt and the earth itself for the sake of the micro-biome 54:05 – Low hanging fruits on how to deal with stress better in context of our human biology 58:05 – The role of the athlete in modern society 1:01:55 – How to build a total training day based on the rhythms and mechanisms of the human being “There is no emphasis on appearance (regarding movement and “exercise” as observed in the animal kingdom)” “It’s important to remember that sports are movement specialties” “In human athletics, there is constant striving all the time that is divorced from habitat; it is almost as if we are training in a bubble” “For the playful athlete, the motivation is purely intrinsic” “We’ve lost sight of the fact that the dose makes the poison, the dose makes the medicine… the wisdom lies in remembering the shape of the inverse U-curve” “I don’t think we give our animal bodies enough credit for knowing what’s going on… I think we just need to listen more” “(Dancing) is not sagittal movement, it’s transverse plane movement” “There’s rhythm everywhere, drumming and dancing are fundamental for all of us” “At various weightlifting facilities, bring drums in and use them, that would an easy thing to add that would increase enjoyment and it would increase performance too” “Play is deeply wired into the primate-mammal body” “If you isolate rodents (from being able to play) they will grow up to have huge social deficits and dysfunctions” “What I’ve tried to do with people is have a bio-regional approach to athletics” “Native people always identify with habitat, and that is something we have lost a lot of in the modern world” “The blue collar stuff is really under-rated (for physical fitness)” “Our microbiome now is completely out of whack, and the way to get back to that is to put your hands in the dirt and actually contact the soil, or run barefoot, or go climbing (outside)” “(Modern ambient noise) is an assault on the autonomic nervous system” Show

Today’s show welcomes back coach Michael Zweifel. Michael is the owner and head of sports performance for “Building Better Athletes” performance center in Dubuque, Iowa. Building Better Athletes focuses on building the athlete from the ground up by mastering the fundamentals of movement mastery, strength/power training, recovery modalities, and promoting ownership in athletes. Michael is also a team member of the movement education group, “Emergence”. He has been a frequent guest on this podcast, speaking on topics of perception-reaction, exploration in the weight room, creativity and more. As I’ve grown as a coach (and a human mover/athlete) it’s been really enjoyable to experience sport, and movement in different ways. In working in a college weight room, it was also very interesting to pay attention to the defining characteristics of the best athletes. They weren’t always the strongest, or even the fastest, but they could move and react incredibly well in context of their sport… and they loved to play. One of the things I’ve been enjoying doing recently, is coaching youth sports (5 year olds, to be exact) and it’s a learning experience that impacts my philosophy, all the way up the chain into high level performers. With play and exploration at the core of athleticism and sport, why is it that the culture of the gym (and in many sports performance settings) completely the opposite? So much of modern sport acts like athletes are robots, a culture based on lines and whistles, and a perception of needing to do everything one particular way. On today’s show, Michael Zweifel goes into a deep dive on how his warmups fit with the key characteristics of elite athleticism. He speaks on how he connects his warmups to core human instincts and needs, and talks about how to develop a love for movement and play that transcends organized sport play. Michael and I also take on a broad-scope discussion on the over-structuring that is rampant in sport (and our culture in general). This show is truly important in light of our modern sport culture. 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 4:50 – Michael’s thoughts on trail running, longer runs, and elasticity 13:20 – Michael’s biggest changes in his warmup process over the last decade 16:30 – What Michael would take back with him in terms of his warmups and training if he returned to the university sector of training 21:50 – Comparing “routine” warmups (lines, movement prep, etc.) versus a more dynamic and adaptive form of warming up for a training session 28:50 – Speaking on the different stages of the warmup defined by Emergence: Ownership, exploration and attunement 33:50 – If there are any general warmups that Michael’s athletes will actually do, and how he approaches that type of work 35:50 – A broader-scope discussion on coaching, creativity versus militaristic coaching 48:00 – What age groups and settings Michael feels sports performance coaches should work with to optimally learn the nature of training sport 52:50 – The critical nature of play for human beings, and how professional athletes are very play driven 1:05.35 – How Michael might lead up to a more output driven day in the gym from a warmup perspective 1:07:50 – Some more specific changes in the warmup process that Michael has made in the last few years: Applying “levels” in sport and human movement 1:14:50 – The sad reality of kids quitting sports early, and without preparedness for how to enjoy life from a movement practice at that point 1:20:50 – Key differences in what Michael has in the warmups of different age groups (elementary school, middle school, high school, etc.) “What transitioned my warmup was being in the private sector. In the private sector, each and every day I have to win my athletes over… in the college sector my athletes will be back no matter what I do” “If you think about the basic dynamic warmup, with the lines, we never do any of that stuff anymore; I think there is so much more opportunity to engage our athletes in a deep level…. We’re attacking the warmup from a perceptual standpoint, we are attacking the warmup from an emotional and social standpoint, we are attacking our warmup from a technical/tactical standpoint” “The transition to transforming my warmups has been hard; every day is about reading the room, asking questions, giving certain athletes autonomy and ownership; the warmups are alive” “If I value my athletes being adaptable, and I value my athletes being creative and having abundance in movement solutions, how is doing the same warmup day in and day out building that capacity? It’s not, it’s restricting it” “Our three stages (of warming up at Emergence) are ownership, exploration and attunement” “For youth athletes, exploration is the key to learning” “I’m a big fan of allowing e

Today’s show is with Kibwé Johnson. Kibwé is the director of track and field at SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio, and the founder of FORTIUS performance. Prior to SPIRE, Kibwe coached throws at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida for 4 years. In his time as an athlete, Kibwé established himself as one of the USA’s best hammer throwers by being ranked first or second for over a decade, and his personal best of 80.31m/263’5” in 2011 the best mark by an American hammer thrower in over ten years. He also owns the world’s all-time best HT/DT/WT combination of distances. Kibwé has personally worked with some of the most well regarded coaches in the US and internationally. His coach for his final 10 years, Dr. Anatoliy Bondarchuk, greatly influenced the development of Kibwé’s own methodologies. Kibwé’s coaching philosophy is built on communication and cites his experiences as a husband and father with learning how to become more effective as a coach. In my time as a coach, I’ve learned that technique and skill are more than a set of instructions, or a final “model” to shoot for through a series of drills and cues. Although these instructions can certainly be helpful for lower level performers, once an athlete gets to a more advanced level of performance, drills lose their luster, and we must become more attuned to the actual interaction between the athlete and their environment (implements, the ground, gravity, etc.). On the show today, Kibwé talks about his experiences as an athlete, particularly with Dr. Bondarchuk that helped him develop as a thrower, and in his eventual career as a coach. He talks about the unique, high velocity and cyclical elements of the hammer that demand a particular relationship to the instrument, and things we can take from this relationship that can transfer to other skills, or life itself. Finally, Kibwe speaks extensively about drills, vs. holistic skill performance, and the many “subtle” elements, such as awareness, that go into enhancing holistic performance on the highest levels. 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 6:40 – Kibwé’s evolution as an athlete, and what led him to his philosophy of “The Tao of the Hammer” 10:25 – Kibwé’s experience in working with Dr. Bondarchuk and how the communication barrier actually helped Kibwé to figure out his throw without the use of words or cues 18:20 – How the hammer throw in track and field is unique in respect to other throwing events due to its unique, very high velocity rotational dynamics 21:10 – Kibwé’s take on teaching athlete’s fundamental positions vs. letting them figure out skills in a different manner (or on their own), particularly in context of the hammer throw 26:40 – How acquiring the “feeling” of a good throw is helpful to scale to throws of all distances 32:25 – How people tend to want a “list of things” when doing something, and the battle of getting an athlete outside of a list of cues, and to facilitate them figuring things out on their own 34:40 – How to learn, from a “Tao of the Hammer” perspective, and what awareness in a hammer throw means to Kibwé 46:40 – Examples of elite athletes who have had their mechanics “fixed”, as per a “technical model” and had poor seasons or failed to improve 51:25 – How Kibwé would address a “mistake” in an athlete’s throwing, and portions of an athlete’s technique 56:40 – Where drills fall short in training a complex movement, such as the hammer throw 1:02:40 – Reactivity as needed between the hammer and the athlete, and how to “do less” in the course of a throw from a perspective of actively putting force into the implement “It really came down to trying to find the words to explain how I was feeling when I felt my best; because I wasn’t seeing that anywhere” “It’s pretty typical that a coach will use a whole lot of words, but in all of those words, there is no space for that athlete to fill that with their own natural instincts, or nests. What makes that own individual amazing gets tripped away with a ton of words, in my opinion” “In track and field and the technical disciplines, the athletes who were allowed to grow and evolve and change on their own, are more artists in a way, if that makes sense” “There is an importance to teaching a base level, “how do you move, kind of thing”…. But there is part of me what says, “why not?”” “Hammer throwers who started at 10 or earlier, it is beautiful to watch” “My thing there is when an athlete is essentially connected to that feeling, and they can maintain that through the throw, you can have that feeling no matter how hard you throw” “The next day, the feeling they received from that cue that you gave them (the day prior) is different, for an innumerable number of reasons” “Both are needed, masculine and feminine, yin/yang. Both are needed, but then

Today’s show is with Alex Effer, owner of Resilient Training and Rehabilitation. Alex has treated and trained a variety of clients, from professional and amateur athletes, to a wide spectrum of the general population, ranging from those with certain medical conditions, to postoperative rehabilitation and individuals with chronic and complex pain. Alex has experience as an exercise physiologist, a strength and conditioning coach, and has consulted with a number of elite and Olympic organizations. Alex has taken a tremendous amount of continuing education courses and is on the leading edge of modern training theory. There are loads of different continuing education courses and theories, each carrying methods to train athletes from perspectives on breathing, corrective exercise, and exercise variations, to name a few. It is in the process of getting to the core principles that define these many training systems, that we can gain a greater level of wisdom to make better decisions in exercise selection and training organization. For today’s podcast, Alex speaks on his continuing education journey, and core principles that many current courses in human performance/assessment and biomechanics tend to have in common. He speaks on how to dial up, or down, points of contact in a movement to help an athlete achieve better mastery over a skill or core human function. In the second half of the show, Alex gives some analysis and progressions with functional training movements, such as crab walks, and bear crawls, and then talks about how some “meathead” oriented exercises are actually more functional than we give the credit for. Finally, Alex talks about exercises that either “push an athlete backwards in the chest” or “push them forwards” from the back, and how those ramifications can go into, not ony the way we select exercises, but aso the way that we periodize and organize our training programs. 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 – Common trends that Alex found in his educational process, having taken “all the courses” 13:30 – How Alex looks at force vectors in training and movement, and the difference between walking and running when assessing gait and looking at these force vectors 20:15 – Where Alex has gotten most of his information in training when considering PRI versus other educational systems (such as DNS or SFMA) 22:15 – Why it may be a faulty method to try to compare babies to adults in terms of baseline movement patterning 30:00 – How to transition a client from 12 points of contact, to only 2, and how to use the extra points of contact to improve one’s movement ability when athletes may struggle with standing motions 44:30 – Assessing crab walks, and explaining (or regressing) why athletes might not be able to lift their hips up while performing the crab walk 51:15 – Why some “fitness/bodybuilding” movement can have athletic movement applications, such as a tricep kickback or arm curl coupled with head turn 56:15 – How athletes doing exercises in a manner that “feels good” often times is an optimal method of them doing that movement, versus whatever the commonly accepted technical model for that exercise might be 1:00:00 – Alex’s theory on periodizing training based on early, mid and late stance oriented movements 1:12:15 – Viewing training intervention as either “pulling someone back” or “pushing them forward” “When you take every single course, you kind of get mind-blown by them the first time… and then you hit a client that totally goes against all the algorithms and everything they say, and you have to pivot” “(all the continuing education courses) believe in some sort of respiration and how that affects the body” “You got two phases of respiration, so you got inhale which is more external rotation, and exhale which is more internal rotation. You also have the three phases of gait, two of the phases are external rotation so you’ve got to believe there is some semblance with inhalation, and then you’ve got one of the phases, mid-stance which is more pronation, so you have to believe that is going to be more exhalation” “If this person is limited in internal rotation, they must be limited in exhalation in that area” “As I pronate my foot, I’m going to have an internal rotation force go all the way up near my head” “If I can’t get the air in certain parts of my ribcage, or certain parts of my pelvis, then I am going to induce more muscle tone in that area… I now have to use a muscle strategy in order to pull the air in; I use my lats, I use my pecs, I use my SCM, I use my traps” “Go into the anatomy app, and remove all the muscle, and start with “how do the bones move” “So, position, breathing, gait, and force vectors: To me, those are the main things that I think about based on all of the different sys

Today’s show is with Lance Walker. Lance is the Global Director of Performance at the Michael Johnson Performance Center where he designs and implements performance training programming for local and international youth, collegiate, and professional athletes in all sports. Prior to MJP, Lance served as Director of Performance Training at Integrated Athletic Development, as well as having served as an assistant strength coach with the Dallas Cowboys, as well as the University of Oklahoma. Lance is also a current Registered Physical Therapist in the state of Texas, giving him a unique blend of skills and lenses by which to observe athletic performance. In looking at what makes athletes operate at a high level, we can’t go too far without looking at the actions of the pelvis and spine. As both a strength coach, and physical therapist, Lance has detailed knowledge of both the anatomy and fine-tuned function of this region, as well as more global concepts, linking it to sprinting and general strength training. For today’s show, Lance takes us on a journey of hip function, and how that function ties into sprinting and athletic movement. He goes into pelvic dynamics in the weight room (including some important points on split squatting and the hips), as well as how using horizontal resistance combined with vertical exercises can drive unique and more specific adaptations. Finally, talks about some key strength movements to achieve better pelvic function for speed and resiliency. 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 Lance looks at the action of the pelvis in sprinting and human movement 19:00 – Pelvic dynamics in bilateral sagittal plane activity (squatting and deadlifting) versus sprinting, and helping athletes determine their own individual squat depth 21:30 – How a rear foot elevated split squat can create lumbo-sacral torsion that could provoke injury in the pelvis 34:30 – How to help athletes who are not reciprocal in the pelvis improve their pelvic action in sprinting, and Lance’s view on core and trunk training for athlete 38:00 – The role of hip flexors in training for speed and athletic performance 50:30 – How adding horizontal band resistance can dynamically change strength training exercises 54:30 – The idea of hip separation in fast sprinters (front knee and back knee distance) and if this is a good idea to specifically train in practice “That pelvis motion, rotation and listing, that’s my focus now, both from a dysfunction standpoint and a speed standpoint” “The body needs to set up and list the pelvis to be fast” “Optimized motion should probably be the approach, and let’s just not stabilize the tar out of it and make everything move around this stable, fictitious pelvis” “It’s like you are setting the spring so when you throw it, it abducts, externally rotates and extends, and when it hits the ground, it’s still rotating” “There was this incredible increase in pubic symphysis issues… there was this mad rush to load this split stance stuff, because, nobody hurt their back anymore, and “it’s more functional”” “Hip flexor strength is a thing!” “Just stretching the hip flexors, and strengthening the abdominal wall doesn’t help (anterior pelvic tilt) those people” “When you are doing your leg drop series, don’t put your hands under your pelvis” “(Regarding the supine leg drop test without the low back arching up) The one’s that have a lot of issues, the bottom 10-20%, chronic hamstrings, spondy, all those things, yeah that’s a test (that failing fits with getting hurt more often)” “That’s a key concept in hamstring rehab is training the hamstring while training the hip flexor” “We worked with elite distance runners at MJP, and the more elite they were, the more positive their Thomas test was (poor hip flexor mobility)” “Fast freaks are not putting a lot of pressure into the ground after neutral… the ones that suck, they are the ones still putting pressure into the ground after center” “These elite sprinters are not hitting directly below their body, they are hitting 6” in front of their body” “I’m anti-deceleration, we are doing a dis-service by teaching others to slow down” “All of us that get to work with athletes, or patients, we are shepherds to this adaptation, we are not driving adaptation. Don’t kid yourself; the human body, that is the magic maker” About Lance Walker Lance Walker is the Global Director of Performance at the Michael Johnson Performance Center in McKinney, Texas where he designs and implements performance training programming for local and international youth, collegiate, elite, and professional athletes in all sports. Lance previously served as Director of Performance Training at Integrated Athletic Development and was responsible for the training and/or physical rehabilitation

Today’s show is with Christian Thibaudeau. 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. I have had Christian on the podcast many times talking about neuro-typing, but more recently I’ve been digging into his knowledge of various types of training repetitions (Omni-rep) which we talked about on podcast 221. As per any strength coach I am aware of, Christian has the greatest knowledge of set-rep schemes and combinations available for training, and, as such, I have really enjoyed the chance to speak to him on the terms of training complexes and schemes. On the show, Christian gets into power training complexes, and the possibility of utilizing sport skills in the total framework. He also talks about how to periodize and assign the use of complexes, as the method “costs” more in terms of the adaptive resources of the athlete. Finally, Christian spends time talking about training stimulus, and how to create the “purest” possible adaptation for an athlete with the minimal amount of noise in the system, ending with a description of his double and triple progression systems. The interesting thing with this talk was that it was almost more about what not to do, than what to do. In times like these, where coaches are armed with a massive arsenal of possibilities at their fingertips, the need for wisdom on how to actually utilize and progress the methods, without adding excess noise to the system, is at a premium. 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 5:45 – Recent insights from Christian on watching his children grow and mature in regards to sport preference, behavior and physical abilities 13:30 – Christian’s thoughts on introducing specific sport skills into power training complexes 25:45 – Why more movements in a complex is more neurologically demanding, and how to choose how many exercises in a complex, based on the type of athlete you are working with 32:15 – Christian’s take on when to use (or not use) power complexes in a training year, based on the athlete 47:45 – How to increase training stimulus, and how to progress in training without adding volume, or even weight 59:45 – Why it is important not to give a client what you, as a coach, are currently in love with in terms of training methods 1:05:45 – How to make training the “purest” it can possibly be, reducing all un-necessary noise in a program to help athletes adapt in as direct of way that is possible 1:12.00 – Christian’s take on using bar-speed monitor units for athletes in light of adrenaline increases and intensification factors 1:22.00 – Using very simple lifts, such as a leg press, in order to put minimal stress into a training program where an athlete is doing a non-strength sport 1:28.00 – Christian’s simple-strength progression method, the “triple progression method” that offers a low level of noise and a long-term progression potential for an athlete “The simple fact that it feels lighter (doing a light set, after doing a heavy set), it will make you more confident, and you will produce more force” “The closer both movements are together, the easier the brain will connect both (for the brain to transfer to sport skill)” “That’s one of the issues with complexes is that they will raise adrenaline more than any training benefit you can find; which is a benefit in the short term… the downside of that is the more adrenaline you produce in training, the more likely you are to suffer from training burnout” “I prefer top range of motion (lifting) in the transfer phases; studies have shown that partial squats have much more impact on speed and jumping capacity than full squats” “The more stations you have (in a circuit) the easier the transfer is” “If you have the natural capacity to transfer gains easily, athletes who can take the gains in the gym and transfer them to the field, well you only need two stations because transfer is easy for you, you might not even need to do a complex. But the reality is that many athletes are not that gifted when it comes to transferring the gains they make in the gym to the field. They will need more stations in the complex, or periodizing their complex” “Remember, the more stations in the complex, the harder it is on the nervous system, so if I can get away with only two stations in a complex, I will take that option” “I’ve had people who will increase 5kg on their squat and jump higher and run quicker. Others will increase their squat 30kg and not improve… those who are naturally explosive are normally those who transfer strength very easily

Today’s show is with Gavin MacMillan, sports performance coach and founder of Sport Science Lab. Growing up in Toronto Canada, he participated in 7 high school sports, and received a tennis scholarship from San Jose State University. In 2001 Gavin founded Sport Science Lab where he has experienced a great deal of success training athletes and teams at every level in multiple sports. I’ve personally had a mixed relationship with barbells in the course of my own athletic career. I’ve had positive (squatting sub-maximally 1x a week being a staple in my best athletic year), but also several negative experiences, one of which was my surprise at age 20, I had spent fall of work increasing my best clean from 225 to 245lb, yet high jumped only 6’1” the first two meets of the year (my PR from high school being 6’8”). In my first few years as a college track coach, I learned quickly that an athlete who learns to lift barbells better is not necessarily a faster athlete. When I was 21, I stumbled across a book called “Pro-Bod-X” by Marv Marinovich and Edyth Hues. The training methods within were like nothing I’d ever seen, incorporating a lot of unstable surfaces, and they didn’t use heavy weights. Doing the workouts for just over a month, I was pleasantly surprised by just how easily I was moving and jumping in my pickup basketball games. Gavin MacMillan does not use barbells in his training program, and yet gets incredible results on the level of building speed, reactivity, jumping ability, and tremendous resistance to injury. He has a strong use of balance and proprioception based movements in his training program. Regardless of where you stand in closeness traditional weightlifting/lifting maxes as a form of progress in a program, you will be a better coach by understanding Gavin’s approach to training athletes, as well as his own experiences as an athlete that led him there. On the show today, Gavin shares his background as an athlete, his results using a non-barbell based training program, concepts on force-production training without using barbells, foot training, and the role of athletic balance training that can be merged with resistance training means for big improvements in reactive outputs. 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 6:15 – Gavin’s athletic background (which included ballet and figure skating), and how he got into sports performance coaching 12:30 – Gavin’s experience with traditional barbell weight training, and how he ended up going away from these methods in his own training, and with athletes he worked with 21:15 – Taking a step away from traditional barbell training, and how Gavin was able to transform the injury-reduction factor of a professional Rugby team, setting the record for the fewest player minutes lost 29:15 – Gavin’s answer to the question on, how to train an athlete who needs to get generally bigger and stronger, without using traditional barbell methods 33:00 – Gavin’s thoughts on how to train strength and force for people who don’t have access to advanced training machines 46:30 – Talking on what one sport might be able to offer another from an explosive perspective, such as the impact of figure skating in Gavin’s upbringing 52:00 – Elements of a fast transition to the ball of the foot 54:00 – How squatting with a foot on a balance disc fundamentally changes the exercise adaptation, soreness, and athleticism 1:04.15 – The various surfaces that Gavin uses with his athletes, that optimizes their interaction between the foot and the ground 1:10.30 – How Gavin uses isometrics to produce high rates of force development, without generating large amounts of muscle soreness 1:20.30 – Ideas on the rhythm of moving a load in training “What a gift (ballet) was, because now I was taught balance, I was taught flexibility, I was taught to control my body in space. And then in figure skating, I really had to find different ways to balance on small blades, and I was skating circles around people” “If a system (such as barbell training) is relying on your form being perfect to work, that’s flawed from the outset” “To be able to handle my own bodyweight at a higher velocity is imperative” “In rugby for instance, the scrum is 2% of the game, so I’m not going to spend the entire training platform more than he’ll actually need it” “You are not going to improve the ability to move an external load unless you move external loads; have you ever tried to bale hay in your life? I’d rather a guy is flipping tires than back squatting” “A human can only produce force properly at certain joint angles” “We’ll incorporate a balance element into almost all the strength work we do” “The foot is so important because it’s a suspension system that the rest of the body has to stretch against, and the foot has flex as well”

Today’s show is with athletic performance coach and long-term athletic development expert, James Baker. James is one of the co-founders of the LTAD Network and is currently a Strength & Conditioning coach and Performance Support Lead at the Aspire Academy in Doha, Qatar. James has a unique blend of skills and experience as an S&C coach, PE teacher, sports scientist, and researcher. So many times in sports performance, and particularly in the sub-set of speed and power training, we look to focus on the most high-intensity methods we can possibly utilize to achieve adaptations in athletes. Or perhaps, we inquire about the optimal technical or tactical methods for the sport in front of us. Unfortunately, we don’t tend to look much at the entire, long-term process of an athlete achieving their best possible result in a sport, as well as being well-balanced outside of their sport-specific ventures. To give athletes the best training experience, we need to have a thorough understanding of how they might respond to various training methods at different points in their athletic journey. Look at the long-term process; look at the love of movement and play outside of one’s specific sport, and better understand the entire umbrella of what it means to be both human and an athlete James Baker's Topics of Discussion On today’s show, James will discuss the difference between early specialization and early engagement, and the need for athletes to love and appreciate other forms of movement and play as their sport career unfolds. He will also take on free-moving sports like parkour in relation to ball sports, and then deliver some great ideas on progressing plyometric and strength training means over the course of an athlete’s development. For those of you who don’t work directly with growing athletes, realize that by learning more about how young athletes develop, you can learn a lot more about the mature athlete in front of you, and the process that led him or her there. 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 5:02 – What key changes James feels could help young athletes as they go through the levels of sport without burning out 8:49 – The importance of athletes learning to love and appreciate other forms of movement practice outside of their primary sport 14:23 – James’ thoughts on early specialization versus early engagement in a sport 22:05 – Thoughts on early specialization and mental burnout in sport 24:44 – James take on using other/alternative sports in the course of a traditional sports training program 31:01 – When to incorporate, and then intensify strength training in young athletes 34:23 – Standards to “earn the barbell” in the training of young athletes 40:00 – How an athlete’s peak-height-velocity timing will impact whether or not strength training will be helping them to benefit explosively as an athlete 46:45 – How athletes who have less muscle mass may respond less favorably to strength training to improve speed and power outputs across a full spectrum of age ranges 48:07 – How peak-height-velocity will impact an athlete’s reactivity and ground contact times 51:06 – Plyometric progression ideas for young athletes in regards to pogo hops and depth jumps James Baker's Quotes “The danger of athletics is kids wrap up their identity with being a sportsperson” “If anything needs to change, it’s the support network around those kids (that don’t make the next level) and helping them transition” “I think it’s a case of early engagement versus early specialization (especially in “high skill” sports)… getting them in front of good coaches early, but not having that be the only thing they do” “(Regarding how early success does not correlate heavily with later success in “physical sports”) The physical qualities create a big advantage to those that have matured earlier in the teenage years, but they are not necessarily the ones who go on and progress…. Myself I played a high level of rugby, I didn’t pick up a rugby ball until age 15” “The trick is getting early engagement without having an athlete specialize in that sport” “You are going to gamify training a lot more with younger kids… gamification is still important but has a much less amount of time allocated to it at the professional level” “Strength training can be started at any age, but it’s important to understand what the most appropriate starting point is…. It’s about earning the right to progress by demonstrating technical competency” “Sometimes these younger athletes have the capability to do some of these (strength training) movements with load, but they don’t tolerate doing these things with frequency” “Pre-PHV (Peak Height Velocity), what they showed is that it is the plyometrics and the speed work at improving outcome measures like sprint time a

Today’s show is with athletic performance coach, Erik Huddleston. Erik is currently the Director of Performance at Indianapolis Fitness & Sports Training (IFAST) and a performance consultant for a number of professional baseball & basketball teams. Erik previously spent time at Indiana University & Texas Tech University with the men’s basketball teams. So often in the course of using barbell methods for athletic performance, there are often movements that are considered sacred cows of training. There also tends to be common thoughts as to how these lifts should be performed, such as all athletes needing to squat heavy “ass to grass”. In reality, athletes come in all shapes, sizes and structures. Athletes of varying shapes may respond to various types of barbell lifts differently, and there are ways to optimize training for performance, and robustness when considering structural differences of athletes. Advanced and elite athletes will tend to utilize the feet, and stance in different ways as well. Knowing how an athlete is leveraging the gait cycle, and what points they are particularly biasing to achieve their performances, is important when thinking about which lift variations we might want to utilize with them over time. For today’s episode, Erik takes us on a deep dive into squatting and how it relates to the “reversal ability” of athletes, given their individual shapes and structures. He also relates the phases of gait (early,mid,late stance) to squatting and jumping concepts, to help us better understand how to give athletes what they need at particular points in their career. Erik cover important elements of single leg squatting as well, in this highly detailed chat on performance training. 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 4:00 – Some of the things Erik has learned from spending time in both the collegiate and private sectors of training 9:00 – Things that Erik looks at in training video that he may be addressing in the gym setting 15:00 – Managing squatting and squat training in light of the various phases of stance 25:20 – How to “bucket” athletes based on need in squatting, in terms of depth and heel-elevation, particularly those with wider hips and narrower shoulders 35:00 – How an athlete’s body shape and structure will tend to determine their functional ability and biomechanics 49:00 – Self-selection principles when it comes to strength and power exercises and coaching 52:00 – Shin angle principles in light of squatting and reversal power 55:00 – How single leg differs from double leg training in terms of pelvic-sacrum action and pressurization 1:00.30 – What Erik is looking for in the stances of the foot when an athlete is jumping or dunking 1:05.30 – Why banded work can cause athletes to “over-push” in jumping, and the impulse related nature of “point zero” in a jump 1:11.30 – More talk on jumping in regards to single leg jumping and accessing late-stance, and why advanced athletes tend to be more late-stance dominant 1:22:00 – Erik’s take on athletes who are early-stance dominant, and how to help them overcome resistance, create compression, and ideally get to mid and late stance more easily “An ability to translate through the phases of gait is something that I look at (when assessing video)” “Some kids are naturally not going to be able to get lower in that athletic stance” “Gait is a constant falling and catching yourself as you go forward” “If the tibia moves forward and your heel is on the ground, you are moving towards the middle phase of propulsion…. as soon as the calcaneus breaks the ground you are in a later phase of propulsion” “(Internal rotation) doesn’t allow for a lot of general movement qualities… or a fluid variation in movement. IR is compression, IR is force production, it is not necessarily fluidity of movement, it is meant to block things from happening; to compress and produce force” “If someone is at that (max IR) point, and you ask them to change levels, then there is going to be a compensation” “A lot of the higher end athletes I work with are biased towards this middle or late propulsion, so for them to squat, I need to bring the ground up to them (through a slant board)” “Having only half of your foot, or just your heel on the slant, doesn’t put you in an early position (with heels on plates, the bias is still towards IR)” “If they are spending too much time, and they are too shoved forward into middle and late stance, access to early (stance) is key” “3rd world squatting, sitting on your heels is very early stance biased” “Compensation is not a poor choice, you just need to have resources outside of that compensation” “From a strategic standpoint it is difficult to get (narrow shoulder/wide hip individuals) to come out of the bottom of the squat with qual

Today’s show is with Ben Askren, former mixed martial artist and wrestler, who is now a wrestling coach (amongst his other ventures). Ben is one of the most successful wrestlers, and MMA fighters of all time, known for his unique style and technical skills. Ben’s NCAA career consisted of a 157-8 overall record. His final two years were dominant with an 87-0 record capped by back-to-back national championships (2006 & 2007). Ben was a four-time all-American, and two-time recipient of the Dan Hodge Trophy (the college wrestling equivalent of the Heisman). Askren was the former Bellator and ONE Welterweight Champion, remaining undefeated for over a decade before competing in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and had a final win-loss record of 19 and 2. Ben has co-founded Askren Wrestling Academy (AWA) with his brother Max. They currently operate 5 gyms. I am perpetually fascinated by elite talent in sport. In training athletes, so often we take for granted, the long term process, the mental process, and the creativity that makes some athletes so elite. It is very easy to get “sucked in” to sets, reps, exercises and positions, and fail to nurture both the individual creative and mental processes that are going to help athletes succeed as the level of competition rises. On today’s podcast, Ben takes us through his early life in sport, and about when he made the transition from multi-sport athlete to specialist in wrestling. He shares about the grounds the led to some big leaps in his creative ability as an athlete, and the balance between creativity and structure in the development of a young athlete. Finally Ben shares lots of information on developing one’s practice of mental composition for athletic performance. 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 4:53 – What inspired Ben to make the jump from wrestling to MMA fighting in his career 8:52 – Ben’s athletic background from a young age, starting from a multi-sport perspective, and how that eventually funneled into specializing in wrestling 15:52 – Prime coaches and mentors in Ben’s athletic career that impacted his formation as an athlete 18:16 – Ben discusses his practice of study in his own development into an elite wrestler and fighter 21:24 – The balance between creativity and structure in training wrestlers as they go from youth to a mature athlete 22:59 – How Ben’s wrestling academies teach children with individual facets of performance in mind 25:56 – Thoughts on teaching athletes to deal with adversity in their sporting careers, and as they advance in level of competition 33:14 – A conversation on the value of submaximal lifting versus heavy strength training in performance training 44:04 – Development of young wrestling athletes, and how early success is not a requirement for later successes 50:17 – How to educate parents to buy into the long term vision of success for their athletes, and why the youth sport system (and monetization) is not set up in favor of long term athlete success 55:40 – How to manage stress and anxiety in big competitions 58:03 – How Ben approaches mental training in practice and competition 1:03:49 – Tactics to minimize anxiety in competition “(When I made the decision to specialize in Wrestling after freshman year of high school) At that time, that was totally unheard of… all specialization was much more limited at that point in time” “I try to not let the parents push the kid into more participation, I want it to be the kid’s choice” “I know there are some people who say you should never specialize, and I strongly disagree with that… at my academy, there are certain kids who going into their freshman year are 92 pounds, what other sports can they play?” “A lot of (creativity) was me and my team-mates. My team-mates were spurring innovation that happened, bouncing ideas off each other” “I barely every studied opponents; I kind of saw it as a waste of time (compared to studying elite fighters instead)… my best end form is not highly tied to me needing to win this match” “Inevitably when you compete at a higher level in sport, you are going to find adversity; when you find that adversity, how do you succeed from there?” “Great champions have multiple ways to win” “A lot of wrestling programs think the only solution is doing things more and doing things harder” “I think I would go back and take away a lot of heavy lifting; it is not necessary for me to be an elite athlete” “Most parents only pay attention to the year above and the year below their kid” “Most youth coaches are not incentivized to do what is good in the long term for the kid… the incentive for the kid, and the incentive for what their bank account says is two different things” “Don’t be too stuck on one method that is going to get you to the top; if you are really goi

Today’s show is a Q&A with Joel Smith. We are back again for a series of your questions and my best answers. Today’s show is by theme “The Speed Show” with a ton of questions on speed, acceleration, max velocity, muscle-relaxation speed, and even working with distance runners. Sprinting is always going to be a synthesis of so many elements of human performance, and is one of the highest-reaching challenges for any coach in athletic coaching (which is why it’s also such a rewarding puzzle to solve). Outside of the common speed questions; I also had an interesting question on how to assess “swings in the pendulum” of training methods. The awareness by which we get to our own coaching biases is important, so I’ll dig into some ideas there as well. 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 1:59 – How to fix heel-striking in athletes 12:56 – A step by step process on helping athletes improve hip extension and delay knee extension 19:50 – Thoughts on flat feet being an advantage since you enter mid stance more quickly? 22:16 – The top 2-3 faults, issues I commonly coach as it pertains to start out of blocks, acceleration in those first 2-3 steps, and common drills I utilize for correcting said issues. 33:57 – How to periodize maximal velocity work. Once intensity is at the max and assisted/overspeed is touched upon sporadically, where do we go from there? 43:18 – Thoughts on setting up a weight room/jumping/sprinting program for high school XC runners. Training age with me 1-3 years. 50:44 – How do you balance your stance/beliefs when training philosophy and paradigm swings like a pendulum? 56:54 – In regards to the Soviet research on muscle relaxation times being the differentiating factor between their elite and non-elite athletes, what are some methods to train relaxation times? Show Notes Dave O’Sullivan Slouches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYD4Jx_IXSw Usain Bolt Warming Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW9GxrrSDFg&t=163s About Joel Smith Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance coach 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.

Today’s show is with Jake Tuura. Jake currently works at Velocity Training Center as a strength and conditioning coach. Prior to Velocity, Jake was a collegiate S&C coach for 7 years. Jake is the owner of jackedathlete.com where he teaches athletes and coaches principles on muscle gain, jumping higher, and rehab from jumper’s knee. Training for things like vertical jump and sprinting are enjoyable to discuss, but we need to always be zooming out into more global concepts of performance. For example, you may tweak every ounce of your training to help an athlete jump 4” (10cm) higher, but what if that athlete just got into a really good community where athletes were doing various dunks, and found that simply being in that environment unlocked 4” of jumping gain, that was eventually able to filter over into their permanent results? Or perhaps look at the formation of jumpers who are obsessed with jumping as youths, doing dozens, if not hundreds, of jumps each day? Also, understanding how to be consistent as per staying healthy is not often considered as it should be, particularly for jump-related sports. Jake Tuura has been on a journey of sport performance exploration for years, and offers grounded solutions for those seeking muscle gain, performance increase and pain reduction. On the show today, Jake talks about what he has been learning since leaving the university sector in strength and conditioning, as well as updated knowledge in the vertical jump training space. Jake also talks about how to use games as the ultimate warmup (and workout, when combined with sprints and jumps) for athletes, and finished with some great points on knee pain and rehab, and points where isometric exercises might not be the panacea that it is so often offered as. 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 4:56 – Some of the last things Jake learned as a college strength and conditioning coach 16:31 – What Jake has learned working in the private sector of sports performance since moving beyond his university coaching job 18:44 – Thoughts on using games with pro-level players versus younger athletes 25:29 – Things that Jake has been compiling in the last few years in regards to vertical jump training 38:21 – What Jake has noticed in elite dunking athletes in regards to their training history and jumping volumes 46:22 – The importance of using sport play as either an advanced warmup or potentiation for jumps or even sprints 51:59 – Thoughts on penultimate length in a running two leg jump” 58:13 – Looking at isometric training, versus kinetic chain training and general strength conditioning when it comes to knee rehabilitation and injury prevention “When you are a college strength coach, you think that everyone really wants to be in (the weightroom)” “You are warming up their bodies, but are you thinking of how you are impacting their brains?... they are like zombies” “If you are a college strength coach, there are 1000’s of kids who will do your job for free… and you have to impress the head coach” “I think we need to start vertical jump training with the objective starting point of physics, and then you can create a good plan” “Can you get stronger by just jumping? Yes you can; but… some people are just not built for that, and they need extra training… sometimes freak athletes, they may not need the extra training, they were just born for it” “(In regards to knee pain) Jumping as high as possible for a decently high volume… would a caveman do that?” “The pro-dunkers, would jump every day (growing up) and as they get older and increase outputs, they do not jump every single day; and they always get into strength training” “Having the people to do dunk sessions with is huge; we had like 10 guys at an LA Fitness out here one Friday night, and everyone’s vertical jump was up, like 4 inches” “If you can start playing pickup basketball for 30-60-90 minutes, that is the best warmup to dunk” “If you can stimulate the system with gatorball, you will feel a lot better going into your sprints” “You just do not know the story to be giving these canned technique tips to people; they shouldn’t exist” “Isometrics, heavy isometrics like a leg extension, are going to be huge for the patellar tendon, and the quad tendon, and Osgood Schlatter, is will be great for that, but that heavy isometric will not be good for patella-femoral pain; someone who has general knee pain” “Iso lunges, Spanish squats, all those are going to give you immediate (tendon) relief. If you do those exercises, and you don’t have immediate relief, then you probably don’t have a tendon issue” “There is correlation from having lack of dorsiflexion and having jumper’s knee” About Jake Tuura Jake Tuura, MS, CSCS currently works at Velocity Training Center as a strength and conditioning c

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