Today’s episode features strength coach and consultant, Dr. Matt Jordan.  Matt is a strength and conditioning coach/performance consultant for elite athletes with six Olympic cycles of experience. He holds a Master of Science in Exercise and Neuromuscular Physiology, and a PhD in Medical Science from the University of Calgary. Matt has consulted with more than 30 Olympic and World Championship medalists and provides expertise to high performance organizations in the NHL, NBA, NFL, and military. He is currently the Director of Sport Science at the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary and leads the Sport Science/Sport Medicine program for Alpine Canada.

In training athletes, it’s very easy to simply get caught in the way of thinking that we were brought up into in our own time as athletes and as young coaches.  If we don’t ever get some sort of data behind the methods we are performing week in and week out, it’s hard to know what to change and why.

When it comes to making meaningful decisions on key performance metrics, reducing the noise in a system, and using simple and consistent measures to help guide performance, Dr. Matt Jordan is the guy that you want to talk to.  On today’s episode, Matt gets into this subject, particularly on the topics of periodization and training organization, as well as data collection and the use of vertical jump profiling as a measure of performance fatigability.  He also gets into the job of a strength coach in context of a total high performance system with the idea of reducing noise in the system in mind.

Ultimately, this show is about helping coaching learn to make their training decisions and their data collection more simple, meaningful and integrated to help improve clarity in programming, and results.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

3:15  Positives and negatives to the traditional model of periodization

12:30 How ideas on periodization might change when moving from a sport of high complexity to one of low complexity

21:00 Some thoughts on reducing the noise in a high performance system when there are multiple practitioners working with the athletes (strength coaches and team sport coaches)

36:00  How vertical jump profiling can fit into the bigger picture of an athlete’s total training for their sport

45:20  How performance fatigability differs from how well the competitive exercise is improving

 “There is not a lot of good data to support periodization, but as anybody who has done this in the real world, we understand that sequencing and organization of training stimulus, and interference effects are very much real things and therefore require some thought which is the cornerstone of periodization”

“In all disciplines, whether you are a teacher or a physician, there is a very big struggle to override your experience and the way you’ve always done things, rather than a data-driven approach”

“Weather shaped how people trained for decades, even after they didn’t have weather to contend with”

“If (as a strength coach) you can’t adapt to the culture (of a team sport) you can’t give those athletes what they need to succeed”

“If you don’t have trust, you can’t have impact”

“With an alpine skier, it’s really tough to pull a number out that says “this is how well you are performing today”

“Performance fatigability is the effects of fatigue on performance”

“In a lot of sports, the competitive exercise (CE) is just super complex”

“I say to coaches, “what is your pan evaporation?”,  Find your simple metrics, repeatable over time, stick with them.  They help bring clarity to a complex world that we are trying to understand”

“It’s really tough to understand things when you start noisy”

About Matt Jordan