This week’s podcast features two familiar faces to the show: Chris Korfist and Dan Fichter I gathered these two speed training experts together because the topic of the day is the Inno-sport system and its derivatives, in context of getting athletes faster and stronger.

Back in the mid-2000’s, the “Inno-sport” philosophy started to permeate the training sphere with some very uncommon, and in many cases, never seen before training methods, touting big results in speed and power.

Much of the Inno-sport training was likened to Jay Schroeder’s training methods (although it was not Jay Schroeder) which included lots of isometrics, reactive lifting, plyometrics, and time-based lifting brackets, the same methods that afforded Adam Archuleta a 4.37s 40 yard dash, 39 inch vertical jump, 530lb bench press and 663lb squat.

Some of the sample terminology and concept of the system are as follows:

• Training in two brackets, “An1” (0-9 seconds) and “An2” (9-40 seconds, but generally around 9-25 seconds as far as improving An1 is concerned)

• Classification of movement (really the wiring of the nervous system) into duration, magnitude and rate elements

• Utilization of “drop-offs” that are tagged to particular exercises in the workout, such as sprinting, jumping, or lifting numbers, that indicate when the workout is over, and when is generally an optimal time to train next (dropping off 6% will require around 4 days rest before training the same muscle groups/motor patterns again). You’ll hear Dan and Chris talk about this in terms of “autoregulation”, or AREG, which determines how much work you’ll do in a day (when you drop-off X amount of performance), and when you’ll train again (the more you dropped off, the longer you have to wait until you can train hard again). Let’s say you were running 10 meter flys and wanted to drop off 3% so you could conceptually be good to train speed again in two days. If you ran 1.00 in the 10 fly as your best, then once you ran a 1.03 or worse, you would have “dropped off” and be done for the day.

• The inno-sport system is an entirely neural driven system, not related to the training residuals that classify traditional periodization and planning methods, or on planned overtraining and tapering

Dan and Chris spent a lot of time emailing the creator of inno-sport, who was known as “DB Hammer”, and the information they gleaned was far beyond what was contained in the famous Inno-sport book, that is sadly unavailable today.

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