Today’s guest is Dr. Donald Chu, performance coach and physical therapist, as well as legendary track and field coach at UC Hayward in the 1980’s.  Dr. Chu wrote the landmark book “Jumping Into Plyometrics”, which was one of the first in my own bookshelf that I had even in high school.  The special exercise of doing a depth jump into a basketball dunk was one that inspired many creative variations of my own doing and with my athletes.

Dr. Chu has developed an extensive reputation in the field of sports rehabilitation and in the areas of fitness and conditioning. He has been credited with bringing "Plyometric Training" to the attention of the athletic world through his application of theoretical knowledge into practical demonstrations.  

I’ve heard from more than one experienced track coach in the last few years just how successful Dr. Chu’s jumpers were at UC Hayward, and I was very excited to ask him questions regarding his training methods.  If I’ve learned anything over the years, it is that “if a method works, it works”, and the science will eventually catch up with it.  I think there is a lot of gold that came out of the 1980’s in training and coaching that we are missing out on today.  If you just look at some of the national and state record books, you can see so many outstanding performances from this era, despite all the “training advances” we have gone through. 

On the show today, Dr. Chu and I talk about quantifying and implementing plyometrics, jump training, Russian training methods, keystone workouts, and much more.  For anyone interested in defying gravity, as well as paying respect to the prime training methods of decades past, this is an amazing show.

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

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