Ben has over 20 years experience across elite sport having been involved in the physical preparation of athletes since 1999. His coaching experience extends across a wide range of sports both professional (AFL and cricket) and Olympic sports including leading the physical preparation for the Australian Beach Volleyball program for the 2013/15/19/21 World Championships and the Rio Olympics and Tokyo Olympics. He has also had extensive experience in coaching developing athletes having worked at ASPIRE Academy and in his current role as Head of Athletic Development at St Peter’s College in Adelaide, Australia.

He has completed a PhD examining the neuromuscular effects and adaptations to maximal strength and power training and is an ASCA Level 3 and Master Coach and in 2023 was awarded Life Membership to ASCA.

QUOTES

"What is really clear is the neuro side of the neuromuscular is tough. And for good reason… It's because for a long time, our understanding of the neural system and its impact on performance outcomes, because again, that's what's important for us and our athletes, has not really been well understood."

"One of the things that we're starting to discover is that your gaze where you are looking, what you're doing with your eyes is a really powerful tool to help prime, for lack of a better word, your extension movement pattern."

"The top one percent that are going on to win medals at Olympic Games versus those that are not, it's not so much the force that they can produce or the force at velocity via their agonist muscles but it's how well they can turn off their antagonists and cycle through multiple movements."

"I think what we probably initially started to blame CNS fatigue on was more acute type of fatigue, when probably the only people that start to show significant levels of neuromuscular fatigue from a neural perspective are those that have been chronically overtrained for a significant amount of time"

"What I found was that the sprint cyclists had much greater ability to damage themselves, to put themselves into even just a short term performance hole compared with rowers based on the type of training they were doing."

SHOWNOTES

1) Ben’s background and journey in strength and conditioning

2) Understanding the neural side of neuromuscular training

3) Opportunities in training and practical methods to enhance the neural response to training

4) The priming effect of gaze on different movement patterns and the role of coordination in peformance

5) Periodizing methods to enhance neural responses in strength & conditioning sessions

6) Neuromuscular assessments and Ben’s thoughts on neural fatigue

7) The use of electrical muscle stimulation in training and the time course of recovery from high neural load activity based on level of athlete

8) Reframing strength as a skill and countermovement jump numbers in beach volleyball

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Cal Dietz