Just Fly Performance Podcast

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-326/

Today’s episode features movement coach, inventor and innovator, Adarian Barr.  Adarian has been one of the absolute biggest influences on me in my coaching, as well as my own personal movement and training practices.  You will be hard pressed to find an individual who sees movement in the detail that Adarian does, while also having the experiential and coaching knowledge to back it up.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned from working with Adarian is improving my understanding of how joints work in the scope of human motion.  From the first time I met Adarian, I remember him discussing the spiraling actions of movement to take the slack out of the system, and how he prefers discussing movement on the motion of joints, rather than muscles.  I remember working on what happened when my joints were in flexion, rather than trying to resist, or “punch” my way through movement, the results of which were numerous post-university sprinting bests, and a quantum leap forward in the way I coached athletes.

“Stiffness” is a commonly discussed term in the world of athletic movement.  Athletes are generally instructed to “be stiffer” in their lower body to jump higher and run faster.  The truth of the matter though, is that in motion, there must be something in the body that deforms, and the ultimate stiffness is a limb in a cast.  On today’s podcast, Adarian takes us through what he considers true joint “stiffness” to really be, when it comes to human motion and movement, and throughout the discussion, creates the grounds for better terminology on the level of the coach, when we speak about joint deformity, stress and strain, in the scope of sprinting, jumping, track and field, and beyond.  This is a podcast that will powerfully impact your mindset on the nature of plyometric exercises, sprinting motions and constraints, and how athletes move ideally in their sport.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-325/

Today’s episode features biomechanics specialist, David Grey.  David is the founder of David Grey Rehab, where he works with clients from all walks of life. David’s specialty is assessing his clients gait cycle in depth to develop a plan to help restore the movement or movements they struggle to perform.  David has learned under a number of great mentors in the world of human movement, athletic development, gymnastics, Chinese martial arts, and biomechanics, and is an expansive thinker, blending many elements of human movement together in a down to earth way we can all resonate with.

Humans absolutely love to categorize things, and put things in boxes.  For those in their initial learning stages, this can really be helpful to the learning process, but at some point, we need to see the grey, or continuum-like nature of things, and how training interacts on its different levels.  When we put things in the box of simply being a “corrective” exercise, for example, it loses touch with many of the helpful principles of training and overload that come in more “standard” training exercises.  When we can see things from an expansive viewpoint, we can start to gather the wisdom regarding how different pieces of training work together.

On today’s show David, puts many things together in regards to good functioning of the kinetic chain for not only knee health, but also better movement.  We talk about the muscles of the lower leg, where he stands (and how he has changed) on the level of more “bodybuilding” oriented training methods, keeping things simple in exercise progression (and how putting “corrective exercise” in a box is a bad idea), sensory awareness and fatigue contrasts, and finally, a ridiculously good summary on how David approaches knee rehab and health from a multi-factorial perspective.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: https://justflypinepollen.com

Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to https://justflysports.thinkific.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-324/

Today’s episode features Jarod Burton.  Jarod is a human performance specialist, chiropractic student, and health coach.  He got his coaching start working with Brady Volmering of DAC baseball, and has spent recent years coaching, consulting and running educational courses in the private sector.  Jarod focuses on engaging all aspects of an athlete’s being, providing the knowledge for the individual to thrive in their domain.

In the world of coaching and human performance, the road to success is often thought of on the level of do “A”, in “B” amount, so you can accomplish “C”.  The focus on typically on numbers, exercises, and (often) a linear cueing process for those said movements.  We are so quick to judge programs entirely based on numbers and exercises.

What we don’t consider often enough is the complex factors surrounding the volume that is administered.  There are elite athletes who have won gold medals and set world records who do a lot of volume that would “crush” other athletes (think the athletes that survived the Soviet or Bulgarian training systems, or modern-day athletes, such as Karsten Warholm, the 400m hurdle world record holder).  We need to ask ourselves, “what is the difference, or elements, that allowed the athlete to tolerate that?”.  Is it that their musculo-skeletal system was somehow just “better” than the other trainees, or are there other additional elements to consider?  The more elite coaches I’ve had the opportunity to work with, the more I realize that good coaches intuitively key into the mental and emotional state of the athlete, as well as the physiological management.

On today’s podcast, Jared chats on managing high training volumes, work capacity dynamics, the critical role of boredom/interest in training, athlete self-discovery, and much more.  This is a podcast that causes you to ask questions, and gives us a new and interesting perspective on the dynamics of training.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-323/

Today’s episode features performance coach and breathing specialist, Leo Ryan.  Leo is the founder of Innate-Strength.com.  Leo has studied from many elite personal training, physical therapy and breathing schools including Dip. Buteyko Method, Wim Hof, Oxygen Advantage Master Instructor, Fascial Stretch Therapist, Strength and Conditioning Specialist and Pilates.  Leo previously appeared on episode 219 speaking on many elements of breath training for athletic performance including nose vs mouth breathing in training, breath hold time as a readiness indicator, and more.

The use of one’s breath for training and overall well-being has become more and more on my radar with each passing year.  From my foray into the endurance end of the competitive spectrum (Spartan Racing in 2019), to understanding the role of rib cage expansion in movement biomechanics, to breathing for energy and recovery, to the training practices of the old-school strongmen, in each year of my life, understanding and training the breath becomes more substantial.

On today’s show, Leo Ryan returns to dig into the role of breath training, and its role in recovery, both within the workout itself, and in day-to-day recovery from training efforts.  We often talk about having an adequate “aerobic base”, but for some reason, the actual core of that aerobic base, which is “breathing”, is rarely considered, and Leo goes into making capacity workouts even more effective through breathing mechanics, physiology and rhythm.  Leo will also cover the role of CO2 and CO2 tolerance in human and athletic function, rhythmic aspects of breathing in athletic performance, and then some dynamics on breathing in the scope of strength training sessions.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to https://lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: https://justflypinepollen.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-322/

Today’s episode features strength and track coach, John Garrish.  John is the director of athletic development at North Broward Preparatory School in Coconut Creek, Florida, and the school’s head track coach.  John was recently voted the 2022 National High School Strength Coach of the Year by the National High School Strength Coach’s Association.  John appeared previously on the show discussing his speed training approach in episode 182.

The symbiosis of track and football is often discussed in the process of training, and importantly so.  What is talked about less, are some of the specifics of what track has to offer, not just in the sprints, but also in events like triple jump, that can enhance an athletes speed, power, elasticity and overall movement profile, in their other sports.

John was a hammer thrower in his college years, as well as a former football player.  The hammer throw is, of all the throws, the one that requires the greatest symbiosis and harmony with the implement.  The triple jump (bounding) requires a tremendous symbiosis with the ground, and how one interacts with it.  You can easily see John’s experience and intuition of track and S&C concepts emerge in his progression of bound, skip, hop and overall elastic training with his athletes.

On the show today, John covers thoughts on hand position and “elastic/rigidity” vs. “muscular” sprint strategies in athletes as they move from youth to high-school levels.  This sets the stage for his talk on his galloping, skipping and bounding progressions, and how he keeps movement quality and velocity at the core of the progression.  John talks about how he keeps the training fun and intentional, and how he changes emphasis as athletes move from middle school, to high school years.  This show is a beautiful fusion of team sport S&C, and track and field concepts, and can be used to help any athlete develop more fluid, dynamic power outputs on the field of play.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to https://lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: https://justflypinepollen.com

Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to https://justflysports.thinkific.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-321/

Today’s episode features strength coach and biomechanics educator, Katie St. Clair.  Katie been training general population and athletes for over 20 years, and is the creator of the Empowered Performance Program.  She is one of my go-to sources of knowledge for all things biomechanics, and the finer details of human movement.  She previously appeared on episode 279 of the podcast, speaking on biomechanical facets of running, lifting and athletic movement.

Humans explore movement in a variety of ways as they grow from youth to adulthood.  We skip, run, sprint, throw, bend and twist with substantial variability, all through the medium of self-learning.  For some reason, as soon as weight lifting enters the picture, variation tends to go by the wayside, and a rigid bilateral (or even unilateral) method of moving that is pasted onto all athletes, is applied.  Human beings are complex, we differ from one another, not only in our builds and structures, but also in how our bodies have compensated and compressed in particular ways over time.  In this sense, our weightlifting programs should offer at least some room for each individual to learn more about the nuances of how each lift might be set up, or tweaked, in a manner the athlete could be optimally responsive to.

On today’s show, Katie goes in detail on staggered-stance squatting and deadlifting, and how it can be leveraged based on the asymmetrical nature of an athlete’s body.  She also gets into detail on single leg lifting, and how turning into, or away from the leg being worked can emphasize various elements of the exercise.  She finishes by touching on hinging, posterior compression, and the link between high, rigid foot arches and what is happening upstream in the body.  Throughout the conversation, Katie highlights how each of these lifting variations can be utilized to bring the athletic body into greater balance, where needed.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast320/

Today’s episode features performance coaches James DiBiasio and Collin (CT) Taylor.  James and CT work at T3 performance in Avon, Ohio, and have a progressive approach to athletic performance training, encapsulating strength, movement, athleticism in a holistic manner that fits with the progression of athletic skill, and leveling up one’s abilities as a human being.  James and CT were both college athletes in baseball and football respectively, and CT played arena football after his NCAA years.  In addition to their coaching, James and CT have been running the “Cutoffs and Coffee” podcast since 2020, having interviewed nearly 50 different guests.

It’s been enjoyable to see more elements of chaos, risk, perception/reaction, and overall athleticism, emerge in the sports performance process in recent years.  Humans are the species on this planet with the greatest overall dexterity of skills, and yet, this dexterity is rarely leveraged in the average “training program” to a shade of its potential.  “Training” is something that is traditionally heavy on data, but low on chaos, and yet, sport, as well as the array of FLOW inducing human movement practices, are quite the opposite.  Yes, we still want to perform movements that improve the strength of muscles and tissues, while increasing capacity, but at the same time, we also want to give athletes challenges that allow them to expand their athleticism. 

On the show today, James and CT get into how they have incorporated a variety of athletic skills, flips, and calisthenic movements into their training, how much their athletes enjoy it, and how it links to dynamics on the field of play.  They chat about how to leverage principles of intuition and chaos in the training day, and even week, speed training constraints, and finally, James and CT finish with an insightful view on the role of “difficult” training routines, and higher volume capacity-oriented training sets.  This was a fun podcast with a lot of take-aways, and highlights the ways that the field of athletic performance training is expanding and evolving.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-319/

Today’s episode welcomes back coaches Cal Dietz, Dan Fichter and Chris Korfist in a truly epic multi-guest podcast.  The amount of coaching and learning experienced between Cal, Dan and Chris is staggering, and they have been influencing the training practices of other coaches since the early 2000’s.

Speed training is always a fun topic, with a lot of resonance to many coaches, because it is the intersection of strength and function.  Training speed requires an understanding of both force and biomechanics.  It requires knowing ideas on both cueing, and athlete psychology.  Since acquiring better maximal velocity is hard, it forces us to level up on multiple levels of our coaching, and that process of improvement can filter out into other aspects of performance and injury prevention.

On the show today, fresh off of their recent speed training clinic collaboration, Cal, Dan, Chris and I talk about a variety of topics on speed and athletic performance, including “muscular vs. elastic” athletes, the importance of strong feet (and toes), reflexive plyometric and speed training, as well as the best weight room exercises and alignments that have a higher transfer point to actual sport running.  This was a really enjoyable podcast to put together.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-318/

Today’s episode features Pat Davidson, Ph.D..  Pat is an independent trainer and educator in NYC.  Pat is the creator of the “Rethinking the Big Patterns” lecture series, is a former college professor, and is one of the most intelligent coaches I know in the world of fitness and human performance.  As an athlete, Pat has an extensive training background including time in strongman, mixed martial arts, and many types of weightlifting activities.  He has been a guest on multiple prior episodes of this series.

The human body is quite complex, as is the potential array of training interventions we can impose on it.  To ease this process, and help us to direct our focus, it can be helpful to categorize means and methods.  We have spoken on this podcast often about compression, expansion, mid-early-late stance, and other biomechanical topics.  Outside of these ideas, training can also be, simply, considered in light of spending more, or less time on the ground and in contact with objects.

On the podcast today, Pat shares his thoughts on a new idea in categorizing athletes and training means, which is based on that contact with the ground and deformable objects.  This goes beyond muscles, and into the sum total of a variety of muscle, joint and pressure system actions that deal with more, or less points of contact for an athletic movement.

Within this system of “high ground” and “low ground”, Pat goes into exercise classification, as well as an explanation why more “aerial” exercise, such as movements involving a level of balance, are as popular as they are, based on the ground/aerial spectrum and links to athleticism.  Pat also gets into the role of the feet, particularly in mid-stance, on the tail end of this enlightening conversation.  This talk really helps us see a number of training means in a new and helpful light.

Pat and I had a long and awesome talk here; based on some logistics with production and time, we’ll be jumping right into the meat and potatoes of our talk

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to https://lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: https://justflypinepollen.com

Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to https://justflysports.thinkific.com

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-317/

Today’s episode features track and sport performance coach, Jeff Howser.  Jeff has been coaching track and field since 1971, and was himself a 6x ACC champion, named as one of the ACC’s top 50 track athletes of all time in 2003.  Jeff was a sprints and hurdles coach at Florida, UCLA, NC State, Duke and UNC before his time as a speed and sports performance coach, back at Duke University.

If you caught the classic episode on oscillatory strength training with Sheldon Dunlap you may have heard Sheldon mention Jeff as a source of his oscillatory rep training knowledge.  In addition to a number of elite track and field competitors, Jeff also trained the top high school 40-yard dash runner in history, who ran a 4.25 second effort.

In the world of speed training, many folks gravitate towards the “neat, packaged” training methods that are easy to understand and copy, such as sprint skip drills (A-skips, etc.).  Unfortunately, these drills don’t transfer to speed in nearly the capacity that we would hope for.  As Jeff says “I’ve never seen anyone skip their way to being fast”.  True speed is a little more complex, as it involves horizontal velocity and rotation, but is still, simple at its core given the self-organizing ability of the body.

In his decades in track and field, Jeff has seen numerous pendulum shifts in how speed is coached, and has experienced a wide variety of training methods.  As Jeff has said, we often go to clinics and seminars to be fed the same information with a different coat of paint.  The “dark side” of the moon represents what we haven’t seen in the world of performance, and this episode is an epitome of that.

On today’s show, Jeff goes into how sprint training has changed in the last 50 years, what he does, and doesn’t find helpful in speed development, a variety of sprint and speed training constraints and self-governing drills, oscillatory lifting and power development principles, and much more.  This show blends several important elements of biomechanics, strength and program philosophy that are impactful for any coach or athlete.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs.

For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly.

To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com