Just Fly Performance Podcast

Today’s show is with coach and educator, Dan Cleather.  Dan is a reader in strength and conditioning and the programme director of the MSc in strength and conditioning at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK.  Dan began coaching at Cal State Long Beach, and then worked at the English Institute of Sport.  He has coached national and international medalists across a wide range of sports, and in particular has worked with World and Olympic champions.

Dan is the author of several books on the topics of science and sports performance, including “Force”: The Biomechanics of Training, and “The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom”.  Dan has published over 40 peer-reviewed and scientific articles, and is a founder member of the UK Strength and Conditioning Association.

When it comes to performance training, coaches often cite a disconnect between what they are coaching, and what actually happens when an athlete competes.  We can gain a greater understanding of this issue by simply looking at how movement actually happens in sport, and how athletes actually manage forces.  Many control points in coaching tend to revolve around slow, or easily observable aspects of movement (usually the end-points), when the complex reality of movement renders coaching around these endpoints obsolete, if not counter-productive.

On the show today, Dan will share with us how he views common coaching practices revolving around scientific terminology, such as “force absorption”.  He’ll go into some fallacies around force-based principles involving landing dynamics in sport, deceleration training, and how coaches go about instructing Olympic weightlifting.  Dan will speak on where science, and “evidence-based” practices fit in with one’s coaching philosophy and intuition, and will share his thoughts on the link between gardening plants and coaching athletes.

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.

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points:

4:37 – Dan’s background as an athlete and what got him into strength and conditioning

7:58 – Dan’s take on learning skills as a coach, in order to be a better learning (and coach) of skills

15:11 – Dan’s thoughts on what applying science to training actually is

22:42 – How coaches tend to frame “force-absorption” in athletics, and what it actually is

32:47 – Thoughts on the body dealing with forces from a perspective of being a “machine” or from a self-organizing perspective

41:27 – Dan’s thoughts on any sort of deceleration training for sport, and how coaches tend to spend too much time on versions of movement that are too reductionist

48:20 – The link between seeds, plants, gardening and athletic performance

52:58 – Dan’s take on traditional Olympic lifting practices in light of force development

“The more skills you learn, the better you get at learning skills”

“Evidence based doesn’t mean that the science is prescriptive, we see 8 parts of a 30 piece jigsaw puzzle, which are the bits of evidence we are getting from the science, and we work out the rest of what that puzzle looks like based on our experience, our discussions with the coaches, etc.”

“The scientific evidence is an important part of our philosophy but it’s our philosophy that guides the decisions that we make”

“If you do something because your previous coach did it, that’s the evidence of what they did”

“Coaches find out what works, and 25 years later, the sport scientists come along and explain why… if you had to wait for the science before you were prepared to make a decision then you wouldn’t be able to do very much”

“Absorption implies that there is something you have got that is being sucked up by something, and can be released later”

“We call a softer landing with more flexion of the knees and hips “force absorption”, but we are not actually absorbing force when we do that, we are reducing the likelihood that we will have high peak forces”

“Your muscles don’t absorb force when you land, they produce force… if you didn’t produce force you would collapse into the floor”

“There is research that landing drills with at-risk populations will decrease their injury risk”

“We have to remember that, in many cases, landing slow, in competition is a disadvantage”

“I think it will be those kids who haven’t done that sort of play (jumping and dropping off of things in play) where you have to do more regressive things and teach landing mechanics”

“As a profession I think we tend to over-teach things, we want to drill and control movement, where you need to make sure that your athletes are safe, but once you’ve done that, letting them work things out for themselves is more effective”

“I’m not sure we’re mitigating much injury risk by having 80 players do something that most of them do fine (regressive drills)”

“If things look too pretty, the athlete isn’t being challenged enough and they aren’t learning anything.  Keep pushing the envelope of what you are asking the athlete to do until they are not looking pretty anymore”

“We can help ourselves to self-organize, or we can help our athletes to self-organize, but if you think you are going to control them, or they are going to control them, you are mis-informed about how systems work”

“I do feel like gardening is a good practice for S&C coaches”

“For me, weightlifting is jumping, and everything is built around that skill”

“What people see in Olympic weightlifting is the end of the second pull because athletes aren’t moving there and they are about to go down again.  Inexperienced coaches can see that and so they then try and coach that, but the problem is they coach that with reference to what they are seeing, and why you are in an extended position is because of what happened earlier in the movement.  You don’t coach an extended position by saying “hit and extended position” you do it by having them do things earlier on”

“When people cue people to hit a fully extended position, they are actually asking them to try and exert force at the point when they should not be exerting force and being ready to catch the barbell, and you see that a lot”

“Loaded jumping and (Olympic) weightlifting are not the same movement”

About Dan Cleather

Dan Cleather is a strength coach, educator, author and scientist.  He is a reader in strength and conditioning and the programme director of the MSc in strength and conditioning at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK. Before joining St Mary’s he was employed as a strength and conditioning coach at the English Institute of Sport.

Dan began his coaching career as a volunteer assistant strength and conditioning coach at California State University Long Beach. He has coached national and international medalists across a wide range of sports, and in particular has worked with World and Olympic champions in track and field athletics, rowing, canoeing and rugby. Dan is the author of several books on the topics of science and sports performance, including “Force” The Biomechanics of Training, and “The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom”.

Dan’s PhD is in biomedical engineering (from Imperial College London) and his research interests include musculoskeletal modelling, functional anatomy and strength training. He has published around 40 articles in peer reviewed scientific and professional practice journals. He is a founder member of the UK Strength and Conditioning Association and currently serves the organisation as Director of Finance and Administration.

Today’s show is with Boo Schexnayder.  Boo is a current strength coach and former jumps coach at Louisiana State University, and is regarded internationally as a leading authority in training design.  Boo has been a two-time previous guest on the podcast talking about speed and power training setups.  In a world of complexity, and nearly infinite ways to train athletes, Boo knows the art of managing athletic performance by using training means that are not more complex than they need to be.

In my coaching (and athletic) years, I have loved looking into all of the complexities, and details of the human body, training, motor learning and biomechanics.  It’s always been a swinging pendulum in terms of digging in to understand important training nuances, but then zooming back out, to pull along the key pieces of what it really important, both in general, and for each individual athlete.

When we over-complicate training, over-coach, and give out exercises that require too much distraction from actual outputs or muscular adaptations, we create a diminished experience for the athlete, and also create a program that is harder to learn from as a coach.  Knowing how and when to make the complex simple is a mark of an accomplished coach who can really transmit training to an athlete in a way that allows them to self-organize to their highest potential, both on the level of skill development, and maximal outputs.

On the show today, Boo goes in detail on his own upbringing and mentorships in coaching that have led him to become the coach he is today.  He speaks particularly how his work in the rehab process gave him increased confidence in his regular coaching abilities.  Boo will speak on the process of how far he will go on the complexity rung in the gym, and how he balances coaching skill and technique with the self-organizing ability of the athlete.  Finally, Boo gives some of his thoughts on training that focuses on an athlete’s strength, and his take on heavy partial lifts in the gym in respect to the total training system.

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.

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

5:02 – Boo’s early development as a coach, early mentors, and his work in rehab that led him to where he is now

15:30 – Some specifics that Boo learned from the world of rehabilitation that intertwined with his performance coaching practice, and how rehab and training follow the same principles and draw from the same well

21:50 – Boo’s advice on arriving at the place where things can be made optimally simple in coaching

25:10 – Why coaches end up chasing things in athletics that aren’t that important

36:28 – Where Boo draws the line on complexity in the weightroom to the point where exercises aren’t helping to accomplish the primary goal of training

40:26 – The extent of complexity Boo would utilize for single leg movements

46:01 – How athletes must train their strengths in order to potentiate their weaknesses

52:48 – A discussion on how the Buffalo Bills didn’t squat in season and still experienced substantial success

57:20 – Boo’s take on heavy quarter squats and partial step ups in performance training (vs. full range of motion)

“The earliest (change) is when I finally understood specificity and I developed a healthy non-respect for coaching culture, I realized that a lot of coaching is traditional and needs to be evaluated”

“Another bright light that came on is when I got involved in the rehab field”

“I think the key thing to keeping things simple is understanding what you are trying to accomplish”

“So much of what we do in traditional coaching cultures is just filler work”

“I feel that one thing that holds back lots of coaches is technology, there is so much technology out there that so many coaches have been data collectors, but they really don’t know what they are doing”

“Coaches are obsessive over (small pathological issues) don’t understand that those lie outside of the boundaries of what we try to teach”

“Once you get athletes in (movement bandwidths) you have to trust them to do what they do…. I never had to coach athletes to perfection, I only had to coach them close to perfection and then allow their movement organization processes to take them the rest of the way and that’s how you keep it simple”

“If athletes are training in the right direction, just shut the hell up, and let the athletes movement processes take over and trust them the rest of the way, and get involved when things aren’t going so well”

“For everything I coach, I have got it down to 3 or 4 boxes that need to be ticked… I’ve developed this philosophy that all these things are not that complicated, what you are trying to do is build a body in the way to best execute those things”

“Feedback addiction is a real thing; it’s not the healthiest thing for you to say something every single time”

“When I look at my highest intensities of training, the Olympic lifts are probably about as technically complicated as I would get; that’s my ceiling as I might say”

“I always keep it super simple when I’m trying to reach those highest levels of intensity.  The simpler the movement pattern, the more muscle mass that is going to be involved”

“I’ve experimented with single leg Olympic lifts a bit, they are a nice change of pace, but you can’t build your program around them”

“Skinny people are built to sprint, not to lift, so do more sprinting and less lifting.  Big people are built to lift, not to sprint, so do more lifting and less sprinting… a lot of times the athlete’s strong point is potentiating improvements in the weak area”

“My track athletes, I don’t squat them in season but we do every variation of jump squt you could imagine, we Olympic lift, it’s not like we are not lifting, there are just many ways to do things”

“So many of goofy running mechanics and change of direction mechanics go away when you start using full ranges of motion”

“There are strategic blocks in my program where we will use super heavy quarter (squats) but they are not my default”

About Boo Schexnayder

Boo Schexnayder is a current strength coach and former jumps coach at Louisiana State University, and is regarded internationally as a leading authority in training design, possessing 37 years of experience in the coaching and consulting fields. Most noted for his 12 years on the Track and Field coaching staff at LSU, he is regarded as one of the world’s premier coaches, having developed 19 NCAA Champions and 10 Olympians. Schexnayder has coached multiple World Championship and Olympic medalists and has been on several national team staffs, including the staff of Team USA at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

He also possesses 13 years of experience in NFL player development and combine preparations. He frequently lectures and consults domestically and internationally in the areas of speed and power development, training design, motor learning, and rehabilitation.

He has operated Schexnayder Athletic Consulting and serves as director of the USTFCCCA’s Track and Field Academy and Thibodaux Regional Medical Center’s performance division. Prior to his collegiate and international career, Schexnayder was a successful prep coach for 11 years, coaching football, track, and cross country.

Today’s show is with Nick Winkelman.  Nick is the head of athletic performance & science for the Irish Rugby Football Union. Prior to working for Irish Rugby, Nick was the director of education for EXOS.  Nick is an internationally recognized speaker on human performance and coaching science, and is the author of the book, “The Language of Coaching”.  Nick previously appeared on episode 193 of the podcast where he went in detail on internal and external cues, analogies, and what it takes to make cues more effective.

One of the major shifts in my coaching career and personal movement/training practice has been understanding the “art” of coaching on the levels of psychology, motor learning, and how we actually go about instructing athletes in the course of the training session.  As coaches, we all tend to start out with a combination of what we did ourselves as athlete, and then whatever training frameworks we learned in our education process.

When we look at any training session, whether it is sport skill or gym work, it’s par for the course to look at it on the level of tactics, sets and reps, which drills to use, or x’s and o’s.  It’s far more rare to look at the session on the level of meaning and engagement, and how we can work cohesively with athletes to better communicate with them, direct their attention, and allow them to understand, on a deeper level, what improving their sport technique feels like (and not to just intellectualize the process).  Improving one’s ability in this “soft” side of the coaching equation will help improve the long term success and sustainability of the training process.

On the show today, Nick speaks on principles of attentional focus, and how factors such as motivation and novelty can direct an athlete’s attentional focus in training.  Nick will discuss cueing dynamics on a level of meaningfulness and embodiment to the athlete, moving past simply intellectualizing instruction (and how we can improve our dialogue in that process).  Finally, Nick will give his take on how coaches can become better story-tellers to their athletes in communicating ideas and instruction.

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.

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

5:03 – Why Nick believes that the “soft” practices in athletics (communication/cueing/motor learning/etc.) are less-traveled in the process of performance training

2:19 – Dynamics of attention, motivation and novelty in athletic performance

29:03 – “Survival” oriented coaching situations as a means to gain the attention of athletes

31:41 – How to go through the process of making coaching and cueing more meaningful to the athlete through listening to the athlete

43:14 – How the shortcoming of internal cues can teach us more about how we learn and function as humans, and how cues and attention placed external to the body can help the “one-ness” of movement fully form

52:12 – Nick’s take on the place and context of internal cueing in the process of coaching athletes

57:33 – How “noticing”/awareness of one’s body in the midst of movement fits in with the cueing eco-system

1:01:28 – Nick’s take on personal practices for coaches that can help them paint better pictures with their words when they are actually coaching

“Over time, every coach who is attentive and self-aware to the journey, starts to pick up on “a weak signal”, and they start to realize, that “hold on… not everyone responds to programming the same way, so I might have to individualize… and not everyone responds to the same communication style”

“What are we trying to get people to do: We are trying to get people to focus their attention on the right things, in the right way, at the right time”

“Attention is like a spotlight, and we can’t actually increase the size of the spotlight, and I we want to change, we have to change what we point the spotlight towards”

“Attention will switch to the stimulus in the environment that is most likely to inform me of my survival odds”

“Our attention floats to things that are novel, interesting, or things that we are motivated by”

“Cues need to be both accurate and interesting; we are talking about seedlings of communication here”

“Even though motivation powers attention in the long term, in the short term, we know that novelty, things that are kind of salient, things that stand out, that are unique, they are very good at grabbing attention”

“To the individual, you will rarely find someone who doesn’t enjoy solving a problem”

“When you are giving the athletes something that aligns with an individuals preferences, likes and desires, I think some of that reciprocity is paid back in a “hey coach”, we’ll listen to you a little bit better”

“Over time I realized, the athlete is the painter, ultimately they are the one who needs to be able to understand the coaching cue, has to resonate with it, and needs to be able to embody it, such as what makes a change as you recognize as a coach, and they recognize as an athlete

“Over time I felt my coaching convert over to a choice based question format which is based on my ability to listen to them deeply”

“To make it meaningful to the athlete, you need to know what is meaningful to them”

“I might give you one of the following questions: What does that mean to you? How does that cue make you feel? Put that into your own words, if you like.”

“I think every single coach, especially people who get to a higher level, they experience this reality, athletes saying “I know what to do, I just don’t know how to do it””

“So often when we communicate, we just explain the step by step information as if described in a textbook, but that’s not how human motion comes about… human motion is about one-ness, we have a symphony of muscles and joints that must come together in a pursuit of one common goal, just as a real symphony is directed by a conductor”

“If the language we offer is only intellectual, we can’t offer it into the physical body.  I don’t want to know what you think about my cue, I want to know how it makes you feel”

“We know that an external cue provides better results in the moment, and transfers better long term”

“A first principle of motor learning is that, when we are learning something, we are best to place our focus in an externally directed manner”

“I think by taking a fictional form to my work, I am actually embodying at the deepest level, what I’m trying to teach coaches, (and this is certainly not my idea) and that is humans think in narrative, we are story tellers, both prospectively and retrospectively, and we learn far better through fiction, even when it’s non-fiction”

About Nick Winkelman

Nick Winkelman is the head of athletic performance & science for the Irish Rugby Football Union. Prior to working for Irish Rugby, Nick was the director of education for EXOS (formerly Athletes’ Performance), located in Phoenix, AZ. As a performance coach, Nick oversaw the speed and assessment component of the EXOS NFL Combine Development Program. Nick has also supported many athletes in the NFL, MLB, NBA, National Sport Organizations and Military. Nick is an internationally recognized speaker on human performance and coaching science, and has multiple publications through the UKSCA, NSCA and IDEA Health and Fitness.

More show notes at https:www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-293/

Today’s show is with Rob Gray, professor at Arizona State University and Host of the Perception & Action Podcast.  Rob Gray is a professor at Arizona State University who has been conducting research on and teaching courses related to perceptual-motor skill for over 25 years.  Rob focuses heavily on the application of basic theory to address real-world challenges, having consulted with numerous professional and governmental entities, and has developed a VR baseball training system that has been used in over 25 published studies.  Rob is the author of the book “How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach and Practice Sports Skills”.

When it comes to anything we do athletically: playing a sport, sprinting, lifting weights, even holding an isometric position; all of these things are learned skills.  So often, the various compartments of athletics, the sport coach, the strength coach, the rehab specialist, are relatively disconnected, and there is often no common playbook when it comes to athletics and the learning process.

The principles of the way we learn, and how this learning fits with our movement strategy and ability, are universal.  By understanding what it takes to be a better mover via the learning process, we have an understanding of the general process of athletic performance training from a broader frame of mind.

On today’s show, Rob Gray speaks about the fallacy of training a “perfect technique” via drills or repeated cues.  He talks about why using a constraints-led approach to help shore up any key movement attractors (technique) is an ideal way to facilitate skill development.  Rob will get into his take on how to approach learning the “fundamentals” in any sport skill, and also get into important concepts of variability in sport, the differences between novice and elite in variability, and then how there can be “good” or “bad” variability in sport training.  Finally, Rob covers the role of variability in injury prevention, and talks about the sport coach/strength coach relationship in light of variability and the constraints led approach to skills.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

Today’s show is with performance director Daniel Bove.  After spending several seasons with the Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns, Daniel is now the Director of Performance and Sports Science for the New Orleans Pelicans, and is also the author of the book, “The Quadrant System, Navigating Stress in Team Sport”.

As Michael Zweifel has said previously on the podcast, every coach should have the opportunity to work with youth athletes, and pro sports, at some point in their career.  I’ve done a lot of shows talking about youth sport concepts, as well as principles of training through the lens of a child development, but I haven’t done as many shows detailing some of the nuances of working with a pro population specifically.

When it comes to that other end of the spectrum, with professional athletes, the art of strength & conditioning is largely the art of “load management” and stress consolidation, especially over the course of long competitive seasons.  This art of training athletes at the highest level is certainly interesting if you are in the small percentage of coaches who work in this group, but the concepts and ideas behind it can be helpful to understand, regardless of what population you end up working with.

Daniel has come up with a unique system of load consolidation, working with an NBA population that makes a lot of sense.  Not only is “The Quadrant System” a wise method for pro athletes, but understanding the Quadrant System is also helpful from the perspective of understanding “high-low” style training in general (making high days truly “high” and low days, truly “low”), as well as the art of dealing with monotony over the course of long training periods.  On the show today, Daniel gets into his four quadrants of training (recovery, repetition, speed and of course, strength), and how he utilizes these methods of loading through different points in an in-season training schedule, as well as off-season.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

4:23 – How Daniel categorizes load for athletes that he works with

14:48 – How the quadrants might alter as athletes get further down away from the pro-level

15:58 – How high-low training and undulation of the type of stimulus players get offers substantial benefits for players, particularly those in the course of long playing seasons

20:22 – Daniel’s take on the “speed day” in the quadrant system, and how that balances with the explosive work and speed players are doing in their practice

25:48 – How the quadrant system may change when the strength coach doesn’t have a “seat at the table” of the sport coaches and practice volumes

32:05 – Validating heavy lifting in season, on the terms of what Daniel is seeing from data and force plates, and what types of volumes athletes are doing for heavy strength work in season

37:05 – How to approach heavy lifting after game-day if players had a poor game

40:24 – Daniel’s experience with buy-in and the spectrum of players responses in regards to heavy lifting on game-days

43:01 – Nuances of the heavy strength day and how Daniel chooses to load athletes on that day

44:45 – How Daniel approaches tendon health and the repetition day/quadrant 2

47:58 – How the quadrant system changes when athletes are in the off-season or in developmental cases in-season

50:14 – Daniel’s view on a daily micro-dosing program, versus a high-low, quadrant system oriented program, and common movements that may actually be micro-dosed in the pro/NBA setting

55:04 – How Daniel uses work that creates more movement potential within the hips, as a preparation for players to use that range of motion effectively on the court

57:01 – How Daniel views the role of rhythm in training

“That’s the goal of the book, how do we consolidate stress, and how do we manage chaos”

“I matched up strength with high intensity high volume (in the quadrant system), and those are our game days typically”

“Repetition days tend to fall at least two days out from competition and those are for tissue quality”

“Quadrant 3’s (speed days… anything above .75 m/s) tend to fall the day before the contest”

“My population views heavy lifts as the most stressful, which is why I place it after a game day”

“In practices that are extremely high load, high intensity, they become your quadrant 4 (heavy strength day) and your game days become your quadrant 3”

“I can’t just do isos with them every single day, because they have 82 games, and they’ll want to rip my head off”

“(By lifting heavy loads in season) I do think you are setting the athlete up for success to be a more robust athlete… when athletes do start to take 1-2 weeks off of lifting, you do start to see force plate numbers go down, the things that help you buffer ground reaction force start to change”

Athletes, in my opinion, are more receptive to training hard on the days that are supposed to be hard…. It’s a lot easier to get them (for heavy lifting) on the day that they are already pumped up”

“On a quadrant 4, we are typically going with a hex bar (on quadrant 2, repetition and tissue health, it’s a more squat, or hatfield squat oriented day)”

“You have to come to grips with, is this player's limitation physically oriented, or is it skill oriented?”

“The monotony of micro-dosing wouldn’t be great in the (82 game) NBA season”

“One thing I do like for micro-dosing at the NBA level is Lee Taft style change of direction work”

“I like things that involves reciprocal AFIR on both sides, maybe I pair a kettlebell deadlift with a kettlebell self-pass”

Show Notes

Kettlebell Self-Pass Lunge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOcal46KrEA

About Daniel Bove

After receiving a B.S. in Kinesiology from Penn State University and an M.S. in Exercise Science from University of South Florida, Daniel began his career as an NBA physical preparation coach.  After spending several seasons with the Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns, Daniel is now the Director of Performance and Sports Science for the New Orleans Pelicans.

Today’s show is with coach Brady Volmering.  Brady is the owner of DAC Performance and Health. After starting out in the world of baseball skill training, he’s since moved into the human performance arena, putting the focus on increasing the capacity of the human being.  Brady looks at what “training the human being” actually means and how that relates to increases in specific sports performance.

Ever since I’ve been in a formal weight room training setting for athletes, I’ve really wondered about the thought process of how the various barbell and dumbbell exercises were going to help athletes actually be better at what they do on the field.  I’ve always tried to keep a close eye on elements of gym training that could possibly link to athletes who were more successful in their actual sport.

It’s important to ask the question: “what is training?”, and realize that the answer includes “how” just as much as “what”.  Weights are just one tool, or manifestation of the ability to be strong, and if we zoom out from the tool of barbells and dumbbells, we can look at the process of training and adaptation on a broader level.  Muscle tension (and relaxation) can be achieved in a wide variety of ways.  If we take a close look at the mental, emotional, and physical components can be put into the simplest of exercises, we can make then a better conduit by which to improve the whole state of the athlete’s system.

On today’s podcast, Brady gives us his experiences with training athletes on a “human” level.  He goes into the tool of isometric holds, and how to modulate those to draw out different intentions, into ideas on learning the way a child does, the importance of menu systems, as well as “breaking the rules” with higher repetition training schemes (and the qualities it takes to adapt to “unreasonable” training loads).  This is an “outside the box” episode that covers a lot of important concepts in training the total human for sport and beyond.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

4:51 – How Brady started in the specific skill training of baseball players, and how he transitioned into more “human level” training and performance

9:09 – How Brady views the transfer of training ideology in light of the “human layer”, or GPP layer of performance

15:35 – Different intentions Brady prescribes during exercises, particularly isometric type exercises

22:31 – Elements Brady notices that transfer between human-level skills and how an athlete is performing in their sport

29:22 – The mentality by which children make rapid progress in skills, and how to harness that developmental ideal

39:16 – How Brady looks at menu systems for athletes, and giving them the power of choice

47:49 – Brady’s take on “breaking the rules” with high volume training experiences

58:36 – Thoughts on the balance and handing of high volume training versus the minimal effective dose of work

1:02:32 – “Human level” principles of athletes who can absorb and adapt to training volume on a higher level

1:07:58 – What an average training session looks like for Brady in light of the principles discussed in the show

1:11:50 – How to look at sets and reps, versus the construct of time, to direct intention of the athlete

1:14:07 – Some single-joint, high rep modalities that Brady enjoys using at the end of training sessions

“When I’m training a human, I’m not thinking at all about transfer to their sport”

“The goal is the deep pushup is for them to direct their intent into whatever it is they are doing; the pushup is just one way to practice that”

“That’s where the human aspect of things is “how can we go into the human and take off inhibitors so they can direct themselves towards anything in the best possible way””

“That’s one intention, is you are going to hold (the iso) as long as you can… or as long as you can maintaining an exhale that’s twice as long as an inhale”

“The best athletes in the world aren’t there because they did the right superset, or whatever, they are there because the level of their system is leveled up”

“That’s been something that’s been on my is that training doesn’t equal weight room, training equals changing the human”

“If we can take away those stories and get into the athlete being able to go inside themselves, and feel exactly what they need, as they are connected to that intention of the goal that they have, of the outcome that they want, their body is going to tell them what they need”

“Some athletes don’t know how to feel what their body is telling them, because there is so much junk that has gotten in the way”

“You take the athlete where they are at, you find out where their lowest functioning system is, and you level that up”

“High volume isn’t the goal, it’s meeting the athlete where they are at”

“Where we get lost a little bit in strength and conditioning is we only have a small box we look through of exercise, of weight room, of barbell, of exercise, of whatever… if we take all that away, we look at “what is training”, training is taking the human and making them better.  To do that, we need to input a stimulus that challenges whatever is inhibiting them right now so that inhibitor gets taken off and now they are at a high level.. that might be something in the weight room, it might not”

“Every way you could challenge a human being is going to be on that (training) menu”

Show Notes

Lessons from 661 depth drops

https://www.instagram.com/p/CXCu9GRsjrm/

About Brady Volmering

Brady Volmering is the owner of DAC Performance and Health. After starting out in the world of baseball skill training, he’s since moved into the human performance arena, putting the focus on increasing the capacity of the human being.  Brady looks at what “training the human being” actually means and how that relates to increase in specific sports performance.

Today’s show is with coach and inventor Adarian Barr.  Adarian has spent decades coaching in the college and private sector, and currently consults with a variety of coaches in multiple sports.  Adarian has been a guest on this podcast many times, and has a unique, connected, and incredibly detailed perspective on the drivers of human movement.

One piece of movement that we haven’t made a theme for this show yet is getting into rotational, “tumbling” actions of joints.  When we think of “rotational force” in movement, we often just think of “twisting in the weight room”, or training “transverse plane”.  When it comes to “front to back” movements, it is common to simply think in terms of perpendicular forces in terms of movement.  With perpendicular actions, think of a coach telling an athlete to stab or drive their shin straight down to the ground in acceleration, for example, or any coaching cue that has to do with “pushing the ground away”.

In any sport movement, however, the tumbling, or “pitching” motion of body segments (such as the shins) are going to be massively important when it comes to speed.  It’s easy to load hundreds of pounds on a calf raise (a perpendicular force) but to be fast, think sprinting and throwing, rotation is inevitable, so it pays to be familiar with it to make better sense of movement coaching, and building better drills and constraints for athletes.

On today’s episode, Adarian will speak on perpendicular versus rotational aspects of movement, and what it means for exercises, especially common sprint drills.  He’ll talk about the actions of the various lever systems in the body, and how to optimize the way we load these levers for a variety of movements (with sprinting as the primary example) as we use rotation to move with speed.  Adarian will talk about the ideas of “big and small wheels” as well as how not to make the wheel action of limbs a square one, as well as other interesting universal movement concepts.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

5:20 – Looking at a “lever based approach” as opposed to a “force based” approach to biomechanics and movement

12:55 – The scope of true “perpendicular” movements in training, such as in-place pogo hops, in light of athletic movement that is rotational in nature

16:56 – A discussion on the hamstrings, and their role in rotational torque

22:01 – How to treat “perpendicular” oriented movements in regards to their transient, isometric nature

28:59 – The nature of the glutes and their rotational properties

30:55 – How to maximize “class 3” lever actions in the body as speed multipliers

33:30 – Squatty running and single leg bounding as rotational assessments and training paradigms

36:44 – Adarian’s take on upper body equivalents to folded running

46:13 – The principle of “big and small wheels” in movement, as well as why a circular wheel is superior to a square wheel

50:37 – How athletes will shift their “wheel size” when it comes to different athletic outcomes

55:44 – What is a “good” big wheel, and what things happening make a wheel “poor”, as well as how many sprint drills don’t actually train rotation

1:03.42 – A recap on the types of levers present in movement

1:05:20 – Looking at rotation and class 3 opportunities in the weight room

1:10:40 – What roller skating can teach us about levers and human movement

“There is no way to move without a rotational component being added in there”

“Everything we do is rotational, but the math is hard”

“When we talk about sagittal, frontal and transverse plane, that is a location… a better term is pitch, yaw and roll”

“If you move in a strictly linear fashion, you had better be strong as @#$^”

“Levers don’t work well with just perpendicular input”

“I do need perpendicular, because if you put a wrench on the bolt, the perpendicular secures the wrench on the bolt… if I do perpendicular, that is a good setup to use the parallel”

“The closer you get to the fulcrum, the less effective the lever is”

“Class 3 levers work best as their shortest”

“Think about Nordic hamstrings… you are trying to strengthen something that is designed to multiply speed”

“Gravity helps you to create the perpendicular”

“You see this a lot of the time… people get to the toes, and they go up (using a class 1 lever poorly)”

“Gravity creates perpendicular, but the upper body can add on to that perpendicular”

“The scapulas can help you load the legs, which gives you a better rotationa component and can increase the output”

“At the point where the arm is the longest, the scapula is in a power component”

“If I’m going to start, I want a small wheel, I don’t want a big wheel, I want to spin the small wheel.  But once I get going, I need a bigger wheel”

“That’s the big thing to look for is, am I bringing in a level I do not want at this point in time?”

“Dribbling doesn’t have a tumbling action, or a pitch action, or a shin angle change”

“Levers make assessments so easy; (in a straight leg bound) you got a leg swinging, no big deal until the leg hits the ground, but then you hit the ground and do a toe-raise up out of there”

“Class 1 levers (like a see-saw, or standing calf raise) are good at lifting you, but not good at moving you”

“Joints provide an end range for the rotation to stop”

“If I increase my end-range of the class 1, it is going to delay me to class 2, it is going to make me work harder because I messed up my natural end-range”

“Ankle pronation saves the body, because, as I’m coming down, if I didn’t have ankle pronation, the knee would take that”

“All they say is arms is counter-rotation, I need something to load these levers to keep me rotating… people just want to get the legs stronger and push harder, but the reason you are pushing harder is that there was no (input) from the arms in the first place”

Show Notes

Stilts Race (Notice the squatted nature of the athlete to optimize rotation)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYKLuIZMY4d/

About Adarian Barr

Adarian Barr is a track coach and inventor based out of Yuba City, California.  His collegiate track and field coaching stops have included UW-Superior, Indiana State, UNC Pembroke, Yuba City Community College.

He has invented 9 devices from footwear to sleds to exercise devices. Adarian is a USATF Level II coach in the sprints, jumps, hurdles and relays. He has a master’s degree in Physical Education.

Adarian’s unique coaching style gets results, and his work on speed and biomechanics is being adapted by some of the top coaches in the nation.

Today’s show is with Angus Bradley.  Angus is a strength coach and podcast host from Sydney, Australia.  He coaches out of Sydney CBD, co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar, and is also an avid surfer.  Angus appeared previously on episode 249 of the podcast, talking about compressive strategies in weightlifting, as well as the impacts of those compressive effects on narrow infra-sternal angle individuals in particular.

Angus is one of the most brilliant, and practical individuals I know in the world of strength training biomechanics, and connecting it to movement and practical outcomes.  When it comes to making sense of how our body structure and pressure systems fit with different setups in the weight room, and how this might apply to dynamic movement, Angus is a top individual to learn from.

So often in the weight room, we will say that it is all “general” (which technically it is) but then use that as an excuse not to understand the movements we are utilizing in detail that fit with greater concepts of the gait cycle.  Connecting strength work to the gait cycle is key in better strength training practices, as well as individualization.

On the show today, Angus covers the dimensions of exercises based on center of mass position relative to the foot, and how this connects with the gait cycle, as well as how much an athlete is being “pushed forward” (and why that is important).  He’ll cover delayed knee extension in both lifting and sprinting (and how they might connect), concepts of foot shapes, and gait, as well as his take on “floating heel” work not potentially being everything it’s cracked up to be.  Angus will also give some practical ideas on giving more sensory information to athletes unable to access early stance well, how far to take wide and narrow ISA types in terms of “balancing their weaknesses”, and much more.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

4:25 – How doing the “wrong” intervention in training can still lead to positive results

11:30 – Understanding the implications of working through the various positions of the center of mass in relation to the position of the feet, and what this means for degrees of freedom in movement

18:30 – Some performance implications of wide-vs. narrow ISA’s in regards to mid and late stance, and jump technique

23:15 – The idea of “hamstring curling” one’s self out of the hole of a squat in order to delay knee extension

28:45 – Where Angus sees the benefit in “floating heel” training, and where he finds it not very beneficial

34:45 – How to re-train athletes to “let their femurs be” in squatting when they’ve been taught to shove their knees out in the past

39:30 – Thoughts on oscillatory squatting (and split squatting) and its impact on the mid-stance phase of lifting

43:30 – A discussion on developing mid-stance, narrow ISA’s and single leg squatting

49:00 – Flat vs. high arched individuals and what this means for how this impacts athletes in early vs. late propulsion

56:50 – How Angus’s lockdown sprint work went, and lessons he learned with squatted running

1:02:00 – Thoughts on the role of the adductors in movement, why some people may feel them more (or less) in sprinting, and how to train them in the gym

“You can grab (IR and ER) if you just start pulling athletes back… heavy lifting just has a tendency to shove people forward”

“A sign of a good athlete to me, is they will respond to their environment”

“You can simplify it by looking at where they are in the sagittal plane and looking at that map of the foot, looking at where they are in relation to that base of support… if the center of mass is over the toes, you are going to be in that propulsive ER, if the center of mass is over the mid foot, you are going to be in that compressive IR, that mid-stance, and if you get them further back behind that base of support, they are going to be in that early stance and have nice access to that yielding ER”

“From a performance perspective, I probably only need to pull (a wide ISA) back to midstance (instead of early stance) for a lot of them, just get them back a bit”

“What everyone needs when they suck at anything is more external stability”

“That’s why I love Hatfield squats, you just shove the arms out in front of you to keep the ribcage back”

“I’m very high on goblet squats”

“I think there is an association that slow, stiff people are stuck in their heels, and I just don’t see that”

“If you just want to lift a massive weight, do a deadlift”

“You are not necessarily helping an athlete develop their strengths and you are drawing all these mid-stance qualities out of them in the weight room, but maybe you are just making them a more well-rounded player”

“Triple extension and that spring off the ground, that’s the byproduct of the push, the push happens on the ground with the flat foot, and that sets up that beautiful late stance”

“(Squatted running) was allowing me to get into those sprinting shapes and get a sense of what mid-stance tastes like”

“(To train adductors) Can they center themselves over their stance leg well, and can they do a hip shift well”

About Angus Bradley

Angus Bradley is a strength coach and podcast host from Sydney, Australia.  He coaches out of Sydney CBD, and co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar.

After focusing primarily on weightlifting for the first half of his career Angus finds himself spending as much time ‘outside of his lane’ as possible trying to identify the principles that transcend all human movement.  He works with a diverse crowd from strongman to surfing and everything in between.

Angus has been mentored by Jamie Smith from Melbourne Strength Culture, and formerly dropped out of his major in journalism to tour Australia with his band.

Today’s show is a Q&A with Joel Smith.  It’s a lot of fun to see the questions you all have, and putting together a list of answers.

Some major themes in this show included the dynamics of how an athlete learns and acquires a skill, how to give athletes ideal constraints to learn a skill better (particularly on the level of the arms in sprinting and step-action in jumping), and then questions on training the spectrum of the force velocity curve.

There also were a lot of questions and answers that lent to training individualization based on the individual structure of the body and if one is a “power or speed” based athlete, which relates to an athlete’s ribcage structure and ISA bias, and of course, a lot of speed oriented questions.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

1:15 – The difference in training fascial vs. elastic athletes

7:33 – How to train a “power” sprinter with poor top end speed

13:40 – Thoughts on training at different points on the force-velocity curve

24:06 – Arm action in sprinting, and constraint-driven coaching versus “positional” coaching

34:14 – Structuring a weight training and performance program for speed and acceleration

36:32 – Why some athletes have a long vs. short penultimate step in jumping

40:45 – Thoughts on in-season programming for team sports

46:56 – Dealing with a toe-sprain and learning to feel other parts of the foot

48:30 – Frequency of training with bodyweight iso holds

49:37 – Thoughts on “inside edge” vs. “outside edge” in movement and training

54:35 – Fascial awareness in movement

55:42 – Is concentric power building in the weightroom worthwhile?

57:01 – How to use falling/slipping/stumbling reflexes to our advantage in training

About Joel Smith

Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance coach in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and trains numerous clients in the in-person and online space.  Joel was formerly a strength coach for 8 years at UC Berkeley, working with the Swim teams and post-graduate professional swimmers, as well as tennis, water polo, and track and field.  A track coach of 11 years, Joel coached for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club for 7 years, and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault and multi-events on the collegiate level, working at Wilmington College, and the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse.

Joel has coached 2 national champions, multiple All-Americans and school record holders in his time as a track coach. In the realm of strength and conditioning, his programs have assisted 5 athletes to Olympic berths that produced 9 medals and a world record performance at Rio in 2016.

In 2011, Joel began Just Fly Sports with Jake Clark as a central platform to promote information for athletes and coaches to reach their highest potential.  In 2016 the first episode of the “Just Fly Performance Podcast” was released, now a leading source of education in the sports performance field.  The evolving mission of Just Fly Sports is focused on teaching athletes to realize their true, innate power, and achieve the highest joy in their training, competition, and in the community.

Today’s show welcomes back running coach and biomechanist, Helen Hall.  Helen is the author of “Even With Your Shoes On”.  She is an endurance athlete, minimalist ultra-distance runner, 6 times Ironman and credited with being the world’s first ‘barefoot’ Iron(wo)man.  Helen is the owner of the Perpetual Forward Motion School of Efficient Running, as well as a running injury clinic, using the latest movement science and gait analysis technology to help people find solutions for their pain and injuries.  She appeared on episode 180 speaking on all things joint mechanics and technique in running.

One of the most common things I hear (and have seen, especially in my club track years) about athletes is those who have a heavy heel strike when they run.  Excessive passive forces in athletic motion is never a good thing, but it’s always important to understand binary concepts (you had a heel-strike or you didn’t) in further detail.  There is a spectrum of potential foot strike positions in running, and nobody stays on their heel in gait, as we always move towards the forefoot.

On the show today, Helen goes in depth on heel striking and the biomechanics of the heel in the running cycle, as well as the difference in heel striking motions in jogging versus sprinting.  One of the topics I frequently enjoy covering is how the human body can interact with nature and natural features to optimize itself (which includes optimizing running technique) and Helen speaks on how one can use uphill and downhill grades to help athletes and individuals self-organize their own optimal running technique.

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

For 25% off of an Inside Tracker order go to info.insidetracker.com/justflysports

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points

5:27 – Why Helen feels individuals heel strike in the first place

11:33 – Helen’s “happy medium” when it comes to socks in running

14:28 – Helen’s view on the heel bone and pronation in the initial strike in running

21:03 – How Helen would help an athlete who heel strikes in a sprint when it is not desired

29:28 – The importance of relaxation and “letting” the body move and react, versus trying to force the body into motion

38:41 – Nuances of using uphill and downhill running, what to notice, and how to integrate that into one’s stride

45:29 – How un-even surfaces can create grounds by which individuals can self-organize their stride and foot action

48:35 – How to leverage hills to optimize the function of the glutes in running

“I never change somebody’s first point of contact; their bodies change their first point of contact themselves”

“There can’t be a right or wrong, since there are so many people whose first point of contact is the heel, and they are not in pain”

“If you land in front of the heel, then you get the eccentric loading of the Achilles and what it attaches to”

“People decide they are in “this camp” or “that camp” and thereby the camps run parallel to each other and never exchange ideas”

“You want to be landing, not in a pronating foot.. in the context of running… the descent is arguably a posteriorly tilted calcaneus because you are landing in a supinating foot… unless your foot is going to go “splat” immediately”

“You want to land on a foot that is relaxed enough to give”

“They are reaching for the step, and by reaching on the step through hip flexion, they are ending up on their heel first, and that may be giving them more control as they go through the forefoot”

“In my experience, people do not go back to the heel-strike, and all you need is a slope (to correct it)”

“If you want to slow down, the most natural thing in the world is to shove your foot out, and brake with your heel”

“You have to be relaxed for the response in your unbelievably complex system to happen in .2 seconds”

“When you go downhill on a heel strike that you don’t feel on the flat… so you get to feel what it’s doing on the flat that you didn’t know before”

“If you are aware of the terrain, the brain to body connections will take care of themselves”

“Even if you are an athlete who operates on a pristine soccer pitch, if you can get out in nature and operate your body and ask it to do natural things, you are going to be more resilient towards the injuries of “everything has to be perfect”

“You can’t clench your glutes when you run, if you clench your glutes, you go backwards”

“You know you are stacked when you have maximum head rotation”

About Helen Hall

Helen Hall is the author of “Even With Your Shoes On”, a comprehensive manual on teaching running in a natural manner based on the sensory capabilities of the human body.  She is an endurance athlete, minimalist ultra-distance runner, 6 times Ironman and credited with being the world’s first ‘barefoot’ Iron(wo)man.  She has completed “the hardest ironman in the world”, Ironman Lanzarote in 2011.

Helen is the owner of the Perpetual Forward Motion School of Efficient Running, as well as a running injury clinic. She specializes in the solving of chronic pain and repetitive injuries, be they in the neck, shoulder, back, hip, knee, ankle or foot and connected to sports or not.

Helen uses the latest movement science and gait analysis technology to help people find solutions for their pain and injuries.  She is a cofounder of Barefoot Audio, an audio tool merging evocative coaching cues to inspirational music composed specifically with efficient running in mind.

She is the author of the YMCAfit Barefoot/Efficient Running course and manual and was the coach to the inov-8 Natural Run program.

Helen is qualified as an Anatomy in Motion Level 4 Practitioner, has multiple CHEK certifications, as well as certification in lymphatic therapy.