Just Fly Performance Podcast

Today’s show brings back Rafe Kelley, owner of Evolve, Move, Play.  Rafe has experience with dozens of movement styles, playing many sports, including gymnastics, learning dance, exploring parkour and studying many forms of the martial arts and MMA styles.

When it comes to human movement, and the story and history behind our movement, Rafe is my go-to expert.  Rafe’s students have ranged from world-class parkour athletes, to MMA fighters, to untrained grandmothers.  He has been a two time guest on this podcast, and offers knowledge from a source that is largely un-touched by mainstream strength and athletic development.

On previous shows, I have talked with Rafe about our movement roots, structured vs. unstructured training, play based training, and emotional and cognitive links between play, performance and adaptation.  Episode #174 was one of the most transformative episodes I had done in terms of how it immediately impacted my work in my own group training sessions afterwards.

On this show, I wanted to tap into more of Rafe’s knowledge of human movement in terms of his experience with martial arts, fighting and modern dance.  The sports performance industry talks about force a lot, but it is critical to look at the best athletes in the world on a level comparing to them with dancers, instead of powerlifters, to get a fuller understanding of the required timings and rhythms.  Today’s podcast is a wonderful experience in discussing the deeper movement qualities that really make elite athletes and how we can consider those qualities of rhythm and fluidity in our own training designs.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs.  For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly

Today’s show brings back guests Kyle Dobbs and David Grey for an epic meeting of two biomechanical minds.  I’ve learned a lot from both Kyle and David on and off of this podcast.  Both David and Kyle’s prior episodes have been in our all-time top-listened shows, and I’m excited to get them together for a show.

Kyle Dobbs is the owner and founder of Compound Performance which offers online training, facility consulting and a personal trainer mentorship.  He a leading expert in integrating complex movement principles into physical training methods for multiple human disciplines.   David Grey is a biomechanics specialist based in Waterford, Ireland.  He is the creator of the “Lower Body Basics” programs, and has learned under a number of great mentors in the world of movement, S&C, gymnastics, mobility, martial arts, and biomechanics.

One element of human performance I’m always looking to become better versed in is breathing, posture, pressure dynamics and how these elements impact our movement and performance potential.  From lifting, to running, to changing direction explosively, how we “stack” and align our pressure centers and body structures makes a big impact on how well we can perform those skills and be free of injury.

On today’s podcast, Kyle and David go in depth on rib cage dynamics, breathing and pressure management in context of crawling and running.  We’ll also touch on posture, training the frontal plane, and finish with some talk on the feet, plantar fasciitis, and thoughts on coaching preferential foot pressures in movement.

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

Today’s show features Cal Dietz.  Cal has been the Head Olympic Strength and Conditioning coach for numerous sports at the University of Minnesota since 2000, has worked with hundreds of successful athletes and team, and is the co-author of the top-selling book “Triphasic Training”.  Cal has a multi-time guest on this show, most recently appearing in episode #168 (one of our most popular episodes of all time) on single leg training methods alongside Cameron Josse and Chad Dennis.

Cal’s ideas on complex training (French contrast and potentiation clusters) have made a huge impact on the formulation of my own programs and methods.   French Contrast as a training ideology and method has probably been one of the most consistent elements of my training for many years now.  Cal is never one to sit still, and has recently made further advances in his complex training sets as they relate to our neurological and technical adaptations to these movements.

On today’s show, Cal talks extensively about his new methods in complex training for improving sprint speed.  As Cal has talked about on previous episodes, even bilateral hurdle hops have the potential to “mess athletes up” neurologically, and so Cal goes in detail on how his complex training sets are now adjusted to address that.  Ultimately, Cal has formulated his gym training for the primary purpose of improving sprint speed and sprint mechanics.  We will also get into Cal’s take on block periodization, and how Cal uses 5,10 and 20 yard dash markers to help determine an athlete’s primary training emphasis for the next block of work.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.

Today’s show features Jeremy Frisch and Calin Butterfield.  Jeremy is the owner and director of Achieve Performance Training in Clinton, Mass, has been a multi-time guest on the show with all-things youth and creative training, game-play and long-term development.  Jeremy is not only a strength coach, but also has skin in the game as a youth sports coach, and provides an incredible holistic perspective on the entire umbrella of athletic development.  Calin Butterfield is the high performance manager at U.S. Ski & Snowboard.  He worked for EXOS for about 8 years as a Coach across all different spaces including Phoenix, Dallas, SF at Ft. Bragg, Adidas America, and the Mayo Clinic.  Calin and Jeremy are working together now on concepts related to long term development of ski and snowboard athletes.

So often, we have our “standard plyometric battery” in performance training, but we cling to these fundamentals hard when we would be served well to be observing jump training and movement in a variety of mediums to create ideas for our plyometric progression.  Studying athletes in sports that demand fast reactions, impactful landings, high risk, and rewards for creativity have a lot to offer when it comes to looking at our own training designs for the athletes we serve.

Together, Jeremy and Calin will talk about their collaboration together with skiing, the use and progression of games with young athletes up to college level, plyometric progressions and advancing complexity, and how the natural warmup process in ski and snowboard (terrain park) can give us ideas that we can port over into how we can prepare athletes for sport.  There is a lot of great information in this podcast that can be useful for sport coaches, strength coaches and skiiers alike.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.

Today’s show welcomes back coach Bobby Stroupe.  Bobby Stroupe is the Founder and President of Athlete Performance Enhancement Center (APEC) and has directed human performance systems for nearly 20 years, working with a full range of athletes from youth to professional.

In my search for higher-transfer, holistic methodology in sports performance training, I’ve met few coaches who have covered more bases than Bobby Stroupe.  On our last show, which aired just over a month ago, we talked about several of Bobby’s “unorthodox” methods in training speed, power strength and more in light of athletic needs, and I still had about half of the questions left on my own list to ask him.

Bobby is back on the show to cover the rest of the questions we missed last time.  He will discuss his influences and how he got to where he is today as a coach, including some of the mentors and coaches that have influenced the way he trains. Bobby explains how he incorporates heavier strength training into his sessions and how his single set mentality is a huge impactor on performance (and a defining factor of great athletes).   Finally, Bobby shares his views on upper body training, as well as training the foot and the relationship between the two.

In the middle of the show, Bobby gets into the “8 factors” by which a strength coach can impact an athlete, which was such gold! I hope you come away from this show as excited as I was about coaching my next training session.

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

Our guests today are Justin Moore and Michael Camporini.  Justin is a master instructor and the professional development manager at Parabolic Performance and Rehab.  Justin has been a popular guest on the podcast many times in the past, discussing advanced biomechanical principles in regards to things like breathing, positioning in strength training, and much more.

Michael Camporini, "Campo", is a sports physical therapist in Phoenix, AZ, and previously worked with athletes of all different levels and ages with experience as a strength coach at Parabolic.  He has completed internships with Resilient Physical Therapy and IFAST, as well as completing a clinical rotation with Bill Hartman.

More show notes at just-fly-sports.com/podcast-241-campo-moore/

You may have heard me speak on the drawbacks of doing too much strength and barbell training many times in the past.  Unless we have some ideas of the exact, negative structural changes that happen with excessive barbell lifting strain (and how to reverse them) we might potentially live in a world where heavy weightlifting is some sort of bogey-man we can’t quite define the effects of.  This is important because some athletes need heavier training, while others do not.

Recently, Justin Moore (who has a long history of heavy strength training) had a significant knee injury that occurred while demonstrating a skipping exercise (he had injured his knee multiple times in the past), that led him to reach out to Mike Camporini to help him create an intervention program, which led Justin to playing flag football pain free and moving extremely well.  On the podcast today, Justin and Campo talk about the intervention, the issues Justin had from years of too much lifting strain, and how they reclaimed his range of motion and athletic ability.  This podcast goes into many concepts of human function, stretch shortening cycle dynamics, compression versus expansion, defining what “stiffness” really is in context of sport skill, and much more.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com and Lost Empire Herbs (www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly)

Our guest today is Steven Kotler, best-selling author and renowned Flow-State expert.  Steven is the author of 9 best-selling books (3 of which are NYT Best-Sellers), which include The Art of Impossible, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman (Rise of Superman was my initial introduction to Steven’s work) and others.  His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into 40 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications. 

More show notes at just-fly-sports.com/podcast-240-steven-kotler/

Steven is the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance.  He has been involved in a number of extreme sports, such as surfing, downhill mountain biking and skiing, and has learned (and participated with) from a number of the world’s greatest athletes in this arena.

One element of athletic performance that I’m adamant about pursuing is the idea that we must get outside the known field of “athletic performance” and into other fields of human performance to maximize our service to the athletes we train.  We can only grow so much without “getting outside of the box” of our typical field education and integrating more global concepts of human performance.

In this podcast with Steven Kotler, we discuss numerous elements of neuro-biology and flow as it relates to goal setting, burnout, skill progression, career progression, and much more.  This was a podcast that truly integrates many concepts coaches (hopefully) are familiar with, and helps us to understand them more fully from a biological perspective, as well as one we can also integrate into our daily lives.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com and Lost Empire Herbs (www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly).

Our guest today is Nicolai Morris, strength and conditioning specialist with High Performance Sport, New Zealand.  Nicolai is the lead S&C with the New Zealand Women’s (Field) Hockey Team (Blacksticks) as well as coaching an international elite high jumper.  From Nicolai’s athletic career origins as a swimmer, she has honed her eye for movement through a wide range of land and sea-based sports and athletic situations.

Nicolai has previously worked with New Zealand Rowing in the elite and U23/Junior pathways as well as, multitude of sports in her role as strength and conditioning specialist at Sydney University including swimming, track and field, rugby, rugby 7’s, water polo and soccer. She also worked as the Head strength and conditioning coach for the Australian Beach Handball team and the NSW Women’s State of Origin team. Nicolai is a ASCA Level 2, Pro-Scheme Elite coach, and a Masters in Strength and Conditioning with over a decade of coaching experience.

We talk on this podcast often about going beyond simply looking at, and emphasizing weightlifting maxes for athletic performance improvement; moving into some of the finer biomechanical details of speed, jumping and athletic technique.  At the roots of all technical ability in sport is baseline human ability to sense and coordinate ourselves in space.  Although we have had good conversation on the importance of developing body control and coordination in regards to training children, it’s not often we speak on how to integrate gymnastic and coordinative ability into training with mature athletes, despite the fact that there are so many “poor movers” on this level, whose base line functioning often leaves them pre-disposed for injury.

On today’s podcast, Nicolai speaks about her transition as a swimmer to strength coach, as well as a deep-dive into the role that gymnastics and rough-housing work plays in the developmental process of her athletes.  She also speaks on building buy-in and belief from her athletes (and team management/head sports coaches) from a female perspective, and we close out the show with a brief chat on blood flow restriction training (BFR).

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com and Lost Empire Herbs (www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly).

Our guests today are Mike Guadango and Alex Brooker.  Mike and Alex (“Brooker”) met when Alex interned for Mike at DeFranco’s gym a decade ago, and they now have a podcast together, “The Mike and Brooker Show”, in addition to their coaching careers.

Alex is the owner and operator of Pathfinder, a private training service focused on performance psychology and physical preparation for professional athletes.  In addition to traditional schooling, Alex is now pursuing his PhD in Self-Hypnosis at the University of Bern.  Mike is currently a Coach, Writer & Owner at Freak Strength.  He has been mentored by coaching greats such as Buddy Morris and James Smith, and started his career working at DeFranco’s gym.  Mike has coached levels of athletes from many different professional sports to Olympic medalists to pre-pubescent athletes, as well as consulting for high caliber athletes and coaches worldwide.

As an ever-optimistic individual, it’s important for me to have conversations with those who have a different way of looking at what actually works in the world of sports performance.  In the coaching world, it is extremely easy to have worked with an athlete who has achieved a high result, and then rationalize the factors that led to their success.  It is very easy for us all as coaches to think of our own training as highly optimal, but a question to ask is how often and effectively we truly challenge our reasoning?

In looking at training closely, it is helpful to fully understand the power of belief, as well as placebo effects in not only training, but also pain science and rehabilitation.  Understanding human adaptation to training and rehab stimulus requires, not only an understanding of the body, but also of the mind.

In today’s podcast, Mike and Alex “Brooker” talk about how they have evolved themselves as coaches, moving into the realms of hypnosis/mental training, acupuncture and rehabilitation.  We spend a lot of time chatting about the power of belief and the ability of the mind to supercede a “poor” training program, and how the fundamentals of adaptation style can be seen in rudimentary rehab.  Finally, Mike, Brooker and I spend some time discussing some training points such as play, competition in training, and training transfer.  This was a fun show with speakers of 3 clearly diverse viewpoints, which always makes for great discussion.

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

Our guest today is Pat Coyne, coach and owner of Black Sheep Performance in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Pat started helping clients of all levels reach their fullest potential after his career as a 4-star high school football recruit ended in college due to injury.  Pat started Black Sheep Performance in 2018 on the side of a house in Cincinnati, OH. Within 3 years BSP organically outgrew itself, working from renting gym space, to a barn, to a state of the art 11,000 sq. foot training facility.

More show notes at just-fly-sports.com/podcast-237-patrick-coyne/

Pat has mentored under some of the top coaches in the nation, is a progressive thinker, and gets great results with his clients in his fast-growing business.  When I moved back to Ohio in July, I connected with Pat shortly thereafter and have gotten several training sessions and conversations in with him since then.  Pat has a training style that fuses many of the elements I consider essential: A great environment, room for exploration/creativity, competition and reaction, as well as an integration of modern speed training methods, such as those taught by multi-time podcast guest, Adarian Barr.

As such, it was only a matter of time until Pat and I sat down together and recorded a podcast.  Two of the big things that Pat and I are both passionate about are being life-long learners and then looking at (and experiencing) the holistic effects of things like the training environment, athlete autonomy/creativity, and the effects of music, rhythm and reactions on performance.  On this podcast, Pat and I go into his background as an athlete and coach, his thoughts on structured vs. unstructured/open training, his progressions on speed training, rhythm, timing, how he challenges athletes on a holistic level, and some deeper discussion on the evolution of the human/sports performance industry.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.com and Lost Empire Herbs (www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly).