Just Fly Performance Podcast

Today’s episode features Dr. Mark Wetzel.   Mark is a chiropractic neurologist with expert knowledge of the nervous system, reflexes and transference to sports training.  

A running theme of this show has been digging into some unconventional training methods, one of which is long duration isometric holds and other exercises used by coach Jay Schroeder.  The more I’ve heard of Jay’s methods, the more questions I tend to have. One guy I’ve met who answered those in the best detail I’ve yet heard is Dr. Mark Wetzel, who is based out of Memphis, TN.  

Many of those questions relate to training ideas such as:

The thought that “Velocity recovers everything”

Why 5 minutes could be a viable time suggestion for isometric holds

That traditional barbell lifting can carry some neurological drawbacks in terms of muscle contraction and relaxation cycles

If you are curious about the Jay Schroeder training methods, or just want a thorough explanation of why extended isometric training in the proper athletic position can carry huge benefits, you’ll love this podcast.  It’s actually been one of my favorites thus far, and that’s saying a lot as we’ve had lots of tremendous guests on this show.

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Key Points

Dr. Mark’s background

The science of extreme isometrics

Energy system cycles that isometrics done to fatigue go through

Lactate as a friend or foe in training power athletes

Thoughts on the idea that “velocity recovers everything”

 

Dr. Mark Wetzel Quotes

“When you are holding an (isometric position) the muscles are turning off and on very fast”

“The 5 minute approach for the isometrics is that you want to get to failure, and you want to fail in an eccentric state”

“When you get out of position in isometric holds, you are putting in more effort, but getting less gain”

“If you can fatigue multiple times in that 5 minutes you are getting better adaptation"

“To get to the lactate cycle you need to fatigue the previous three energy cycles”

“When you get into a new energy cycle, it starts the recovery process of the previous energy cycle”

“If you hold out long enough (in an isometric lunge) the burning will eventually get sucked in by the muscles, used as energy, and you can keep doing what you are doing”

“The more you can push into the threshold, the more it will recover your other systems and create sustainable energy (in competition)”

“Velocity training is your body’s ability to relax the antagonist muscle”

“The squat (max) should be a test to see if you are training correctly (as opposed to being an end of itself)”

“It requires more energy to relax a muscle than contract it”

“The faster you can contract a muscle, the more you can create relaxation in another muscle”

“70% of muscle strength comes from your brain telling it to work, 30% comes from the gym”

Show Notes

Iso lunge Hold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJYk9EeIalo

About Dr. Mark Wetzel

Dr. Mark Wetzel is a chiropractor based in Memphis, TN.  Mark has a diverse experience and is an expert in the neurology branch of chiropractic.

Today’s episode features strength coach, educator and entrepreneur, Zach Even Esh.  Zach is one of the most well respected figures in the strength and conditioning industry, and has impacted over 1,000 athletes in his career as a coach.  He has founded the Underground Strength Gym, as well as creating the Underground Strength Coach Certification.

Zach appeared originally on episode 100 of the show alongside Jeremy Frisch and Jorge Carvajal speaking on the epidemic of early specialization, and even more problematic, the lack of play and physical proficiency amongst our youth today.  Zach is a guy who is truly in the trenches when it comes to the art of training young athletes.

One of the things that has always stood out to me about Zach, and has also resonated with me in life always, is the power of using “what you have “in training.   On podcast episode #96, Dan John talked about training high achieving throwers with minimal facilities and even coaching a girl shot put with a rock.   Adarian Barr has coached me in the same manner with simple tools like a 25lb plate on a grass field.

Zach has used odd and unconventional training means to achieve incredible results with his athletes and we’ll get into that on the podcast today.  We’ll also cover Zach’s mission as a coach and trends over the last two decades in terms of youth performance and decline in the physical readiness of these athletes.

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

View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Key Points:

Zach’s story and mission as a coach

Using alternative means for training athletes

The importance of partnerships and environment in enhancing creativity and work outputs

Trends in youth performance in terms of kids physical readiness

Quotes:

“The injuries of the 1990’s were not what they are of the 2000’s”

“One of the early influences to my early training setups were Rocky movies”

“Odd objects got kids tough, and gave the kids a unique element where they felt special”

“We just have different kids today compared to before”

“I’ve seen so many athletes get injured, not from training, but from overuse of sport”

“I respect how strong people got with basic equipment, limited knowledge and limited nutrition”

“Spending time on smartphones will kill your creativity, you won’t be able to create because you are only consuming”

“As a strength coach you have to find people who have an abundance mentality”

“Today, we are talking overuse and a lack of physical readiness”

About Zach Even Esh

A leading figure in the strength & conditioning industry, Zach Even – Esh has trained over 1,000 athletes ranging from the youth level to the Olympic level.

Zach founded The Underground Strength Gym and created The Underground Strength Coach Certification, both of which have inspired and educated coaches and athletes from around the world to achieve greater success in both sports and life.

Since creating The Underground Strength Gym, Zach has consulted with Division 1 athletic teams, Olympic Level athletic clubs, Spartan Race, pro teams and independent coaches and athletes from around the world.

The Underground Strength Gym began from Zach’s parents garage while he was a Health and Physical Education teacher in 2002. What started as a summer experiment training a few athletes grew into a full time obsession and now Zach and his Underground Strength methods have grown into a world wide movement, inspiring athletes and coaches all around the world in training and life.

Zach’s Underground Strength Coach Certification has attendees traveling from all around the world and range from independent Strength Coaches, active Military personnel, athletic coaches, college coaches and former Navy SEALs.

Zach lives in NJ with his wife and 2 kids and continues to inspire a...

Today’s episode features sport scientist Max Schmarzo. Max is the director of sport science at Resilience Code and the chief science officer at Exsurgo Technologies. Many of you may know him by his Instagram handle @strong_by_science where Max posts a variety of practical and scientific information that has garnered a large following.

Max is one of the smartest young coaches I know, and I am constantly blown away by the breadth and detail of his knowledge. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of human performance, Max is a go-to guy to talk to. Not only is Max well versed in many facets of strength and conditioning, but he also has education as an athletic trainer, and has deep knowledge of holistic markers of human performance in fields such as functional medicine.

Today our theme is the holistic adaptation of the body to stress. When it comes to getting results, having a good grasp on things that can make or break one’s strength and performance gains, or predispose one to injury can create a broader vision of if one’s strength program is actually effective, or if lifestyle, nutrition and general stress needs to be considered.

On today’s show, Max and I are chatting about these adaptive processes, the different effects of recovery modalities, nutrition and it’s impact on training decisions, the adaptation of tendons, inflammation and its role in training, and more.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-114-max-schmarzo/

Today’s episode features strength coach and sport scientist, John Kiely. John is a senior lecturer at the university of Lancashire, a strength coach with extensive rugby experience, and also a former boxing champion. He is one of the most intelligent minds in the field, and is widely known for his ideals on periodization and planning.

As much as I love talking the organization of training, John’s experience and knowledge runs much further than periodization, and some of John’s work on running and coordination have been some of the most memorable articles I’ve read in my experience as a coach.

To that end, I’m thrilled to have John Kiely talk about some significant pieces of training that I think go under-appreciated. These are the topics of variability and its impact on the brain, how to optimally train coordination in athletes, and also how we as humans differ from the animals in our running and locomotion. It is these concepts taken full circle that I believe can give any coach or athlete a much fuller appreciation and depth to how we as a species can be trained to our fullest potential. Coordination and variability are really the links to that zone we often refer to as the land that sits between rehab and strength and conditioning where so mamy performance gains are often made.

On today’s show, we also get into the concepts of reflexes in sport, as well as internal versus external cues, given the rules of coordination in training.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-113-john-kiely

Today’s podcast features strength coach and sport scientist John Wagle. John is an expert in eccentric loading, periodization, muscle structure and many other aspects of athletic performance. Today we are going to dig into the relationships between various training methods and physiological outcomes. In other words, we are talking about how various barbell exercises affect the actual structure of the muscles themselves, and how this can fit in with exercise selection, planning, and the tapering process.

Dr. John P. Wagle is a fellow in the Sport Physiology and Performance program at East Tennessee State University. He serves as the Strength & Conditioning Coach and Sport Scientist for ETSU baseball. Additionally, Wagle assists Dr. Brad DeWeese in training Olympic Training Site athletes. Previously, John was the director of sports performance at DePaul University.

Ever since I started the process of training myself as an athlete, and eventually coaching others, I’ve always thought about the benefits and potential drawbacks of various exercises, as well as how to sequence these movements based on this dynamic. For today’s episode, John will go in depth on why muscle architecture is an important factor to look at in training, and how barbell and supramaximal barbell training impact this architecture.

John is an expert on eccentric loading for athletic performance training, so he goes in detail on how weight releasers impact the rest of the set when the first rep is extremely heavy. We’ll also cover the impact of full versus partial range work, as well as some fine points of cluster training and finally touch briefly on jump testing and monitoring.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-112-john-wagle/

Today’s podcast features Logan Christopher of Legendary Strength and Lost Empire Herbs.

Logan Christopher is a strongman, entrepreneur and mental training expert from Santa Cruz, CA. Logan is regarded as an expert in the mental performance field, and he has in depth expertise as an NLP Master Practitioner and certified hypnotist.

In the last 6 months, I’ve begun to understand that an area I wanted this podcast to reach that often remains untapped and unknown is in the sports (and human) psychology fields. We tend to turn the basic means of strength building over and over again in our heads without taking a deeper look at all the other influencers of a training program, namely the mental aspects. Since the nervous system drives all major athletic adaptation, and the mind is the seat of the nervous system, I’ve made a commitment to getting more sport psychology specialists on the show.

Like Logan says early on in this episode, we often credit winning and losing as being in the mind, but we rarely make any sort of coordinated effort to improve our mental abilities, leaving these words more hollow than anything. In this episode with Logan, we dig into the “big three” structured mental training concepts that can be useful in any athletic pursuit (and even outside athletics), which are visualization, hypnosis and anchors. Having a better understanding of these three mechanisms can give any coach or athlete more tools by which to improve their performance, and realize their fullest potential.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-111-logan-christopher/

Today’s episode is a solo show, where unlike the question and answer shows I’ve done in the past, I wanted to speak at length on a single topic that I felt could offer value to coaches and the opportunity to sit and reflect on how each of us arrived at how we see the coaching of athletes.

Today’s show is all about my own development as a coach, and the evolution of viewpoints I have on various aspects of sports performance training.  These viewpoints include ideas on cueing, maximal strength training, periodization, plyometrics, special strength, and mental training.

The coaching of athletes is not a robotic venture; athletes need to optimize their own machinery in a manner that reflects with own body-type, biochemistry and environmental preferences.  In the same way as coaches, I don’t believe we should all hold the exact same slant of coaching athletes, and each of us how individual aspects of our system that can deliver a unique experience to athletes in line with our personal philosophy.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-110-joel-smith

Today’s episode features strength coach and sport scientist, Jake Schuster. Jake is a coach who has brilliantly connected the dots in terms of research, technology and data collection, and transfer to athletic performance in both the team sport and individual (track and field) environment.

Jake Schuster leads the physical preparation of Florida State University sprints and hurdles groups on the Track and Field team and serves as the liaison between FSU Strength and Conditioning/Sports Performance and the ISSM. He works alongside Dr. Michael Ormsbee to oversee several MSc thesis students in applied research projects.

I’ve loved talking with coaches about the raw, specific qualities associated with high performance sprinting for a long time. Although sprint derivatives are of the highest importance in getting faster, every coach I talk to is invariably interested in things seen in jumping or resistance exercise that could deliver transfer to speed and execution on the track or field of play. After all, that’s the reason we train.

In this regards, Jake Schuster is an expert in blending data from tools such as the force plate and Nordbord hamstring unit, and integrating it into what is seen in on-track performance. He also has great wisdom in how this process works in getting field sport athletes to their highest performance. On today’s podcast, Jake delivers pragmatic information on asymmetry, force development in jump tests, isometric and hamstring training protocols for sprinters, approaching general strength means for track versus team sport athletes, and more. As a former strength coach for track and field, this is one of my favorite podcasts on the topic to date.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-109-jake-schuster

Today’s episode features strength coach and educator, Michelle Boland, Ph.D.   Michelle is the owner of Michelle Boland training, and earned her Ph.D. from Springfield College.  She coaches at Northeastern University where she works with women’s ice hockey, field hockey and rowing, as well as assisting with men’s basketball.  She is one of the most intelligent and forward thinking coaches in the field, and I’m thrilled to have her on the show.

I’ve been interested in the work of the postural restoration institute for some time, having it first recommended to me years ago by Dr. Mike T Nelson.  Since then, I’ve taken three courses and hosted numerous experts on this podcast who are experts in both PRI practice and its integration into sports performance training as well as human movement and fitness.   

The core tenants of PRI that are a game changer for training humans is that the body is fundamentally asymmetrical and that the position of our breathing cylinder is of highest priority in making lasting changes in athletic balance and function.  This being said, most coaching cues and corrections that are in response to an “imbalance” such as shifting to one side in a squat or one arm rising faster than the other in the bench press, do not deliver results that fit with the true function of the body.

To that end, Michelle is a field leader in the integration of these concepts into performance training, and one of the smartest guests we’ve had (which is saying a lot given our incredible lineup).  Today I pick her brain on integrating PRI principles into core components of sport performance, including bilateral sagittal plane lifts (squat/bench), single leg training, trunk training, and frontal plane training.  Michelle’s work represents a science and practice based, practical application to getting athletes functional and strong for their sport.  

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-108-michelle-boland

Today’s episode features biomechanist and inventor David Weck. David has devoted thousands of hours to the intensive study of human movement and locomotion, and training implications. His inventions focus on building the rotational, pulsing and coiling abilities of the body, as well as the feet, in a manner that fits with natural locomotive abilities. As a coach looking to integrate the field of sports performance as closely as possible with natural human function (and not creating programs fully centered around qualities needed to perform a bilateral barbell lift), this is a great addition to the Just Fly podcast lineup.

David Weck is the creator of WeckMethod and the CEO and Founder of BOSU Fitness. He is the inventor of the BOSU Balance Trainer, the new WeckMethod BOSU Elite, the RMT Club, and other products. He has worked in fitness for more than 22 years and has helped people of all fitness levels including elite athletes from multiple sports. He is a consummate student of movement who believes physical education is the foundation for a happy and healthier world.

For today’s episode, we go into one of the biggest “hot-buttons” in the industry which is the action of the trunk and “core” in sport movement and related training implications. Many coaches will put a heavy program emphasis on the ability to brace and resist (in order to transmit force) through using the core, but the reality is that actual observed sport movement, as well as a study of human evolution (Piscean locomotion theory) shows a different strategy in training integration. This episode is fully loaded, and goes into this performance aspect in detail, in addition to many other aspects of athletic movement, including the action of the arms that carries an instant transfer to improving speed.

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

View more show notes at Just-fly-sports.com/podcast-107-david-weck