Upper Left Performance

Season 3 of the Upper Left Performance is brought to you by RockDaisy Athlete Management Systems. 

RockDaisy’s AMS is what the pros use to collect and analyze strength, conditioning, and health & wellness data. Features include:

The company is offering a free version of their AMS platform. Check it out at http://ams.rockdaisy.com/

Welcome back to a third season of the Upper Left Performance Podcast. We are kicking things off with a recent chat I had with Pratik Patel. Pratik is currently a PhD student and consultant for athletes ranging from high school to the professional level. He previously worked for the New York Giants, University of Oregon, Michigan State and Kansas State primarily as a dietician, but also as a strength coach with the Giants.

Pratik and I discussed the potential pitfalls facing professional sports in relation to physical preparation. We touched on the NFL's CBA and how it actually can work against an athlete's ability to stay physically ready for the rigors of an NFL season. Kicking the can a bit further, Pratik also detailed how the sudden onset of training camp can be catastrophic for some players. He mentions sleep, nutrition, and loading and just how we can do better as performance specialists to get those things right for the athlete.

I really appreciated Pratik's candor in focusing on the issues facing elite sport and how performance staffs can go about improving their systems to ensure as little as possible slips through the cracks. We all know communication between all members of a team is important, but it was great to hear him expound upon that with his real world experience. 

Though Pratik has worked primarily with nutrition, he possesses a deep knowledge of all the working parts that go into athlete success and it's quite obvious that his understanding of the interconnectedness in sport is something more of us need to embrace. Follow Pratik on social media @pratikxpatel on both twitter and IG. 

John Garrish is the head Strength and Conditioning Coach and head track and field coach for North Broward Prep in South Florida and he hopped on the pod today to talk about high school strength and conditioning and how far it has come since he joined its ranks 7 years ago.

What blew me away was John’s dedication to his athletes and desire to provide an environment that fosters excellence in his kids regardless of athletic talent. We talked at length about his approach towards working with a wide range of kids and assembling a solid coaching staff that is equally committed to development of the whole person.

John also breaks down what has changed for him since Covid-19 in terms of scheduling and providing a safe experience for his athletes. He breaks down how his schedule works and how he took over the track team several years ago and then we discuss his most recent initiative: free Saturday speed sessions for anyone in the North Florida community.

John’s passion for helping people was really special to hear about. He is truly a selfless person and it certainly left me thinking of ways I can better serve those around me. Thanks to him for hopping on and hope you enjoy our conversation

John also writes for Teambuildr and can be found on Instagram @coach_garrish and on twitter @John_Garrish

Daniel Back is a performance coach in Austin Texas and the founder of Jump Science (website: jump.science). You can find him on IG @jump.science

He has been working in the industry since 2012, but has long been a student of athletic performance particularly plyometrics and speed. Some of his YouTube videos on sprint mechanics and physics shattered my entire world when I first saw them and I’ve long been a fan of his approach and his counter-cultural thoughts on training

In the episode today we discuss why strength training exclusively can limit adaptation in youth athletes and how filling in other athletic gaps first can be a better place to start.

Then we dive into the overshoot phenomenon vs super compensation and how to be practical in programming for athletes given what we know about those factors. This leads to a discussion about negative adaptations and fiber types and how we need to consider these when writing training programs.

Then we shift to speed and discuss max velocity for basketball players, what metrics and outputs Daniel tracks in his sprinters and how he thinks sprinting should be at the heart of training for most athletes.

All of that and we didn’t even discuss jump training, which is Daniel’s bread and butter. Since we missed out on that make sure you check out his website jump.science and his IG of the same name and he’ll get your vert right.

Thanks again to Daniel for hopping on for what was a terrific deep dive on some very thought provoking concepts.

Anthony Donskov is a strength and conditioning coach for elite and youth hockey players and owns Donskov Strength and Conditioning in Columbus Ohio. He has also written two books: Physical Preparation for Ice Hockey: Biological Principles and Practical Solutions (2016) and The Gain, Go, Grow Manual: Programming for High Performance Hockey Players (2020).

Needless to say after 16 years coaching some of the best in the world, Anthony is one of the leaders in hockey S&C. His ability to draw information from a variety of sources is second to none and it shows in his approach. Luckily he broke down a lot of his principles in full here in thoughtful and precise manner.

We talked about his process of writing and how was able to complete two books. We also discussed training players in the offseason, balancing stressors between sport and training, ramping up on-ice work in the offseason, the differences between youth and pro athletes, skating vs sprinting, and conditioning considerations for hockey players.

The conditioning discussion was particularly fruitful as we discussed how much off-ice conditioning is needed, how effective it is and how to incorporate as much on ice work as possible especially for pros.

Here is the study referenced: Adaptations of skeletal muscle to endurance exercise and their metabolic consequences

And finally here is Anthony's social media platforms: Twitter: @anthonydonskov IG: @anthonydonskov

Eric Schmitt is the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Memphis Grizzlies. He has been putting out some tremendous content on IG (@coacheschmitt) in regard to conditioning tests, analysis of said tests and practical application for athletes given their conditioning profiles. We talk about this, his current energy systems framework when viewing oxygen as the currency driving all three systems, the power/duration relationship, breathwork for low-intensity exercise and how to keep your eye on the demands of the sport itself rather than pursuing fitness via other means.

Eric's ability to hone in on what matters is second to none and vital for the rest of us to develop. There are so many systems in play that can affect conditioning and there is much research dedicated to it. It's difficult to make sense of it all. Eric does that here and I can't wait to look at this through his lens.

Subscribe to the pod, leave a review and if you are so inclined, share it with a friend! Thank you for your continued listenership and let's keep moving the needle.

Jake Rauch is a Performance Scientist at Peak Performance Project (P3) in Santa Barbara, CA. He works primarily as a biomechanist at P3 where he is involved in the research and assessment of elite athletes. Jake has several terrific papers on force-velocity profiling and clustering athletes based on their countermovement jump kinetics/kinematics and we talk about them in depth here.

Jake is also currently working on some research that will try and establish more of a relationship between training interventions in the gym and on-court performance for basketball players. He details some of the obstacles to such research and some of his theories about how to make the process more feasible.

Jake and I have been co-workers for the past eight months. He has taught me a tremendous amount about the research process and what matters in data collection and analysis. So I also ask him to share his recommendations for those looking to establish their own reliable testing process and database of athletes. Then we talk about how we can marry our data observations to the subjective art of coaching and "miss" less often on creating adaptations in each athlete.

While I have spent a lot of time interviewing coaches based on unstudied models and concepts, this was a route I would like to travel down more often. Research has become more refined and is a valuable tool for measuring what we as S&C practitioners do. Jake does a great job kicking off this little foray and I look forward to more of these.

You can find Jake on Twitter @JTRAUCH and check out all of Jake's papers here https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacob_Rauch

Mike Kozak is the owner and head coach for Soar Fitness out of Columbus, Ohio. He is one of the coaches doing an outstanding job implementing Adarian Barr's concepts in a group setting and on the pod he goes into detail about how he structures his workouts utilizing such principles. Mike has tried almost everything under the sun in his 20 years of coaching and it's awesome to hear how he has sifted through what works and what doesn't. Furthermore, I love how he is able to bring a session to life, which you can tell from this interview and on his IG (@soarfitness).

Make sure to also follow Mike on Twitter (@soarfitness) and thanks to him for coming on and shedding more light on some practical applications for speed and plyometrics with a lever-based thought process.

Jason Feairheller and Ryan Heickert are co-owners of Strength and Function, a gym in Pennsylvania working primarily with hockey players of all ages. They are also the hosts of the Speed and Power Podcast, which has put out some outstanding episodes. Jason and Ryan have put together a top-notch program with a particular eye on on COD and agility.

In this episode we discuss different coaching strategies for COD/agility, considerations to be made for off ice training for hockey players and the finer points of curved running. 

Make sure to check out the Speed and Power Podcast, Jason's IG (@jasonfeairheller) and Ryan's IG (@ryan_heickert_)

Season 2 of ULP is here with a great episode from my buddy and Northeastern Assistant Strength Coach, Alex Pacitti. Alex has mentored under Dan Sanzo at Northeastern and this has impacted his training for various athletes. Much like Erik Huddleston, Alex is looking at the shape of an athlete (particularly at the pelvic and thoracic outlets) to determine areas of high and low pressure, which will influence the movement of fluid and guts within the body.

Understanding these concepts can explain why some people don't have the same explosiveness or propulsive abilities of others. While shapes/structure help predetermine someone's abilities, Alex is training some of his athletes to overcome potential power deficiencies by limiting the amount of traditional weightlifting being done in favor of other interventions. We also talk about how certain shapes or abilities can help the athlete select their respective sport or positions. This predisposition to certain qualities is often overlooked by cookie-cutter strength programs so looking through this lens is in the very least a great way to re-think individualized programming for athletes.

Alex can be found on IG @coach_pacitti and his page is a great resource for visualizing a lot of the concepts we talk about on the episode.

Nicole Surdyka is a former Division I soccer player, doctor of physical therapy and a strength coach specializing in soccer performance training and rehab. She currently owns Surdyka Physical Therapy and Performance and has extensive experience working with athletes of all ages.

Nicole has also worked as a soccer coach and possesses a wealth of understanding about the game and has tremendous passion for growing it in the US. While I am not well versed in soccer, I really admire Nicole’s ability to break down various strategies and tactics and how they might affect a player’s physical training load.

This was the crux of our discussion as we get into the finer points of how reverse engineering a sport can work. Nicole breaks down some basic soccer formations and how each can impact the workloads of different positions and then we deep dive on how we might alter training based on particular strategies.

We also talk about taking care of the whole athlete, the current landscape of soccer in the US and various training topics especially pertaining to psychological/mental stress and how we can find out what interventions will best resonate with each athlete based on their personality and playing style.

Nicole can be found on:

IG: https://www.instagram.com/dr.nicolept/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NSurdykaPhysio

Website: https://www.nicolesurdykaphysio.com/