Just Fly Performance Podcast

Today’s show is with Scott Robinson, neurology expert, consultant and personal trainer.  Scott is an Applied Movement Neurology Master practitioner and has worked successfully with all levels of neurological complexity in his time training and coaching a wide variety of clients.  Scott is a specialist in dealing with a variety of neurological issues, such as weakness, pain, range of motion and trauma to the emotional systems, amongst many others.  Scott is a former Taekwondo athlete and has more than 20 years of experience in Applied Movement Neurology. Scott previously appeared on episode #188 of the podcast, and on the last show, talked about inhibitory factors of the nervous system, the importance of belief systems on training, fascia and foam rolling, and also how to optimize novel motor response in a training session. The role of the brain and nervous system in an athlete’s performance is of absolute importance in the role of training and competition.  We must regularly draw neurological links between the two, instead of living in the isolated environment of the exercises or drills we are teaching or coaching.  By understanding more about what makes elite athletes tick from a body-mind perspective, we can really dial in on how to optimally set up each and every training session and competition preparation. In this podcast, Scott gets into ideas on a “neurological checklist” in the midst of training or competition for athlete to utilize.  He also talks about dopamine and reward in athletic training and performance, “celebration” as a neurological learning tactic, the importance of intention setting in coaching and athletics, and much more. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:30 – How to get further into the “present moment” in training or competition, and how to go through a mental checklist to get in the ideal mental zone 15:30 – How celebrating one’s performance can draw the brain’s attention to desirable outputs 32:30 – How to build up dopamine and reward responses in athletes, via celebration or intermittent rewards for athletes 44:00 – How to set intentions as a coach (or athlete) to help maximize one’s effectiveness and gain new insight on a situation 1:01:50 – How celebration of performance is a characteristic of an elite athlete, and how to practically put celebration into day to day training “If you are trying to learn a new skill, the first thing the brain will do is search its’ memory-bank and look for relevant data… when it finds some relevant data and it believes it can put together a movement from memory and experience, that may not be what you are looking for” “When I changed the focus and got the brain to acknowledge the errors and correct, there was a very different result, and to me, that is your present moment awareness” “The brain hates an open loop, it hates loops that are unclosed” “What you are doing (when you celebrate) is draw the brain’s attention to a desirable output” “You can celebrate with a fist pump, but you want to make it novel, you need to create attention” “Attention, urgency and alertness are the 3 keys for neuroplastic change…. Add emotion to things and it’s like a fuel source, it supercharges the moment” “You don’t “build” strength, your nervous system grants you strength” “If you have access to 100% of the nervous system, then you can see maximal strength” “The brain also receives dopamine for a “near-win”… gamblers brains can’t tell the different between a win and a near-miss” “You can withhold the celebration, you can withhold the reward, and then the brain will look to solve that problem by giving more, by increasing the output even further” “If you are actually prepared to play with some of these (withheld reward) outputs, the scope for improvement is enormous” “If we set a clear, coherent intention, then the brain is going to work to adhere itself around that…. Maybe we just have silence for a while… but then the words come, because the subconscious is figuring it out” “Whatever the intention needs to be… set that, and then give yourself space for it to come out; your subconscious will be working away, and the information will come to you” “If you look at yourself as a training variable, it means I need to keep myself in good mental and emotional shape” “Thought is an energy, and energies maintain fields…. all of us are walking around maintaining thought fields, and they create an atmosphere of belief” “The coach has a big influence on (success) not just out of the instructions they are giving, but also on what’s given off (from a thought-field/culture/atmosphere perspective)” “We just need to make it OK to celebrate… when (they) score a goal or put together a good passage of play, I encourage them to show me their celebration” About Scott Robinson AMN Teaching Faculty member, Master Practitioner & Coach, as well as; Mentor to AMN Practitioners. Scott is the creator of AMN Neuro Flexibility & has worked successfully with all levels of neurologic complexity. Scott’s approach is to first assess & then bring each individual’s nervous system towards a state of balance. If resolution of a complex neurologic or pain presentation is the objective, then achieving this (homeostatic) balance is often key. Where Movement is the primary objective, then achieving this balance within the body prior commencing a training program gives the individual’s body every chance of progressing towards their movement or functional goals, as opposed to progressing towards injury, which is often the case when training with pre-exisiting imbalances in the nervous system. Scott’s knowledge & skill set means that he is capable of transforming a person with a nervous system of a degraded output, into a person who is capable of achieving advanced calisthenics strength, flexibility and skills. As an AMN master practitioner, Scott is a specialist in dealing with: movement compensations, muscle weakness, muscle control, range of motion & sensation, historic injury & surgical compensations, pain complaints, all manner of musculoskeletal dysfunction, trauma to the emotional system, respiratory, gastrointestinal & immune systemic issues, circadian biological function & sleep disturbances, disturbances to the balance system, the emotional motor system, stiffness or dysfunction to myofascial & other connective tissues, post concussion syndrome, stroke, Hay fever, TMJ dysfunction, coordination, posture & memory. All of the above, along with many other issues, can all potentially be normalized. This is all achieved via a utilization of the entire AMN system, from assessment to calibration of the brain & the nervous system. A former elite athlete in Taekwondo & athletics, a personal trainer of more than 20 years experience & a master practitioner with knowledge of the entirety of the AMN system along with being both a teacher and a mentor within the AMN education. Scott is ideally placed to help you get your body, your movement capabilities or your skillset as a practitioner, to where it needs to be.

Today’s show is with sports performance coaches Nick DiMarco and Keir Wenham-Flatt.  Nick DiMarco is the director of sports performance at Elon University.  He is a leader in the NCAA University coaching system in the realms of high performance ideology.  As a former professional athlete (NY Jets and Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker in 2014), Nick is well versed in the intuitive aspects of what it takes to be a high achieving athlete. Keir Wenham-Flatt is a strength and conditioning coach and educator.  He has a background in American football and experience within professional rugby for nearly a decade in five different countries: the U.K., Australia, China, Japan, and Argentina. Keir is the founder of the Strength Coach Network and Rugby Strength Coach, and has been a prominent figure in coaching education.  Both coaches have been prior guests on the podcast, speaking on topics ranging from perception-reaction and training transfer, to mental resiliency. The art of preparing athletes in team sport goes far beyond strength development, and even linear speed.  Knowing which elements of physical preparation are the “lowest hanging fruit” for each athlete, and how to appropriately progress them through their careers is a trademark of an experienced and thoughtful coach.  Many athletes in college football will barely improve in speed versus their high school abilities, especially after their first year of college strength training. On the show today, Nick and Keir will get into the finer points of off-season and pre-season training for American football, and how to place players in training priority groups based on need, such as strength, speed, or body mass-composition factors.  They also speak on how to utilize auto-regulation to make the process of maintaining (or improving) performance factors as quickly as humanly possible.  Finally, topics of specific conditioning means and methods to meet the demands of the game are discussed in depth, and particularly in how collision sports differ from contact sports in this regard. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:15 – Off-season and pre-season training emphasis in American football physical preparation 16:36 – Nick’s different programs and “buckets” for various needs of his NCAA football athletes 22:11 – How to auto-regulate strength, power and speed markers once an athlete already has the pre-requisite levels of maximal strength for their sport – Thoughts on the demands of long-drives and the extreme ends of game speed-endurance and its impacts on how coaches should go about a conditioning program 48:24 – Keir and Nick talking about the “Robustness Bucket” in working with athlete populations 56:10 – How Keir and Nick steer training into reactive game-speed oriented tasks as the pre-season nears “Why do they break in camp? It’s not from a lack of exposure to heavy weight-training” Wenham-Flatt “Ask yourself, “What do you get most tired doing, what do you do most often, what is tied most to the outcome of the game?” that is the stuff that you need to be a master of, and robust to, in context of your position” Wenham-Flatt “With regard to the developmental stuff, where-ever possible, the answer would be auto-regulation; if you are auto-regulating every set in a target ability, you are hitting the maximum productive value of that session” Wenham-Flatt “There are anthropometric barriers to entry you must clear as you if you want to thrive in your position, and they go up, as the levels go up” Wenham-Flatt “1RM barbell strength is going to transfer to explosive movement to a point, and it’s lower than people think” Wenham-Flatt “I think one of the reasons most athletes make a lot of progress early on, and then stall out later in their career, is that there is really no change in the means that are applied to them” DiMarco “We’re going to do explosive pin squats for sets of 3, until you drop by .1 seconds average velocity, and he did 14 sets.  But when he went back down to New Zealand and tested his max, it had increased by 45 pounds” Wenham-Flatt “You would be surprised just by how much some athletes need, and just how little some athletes need” Wenham-Flatt “In the early days of experimenting with this at London Wasps, I had one guy do 3 sets, and one guy do 17 sets (with a .1 drop-off in squat speed)” Wenham-Flatt “Fly 10’s: if a guy runs a PR on a first rep, he is going to shut him down” DiMarco “Putting a cap on it, for the (sprint) speed work is helpful… but set a bar speed, and I’ve squatted 90% of my max 30 minutes in a row” DiMarco “I’m not huge on the actual use of repeat sprint ability within the training session; we’ll do a lot aerobic work and tempo based stuff early on, we’ll do speed on the other end of the spectrum, and those two things make people very good as repeat sprint ability” DiMarco “All sport preparation, tactically, technically, physically, psychologically, you are trying to answer the question “have I been here before”… and if you haven’t been here before, that’s when things start to break down” Wenham-Flatt “Most of the time (injury) happens to people who don’t handle volume successfully” DiMarco “Can a over-zealous sport coach make them 5% weaker within a day of dumb training? Yeah… the greatest return on your effort as a practitioner should probably be on the education, and collaboration on everyone who touches that athlete rather than looking at the perfect rehab exercise (of course what you do in a rehab program is going to be important)” Wenham-Flatt “From the parkour standpoint, we do some sort of tumbling variation, 3 times a week probably.  Almost every single play ends up with somebody on the ground, so teaching something as simple as how to roll forward, backwards, right, left, is important, just to teach them how to land effectively and how to roll out of things, it might be able to able to prevent one injury here or there… it teaches them general skills they might find enjoyable most of the time” DiMarco “You have these guys who consistently outperform what their testing metrics say they should do, because of their ability to play the sport, and react, and end up in the right positions” DiMarco About Nick DiMarco Nick DiMarco is the director of sports performance at Elon University, a position which he has held since 2018.  Nick is a leader in the NCAA University coaching system in the realms of high performance ideology.  As a former professional athlete (NY Jets and Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker in 2014), Nick is well versed in the intuitive aspects of what it takes to be a high achieving athlete. With a thorough understanding of training loads, and the components behind transferrable agility training, Nick has a unique array of insights he brings to the coaching table.   Nick received his undergraduate degree from William Penn, and Master’s from California University of Pennsylvania, both in the sports performance sector.  He is on track to finish his PhD in Health and Human Performance at Concordia University of Chicago by early 2020. About Keir Wenham-Flatt Keir Wenham-Flatt is a strength and conditioning coach and educator who has worked with professional teams on 4 different continents.  Keir has expertise in weight room-based strength and power development, speed, agility, conditioning, and close integration with the football staff to monitor training load, offer sport science insights, and assist in the management of the training process.  He is the founder of the Strength Coach Network and Rugby Strength Coach, and has been a prominent figure in coaching education. Wenham-Flatt has a background in American football and experience within professional rugby for nearly a decade in five different countries: the U.K., Australia, China, Japan, and Argentina. Among his career highlights are a fourth-place finish at the 2015 Rugby World Cup with Los Pumas Argentina and a 2014 World Club Challenge win with Sydney Roosters Rugby League.

Today’s show is with sports performance coach, Jeremiah Flood.  Jeremiah is the owner of Flood Sports, a sports training company in Southern California whose mission is to facilitate the development of mindful and adaptable athletes.  Jeremiah is a former NCAA D1 defensive back at FIU where he earned his B.S. and M.S. in Exercise Science. After becoming a CSCS and working with Women's Volleyball and Soccer at his Alma Mater, He found the sport of Rugby, spent some time in USA rugby academy and garnered a professional contract.  Jeremiah looks to enhance the soft skills, such as decision-making and confidence in training the speed of both the mind and body in training. Strength is a relatively easy quality to develop in athletes, while speed on the other hand, is a more complex, but in many ways, more rewarding venture.  In the realm of athletics, “speed” is multi-factorial, and just because an athlete is fast over 20,60, or 200 meters, does not mean that they will be equally as fast in the speed of a game.  Game-speed involves complex decision making processes, mixed in with emotional management and confidence under a variety of stressful conditions.  To be skilled in facilitating means to improve game speed requires a holistic and dedicated approach. On the show today, Jeremiah takes us through his unique approach to building the speed of the mind and body.  On the physical level, we talk about his approach to testing and training linear outputs, such as sprinting and jumping.  On the mental level we get into the facilitating of the development of self-awareness, confidence and specific reactivity in athletes as it pertains to sport, and how speed and power can be blended with mental elements.  Finally, Jeremiah gives us some great “nuts and bolts” talk on how a daily training session unfolds under his process. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:55 – How Jeremiah pivoted his training as a result of the covid-19 pandemic 7:30 – Training athletes when there’s no official tournaments or competition 10:08 – How to play “Gatorball” & why it’s a great game for young athletes to play 15:05 – Why blend cognitive development with physical development? & Jeremiah’s experience evolving as a college athlete 17:52 – How Jeremiah gives feedback to athletes on self-talk, self-reflection, and having a routine 22:32 – Jeremiah’s thoughts on working with an athlete who doesn’t seem motivated to formally “train” or do particular exercises or drills 27:17 – How often is pure speed the limiting factor for athletes to reach their goals? 33:06 – Basic “game speed” principles and practices 37:25 – The duties of a strength coach for high school and middle school athletes 40:48 – Jeremiah’s approach to testing athletes’ performance 49:44 – Toughness & the significance of doing things you don’t want to do 57:05 – Neural-perplexity: Challenging an athlete’s cognitive load and speeding up the brain’s reactivity 1:02:42 – What does an average training session look like for Jeremiah and his athletes “If I could go back in time, I would loved to have had a physical preparation coach who not only could’ve helped me in my physical abilities, as I loved, but also to tie that in with the mental and emotional, perceptive and reactive, all those elements that, holistically speaking, can help us maximize our outputs in the games we play.” “When I was transitioning from college football to rugby, it’s obviously a huge difference in skillsets, perception, action as far as catching, keeping your eyes ahead of you and passing… it really forced me to build that ability to scan the field. I didn’t have that when I first tried to play rugby and I thought I could just use my speed and physicality, but in rugby everyone has that, so I had to find a way to differentiate myself or just evolve myself.” “I was working with these kids… and I just started implementing things based off feedback from parents that there was a disconnect between speed training, performance training, [and] their actual game.” Questions Jeremiah gives his athletes to reflect upon and talk about: “What are my goals? What do I enjoy about sports or about the game I play? What do I want from this? What are my strengths and what are my weaknesses?” “My job [as a strength coach] is to put a smile on kids’ faces and you’re going to be happy because you’re getting stronger and because you’re getting faster but you’re also going to have fun and play games that may have a lot of relevance to your sport, or maybe they don’t and it’s fun because it’s just a game and you’re generally enjoying moving your body and reacting!” “We time every time we’re at the field… and during the pandemic, we brought the Vertec to the track. Honestly, it was really up to them… We don’t really put that much thought into it because, again, we use it as a confidence tool. Like okay, you’ve leveled up, how are you going to apply it?” “If they can express themselves autonomously, they can also self-soothe and recover by themselves.” “Our warm-up is usually either a series of different isos or we’ll just play a small-sided game for a couple of minutes and it usually depends on the demeanor of the athletes, the way they come in. If they’re really bogged down by playing tournaments that they’re already doing, we’ll spice it up.” About Jeremiah Flood Jeremiah Flood @coach_jflood is the owner of Flood Sports, a sports training company in Southern California whose mission is to facilitate the development of mindful and adaptable athletes.  Jeremiah is a former NCAA D1 defensive back at FIU where he earned his B.S. and M.S. in Exercise Science. After becoming a CSCS and working with Women's Volleyball and Soccer at his Alma Mater, He found the sport of Rugby, spent some time in USA rugby academy and garnered a professional contract. With his playing days behind him, Jeremiah focused on developing athletes of the future. His philosophy in the development of growing athletes is that there is more to sports performance than just power, speed and agility.  Although these skills are extremely important, He also looks to enhance the soft skills, such as decision-making and confidence in training the speed of the mind and body.

Today’s show is with sport movement expert Adarian Barr.  Adarian has been a many-time guest on this podcast, and has been my primary mentor in the world of sport movement and biomechanics.  Adarian has many years of coaching experience on the college, high school, club and private level of track and field, as well as in private sports training and movement analysis. There is a lot of talk in sports performance circles about “absorbing force”, as well as being able to “decelerate” in order to “accelerate”.  Although it is certainly helpful to speak outside of concentric/pushing muscle actions only in athletics, a key point is that sport movement is much more than simply accelerating and decelerating things.  Moving outwards to another layer of awareness, sport is much more about re-directing momentum than it is abruptly stopping and starting it.  Many top experts in speed training now are putting much less emphasis on deceleration, and more on change of direction. Change of direction concepts can be taken into much more than just running, however, but can be looked at in jumping, throwing, and pretty much any sport skill an athlete will undertake.  When we look at the dynamic work we are doing in training from a “collision” perspective, it helps us to appreciate athletic movement, and movement transfer to a higher degree. On today’s show, Adarian Barr talks details on setting up and managing collisions in sport movements, as well as lots of plyometric considerations.  We finish off the show with a brief chat on how this applies distinctly to the foot and sprinting from a timing and lever-based perspective. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:13 Adarian’s take on training landings and a criticism of “snap down” exercises to train landings 14:44 Why it takes guts to hit a big collision in sport, and Adarian’s top collisions for athletic performance ability 21:35 Discussing the “ultimate” collision in sport, the javelin-throw final step 31:13 Considerations on setting up, and managing collisions in sport 34:30 Thoughts on using small boxes to manipulate jump takeoffs in track and field 40:25 Low rim dunks in basketball, in respect to collision management 44:55 Adarian’s thoughts on if “landing training” is a good idea for athletes 46:25 What plyometrics actually transfer well to setting up and managing collisions 53:40 Squatting and folding up in context of plyometrics and sprinting 1:01:13 How we can get to the ball of the foot at an optimal rate in sport movement “There is something people don’t understand about collisions; the impact force at the feet is not the same as what is being transferred to the rest of the body” “I’m not trying to absorb (the collision) I’m trying to manage (the collision)…. We are not taught to manage the collisions, we are taught to absorb.  If you are practicing to absorb collisions, you had better be strong” “There’s very little times where you are going to come to an abrupt halt in a landing (like a snap-down)” “When I chew my food, I do a plyometric” “If you want to build up that (collision management ability) teach everyone to triple jump” “What do athletes do better than anybody else, they manage collisions better than anybody else, because they don’t have fear” “As soon as you have fear in the equation, all of a sudden, you can’t manage the collision and you have problems” “People miss, more than anything, is how you set up the collision; and snap downs don’t teach you to set up the collision” “Two things to know: 1. How do I set up the collision, and 2. How do I manage the collision” “When the (cricket bowler) takes that big leap (4 steps out from the plant), that’s where it all starts” “Landing is the least of my worries when it comes to plyometrics” “The most difficult thing with plyometrics is asking “what am I stretching to shorten”?” “One thing about tissue tolerance is, is your tissue tolerant to folding up?” “When I do a plyo, and I jump and land, to me, when I hit the ground again, I am going to stretch something, and I am going to stretch it to end range” “Play should be the greatest form of training” “A skate board activity fits the definition of a plyometric, so why not do it?” “Part of collision is managing that ground-reaction force, at the foot” “If the ankle locks up at the right time, and the ground decides to push me back, then I’m going to take advantage of it” “It cracks me up when people talk about positions and shapes… you need to feel the position; and I’m thinking, no, you need to feel when the ground is about to do something to you, and what are you going to do about it” “I’m doing a start and I got my hands fixed in (this) position, well then my feet are doing; they are fixed in (this position) too, well then when my foot hits the ground it’ll be too stiff, the ground reaction will be too fast” “Arches will work, but having arches work is not the same as having a stiff foot” “How does the foot transition from class 1 to class 2? Calcaneus has to shift” Show Notes: Jonathan Edwards 18.43m triple jump “extending the collision” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmUJ2GfVkKY Christian Taylor with an 18m jump with slightly less “drop” into the collision as Edwards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAIqV5yJnkU Simone Biles “Double Yurchenko” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKZNkCtgPJ4 Miltos Tentoglou 28’2” long jump (foot flop and reactivity)   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Jumpers World (@jumpers.world) Falling Bunny Hops https://youtu.be/-hfztsEIM4k 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 Sam Wuest.  Sam is the head coach and manager of Intention Athletic Club based out of South Florida.  A licensed acupuncturist and former collegiate track & field coach specializing in the jumping events, Sam owes much of his unique perspective to apprenticeships with Ukrainian Olympic Hurdle Coach Olex Ponomarenko and several master acupuncturists as well as his continued education within Daoist Gate’s martial arts and meditation programs. Sam has been a writer of some of the most popular articles on Just Fly Sports, on the importance of rotation in sprinting, jumping and sport jumping movements, such as dunking a basketball.  Sam is a holistic, outside the box thinker who has been able to blend several unique worlds of thought into his own process of training integrated athleticism. So much of our modern thought on sports performance comes from “Western thought”, which focuses largely on forces, muscles, and things that can be easily quantified in training.  You’ll often hear things like “producing the most force in the least time” or “maximal stiffness” as common pursuits in athlete training.  It’s not that these ideas aren’t important, but what we don’t consider is the other “side” of training that involves things that are harder to quantify, such as timing, fluidity, connectedness of the body and mental-emotional factors. On today’s show, Sam gets into the fine points of posture and expanding joint positions, what it means to train an athlete from a “fascial” perspective, and how his influences from the martial arts have made a major impact on how he goes about training athletes.  He also closes with a bit on how to balance a training program from a philosophical perspective of “yin and yang”. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:42 - What can martial arts teach us about movement quality? 10:39 - Why we talk about fascia & What “fascia” means from a performance perspective 13:55 - Why focus on postural cues in athletes? 17:34 - The role of contractile elements in the body & The importance of timing in jumping 21:21 - Posture, the long spine, & The Alexander Technique in relation to athletic performance 31:53 - Fascial stretching & coming back from an injury 38:03 - Engaging the anterior of the body & Internal vs. External cueing 42:04 - Martial arts drills, mobility exercises, and mindfulness techniques Sam uses to expand the long spine and the tensegrity system 58:29 - The yin and yang of a training cycle: What a week of training for Sam’s athletes looks like 1:10:02 - Why you should finish your day with a parasympathetic cool-down “All these different movement styles, martial art styles… especially the ones that say they’re internal, you’ll see that they’ll use the body in a different way because they’re not trying to use them in the same way as an external martial art… because you’re using different sections of your body in a particular way and you might be mobilizing different things that I think, in strength and conditioning, we don’t often assume can or should move.” “When we talk about the fascia, it’s adjusting one area of the body to check the tissue length in the other area of the body. So when we talk about tendon strength versus maybe muscle strength, we’re talking about adjusting big muscle strength in the gym, usually if you see a body builder… their biceps are not big all the way through the upper arm.... Whereas someone who has more of a tendon or even elastic structure… you’ll often see that the muscle is almost more spread out because the tendons and the connective tissue at the joint level has also developed.” “A lot of the little postural adjustments are to adjust the tensegrity... they’re to adjust the little bits of the system so instead of just having to contract a muscle more, we could actually sometimes even lengthen, just slightly, something around a joint or spine or on the mid-section of the body and by creating that little bit of length, we add that sort of elastic, and maybe we can say fascial, strength. Sometimes we can actually get stronger not just by contracting harder but by lengthening, just naturally.” “The more lift-dominant programs seem to have more of the folks that started to stack up injuries, even if they weren’t on the spine. I don’t think it’s just the lifting, I think it’s maybe something of the mentality but also I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there aren’t that many ways that people have in their standard coaching/strength and conditioning toolbox to really open that up… Everybody knows how to compress something… but pulling it apart is a little bit more nuanced.” “That’s sometimes what I’ll do, unbeknownst to the person I’m working with, when I’m trying to work somebody back from an injury and I want them to go all out, is I’ll do something in the days before or in the warm up that’s going to take a bit of juice out of the system so they’re going to feel 100% but they’re not actually going to be running as fast as they can.” “There are ways to engage posture without just throwing more tension on the system.” “We talk a lot about internal and external cueing, but I don’t think the distinction is as clear cut as people make it out to be because there’s also imagery that will allow you to almost be thinking about your body parts and your limbs as if they are external, even though they’re on the inside of the body.” “Especially people these days, because everything is so visual, so technological, but we need people to go back into their bodies more and more and more and be able to actually feel where they are in space, feel where their limbs are in relation to each other. If we can do that through movement, that’s wonderful, but sometimes we also need to just affect the way someone’s mind is working and kind of cut off some of those outside distractions. Otherwise, we have no place to go with this stuff.” “You can be the [first lines of defense] for yourself, before you ever get into the other stuff, if you know yourself, if you can go inside a little bit. I think people are realizing that.” “The way you start and end something is the way you remember it.” Show Notes Sam Wuest postural drills inspired by the martial arts   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Sam Wuest (@way_of_sam) Tommy John extreme isometric lunge hold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfEdRv7utNA&t=199s About Sam Wuest Sam Wuest, L.Ac., M.Ed., is the head coach and manager of Intention Athletic Club based out of South Florida. A licensed acupuncturist and former collegiate track & field coach specializing in the jumping events, Sam owes much of his unique perspective to apprenticeships with Ukrainian Olympic Hurdle Coach Olex Ponomarenko and several master acupuncturists as well as his continued education within Daoist Gate’s martial arts and meditation programs. Please visit wayofsam.com or IG: @way_of_sam to hear more about his training philosophy.

Today’s show is with athletic performance coach and hamstring injury research specialist, Johan Lahti.  Johan is an S&C coach (CSCS) at R5 Athletics & Health in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. on a multifactorial approach for hamstring injury risk reduction in professional soccer under the supervision of Professor JB Morin and Dr. Pascal Edouard via the University of Cote d’Azur.  Johan is a practitioner who truly has a hand in both the worlds of the art and the science of athletic development. Hamstring strains are not only one of the most common muscular injuries in sport, but also will be more likely to happen once an athlete has had this issue in the past.  The human body is a complex organism, and as easy as it can be to pin the cause of an injury to one source, we most always take a broad and holistic approach to these issues.  Johan recently did a fantastic explanation of his hamstring injury prevention methods for a Simplifaster interview, where multiple causes and solutions to hamstring problems were addressed, such as running technique vs. hamstring strength training, mobility and hamstring risk, pelvic tilt and more. In today’s podcast Johan and I chat about an athlete’s strength vs. their raw technique when it comes to lifting, and what resistance training exercises have the greatest impact on the hamstrings from a prevention standpoint.  We talk about running technique and hamstring injury, mobility and flexibility, and proprioception, and cognitive demand, all related to hamstring injury risk prevention. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:31 - What inspired Johan to research hamstrings & His greatest mentors 8:05 - Strength vs. Running technique in hamstring injury prevention 12:43 - Factoring in ultra-specific hamstring training, like Nordic exercises 17:57 - Efficiency in hamstring research and technique 19:59 - Running mechanics: Correlations between on-field running techniques and hamstring injury 23:25 - Factoring in sports that require holding something in your hands while running, like a field hockey stick 24:55 - Stretching and strength training in hamstring injury prevention and mobility/range of motion 32:07 - If you just do max velocity sprint work, will your hamstrings organically get better at end range? 36:48 - Fascicle testing & Sprinting vs. Isolated exercises 42:48 - The best protocol for preventing hamstring injury and keeping hamstrings healthy 44:43 - Lumbopelvic movement measurements & Sprint mechanics 50:41 - Starting at a young age: Building better postures and movement in sprint techniques 53:12 - Thoughts on posterior chain training “Looking at the hamstrings particularly, it is amazing, not only the sagittal plane or the front to back, but also the rotational component of this muscle group and how it works to help us perform as athletes is absolutely amazing.” “Let’s say if you’re doing a squat, a force plate can read a specific Newton output but they can produce that force by different strategies so… the end result is the same in terms of Newtons, but are they technically producing strength for different tasks even though it’s defined as a squat? So that is really interesting and I think that should be discussed more. That’s why I don’t like to separate strength and technique… but evidently it needs to be done in terms of research.” “It’s difficult to answer that question of ‘what is the optimal exercise?’ I think if you’re ticking those boxes, then you could argue that some exercises are doing enough if you have other exercises ticking the rest of the boxes.” “There’s so much money going into hamstring research, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone picked [time efficiency] up as a research topic… because time is of such high value.” “We can create these great protocols in the lab, gold standard equipment, but then what’s the use if teams don’t have the budget or time or resources or facilities to conduct these tests? So there needs to be a lot of technological advancement that we can get… with less testing, a good idea of what’s going on. That would be the end goal.” “There’s supportive biomechanical evidence for lengthening the angle of peak torque in the hamstrings with range of motion training… additionally, that your range of motion is moderately correlated with how much mechanical strain or lengthening past optimal length takes place during sprinting.” “We shouldn’t just consider the hamstrings, we should consider other muscles that influence the hamstrings that modeling studies have shown that muscles that basically can pull contribute to lengthening the hamstring... and the hip flexors are the most famous for it.” “Right now, it seems that there are benefits of increasing both of it, fascicle length and pennation angle, depending on what head we’re talking about in the hamstrings.” “I really want to emphasize that my PhD focuses on soccer, so therefore, these are the categories we have interest in this context. We have four main categories that we thought would realistically fit into schedules and screening protocols, so that would be posterior strength testing, range of motion, lumbopelvic control, and the last one is sprint mechanical output testing.” About Johan Lahti Johan Lahti is an S&C coach (CSCS) at R5 Athletics & Health in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. on a multifactorial approach for hamstring injury risk reduction in professional soccer under the supervision of Professor JB Morin and Dr. Pascal Edouard via the University of Cote d’Azur. Physiotherapist Jurdan Mendiguchia functions as an external supervisor.

Today’s show is with James Wild.  James is a coach, an applied researcher and a performance consultant.  Currently, James leads the speed program for Harlequins rugby men’s team and is Head of Performance for England Women’s Lacrosse.  He also leads modules in skill acquisition and strength & conditioning at the University of Surrey.  James is in the final stages of completing a PhD in the biomechanics and motor control of team sport athletes during sprint acceleration and is the author of “Strength Training for Speed”. When it comes to speed, it’s always helpful to look at things from both the perspective of the coaching eye and applied biomechanics, and then on the other end, from more raw perspectives of strength and data points.  When we look at both the qualitative and the quantitative, we can get a fuller total picture of what it takes to maximize an athlete’s speed potential in a manner that sticks over time and gets results.  James is not only great with sprinting data points, but he has also been in the trenches coaching athletes for 20 years with many high level athletes, and his combination of the data, as well as in the art of coaching offers valuable insight for any coach. On the show today, James and I talk about his process of building an acceleration profile for athletes, rate vs. stride-length dominance, foot vs. hip dominant strategies in sprinting, resisted sprinting, minimal explosive strength standards for sprint performance, and more. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 4:38 - James’ main objective with his PhD work 6:30 - The results of James’ sprint acceleration polls on social media 9:53 - The effects of acute, verbal interventions on sprinting improvement 13:34 - How to analyze and experiment with athletes’ sprinting using continuums 17:45 - How to allow athletes to experience continuums 23:47 - Running with low knees vs. high knees & Variability in performance 27:11 - The importance of incorporating experiential nature into training 29:05 - Key markers and components of acceleration profiles & Cluster analysis 34:58 - 4 main strategies for sprinting & Exploring athletes’ reliance 39:36 - The quickest way James has facilitated change in sprint acceleration performance 44:46 - The role of technical changes vs. improving strength qualities 51:51 - 3 strength measures & Single leg jump in place test 55:56 - Analyzing hip and foot-dominance in athletes 1:00:12 - How does DRF help project horizontal force or convert force to a horizontal acceleration? & Using a sled to train “It’s certainly not been my experience that there is this one size fits all, classical model [of sprinting] that we can shoehorn everyone into and that they will run faster as a result.” “One of the things I do will be to longitudinally track their spatial/temporal variables and try and look at essentially what it is that they’re doing when they’re running their fastest. So, it’s this concept of finding out the athlete’s reliance.” “If I’m working with an athlete for the first time or the first few sessions… whilst I’m collecting that data, I want them to experience what it feels like to move along that continuum of greater step length or greater step rate so that by the time I’ve finished some kind of analysis and have an understanding of where their reliance is at… they’ve got prior experience now with adjusting according to that continuum, so it just makes coaching a lot easier.” “They’re never gonna sprint the same way twice in a game, really, so they need to be able to adapt to those novel situations… they’re never going to produce exactly the same step… there’s going to be variability in everything they do, so sometimes exploring that variability is quite important.” “You’ll never find a single strength quality that’s going to be repeatedly related to sprint acceleration performance across all athlete groups.” “Some of the regression analysis I’ve conducted; big hip extension torque, single leg reactive strength index, and peak power during a squat jump, for example, those three measures combined seem to consistently relate to a reasonable amount of variation in sprint performance.” About James Wild James is a coach, an applied researcher and a performance consultant using a blend of strength & conditioning and biomechanics techniques with skill acquisition and motor learning principles to help address sports performance problems. He has worked with coaches and athletes across a full spectrum of abilities over the last 20 years, including medal winning teams and athletes at major international competitions. Currently, James leads the speed programme for Harlequins rugby men’s team and is Head of Performance for England Women’s Lacrosse. He also leads modules in skill acquisition and strength & conditioning as part of the University of Surrey’s BSc in Sport & Exercise Science degree programme. James is in the final stages of completing a PhD in the biomechanics and motor control of team sport athletes during sprint acceleration, is a book author (‘Strength Training for Speed’), and has published several articles within scientific journals”

Today’s show is a Q&A with Joel Smith, answering your questions on training and human performance.  It’s great to see what’s on everyone’s minds from a training perspective, as well as be able to synthesize thoughts on each question. On the Q&A today, we have a wide range of questions, but the focal points are things like speed training for athletes new to training, coaching speed in a manner that doesn’t cause negative compensations, isometric training, weightlifting, and even swimming. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Podcast Questions/Topics What is a simple way to recover from an ACL and meniscus injury and surgery? Programming/training strategies for more strength and muscle driven athletes when limited access to weights? Still worth transitioning to more elastic training style even if they thrive with more longer GCT and joint angle strategies? Which is more spiritually demanding: 5 minute lunge or 3 minute scap hang? Your favorite workouts for speed development (mainly for athletes new to track) What’s the purpose of eccentric loading for speed and jumps? How do you like to teach hip extension? Thoughts on hang power snatches? Best cues or general approach to single leg jumping off the non-dominant foot. Vestibular training assessment, your take, valuable resources for that etc. Can we do extreme isometric lunges every day? What’s the best way to get athletes to always train with intent? What are some things you’ve found that can help your athletes give more. In terms of their efforts and intent during a workout to get the most out of every session. The balance of hypertrophy and RFD in throwing and swinging sports. In a conversation on pronation, Gary Ward mentioned he would not advise powerlifters to pronate under load, but he would for anyone else. If running and jumping causes more force than weight does most of the time, why would he recommend it for that but not for lifting? Specific foot exercises for high arches? Suggested protocol for rehabbing Achilles tendinopathy? Gary ward’s wedges, suspension drop. How to incorporate rhythm in training? How do you structure a warm-up for elastic/max-speed sprinting? Games into drills into progressive efforts? As a coach, what are you looking at in real time when an athlete is performing, say acceleration? What is the mental process in your head to make your job easier? Optimal level of stiffness and compliance in athletes. Assessments and training. Is coaching dorsiflexion a double edged sword? Does cueing it too persistently result in athletes losing that nice shin angle too early during drive phase? Some drills for jumping technique? Weight room training, plyos, etc as it pertains to high school mid distance- XC. Also, good resources. Coupling load - plyo exercises for post activation potentiation. Do you differentiate between swimming techniques the amount of heavy strength training that they do? Elastic Vs muscular athletes (a backstroker vs a breastroker for example). I found that normally, simultaneous technique athletes are more muscle driven, comparing to the others. I would like to know your thoughts on that and the effects that too much heavy barbell has on the rhythmic component of the swimming technique. About Joel Smith Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and trains athletes and clients in partnership with Evolutionary Fitness 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. Joel has also spent several years in the realms of college lecturing, personal training, and thesis research.  Joel’s certifications include Neurological and Physical Typing from BATI, CSCS, MAT Jumpstart, and NKT level 1, as well as USA Track and Field credentials.  Joel is also well-versed in the Be-Activated protocols as taught by Douglas Heel, Foot training and biomechanical concepts from Gary Ward, and has been extensively mentored by sprint and sport movement coach Adarian Barr.

Today’s show brings on coaches Andrew Cormier and Joel Reinhardt.  Andrew Cormier is a sports performance coach at the University of Massachusetts, working with the men’s lacrosse, women’s soccer, and softball programs.  Joel Reinhardt is the Assistant Director of Sports Performance at the University of Massachusetts, working with football and women’s lacrosse.  Together, Andrew and Joel run the sprint-jump-throw.com website, as well as the Sprint Jump Throw Performance Podcast. Speed training, on the surface is a very simple venture.  High quality sprinting efforts in a fresh state is key to getting faster.  For track and field this is quite simple, but for team sports, this becomes more difficult, since it’s harder to control fatigue, as well as address the many facets of speed displayed in the course of a game, compared to a simple linear sprint race. Andrew and Joel are two young coaches with a view on speed training for sport that blends “Feed the Cats” ideologies, into their progressive system that seeks to eliminate the noise from an athlete’s regimen.  On the show today, Andrew and Joel talk about a speed-based model that they utilize in their team sport preparation, running technique and options in the course of game play, and their model of cueing and instructing athletes. Andrew and Joel have taken on an approach to “rank-record-publish” in speed-based training that gives athletes unique motivation in regards to improving this critical component of athleticism.  Throughout the podcast, we also chat about the role of visual field, perception and body language in the development of game speed, as well as diversity in running “options” that high level athletes display.  We finish this chat with Andrew and Joel’s take on the utilization of tempo in resistance training, and how much we really need to rely on the weight room for power if speed-based ranking systems are being utilized outside of it. 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 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:05 Andrew and Joel’s history in working together as coaches and how their podcast came together 11:05 How Andrew and Joel are building a “feed the cats” model of speed development in the context of team sports 18:35 How to replace linear-extensive tempo and long runs with more coordination driven, locomotion-complex style running for field sport athletes 27:50 What KPI’s Andrew and Joel are looking to boost throughout the year in regards to team sport physical needs, and how maximal sprints are ranked-recorded-published 39:35 How to work with athletes who are regularly in the last places in speed-based measurements 42:20 How Andrew and Joel consider change of direction ability in their training regime 57:55 Approaching running technique in light of the needs of team sports and the various types of running that may be present in team sports 1:09.20 Ideas on approaching bar tempo in a weightroom setting “It’s prioritizing the high speed components of the game, and then filling in the cracks elsewhere” Reinhardt “If we are trying to build some sort of physical stimulus, we always go back to “how can we build this playing lacrosse” Reinhardt “Instead of (traditional tempo or a long boring run for soccer players) now we are throwing a bunch of different movements at them (such as gallops)” Cormier “In season we only supplement fly 10’s (for field sport athletes)” Reinhardt We track (fly 10’s) as soon as we are done tracking it, I rank them, send it in the group message, put it top to bottom, color code it, green to red, mark PR’s on there, and they get all excited about it… the slight shift in language even within the team, instead of girls asking “how can I get in better shape” they ask, “how can I get faster” Reinhardt Team average we put 1.5 mph on their (lacrosse) average max velocity, in season, over 14 weeks (Reinhardt) “With female athletes, I’m not too worried about introducing more tone to the system” (Reinhardt) “They are doing some sort of high intensity lacrosse (and therefore change of direction) almost always, I’ve been working with them almost 2 years now and I have not done a single change of direction drill.  (Reinhardt) “(Instead of change of direction drills) I do strictly intense plyometrics in multiple planes, and then say, “just play your sport” Cormier “We are going to start doing sprint training where now we are going to stare at a point off to the side, but we are going to run in a straight line, and you are going to learn to track being in a good position and the only thing we are changing is the actual physical demand” Cormier “(In regards to Cal Dietz’s work, neural perplexity, and attention management) What correlated most with the guys who went to the NHL was the guys who were able to do math while they were skating” Cormier “For me, a lot of the weight room based movements are so general, that if you are not allowing yourself to be in a good position, then you are probably causing more harm than good, so I force tempo on a lot of exercises…. I know you are getting a ton of eccentric stress from all of your change of direction sprinting that you are going to do in practice, so I am not going to throw much more at you” Cormier “We do a ton of alactic, 7-10 second (isometric) hold sets for almost every single exercise” Cormier “I even, this year, took away… we used to do a decent amount of groin prehabs stuff… adductor/abductor stuff, to be honest with you I kind of stopped doing it this semester, and we hit more big-pattern, end-range isometrics, and we still didn’t have any nagging groins and hip flexors” Cormier About Andrew Cormier Andrew Cormier joined the University of Massachusetts Department of Athletics as a sports performance coach in July 2019 and works directly with the men’s lacrosse, women’s soccer, and softball programs. He came to UMass from Holy Cross, where he was an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Crusaders’ men’s and women’s lacrosse, women’s volleyball, and men’s and women’s tennis programs. Cormier’s prior stops include a sports science internship at the University of Minnesota, a graduate assistant coaching position at Amherst College, a sports performance internship at the University of Denver, and a strength and conditioning internship at his alma mater, Springfield College. Cormier co-runs the sprint-jump-throw.com website and the Sprint Jump Throw Performance Podcast alongside Joel Reinhardt. He earned both his degrees at Springfield College: a B.S. in Applied Exercise Science in 2016 and an M.S. in Exercise Science and Sport Studies in 2018. About Joel Reinhardt Joel Reinhardt is the Assistant Director of Sports Performance at the University of Massachusetts, working with football and women’s lacrosse. He has previously served as an assistant at Nicholls State University, and as a GA at Springfield College.  Reinhardt co-runs the sprint-jump-throw.com website and the Sprint Jump Throw Performance Podcast alongside Andrew Cormier. He earned his undergraduate degree from St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minn.) in Kinesiology and Exercise Science in 2015.  Reinhardt’s strength and conditioning expertise also includes internship tenures with Total Hockey Minnesota (2013), Springfield College Athletics (2015), the UConn Athletic Department (2016) and Western Michigan football (2016).

Ryan Banta and Derek Hansen discuss the value of tempo sprint training for speed development and team sport preparation. They explore the benefits of tempo training in track and field and team sports, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing running and individualized training. They also discuss alternatives to tempo running, understanding individual athletes, and different styles of sprinting.