Just Fly Performance Podcast

Renowned Flow-State expert, Steven Kotler, discusses neurobiology of flow states, fear in extreme sports, shifting to an organic approach in training, exploring human potential and advancements in sports and technology, intrinsic motivation and meaningful progress, staying in the 'sweet spot' of flow, and challenges of maintaining peak performance.

Nicolai Morris, strength and conditioning specialist with High Performance Sport, New Zealand, discusses the importance of diverse movement activities in athletic performance and shares anecdotes of skilled athletes benefiting from early exposure. They explore the impact of gymnastic work on movement quality, mentality around movement in different cultures, and the positive influence of gymnastics training on athletic performance. They also discuss training data collection units, setting boundaries as a coach, and the importance of being open-minded in training.

Mike Guadango and Alex Brooker discuss the power of belief, placebo effects in training-rehab, and becoming your own coaching superhero. They talk about adapting to training and rehab programs, alternative therapies, creating a competitive atmosphere, the complexity of training and coaching, exploring alternative approaches to pain management, and shifting perspectives and priorities.

Patrick Coyne, coach and owner of Black Sheep Performance, discusses holistically challenging athletes, evolved speed training, and the art of sports performance. The podcast covers topics such as the importance of mental power, incorporating sports skills in training, observing nature, different approaches to training athletes, results of training methods, and creating a powerful training environment for athletes.

Our guest today is Bobby Stroupe, founder and president of Athlete Performance Enhancement Center (APEC).  Bobby has directed human performance systems for nearly 20 years.  His coaching ranges from youth athletes to some of the top names in multiple professional sports, including first round picks, as well as Super Bowl and World Series champions.  Bobby is well-known for his work in the physical preparation realm of Patrick Mahomes, quarterback of the recent Superbowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs. After doing 235 episodes of this podcast, and opening up my eyes to more and more of the performance space, I’m always excited to find those coaches who are spearheading creative and effective training methods in athletic performance transfer.  When I recently watched Bobby Stroupe’s presentation at the recent “Track Football Consortium” regarding his methods in working with Patrick Mahomes, I was like a kid in a candy shop, viewing training methods that replicated many time and space requirements of sport play without being mechanical or contrived. Bobby is not only a holistic and open minded coach, but he is also an incredibly thorough and detailed thinker.  There are so many points of carry-over in what Bobby does, I believe that studying his work is essential if we are to reach the point of getting our training to truly transfer to the field of play.  Bobby achieves this transfer in a way that still pays homage to traditional principles of force development and human performance, but is able to add in the tri-planar and chaotic nature of what athletes will encounter in sport. On today’s podcast, Bobby gets into a variety of his “unorthodox” training methods, including locomotion complexes, tri-planar plyometrics and strength training, complex training, long-term development, and athlete autonomy.  Again, with the interest of transfer to sport in mind, any aspiring coach should be familiar with the work of Bobby Stroupe and Team APEC. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.     Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:15 What Bobby and I have learned about coaching from being fathers of young children 11:00 Bobby’s take on working with athletes from a young age, and how his team approaches long term athletic development 21:05 Bobby’s thoughts on being able to follow elite athletes for an extended period of time, as many professional athletes have been working at APEC since they were quite young 23:25 How human locomotion is taught using “locomotion complexes”, triplanar and scalar breakdowns of basic motions such as skips, caraocas, and gallops 36:40 Multiplanar jumps and how Bobby will complex these movements in with more static strength training means 46:35 Using different body alignments in strength training movements, as well as Bobby’s work with lunge matrixes using different foot positions 56:26 Bobby’s background with therapeutic education, and how that has impacted his work as a strength/physical preparation coach 1:04:00 Bobby’s take on the efficacy of technology for training athletes “What we want kids to say is, APEC is so fun we went up there and played for an hour and I wish I could come every day” “If someone comes up and tells us what we want them to do with their kid, we tell them that generally, it’s not a good fit” “Typically, middle school, with what we do, the girls are fairly dominant by the time they are in 7th grade” “We want to educate the individual on what makes them unique, what are their gifts?” “You will not find more variance than (coaching 40 middle school kids in one session) that in any training situation” “The number one rule of locomotion is “you do not restrict an athlete in space”” “There’s no better way to (calibrate) than letting the body move through space on its’ own with tension relationships” “I’ve even incorporated locomotion between heavy strength sets to make sure that the body applies those types of things to movement, which is our priority” “If you have an athlete who can do the caraoca pattern forwards and backwards (backwards is very difficult) and increase the circumference of the space they are taking up, that is a highly coordinated athlete that is going to do special things in space” “Anything that you can do with a kid that’s effective, is going to be effective for a professional athlete.  But anything you do with a professional athlete is not going to be effective for a kid.  So if there’s something you believe in that’s in your core curriculum for youth development, then you have to make sure your professional athletes get some exposure to that, because at your core, you are a human being” “If I’m going to take the time to do something that’s more human performance based, but not practical in a game, then I’m always going to cross it with something that is more multi-dimensional so that the brain and the body understand what I am trying to do” “I had a great coach one time tell me that they get better 40 times if they test agility first, at the college level” “For a lot of people, feet straight is “turned in”” “We are generally going to do a heavy squat once every 14 days” “I don’t feel the need to squat twice a week” “With Patrick, with 2 to 1 patterns, I’ll say here’s your options, I am going to give you 5 seconds and you need to get 10 contacts…. I’m creating an environment and he’s got to solve a problem” “Here’s how I look at technology: Does it elicit an action from my athletes that is more than I could product without that technology.  If not, I’m not interested” “I think the higher the level the athlete, the more autonomy you want to give them… with high level athletes, things are going to come in terms of questions and options, you always want them to feel like they are in control” Show Notes 8 Point Contact Leap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15UcR_g0Als About Bobby Stroupe Bobby Stroupe is the founder and president of ATHLETE Performance Enhancement Center (APEC). Stroupe and his team built APEC from a grass field in 2005 to a worldwide training leader in human performance today. He serves as the president for APEC, making strategic decisions, designing training systems, and guiding an elite team of coaches that power two locations (Tyler and Fort Worth). Coach Stroupe directed human performance systems for nearly 20 years, while expanding his influence as an author, consultant, speaker, and educator. His experience includes working with school systems, collegiate teams, professional teams, businesses, corporate fitness, and individuals. His coaching ranges from youth athletes to some of the top names in multiple professional sports, including first round picks and Super Bowl and World Series champions. APEC has been a part of developing over 20 athletes who trained with its system from grade school all the way to the professional ranks. Stroupe and his team currently support over 100 athletes in the NFL and MLB alone. He has been credited with supporting arguably some of the best in the game of baseball and football, including NFL MVP Patrick Mahomes. Coach Stroupe has been featured as a top trainer for multiple sports and athletic performances in Sports Illustrated and USA Today and on ESPN, NFL and MLB networks, STACK, Bleacher Report, and many more. Stroupe presented on various human performance topics at notable coach’s clinics internationally, including the NIKE Roundtable and the China City Bowl tour. He launched the CAPEC certification at Nike World Headquarters, in addition to doing work with Nike Training and the Nike Young Athlete division. Stroupe serves on the Advisory Committee for Wellness and Exercise at Tyler Junior College, where he and his staff powered strength and conditioning during TJC baseball’s four-times-in-a-row National Championship run. Coach Stroupe belongs to an elite group of physical therapists, athletic trainers, and human performance practitioners as a Fellow of Applied Functional Science. He has also been named an RSCC*D by the NSCA due to his 10+ years of demonstrating high standards and professional practice.

Our guest today is Rob Assise, track coach at Homewood-Flossmoor High School.  Rob has 17 years of coaching experience, and has been a regular speaker and writer in the realms of track and field, plyometrics and speed training.  He previously appeared on episode #95 and #196 of the podcast. One of the more fascinating ideas that I’ve been working with over time, as a coach, has been the idea of using a “long-burst” training movement of around 10-30 seconds, to help improve the power output of “short-burst” movements, such as a jump or short sprint.  Dr. Mark Wetzel spoke about this in depth on a recent episode and his take on it has confirmed things that I’ve seen anecdotally for some time, as well as read up on years ago in the mysterious “Greatest Sports Training Book Ever” by “DB Hammer” with the “AN1” and “AN2” bracket systems. Rob has taken those bracket systems and has done some creative training work with them recently, where he has also infused “infinity walks” which Dan Fichter talked about on a recent episode, into the mix.  Rob talks about that today, as well as ways that this concept can be taken creatively for track and field athletes.  In the second half of this show, Rob and I talk plyometric concepts, and how to build bounding and plyometric training “from the feet up” and “from ground contact times upward”. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.     Head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly for 15% off of your purchase! Timestamps and Main Points 6:35 Catching up with the struggles of being a high school coach in this period of history 9:50 How Rob has been creating workouts with complementary energy system brackets (i.e. a speed-endurance energy system work recovering a sprint system, and vice versa) 18:50 Ideas on how to optimize track and field events based off of game play and opposing energy systems 28:35 How Rob has observed warmup preferences and tendencies based on an athlete’s neurotype 31:35 Rob’s take on teaching bounding and bound progressions, as well as ideas with bounding with different foot strike emphasis 50:05 Using power metrics in conjunction with bounding using the Muscle Lab Contact Grid, as well as contact time based bound teaching ideas 56:55 How Rob manages contact times for depth jumping, hurdle hops and traditional plyometrics 60:40 How Rob’s thoughts on speed training have evolved over the last few years, as well as “bleed” versus “blast” methods in working flying 10 sprints “A typical thing we’ll do right off the bat; we’ll do an altitude drop, something intense, then they’ll go into doing something like a speed Russian lunge for 30 seconds, and then they’ll go into doing an infinity walk, or crawl or carry, for about 90 seconds, and then they’ll do something to failure, like hanging from a bar or doing a cross-crawl superman or something like that; something that falls into one exercise recovering another” “One thing that might be overlooked the most on the infinity walk is the vision component” “I’ve thought about the idea of, do a couple of (high or long) jumps, then go to a basketball court and play 3 on 3 real quick (and then come back to do more jumps)” “We would just give athletes at the start of practice on a Friday an option to do whatever they wanted to do in the warmup.  The type 1’s would always do something where they were competing.  The Type 2’s, it would depend who they were hanging out with.  The type 3 would literally go through the same warmup they would go through every day… if you just give athletes 10 minutes and watch what they do, it tells you basically what they are” “We work heel to toe on a low intensity (to teach bounding)” “I think you have to rotate through the ball of the first metatarsal when you are doing the lateral bound; you are also getting more of the lateral sling involved with it” “Any time you can hone in on a specific body part and get them some body awareness, that’s helpful, because athletes are really lacking in awareness these days” “The first couple of weeks we’ll do light barefoot bounding, so they can get better sensation, so they can feel the heel” “You are going to see more of a forefoot contact for .2 seconds and below, and anything that is above, you are going to get more of the heel involved” “(The shift onto the ball of the foot in jumping) That’s the moment of truth” About Rob Assise Rob Assise has 17 years of experience teaching mathematics and coaching track and field at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. He also has coached football and cross country. Additional writing of his can be found at Simplifaster, Track Football Consortium, and ITCCCA. He can be reached via e-mail at robertassise@gmail.com or Twitter @HFJumps.

Dan John, strength coach and best-selling author, discusses the art of 'letting go' and achieving better performance through relaxation and tension management. He shares creative coaching practices for throwers, such as playing unique games and super-setting kettlebell work with throwing. The importance of carrying heavy objects in training and the relationship between minimalism and kettlebell training in athletics are also explored. The podcast ends with a discussion on perception and coaching strategies using color charts.

Lee Taft, athletic movement specialist, discusses the long-term development of athletes and the importance of speed and reactivity. Topics include warm-ups with fun games, incorporating tag games for game speed skills, herbal supplementation, decision-making in sports, and the importance of specificity in training.

Our guest today is Dan Fichter, owner and operator of WannaGetFast, a sports performance facility in Rochester, New York.  He is one of the leading experts in applying clinical neurology into athletic rehabilitation and sport performance applications.  Dan has been mentored by a variety of elite coaches, therapists, and neurologists, and has trained numerous professional athletes and Olympians across a variety of sports.  He has been a multi-time guest on the podcast, with one of the most popular episodes of all-time being a joint discussion with Chris Korfist on “DB Hammer” training methods (an old-school classic). It’s somewhat of a “woke” term to mention the nervous system in training, as Matt Cooper said on a recent podcast.  Although it is easy to pay homage to the nervous system as the ultimate controller of training results, it is much more complicated to actually observe and specifically train the CNS.  This is where people like Dan Fichter are awesome resources in regards to being able to take the complex inter-disciplinary work on the subject, and tie it into simple methods we can use in our own practices. On today’s show, Dan runs through a wide swath of nervous system training topics, centering on isometrics, as well as their role in light of long term athletic development, crawling and the nervous system, infinity walks, as well as his keys to a good warmup from a neurological perspective.  There was a huge amount of practical training gold in this episode. 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.   Timestamps and Main Points 7:00 The top 3 things Dan learned from Jay Schroeder that have stuck with him over his years as a coach, particularly that of isometric exercise and intention 13:30 How isometrics specifically help create a condition for the body to solve a functional problem 20:30 How Dan’s exercise distributions have been altered over time (isometrics, bodyweight and traditional lifts) 27:00 Where Dan fits on the “5 minute hold” to shorter isometric hold spectrum 31:30 Questions on, “are isometrics alone enough to help an athlete overcome their injuries” 34:45 Crawling and links to neurology, as well as why it’s important to crawl in an extended posture position and the head up 39:45 How sensory stimulation precedes motor output in athletes, and the importance of stimulating athletes on a sensory level 47:00 The power of infinity walks in empowering an athlete on a neurological and sensory perspective, and how this can tie into, and be complexed with, other athletic skills 54:45 Things that Dan finds essential in the warmup process for his athletes 56:25 The electrical ramifications of tapping the heel in an athletic movement “As Jay says, “everybody is fast, and everybody is strong, they just can’t display it”” “Every step you take, the body finds the easiest and safest path, to complete the task” “When it comes to neurology, you have to hit it perfect, and when you hit it perfect, magic things happen” “Jay used to say this all the time “water will find the crack”” “One of my most favorite things I’ve learned from Jay’s was “quick style” exercises; my favorite exercise is a towel curl press, where they curl (the towel) up, they press it over their head, they pull it down, and then they extend their triceps, so there is everything about upper body movement in one exercise, and as Jay says, it’s recovering you while its training you” “When you get into studying the brain, it’s a flexion/extension synergy” “When you trace a complex movement, your cerebellum lights up like it’s nobody’s business” “For a 10 year old, I have them hold isometrics as long as they can… the younger you are the longer we’ll hold it.  The older you are, the more developed you are as a mover, we are going to start weighting things, we are going to start shortening times, and making contractions more intense” “Your proprioceptive maps get compromised as you get older… my son when he was 6,7,8 could hold lunges for ridiculous periods of time, as he gets older it, as he picks up little bumps, he can hold less time” “It’s not anywhere in the literature, “I rock to recover”, just think when a baby is crying and sympathetic is going nuts, we rock to recover them” “Part of crawling is picking your head up to activate your extensor chain, because we are born in a flexed position” “What starts (shoulder range of motion) is the tactile stimulation in your hand.. if we lose that tactile stimulation, that is going to jam everything up” “People think, “I need to get strong, I need mobile joints”… you need sensory input!” “When you see someone do an infinity walk (figure 8 walk), and then do your skill, you are like “whoa, what just happened there?” “I hardly ever go back into the weight room during in-season training, one of those stations is always infinity walks; they’ll crawl during infinity walks, they’ll hold their breaths, they’ll do farmers walks” “The (reading retention) is way better (while doing infinity walks)” “Crawling doing infinity walks is crazy” “(Regarding the warmup) Breathing is key, getting your heart rate up, hitting your heels and creating an electrical vibration throughout your body, creating structural balance, addressing your reflex system, addressing certain joint angles, addressing tactile, and then the hemispheres of your brain.  Just pick something out of those 10 things, there’s your warmup” “If you put your tongue between your teeth, and there’s some type of vibration going through it, your whole mandibular area relaxes” “Gaze stabilization is one of the most important things to teach an athlete… if you can find ways to keep your head still, threat disappears” “Your feet and your eyes dictate your posture” About Dan Fichter Dan Fichter owns and operates WannaGetFast Power/Speed Training, a sports performance training business in Rochester, NY that offers training to elite athletes.  Dan is one of the leading applied neurological training experts in the world, and has made numerous connections between clinical level neurology, and athletic performance and sport training.  Dan has coached athletes in all sports from all over the country, and is in two different Halls of Fame for his own athletic prowess in football. Fichter’s clients have included pro hockey players Chris Thorburn (Winnipeg Jets), Stanley Cup champion Brian Gionta (Buffalo Sabres), Ryan Callahan (Tampa Bay Lightning, US Olympic Team), Shane Prince (Binghamton Senators), Olympic track and field star Victoriya Rybalko from the Ukraine, NY Yankee shortstop Cito Culver, UFC fighter Mike Massenzio, Oakland A’s 2nd baseman Andy Parrino, Washington Nationals Infielder Chris Bostick along with Washington Nationals pitcher Brian Dupra.

Our guest today is Dr. Mark Wetzel, chiropractor and neurology expert based out of Nashville, Tennessee.  Mark has been a guest on the show several times before, speaking about the physiological and neurological elements of the training method of “extreme isometrics” as well as the fantastic results that he achieved from using the method with a high school baseball team. Isometric holds of all sorts have become very popular in training in recent years, and for good reason.  Where typical “up and down” lifting is a bit of a shotgun approach to performance, isometrics can isolate very specific elements of our physiology, and allow us to devote the body’s resources to these specific elements, rather than a wider array of general elements that we find in more traditional strength methods. One of the things you may remember Mark talking about on previous shows is the idea of “cycling through the energy systems” while performing a long isometric hold, and if one can make it through all of these energy systems, then a large benefit can be derived by the athlete.  In recent conversations with Mark, he has been taking this further by teaching me how training maximally in one “energy system bracket” can optimize your performance in another “energy system bracket”. For example, most people in track and field are familiar with the idea of feeling more “warmed up” to do an explosive jump after running a 100 or 200-meter dash maximally.  In the team sport world, playing a pick-up game of basketball is often a better warm-up for explosive jumping than doing basically any sort of “traditional” warmup that you might find.  On the podcast today, Mark and I dig into these concepts, as well as reinforcing many important elements of the isometric hold itself, such as breathing, intention, posture and much more. 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.   Timestamps and Main Points 5:05 Why do an “extreme isometric” for 5 minutes, instead of just 2-3 minutes in length 17:40 What Mark sees in the midst of fatigue in an extreme isometric hold and how this resonates with what happens in sport and life itself in uncomfortable circumstances 26:00 The role and sequence of breathing in isometrics and exercise in general and how it contributes to one’s results and recovery from other bouts of training 33:00 Staying in a parasympathetic state, and letting the body choose when it wants to go sympathetic 35:00 The role of intention and focus in isometric lunges and beyond 43:50 Thoughts on the idea of using one energy system to recover another, and how a longer duration burst can improve a lower duration burst and vice versa “The last 2 minutes (of a 5 minute extreme isometric) is when you can really tap into that Cori cycle” “When we lose focus during (those last minutes of an extreme isometric lunge), we have to restart the (energetic) process” “It’s not so much like, I need to grunt it out and hold that 5 minutes because it’s going to make me better at what I’m doing.  It’s more about how much can I stay focused and how much can I hold the intention of what I’m doing in that 3-5’ window is going exponentially make you more successful at whatever you are trying to accomplish outside the isometric” “When you talk to yourself (positively) you release dopamine; and dopamine is going to help you hold on (to the isometric) slightly longer.  Changing how you view yourself is going to help you hold on to that isometric” “When visual people start to suffer (in an isometric) their eyes start wandering… if you are an auditory person, you are going to yell a lot, and if you are kinesthetic, those are the figety ones” “Isometrics will teach you to keep calm through real life situations” “Exhaling longer than you inhale gets you more CO2 tolerance… if you are a stressful or anxious person, your body cannot tolerate CO2 very well” “When I do my isometrics, I try to breathe in for 4 seconds, out for 8, every single time” “You can trick your brain to think you are staying calm and collected by using slow breathing” “It’s about letting the body decide when you need to be in (the sympathetic state) versus amping yourself up for it.  We know that staying in that state for long periods of time is not good for anything” “If you can hold onto an intention you can keep acetylcholine from breaking down” “When you stand erect, you will actually release serotonin while being in that position” “Every time you do an isometric, you need to ask, “what is my intention behind this isometric” “We have 4 systems, the initiation of muscle contraction (ATP), we have the anaerobic, followed by the aerobic, and lastly the Cori cycle.  Every time you enter one of the systems, it recovers the previous system” “When we train, we train to recover and we don’t train to strain” (Jay Schroeder) “The harder I gave effort into my “recovery” exercise, then the more I would feel explosive in the first exercise I was doing” “Our body uses gluco-neogenesis a little to make sure we can wake up and start our day without having to eat something” Show Notes Tommy John and Vlad Curguz iso lunge hold 5 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfEdRv7utNA&t=196s   About Dr. Mark Wetzel Dr. Mark Wetzel is a Chiropractor based in Nashville, TN. Dr. Mark received his Doctorate of Chiropractic from Northwestern Health Science University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dr. Mark has diverse experience and is an expert in the neurology branch of chiropractic care and sports performance. He completed his undergraduate studies from Indiana University while competing for the Indiana University Men’s Swimming and Diving Team. Dr. Mark has a passion for treating and educating people who want to achieve a healthier lifestyle, and enjoys helping them reach their health and fitness goals.