Episode 503 – Fearghal Kerin – “Managing T-junction injuries and location based hamstring rehab”

 

In this episode of the Pacey Performance Podcast, Fearghal Kerin, Rehabilitation Physiotherapist, Chelsea Football Club, discusses the growing prevalence of T-junction hamstring injuries and the importance of location-specific rehabilitation strategies.

 

Hamstring injuries are classified into sprint-type and stretch-type, with the T-junction—a confluence of the long and short head of the biceps femoris—being particularly susceptible to injury. This area is complex due to its dual force vectors, dual nerve supply, and bi-articular function, making it challenging to rehabilitate.

 

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

For a  comprehensive overview you might also like to read:

• Fearghal’s article – T-Junction Injuries of the Distal Biceps Femoris
• Hamstring rehabilitation in elite track and field athletes – Applying the British Athletics Muscle Injury Classification in clinical practice

 

Discussion topics:

 

“What’s behind the interest in hamstrings.  Was it a personal interest? Was it the PhD that sucked you in?  Did you manipulate that to fit what you wanted to look at the area you wanted to go down?”

 

“I’ve had a long time relationship with a professor at University College Dublin, someone who I collaborated with for some time and he came to me 2016-17 with a potential source of funding if we could figure out if I wanted to carry out a PhD, and Leinster Rugby have been amazing for a load of us guys who came through who were all able to complete a PhD through our time at Leinster.  So the question was, what would that actually look like?  I considered all body parts and initially my thought was let’s go down the concussion route.  It is so important for where that sport is going, and if we can make a difference in that area and contribution, it would seem like a very worthy thing to do.  But also at the time, like everybody who works in sport, there is the eternal challenge of hamstring injuries in the background and challenges you professionally with re-injuries and the growth of muscle injury classifications and being introduced to that for the first time, and wanting to be able to service the athletes a little bit better.  So I made the call, let’s go down the hamstring route.”

 

[Daz comment: Side note on on hamstring injury profile:]

 

Hamstring injuries remain the most frequent muscle injury in elite football, accounting for 34% of all muscle injuries. Even more problematic, they have a high tendency (up to 16%) to re-occur.  

 

• The proximal myotendinous junction is the most injured location in acute hamstring injuries and these injuries generally have a shorter return to play time than injuries affecting the free tendon
• The Bicep Femoris long head has received much research interest as it is the most commonly injured muscle of the hamstring group (more than 80%). It is most frequently injured during sport involving high speed running such as football, AFL, rugby and athletics; injuries occur predominantly in the proximal musculotendinous junction (MTJ)

 

Key concept:

 

The most frequently injured of the hamstring muscles is the biceps femoris (BF) in running sports. While these typically occur at the proximal musculotendinous junction (MTJ)  Entwisle, Ling has recently descripted the distal MTJ ‘T-Junction’ of the biceps femoris, formed by a complex confluence of the long head and short head in the distal posterior thigh. Injuries to this location have been suggested to be a more severe variant of HSI that should, like intramuscular tendon injuries, be treated as a distinct clinical entity.

 

Now back to the interview with Fearghal:

 

“Initially the decision was made we would do a project where we would look at recovery of neuromuscular factors associated with hamstring muscle re-injury:

 

• Strength
• Fascicle length
• EMG – activation and recovery in hamstring following injury

 

We couldn’t do this for a couple of reasons.  One being change in staffing meaning we couldn’t go down the EMG route the way we had hoped, and probably because of the onset of Covid we weren’t able to pursue the research we wanted to.  This meant that it made more sense to pivot a little bit, and I was becoming keener and keener in the area of location specific rehabilitation, and words like T-junction; you’re starting a conversations with people, “how are you managing your T junctions?” I’m seeing these things come up on a MRI scan, and we’re starting to look deeper and deeper into our functional rehabilitation of some of these injuries but are we playing with one hand tied behind our back in terms of the actual pathology and that was a concept that fascinated me because I felt that often we were beating ourselves up in terms of aspects of the rehabilitation, but what I was really interested in was whether we were doing the right things in the first place?

 

So I pursued that and then we carried out some reasonably large studies looking at our injury data retrospectively and injury location and made some suggestions then through different outputs we had and how that might influence rehabilitation?  I guess, once you’ve shown an interest in an area like hamstring injuries where it is so topical, it’s an emotive area for a lot of people in sport where we tend to feel exposed because we care so much and then we get stung with a reinjury.  People tend to reach out and then you create a network and a community, it’s a lot information sharing and finding out about how people are doing things globally and I guess I just went deeper and deeper down into that space and ultimately that’s probably what ended up allowing me the opportunity to move into my current role.”

 

“Briefly, where do you think the interest in the rehab space has come from in terms of education but also general interest from not just physiotherapists but S&C coaches like yourself? I think it’s booming.  The interest we get in terms of any sort of rehab content that we put out (even though that’s not the core content) people love, people are lapping it up.  S&c coaches often wanting to upskill in that area because they’re put in a situation where they are doing the late stage and maybe their education hasn’t positioned them to feel confident, and they’re looking for other ways.  What’s your perspective?”

 

“I completely agree.  I think two things:

 

• Personality – of the type of people who go into that space – they often tend to be S&C coaches with a massive growth mindset
• Evolution – Because you’re so patient facing all the time you have to demonstrate evolution – you have to demonstrate growth.

 

I guess people take this all very personally when results don’t go to plan.  It’s a fantastic feeling when you get someone back quickly without reinjuring them.  But there is no lower feeling than having to restart and go with a second plan to an athlete and explain why it hasn’t gone the way we wanted to and start from zero again, and try and maintain their trust the second time around.  So I think people are very, very engaged in trying to evolve their practice and personally I think it is a fascinating area; it’s a real blend of application of some principles around anatomical location and delivering S&C programmes that evolves over time – I often say with some of these injuries it’s just S&C for injured players!  This is a really exciting area where we can have some impact with our players, and it’s a major area that is growing and traditionally hasn’t been done that well.  S&C coaches tend to drag physios along traditionally and things like sport science, S&C have lead the way for physios and bringing the next iteration of what sports rehabilitation looks like.”

 

“So latest thinking on hamstring injury mechanisms from the industry as a whole but yours too?”

 

“I suppose the first concept on hamstring mechanism it based on Askling’s work which defined two main types of injury- binary and 2-Dimensional, but extremely appropriate and that was that we have:

 

• sprint type injuries – involve high speed running
• stretch type injuries – involve gliding/slide tackle and high kicks

 

Sprint type work according to Askling’s work will involve the long head of the bicep femoris.  Stretch type work will involve the proximal tendon of semimembranosus, with pain near ischial tuberosity and up to buttock. 

 

See full article here for further info:

 

 

Stretch type injury has an “over-stretching” mechanism so involving hip flexion, knee flexion, trunk flexion type mechanisms.    My perception had been that I think we are starting to see less incidence of players sprinting up the wing and pulling up with a sprint type injury.  I don’t think that’s necessarily something we see as much.  So one of the areas we decided to go down with the PhD was could we describe the actual actions associated with the injury and could we describe the biomechanical position via video analysis.  This had been done with a couple of other injury types for position of injury in ankle and ACL type injuries, and adductor injuries so we decided to follow that for hamstring injuries – see the abstract for the article:

 

– It’s not all about sprinting: mechanisms of acute hamstring strain injuries in professional male rugby union- a systematic visual video analysis – HERE

 

Results: Seventeen acute hamstring injuries (HSIs) were included in this study. Twelve per cent of the injuries were sustained during training with the remainder sustained during match-play. One HSI occurred due to direct contact to the injured muscle. The remainder were classified as indirect contact (ie, contact to another body region) or non-contact. These HSIs were sustained during five distinct actions – ‘running’ (47%), ‘decelerating’ (18%), ‘kicking’ (6%), during a ‘tackle’ (6%) and ‘rucking’ (18%). The most common biomechanical presentation of the injured limb was characterised by trunk flexion with concomitant active knee extension (76%). Fifty per cent of cases also involved ipsilateral trunk rotation.

 

Some other research came out by Thomas Gronwald a few months earlier

 

– Hamstring injury patterns in professional male football (soccer): a systematic video analysis of 52 cases.  Abstract link HERE

 

Results: 52 cases of hamstring injuries were included for specific pattern analysis. The pattern analysis revealed 25 sprint-related (48%) and 27 stretch-related hamstring injuries (52%). All sprint-related hamstring injuries occurred during linear acceleration or high-speed running. Stretch-related hamstring injuries were connected with closed chain movements like braking or stopping with a lunging or landing action and open chain movements like kicking. The kinematic analysis of stretch-related injuries revealed a change of movement involving knee flexion to knee extension and a knee angle of <45° at the assumed injury frame in all open and closed chain movements. Biceps femoris was the most affected muscle (79%) of all included cases.

 

👆 What they found, which challenged a little bit of what had gone before, unlike what had been found Askling, they found the stretch type mechanism ALSO involved bicep femoris.  

 

So I guess it starts to grow this idea of thinking about the injury mechanism in this 3-D multi-joint, multi-plane mode more than we probably thought about before because when we think of our understanding of kinematics and kinetics, some of that comes from upright treadmill running which isn’t the sport. Many of the Bundesliga injuries involved indirect contact, even some of their sprint type injuries, so thinking probably some kind of contact to the upper body.  So, again, while we traditionally think of hamstring injuries occurring in the late swing phase, what’s the contribution of trunk flexion to that? Of excessive hip flexion? Of trunk rotation?  So moving beyond a linear running model but also one that is more closely matched to the demands of the sport.

 

• Acceleration-deceleration-acceleration again
• Curved run
• Duel with an opponent
• Tackling and overreaching

 

The point that we tried to make with our slightly catchy title, “It’s not all about sprinting,” was to say that not all injuries occur at high speed.  We described injuries occurring during kicking, running, deceleration, tackling and in the ruck.  Characteristic of those injuries we saw was a combination of:

 

• Length
• Load
• Speed (rate of loading)

 

Any combination of those three things can result in hamstring injury.  We then published in our supplementary appendix where we also linked the biomechanical position to certain injury locations.

 

Do we need to think more of a 3-dimensional sport specific multi-directional rehabilitation strategy?

 

There are probably lessons to be learnt if we are seeing a consistent pattern of injury location associated with a consistent mechanism of injury.  That tells us a little about how that tissue was loaded and what positions that might be useful to us or should potentially be avoided during certain phases of the rehabilitation, and also it might help from the diagnostic perspective because certainly at some levels of the sport we don’t always have MRI available to us.  There are certain heuristics and rules of thumb, where if you can say to a clinician that with this mechanism we may want to be suspicious of this particular type of injury then that can be very, very helpful too.

 

“So are you still thinking along the same lines or have you moved on anything based on the experiences you’ve had in different sports and athletes?”

 

“No.  I think we’ve confirmed some key factors.  In involving these discussions with others, it’s what people tend to see.  A lot of people would share the feeling you don’t tend to see that many sprint type hamstring injuries anymore, as in purely linear sprint type hamstring injuries.  They tend to be associated with another action, be that some kind of change of direction or speed, some kind of contact or change of position of the upper body.

 

Whether that’s because athletes are stronger now than before; the Nordic curl research in football showed that 337 Newtons and being below that with short fascicle length puts you at risk of injury.  When we think that most athletes are quite a bit above that now as an average and perhaps we’re no longer having weak athletes that are below that strength threshold, we can now tolerate linear sprinting but now it’s certain other positions that we more likely get an injury associated with different types of mechanisms in slightly stronger athletes.  That could be different parts of the muscle, more frequently the intramuscular tendon, or influence different parts of the actual muscle itself so thinking a greater percentage of distal hamstring injuries than would have been described in research 10 years ago, I think we’re starting to see a different profile of hamstring injuries and that’s likely, in my opinion, related to changes in the sport and changes in the athletic profile.”

 

Distal Bicep Femoris Long Head (A biarticular hamstring muscle)

 

 

“T junction and hamstring injuries.  Just give us the basics – what is T junction for anyone who is listening and thinking, what is that?”

 

“I had a familiarity with the Tom Entwisle paper “Distal Musculotendinous T Junction Injuries of the Bicep Femoris” which originally described the anatomy of the T junction and I was aware it was something we were starting to see on MRI reports but hadn’t realised it was probably an area I needed to have a specific approach for.  So what is the T junction? It’s the confluence of the long and short head of the bicep femoris.

 

The bicep femoris, as its name suggests, has two heads – the long head (which is the bi-articular component) and the short head, arising more distally (mono-articular hamstring muscle, meaning it only crosses the knee joint).  They form at the T junction because it’s a T shaped structure and it is thought to be an area of the hamstring that is either at particular risk of injury, or will certainly be more complicated when it gets injured because 1) it’s a complex area and doesn’t really fit within any grading or classification structure in terms of the anatomy of the structure itself but also 2)  there are duel force vectors and different angles from the long head and short head when they join together.  There is also a duel nerve supply with a bi-articular function and lengthening of the long head during hip flexion and knee extension, with the contribution of short head to knee flexion.

 

Entwisle et al describe the distal musculotendinous T junction (DMTJ) of the biceps femoris where the opposing anterolateral aspect of the long head and the posterolateral aspect of the short head form the musculotendinous junction which appears as a T-shaped structure.  They report higher reinjury rates involving this DMTJ of biceps femoris muscle in their cross-sectional study of 106 injuries in Australian Football players. The reinjury rate was 54%, with 86% of subsequent injuries being the same or of higher grade than the index injury.

 

So with such a high reinjury rate (54%) then the challenge becomes how do you then manage these injuries? Do they need much longer time? Does that mean that they need a specific type of rehabilitation?  Does it need an intervention of some sort such as surgery etc?

 

In our own analysis of injuries [in Rugby], we were able to determine that for us 20% of our hamstring injuries during a 5 year period involved the T junction, and about half of our distal hamstring injuries were T junction injuries.  So I would say that if you had a distal hamstring injury, based on our findings in that group and in that sport (rugby), at that time, there is a 50:50 chance your distal hamstring injury may extend within the T junction.

 

It is suggested that these injuries don’t heal as well and heal as cleanly as other type of hamstring injuries.  They settle asymptomatically in 3-4 weeks (and in my experience they settle in 2-4 days).  They feel good really, really quickly and you take them up to 70% and everything looks great.  Then as soon as you add sport specific demands to your T junction injuries (whether that’s specifically around rotation) or whether that’s acceleration and reaching and trunk flexion (more proximal) and particularly trunk rotation (more distal) for these injury types you then get a second injury, and that’s when things become more challenging.  Particularly with your quicker athletes, I think your chances of you getting a good outcome on these I think is traditionally thought to be lower.  And some of it is probably because our assessment is limited; what we do on the bed, what we do from a strength diagnostic point of view, we don’t have strong rotational tests and probably due to the nature of the injury having a shearing component these injuries appear to be good really quickly and then they tend to let us down.

 

Probably what I see and what I talk about is I think there is a very consistent injury mechanism – it’s trunk rotation.  I think it’s the ratio of different components of movement that define injury location.

 

More proximal injuries tend to be more trunk flexion.  Distal injuries tend to be more trunk rotation.

 

Because the distal injury mechanism seems to be related to trunk rotation that probably explains why we can take them through a clinical assessment and they look good, and we can take them through the early stage of rehabilitation and they look good but we’re not actually sufficiently or appropriately shearing the injury location to determine whether it is actually a stable configuration.”

 

“You mentioned location specific rehab.  Would you be able to give us a few examples so people can really get a sense of how that looks in practice?”

 

“If we are saying that there are different injury sub types then the principle comes from let’s say 30% of hamstring injuries reoccur, so within that, 70% don’t.  So the question then is, is there something specific in those 30% that causes them to reoccur? Is it that it’s the intramuscular tendon, the T junction or what exactly is it?

 

We think most injuries return within 3 weeks but the end stage of muscle healing is 6 weeks and beyond.  If we think that certain injury locations are likely to break down then do we give consideration to anatomical healing more so in those cases, and then are there specific actions that should be taken during the rehabilitation process that respects the anatomical healing?

 

If we take a location specific approach it’s across the entire process, so I’ll split all my rehabilitation considerations into:

 

• Anatomical
• Functional

 

The first principle of the British Athletics Muscle Injury Classification (BAMIC) approach of hamstring muscle rehabilitation is to establish an actual structural diagnosis and I think that’s absolutely critical and it certainly underpins location specific approach.  Once you’ve determined that you can then set expectations around what is a normal time to return to play for this athlete.  We can then start to periodise what we do within that time.  We can then reconsider the reinjury risk and then start to think about what are the influences of this on tissue loading, is this is an injury that is going to respond to specific types of loading ie. are we trying to get a specific adaptation within the muscle tendonous junction, within the intramuscular tendon? Can we lean into research from other disciplines, other tendinopathy research and can we learn about heavy slow resistance and how can that be applied to it too?

 

We can also think specific type of injuries that bias particular locations within the muscle, ie. if we know that hip hinge type exercises (research points to 45 degree hip extension exercise, primarily for me I would use the RDL as my main hip hinge exercise) well we know that is going to have the greatest activation of the proximal hamstring.  So perhaps if we have a proximal hamstring injury we might delay the hinge type work until later on in the rehab.   We might delay outer range eccentric exercises initially because we are trying to respect the anatomy of the injury because we have deemed that to be important.”

 

[Daz comment: Side note on muscle healing 👇 – from article: WHAT IS A HAMSTRING INJURY?]

 

As clinicians dealing with hamstring muscle injuries, it is pivotal to understand the basics of muscle healing to optimise our rehabilitation of these injuries. Simultaneously, this knowledge is useful to manage stakeholder expectations and most importantly, the athlete’s risks of (early) return to sport. Most muscle injuries happen at the MTJ. This area is frequently thought of as the weakest link in the chain, because the MTJ is where the projections of the myofibers interface with the connective tissue.

 

Fibroblasts deposit scar tissue in the gap and as this scar tissue matures, it forms new MTJs with the stumps of the damaged fibres. This maturation is driven by mechanical loading. This is exactly the process where the clinician can provide the most benefit through mechanotherapy.  Traditionally, management of acute hamstring injuries (or other acute muscle injuries) included a set amount of days of treatment with (P)RICE, usually combined with passive/active stretching before active loading is commenced. However, there is no strong evidence supporting this approach when managing acute hamstring injuries in the early period. Bleakley et al already suggested a revision of this model called POLICE, adding in Optimal Loading (OL) as a replacement for Rest (R). The aim is to encourage clinicians to think about the optimal progression of rehabilitation and apply an appropriate loading strategy during the first crucial days of rehabilitation. Most likely, relative rest is not ideal as confirmed by recent studies suggesting that an early start with rehabilitation expedites return to sport.  Considering the anatomy, physiology and mechanotherapy presented here, we might suggest a basic clinical guideline:

 

Respect the healing tissue, but start loading early!

 

Now back to the podcast interview:

 

“So then we can periodise accordingly if we think that there are specific types of exercises that may overly stress the injury location, perhaps we are going to allow for an initial protective or early loading phase where we will control the:

 

• contraction type – we might start with isometric in the first instance, and delay eccentric until a certain time point
• length – not overly stressing towards outer range.  So if we are doing knee dominant work we will do from inner to mid range
• load – change rep range
• control – delay unanticipated movements and keep the rehab 2-dimensional in the first instance

 

High-density electromyography activity in various hamstring exercises

 

 

We can control these factors and layer them in over time.  Using RDL as an example we could:

 

• Range – change to a rack pull
• Load – make it supramaximal for certain parts of the movement or make it light and use it as a movement patterning exercise
• Perturbations – while they are doing an isometric hip hinge hold I can perturb them with a Swissball or they could do bounds ending up in an RDL position, or they could bounce a ball in that position, and even adding in some rotational components to it and some unanticipated movements.

 

Given that early recurrence is a key feature is this injury, the pace of progression is critical. If attempting to offload the distal BF, exercises that preferentially activate the medial hamstring or proximal BF may be indicated. In addition, initially restricting range of motion and rate of force development, as well as muscle length across the two involved joints are characteristics of exercise selections that can be manipulated and progressed, while still giving consideration to prioritising the adaptations that might be necessary to prevent recurrence.

 

 

What environment are we trying to create?  Can we create an environment eliminates those signs of re-injury on an MRI through early injury specific rehabilitation that allows for a resolution of the oedema and return of tension by appropriately staging our rehabilitation? So that by the time we actually progress through the rehabilitation we have actually achieved the goals: we have increased their eccentric strength, we have increased the fascicle length and we have prepared them for the game.  Can we create an environment where the scan looks good, we have a return of tension and not overly stressed them but they are now ready to progress back into the sport safely.  We have ticked off the functional components of the rehabilitation to return to where they were before while also possibly getting the adaptations they needed at the injury location itself.

 

British Athletics first reported their re-injury rates for C type injuries at around 60% back in 2016, so similar to the T-junction type injuries, on the absolute higher end.  For those athletes it is  important to note that when we talk about the British Athletics research, we’re talking about really really quick guys so we are not talking about a field sport, a change of direction/reactive team sport.  But we are talking about about athletes whose speed is well above 10 m/s and are certainly super elite athletes with re-injury rates of 60%.  They described through their approach in Ben McDonald’s paper on hamstring rehabilitation (2019) framework with examples of 2b and c hamstring rehabilitation exercises.  I always If you could only read one paper for hamstring rehabilitation injury I would just refer to this paper.  It’s an absolute must read, very digestible and has examples of 2b and 2c type rehabilitation type programmes from track & field based sport.  It’s a seminal paper for me.

 

But how can we have our management influenced by muscle injury location to change from 60% to a re-injury rate down to something that more matches some of the other injury locations?  They put their money where their mouth is and published their findings after applying this framework and they had dropped from 60% re-occurrence rate down to 0% in C type injuries within a 4 year period!

 

This is contentious because there is different methodologies across the literature.  We can compare their outcomes with other sports but it’s not the same, they are much quicker.  For their 2c type injuries they returned in 5 weeks and for their 3c type injuries 7 weeks with successful outcomes.  But how do you copy & paste that to field sports?

 

• Should that field sport athlete take a little bit longer – because once we get them to say 5-7 weeks we now need to add in a sport specific acceleration-deceleration ball work reactive phase?
• Or do we need to take a little bit less time – because the athletes don’t hit the same absolute massive speeds that the track & field athletes do?

 

So it’s difficult to copy & paste that with any other sports.  There is also research carried from Qatar and the group at Aspetar and they showed within their cohort they didn’t see a increase in reinjury and they only see a small difference in time to return to play so they would conclude that intramuscular tendon injuries don’t warrant being defined as a distinct clinical entity.  This was a unique study because the researchers and athletes were blinded to the specific injury profile.

 

We found in our research [from Leinster] that C type (intramuscular) injuries took three times longer than other types of A and B type injuries but you can very justifiably argue that, “well, of course they did because weren’t blinded with the outcomes and you think they take longer, so of course they take longer!  We didn’t have higher reoccurrence rates for intramuscular tendon injuries, but we also took three times longer so I guess taking longer you’d want to have lower reoccurence rates than other injury types.

 

Because of the difference in methodologies, because of the difference in sports we can’t compare across but for what it is worth, my opinion experientially , this injury location warrants being treated differently.

 

TO BE CONTINUED………

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

1. Hamstring injuries remain the most frequent muscle injury in elite football
2. Two main types of injury- binary and 2-Dimensional, but extremely appropriate and that was that we have: sprint type injuries – involve high speed running & stretch type injuries – involve gliding/slide tackle and high kicks
3. Limitation in current assessment of injuries – need to think more of a 3-dimensional sport specific multi-directional rehabilitation strategy?
4. Injury mechanism – More proximal injuries tend to be more trunk flexion.  Distal injuries tend to be more trunk rotation.
5. Rehabilitation model – need for more location specific approach.  Respect the healing tissue, but start loading early!

 

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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In today’s blog I’m bringing you another Pacey Performance Podcast Review.  This podcast came at a great time as I have been reflecting on the APA Method in recent days.  Whenever you onboard a new member of staff (we have recently recruited a new Head of S&C in one of our Tennis Academy contracts) it’s naturally a good time to reflect on your keystones or “pillars” of the programme.

 

I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Kelvin Giles when he came back to the UK in 2008.  He was doing some consultancy with British Tennis at the time and he was kind enough to share with me an early version of his “Movement Dynamics” physical competency manual.  This manual was a huge influence on my understanding of how to help young athletes improve their movement efficiency and ability to “move well.”  Taking players through a Physical Competency Assessment (PCA) became a keystone of APA’s method, which is still there to this day.

 

Kelvin talks extensively about the broader topic of how to engage our current and future generations of young people with an active lifestyle, and in his opinion, the failings of having the only solution being one based around competitive sport.

 

“Every activity, every word spoken to the young people in our physical education or in our junior club coaching sessions is geared around Results, Ranking and Rewards, which creates ongoing critical stress points to this young person, who is just trying to navigate their growth and and it’s detrimental to their individual progression to adulthood.

 

79% of 8-14yrs old are not getting the required amount of daily physical activity. 

 

Just from the stats of “how much” physical activity they are getting, we are in a woeful situation.  But one of the key things for me when you start  to discuss and debate this topic, is let’s not just deal with how much physical activity, the critical one is HOW this is being done.  What are these kids being exposed to by these adult ambitions that are being forced upon them? What’s the progression that they are going on for the next decade?  The physical was taken out of physical education around 40 years ago, and it was decided that our physical education in schools and our junior sports development would build everything around a competitive games-based solution, and we think that it’s the only vehicle we can ever use to get kids moving!  The only solution is to give them a competitive  win-lose type of strategy.  It’s failed, and it’s failed for 40 years!  The 3 Rs are not conducive to development.  There is no such thing as a high performance talent at 8-15 yrs.  We need to give children the enthusiasm to move and to keep moving for the rest of their lives so they stay active is vitally important. The 3 Rs is for high performance but we have a bigger responsibility to the rest of the people in our community.”

 

[Daz comment- Although this topic is one close to my heart, for this particular blog post I’ll summarise the first 30 minutes. I  then skip to focus in on the second part of the discussions around your “coaching toolkit, which was discussed in the last 20 minutes.]

 

Episode 481 – Kelvin Giles – “Changing the narrative around health and performance of young athletes and people.”

In this episode of the Pacey Performance Podcast, after 7 years since he first appeared on the show, Rob is joined by High Performance Consultant, Kelvin Giles. With a career spanning decades in both the UK and Australia, Kelvin brings a wealth of experience and insight into the challenges and successes of coaching. This episode takes an in-depth look at the shifting landscape of youth sports, focusing on the critical need for a holistic approach to training and well-being.

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

”The high performance interest from professional clubs.  At the bottom of their pyramid is participation – it’s physical fitness in schools.  That’s where they are picking from at 8,9 and 10 years old.  So with that in mind, what is the solution in terms of that base level of keeping kids active or pushing on to high performance?”

 

”Whether you want to send them on the pathway to high performance sport, where all the money goes, or you want your child to have health and wellbeing for the rest of their lives, they both start at the same place, so there is no excuse!

 

If your development programme and your high performance programme look exactly the same, then one of them is wrong.  If all you’re doing is watering down the high performance factors, and trying to force that into the children so you think you’ll have an easier pathway to high performance, you’re wrong!  And you’ve been wrong for 50 years.

 

So it’s going to come down to, who is brave enough and wise enough, to change the mindset of the adults, the language of the adults, the general outcomes that we are going to put down and applaud which is not results, ranking, and rewards.  It’s going to have to be something else, like ENGAGEMENT.  How can we keep engaging them every single day, this individual that keeps turning up.  How can we PROGRESS them appropriately?  Can we engage the individual in this group, or we just going to lump them all together and just wait until we see the one talent.

 

Coach Education & Mentoring

 

• Are the coaches using sound learning tools from their toolbox (discussed later in the blog), from implicit learning right through to explicit learning?

• Where’s the quality control coming from?  How’s the national governing body interacting with the coaches? Are they coming down to your club and seeing how you are and watching what you’re doing and mentoring you forward?

 

Usually the reply is, “No! Once we’ve got our certificate we’re on our own, so it’s in those areas that the solutions have to be found, from the mindset, the vocabulary, right through to what we are teaching our teachers and coaches.  What skills are we wanting the coaches to have?

 

It took me three years to get anywhere near understanding how I’ve got to try and teach physical education, and even that wasn’t enough, let alone doing just one weekend course for £250 and then letting you loose and hoping that you can go and win the medals for people. 

 

Can’t you see how it’s just a nonsense.  Yet there are bureaucrats continuing with this process.  But there are pockets of best practice dotted around the world including notably Jeremy Fisch

 

 

In the second part of the podcast, we switch up to focus on the “Coaches’ Toolkit.”

 

”The last thing we will discuss is what should be in a coaches’ toolbox, and I think by coach we could mean someone in high performance, we could mean someone who is working in a primary school or a secondary school etc”

“I’ve got nine things, and the sad thing about just you and me chatting now, is that unless you’re in a room with these people and you’re with them for a couple of days and you’re with them for several weeks, and you say okay, get out your chairs; we’re going to choose one of these tools here and you’re going to practice it.  You’re going to practice it in pairs, then you’re going to practice it in a group, and we’re all going to watch!  We are going to criticise it and then help you out and then you’re going to do it again.  Then we’re going to come and do it again tomorrow and you’re going to keep practising and practising, and you’re going to make terrible mistakes.  We’re going to be here to support you and we’re going to help you through this and we’re going to build your confidence!

 

1. THE INDIVIDUAL – who are they, where are they, how are they? Not just when they first arrive, but all the way through the session, through the week, through the month, through the cycle, the year, the decade. it never stops!
2. UNDERSTAND THE KEYSTONES – those central pillars of a movement pattern, or an individual pattern inside the foundation movements, or a collective pattern inside the fundamental movements that glue everything together.  It takes a long time to become au fait with those, but that’s part of the job.  For example, getting kids to run as one of the fundamental movements.  So my keystones, the ones that I’ve settled on after 50 years of doing this might not be the same as what you might do.  Mine are: where the foot hits the ground, and in what direction the foot comes off the ground.  Every exercise and activity I do is aimed around those keystones.  So if I take that to the next step, when I see that happen in front of me, it means “toes up, heel to hamstring, step over the opposite knee,”  that becomes where I keep all my attention and I aim at that, and I know if I get those optimal for this individual, those keystones optimal, whatever exercise I pull in are all all aiming slowly in some way, generally. related, specifically, efficiency, consistency, resilience that’s where I’ve finished up
3. PREPARE FOR SESSION – you’ve got to understand time management, space management and equipment management inside this session.  You’ve got to manage time between technical, tactical, physical and behavioural.  We have to keep a sport specific element going on, there has got to be an essence of the sport that the athlete has turned up at a rugby club to play rugby!  That time mangement has got to handle the general to relatedness to specific to make sure I’ve given enough time to those.  Is there enough space for this activity to be done well and safely?  Is there enough space so that there is no queuing going on? Is there enough space for you to coach in, by walking around.  Is the equipment appropriate?.  Have you got enough and where is it?  The athlete will determine what comes next.  So write the session plan in pencil because you’ve got to have adaptability in your coaching because you might need to spend more or less time on something depending on how they respond.  You might need to accelerate an activity for an individual or group who is flying, or you might need to back off if they are struggling.  Where should I stand to look out for the keystones?
4. PLAN THE SESSION ITSELF – a typical session for children is 10 five to seven minute units for a group of 8 year olds.  Ten different sections to keep their attention and cover all the things I’ve said before: Let’s take an example of a running based session plan: warm-up, general running (forwards, backwards, sideways), then some locomotion of hopping, skipping and galloping and then I’m going to work on the event specific keystones, then I’m going to do some of my physical work (squat, lunge, brace, rotate, gait) then I’m going to apply some of the things we have learnt into a fun game such as a relay race.  Now I’m halfway through my session and I’m going to go through it all again, and then I’m going to warm them down. If it’s with the 14 yrs old then maybe I’m going to spend a little bit longer in each unit and do eight times eight units because their attention span is a little bit better.  You are going to fit this programme to these athletes, the opposite has never worked!  Change it on a second to second basis to fit with what is going on.
5. UNDERSTAND THE TOOLS OF PROGRESSION – static to dynamic, simplex to complex, slow to fast, big to small, unloaded to loaded.  Turn the exercise up/turn the exercise down – you do what they can do, you don’t chose how fast they can learn it.  Start with what they can do.  Whoops that was too hard, go back to what they can do!
6. MANIPULATE THE TASK – use analogies to try and create pictures.  Get them to have an external focus, get them to use observation skills with their partner
7. BRING VARIABILITY INTO THE WAY YOU TEACH
8. PROVIDE FEEDBACK – when, what are you are going to feedback, and how are you going to feedback? Start with what’s going right.  You never try and give them feedback while they are doing it.  Choose words that give them pictures straight away.  Ask tjhem questions more than giving them instructions.  Try harder, go faster are meaningless feedback
9. REFLECTION – after 5 minutes ask is this working? Have I engaged them all? Then reflect at the end of the session? Did I engage them all? Was it fun? Will they all want to come back again? Did I progress them in some way, not just outcomes of winning performances?

Top 5 Take Away Points:

1. Results, Ranking and Rewards – creates ongoing critical stress points to this young person.
2. Today’s children are inactive – 79% of 8-14yrs old are not getting the required amount of daily physical activity.
3. Current solution is not fit for purpose – we build everything around a competitive games-based solution, and we think that it’s the only vehicle we can ever use to get kids moving!
4. Time for change – We need the key stakeholders to change the way we approach the coaching of the athletes and also the coaching of the coaches!
5. Importance of a coach toolkit – the essential skill any coach needs to successfully coach a group of athletes.

 

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
• Share this post using the buttons on the top and bottom of the post. As one of this blog’s first readers, I’m not just hoping you’ll tell your friends about it. I’m counting on it.
• Leave a comment, telling me where you’re struggling and how I can help

 

Since you’re here…

 

…we have a small favuor to ask.  APA aim to bring you compelling content from the world of sports science and coaching.  We are devoted to making athletes fitter, faster and stronger so they can excel in sport. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — APA TEAM

 

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In today’s blog I’m bringing you another Pacey Performance Podcast Review.  Full disclosure, I’ve focused on part 1 of the podcast chat – which focuses more on the conditioning methods chat.  Part 2 was all about the role of sport science, which I haven’t mentioned below, so if you’re interested in listening to what they spoke about on that topic, you’ll need to listen to part 2.  This podcast came at a great time as I have been gearing up to support a few professional tennis players on their “pre-season.”

 

As Aaron discusses in the podcast chat, certain sports present certain challenges from a physical conditioning standpoint.  Even though Aaron was talking about MMA and later on about baseball, I think almost all of the lessons apply to Tennis.  In Tennis, you can compete year round, and as one of my colleagues in Tennis, Joe Reed mentioned during his first experience working in Tennis over 2 years ago,

 

“This opportunity opened my eyes to a new sport (tennis) which can only be described as potentially the most physically, mentally and emotionally demanding out of any sport I’ve coached in. Due to the 11 ½ month competition schedule and non-existent off-season, which is seen in the majority of sports. The athletes are expected to endure long weeks in which they have to manage school, and tennis and maintain outside interests from the age of 10 and up.  The realities of the sport gave me a true appreciation for the athletes that compete and the level of drive necessary to compete at the highest level.“

 

I’m not going to get into a mud slinging debate as to which sport is the toughest physically, or which one is the toughest to plan for physically.  Let’s just leave it as tennis is right up there.  As for the “non existent off-season” that Joe was describing, to give you a taster, the pro athlete I’m preparing a plan for is currently out competing, starting their second of three final events of the year. They will come back for a less than one week “off-season” over the Christmas period, and then doing a one month “pre-season” to prepare for playing around 60+ matches over at least 25 weeks of the year, that will start at the end of January 2024.  Now, if that same player isn’t consistently qualifying through to Main Draw (which you need to do to earn professional ranking points) then they likely will need to play for more than 25 weeks to chase those ranking points.

 

Even though that might not sound quite as hectic as a baseball, cricket or basketball competition period, you have to remember that in reality most players trying to climb up the rankings are out there for 25+ weeks of the year in competition mode, have perhaps a few weeks at best completely off to rest, and 4 weeks “pre-season.”   This leaves around 20 weeks to “top up” physical qualities, usually in mini training cycles of 7-21 days, often book-ended by travel from and to their next competition.  So you have to allow a few days either side to manage fatigue.  In reality you have to be really clear on what are the physical themes that will give you the most bang for your buck and push the physical envelope, as you might only have a 7-day window to create some adaptations that will support their physical development throughout the year.

 

Episode 473 – Aaron Cunanan – “What team sport coaches can learn from UFC about conditioning methods.”

In the Pacey Performance Podcast, host Rob Pacey engages with Aaron Cunanan, the Director of Applied Sports Science for the Cincinnati Reds, delving into various facets of his professional journey and perspectives on sports science. Cunanan begins by acknowledging the influence of mentors like Duncan French, Jeff Head, and John Wagle, who have significantly impacted his development both as a professional and an individual.

 

Cunanan’s career transition from a weightlifting athlete to a coach marks a pivotal point in his narrative. His initial coaching experiences under Dr. Kyle Pierce at the International Weightlifting Federation provided him with valuable insights into systematic and process-oriented coaching in Olympic sports.

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

”From an adaptation point of view, maybe the weightlifting comes first (to mind as a training tool, given your background in weightlifting), can you take us through an example where you intended to go with X in an ideal world, but because of A,B,C and X,Y, Z we have had to go this route?”

 

”During my time in the UFC and seeing those athletes train and looking at some situations where you have a long time before athletes fight, and they have several months before they next fight, you are able to go through an actual general [physical] preparation phase (GPP) where you might include some weightlifting movements and maybe you are starting out with someone who has zero resistance training experience, and you are going through basic barbell exercises and introducing some simple derivatives or variations from weightlifting.   But the world of MMA is insane.  There are so many different training elements that they are managing from day to day.  You have striking, grappling, wrestling, Ju jitsu, then actual MMA training, then you throw the physical preparation on top of it, recovery and all that sort of stuff.  They may be training for 5, 6, sometimes 7 days a week and maybe things are going great, like I said, you’re introducing these basic weightlifting variations, and suddenly they tweak their shoulder during Ju jitsu, or they tweak their knee.  That may put certain exercises or variations off the table, at least in the short term, or maybe for the rest of the training block.  So, during that general preparation phase you are trying to build general physical capacities, and if you have taken that specific exercise or group of exercises off the table, how are you going to adjust?

 

Maybe you switch over to loaded plyometrics, or something like that.  So even in a world where resistance training hasn’t always been very embedded within martial arts and MMA (The UFC has done a great job of advancing the approaches to development and training within MMA) you are getting people that for the most part have a really low training age, and you really have to think about the other demands that are being placed upon them.  A lot of time you do have the time from a learning standpoint and a physical development standpoint to make good use of the weightlifting movements but maybe because of all the other things they are doing that day, that week, those exercises are off the table because of not necessarily injuries, but slight tweaks, or soreness or fatigue that may just make that type of training ineffective.  So you have to be able to understand what is the next best thing, or what else can I do in place of that?

 

Keeping in mind the quote,

 

 

there is no perfect fit.  You do something to gain in these things, but you also may lose out on some other areas.  As a practitioner, it is important to be able to and willing to stand behind your decisions and have a good rational and thought process in place for why you make those decisions to be able to defend them if you need to, and being aware of a variety of different modalities so if you do have to make an adjustment, you have different options that you are able to call upon.”

 

“We have seen that [sport] coaches are looking to track & field coaches for education, inspiration, knowledge, experience in building fast people and we are integrating that into team sports.  I think that is definitely happening more in the conditioning world, people looking to different sports who are perhaps a little bit further ahead in the conditioning sphere, and trying to see how it can be transferred into baseball, for example.  So, I’d just like to get your take on UFC and what you learnt there from a conditioning perspective, and how that’s influenced and helped you transition into other sports like baseball?”

 

“For me, one of the most exciting things as a practitioner and as a fan of MMA, I think it is the ultimate n = 1 sport in the world.  You have so many different scenarios of working with a fighter who has just signed their first contract with UFC and they’re getting ready for their first fight, all the way through to champions in a weight class that are getting ready for a title defence, and everything in between, including fighters that are changing weight classes, so literally no two instances are the same with any of the fighters, so that can create a lot of challenges but that for me I think is one of the exciting things about trying to solve those challenges, and how you come up with appropriate “trade offs” for those scenarios.  But it does create a lot of difficulties in dealing with these fractured time lines, or these unpredictable time lines.

 

You might get a scenario where you are working with a fighter who doesn’t have a fight scheduled and they get a call for a short notice fight in 2 weeks.  So, what do from a conditioning standpoint for a fighter who has 2 weeks to prepare?  Or what do you do with a fighter who is on an 8-week training plan, getting ready for a fight and then their opponent gets injured so then the fight gets pushed back another several weeks, so you have just completely disrupted the timelines there.  So, from a periodisation standpoint there is certainly a lot of challenges in terms of how you go about approaching that and addressing that.  But I think that utilising the principles of periodisation and periodised programming still can really help you address all of those different scenarios from a conditioning standpoint.

 

I talked earlier about all of the different training elements involved in an MMA athlete’s day to day, so you are really trying to make sure that you are aware of and managing all of the different units of training and you should be, I think, trying to maximise training economy.  Where are those opportunities that you can work on conditioning, or specific elements of the conditioning, within some sort of sport specific martial arts practice versus what should you try to address within an S&C specific session?  In an ideal world, if you have the ability to run a full quote unquote “training cycle”, principles of periodisation can be followed:

 

• Simple to complex
• General to specific
• High volume to low volume
• Less intense to more intense

 

From a conditioning standpoint, one of the clearest or most useful spectrums to think along is Global adaptation to local muscle endurance, and how that transitions or fits across that ideal timeline.  You may start to work with a fighter at any point along that spectrum and they may not have already gone through a GPP phase, but you pick them up when they would be in a specific preparation phase (SPP) or in the case of a fighter who is taking a short notice fight, in 2 weeks.  That is not enough time from a physiological standpoint to chase cardiac adaptation or any sort of big changes in capacity.  That could be enough time to work on some high intensity endurance through high intensity intervals but with that comes some additional fatigue during a time when (especially if they weren’t specifically preparing for this fight) probably should be sharpening their skills or making sure they’re up to the task from a technical standpoint.  So we know that there is a relationship between increased fatigue and technical execution so what’s the trade-off there that you’re willing to go after?  Is that periodised training? If periodised training is aligning your goals and objective to the available timeline, then I think so.  Some might argue otherwise but the reality of the situation is that you have to understand what adaptations are possible within a given timeline?  What’s your proposed ideal plan for sequencing those adaptations? Then, being able to coordinate with the technical side of things and the sport specific training, I think that’s where you can make the biggest gains or have the biggest impact in terms of not adding too much additional fatigue outside of what they are already doing, but making sure you have a specific training effect to the adaptations or conditioning that they might need.

 

A realisation I’ve had, which is not something I expected, is that I see so many similarities in terms of weightlifting through to the MMA world through to the baseball world.  Those tight schedules, a lot of training elements, high skill natured sport with focus on the technical execution and the importance of that.”

 

“From a conditioning point of view in baseball, moving to the present day, what does conditioning look like for your guys?  Obviously there is probably multiple buckets of athletes depending on positional requirements, and scheduling wise, who’s involved, who’s not involved etc  But what does it look like for you?”

“Going back to what are the demands of the sport, we can focus on pitching specifically, by and large it is not an aerobic task in the sense that it is not long continuous activity, but I would say that it is aerobic, or at least, has a high cardiac demand from the standpoint that when the pitcher is on the mound their heart rate is 85% plus of heart rate max the entire time they are on the mound, even though with the introduction of the pitch clock this last season, they are throwing a pitch every 15-20 seconds, depending on if there is a person on base or not.  And so that ability to repeat those high intensity efforts of throwing a pitch at max or near max effort with an elevated heart rate for that prolonged period of time, I think, to me points towards the importance of having a strong cardiovascular system from a very basic standpoint.  Then throw on top of that from a bioenergetic standpoint, rephosphorylation of creatine is primarily takes place through mitochondria respiration which requires aerobic capacity.  So, not to dive into the physiology too much, I do think that there is a strong case for having a robust cardiovascular system to support the efforts of pitching both from the cardiovascular strain that these pitchers experience while they are on the mound, and then also from their recovery in between those high intensity efforts.

 

It’s pretty clear, you can go into any physiology text book, to see how to improve those things.  Going back to talking about what we were talking about earlier, how do you do that within the environment that you are in, both in terms of equipment that is available, time that is available, when during the year you have the ability to work with these athletes?  In terms of setting a base and foundation standpoint, I think that’s my general philosophy.  And then obviously how that fits in with a specific pitching standpoint in terms of the arm and shoulder being conditioned and ready to throw at high intensity, and what the throwing programme looks like from the off-season, to preparing for that spring training camp, to getting ready for the season.  Again, if we are looking from a macro periodisation standpoint, your off-season training, pre-season training and in-season training, sport specific activity from a throwing standpoint is going to be different just like any other team sport, or any other sport, your conditioning activities off the field should compliment what the objectives of the sport specific training are.  So, you may go from more general aerobic capacities in the off-season from a conditioning standpoint, to more introduction of different circuits, whether that is plyometrics circuit or med ball circuits, or whatever, with just a little bit more higher intensity, repeated effort type circuits, to more pure high power output type activities as we get really close the the spring training period.  Those timelines may shift, or emphasis may be more or less depending on the specific case but speaking in generalities that gives you the meat and potatoes of it.

“One of the easiest adaptations to go after in the off-season would be increasing left ventricular volume, and you do that through low-intensity steady state for really extended periods of time, it’s boring but it is super effective.  From a compliance standpoint, there is probably a more nuanced conversation to land on what the exact training prescription is going to be but you are looking at heart rates at zone 2  (which is all the rage these days) for really extended periods of time, 30 minutes to an hour plus of uninterrupted zone 2 type training around that heart rate intensity.  That helps to target the increase of the left ventricular volume to help increase the amount of blood that is getting pumped out with each beat to the periphery.

 

As you transition closer to the pre-season camp or your spring training, then you might be able to go after your longer intervals of 4-6 minutes at 80-90% heart rate max, or maybe a little bit higher depending on the fitness level.   That’s where you are getting into stressing the cardiovascular system and the heart specifically to sustain that high heart rate for extended periods of time.  So for me, that’s how I would manage that transition of building a capacity of the heart to fill and deliver blood to the periphery and then you’re making it a little bit more specific with the longer intervals at the higher intensities to be able to allow the heart to sustain and manage that workout or output for those extended periods of time.  That would then probably shift into shorter intervals, not necessarily running or bike but more of the whole total body whether that is med ball or some sort of plyometric interval-based approach, where you are doing repeated high intensity outputs every 10-15-20 seconds, 3-5 reps of that, multiple sets of that to build in that robustness to be able to execute those near maximal or maximum efforts back to back to back.  So that would be the general sequence of those type of activities that would be appropriate.”

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

1. Maximise training economy – Where are those opportunities that you can work on conditioning, or specific elements of the conditioning, within some sort of sport specific martial arts practice versus what should you try to address within an S&C specific session?
2. Global adaptation to local muscle endurance – From a conditioning standpoint , one of the clearest or most useful spectrums to think along is Global adaptation to local muscle endurance, and how that transitions or fits across that ideal timeline of a training cycle.
3. Utilising principles of Periodisation – you have to understand what adaptations are possible within a given timeline?  What’s your proposed ideal plan for sequencing those adaptations?
4.  Pitching has an aerobic cost – heart rate is 85% plus of heart rate max the entire time they are on the mound.
5. Conditioning should compliment not compete with technical practices – your conditioning activities off the field should compliment what the objectives of the sport specific training are.

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
• Share this post using the buttons on the top and bottom of the post. As one of this blog’s first readers, I’m not just hoping you’ll tell your friends about it. I’m counting on it.
• Leave a comment, telling me where you’re struggling and how I can help

 

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…we have a small favor to ask.  APA aim to bring you compelling content from the world of sports science and coaching.  We are devoted to making athletes fitter, faster and stronger so they can excel in sport. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — APA TEAM

 

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Today I’m reviewing Les Spellman Pacey Performance Podcast.

 

Just before we get into the blog I just thought it would be pretty cool to point out the timeline of the journey of Les’ growth as a coach, which he mentions in both his first episode with Rob in 2020, but also his more recent appearance in 2023.  I didn’t write it in my original blog review as I tend to skip past the bio section.  But in this case it’s pretty cool to document it.

 

He started running NFL combine training camps in 2017 and had 3 athletes, all three did pretty well, next year he had 18 and had pretty good success with them, next year had 28 and started getting first rounders, and then this past year he had a smaller group of 14 but he had the number 1 draft pick and most of his guys drafted and get on teams.

 

As a side note, he was getting up to over 40 athletes but he has pivoted to running a smaller group of 10 or so athletes in recent combine camps, but is clearly provided a higher level of programming support.

 

What I loved about his story, was when Les spoke about how he developed his coaching business.  When he first moved to San Diego he was sleeping in his car, he needed to make money so he printed out flyers and was putting them on everyone’s cars and hoping someone would call him.  But he realised he only needed one athlete, so he got one athlete in and he did his best job with that one athlete.   That one athlete led to two more, and he did his best job with those two and just built it. “Honestly, it is was about providing as much value to that one person whoever is in front of me and staying in the moment, that was the most value for me.”

 

Building the relationship was the most important thing for him.

 

If you want to hear the first episode (314) you can 🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Episode 432 – Les Spellman – Getting athletes fast when time is limited

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

 

Discussion topics:

”When it comes to the combine and American Football, talk to us about the programme, how you’re putting it together, the amount of athletes and how you’re managing those.  I’d love to get a bit of an insight”

 

”I’ll give some context first.  Essentially what happens is guys finish their college football season either late December or early January.  We had two guys who played in the National Championship so they didn’t finish until January 9th.  When they finish they sign with an agent and then that agent basically pays for their housing, their food, their medical, their training, car, like everything they need until the NFL draft. And then what happens after that agent signs the guy, typically they’ll call me and they’ll say I have a guy that wants to come train with you and then they show up two days later.  The process in the past was 20 to 30 different agents in the past calling and that would be a logistical nightmare, whereas this year it is just one (Vaynersports of Gary Vaynerchuk fame).  Essentially what happens is once they sign, they come in we go through medical.  Most guys are beat up, most guys are coming from a grueling season.  Most guys haven’t fully sprint or done anything crazy athletic outside of playing a game because the last couple of games of the season are a grind.  You’re tapping into your reservoir of whatever you’ve built in the off-season at that point.

 

So we go though medical.  Once they are cleared – green, yellow, red – green (full), yellow (partial-need some plan B exercises), red (they can’t go on the field).  Then we will go through our assessments:

 

• Force plates – CMJ and Rebound jump with Hawkin dynamics force plate
• Isometric tests – Alex Natera’s ankle, knee and hip iso test

 

I used to write these crazy programmes before every guy got there but now I have 11 guys so it’s actually relatively easy after that medical, jumps and iso tests to say what are we looking at when it comes to programming.  Now I have an idea, I have a shell of what I want to do; how much volume I’m going to push each week, what’s the intensity, what are the fly zones for velocity, how much time am I going to spend on starts, like I know that stuff, but when it comes down to the meat and potatoes of the programme it’s really those first couple of days where we dive in.

 

 

”Talk to us about the iso tests and how that informs step 2,3, 4 and 5 in your programme”

 

“So I just got force plates this year.  With the force plates we were able to do the iso test at ankle, knee and hip.  The first thing it tells us is which of those three is either under performing, or is becoming more dominant to make up for a weakness somewhere else.

 

So we are saying, what are some of the running styles that are happening as a result of weaknesses that show up in these tests?

 

Me coaching six years ago, was like all this technical stuff and me talking a lot, and I burnt out because number one I didn’t have good performances.  Five years ago I started to think I’m talking too much so maybe I should just stop talking and I had better performances, so maybe there is something to that.  Now looking at it from the physical lens first, what physical bucket may not be filled and how can I identify that? So the iso tests allow me a lens into that.  So, we know they run crazy and weird but is it showing up on this test? And if it is, well let’s improve that quality in that athlete, and that’s what it allowed us to do relatively quickly even before we tested them and had them run a 40 Yard sprint, or anything like that.

 

We don’t test them all at once.  It’s in the weight room, so exercise (A1) high pull, exercise (A2) ankle iso test.  It was just part of their training.  We never made it like we were testing, it was like, hey do this real quick and then push hard.  Oh, it wasn’t hard enough.  Come back next round and push harder.  It just became a part of the training block.  We either did it before to potentiate or we did it as part of the training block.  The limiting factor is if you have one force plate but having the force plate numbers is massively helpful.  I have a metal femur on my left leg.  When I did the iso knee test, it was producing 50% less forces than my right side.  Now I trained for the past 3 weeks and it’s now down to 25% imbalance. It’s crazy how fast this works.”

 

”If someone was clearly down on the iso hip for example, how would you attack that just so that listeners can get into your mind with how you look at those numbers and then what comes after?”

 

“To be honest, we kind of all do the same training with the guys, there’s not much difference; we still have our ankle, knee and hip blocks throughout the week

 

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Ankle/Knee			Hip		Individual

 

On Saturday we just double up on the weakness, so we will pick one iso on that Saturday as we’re moving fast and we have a lot to do. So if the guys’s poor in the hip, we just hit hip again, if he’s poor in the ankle we just hit the ankle again.  We just find the limiting factor and then hit it one more time.  That’s the way we’ve seen it work the best because individualising even with 11 guys is tough.

 

So we have one guy who is super poor on the knee iso and he’s got an imbalance, and when he ran he has poor stiffness; he compresses like a spring, so when he hits the ground his body drops and you literally see the sinking action.  So we improved his knee iso by about 8% and his contact times improved, his speeds improved, he is running with a taller hip, so those are the sorts of case studies we are able to capture with the iso tests.

 

We ended up splitting our speed session into two sessions in a day in Phase 2 (of our three phase programme).  Now it sounds crazy but it’s actually not because it’s the same amount of time.  So, if I take a 90 minute session. I was like, why was it 90 minutes? It’s because I run my mouth and start talking.  When I talk, I interfere and mess things up, and when I mess them up I have to bring them back, so that process takes 30 minutes.  So what I started to do was look at my acceleration session, and what is my goal of the acceleration session?  I want them to be able to project the body, I want them to be able to switch, hit the ground really hard and aggressively climb in speed. Now, I need them to be able to execute this skill without me, so the first session of the day is an acceleration session that’s basically:

 

Acceleration Session – physical capacity

 

• resisted runs – chain sprints, 1080s
• starts – 20Y, 30Y etc
• a couple of timed sprints
• a couple of jumps
• a couple of med ball throws
• and then we’re done 60 minutes

 

 

Take a break.  We go to the film room.  Then I run my mouth.  I can talk here.  We go through it, everyone takes notes.  Here’s the goal we talked about.  Here’s where you’re at, here’s what you need to improve.  Now after that film session we go back on the field, and on that field session we do a technical session, but the way we do it is we do 30 minute technical session:

 

Acceleration – technical capacity

 

• Force, Power or Velocity block
• Force block- some starts – as obviously the start is really important for the 40 Yard dash (combine test)
• Power block –  we will do a little bit of starts but we will carry the start out longer, we will do a 7 step acceleration versus a 4 step acceleration, or we’ll do transition stuff working on the torso
• Velocity block

 

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Force block			Velocity Block		Power Block
					Force or Velocity dominant
Technical capacity based around producing forces at the start			It very reactive, it’s all contact time		Think of it as the middle of the run and what qualities you need
Banded 1 step repeats			Box switches		Bounding
Banded hip sled drives			Reactive hops/pogos		Repeat hops
MB throw to start			Drop jump to a hurdle jump		Triple broad jump
Intensity might climb moderately but it’s nowhere near as high as what I had them do in the morning					They are qualities that require you to produce power at a moderate GCT.  It’s not really reactive like a drop jump to a jump

 

Then I’d go over to the weight room and I had much better transfer of the skill than I did if I just had one 90-minute block.

 

Everyone is the same in Phase 2.  We train speed Monday, Thursday and Saturday.  But what happens is after phase 2, you’ll have one Force block, one Velocity block and then the power block is either going to be force or velocity dominant.  So when you get to Saturday, because you’re also doing individual isos you may have force (basically start or potentiation based work) or you might have velocity potentiation type work.  The weight room follows the same trend, we have certain athletes who need to work more on the velocity based power, and there are guys that are still getting stronger working on the force based side when we are in Phase 3.”

 

For reference, I’m just sharing below 👇 a slide Les showed in his Sportsmith Speed Conference presentation (which was awesome by the way!).   The last option in the slide is closest to what Les is talking about above, but it goes to show that there are options, and several ways to set up your training week.

 

 

”You mentioned about the physical work clearing up the technical stuff.  Could you give us any examples where you’ve seen that out on the field where that happens?”

 

“I’d say the biggest one that I usually see get cleaned up relatively quickly is hip extension velocity, so how fast does that hip extend and how powerful, or you could say hip projection. So, most football athletes have poor hip projection in the first couple of steps, meaning that they don’t displace themselves forwards. They like to spin really fast, cycling their legs really fast at the start and they don’t go any where; they take four steps in four yards!  When we do the isos, especially the hip iso, or a lunge iso, it cleans it up very quickly and what we’ve noticed is that guys are getting very good projection from cleaning up that physical quality doing the isos or doing some weight room work.

 

A lot of them have the strength but they’ve never felt that, and being able to get them in that position where they’re producing force a little bit longer than they’re used to has been really helpful.

 

As for the knee iso, my biggest thing this year has been looking at how much hip negative displacement they have, so does their hip drop in max velocity, and how do I fix that because that’s a huge limiting factor to running extremely high velocities and most football players do not have good stiffness, and really because number 1, they’re wearing 12lb pads all the time, they’re running on soft surfaces, and they will very rarely build up to high, high speeds (versus track you’re running on a hard surface in spikes full effort multiple times a week, you don’t get that in football).  So when they come to us, we are putting them in that environment where it’s very fast, very high hip, it’s difficult and the isos help a lot.  It allow them to have a higher hip so when they attack the ground, they have less depression of the knee and they can carry a higher hip throughout during the contact phase.

 

The ankle iso has been huge for us.  A lot of the guys tape their ankle in college football so they don’t have very good plantar/dorsi flexion. So when they are getting into positions where they are trying to attack with a stiff ankle they struggle.  You see a lot of guys that when they hit the ground their foot and ankle would just collapse.  Versus now they’re hitting at a better position and they can manage that isometric so that their ankle is locked as their hip and knee move over it.  If your ankle doesn’t have the ability to withstand those forces it is going to drop!  Usually Alex Natera’s measurement of 2.6 x bodyweight, if guys can’t produce 2.6 x bodyweight on that test, we are looking at guy’s contact times and seeing that it checks out.  As it improved, our contact times improved.  Don’t know the science behind it so don’t ask me, but it worked and that’s all I care about when I’m going through it!”

 

 

”You will be talking at the sportsmith conference on creating a year round speed system.  So when you’ve got an athlete for longer periods of time, what’s your overall philosophy and how do you think about that process?”

“When I got into the private world I never had anybody for more than 6 weeks so it was fun. This is easy, shotgun approach, throw things at them and that stuck, Ok, easy! More recently, I’ve got back into some long term planning working with a couple of schools and I had to come up with a process for identifying what our goals were for the year. 

 

If I was to split the year up, football is very easy, you have in-season, off-season, spring season, pre-season, you have these phases.  So if we’re developing speed, at what phase do we want to work with an athlete developing weaknesses versus working strengths?  It’s the hardest thing to think about, it’s like if I’m in pre-season do I really want to start attacking this athlete’s weakness? Probably not.  But, if I’m in early off-season, do I want to have them just work on their strengths? Well, you can but if I’m trying to make year on year progress thinking of a freshman to senior, how can I make this a multi-year process of developing this athlete?

 

What I came up with was, what we do is target the weakness in the early part of the off-season, and what we’re trying to identify is both physically and technically what the athlete needs to work on in order to improve.  When we get to late off-season we like to do a mix, so there is some of the weaknesses we are improving but we are also bringing in some of the strengths. Whatever they are good at we are allowing them to be good at that.  At the end of the off-season and even pre-season we like to maintain some of the work on the weakness but most of it is just keeping them confident, keeping them healthy and really working on their strengths.

 

 

With the old periodisation model where you condition in the beginning, then you do strength, and then you do power and then you do speed, so very similar to the linear periodisation model of Charlie Francis, we just keep everything in there at all times but just in different quantities.  So when I get in-season, I don’t just abandon the speed training.

 

👇 Below Les is talking about some of his work with the Arizona Wildcats, which he also presented on at his Sportsmith conference in March 2023.

 

 

What we were able to do with Arizona this year, was we were able to get 31 new Top Speeds in season, with 35% reduction in games lost and 35% reduction in time lost in season, with no time lost for hamstrings.  So looking at the trend, players were continuing to get faster in-season; now they’re not getting faster at the same rate as the early off-season, when they’re working on a weakness and it finally clicks but they are actually faster than they were in the early off-season, which is crazy to think about!

 

 

What we noticed is that an athlete’s ability to hit top speed isn’t a quality which is lost over the course of a season.  But the athlete’s ability to hit that top speed in the same time frame is lost, which is more of an acceleration based thing.

 

So what we focused on was on maintaining acceleration based qualities, so that ability of that athlete to accelerate to that same speed in the same amount of time throughout the season, and we did that with resisted runs.

 

 

You surf the curve and go from heavy to medium to light at different time periods, and then you allow practice to be fast.  You allow practice to have the high velocities.  A lot of this is the technical sports coaches buying in to ensuring that practices are fast, they are hitting top speeds in games, making sure the guys did the resisted work and the 1080 work and the technical work and all that.

 

What we realised was that we were getting the peak outputs in games, which is what you want, you want them to play fast.  We are creating an environment where players are allowed to play fast, not coming into the game where they are cooked.  Most coaches are like, you don’t want to do that [resisted runs] because it might pull back from their velocity qualities (for the game) but we are micro-dosing it – we are only doing 2-4 reps in a session.  But just that minimal dosage was allowing the athletes to maintain that ability to be very aggressive on their acceleration and have a lot of power and then practices started to become faster!  It became a culture of guys wanting to run fast, and Arizona became a place where guys run fast!

 

 

The practices and the system should allow the players to run fast.  It shouldn’t just be a volume based approach.  There should be adequate rest periods and spacing and make the field big enough, wide enough and reduce the amount of players to allow the players to hit top speed in games.  You don’t always have to artificially expose players to top speeds, now you can if they don’t hit it in practices, but what we saw guys were hitting those speeds in practice (95-98% of their top speed) okay, cool, box checked!

 

Sprinting is the highest central nervous system activity you can do, it’s the highest output for the nervous system, it’s as fast as we can move through sprinting.  So it does help the rest of the qualities in your body but you can’t do that without the support of amazing staff (technical, medical, strength & conditioning).

 

 

”We all heard about the incredible physical outputs from the USA men’s soccer National team in the World Cup I’d love to get a bit of an insight into the work that you were doing with them in that preparation period?”

 

“First of all I have got to say that Darcy Norman and Jordan Webb (sport scientist) deserve all the credit because they created an environment that challenged a lot of the norms in soccer.

 

It’s hard because soccer is a very aerobic culture where they love to do long runs, and timed runs and heart rate zones and it’s a very aggressive aerobic culture world wide.  It’s also a sport that is very technical culture, they love practising with the ball, doing everything with the ball.  I remember watching soccer teams at college doing conditioning with the ball, and you have a lot of big egos in soccer as well.  The bigger the money in the sport, the bigger the egos, go look at the NFL, there are times when you realise sometimes you’re not going to win a conversation.   So Darcy and Jordan were able to penetrate that culture and make a massive change by emphasising physical qualities.  

 

The qualities that we were looking at were the ability to maximally accelerate from a start, but also from a jog or a run and being able to re-accelerate.  We looked at max velocity sprinting so a lot of the hamstring type injuries were happening when players were asked to maximally hit a velocity, so how can we mitigate some of that.  Also, we looked at deceleration.  We did a lot of that.  In the game of soccer there are high, high speed decelerations something that Damian Harper talks a lot about.  You have a lot of these movements like a 180 degree turn that aren’t necessarily a physical skill or qualities that teams work on!  So Darcy is not afraid to challenge that culture.

 

Everyone got a Force-Velocity profile and everyone got a Load-Velocity profile on the 1080.  We were then able to bucket guys into what qualities we wanted to push.

 

👇 Below is an example that Les gave at the Sportsmith Speed conference on how you could bucket athletes (he wasn’t referring to the USA Men’s National soccer team, But I’ve included it to give you an example).

 

 

Everyone knows that soccer guys are not big gym guys.  You don’t see them hanging out in LA Fitness doing curls. So we realised that we could get a lot of those force qualities out of heavy resisted running and guys liked it! Because it’s a couple of runs, on the field, you’re in your soccer boots and it’s right after the warm-up and you can get big outputs from the guys and improve their ability to hit high speeds in training!

Top 5 Take Away Points:

 

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Episode 456 – Danny Foley – Using a fascia based approach to performance training and rehabilitation

 

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

”Fascia is a topic that hasn’t been discussed at all never mind in depth on this podcast so I’d like to go there and spend a lot of time there.  So before we go any deeper, let’s keep it super simple, and I’m going to ask you what is fascia and why should we be interested in understanding more about it? ”

 

”The first thing to understand is that the fascial system is real, it’s a palpable tissue and it is essentially a global connective tissue that is highly enriched with sensory bodies, proprioceptors and mechanoreceptors, and it just has a very wide reaching responsibility and functionality.

 

 

There is definitely a lot of inconclusive evidence and things that still need to be more conclusively proven from a scientific standpoint, but I think there is a clear reason as to why the literature is lagging and I also feel that there is a lot of intuition that we all understand and just perhaps haven’t put some terminologies to it.

 

But the fascial tissue specificically really is just collagen, water and has different concentrations throughout the body.  So if we take the plantar fascia of the foot or the IT band that is a much more fibrous and dense tissue, whereas if we go to the fascial tissue that is covering the abdominal region that is more of a watery medium, it is much more elastic than it is fibrous.  So even though this is one integrated and unified system and tissue throughout the body, there is different densities and concentrations throughout.

 

The other thing that is interesting with the fascial system is that it has non Newtonian properties so it doesn’t necessarily respond to a stressor or strain in the same way a muscle or other connective tissues like the ligaments or the tendons do.

 

With all of that being said, the biggest priority for the fascial system for the sake of strength & conditioning coaches, physical therapists and athletic trainers is understanding that there is an inextricable link with the fascial system and the musculoskeletal system.  So, I think of this like the energy systems, and we understand that we have three primary energy systems that are all working at all times just in different capacities or in fluctuating manners.  So the number one thing that I’ll get pressed on with the fascial system is when are we not training fascia?  I understand that, but when we are doing a 5km run we are using different proportions of our energy systems as compared to when we are running a 100m sprint.

 

So if we look at training parameters and the ways we set up and conduct exercise, it works very similarly.  There are going to be certain aptitudes that are going to be more predominantly musculoskeletal based, but then there are going to be different layers or parameters where it will be a little more fascial based.  I think that is a really important starting point, and from my point of view, nothing about this fascial approach is supplemental to what we have already understood, and on a broad scale, what we are already doing.  My interest is deviating at a certain point, once we’ve reached these peaks of strength and once we’ve established the foundations from a physical standpoint, to really try to focus on these integrative aspects of movement as opposed to just continually trying to pursue progressive overload.”

 

”So when it comes to how you think about programming, and your philosophy, does this way of thinking start from beginners and all the way up, or are you starting to try and understand it when you come to working with more advanced athletes?”

 

”I definitely think that it is more so for the athletes who are already established and have already developed their rudiments and their foundations.  Everything about my work was predicated on injury and pain for a long time, so I’m now in this interesting space where I’m trying to reapply and redevelop some of these approaches, and figure out how much of this is for developmental athletes for the sake of high performance and for people who have low injury histories.

 

What I’ll say at this moment, is that for pain and injury I think that the fascial approach is definitively better.

 

I think that on the performance side, it’s a little bit more of the side dish as opposed to the entrée.  (Daz comment – Entrée is a French word that Americans use to refer to a “main course.”)  Nobody is going to get around developing power, speed, acceleration, developing true levels of strength.  But once you hit that point, and that’s another one that is difficult to define – we say, ”how strong is strong enough?” Well is it different for a rugby player and a soccer player? I’d imagine so.  However, whatever that context is, whatever that number is for you and your athletes, once we reach that point, I think it goes from pursuing progressive overload to actually deliberately improving the ability to tolerate variability.  So, in other words, I want to express those strength and power qualities in as many different ways as I can.  I’m going to maintain those fundamental values of strength but then I really want to expose the system to variability more than anything else, because at the end of the day sport is controlled chaos!  We cannot continue to sit here and say that American football is a sagital  baseball is a frontal plane sport.  I think that is very arbitrary.  I think there are so many different angles, magnitudes and vectors that we load through and athletes have to respond to, so I think our training needs to mirror that as closely as we can without obviously becoming gimmicky.”

 

”I think it would be prudent to start around assessing the fascial system and how you go about measuring quality and how much of an impact you can have and where that baseline is.  How would you go about that?”

 

“I’m working on a follow up to Fascia Chronicles with a buddy of mine.

 

 

Our goal to be perfectly candid, is to solve this question of how do we know when it’s muscle, how do we know when it’s fascia, how do we know when it’s some combination of each. I wish there was a clear and definitive way of doing this.  I wish that there was something that was just tangible, and objective and measurable.  We have a couple of ideas that I think are going to shed some light on how we can be a little bit more myopic in how we assess the fascial system.  But at the moment, measuring fascia is virtually impossible because it is inextricable.  The measurements and assessments that have been done in some clinical settings are just impractical and inaccessible to 99% of us.  So what I’ve put together here recently, is I came up with a Fascial Line Assessment Battery.

 

• Anterior Functional line
• Posterior Functional line
• Lateral Functional line
• Spiral line

 

These are lines that have associated muscle groups and work in tandem together.  So it is a qualittative and subjective analysis but I’m looking at basically the ability to lunge forward to lunge backwards, doing it with more of a coiling pattern, with trunk rotation pattern coming forward and then reaching overhead coming back.  Then looking at a lateral to curtsy lunge, and then the third one, looking at a single leg cross-over hinge to a lateral trunk flexion (or side bend).  The spiral line looks basically at an upper body rotation with the arms overhead in a split stance.

 

So this was my way of essentially taking those primary fascial lines, and looking at it as a functional movement evaluation.  I’m not interested in scoring it.  For me the way that I look at this is that I want to 1) give them the least amount of input as I can, in terms of instructing the movement, I’m going to show them it one or two times and then see how their ability to replicate that is 2) I’m going to really evaluate what I see as compared to what they feel.  With the fascial system, one thing that is unique to the fascial system is the concept of interoception – in other words, the sensory bodies that are responsible for detecting how we feel about how we feel.  (Daz comment: Interoception is the collection of senses providing information to the organism about the internal state of the body.  The process of sensing signals from the body, like heartbeat, breathing, hunger, or the need to go to the toilet.) 

 

By doing the assessment in this manner, where I know what I’m seeing and comparing it to what they are feeling I think that gives me a really good starting ground for trying to close the gap between those two.  We see athletes that are all over the place, can’t hold a single leg balance, can’t do a lunge with rotation, and I ask them how do you feel on that, and the athlete says, “I felt great!”  So that tells me we are going to have a lot of work to do!  And then I’ve got other athletes who come in and move as close to perfect as you can imagine, and I ask them again, “how do you feel on that?” and they’re like “man, my foot was starting to drop when I rotated medially, I felt my left shoulder and my knee come in.”  I’m like “OK!”  Not only does that give me an idea of how they understand their movement in comparison to what I see or evaluate, but it also gives me a great talking point for how I’m going to instruct and improve these things.  I think the ability to develop movement literacy and comprehension is a fundamental responsibility for coaches for sure.

 

From there, I like to go to anything that anyone would go to for the sake of measuring the tendinous component or the elasticity of the athletes.  So I like to do a single leg triple jump or a triple bound.  I like to do a single leg drop jump to a vertical, so essentially an RSI.  And then I like to do some kind of medicine ball movement.  If they are a throwing athlete it will reflect more of that throwing pattern.  If they are more like an offensive lineman in football it will be a hip toss.  I’m just looking at these things from the point of view of fascial integrity and the ability to produce elasticity.

 

With the RSI jumps we are looking at the time spent on the ground versus time spent in the air and that to me really is a major separator for programming purposes.  For the fascial sake of this, lack of flight time is more indicative of there being a deficiency for elasticity/propulsion.  Whereas for someone who is just more heavy footed and doesn’t get off the ground very much then we are going to have a different approach for how we are going to programme against that.

 

The broadest difference between this conventional and fascial approach is really more so a change in perspective than it is in practice.  80-90% of what I am doing is not different or unique to what any other practitioner is doing, it’s all the same stuff.  But the perspective from which I’m evaluating it and implementing strategies for what I’m evaluating is probably slightly different, and that’s why the fascial approach has really shown its value for me.

 

I’m looking at things from an integrative perspective more so than a isolated approach.  If we look at the history of muscle based testing it’s all isolated, e.g., peak isometric force on a single leg extension.  My interest is much more on the integration of movement patterns.  How do they sequence movement?  Now I realise that someone could find it difficult to transition from a forward to reverse lunge simply because they have weak quadriceps.  But I’ve seen plenty of athletes who can hold 75-100lb dumbbells in a split squat or rear foot elevated split squat, and when I have them do a anterior to posterior bodyweight lunge they are rocking like they are on a boat and can’t control or coordinate that movement.  So that to me is indicative of lacking this integrative capability and goes to that fascial line and ability to produce and reverse the course of movement.

 

The second thing I would say is that all of these movement evaluations are done barefoot and they are done with a PVC pipe in their hands.  So if we think about these lines as being globally integrated and running from the occipital groove coming all the way down to the base of the foot, then for my interests, a fascial based assessment needs to have direct ground contact or interfacing with the ground, and also needs to have something that involves or demands the hands.

 

Having someone perform a movement where they have to deliberately create tension through the PVC pipe versus doing the same movement with hands on hips often look dramatically different.  So if we think especially of throwing athletes or overhead athletes, when we are doing evaluations, we want to make sure that we are integrating that in.

 

With the foot, that’s really where a lot of my interests start.  For me, again, it’s like let’s evaluate what they do in sport and virtually any sport is going to have ground contact and different foot positions (or what I refer to as pressuring) to change the kinematic sequence of the chain.

 

For athletes who have had a very traditionalist approach to training where it has been very linear and sagittal and isolate dominant, whenever you take them outside of that they just do not navigate it very well.

 

Just before we carry on with the Pacey Performance Podcast Review, just a reminder, if you want to come along to our next Speed & Agility Masterclass with Jonas Dodoo, you can book online below 👇

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Now back to the podcast review…….

 

”With so much going on and so much detail, how are you taking note of all this, given how subjective it can be, so you can progressively monitor and understand if this person is improving, especially with the integration of questioning such as ,how did that feel?  How does this come together into a coherent system?”

 

“I think the first thing is, I’ve never had the opportunity to work in a University setting for 5-6 years where I would have force plate analysis, and all of these supporting modalities and supporting metrics to help drive my programme.  I sure wish I had!  So for me, it’s a little more about being resourceful so to speak.  But with that being said I think that the number one thing that I try and take away from it is trying to develop and continue to work on the coaching eye, and being really able to analyse movement for what it is, and the best that I’ve ever seen for this is Dan Pfaff.  Watching any kind of film analysis with him is really quite intimidating!  So I think that the coaching eye that despite the evolution of technology, and all of the resources that are becoming available to us, we can’t lose sight of it.  At the end of the day it is a fundamental aptitude for coaches.

 

A measure that I think is a really good one for the sake of fascial evaluation is looking at time to stabilise.  I think that if you take any specific force plate measure, we can have an endless discussion back and forth, about that’s more tendinous or that’s more fascial.  Time to stabilise is kind of a unique one because it really isn’t one that is tendon driven, and it’s one that does require motor unit integration and inter/intramuscular coordination and I think that that is something that speaks more directly to the proprioceptive and mechanoreceptive acuity of the fascial tissue as opposed to the muscle belly itself.”

 

”So we’ve got a training session with this person for the next hour, how are you going to address that with this way of thinking versus a traditional way.  Will you just take us through that process?”

 

“If we start this by just suggesting what is fascial toolkit as a basis for a fascial based training approach? I would very simply say it’s:

 

• Unilaterally and contra-laterally dominant
• A very minimal amount of bilateral load
• Developed more around the ability to tolerate variability as opposed to pursuing progressive overload
• More open based movements, less constraints, as opposed to more closed chain isolated focus
• Emphasise intrinsic stability as opposed to extrinsic stability
• Look more towards rate of movement as opposed to time under tension
• Omni-directional focus, trying to move in as many directions as possible

 

There is a time and a place for a muscularly based approach, I’m never going to feel otherwise about that.  Also, there is going to be a time and place when we want to be a bit more fascially orientated. I believe that moving in the frontal and transverse plane actually cleans up a lot of the movement in the sagital plane.

 

If we take the example of the rear foot elevated split squat.  This was something that was very prevalent with the military population.  You load them up and they move pretty good. When you load them up in one direction, they’re solid 9/10 times.  If you unload them and ask them to move in an array of vectors, most of them struggle.  When they are on the job, they are under an additional 25-45 lb of external mass at all times, then you have the helmet which is about 7-9 lbs of additional mass.  So for this population being out of kit is actually unfamiliar to them.  So when we are in a training setting, giving them load is familiar and unloading them is completely unfamiliar.

 

So with the situation of the loaded split squat looking good and the unloaded version looking bad, the first thing that I want to focus on is mechanical coupling. So I’ll use derivatives of the spring series from Cal Dietz – (check out Danny article Beginners Guide to Training the Foot and Lower Leg).

 

 

I’ll use a variation of wall patterns, we will do some sled and locomotive variations that are very lightly loaded and realy teach this concept of intramuscular coordination starting with the foot and lower leg, being able to suspend heel, put the knee over the toe and get force coupling above and below the ankle is critical.  Being able to manipulate, move and manage the upper body unloaded so a lot of bridging and crawling patterns, plank push up variations and doing them in a way that is organised to these fascial lines.  Really own those positions and be able to integrate.

 

So with the split squat it’s the same concept.  Once we get past that force coupling phase, now I just want to add velocity to it.  I’ll actually sometimes just under load them and utilise bands above to help them teach them to be faster in that bottom position.  And I think it’s almost entirely a proprioceptive or a neuromuscular aptitude of being able to control speeds at terminal ranges and then integrate them into a different vector rapidly.  I think it is a teachable and a trainable quality, and it gets overlooked a lot and we don’t necessarily put the same priority to it.

 

I believe that moving in more lateral or rotational planes of movement actually cleans up a lot of the movement in the sagital plane.  So if we think about what is happening at the pelvis when one leg is extended and one leg is flexed.  We have different muscular relationships on each side of the pelvis but then also on the trunk.  And then on the leg that is getting loaded we are getting a lot more adductor and abductor when we don’t have load present because now we don’t have something to stabilise against; we have to intrinsically stabilise.  In bodyweight we start working the ad and abductor group more and some of the trunk mechanics that are involved there without load I think it goes back to becoming more stable in that sagital plane when we are unloaded.”

 

”When it comes to pain management what is it about this fascial approach that makes it so effective?”

 

“The first thing is the amount of proprioceptive bodies that are located in the fascial tissue.  There’s been quite a few studies that propose that there are about six times the amount of proprioceptive bodies in fascial tissue as compared to the same surface area of muscular tissue or otherwise.  So I think that’s really the foremost priority that the receptors are becoming attuned to how to essentially understand and detect the inputs or the stressors that are being applied and then going from being in a chronic state of pain.  A lot of time pain with movement is a sensory malfunction, it’s not necessarily a physical abnormality or deficit, it’s the sensory network.  So if we can retrain the body that this position is not bad, then the body can register that and take it on that this position is not painful.

 

In terms of conditioning the foot I would approach it in the following way:

 

• Getting out of your shoes and move the foot in barefoot and single leg in static conditions to train the intrinsic foot muscles
• From there I’ll look to more of the rudimentary movements, A series, hop series, skip series, all of those are primary ways that you can load the intrinsic foot muscles.
• The third point is foot compliance or the ability to interface and interact with the ground, in different vectors and directions of force.  I want to go back to working in more of that lateral/frontal plane or transition from forwards to backwards, or transitioning from the lateral to medial border of the foot or vice versa.
• The fourth mechanism is going to be the windlass mechanism or the suspended heel so essentially being able to fully mechanically load the plantar arches and being able do so without having a drop in that heel position.  I use the spring ankle series from Cal Dietz, and I probably programme that more than anything else, and it’s in almost everyone’s warm-up (Daz comment: The windlass mechanism describes the manner by which the plantar fascia supports the foot during weight- bearing activities and provides information regarding the biomechanical stresses placed on the plantar fascia.)”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

 

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