Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 481 Kelvin Giles

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.”

Kelvin Giles

Background

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.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 464 Duncan, Danny & Rhys 

Episode 473 Aaron Cunanan

Episode 457 Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 456 Danny Foley 

Episode 450 Tony Blazevich

Episode 446 Hailu Theodros

Episode 444  Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 432 Les Spellman

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 314 Les Spellman

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

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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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 464

In today’s blog I’m bringing you another Pacey Performance Podcast Review.  This podcast came at a great time as I have been gearing up to support a few professional tennis players on their “pre-season.”  It stays on the topic of conditioning for combat sports, which I previously reviewed in the last blog – Episode 473 – Aaron Cunanan – “What team sport coaches can learn from UFC about conditioning methods.”

 

As Duncan, Danny & Rhys discusses in the podcast chat, certain sports present certain challenges from a physical conditioning standpoint.  Even though they were talking about contact sports (MMA. boxing and Taekwondo) 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,

 

Challenges Periodising for Tennis

 

“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 464 – Duncan, Danny & Rhys – “Optimising strength and conditioning for combat athletes.”

The Panel

Background

In this episode, the presenters delve into the intricate world of combat sports, specifically boxing and mixed martial arts (MMA), and the critical aspects of training and preparation that underpin these intense disciplines.

The expert panel includes Duncan French, from the UFC Performance Institute, Danny Wilson, Co-founder of Boxing Science, and Rhys Ingram, formerly of GB Taekwondo and currently with GB Cycling.

Danny has previously been on the podcast – episode 215

Duncan has also been on the podcast – episode 162

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

”Conditioning fighters. Where do we start to understand what the athlete needs?”

”@Duncan.  For me it’s pretty complex and like everything, there’s no right or wrong answer.  For me, a good place to start is the need to understand the balance between sport specific conditioning and general adaptation conditioning.  I think that when you get into combat sports which are not necessarily locomotive in nature and lend themselves always to what I would call traditional conditioning, sometimes we get caught or hung up in the need for things to look super specific.  It’s got to look like the sport, so it’s got to be taekwondo kicks, or it’s got to be grappling exercises in Ju jitsu or striking efforts.  I think we’ve got to be really careful with that, and if I think that if you really start to build out your programming and your planning strategy, you can then understand the right time and place to put those kind of things in there.

 

I am an advocate of not everything looking like the sport.

 

90% of the coaches that I’ve worked with in combat sports actually have a preference to do true conditioning, fight specific conditioning, in combat, in sparring.  So we’ve got to understand our role in the process here as strength & conditioning coaches, and how we get the adaptations to support the technical/tactical work.  So I think that’s where I always start, what’s the balance there?

 

@Danny: “Boxing is a sport with repeated bouts of high intensity.  I’ve heard Duncan say before that in MMA that these bouts may be 5s, 7s, or 10s going for the finish but you don’t know whether that’s going to be in the first minute of a bout, last minute of a bout, or in the middle!  You don’t know whether [during this attacking bout] they are going to finish their opponent, or if they don’t get that TKO [technical knockout] they go into a high spike where they’ve got high muscular acidosis and then it’s about whether they can recognise that and recover from it.

 

With us at Boxing Science we say to the boxers that we want to improve their ability to 1) produce high-intensity performance and 2) have the ability to repeat and endure that.  We do that in various ways but one way that I will mention, because of what Duncan mentioned about going from very specific to general adaptations, boxing is 3-minutes on and 1-minute off, and our key session that we use is 30-seconds on, and 3 minutes off, and we normally do four repetitions.  Again, for boxers to be bought into that straight away can be difficult sometimes.  They scratch their heads and think, what am I doing this for?  This looks nothing like the sport, and so then we have to explain to them, the reason why we are doing this is for you to produce the highest amount of intensity you can produce [a 30-sec bout] and then have the ability to repeat that and endure that in a bout, so then you are basically ready for anything when you go into boxing.”

 

”For someone like me looking from the outside, it would look like you guys are challenged by the long slow distance (LSD) steady state running tradition.  But from what Duncan said right at the start, in terms of skill coaches, is that quite the opposite Duncan, where they want it to be specific?”

“@Duncan: it’s a great question.  I’m going to answer it in two ways.  I think that in all the different combat sports that I have worked with, there is a dogma of high-intensity, high acidosis type conditioning strategies.

It comes down to the “fighter will” and the desire to run through a brick wall, and what coaches tend to do is jump on top of that and push fighters, and drive “going in to the deep water” and ultimately taking your fighter to somewhere where they are going to be in a fight and then understand how they are going to meet and get through that demand which usually is on a high-intensity, high capacity characteristic, right?  But, absolutely there is a time to do steady state (I’m going to take out running, I’m going to say steady state exercise) because certainly for our fighters we don’t necessarily do a lot of running, because they are not locomotive animals and we don’t want to get into some issues around joint pain or body postures because it is not a locomotive nature.  But we do a lot of steady state cardiovascular, or cardiac output strategy work.  Rhys touched on Joel’s work historically, and he was probably the first one who got stuck into the need for cardiac output training, in heavy efforts for prolonged periods of time, and the benefits it can have on stroke volume and heart rate and all the factors that can go into cardiac output.

 

We have got to remember that aerobic and cardiac endurance is the foundation of repeat sprint ability from the clearance and resynthesis of energy perspective.

 

So there is absolutely a place for it but I think what I would say is, you’ve got to strategically understand the fight cycle of a combat athlete, and where do you start to put that type of application of training into it? That’s where the secret sauce gets added into people’s programming, because I’m not doing LSD throughout a whole camp fight cycle for an athlete, but I’m certainly putting it in to particular places where I’m using that modality for a very specific adaptation that I’m trying to chase, which is physiologically based.  It’s not a sport specific adaptation.  I’m driving cardiac development for benefit later down the road when we get into sport specific training.

 

So yes there is a place for both.  What I’ve seen historically is this dogma of everyone’s going to go into the meat grinder and deal with it, and that’s not the most intelligent way to try and train combat fighters.  But at the same time, at the right time and the right place, as part of our conditioning strategy, absolutely we’ve got to go there.  We’ve got to touch those competition levels of conditioning.  Again, it’s the puzzle of periodisation and programming.  Never say never to LSD training but there is a time and a place.

 

Two general rules that we try and adopt.

 

Number 1.  Combat sports are largely driven by repeatability.  Your best athletes are going to be the ones that can do things repeatedly for capacity.  Whether that is high-intensity discrete efforts, and you repeat those over time.  Or whether that is endurance efforts that are repeated over time.  Combat sports are about the ability to go again, and again and again, and execute.  The best athletes do that.  So when you get into conversations around bioenergetics [conditioning] I will always go to as a cornerstone of programming for combat athletes, is making sure they have repeatability in their conditioning skills.

 

Number 2.  We work in weight classification sports so if you think about the need to make weight and one of the athletes is challenged by the weight making capabilities, that totally changes your conditioning paradigm.  So you say, so how do you burn calories? Well that’s usually LSD cardio, well that’s the antithesis of performance training, because performance training is high-intensity, intermittent, high volume efforts.  Now those two things are at polar ends of the conditioning spectrum.  So is Athlete A on a weight making strategy, or a performance strategy?  Because you ultimately want to sit them in this performance strategy because that’s hopefully going to get you to the physical capabilities you are going to need for the fight. 

 

But if you don’t make weight whether you are an amateur environment and you potentially can’t compete if you miss weight or in a professional environment and you are going to lose a lot of money if you don’t make weight, one or the other, sitting in this paradigm of weight management driving your programme strategy is actually the antithesis of what you want your performance programme to look like.  But because we are a weight classification sport, that’s what happens with some athletes is the pendulum swings from one direction to the other.  So that then influences massively what type of training you ultimately have to do.  You can write the world’s best training plan but if this athlete is chowing down on too much food or is struggling with the weight management strategy, unfortunately you’ve got to ditch that and get over here, because they can’t fight if they don’t make weight or you are going to lose a lot of money.”

 

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

  1. Balance of your programme –the need to understand the balance between sport specific conditioning and general adaptation conditioning.
  2. Rational for your programming – boxing is 3-minutes on and 1-minute off, and our key session that we use is 30-seconds on, and 3 minutes off, and we normally do four repetitions so we need to explain how if we practice producing the highest amount of intensity you can produce [a 30-sec bout] and then have the ability to repeat that and endure that in a bout, so then you are basically ready for anything when you go into boxing.
  3.  Relevance of LSD – aerobic and cardiac endurance is the foundation of repeat sprint ability from the clearance and resynthesis of energy perspective.
  4. Combat sports are largely driven by repeatability – as a cornerstone of programming for combat athletes, make sure they have repeatability in their conditioning skills.
  5. Weight making vs. Performance strategy –  you ultimately want to sit them in this performance strategy because that’s hopefully going to get you to the physical capabilities you are going to need for the fight.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 473 Aaron Cunanan

Episode 457 Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 456 Danny Foley 

Episode 450 Tony Blazevich

Episode 446 Hailu Theodros

Episode 444  Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 432 Les Spellman

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 314 Les Spellman

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

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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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 473

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.”

Aaron Cunanan

Background

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.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 457 Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 456 Danny Foley 

Episode 450 Tony Blazevich

Episode 446 Hailu Theodros

Episode 444  Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 432 Les Spellman

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 314 Les Spellman

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

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.
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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 450

Episode 450Tony Blazevich – “Activation” sessions and asymmetries: Are they really that important?

Tony Blazevich

 

Background

This week on the Pacey Performance Podcast, Rob is speaking to Professor of Biomechanics, Tony Blazevich. The first half of the episode is all about activation sessions.  What does “activation” or sometimes called “pre-activation” actually do? Does it do anything? Does it do what we think it does? In the second half of the episode Tony finishes off with a fun chat about sprint mechanics as this was Tony’s area when doing his PhD.

Email: Blazevich@exu.edu.au

 

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

”In terms of biomechanics, and one of the disciplines, I suppose that normally encompasses a sport science degree, is biomechanics the most scary for an S&C coach?”

”Well, I mean, it depends on your background, but I would say, yes. But here’s the thing. I mean, biomechanics is normally first up, also not the favorite of any sports science student. And what I would say is, I nearly failed maths in high school, I really struggled with maths, physics is a whole different kettle of fish. I loved physics, because it made sense. Maths was very abstract. And so I think with biomechanics, if you are taught by someone who really focuses on techniques, technology and the mathematical underpinnings, then it’s going to scare a lot of people who don’t have happy experiences in that realm. But to me, I always thought when I was a sports science student, that I would end up as a physiologist, because after all, isn’t that what they all were?

 

But actually, as I got further into my degree, I realized that if I don’t know the movement patterns that are required, if I don’t know the forces we have to develop, if I don’t know the ranges of motion I have to move through. And if I don’t know the speeds that I need someone to move at, then how can I possibly set any kind of useful training program? And so I ended up having to move further and further into the biomechanics. And by the time I got to my PhD, my questions were simply, how do we give an optimum strength training program to a sprint runner? And I would already figure out that maybe just imitating or trying to imitate velocity was not really a key, but there are lots of adaptations as we train it in very different velocities. But maybe there’s something about the movement pattern that we need to replicate.

 

And I really, in my early career got into this idea of understanding how much we need to replicate a movement pattern, or whether just with lots of sports training, we can just give some basic lifts. And of course, the answer is very, very complicated. And the more I learned, the more I realized I never knew at the time, but that meant that I really had to focus on biomechanics. And ever since then, comparing how humans move to birds and cheetah and monkeys or primates, other primates. That kind of biomechanics really informed me and that was when I was over with you guys in the UK, there are people at UCL and King’s College and that who were really on the animal side, and it really opened my eyes to understanding how any organism can actually complete a task. And once we just break everything back and say, “What organism have I got? What is their goal? And what would be an optimum solution to this movement problem?” Then we start to be able to develop plans. And to be honest, it’s just the most enjoyable part of Sport Sciences, if we just stick to sport today is trying to understand a human from that level. So yeah, I would say, get into your biomechanics as much as you possibly can.”

 

“One thing I want to start with Tony, and I think it’s probably the thing that with time with an athlete, especially on the field, the S&C Coach has relative carte blanche over, and that’s the warmup. Whether you get 20 minutes, whether you get half an hour, whether you get 10 minutes, is the time where the S&C coach can have some sort of influence and a regular influence.  Why do we do a warm up in the first place? And then we will get into the intricacies of different phases of the warm up, I suppose, in a second?”

 

“Yeah, sure. I mean, there are a lot number of reasons we do the warm up. And you have kind of hit on this idea that if you are the S&C expert in sports like football, I know it’s very common that the warm up is sort of that one place where they say, “Right, you are that person you go and lead it and everything else is really up to the coach.” In other sports, of course, rugby, for example, collision sports, S&C coaches usually have a lot more input, including even the technical aspects of, how to hit and all this kind of stuff. But if we do accept that warm up is all you have got, I mean, ultimately, the warm up is there to get the body ready for optimum performance from a physiological perspective. So that’s everything from changing muscle temperature, remember that around about a one-degree increase in muscle temperature can increase the power output by about 5%. So it’s quite a significant effect having a higher muscle temperature, we have got increasing blood flow and getting the aerobic energy system really kicking along to reduce that oxygen debt when we need to then do high intensity exercise, we have got increases in muscle water, which I think a lot of us forget and maybe we are not still sure of exactly what the overall benefit is. But if you have read studies from the 60s and 70s, you will be very convinced that as the muscle draws a bit of water mostly dragged in by lactate ions or molecules, that muscle water increases muscle force production and improves it across the velocity spectrum. So we think that might have a big effect.  And, that’s sort of, in addition to the neurological perspective.

 

The neurological is, of course, if you are talking about an S&C, and only having a certain amount of time and trying to figure out how to make the most of it, I think what most of us talk about is, “Well, how can I use that as a way to ingrain optimal movement patterns? How can I use that as a learning opportunity, because I am doing a warm up in every training session and before every game, instead of just literally warming them up, how can I get more bang for buck?” And that’s where a lot of your listeners will think about using drills or skills to optimize movement patterns, putting in situations specific skills and drills that allow players to learn to pick out and notice patterns of play, which the more you see them, the more you start to get them naturally, that can be done in training, understanding how they can regulate their psychology for optimum levels of arousal that can be done during the warm up so that they can then continue to monitor that throughout whatever their competition game or match is. And so there are lots and lots of things you can achieve in a warm up, if you know how to then put the pieces together.”

 

“Just going back to the animals and it may come back to the same universities, you never see a cheetah stretching and going to do mobility before they go and sprint and catch prey or whatever it is. That’s obviously a far-fetched comparison. But where does that actually come from? Is there anything there whatsoever?”

 

 

“Yeah, I mean, first start with the cat. I mean, cats do stretch, by the way. But they don’t do it just before they hunt maybe, they usually have been stalking and moving before they hunt. So they are moving. But you are absolutely right. I mean, the question there, as we could always ask is, “Well, what if the cheetah could warm up would they have been more successful?” And the answer is, we don’t really know until we do the experiments, right? But if your question is, then seriously, why is it that humans feel the need to do these sort of long, protracted warm ups when every other animal on earth, goes about their daily existence without having to do the warm up? And all I would say is that it seems like at least in humans, and this is the same for most mammals, though, is that when we are sitting at rest, our body is not in an optimum state for movement. If you are about to be chased by another animal, we immediately increase body temperature, we increase sympathetic drive, we increase blood flow, we take all the blood from our internal organs.

 

But when we are about to play a game of netball, or basketball or run 100 meters, we don’t necessarily have that absolute life and death physiological response. And so we then have to imitate it, then once we try to imitate that to some degree, we then start to say, “Well, what else can we bolt on that would make us absolutely optimum?” Because in the end, when we are trying to win a game by one point or one goal or 1/100 of a second, and so then we start to say, “Well, what else can we do?” And this is where the warm up starts to get longer and more complicated when we really tried to fully optimize human performance. I don’t think we need to do that for every weekend warrior, or everyone who just wants to exercise I think these sort of proper, highly developed warm ups are really optimum for competitive athletes and we are trying to do something pretty extraordinary.”

 

“Do we need to do activation before a training session for rugby or a training session for football? What is the purpose? What do people think is the purpose?”

 

“Okay, well, I am probably going to have to give a slightly complicated answer here. Just to allay people’s fears, it is not the case that if I just get a glute band and do some side shuffles, and then 15 minutes later go and warm up fully for my sport and perform in the sport that there is likely to be some sort of major and significant effect on performance. That’s probably not the case. But let me just try to allay everyone’s fears across the whole spectrum here. It could be the case that some motor pattern opportunity is being gained by just practicing a very discrete skill first, and that maybe loading it by adding a band just presents more feedback to the central nervous system to know where the body is in space. The idea that it’s somehow then allowing us to activate the agonist muscle to some degree to get more force, I am not sure it’s true. And I can go into much more detail as to why but the idea that the brain needs to get calibration as to where its movements are in 3D space, could be a reason why those sorts of brief short activation sequences might make people feel like they are doing something well. I would argue that if you actually did a very sports specific, skill specific warm up, we would see that those initial activations are not doing anything at all.

 

 

But I just want to remind people, though, that it is the case that you might hear, particularly in the physiotherapy fraternity that these activation exercises are maybe more common than in the sports science fraternity and you wonder why and you think, “Well, maybe it’s because we are trained considerably in exercise, whereas they have to be able to diagnose so they get less time to actually learn about exercise.” But at the same time, remember, physios are there with a lot of people who have pain, a lot of people have been injured for a prolonged period of time. And we can talk about this, it absolutely affects your motor pattern and the way the brain communicates through the spinal cord to the muscles. And so in athletes who are struggling to adopt an optimum motor pattern, it is true that if we spend a very small amount of time deliberately trying to activate a muscle or muscle group at a certain length or at a certain joint angle, and we slowly increase the amount of force reproduced in that joint angle, that over the next minutes or even hours, that specific motor pathway will be highly excited, that it will be a pathway that is easier to send signals through, the possibility then exists in those athletes, that when they then start to do the warm up, they are actually feeling like they are able to hit the appropriate technique better.

 

Again, I am not saying that, that means that they can all of a sudden activate the muscles so remarkably well. What I am saying is that long term potentiation, by long term, we are talking seconds, minutes, maybe hours. Long term potentiation of a neural pathway literally is a way to allow our brain to activate a very specific action or muscle with less central or descending drive. So I just want to say that whilst I would normally not think that what we tend to see as activation exercises are going to have a significant impact on the majority of athletes, I just want people to take that step back and accept that potentially in some people, there is a reason to do it. And it might then help them further down the track through the warm up and into a game or a match.”

 

“Why did the glutes get such an emphasis on this because I have been places and people call it glute activation, So why focus there? And I know this is a horrible question. But is that focus necessary?” 

“Yeah, I am going to give you my answer. And then I am going to give you that little caveat again. In the majority of people, doing a glute activation exercise is not going to affect the way they then perform a very complicated high velocity task. Okay, so for the majority of people, I have seen no evidence that lying on your back, one leg with your knee very flexed, which just takes your hamstrings off stretch, and trying to activate the glute then affects the way the body works. And I know that there are one or two studies maybe concluding that there is but when I delve into the actual data, I either don’t see that it backs up the conclusion or in fact, I would have taken the opposite conclusion that this actually is indicating that the nervous system is not using it right. So the question then is, “Why is everyone focusing on the glute?”

 

Well, for a start, if we are talking about running based athletes, it is true that when the hip is relatively flexed, and then generates an extensor moment, the gluteal muscles are very, very important. In that case, gluteus maximus is a really important hip extensor along with the hamstrings. Once the foot is on the ground, you have other gluteal muscles that are really important, minimus medius, as well as tensor fascia latae and a few of your, I will call them just hip rotator muscles a bit like your rotator cuff, you have got like a rotator cuff around the hip. And they are trying to hold the pelvis in the optimum position to allow the hip as the leg swings to store and release elastic energy. And if the hip is falling, that’s energy that we are using to cause rotation. And that’s not energy going into forward propulsion. If the hips are moving like this, then when the thigh moves back, the muscles that are storing elastic energy and not the ones that are then trying to drive the hip flexion once the hip then comes back and corrects itself.

 

So what we need is for the axial skeleton and the pelvis to be held in very specific body positions, we need a very complicated activation pattern to do it. This requires a lot of the muscles that help to do it, either to extend the hip in the first place, or to hold the pelvis or gluteal muscles, not just glute maximus. And in my experience, I have to admit, I am particularly working in football or in soccer, where you see flattened bums in some athletes, the amount of hip rotation being caused is significant. And when we have then spent eight weeks doing exercises, both the running drills and strength work to get the hip extensors working more effectively, the glutes firing if you like, the running mechanics fix up, and the injuries are moving away. And they are running faster. So I know we don’t like to say, “I want to activate my glute better.” And then people say, “Well, if I couldn’t activate my glute, I couldn’t walk.” And I would say, “Well, I can do a push up, but I can’t bench press 200 kilos.” At the elite level, it could be the case that working a certain motor pathway is very, very useful. And because a lot of us are running athletes, the glute probably caught a lot of that stuff. But look, at the end of the day, the predominant power output is actually coming from your ankle when you run, not from your hip. Your hip obviously does the work that is stored at the ankle. So it’s still absolutely vital. But in lots of other sports and lots of other movement directions. There are many other muscles that need to be activating appropriately for optimum performance. So I am not sure why glute is always specifically targeted. But at the same time, I just want to put in that caveat that in a lot of athletes who aren’t highly trained sprint runners and are doing sports where they are often performing under fatigue and start to get into bad motor pattern habits, that working on how the hip extensors function can be very, very useful for those athletes.”

“So if I am a S&C coach, and I am working in a professional club, and I have sold the coaches, that I need an extra 10 minutes per day, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday for an activation session, what would you recommend that looks like for a group? Do we continue down the glute activation? Because that potentially, based on your previous comments, could be beneficial ?”

 

“Now, that’s an unanswerable question in the sense that what you would have to be doing is you would have to understand how your players are moving. You have to be thinking about what you believe their current weaknesses are and then if you could improve the way they move, that would reduce injury or improve performance, what exercises would they be? Now, first of all, it’s going to be different for every individual. So you are going to have to prescribe it individually. But let’s pretend that most of your athletes are running in a certain way. Well, the thing is, is that what I would ask is, whether doing some side shuffle glute band stuff is actually going to then optimize the technique you are trying to improve, whether that’s running, running acceleration, changing directions, swerving, whatever it is.

That is if your rugby player is not getting low enough to engage in a tackle, should you be imitating something like that with walkover lunges, or bear crawls on the ground to improve the mobility through the hip? If you have got an athlete that is struggling to decelerate, you might want to then just give a couple of opportunities to decelerate. A lot of athletes have a problem decelerating, and then changing direction and re-accelerating. And so the idea of actually giving them a specific task might be better. And if you want to really peal it back again to replicating glute activation, you know things like one-legged walk over lunges so that we can practice how the hip is going to extend from that, flexed position where we are relatively weak, you can do those kinds of, I guess, activation exercises to remind the brain of where the pelvis is in space, where the hip is, and to remind the brain to make sure that you are using glutes, hamstrings and everything to actually extended the hip. Every coach is probably aware that if you want to optimize a complex task, it can help to break the task down into smaller chunks, allow an understanding of those chunks and then build it back up. And I would argue that as the S&C Coach, you have got the opportunity to do exactly that. And if it looks like a glute band exercise, because you have decided, whatever, that’s not for me to judge, if it looks like a walkover lunge, or it looks like a sprint running drill, or it looks like whatever, that’s up to you. But breaking down a task, and then building it up is not a bad way to spend 10 minutes of a warm up.”

 

“The influence of the track coaches has made its way into the team sport world and having the audience that we have got mainly in a team sport environment, should they be looking to the best sprinters in the world and saying “I need to use that as my technical model. I need to move my athletes towards what that looks like” Or should we have an alternative model that is more appropriate for my athletes?”

 

“So there’s a global understanding of how most humans would relatively optimally run at high speed.  There’s a certain configuration of the leg that if we get it about right, we are actually able to store and release elastic energy.  These sorts of ideas, I think are good for every team sport athlete, and there’s no doubt that having a basic understanding of running mechanics and doing basic sprint running training is going to be good for athletes. And, I guess in the US a lot of them have done track at high school, and then they go on to the NFL and they can run, their mechanics are actually really generally very good, not comparing to the elite. I guess the thing that differs is that first of all, there are individual differences. Second of all, you can’t spend all your time doing sprint training. It’s a bit like the S&C coach who wishes they could spend all the time of the athletes in the gym. That’s just not going to happen.

 

But first of all, there are some nuances. There are some differences in how someone has to run when they are on a field, changing direction and responding to patterns that are in front of them. There’s no doubt that you can only change direction when your foot is on the ground. So having a longer stride may not always be optimum, because you can swerve at long stride, but you can’t change direction effectively at long strides, we may never try to deliberately run our fastest.  A lot of running backs say, “I never actually try and run as fast as I can,” because you are so busy scanning and manipulating that you are not necessarily trying to run as fast as you can. Centre of gravity might be slightly lower, because remember, to change direction, you need to land with some knee flexion and push outwards. And if you are high, you literally can’t do that. And there’s an ACL risk there, because you can align with a straight leg. So there is the idea of keeping centre of gravity lower during acceleration and waiting for changes in direction. There are lots of reasons or lots of ways that I would argue that we manipulate the technique to reduce arm length, stride length, lower centre of gravity, and increased stride rates that are useful in the field sport context that we wouldn’t teach a 100-metre runner. So again, maybe the answer to the question is globally, yes, I actually do believe that understanding how to teach someone to run fast is useful. But then understanding then what you are actually trying to achieve on the field or the court and optimizing that motor pattern is really an important consideration. So just getting someone who can run a fast 100 meters doesn’t mean, they are then going to be extremely good at a sport.”

 

“So you mentioned sprint drills there. And again, it’s something that’s come up multiple times in conversations with guys that are in the trenches every day with team sport athletes trying to get them fast, or sprinters trying to get them fast. Do you see that there could be potentially poor use of sprint drills, lack of understanding of what the actual end goal is for these particular drills?”

 

“Yeah, and so in my opinion, my current belief system, where I am at the moment is, again, if we think about trying to learn a very, very complicated movement it is very useful to break it down into smaller components and make sure that the brain understands where the body is in space, then start to move it faster, then start to add on more and more components until we learn a complex activity. In sprinting, which is a very complex sport, we might argue that what we call sprint drills are meant to do that. And I personally have had a lot of success in taking chronically injured athletes and not only improving mobility and balance and a few other things, but taking them back to basic sprint running drills. Because what they are then learning is where their body is in 3D space and getting the nervous system to be able to control this hugely complex environment to move in a pattern that is much more optimum for performance and also for reducing the risk of injury.

 

And so, if we just take something like a knee lift drill, why do a knee lift? Notice I never call it the high knee lift drill. And that comes down to the cue that if someone’s trying to do the highest knee lift, they tend to lean back, the toes are pointed. I mean, what’s the point? There is none… I can’t understand the reason for that kind of drill. And that’s where we see it, we see people doing drills, but not actually understanding what they are trying to achieve with the drill. Some of the common drills, I never use, to be honest, because I am just not sure what I am trying to learn from it. But if you have got a set of drills, where you know exactly what you are trying to get the human to achieve, and then you build them up into a run. And then if you notice that there’s an issue, you might come back and work on another drill, and then go back into the run and see if that motor pattern has helped. That’s where I think those drills are very, very useful. And if you do them for, particularly from a young age, for years, your body knows exactly where you are in space. And that movement pattern becomes really, really important.

 

And I will just remind you, because obviously there will be people saying, “Yeah, but the only problem during drills is you have to stay very internal. You always think about where you are, when you are on the field, you can’t do that.” I completely agree. And that’s the whole point right, if every warm up, and every off-season, every pre-season…? Yeah, we do it with our youth development squads from young ages, once it becomes naturalized, you don’t think so much anymore. And that’s the other benefit to warm up is if you just optimized it now, your brain doesn’t have to think, it’s the optimum motor pattern you have just practiced, then you can actually focus on the field and the tackling and the ball and the motor, the patterns that you are trying to achieve external to you and your body should follow a more optimal motor pattern. So I am a big fan of an appropriate drills done with specific rationale in the lead up to proper complex running, change in direction skills.”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

  1. Benefit of warm-up – how can I use that as a way to ingrain optimal movement patterns?
  2. Band “activation” exercises – adding a band just presents more feedback to the central nervous system to know where the body is in space.
  3. Best use of warm -up – first you would have to understand how your players are moving. You have to be thinking about what you believe their current weaknesses are and then if you could improve the way they move, that would reduce injury or improve performance, what exercises would they be?
  4. Condition for the task not the muscle – the idea of actually giving them a specific task might be better [than a banded glute exercise.
  5. Nuances in sprint technique – there are some nuances. There are some differences in how someone has to run when they are on a field, changing direction and responding to patterns that are in front of them. There’s no doubt that you can only change direction when your foots on the ground. So having a longer stride may not always be optimum.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

 

Episode 457 Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 456 Danny Foley 

Episode 446 Hailu Theodros

Episode 444  Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 432 Les Spellman

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 314 Les Spellman

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 432

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

Les Spellman

Background

This week on the Pacey Performance Podcast we have Coach and Founder or Spellman Performance, Les Spellman. This is the second time that Les has been on the podcast but lots has changed since then so we wanted to get him back.  Les is a speed coach and is best known for his work with athletes preparing for the NFL combine. Because of this we wanted to talk about how to get athletes fast in short periods of time

🔉 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:

  1. Sprinting is the highest central nervous system activity we can do, it’s the highest output for the nervous system
  2.  Benefit of splitting the speed work into two sessions per day – 60 minute physical and 30 minute technical
  3.  Value of Isometric strength testing – to determine which physical buckets could be filled to help fix technical issues
  4.  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.
  5.  Resisted runs are easy to get buy in for because it’s simple, effective and easy to implement.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 457 Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 456 Danny Foley 

Episode 446 Hailu Theodros

Episode 444  Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 314 Les Spellman

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

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 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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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 314

Episode 314 – Les Spellman – Getting athletes fast when time is limited

Les Spellman

Background

In this episode of the Pacey Performance Podcast I am speaking to Owner of Spellman Performance, Les Spellman. With the NFL back up and running I thought it would be a perfect time to get a guest on the podcast who prepares these athletes for the coming months.

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

 

”A team sport athlete that has never done speed work before, just give me your general thoughts and give the listener a sense of where your heads at when that athlete turns up to your group?”

 

”Initially I prefer the athlete that has never done any speed work before, because they have no bias coming into it.  When they’re raw I love it, it’s like a raw piece of clay.  Our system will teach them the things that they need to learn.

 

It doesn’t matter if they are a professional athlete or a lower level; the first thing we are going to do is profile the athlete.  Sometimes they have these things that we might consider are bad habits or we might say are incorrect, but when we profile them, we see their horizontal forces are amazing, their power and velocity are super high.  So, it might be something that if we try to change just because we want them to fit into a certain technical box, we might end up undoing some of those things [that make them great].  One thing I learned from Jonas is just be very cautious about changing too many things at once, especially if it’s something where that athlete is wired that way.  Because if we unwire them we better be able to support them, and do everything else we can do to make them take that new neural pathway on.

 

The main thing we do is profile them, and the second thing we do is build out the technical model.  For example, if they are consistently high on their toes, we have vertical drill walking patterns making sure we are cuing things there, and then progressing to see if when they are running does that skill that we are teaching them in a very technical part of the practice, does it translate over to the running? If it does, great; if it doesn’t we keep drilling it until it does (although it may or may not).

 

I think in the beginning I was coaching because it was a show, and I was trying to get other parents that were watching to send their kids to me so I was coaching everything; it was less about the athlete and more about me at the time, and I was over coaching them.  Now, perhaps maybe because I am older (and about to be a Dad) I’m  a lot more patient, so I’m looking at number 1, do their physical capabilities line up?  If not, okay, here’s the intervention.  Number 2, does the technical issue they have, is it going to lead to injury or a decreased performance, and if it’s one of those two things I’m going to intervene.  But if their power, velocity and force is high but they don’t look good, well, we’re going to do 1% changes but we are not going to undo the athlete completely.”

 

”With this team sport athlete that comes in for this speed profile, is there anything else you would do with them as part of that assessment?”

 

“We really look at three things:

  1. Force-Velocity Profiling – right now we are doing it off of GPS.  We are pulling up their horizontal force number, their theoretical maximal velocity, their ratio of force (max – so where they are at at the beginning, but also mean, over a couple of steps), peak power, and the slope of their force-velocity profile. We are looking at the data for indicators of Low Force- High Velocity (that’s easy – we will add more force and maintain the velocity).  Some athletes are High Force-Average Velocity (this is a bit harder to manipulate but we can definitely influence this).  We are looking Number #1 at what are the physiological changes we need to make and that’s more on the programming side.
  2. Split times – the second thing we are going to do is look at their split times.  It’s pretty simple, and I think a lot of people look at that first but for us that’s secondary.  Are they able to accelerate every 5 yards to 30, or whatever it is we are testing? We are looking for inconsistencies there.
  3. Kinematics – I want to see ground contact time (GCT), air time, step length.  The first thing I’m looking at is their initial acceleration, over the first four steps, but really the first two steps are where we have the largest changes in velocity. I want to see how they manage those first two steps, and then look at top speed, and see if there are imbalances in terms of contact times, left and right, between step length, GCT etc.”

 

”There is opportunity to individualise but the larger the group the harder it becomes to individualise, so how do you manage that with potentially a quite big spread of experience and movement quality with the sprinters you work with?”

 

“I think it’s a bit like the weight room.  There are things that can be individualised for athletes, and there are things that are just general.  We warm up as a group, we will do a couple of high velocity runs without any kind of resistance as a group.  But then to get to individualising, we are really talking about individualising each athlete’s peak power, and individualising the load on the sled to identify where their peak power is and assign the % bodyweight on the sled to attack that.

 

 

We used to do what everybody did to some extent, where you take an athlete and you do 10% body weight, or you do 40% bodyweight.    But it’s essentially like if you went in the weight room, and we say we’re both going to do 50% bodyweight on the bench press, we’re getting two different adaptations because it’s not individual to each athlete’s force-velocity curve.

 

So one thing about power, most athletes hit peak power within 1-second and are exposed to that peak power for a fraction of a second.  So if we’re just going to do bodyweight runs we are just going to expose our athlete’s for a fraction of a second over the course of a session.  So our goal is expose our athlete to that range for longer exposure time.  So we want to identify what their peak power is and then identify how do we get a sled % body weight to match that?  What we are looking right now, is that 50% of their peak velocity is generally the range (Cam Josse said it’s 48-52% and he’s smarter than me so I generally just use the range he works off!).

 

We do a Force-Velocity Profile – so we do a bodyweight run, a 25% bodyweight run, a 50% bodyweight, a 75% and sometimes a 100% and then we plot that on the chart back to their 50% max velocity, and that’s the weight we put on the sled.  It could be 75% body weight, it could be 85%, that’s individual to the athlete!  Athletes know that number and we train on that number for two weeks, then generally re-test and give them another number.  So they’re pushing their peak power exposure higher and longer and we are doing 4-6 reps for that load per week so that’s the part of their programme that we individualise.  And then the rest of the programme is pretty general.  It’s not rocket science, I think it’s pretty simple.

 

With the middle school population we are doing well if we teach them one thing a week that they retain.  Yet at first,  when I was  a less experienced coach I tried to teach they five things in a session, I over-cued and I created paralysis by analysis,  Even with the NFL combine I did that in the past.  In this past year I try to keep it simple and our philosophy is built around 70% physiological changes we are going to create, and 30% technical.  That 30% technical work is around the start and a couple of KPIs such as learning how to switch, learning proper foot contact (reactivity) and that was probably it.  With the physiological changes, we are not going to create a tonne of more force, we are not going to take the resultant force from 1000N to 1200N but what we can influence physiologically, is take whatever resultant force they have and change the ratio of force from vertical to horizontal (at the start especially).  If we can take that resultant force and make it closer to 50% of ratio of force horizontal, we didn’t necessarily increase their force but we increased the percentage of horizontal to vertical at the start.”

 

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 👇

Book Online

Now back to the podcast review…….

 

“Scenario is you have an athlete who comes to you with hamstring issues.  What would be the first port of call for you to attack with these guys?”

 

“This is always a touchy subject  because therapists will say, that’s not your lane!  It could be multiple things:

  • Running volume
  • Lumbo-pelvic control (LPC)
  • Something physiological – presented on the Force-Velocity profile.  For example, we see a lot of guys with super high velocity have very low horizontal force outputs, especially in the beginning.  We are noticing in some of our middle school athletes who are velocity orientated, we see these kids complaining about soreness in their wellness scores, they’re more sore and having nagging injuries.  So that lead us to ask what is leading them to always getting hurt?
  • Something technical – are they extremely backside orientated, are they contacting in front of their centre of mass, how far are they contacting in front?  What does their hip height look like?

 

What we will do number one,  is pull back on the velocity side of things.  Most of the injuries that they are experiencing are from the higher velocity.  We will still keep the velocity in the programme but we will just reduce it, by 50%, and expose them very minimally.  What we have seen is that we can make a 10-15% increase in horizontal force within a 4-6 cycle sometimes, especially with our middle school athletes.  If we can increase their horizontal power and get them more horizontal on the force side and still keep that velocity in tact, sometimes that tends to work out some of those issues that they might have had at higher velocities because they’re getting to that velocity through an efficient acceleration.  If they are not touching on velocity based movements to get to that velocity we will tend to see a little bit less of those soft tissue issues.

 

All of our athletes will have Lumbo-pelvic control (LPC) exercises that we can work into the programme, and use drilling to practice hip position and keep it as neutral as possible.  Sometimes we see that if the psoas and glute can’t work to keep that locked in then we start to see secondary hip flexors come in to play as primary ones, and we see hamstrings and adductors trying to do the job that the glute would do.  I try to get the hip to drive the movement and I have Jonas to thank for getting me addicted to doing switching.

 

I’m not a therapist, I can only speculate.  I would never try to work through this on my own.  I’d work with other experts and ask them what they see and then try and do my part.

 

In terms of maximising an athlete’s time, we can’t really move the needle in terms of resultant force or max velocity in a few weeks, but we can also look at things like the time it takes them to get to max velocity.  So we might have an athlete who gets to a top speed of 22mph but it takes you 5.5 seconds to get there.  For a running back, we can say we want to access that speed sooner for your position.  So let’s see if we can get you to that speed at around 4 seconds or somewhere around there.  So most athletes we have, we are looking at the horizontal force part of the equation.  We can influence in a short amount of time, the ratio of force, so if they are at 45% horizontal to vertical, we want to push it higher.  We are not expecting a change in resultant force but if we can do heavy sleds, do drills based around that and increase their power horizontally then it’s going to pay dividends and it’s going to have them run faster.

 

We’ve seen a couple of guys that had 10-12% increase their [horizontal] force and maintained their velocity, we saw 0.15 to 0.20 difference in their split times over 40 Yards within 4 weeks.  We are not really going to move the needle much in terms of velocity, obviously if you have time you can seen athletes get 2-2.5 mph faster which is incredible, but in 6 weeks you can attack acceleration, both early and late acceleration through specific force development training such as heavy sleds, resisted bounds and things like that.  And that’s going to move the needle as you’re going to get adaptations to those means.

 

Also, in season you’ll see athletes that the force decrement over the course of a season is pretty large, you’ll see athletes drop 10-15% over the course of a season while maintaining similar velocities which can expose them to more injury risk.  We can help teams track their data on speed without needing to run guys and have velocity based injuries.  We can use some innovative ways that look more like special strength than actual sprinting that we can implement into a team environment from professional all the way down to high school athletes.

 

Just like in the weight room where we try and maintain vertical forces, we are trying to maintain horizontal forces on the field.”

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

  1. Assess don’t guess – the importance of the Force-Velocity profile
  2. Individualisation -we are really talking about individualising each athlete’s peak power, and individualising the load on the sled to identify where their peak power is.
  3. Horizontal force- the greatest improvements can be expected with 10-15% increase in horizontal power and 0.15-0.2 seconds increases in splits over 40 Yards when you attack the horizontal force component.
  4. Keep it simple – philosophy is built around 70% physiological changes we are going to create, and 30% technical.
  5.  The KPI for sport is how fast you can reach your max speed – we want to access your speed sooner!

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 457  Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 456  Danny Foley 

Episode 446  Hailu Theodros

Episode 443  Nick Kane

Episode 442  Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 444 Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 436  Jonas Dodoo

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

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 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

 

=> Follow us on Facebook

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=> Follow us on Twitter

Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 456

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

 

Danny Foley

Background

This week on the Pacey Performance Podcast Rob is speaking to Human Performance Coach at Rude Rock Strength, Danny Foley. Danny is on this episode to discuss all things fascia and 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 👇

Book Online

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:

  1. 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
  2. Fascial system 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.
  3. The philosophy shifts from pursuing progressive overload to actually deliberately improving the ability to tolerate variability
  4. The broadest difference between this conventional and fascial approach is really more so a change in perspective than it is in practice.
  5. A measure that is a really good one for the sake of fascial evaluation is looking at time to stabilise.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 457  Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

Episode 446  Hailu Theodros

Episode 444 Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443  Nick Kane

Episode 442  Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436  Jonas Dodoo

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 457

Episode 457 – Dan Tobin & Dan Grange – Using collaboration and smart data collection to enhance the transfer of training

Dan Tobin & Dan Grange

 

Background

 

This week on the Pacey Performance Podcast is Dan Grange and Daniel Tobin, both of Gloucester Rugby. Discover their revolutionary approach to game speed training and the challenges they face in achieving optimal transfer from training to gameplay

 

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

 

Discussion topics:

”When it comes to training transfer it’s a little bit of a slightly murky area, based on the demands of the game and how complex it is to actually understand what transfers and what doesn’t, but what’s your process, where do you start in trying to understand what transfers from the gym and physical side into a technical and tactical model?”

 

”@Daniel Tobin: The step we have taken is trying to understand what the coaches want from the team, what’s the game model, what way are we trying to play, and what do we value in a game? We talk a lot about the KPIs of our game, in terms of what are the parts of our game that need to perform really well in order for us to be successful.  Then we reverse engineer from there into how we underpin that with our physical programme, and ensuring that technical models are in place in all those KPIs so then the transfer comes from whatever are the relevant strength, power and speed qualities needed to develop from the physical end, that need to be channeled technically into the same technical models that improve game output.  So what we do has to be completely linked to the rugby programme and there has to be massive integration; we need to know what they are trying to get from it and we have to ensure that we are linked specifically to that.

 

As an example, a lot of the article [on sportsmith] was on carry dominance (see full article below) 👇 and how we try to influence that area of the game.  So we identified that as a KPI we wanted to improve.  We looked at the physical qualities that we know to relate to those areas, things like power, reactive strength, acceleration, but that doesn’t tell the whole picture as it’s not simply that we get those qualities good and then we become a team that gets carry dominance because we found that this wasn’t the case.  So, it’s then making sure there is a good technical model in place for the carry , and that’s coached well and developed well, and that we track that technically in the training environment and track the KPI in the game situation.  You then react to that with a bit of trial and error to see where those figures are moving, and going in the right direction, and altering the programme if they’re not. So that’s probably it in a nutshell.”

 

From the gym to the pitch to the game: Maximising training transfer

 

Some key take aways:

 

  • Training transfer is often discussed in S&C terms as the effects of resistance training or plyometric training on linear and change of direction speed. However, when it comes to team sport preparation, the aim is to improve on field performance. Within that context, linear and change of direction speed are general, not specific, qualities. They are qualities that may impact on field performance, but they are not the target task.

 

  • Operating within the S&C silo and improving vertical jump scores or 10 metre acceleration time is not a badge of honour for training transfer

 

  • Depending on a player’s profile and development stage, physical development can have a significant impact on competitive performance by impacting KPIs within the game. At some stage, the benefits of that physical development programme will diminish, and further improvements in the target task might come through improving the biomechanics of the task or the player’s decision making and execution of this skill in context.

 

  • As an example one of the important KPIs for rugby union is carry dominance.  The outcomes we on the S&C staff were looking for were an increased percentage of carry dominance by our players, and an improvement in our average dominance compared to the other teams in the league.

 

  • Capacity” is when we are influencing areas on the force-velocity curve that we know underpin or, in some way, relate to carrying ability. While it is important not to overplay the role of these qualities in training transfer, we must also not miss a trick here and underestimate their importance.  The important question to ask is, what physical qualities are going to relate to, or underpin, the target KPI?

 

  • Correlation studies, however, do not imply cause and effect. Improving vertical jump height, for example, does not guarantee enhanced carrying ability, despite the proven relationship. Apart from the obvious reason that the two exercises are biomechanically dissimilar, you must also consider the law of diminishing returns when predicting the transfer from capacity improvement to specific technical performance.

 

  • The other base of our pyramid is where we target “efficiency” of movement, particularly the efficiency of fundamentals like acceleration, deceleration, upright running and change of direction. Again, when considering the target task, in this case the ball carry, we need a technical model in place for this activity. Frans Bosch talks about attractors as being the stable part of the movements that we want to deepen and ingrain. Every movement will have attractor states that are stable and fluctuations in the movement that are unstable. Attractors are the generally applicable rules of the movement – things we always want to be present. Dan Pfaff refers to these attractors as landmarks and suggests there is a bandwidth with individual variation, but concurs that a technical model must exist as a reference point for evaluating movement.

  • When considering the ball carry, we examined all our forwards’ carries across a season and asked, what does it look like technically when we have a dominant carry? What are the differences when we have a neutral or negative carry?  The key things we found for dominant carries was that players entered the tackle zone with a discernible drop in body height (“low”), avoided entering the tackle zone at an angle (“square”) and planted their foot close to the tackle point (“stepped in”).

 

  • Once everyone around the table agrees to the technical model, the next step is establishing a shared understanding of what the coaching process will look like. We agreed to be clear on what principles we were going after in any given training session and what cues we would use to promote them.  We improved the consistency of landmarks across individual players and the group, as judged by video footage. Players also trained in carry drills that were highly specific to our attack shape and in-game scenarios.

 

  • Throughout the process of achieving training transfer, the challenge on the S&C coach varies substantially. We use a sliding scale of “own – collaborate – influence” when moving from general to special to specific exercises.

 

  • We need to own the development of general capacities in the gym and get players to the point of diminishing returns. This is the pure and traditional technical requirement of the job. It is usually where the S&C team is left to their own devices.  When it comes to putting a technical model together for a sporting task, we must be able to collaborate well with a coach or group of coaches. There is give and take involved and both sides need to be respectful in simplifying complex ideas from their own area of knowledge.

 

  • Finally when it comes to the most specific forms of preparation (on field rugby preparation in this case), a good S&C coach must be able to influence intensity, workload, order of exercises and work:rest ratios; and offer informed opinions on the overall direction of the programme.

 

  • “Transfer” is the apex of our programming model, when we are truly targeting the activity in question within the specific context.  This is most likely to be an exercise taken by the rugby staff, but it is still a part of the integrated model.

 

Just before we carry on with the Pacey Performance Podcast Review, just a reminder, if you are an athlete and want to come along to our next Speed testing for Tennis day, you can book online below 👇

 

Book Online

 

 

Now back to the podcast review…….

 

‘Where does your head go when we do talk about transfer (question to Grangey)?”

 

”@Grangey.  I guess like Dan touched on a bit there, integration is key, and credit to Dan and our Head coach, as we have worked so hard the last couple of years to effectively create an understanding of what that means, and how we act upon that.  All of the coaches are responsible for a certain area, but it’s all our area and responsibility to drive the game model.  Dan touched on it a bit in his article that we have got to own our area to be able to get credibility to integrate.   We all have different backgrounds and education and we can all bring different solutions to the problem.  I’d love to say it’s a streamlined process, but it’s pretty messy at times.”

 

“Talking about integration, that merges into the technical/tactical side.  So on going on this journey (which may have started many years ago with multiple coaches) what did you try to do to get yourself in a position where you could discuss technique and how it relates the physical side?”

 

”@Dan: I didn’t use to do it to be honest.  The first port of call for any coach is that you must be outstanding in your own area, in order to get the respect and then step into a different room, to say that there are a few things that are going well in our area that I think you could look at, and we could improve the rugby programme.  So as an example for that. we would have done a lot of work around using coaching reviews and coaching checklists last season to try and improve the delivery in whatever area of the programme we were then trying to improve.  That then is something that transfers across domains because some of the content of what and how you coach might be different but there is a general structure there that is transferable across domains. So if something has gone well in one department you can then offer that with some integrity that you can share, and ask what they think and how it might work in the rugby domain or medical domain etc.”

 

”How much is it about you understanding the technical/tactical coaches and their job and understanding rugby versus expecting them to come in your domain and go that way?”

 

“@Dan: It does go two ways certainly, and over the years I’ve had S&C coaches who did dip into the rugby domain whereas I have never played the game, so you have to come at it from your own area with your own angle.  From a biomechanical point of view, we look at a running mechanics a certain way and certain landmarks and positions we want the player to be in.  If they hit those landmarks and positions consistently they will perform better, they are less likely to get injured.  So any technical aspect of any game should have those landmarks and positions that we look for to be stable.  How do we track it? How do we coach it?  What is the level of performance across the group?  If we are asking probing questions around what are the technical landmarks of the [insert rugby skill] we will develop some conversations hopefully, if your relationships are good and then from there you can start to influence that aspect of the programme.

 

From our end, if we think we have players who are quick enough, strong enough and powerful enough to be dominant in the tackle area, and then we start probing and influencing the technical execution of that area, then that’s how we connect and get transfer.

 

You can’t just sit in the gym and think we’ve nailed it here boys; everyone is jumping higher, running fast and squatting well.  That’s not going to guarantee anything without those other elements, so it’s all context specific and it depends on your relationship with the coaches.”

 

@Grangey: ”Similar to what Dan says, the main side we have attacked it from is a technical model standpoint, of how we can apply basic, sound biomechanics to these sporting actions, so we can come up with technical models that we can hold players accountable to these, and coach towards these KPIs.

 

”Just moving to the Game Speed topic, how important is it to understand the game model before embarking on this game speed journey?”

 

“@Grangey: It’s probably your primary port of call.  Whether you call it a game model or principles of play, whatever you call it, it’s pretty essential if you want to go through this process of being a highly integrated programme and narrow down and be really targeted in our programme, we’ve got to be able to collaborate and we’ve got to be able to understand what those principles are, what the outcomes are there. and what the coaches really want there.

 

Everything we do has got to have an impact on our game model, otherwise why would you do it?  We can work on a scale from general to specific but at the end of the day, we’ve got to win games at the weekend.

 

There are certain physical qualities that underpin that but when we are looking at game speed from a highly specific end, we have got to try and influence things that will make our individuals or team better, whether that’s COD evasive qualities or underpin the system using coordinative qualities.  These players are under so many constraints in a game that their decision making is literally homed in with so many different rules, or principles or guidelines as such that it becomes quite predictable that they’re either carrying on with the system or they are beating someone with footwork.    So my though process around game speed is we are either working on their ability to break out of the system doing something brilliant as an individual with their evasive qualities, or we try to underpin them to effect them to make our system better.

 

The long winded answer to your question, is yes it is essential to understand the game model, to understand what we are working back from at the end of the day.”

 

”You mention a lot about separation in your article in your reference to robust running.  Would you mind building that out for us around the qualities needed to execute that?”

 

The article was on Developing game speed in collision sports (see full article below) 👇

 

Developing game speed in collision sports

 

“@Grangey: It builds on our ability to maintain stable efficient running mechanics.  We want to be able to maintain a nice stable pelvis, that yes will transition between anterior and posterior pelvic tilt, and efficient front side mechanics, which everyone is buzzing around (which is brilliant), but whilst being able to rotate our pelvis and extend through our thoracic and fend off from different positions and pass from different positions while maintaining a square, stable pelvis.

 

 

We challenge upper limit rotation while being able to maintain a square, stable pelvis by moving at different speeds, from general stuff in the gym (as prep drills) and we work very specifically on the field, we do different plate punch positions where we are holding plates out in front with upper limb rotation while being able to run square, whether that’s running over wickets or we challenge that with speed and we are punching out dynamically, banded at the waist.  Then we piece it together into different passing variations; passing over wickets, racing while completing a pass.  We layer it up by going into 2 versus 1, adding different perceptual demands and try to build that up into a representative practice that underpins one of our principles of play.

 

For the lower body evasion qualities, there are different layers.  We can start by working on general qualities of change of direction and apply those principles and we do; different 45 degree cuts and 90 degree cuts and 180 degree turns.  But when we look at evasive qualities that’s a different layer – how can we narrow and home in on two or three key ones and make them better (see image below 👇).  Then the next layer is how are these players changing direction into contact, which links into Dan’s carry power principles, so that’s another layer, but we are still working on one or two key components within it.

 

 

Although we might have multiple layers and working on a scale of general to specific as such, we are maybe honing on one or two strategies.  We have three key evasion strategies that we know that players generally believe one of those three strategies is their X factor, if that’s the style of player they are.  Even if it’s not, they acknowledge it is a quality that they need to develop for their position within our system.”

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

  1.  Linear and change of direction speed are general, not specific, qualities
  2.  To increase transfer we need game based KPIs and technical models for them that improve game output
  3. Own your area first.  We have got to own our area to be able to get credibility to integrate.
  4. Bring your own area of expertise to the discussion to aid collaboration such as biomechanical principles – apply basic, sound biomechanics to these sporting actions
  5.  Essentialism – Although we might have multiple layers and working on a scale of general to specific as such, we are maybe honing on one or two strategies

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

 

You may also like from PPP:

 

Episode 446 Hailu Theodros

Episode 444 Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 446

Episode 446 – Hailu Theodros – Improving change of direction ability, deceleration drills and coaching “transitional movements

Hailu Theodros

Background

 

This week on the Pacey Performance Podcast is Athletic Development Coach at Speedworks, Hailu Theodros. Hailu spoke recently at the Sportsmith speed conference about gamespeed and his talk was incredible so to get him on the podcast was a complete no brainer.

 

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Hailu here

 

Discussion topics:

 

”When it comes to deceleration and the assessment side, how would you go about assessing an athlete’s deceleration ability and where you need to spend your time?”

 

”Generally speaking when developing change of direction ability, the main things I am trying to understand is first and foremost from an applied setting, is what are we trying to prepare for, what are the type of change of directions (COD) occurring in the sport, and what I’m probably referring to more so, is the angles at which these decelerations take place. That’s where my head goes first, but if we are talking more generally about how well an athlete changes direction, the most important thing for me is how well do you brake (and all those KPIs that Damian Harper and others have done a really great job at demystifying, and secondly, how well do you project outside of your base of support.

 

What I mean by that is how well you brake in a 180 degree turn being the most extreme that you will probably experience from a braking standpoint, having to completely stop your velocity and re-accelerate in the opposite direction, and then those more shallow changes of direction, so 60 degrees and less, and looking how well you step outside of your base of support and re-orientating your trunk to move in a new direction.

 

I say it is a polarized approach because I think all of the change of direction angles in between those two angles are probably an amalgamation of those two aspects of how well do you brake and how well do you re-orientate your trunk.  So if we take a 90 degree cut which is smack bang in between 0 and 180 degrees, there is going to need to be some braking involved, but not needing to come to a complete halt, and there will also be a real need to step outside of your base of support.  So if I can understand the extremes and how well you operate in those, I feel I gain a good understanding of how well you will probably execute other angles of change of direction, and obviously there are some physical qualities underpinning those.  From an applied setting I would focus on the 180 and the more shallow COD and not test the 90 degree cut, so how well you are able to maintain your speed in the more shallow COD, and the more aggressive change of direction.  For me I have found it helpful to understand opposite ends of the spectrum to get a good gauge of your strategies of doing everything else in between.

 

Testing wise I use the 10-5 for COD and having more of a frontal plane camera.  For the more acute angles of COD I’d have a front on facing camera, looking at what happens in the sagittal plane, what does the trunk do, how wide is that touch down distance relative to the centre of mass, and this is obviously being in more of a pre-planned situation.”

 

”You put a really interesting post out, and a slowed down video of a 180-degree turn, and you were talking about how much time two comparative athletes were spending in the hole. And that brings me onto my next point which is folding vs. sitting in terms of what the athlete does and looks like in the change of direction.  Can you explain that a little bit for us?”

 

”The post was about some positive change that had taken place over the course of that intervention, and how we were able to improve that individual’s change of direction ability, by focusing on that deceleration more so, and the biggest take away point that came from that was actually helping teach that individual how to fold vs sitting.  What I’m talking about when I refer to that, is we know that during change of direction dropping centre of mass (COM) is a key KPI for braking, particularly how (well) does that individual execute the dropping of COM and commonly in the athletes I’ve coached there are those two ways of people doing that.  We have a fold, by flexing at trunk, hip, knee and ankle, and I would describe that as crumbling into flexion.  Or, are you able to remain fairly vertical and disciplined at the trunk and achieve more of that dropping of COM through predominantly hip, knee and ankle while the trunk remains fairly disciplined? Those are the two buckets I commonly fit people into.

 

 

If I go into the relevance of this, sitting allows for COM to be projected down and back and shifting towards that penultimate step, and probably facilitates using that penultimate foot contact a lot more, and from the research that others have done, there is a massive importance for a large amount of that braking to take place at penultimate foot contact, versus actually folding at the trunk and folding forwards to drop COM.  This definitely promotes COM to shift forward onto the front (leading) leg and actually doesn’t encourage sitting back and preparing for the new direction, and really create that nice stable base of support and counteract that forward momentum, and putting appropriate braking forces in the right direction.”

 

 

‘The importance of the trunk and the orientation of the trunk to decelerate and then re-accelerate is that something that is isolated in terms of a training capacity, or is that something that is a result of something else?”

 

”I don’t want to say it is one or the other, I think it can be an amalgamation of both.  It could be that individual’s capacity that is forcing a folding action – maybe they aren’t able to produce the right amount of (eccentric) forces at the lower limb in order to create the right amount of braking and therefore more of the body needs to be involved in that braking action, and counteract that forward momentum.  Or, actually that individual doesn’t have the confidence to increase that touch down distance.  In coaching deceleration, we feel that deceleration is the inverse of coaching acceleration so in acceleration we see:

 

  • hip height going from low to high
  • a decrease in touch down distance to increase our propulsive forces

 

So when things get confusing, how can I understand it better, and actually the folding action doesn’t support our ability to increase touch down distance, doesn’t support our ability to redirect our COM in the new direction.  When we look at sitting, it definitely does support that a lot more, as a result of dropping COM (hip height) effectively whilst increasing touch down distance and actually having a negative displacement across the steps, as opposed to what we see in acceleration which is a positive hip displacement across the steps.”

 

”Would you be able to take us through what you’re actually looking for when that athlete starts to decelerate, and and then look at some drills to be able to coach them into these positions?”

 

”Going back to some of Damian [Harper’s] work, I’m predominantly looking at the anti-penultimate, penultimate and final foot contact.  We start from the anti-penultimate, and we use this phase of projecting back, and is that individual able to increase their touch down distance and have the confidence to increase it,  get their foot out in front of them and project themselves backwards in order to counteract the forward momentum that we get from acceleration, or linear speed.   And then progressively over those steps, as much as we are projecting backwards, are we also able to drop our COM?   The importance of dropping the COM is so that we can apply those braking forces more horizontally in the opposite direction and it’s really, really challenging to stay very vertical and increase touch down distance from an anatomical standpoint.  And again, I’ll refer back to acceleration, it’s very hard to project forward when you are in a very upright position.

 

So across the anti-penultimate and penultimate step are they able to increasingly step in front of their base of support and be fairly upright in their trunk whilst dropping their COM?  That can be a little bit tricky to see, but again it is this sitting action, almost sitting on the toilet is a good way to describe it; we wouldn’t flex at our trunk in order to sit on the toilet, we stay fairly vertical.  So we are sitting into our hips, dropping into our hips, and when we get close to that final foot contact we are hoping that a large part of our braking has been done in the anti-penultimate and penultimate contact, and the final foot contact is really to create a final block to decrease our forward momentum before helping us to project forward into the new direction.  We are looking that in that position the orientation should be of the trunk but also the shin in that final foot contact directing towards the new direction, but also the ranges of motion that that individual goes into should be fairly shallow, on the final foot contact providing that they have done sufficient work in the proceeding steps.

 

Getting out of the hole and how long you take to get in and out of the hole, and if you spend too long in the hole, it is probably a lot of the time, because you haven’t done enough [braking] in the previous steps and your final foot contact is working extremely hard, not only to brake but also to re-accelerate.  I see those preceding steps as helping your final foot contact out.  Can we help ourselves out by doing more work in the earlier steps?  Final foot contact has a larger emphasis on projecting out into the new direction, than it does slowing momentum down.

Foot positioning

 

If the foot isn’t beginning to reposition towards the new direction at the penultimate step it is extremely hard to create the right braking forces, to block against forward momentum, when feet are facing forward towards the initial direction we come into.  Not only does that rotation of the foot need to happen at the penultimate step to redirect, I also think it needs to create a real block to go against momentum of the initial acceleration direction, so it almost has two roles.

 

By the time the final foot contact takes place, half of the work [of braking] should be done, if not more of the work should be done, in order to redirect.

 

There is just a slight change of orientation of the trunk in the transverse plane, but we shouldn’t have to spend more time having to take another step in order to redirect.  You commonly see this with players doing a 180 degree COD, they struggle to stay within a corridor of COD, and what I mean by that is that they come in and really curve their re-acceleration, because either they haven’t prepared well enough for the new direction, or, they need to take more steps in order to brake and decelerate their horizontal momentum.”

 

”When you’re coaching deceleration in this capacity, like we’ve discussed, is this always done in a 180 COD, and would you always do this from a max speed perspective, because often in team sports when you’re making a COD you’re not particularly going fast.  If you’re a defender, for example, you’re jogging and then a quick deceleration and COD, so I’m just wondering how you incorporate the demands of the sport and the position with the coaching of it ?”

 

”For me, I think braking as a quality, that is going to happen at the extremes of the CODs, and if I really want to overload that, I might use that [180 COD] as an intervention.  But definitely I agree with you (and especially when we come onto talk about our Speedworks levels) it needs to be more representative of what we are trying to train for.  Yes, braking might be your limiting factor, as to why you can’t stay tight in a 1 vs 1, or you struggle to change direction.  So I might use a 180 COD to really overload that stimulus, but I definitely need to shift our training along to make it more representative of what we are trying to train for, specific to the velocities and angles of COD that take place, but I don’t necessarily think that it always needs to be a sprint into change of direction.

 

Some of the ways in which we have coached it. have been based on applying a well understood and applied framework for acceleration so there is going to be some:

 

  • Isolated exercises – that focus on key moments of the penultimate contact or final foot contact, or trunk orientation.
  • Integrated drills – exposing the athlete to different CODs, coming in at different speeds, different types of derivatives- which are transitional movements in themselves, such as lateral shuffle, cross-over and backpedals, where there is still an element of braking involved. These allow you to focus on key shapes and positions at lower intensities and lower speeds.

 

We can also do two to three decelerations from walking and jogging positions that are accentuated from a band, pulling that individual further into the direction they are initially heading in.  We can not just decelerate to stop, but decelerate to move off again.  We can decelerate off larger distances, shorter distances, there is a real wide spectrum, it’s just important to understand the context of what we are working in, and breaking it down before we build it back up again.

 

”Before we go any further, would you be able to talk us through the speedworks levels, as I know it is something that was mentioned at the conference a couple of times?”

 

”Specific to this context around deceleration, Gamespeed goes from Level 1 to Level 7 and increases in complexity, and gets closer and closer to what we understand as Gamespeed.

 

Level 1 is very much about isolated drills and the development of an attribute whether that is acceleration, or deceleration in this context, and the 180 COD provides that real challenging stimulus for braking as we have discussed.  Level 1 is a really great place to embed some key concepts, that we need the individual to really understand about braking, such as sitting vs folding,  which is going to be a key thing we want that individual to understand in level 1.  That will be a continuous theme as we complexify things and make things more reactive (in higher levels), and the challenge is going to be see if that individual can still achieve the fundamentals, with less time at levels 3, 4 and 5.

 

Then as we move into level 2 it is about adding complexity by adding different variables in, challenging velocity, different directions, different positions, so not just from cone to cone as such. So now it’s not just a 180 COD to a cone where you stop when you reach there, and then come back. It might be applying different angles so you’re doing a zig zag potentially and you’re decelerating to the first cone before decelerating out, or you are starting in different positions before you decelerate, or you are in a specific zone before you decelerate.

 

When we move into level 3 the practice designs are more representative of the end goal, or what happens in the game, but in a closed setting.

 

These are the situations, these are the actions that take place, how well can you demonstrate braking when you have plenty of time to focus on it?  And again, as we begin to complexify these things a bit more we can make them a bit more reactive as we move through the levels.  We can make things a bit  more reactive by using me as a coach, and calling different cones/colours, and reduce the time available to prepare.

 

Levels 4 and 5 are going to be about creating more situations and for me the coaching needs to shift towards more the objectives of the task and the task we are trying to represent from the game, as opposed to what the movement should look like.  Ideally yes, the movements (performed well) should equal achieving the task better and be more successful at the task.  But I think what gamespeed allows us to do, is appreciate that even though there are core fundamentals there is a large amount of variability that will take place when we spend more time at levels 4 and 5 and things are more reactive, and open.  That variability is important because it is more representative of what happens in the game, there is no situation that happens in the game.   So how can we artificially create this environment that creates that?

 

Your objective in that situation was to get tight to your opponent, and you didn’t, and that was probably because you didn’t sit enough or you were folding and you were still in your final foot contact versus shifting towards your penultimate foot contact, and that is why maybe you weren’t as successful at the task.”

 

”Are there certain types of drills that you could share that you use when you are trying to develop these deceleration qualities that we are speaking about?”

 

”I think first of all, especially when we are going back to this point of spending too long in the hole, it is important to highlight that it is important to understand what the limiting factor is to spending too long in the hole.  Is it a physical restriction? Is it a physical capacity limitation? Or is it more of a movement strategy?  Be it that you yield too much or you go into very deep ranges of motion on that final foot contact, and you don’t have those reactive strength qualities to be quick out of the hole.  Or is it that your trunk is all over the place, throughout those deceleration steps and your final foot contact?  So highlighting ‘it’ first of all is very important, and to understand that there are differences and what is the cause and effect of spending too long in the hole.  Once you identify that you can go after it.

 

Using the original example earlier, that individual’s focus was actually around better trunk orientation in shallower ranges of motion and expressing more reactive strength in that final foot contact.  So a lot of the drills that we went to were:

 

  • things that happened out on the pitchhop & returns – plyometric variations
  • things that happened in the gym – focused on overloading the physical elements (which was a smaller portion of the training for this individual), while still integrating a teaching component.  So there was a lot more supra-maximal work eccentric, isoinertial flywheel work to really challenge the eccentric rate of force development (RFD).  It was highlighted that this was a contributing factor to spending too long in the hole, not being able to create those high forces quick enough, which is probably why the trunk was getting involved.

 

While in the gym doing that eccentric and isoinertial work, it was 100% reinforcing that message that I need you to sit, not fold, to remain vertical through your trunk, to remain disciplined in your trunk while executing these exercises, sitting through our hips and knees as opposed to through our trunk.

 

Then we went out to the on field work, which was a larger portion of it, the work was focused around hop & return in the frontal plane (lateral hop & return), but accentuated the eccentric component by using a band to pull that athlete further into flexion, and the athlete has to do his best to resist against this added velocity and accentuated action.  We did a lot of lateral shuffles but with the stick overhead to really challenge that individual’s ability to sit and not fold, when doing a repeated shuffle, when reaching those end points.  Can you stay in fairly upright positions when moving off each side when moving left and right.  Finally, a lot of that work was plyometric work in the frontal plane such as skater jumps, really reinforcing that point of bigger touch down distance, shallower ranges of motion, really reactive contacts and working along that spectrum, much like we would do with acceleration.

 

The biggest difference was talking about those technical points that crossover to what we are trying to achieve in the actual movement itself, and almost having these two components – teaching and training always in tandum.  In the gym, adaptations taking a greater emphasis from a physiological standpoint and then equally out on the pitch, using velocity, and doing slow and fast movements to overload the technical and physical side.

 

One of the reasons why I like lateral shuffles and the importance of them, is that doing deceleration work (specifically 180 CODs) can be quite intense and really challenging to overload them, both from a physical capacity, or their ability to cope with those loads but also the time available to embed those teaching points.  So the lateral shuffle was a great opportunity to still have some braking opportunity at lower velocities in positions that were really specific to what we want to see when we are doing deceleration in a 180 COD.  So the lateral shuffle allowed us to have a lower hip height to start with which is what we want, and can we teach that individual to increase that touch down distance from a position of hip height that is already low, and the stick overhead keeps you accountable to having trunk discipline and keeping fairly upright.  it’s a very good feedback tool to see whether you have trunk flexion involvement.”

 

”Let’s talk about transitional movements, I’d just like to hear more about what you see as transitional movements.  As a defender in football, I was rubbish at them, so I’d like you to talk more about them.  From your perspective, what are transitional movements?”

 

”I almost coin them the connectors between linear speed, braking and COD.  It is the actions that take place between those movements.  I think one thing that has been really pertinent for me and diving into this more and more, and that work started at my time at Chelsea FC, is a lot of that work was triggered by the football coaches.  The background to that is that the coaches would come to me and say, ”he doesn’t move his feet very well, or he can’t change direction very well. But when we as a department looked at how we assessed those aspects, they were more traditional in terms of the 180 degree COD 10-5 test, or we would understand it in terms of a 90 degree cut, and they just weren’t crossing over with what the coaches were talking about.  How we were assessing an athlete’s ability to change direction weren’t aligning and actually that pushed me a bit more to realise that there was more to it than just change of direction.

 

I think the reason why those transition movements are important is really because of the technical and tactical constraints of the sport.  I think if you remove those aspects of the sport, I think linear speed, braking and COD are good enough, they tick the box.  If we look at a sport like volleyball, there is a real need to keep your trunk facing the net while changing direction, and that is a tactical component of the sport, which then means that a lateral shuffle is going to be really important before you accelerate in order to keep yourself facing forwards.  Or, if we are talking about a defender in football, there is a real need for him to stay facing the attacker, if he is running at him in a 1 vs 1, which is why a back pedal becomes important; if it wasn’t, then that individual would just turn and run, and it doesn’t need to be any more complex than that.  So, I think it’s the presence of the technical and tactical constraints that highlights the need and importance of the transitional movements, that connect between linear speed, braking and COD.

 

The objectives of these transitional movements fall into three buckets for me:

 

  1. minimising speed loss when someone is changing direction or reorientation is needed – so for me that looks like someone going from a backpedal into a linear sprint.  You’re still moving in the same direction, going backwards but I’m just changing my orientation.  It doesn’t really fit into COD traditionally.  So the requirements of that situation are how can I get into my backpedal and linear sprint without losing too much speed to keep my speed increasing, because I have a player running at me, for example.
  2. close or exploit space over small distances when change of directions are less effective – so similar to that volleyball situation, where a traditional COD like a 90-degree cut are less effective, and a lateral shuffle is going to be really important to close and exploit space.
  3. preparing for and accessing positions a lot quicker – if I can do a rotational step (drop step) providing that I am doing that effectively, I should be able to access key positions, have my hip height at the right place, decrease my touchdown distance and accelerate faster, when we are talking about linear speed.

 

Although I have categorized transition movements into four categories (lateral shuffle, rotational step (drop step), cross-over step and the back pedal) and it has been helpful for me to dissect and separate those movements into those four categories, one thing I have always been quick to check myself on is that I don’t train movement in just those isolated ways because when we work it back from the sport which is where they are highlighted, these actions do not happen in isolation.  It isn’t just a lateral shuffle, it isn’t just a backpedal.  It is commonly a back pedal into a lateral shuffle into an acceleration, or a deceleration into a drop step, into a re-acceleration.  So for our understanding it is helpful to separate them into these areas, but when we go about training it is important to think about how these transitional actions present themselves in sport, and why, because there is probably going to be a need to mix and merge these movements whilst developing them.

 

It’s helpful to refer back to the levels in the Speedworks gamespeed framework, yes the four movement categories allow us a place to start to work on these categories in isolation.  There is merit and value in understanding how well you backpedal just to backpedal (in isolation), because we know that when we combine these actions and look at the sport, backpedaling is a key component, for example.  But we need to quickly understand that we need to move on to tasks that make things more representative of the game demands as we work through the levels and get closer to game speed.

 

It is not one movement solution for a situation. What is the objective of the task, and what is the most effective solution to achieve that?  It is dependent on the technical, tactical and physical components that are involved in that situation, and not just this is the solution for the situation and I am going to use it.

 

”How do you then dissect things and then focus on that one transition movement, or perhaps you don’t, it’s more of a holistic view of things and it plays into lots of manipulation of these kinds of movements like we have just said?”

 

”Let’s take the situation of the central defender coming out to close down a striker who is then looking to run past them as coaches will commonly highlight defenders, as not moving well enough.

 

I’d definitely start by saying, ”what is the situation that you struggle in?” and for me that is definitely on the coach, definitely on the analyst (if you have those resources available) or perhaps my own understanding of the sport, and taking that real situation that is affecting performance.  So maybe you’re not winning your 1 vs 1 battles or players are beating you too easily.  That’s a real incentive to say, okay, we need to work on this,  let’s highlight the situation you are struggling with and then dissect it – what are the speeds you are running at? What are the actions that are taking place? And what are the distances you are working in?

 

First of all I’m thinking, ”ok you clearly need to backpedal at quite a high speed as you need to keep facing the opponent, and then at some point you need to turn.  Which aspect is it that you struggle with? Is it actually that you have a real loss of balance because you can’t backpedal effectively and that trickles into your turn and makes it look messy? Or actually is it you can backpedal really quick, but the moment I’ve asked you to do a rotational drop step, in order to turn and accelerate, maybe that is where yo have a loss of balance or a real drop in velocity, which works to the advantage of the attacker.

 

So highlight those points first of all, and then for me it’s about what are the key skills that take place in that moment?  If it is the first portion of the backpedal then let’s isolate that, let’s overload it in different ways.  Let’s see how well you backpedal across a 10m stretch.  This is where the Project-Switch-Reactivity (PSR) Speedworks framework has been great for me because it works across many different aspects and it’s not just applied to linear speed.

 

So in that backpedal, can you project your COM in the right direction, can you switch your limbs to stay in control of your COM and can you be reactive on the floor? So, those are the things I would be looking at, and actually the bigger guys, you will probably see some strategies where they don’t really project themselves very far, they stay very tall and take loads and loads of steps but don’t travel anywhere!  And actually, COM begins to topple over and the top half goes beyond their bottom half and lose their balance and maybe fall on their bum! In those situations there is merit and value in saying, I need to teach you how to backpedal better, so I need to teach you how to drop your COM better and project better, because you’re really good at switching but you’re just not getting anywhere.

 

From then on, I’m just going to use different types of techniques (differential learning) to play with direction, play with speed, to challenge the depth of situations with which you can execute this movement skill in various different ways because there is high variability when you go back to your sport.  So how can I challenge it and stress test it before we go down the levels of 2, 3 and 4 of the gamespeed model, to make it more situation specific?”

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

 

  1. COD is about how well do you brake and how well do you project outside of your base of support.
  2. Benefit of a polarized approach – helpful to understand opposite ends of the spectrum to get a good gauge of your strategies of doing everything else in between.
  3. Importance of a key teaching cue – sitting versus folding as you get in and out of the hole.
  4. Important role of anti and penultimate steps – a large part of our braking has been done in the anti-penultimate and penultimate contact, and the final foot contact is really to create a final block to decrease our forward momentum before helping us to project forward into the new direction
  5.  Importance of transitional movements to gamespeed – lateral shuffle, drop steps, cross-over and backpedal.

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

You may also like from PPP:

 

 

Episode 443 Nick Kane

Episode 442 Damian, Mark & Ted

Episode 444 Jermaine McCubbine

Episode 436 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 414-418 Pete, Phil and Nathan

Episode 413 Marco Altini

Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish

Episode 385 Paul Comfort

Episode 383 James Moore

Episode 381 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 380 Alastair McBurnie & Tom Dos’Santos

Episode 379 Jose Fernandez

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 370 Molly Binetti

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

 

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 436

Episode 436 – Jonas Dodoo – How to use the warm up as a movement screen and revolutionising technique analysis with computer vision and AI

Jonas Dodoo

Background

 

This week on the Pacey Performance Podcast, Rob is speaking to speed coach legend and Head Coach at Speedworks, Jonas Dodoo. Jonas has been on the podcast multiple times and each time he appears, its obvious why. Jonas is here to talk about the Speedworks philosophy of projection, reactivity and switching but also the warm up as a movement screen and sprint technology.

 

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Jonas here

 

Discussion topics:

 

”Can you give us an overview of Projection, Switching and Reactivity?”

 

Projection

 

  • It’s about range of motion between thighs at toe off when you have finished pushing off the ground to separate your thighs and push back into the ground to throw your momentum forward
  • Trunk discipline – the ability to have a big hip extension without having to overuse your back erectors
  • “Bum before back” – using your butt.
  • It’s about displacement, it’s linked to your strength to weight ratio and about separation of thighs and using your bum
  • Once you project and make a big shape to throw yourself forward you need to exchange your limbs and reverse the action that you’ve just done. Hip extension –> Hip flexion (if your extension is driven by your bum, not your lumbar or quad/ knee)
  • Not knee extension–> knee flexion, which would happen if you don’t have good co-contraction of the posterior chain.

 

Drive a good projection pattern that is bum driven which makes it really easy to switch and reverse your thighs really easily and cleanly.

 

If you are knee driven you are doing lots of shin roll and ankle collapse in order to find more tension on the ground. So your hip flexors become really quiet and therefore they are not ready when you start to run faster.

 

Switching

 

  • Switching is really about the coordination of the pelvis so that you can hit a hip lock and bounce out of that position.

 

Reactivity

 

  • Reactivity is like the suspension it’s like the recycling part of this action and it is highly linked to your efficiency.

 

You could have a really good projection and switch, but when your foot hits the ground you collapse, you lose all your energy and now have to shin roll and knee push; you still get stuck in that scenario of not being efficient, not being elastic.

 

Projection, Switching and Reactivity are my key attractors that when they work together you become very efficient in what you’re doing.

 

Most of the movement puzzles that are related to injury are around the fact that one or two of those things are an athlete’s strength and the third one is a weakness.

 

They may not be getting an injury in the calf and ankle. But they will get them in their groin and hamstring and that comes from the fact that they can’t be stiff and stable on the ground and the cascade of issues that come from it.

 

Projection– I’d measure hip displacement. How far have you traveled? Step length

 

Switching– is about reversal of thighs. I’d measure thigh angular acceleration and thigh angular velocity. Velocity being the range and in what time, and Acceleration being the ability to reverse it at the end of those ranges.

 

Reactivity – is all about all about GCT and ankle stiffness and all round body system stiffness. It’s highly related to Switching. We have plenty of players who have the highest RSI in the gym but when they run they have the worst reactivity and they spend lots of time on the ground because the foot isn’t moving back and down, maybe its just down or maybe its even out in front and it’s blocking.

 

Over the last 3 years we have studied runs, we’ve got over 1000 runs, 300-400 players. We do a deep analysis and it always comes back to being able to do one of those three things (PSR).

 

 

‘Can you give give us a bit of an insight into where your head goes in terms of implementing something to improve each one of those three (projection, switching and reactivity)?”

 

”I think it’s actually relatively simple.  Can you make a big shape? So when you watch someone run right now, and you do need a bit of a coaching eye, or an awareness at least, of your population.  So if you know your population and you have a normal distribution, a few of your guys will run with more step length, so bigger strides, almost bounding.  Some of your guys will run with more step frequency, just spinning the wheels.  Some of your guys frequency will come from limiting air time, not wasting any time on the ground, and that’s why they don’t have as much displacement.  (Or) They might be on the ground an average amount of time, just like some of the other guys, it’s just they don’t spend any time in the air, and that’s why they spin fast.   Others may spin fast because they are very quick off the ground.  These guys are being more efficient through the floor, being more reactive, maybe limiting their range on the ground as well.

 

So if you watch your player and they have got big steps, but because they take big steps maybe they don’t reverse very quickly out of those steps; maybe they really utilise all of that time to extend.  Those are the individuals that could benefit from as soon as they get to the end (of hip extension), switching a bit sooner, because just by adding a bit of switching and reversal they can attack the ground a bit sooner.  They ‘may’ lose a tiny bit of length, but what they gain in rate of force development (RFD), in quickness on the ground, is what improves them and allows them to run a bit faster.

 

Being step length dominant or developing step length as a goal is good and is part of the equation of velocity (distance x time), however if you reduce your step length a tiny bit and increase the frequency, especially the reversal and the ankle stiffness you become efficient, let’s forget faster, you just become more efficient.  You can run longer for the same amount of energy, you can repeat sprint, as you transition the later part of a run is less costly.

Projection

 

Making a big shape and pushing against resistance, creating good ankle and shin discipline are the KPIs of projection.  So a broad jump encourages you to push against the ground horizontally, make a big extension (not a big shape) but a big extension against the ground to get a big projection.  A single leg broad jump, or a bound, where time is not your KPI but distance is, will support projection.

 

At a general level so would building a bigger bum, a bit of hypertrophy around your proximal hamstring, even a squat, and stronger quadriceps.  Most of your compound lifts will address your ability to project yourself.  Most compound lifts are vertical, they are slow compared to running, so the transfer is limited but if you are weak and do a bit of compound lifting and get stronger your RFD improves automatically and your force capability (your strength to weight ratio) improves so 50% of what you need to project yourself well in a sprint is covered by just getting a bit stronger.

 

Now, getting a bit stronger after that doesn’t cover much more, so after that point and you have some strength (I would do it concurrently) I would be developing some strength and physical capabilities to use your hip extensors aggressively and stabilise that with your hip flexors and trunk.  Then I would do various transference drills – special strength – be it sled, be it wall drills with a specific focus, some key switching elements where projection is limiting you, or you are stressing projection even though you are switching.  Resistance during some of those key exercises, resisting hips in extension, or challenging your trunk while you are still trying to extend are all the key exercises that would really support projection.  But at the end of the day, you need to do it running!

 

 

So at football clubs (and team sports) we do spend time helping them design micro doses of how to address projection, switching and reactivity through exercises in warm-ups, in the gym, post training on the grass, mid way through technical drills so that they potentiate the technical and tactical aspects.  There are various ways of doing it but at the end of the day it is ‘can you push yourself forwards fast?’, that’s really what we are talking about.  That’s just projection!

 

Switching

 

Maybe I’ll quickly talk about switching.  So it’s about lumbar pelvic control so anything that is core related, anything where you have to be in a split stance and exchange your limbs out of a split stance or be in a split stance and have to be stable and strong and create lots of force closure around your pelvis.  Anything that encourages you to dissociate your pelvis from your trunk, from your leg, being able to rotate, being able to flex/extend, but keep everything in control.  Use your obliques like an elastic sling, use your hip flexors like a sling; anything that encourages that is going to support your ability to switch, or at least support the stability required in order for you to switch.

 

 

Anything that is high RFD at outer ranges of your limb, and having to eccentrically control (some people say it is isometrically- I’m not in that debate!) being able to block your knee on the way up and stop it moving up quickly, using your adductor magnus and your glute, and reverse it back down, that is switching.   Or extending your hip, and before it’s finished its extension, initiate your hip flexors to rip it forwards, there are some high eccentric forces happening proximal to the joint, at both of those joint positions, and both of those things support your ability to switch.  I do think that you need the physical strength, the core strength but that is almost slow strength and you need to be able to do it at high intensities and add some pertubations, and with those pertubations, still be able to switch your limbs!

 

Reactivity

 

I think that all plyometrics can help support your ability to be reactive.  I think calf training and calf loading is only done in most team sports when people are injured, and there is a massive under appreciation of how a sloppy, soft, unstable ankle can create a cascade of issues up the chain.

 

 

Switching activities will also help, because when you are switching and landing on the ground, they actually get your contacts needed to create the RFD and the stiffness at the ankle, alongside running drills, along side plyometrics.  They are all going to be great ways of adding system stiffness.”

 

‘When we talk about using the warm up as a movement screen, from a tech free perspective, and just using your coaching eye, how can you help coaches to zone in on certain things that may help them moving forwards?”

 

”I’m just going to regurgitate and just repeat what I just said, if I’m honest.  I definitely think that PSR is a easy way to bucket the KPIs of movement.  So let’s say you’re just doing a general warm up.  There is:

 

  • walking activities
  • mobility on the ground or over hurdles
  • locomotive activities – be it drills, lateral shuffles

 

Trunk control

 

So already you are doing a range of drills, so having an awareness of your group and asking basic questions like firstly, ”do they have good trunk control?, does their trunk sway forwards and backwards, are they stuck in a bit of lordotic anterior tilt and it remains that way?  Anterior tilt is important for extension but you should be able to get it and come out of it.  Or does it stay there all the time and they have a curve in their back, and they look like they’ve got a bit of a pot belly but really it’s because they open their diaphragm and they can’t set it.  Trunk control is a massive precursor to stability and fluid movement.  Lack of trunk control has been linked to ACLs, and groins and hamstrings and everything right? So, the first thing I’m looking for is trunk control.  Looking side on at something like A skips, I’m looking at their head and seeing if they can keep their head just in front of their hips, rather than just behind because that difference is pretty dramatic in terms of what they are doing with their pelvis, and driving hip extension.

 

So small things around trunk control and its influence on your hip extension quality would be my constant theme, so why put sticks above head and why spend time on the ground doing hip bridges and trunk related activities? It’s so that I can get some co-contractions.  Before we sprint (especially my rehabers) I do an aggressive set of med ball throws (kneeling, above their head, sitting with their feet off the ground and having to rotate) because I just want to turn on their ability to aggressively co-contract and deal with rotation quickly and get out of it.  I don’t think that anti-rotation is something that we coach, or that we should coach and people coach it a lot.  I want to see them go into rotation and then get out of it. I want them to access the edges, and get out of the edges aggressively.

 

So if I’m watching a warm-up I’m using a range of activities to encourage their ability to stabilise their trunk, dissociate hip extension and hip rotation around it.  If I see lots of sway backwards and forwards, it’s an issue.

 

Plyometrics

 

If I’m doing basic low level plyometrics such as pogos, I’m looking to see, ”are you falling or are you flying?”  This is something I have been talking a lot more over the last 8 months just because I’ve been in a lot of Academies and I need to coach it but I didn’t want to waste too much time, and actually it’s the two key things I focus on.

 

If you are falling you never get your toes up, you never attack the ground, you always amortise and squash your body into the ground, you always over rotate to go forwards.  If you are flying, you get your legs ready in the air, you jump before you land.  Before you land you actually initiate extension so as a result, your knees don’t bend as much, and your ankles don’t collapse.  You load your elastic structures to get off the ground and you get more air time.  Every player who does this will say it feels easier, I feel more efficient, it doesn’t hurt my knees.  So as I’m going through a warm-up I’m making sure they are being bouncy and creating pre-tension across all of their plyos, their side skips, backwards runs etc to make sure they are flying and not falling.

 

Switching

 

Then switch, everyone does boom booms or A skips, or whatever exercise it is, but not everyone switches out of their marches, so that’s the first thing.  I want to make sure that you don’t just make a big shape and then your foot falls.  I want to make sure that you make a big shape and you can reflexively exchange your legs.  When people do boom booms, sometimes they have big range, and let’s say they’re doing three booms, and they are going ”boom, boom, boom.”

 

 

But what you often see is, small, small, BIG!  They sacrifice range of motion for speed, and all you are doing is staying in gear 2 and not really doing anything with it.  The aim of projection is about range, so can you project and spend little time doing it.

 

Mathematicians will have taught us that in order to get faster you can’t increase step length and step frequency, is the general adage.  I think it is BS, because if you attack the ground and have stiffness and pre-tension it allows to be quicker off the ground but it also allows you to get good projection, especially if you have enough air time.  You can improve both!  It’s just about how you go about it, and the discipline that is needed for it.

 

This isn’t just in linear sprinting, if you were doing a change of direction drill, the same things would apply.  So what we do, is we go PSR for sprinting.  Now let’s talk about it in terms of a change of direction or a cut or just slamming on the brakes.  And Hailu Theodros has been great at taking those concepts and saying okay, how am I going to apply this to change of direction, but more importantly with his clients in the English Premier League (EPL), how do I make this position specific, so I can continue to layer in good movements and get it to transfer very, very quickly as well?”

 

Top 5 Take Away Points:

  1. Projection – It’s about range of motion between thighs at toe off when you have finished pushing off the ground to separate your thighs and push back into the ground to throw your momentum forward
  2. Switching – is really about the coordination of the pelvis so that you can hit a hip lock and bounce out of that position
  3. Reactivity – is like the suspension it’s like the recycling part of this action and it is highly linked to your efficiency
  4.  Step length and step frequency can both be trained!
  5.  PSR don’t just apply to linear sprinting.  They apply to all movement/

 

 

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

 

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Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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