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

🔉 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 pitch– hop & 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?”

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Episode 443 – Nick Kane – Managing hip and groin injuries and developing a robust injury prevention strategy 

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Nick here

Discussion topics:

”I think it’s a well rounded question, and I think as you eluded to there, the context is probably being is those injuries that come in after a few months of having groin pain as opposed to someone who is saying my adductor is a little bit sore after a game at the weekend.

First and foremost is nailing down a diagnosis, so you know what you are dealing with and what stage of pathology and letting that guide where to start.  Enda King would always say, ”it’s either for rehab, or it’s not,” so if it’s not for rehab there is a pathway you need to work through, but if it’s for rehab, this is what we are about and we need to start our process.  Anything around the groin is usually for rehab.

When I look at my groin process, that starts with looking at the athlete as a whole and nailing down what I think is contributing to that pathology.  So that starts with a thorough assessment and looking through some functional stuff:

• Overhead squat
• Single leg squat
• Hopping
• End range calf raises – ability to hold that position
• General Range of Motion Assessments – pick out imbalances
• Strength assessments – hip abduction/adduction, hip flexion/extension, abdominal loading

So with this you can build up a picture of what you think are your big rocks and what are the big rocks you are going to attack first?  With groins you can pick everything, and go at everything, but if you can pick the big 3 that you are going to go after- such as hip abduction/extension weakness on the right side, if there is a clear imbalance there, then that’s probably going to be pretty high on your list of priorities.  You’ll generally find hip strength is right up there on your big rocks.

In terms of the physio table assessments, I might be looking to see what can change your pain to guide where you are at, such as what actually improves your squeeze power?  If I go hard on some hip and glute exercises does that improve your squeeze power? If I do some timing or work on lumbo-pelvic hip complex (LPHC) positional changes, does that influence our clinical tests?  A bit of pelvic posterior tilt or embracing some abdominal work does that suggest that some of that LPHC work is guiding some of our symptoms? So we can start there.

‘‘Out of those exercises that might present pain, what kind of objective data are you getting off any of those assessments, where are collecting your objective data from?”

”It’s probably initially having a look at those aspects as a visual representation of where they are at, and picking out what you are seeing.  So, before I move onto some really true objective bench marking, it’s more about, okay, their single leg squat doesn’t look too good on the right side.  I go and test their hip abduction strength and that’s clearly showing a deficit, and then their hip extension strength might also show a bit of a deficit.  So that’s clearly bringing that level of importance up higher for me.  So, it’s more about stepping from there away, and then probably working our way through some of key objective testing to really see if that marries up.

Objective Testing

• Isometric Hip Abduction test – 2-2.5 x bodyweight
• Isometric Hip Extension – in a 45 degree position off the end of table with a force transducer – 9-10 x bodyweight
• Isometric Hip Abduction/Adduction – often look for close to 1:1 ratio
• Isometric Hip flexion (90 degrees and 0 degrees) squeeze test
• Lumbo-pelvic hip complex (LPHC) test – double leg lower- lowering down and controlling that without falling into some anterior tilt.  I would like them to be able to lower all the way to the floor without losing their lumbo pelvic control.

Initially I wouldn’t look at some of the trunk capacity tests like side plank and plank holds etc

It is a balance between both our clinical benchmark testing and also what we can produce in the gym to get a bit more of a level of capacity and function in our bench marking, so as physios we our extending our-self more from the physio room and into the gym to tease out some of these capacity and strength markers.  If we are a physio and it’s not our skill set within the gym, then it is certainly about working with someone (S&C coach) who that is, so I’d encourage the physios to link up and work through what they are seeing and what the S&C coach is seeing to tease that out.

Gym Assessments

If we start with the end in mind, we want to have the highest level of capacity and tolerance so that they don’t break down again on the field.  So need to think about where we want the athlete to be at that point, where are they now and how do we get there?

We know that the loads and the forces and the preventative effect of the long lever Copenhagen test is really important so getting them to that level is part of what we do, and it’s probably not the stating point if they have been coming out of some pain and function probably won’t be able to do that.

• Copenhagen long lever – 30 sec hold isometric or 2×10 if it’s eccentric/concentric work
• LPHC Capacity test – Side plank 90-sec and Front Plank 2 minutes
• Single leg squat – really good SLS,  1 set of 10  pistol squats down to 90 degrees free standing in good form and fashion
• Split squat – pain free under some decent load – at least 30kg in a split squat biasing that rear leg position for some rec fem load
• High level Abdominal function– clean reverse ab curls or exercises such as Hanging leg raises
• General Strength – not forgetting general bench marking such as leg press, squat, deadlift and hinge targets relative to bodyweight.”

‘‘What are the common mistakes when implementing groin rehab in a team setting?”

”Under-loading – to find the deficiencies and tease out those things, I think we are pretty good at that.  If they still have some pain, how are we addressing that? Are we saying have some rest, or just do a couple of little band exercises and hope it goes away, and its still there weeks later.  I think we can really get in early, and get really good loading to address what we need to do with weights etc.  Go hard at it, and go hard at it early – unloading in that early and mid phase will just drag groin issues along as we are not addressing what is driving it.

Racing to the finish line – The other one is often a groin will commonly fail you if it’s a chronic groin issue, and they often won’t fail you early, they will fail late.  You’ll put all this work in for 5-6 months and you’ll get them there, and there strength and capacity are let’s say 90%.  Then they go and perform in games repeatedly, or high level training sessions and they break down.  Essentially, they are just not taking that extra bit of time, or really nailing and having really clear benchmarks in your mind and not accepting anything less than that.

Not addressing anterior chain strength enough within rehab – hip flexion, abdominal or oblique strength.  If we only hit the hip strength we may be missing out on something.

Clearly you can get yourself in a bit of a hole if you say he is going to play in 4 weeks time.  It’s about buying your time setting expectations a little bit longer, and rather than setting a date in mind, it’s about working aggressively forward to make that change and putting it on the athlete early  and saying this is where you are at, this is where I want you and then having making sure you are having some routine testing through the process.

Be really strong on achieving those things that you think are important and pushing to get there.

‘‘When it comes to building an Injury Prevention System, what does that look like for you in terms of an overall philosophy?’

Primary Prevention

”As a general framework and how I see myself working within this as a physio, I look at primary prevention and addressing the key risk factors that go across the sport, including:

• Knowing the common injuries in your sport
• Making sure training loads are really high
• Making sure athletes are really strong
• Making sure athletes are recovering well – eating and sleeping well
• Making sure athletes are hitting their speeds – and having a good speed exposure

Secondary Prevention

• Individualising things more in the injury prevention process – to stop an injury from becoming more sinister, or putting things in place and being more selective in our IP approach by stopping the energy leaks.
• Physio benchmarks – hip, calf and hamstring, and hopping metrics.  Most people do them, but it’s more about how well you to do and how much you pay attention to detail on the results but also the process following on from that.

Fitness Testing

With most players at the start of the season, we will look at:

• hip strength (abduction/adduction)
• hamstring strength (Nordic measure)
• calf strength test– seated calf strength (on a force plate- 1.8 x bodyweight)
• calf endurance test – calf raise to fatigue
• 5 hop test (force plate)

We will look at the pie chart with all our benchmark norms and test that at least 3 times a year for some of our younger guys to see that they are improving and addressing those key areas.  For some of our main group or more senior athletes a lot of them might only have one or two things that are sitting at where we want them.  So then in that case we plug in an intervention (here’s your exercise or entry point,  this is our load and you need to progress it like so and here’s how many days a week you do it).  We will re-assess in 4 weeks and get every athlete at that level and once they are that level then fantastic, and we can go again to target something further that they think or we think will further assist them.

It’s about not over-intervening with the information you get.  You could jump at shadows and think, oh his groin squeeze is down, or his hamstring power is down.  But I think it is really important to know that our screening measures (and numbers we are getting) are NOT a decision making tool.

They are purely there to maybe flag something, or at least start that conversation with the physio, to say let’s look at this, and do a bit of that, then re-test that squeeze and we are away.  Or maybe we are seeing some range of motion down, some pain on his groin contractions, and some early signs of fatigue or under recovery of the adductor longus.  Now we want players training but clearly using our clinical knowledge and the context of where that player is at, and where they have come from, and where we are in the season, we might need to make really clear decisions about what is best for them and the team moving forwards so we are not ending up with an athlete who is struggling with groin pain for a few months.  We need to pick things up early and being really aggressive with what we are doing.

Top 5 Take Away Points:

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
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• 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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This blog is a bit of a change up in my review of the Pacey Performance Podcast as I’ll be doing a ”shorter” form review of three Episodes in the next few blogs.

Episode 370 – Molly Binetti – “Enhancing change of direction speed and agility in the real world”

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Molly here

“That’s definitely something that has changed for me over the course of my career in terms of shying away from truly testing COD or using a COD test, and I think when we look at key determinants of a good COD performance – you’ve got your physical capacities – how strong they are, how explosive they are, how powerful they are – and you can measure that and test that a multitude of ways in the weight room through strength testing, jump profiling, ground contact times, reactive strength rate of force development.  Even looking at those physical capacities alone can give you a pretty good idea of this athlete’s capabilities and what they might look like in terms of COD, because if you look at that those metrics are shit, chance are they are probably not a good mover either.

Then you look at the technical aspects of it, what does their centre of mass look like, what does their foot placement look like, what is their trunk doing, what is their pelvis doing, what kind of angles are they creating – and those are things that I have learned to assess every  single day in what we do, just by throwing them in to an environment where they have got to move, and throwing a lot of open drills at them honestly, because that gives me a lot of valuable information about what they look like before I even break things down and teach technique, and I want to see what they look like in an organic environment first.

The third component is that Agility and task specific aspect of it, and added the cognitive effects of that too.

So I break it down and figure out how you can evaluate each of those pieces and I have found that my best assessment of their ability to move is through the basic strength and jump profiling that we do in the weight room as well as I’m watching them move in practice every single day, and seeing what their movement looks like and I’m talking to their coaches about how they move and how they see them move.

I think we take a little bit different approach to it, because typically in the strength & conditioning field, and especially in the college sector when we talk about teaching movement it is done in a very controlled manner, with very few fluctuations.  That used to be too when I teach COD, but I have shied away from that and I really like to incorporate a lot of game play and problem solving activities within the warm-ups and then I can regress if I need to, to teach technique and using the warm-up period to incorporate some of those more closed drills, lateral movements, acceleration-deceleration, hip turns, rotational movements and just incorporating them every single day to get small exposures to it.

Exposure athletes to open drills right off the bat and see what they do naturally.

But I have really just found that doing a COD test like a Pro Agility doesn’t really give me any information, and I’ve found that just because they get better at that test, doesn’t mean that their actual movement performance is getting better in the place where it matters most, which is on the basketball court.  We know that sport is chaos and it involves so many different components and so if I can get a pretty accurate idea through the testing that we are doing in the weight room, talking with the sport coaches, and watching them in practice I can really figure out where their deficiency is – is it a physical capacity, is it technical/tactical or is it cognitive? From there I can figure out where we need to spend time on from a movement side of things.”

‘”Can we dive a little bit into the testing itself, and then link what you do in the jump testing with the intricacies of what you want to achieve in the COD ability?”

“So we are pretty fancy here, and we use the just jump mat, but I will say you don’t need a lot, you don’t need a force plate to measure some of the qualities, so I will go through a pretty thorough jump profile with them.  We will do:

• Drop jump – double leg and single leg
• Counter movement jump (CMJ) – double leg and single leg (both off one leg and land on one leg, and off one leg and land on two legs, so they are not worried about landing on one)
• Repeat 4 jump test – average of the four jump height and the average GCT – both double leg and single leg- look at right and left leg to see the reactivity right to left and see what those differences are.

What I have found to be honest, is that, especially for the first couple of years that I get an athlete here, most of the time they just need to train consistently and then all those qualities are going to improve.  And then it’s really once we have an athlete who has been in our programme for 2-3 years and that’s when some of those individual specific differences come into play and how is that information being used to individualise training

• Is this an athlete that jumps slow but jumps high – okay I know I need to train a little bit more of my time on creating a little bit faster SSC?
• Is this athlete have a really significant right to left deficiency– okay let’s try and close the gap there – and is that showing up on what we are seeing on the court as well?

We have 16 athletes and that’s my only programme.  We are taking that information and break down player by player and focus on what the player needs, as opposed to being in a big team setting where everyone has got a pretty similar programme and we have small tweaks here and there.”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

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 favour 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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This blog is a bit of a change up in my review of the Pacey Performance Podcast as I’ll be doing a ”shorter” form review of three Episodes in one blog.

Episode 414 – Pete Burridge – Debunking 5 myths on speed training and getting team sport athletes FAST

Episode 417 – Phil Scott – Anaerobic speed reserve: Individualising conditioning in team sports

Episode 418 – Nathan Kiely – A critique of the “knees over toes” phenomenon and maximising cross training prescription

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Pete here

”There is a belief in some circles that if you wanted a fast team you had to go out and recruit speed, that you couldn’t work on it and it was just this innate quality that genetics drove.  Don’t get me wrong, there is an element to that but I think that maybe, because that message was so strong some people even now think that you can’t make any meaningful inroads and change on the field when it comes to speed.  I’d dispute that.  Obviously I’m majorly biased and it is even backed up in research that pretty much once you get to 22 years old, the speed gains really start dwindling in a team sport setting, but from my practiced-based evidence I see you can make change, and it can be long lasting but it takes time, good quality coaching, and a culture around speed from a buy in perspective from the players to actually want to make any sort of change.

The same research has shown that what is called a ”meaningful change” or competitive advantage showed that you only need 30-50 cm of separation, which makes a tonne of sense, because if you’re a footballer and you’re trying to whip in a cross, beating them with a step over and knocking it past them and then being able to find that little yard of space to be able to create a window to whip a ball in, that’s going to lead to success.

In my sport of rugby, being able to accelerate that half a second quicker gets you to a weaker shoulder or at least it means you don’t necessarily go through a hole untouched but it might mean you find a weak shoulder, you might get an arm tackle which allows you to get an arm free which then allows you to off load or find a pass, or at the very least make game line, which is very important.

Actually the effects you need to make are very small.  So if someone goes, ”what’s the big deal about making someone’s 10m sprint time go from 1.72 seconds to 1.69 sec?” actually when you extrapolate that out that could be the difference.

”You mentioned also that Technical models are a waste of time for team sports.  Can you tell me more about that?”

”When it comes to technical models, I see the argument- why should we conform someone to run exactly how Usain Bolt runs because Usain Bolt is such an outlier we shouldn’t be trying to conform to what he does, because we are all going to be setting us up to fail.

However, there are some key movement hallmarks for successful biomechanical efficiency

One of your guests that you had on recently, Shawn Myszka, I really liked some of his thought processes around self organisation and guided discovery, especially from an Agility perspective.  But I sort of see it as being a long a continuum.

Imagine Shawn Myszka on steroids way over to one side where everyone just finds out and discovers it themselves – there is no instruction, there is no guidance – again he would attest that’s not how he coaches, compared to the super hyper track coach where everyone runs how Ben Johnson runs because Charlie Francis said so.  We’re at both ends of the spectrum here.

You need to understand where you are with your group.  You have to have some sort of end goal where we are aiming to shoot towards something along these lines because otherwise how do you provide any context for how to change someone’s movement if you don’t have a model of what good ”sort of” looks like?  In the same way that Stu McMillan says you have got to learn the rules before you break the rules!  Absolutely, you’re going to have an athlete that perhaps doesn’t conform to the technical model but can be successful and still run efficiently and fast.  But those cases are more rare than everyone so you still need to have some key things that you are trying to get from someone, which will help you as you go along your coaching journey.

You need to reach the messy zone of learning.  If you are actually trying to change someone’s mechanics, at first it is going to be messy, you’re not going to get good outcomes but understand that that is part of the process.

The process isn’t going to be linear and if we want to maximise learning we want some element of failure in there

That failure rate can’t be 0% otherwise what we’re tasking the guys to do is too easy.  With time and with effort and constantly revisiting what the athlete needs to work on we can hopefully solidify that movement pattern.

• Do it well in a closed setting – an athletic performance lead warm up – coaches aren’t involved, there is not a ball involved, they’re just running in a straight line, not a lot of decision making.  Nail it there and once the failure rate disappears to the point where they are able to nail it there, what do you then do?  You pressurize it.
• Do it well under competition – race each other in a straight line
• Do it well under a level of complexity – run with a ball or run off line so run an arc, or beat a defender and then run upright into space
• Do it well in a game setting in a 15 vs 15

”You mentioned the process that you would go through to understand whether it was a technical thing or it’s a physical thing  Is there anything that you do which gives you more clarity on that?”

”This pre-season we have tried to take our speed programme up a level and taken the concept of ”bucketing guys off,” in part to utilise all our coaching resources as we have a great coaching team, with lots of passionate people about speed.  It’s a top down approach that comes from our Head coach – he is invested in it, he sometimes comes and watches the speed sessions, and is interested in the times that the players run and the players know that this is something that the guy who picks the team is interested in.

We get a lot more time than most coaching environments get to work on both generic speed and also specific game speed.  When we split the guys to bucket off, it was in part to reduce our coach to player ratio, but it was also to see if we could be a little more specific to the player’s needs.  As part of that process we did some profiling, so we tried to marry up some of the more quantitative stuff with some of the more qualitative stuff like video.

We had a couple of categories:

• Any obvious front side issue
• Any obvious shin angle issue
• Any obvious stiffness loss
• Any obvious torso issue – over rotation, chest out, hunched

We used a very simple binary 1 or 0 with the video footage – if the answer was yes to any of the above they got a ‘1’ and we then looked at their RSI scores and ranked that.  W wanted to use some of James Wilde hip isometric strength testing but we didn’t get chance to do that.  But through some of our gym programming we could kind of tell the guys that really don’t have the hardware to project themselves well.  So we were able to group the guys into four main groups:

• Stiffness group – guys with a stiffness issue.  You can’t run on flat tyres so our job was to pump their tires a little bit so they get more energy return out of the ground.  So they did a little more plyos and reactive SSC based work.  It didn’t mean they did no technical work, it just meant in terms of the training pie, more of it was directed towards that.  Cues were things like ”pop off the ground,” and ”push don’t smush.”
• Physical group – if you’ve got a 1 Litre engine versus a 5 Litre engine, all other things being equal, the 5 litre engine is going to run past you.  So those guys were spending a little more time doing resisted speed work that was force driven in exercise selection.   Cues were things like ”tear the ground away, push the floor back, take off like a fighter jet!”
• Technical group – guys with obvious technical deficiencies and may have done more drill based work to really nail the context of running with good postures because you have to have the position and the posture before you can add the power.  They might have the hardware, they might have the 5 litre engine, they might have their tyres pumped up, by the driver is an absolute clown.  If you put me in a Formula 1 car, I’m going to crash the car!
• Remedial group – lower impact work while still trying to get some of the cues and getting the basics of some of our philosophy across to them.  Guys who can’t handle the amount of SSC load, or new players or Academy players who we weren’t fully aware of their training load or how much exposure they have previously had to speed training.

”It’s too risky to train speed.  Is that something that you still come across?”

”I think so.  My instant answer to that is I’d almost argue it’s just as risky to not train it!

If you’re getting max velocity exposures in your training session then doing it in a standalone session, is that necessary? Probably not.

But if our game demands are very different to our practice demands then there needs to be something done to bridge that gap.  If in training you are getting nowhere close to maximum velocity but yet in their games they are getting exposure to it, then that’s a risky game to play.  Because we have been smart with our exposure of speed to our guys and risk management from a medical and athletic performance perspective, we have been able to spot a car crash before it happens and hopefully mitigate some of those risks.  I believe players need exposure to top end speed whether that is to speak to the coaches and constrain a session so we can get it in the rugby session (which is the ideal) – that invisible thread of training, where you are that guiding hand where they are getting it in a (large) small sided game.  But if you are not able to do that then there probably is a place for some stand alone artificial velocity exposure whether that’s in the speed session or within the session itself – it doesn’t really matter as long as you have built up towards it.

Sweet spot for speed might be 6-10 exposures above 95% max velocity per week

• Training– >90% max velocity for over 1 sec – 1-2 artificial exposures per week, where that is either in a speed session or at the end of a warm-up where they do a rolling effort.   Backs might pick up 2 more.
• Game – varied.  Forwards 1- Backs 2-4.
• Pre-season – week 1 >85%; week 2 85-90%; week 3 90-95%; week 4 95% and above; week 5 light the turbos and run a PB.  Do a above 80% warm up, then do a rolling effort and that’s it – you’ve given them what they need.

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Phil here

”A lot of people might think it’s just a lot of guys standing around.  Dispel a few myths when it comes to cricket game demands?”

”It’s deceptive.  Fundamentally we have got three formats.

1. T20 – really short format
2. One day  – lasts 7-8 hours
3. Test match – lasts up to 5 days

What these guys do is quite phenomenal.  Until I got hold of the GPS systems to profile and understand what they did, they, even the players themselves didn’t believe what they did!

T20 – it’s about an 90 minutes of batting and fielding at a time, 3 hours in total.  The bowlers will cover up to about 8 km in that hour and a half.  If are then going on to bat as well and you are successful, you might run between 1 and 3 km depending on how much running you are doing between the wickets.

They are doing up to 300 metres of high-intensity sprinting and there will be around 100 max accels/decels within that game so it is a lot to take on. Bear in mind that it is a relatively short tournament for those T20 games; one experience was 8 games in 21 days with 6 flights, so a game every 2.5 days if you get to the final, which with that experience we did! Its that ability to sustain that performance and recover from that performance, plus, throw in a bit of jet lag so the guys work hard even for that T20 scenario.

One day – they go on a bit longer but it’s a similar intensity so you’re looking up to 16 km per game for the bowlers and if the batters are going to go on and score a hundred in their innings it could be between 5 and 7 km.

Test match – if a bowler is going to bowl 40 overs in a match we have worked out it is around 50 km for an average total distance for that 5 day match.  The highest we have seen this year was 67 km covered in a match over 4.5 days.

I also like to highlight that they usually have a couple of training days leading into that so have 7 km in addition- so they potentially cover up to 65-70 km in a week and they are asked to repeat that seven times throughout the summer, that is a lot of distance and a lot of repeatability purely from a total distance.

The bowlers – Within that 50 km, 7 km of that is above 20 km/h, and 3 km of that is above 25 km/h, and also they stand in a field for around 17 hours

So to translate that into layman’s terms, go for a walk with the dog for 6 hours in a day and every 3 minutes I want you to do a 20 m sprint – that’s the layman’s translation of what they fundamentally do for these test matches.  Once we were able to explain that to the players, and the science & medicine staff as well, wow – this is what we are dealing with – can we raise the game and the expectations and the conditioning to cope with that – so it was a bit change at that point!

”Talk to us about the use of Anaerobic Speed Reserve with Cricket”

”If you are going to work  above your maximum aerobic speed (MAS) then if you don’t take into consideration their maximum sprint speed (MSS) then some athletes will have more efficiency and more in the tank left to work with than others.  So if we take an example:

Athlete A vs Athlete B – Athlete A and B has an MAS of 18 km/h.  But they have different MSS.  While Athlete A has an MSS of 29 kph, leaving 11 kph “in reserve,” Athlete B has a MSS of 33 kph, leaving 15 kph in reserve. If we programme for them at 140% of that MAS that comes out at 23.8 km/h- which is 53% of the ASR of Athlete A and 39% of the ASR of Athlete B.  Athlete A will, therefore, reach fatigue more quickly, and likely will be unable to complete the session at the same level as Athlete B

Athlete A – ASR – 11 km/h  vs.  Athlete B – ASR – 15 km/h

To take in the MSS if we programme at 40% of their Anaerobic speed reserve (ASR).  Athlete A will be going at 22.4 km/h and Athlete B will be going at 24 km/h – that’s fundamentally a big difference, and that for me, was why some guys were blowing up and going ”I can’t complete it”, whereas the other guys were going, ”this is too easy!”  [Daz comment: the athlete working at a higher percentage of their ASR will fatigue more quickly]

In cricket we use a 2 km time trial to assess MAS.  We do a 40m sprint for MSS with splits at 5, 10, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 metres.  90% of my guys will be hitting their MSS between 20-25, or 25-30 metres.

The accuracy of data collection is vital. When collecting maximum sprint speed via timing gates, coaches need to set the gates at a distance that allows your athletes to reach top speed, while also having a small enough margin for the reading to be valid.

SRR = MSS (kph) / MAS (kph)

Calculating this ratio for your athlete or squad lets you start profiling them and then adjusting your training program accordingly. This is not fundamentally a scientifically rigorous process that gives you an exact figure or fibre type percentage that then dictates the perfect program. Instead, it’s a very good guide for your programs to get the best adaptations for the athletes you are working with.

16.2 km/h was the average MAS when I first starting working in cricket.   Initially I was working at above 1.80 as the speedsters and below 1.70 as the aerobic guys.  In between that, that is what I was referring to as the mixed profile.

Why is this important? If I take a typical protocol I was using for aerobic endurance development in pre-season and let’s say it was  1 minute on: 30 seconds off (deliberately a 2:1 ratio) those aerobic guys, it didn’t touch the sides, it wasn’t enough and you would hear them say, ”can I do some more?” and the sprinters would start okay, but then they really would blow up, and some of them would not be able to complete that session.

A power output drop off in research I’ve read was 60% on three repeated Wingates where the slow twitch guys was only 40%.  In terms of recovery, the slow twitch guys were recovered after 20 minutes, the fast twitch guys were not recovered even 5 hours later.

”How do you actually programme for these groups?”

”If I start with the aerobic guys, they fundamentally need longer to give them time to get into that time at VO2 max- 90% maximum heart rate (MHR) – what I call the red zone.  Minimum of 2 minutes and usually up around 4 minutes.

I usually always work with a 2:1 ratio to keep them in the red zone.  The intervals for this group can be longer since they seem to take longer to exceed 90% maximum heart rate.

I have previously used 1 km ladders.  If you think these guys are going at 17 km/h – which is a 3:30 minute 1 km.  So, I found my aerobic guys really enjoyed them and I start them off relatively slowly.  So if they are doing a 1km in 3:30 minutes I might start them off at 4:00 minutes or 3:50 min pace for 1km, and then take 10 seconds off for each ladder, and we would up to 5km.  They are very cocky at the beginning but that accumulation and build up allows them time to get into their red zone and then hold on to it.

For the sprinters I have found that they can even adapt aerobically to a sprint session as it is such work for them but fundamentally a sprint session with 10, 20, 30 or 40m sprints with a jog back and then go again and try to hold them at 90% of their MSS.

As an example of our approach to training these athletes within cricket:

• Sprint work: experimenting with the rest period can also tap into some aerobic adaptations;
• Sprint endurance training: longer sprints (30 sec) at 85-95% MSS with long rest ~(4-8 minutes);
• Repeated sprints: <10 sec sprint with <60 sec recovery;
• Aerobic tempos: 100m in 15-16 sec, followed by active recovery back to the start in 44-45 seconds.

One of my go to is what I call aerobic tempos and go on the minute.  Cricket love ‘6’s’ because you bowl 6 bowls in an over, so I generally break that up into 6 reps and give them a couple of minutes in between.  Sprinters prefer that and they’d rather get their time at VO2 max in that setting that even close to a 1 km ladder – that just doesn’t work.

As far as the hybrid group goes – perhaps a bit of a cop out answer – but you’ve got options.  You’ve got all of those options above but I perhaps don’t go to the extremes.  So I wouldn’t necessarily jump to a 1 km ladder, it might be more of a 500 metre ladder.  They also respond well to the repeat sprint programming.

I don’t have any fast bowlers in the aerobic zone- they all tend to sit in the hybrid and speed group – which makes sense because maybe if you are going to bowl at more than 85 mph you are going to have to have a lot of fast twitch fibres for that, and that doesn’t suit an aerobic orientated person.  So they are able to get very aerobically fit but they are mostly in that high/mixed category.

Once we see the guys hitting that minimum aerobic standard (because we are then pushing that MSS) those ratios go up a bit more and and we see more guys going up into that 1.9 and 2.0s ratio for ASR, rather than changing the standards.

Accessing the SRR does not work particularly well if an athlete has not reached a minimum aerobic capacity standard. Athletes should complete the 2 kilometer time trial in under 8 minutes (15 kph MAS) before you see any real benefit in applying these individual approaches. Prior to that level, they just need to do more cardiovascular capacity work. Obviously, in each sport there will be a minimum standard your players will need to achieve, based on your own needs analysis.

• Aerobic group – minimum standard is less than 7:00 mins for the 2 km time trial – so 17 km/h MAS
• Mixed group – minimum standard is less than 7:30 mins for the 2 km time trial – so 16 km/h MAS
• Sprint group – minimum standard is less than 8:00 mins for the 2 km time trial – so 15 km/h MAS

This is what the guys in the different groups need to feel they can do in order to feel in good shape aerobically

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Nathan here

”Would you mind giving us an overview of what the phenomenon is ”knees over toes?”

”Ultimately knees over toes is just an approach to training your lower body, so on its own I don’t have an issue with it.  In fact, I’m a big proponent of things like teaching a young athlete in the gym an Olympic style squat – I want a vertical trunk, I do want you ass to grass, I do want your knees going over your toes, I want deep knee flexion.  I want each athlete to have the capacity to do that sort of stuff at different times in your programming.

But what I saw was athletes doing knees over toes stuff that I hadn’t programmed for them, and I’d go over to speak to them and say what’s going on here, why are you doing that? They would tell me they’ve got a sore knee, and they’re doing the stuff the physio has given me but I also saw this stuff on the internet and I thought I’d try it out.  So I’d go, ”Cool, let me know how you go with it,” and inevitably 2-3 weeks later they go my knee is killing me, they are so sore, they’ve getting worse, maybe its a time to take a step back from the knees over the toes stuff.

There is definitely a time and place for it but I think we needed to work through the methodology of it and understand it better.”

Rehab Setting

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Athletic Performance

Knees over toes split squat and the transfer to acceleration

Looking at the shin angle and relationship with knees over toes and making you better at performance.  This claim doesn’t come from Ben Patrick.

When I saw that, I thought ”I can see what you’re saying, but that’s not actually how it works.  And the reason that’s not how it works is because of the confusion around LOCAL and GLOBAL COORDINATE SYSTEMS.  I have to give a lot of credit to Dan Cleather and his book Force, and one of the things he goes through is the confusion around Force Vector theory- which he rubbishes and which comes from the work from Bret Contreras.

Essentially you can look at the individual athlete and the reference frame for them.  So you’ve got superior-inferior (up and down) relative to your body and then you have the global coordinate system which is vertical in relation to the World, and your body and the World don’t always necessarily align with each other.

In acceleration an athlete is going to be generating force in an inferior orientation through their body- which is down and back in the World view system and this is where you get confusion around horizontal forces and you look at horizontal GRFs in acceleration and people go, ”oh you need horizontally orinetated strength training like the hip thrust but you’ve got to look at the orientation of the body at a 45 degree horizontal trunk and shin angle.  The athlete is stil pushing straight down in relation to the body.   Then if you look at that and compare that to the knees over toes split squat, you are distributing load over the toes and pushing up and back through the forefoot to return to the start position, which is a different movement, and it doesn’t correspond neither from a local or global coordinate system perspective.

I would argue that a low box step up has far more dynamic correspondence to acceleration than a knee over toe split squat.

Top 5 Take Away Points:

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 410 – Shawn Myszka

Shawn Myszka

Shawn is a Movement Skill Acquisition Coach at Emergence and currently serves as a personal performance advisor and movement coach for more than a dozen NFL players and has partnered with 108 NFL players and counting over 15 seasons.

In this episode, Shawn details his approach which dives into the world of ecological dynamics and a constraints led approach. He explains how his approach differs to a “traditional” approach of pre-planned movements and drilling them time after time. Shawn presents an example of a closed drill which aims to improve cutting and develops it into a much more open drill so the athlete has to react to a changing environment, much like they would have to do on game day.

🔊 Listen to the full episode here

Coaching agility is much more than setting up cones and letting the athletes run routes around them. Agility is much more than just change of direction ability. But with so much complexity to improve the physical quality of “agility”, how can we coach it effectively to ensure transfer to the field?

I view movement and movement skill as my main objective.  I believe that sport is a problem solving activity where movements are just used to produce the necessary solutions

We can impact and influence how athletes are interacting with their environments in a much different way if we view movement and movement skill in this fashion.  Things like ”abundance of strategies,” things like ”adaptability” and ”dexterity” these are things that have shaped my form of life, the way that I view movement and sport behaviour and performance.

I am very American Football orientated but I have co-founded and operate as the co Director of education of an movement skill & education company called Emergence.

”Are you employed directly by players or do you also do consultancy with teams as well?”

”I do some consultations with teams, usually it’s on a very short term situation where I will present to staff, I will come in an for one, two or three days and maybe analyse their practice activities and get into how it is I feel that they can make them more ALIVE, so that’s a term you’re probably going to hear me drop a few times – this idea of alive problems being solved within environments.  Mostly I work directly with the players and become a personal performance advisor/movement skill acquisition coach for players that they and I lock arms with one another to attempt to polish and sharpen their craft – specifically how they behave on a field.  It was the NFL players that referred to me as the ”Movement Miyagi.”

Obviously I still attack things like general physical qualities and general physical preparedness so I’m still doing weight room stuff.  I actually used to be a strength & conditioning coach but I morphed into this role because I felt there was a major gap between what we were doing in the weight room and what they were doing on the field.  I elected to exist within that gap and attack the gaps within their skill set, particularly from movement standpoint.”

”Why did you decide to go down that route to be known as a movement skill acquisition coach and really niche down in that area?”

Learning Environments that weren’t really learning environments

”I was finding that that gap was getting bigger and bigger – and the position coaches within the NFL are very intelligent when it comes to the X’s and O’s, tactics and strategy, principles of play, but really I have been on my soap box during this pre-season about some of the horse shit that is being done on individual drills, where position coaches are taking 10-20 minutes to work with individual players each and every day and they are decontextualised isolated drills- where there is rote repetition which is being prioritised.  It starts to show us the limitations in how they view movement behaviour.  But what I was finding was that gap was getting bigger and bigger because strength & conditioning professionals were really prioritising the same thing within their learning environments, that they weren’t really learning environments.

When they were addressing speed or change of direction qualities it was in highly irrelevant fashions to the way that it would be expressed on the football field.  So I felt that that gap was getting bigger and the player was getting lost in the middle of this saying how do I put those physical qualities to use in highly practically relevant ways to  functionally solve problems in my world?

That’s what the players care about – they are there to become better FOOTBALL PLAYERS. So everything that we do at either end should support and supplement their craft in that way – how they were having to solve problems, the abundance of movement strategies, the diversity withing strategy, their decision making, their perceptions, their actions all being coupled and intertwined in a way, that allows them to really connect to their environment and become more functional problem solvers and more dexterous movers.

People hear Movement Miyagi or movement skill acquisition coach and they think that what I’m doing is chasing perfect execution of motor patterns- motor system degrees of freedom.  That’s what they view coordination of  movement to be.  I do not.  I view it as movement skill in relation to one’s environment which is constantly changing, that has emerging and decaying opportunities and I want to assist the player in perceiving and selecting and acting upon those opportunities in their own unique and authentic fashion.

The position coaches really weren’t doing that, and the strength & conditioning coaches weren’t doing that because they don’t view movement skill in this fashion and so things like speed and acceleration and power and explosiveness wasn’t really being expressed on the field.  That’s why I have been knocking on the door of the NFL to change and adjust its talent identification procedures particularly with the NFL combine, since 2013-14 I’ve been saying the stuff you are looking at isn’t actually overly relevant when it comes to how they are going to behave on a football field on NFL Sunday.

”Bear with me because I have a theory.  The ‘S’ side of the S&C coach is 90% of education when it comes to an under- or post-graduate education.  So we are heavily educated in that area and that translates into a working environment?  We like things in a box, to be measured. We are comfortable in that area.  We are not comfortable when things get complex, or a little bit messy.  There are a few coaches who like the messy and live in the messy and thrive in that area, but the majority [me included] like the package, like things to be in a row, like the drill where everyone looks the same.  Would you agree with this theory?”

The ability to find or organise a movement solution for any emerging movement problem under any situation and in any condition.

”How do you reconcile the struggle to fill the gap between the orderly approach of rote repetition and the chaos of the sporting action, and the need to reign it back in so I have more control.  Would you say that people do struggle with this middle bit like I imagine they do?”

Dexterity doesn’t live in the movements or actions themselves, but it lives in its interaction with the environment

In order to act upon what we perceive we must have the action capabilities in order to act!  All that is saying, is that I have to have access to that strategy within my movement toolbox.  For example, if this situation requires me to execute a cross-over cut but I have tremendous knee tendinitis and I can’t cross-over on that leg I might have to scale down the information down to such a level that the athlete can explore and instead have a live opponent who is stationary.  This will reduce the complexity and aliveness- the opponent isn’t moving.  But at least if it’s a human and not a cone, they can still reach out and touch you, they are much bigger and even just putting a human there changes the behavioural organisation and what an athlete has to perceive.  There are likely not looking down at the ground any more for that cone and instead looking at the posture and position of the opponent.

There might be a place for more closed drills (on a spectrum of fully closed to full open) but not in the traditional sense where we are telling them exactly how to move, exactly where to move, when to move etc.

That I think is the danger.  Or, the situation where we are chasing the same model for everyone; talk about thinking as though we have all the answers!  Movement behaviour in sport is a lot more complex than that!  If you took the top 10 running backs in the NFL and presented them with similar behaving movement problems to solve, guess what?  No two movement solutions are going to be the same.  They could both functionally solve the movement problem- they would all make the defensive player miss (the tackle) but in their own authentic and unique way.

”The other end of the spectrum to what you are talking about is linear progression, it involves doing X drill, okay that’s successful, now we move onto this, making it more complex or whatever progression it might be.  On the side you’re talking about the linear progression is not so obvious.  How would you advise people to try and make sense of that to allow them to feel more confident in that world?”

We never stand in the same river twice.

Second point is we are constantly presenting the athlete different situations or contexts to test the stability or flexibility of the movement solution.  If we start to see movement behaviour that is ‘stickier’ that maybe is emerging on a more frequent basis, well I want to test that ability to match or emerge in different problems.  So I’m going to change positions and speeds of opponents and use different size spaces to work in.  And all while I do that we are basically perturbing the system to see what else may emerge.

Top 5 Take Away Points:

Episode 400 Des, Dave and Bish