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:

 

 

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