Just Fly Performance Podcast

This week’s guest is Lee Taft, who is highly respected as one of the top athletic movement specialists in the world. He has taught his multi-directional speed methods to top performance coaches and fitness professionals all over the world. Today’s episode is all about coaching and building speed in a team sport environment. Through my own journey in learning about the role of vision and reaction in sport this past year, as well as some podcast episodes highlighting reactionary skill as a critical component of the training process, such as Episode #35 with Cameron Josse, I’ve been searching for experts who can lay down solid guidelines on making what we do as strength and speed experts count when it comes to on-the-court play. One of the most frustrating things as a sports performance coach is working extremely hard to improve athlete’s strength, power and armor, but then watching them struggle to keep up with the movement skill of the opposing team. Lee’s work in multidirectional sport movement helps to fill in that gap. You’ll find great insight particularly from his ideas on reactionary speed, linking movements, sensory roles of the feet in team sport movement, and more. This is an episode that confirmed some things I’d been hearing from great coaches in the past year, and more importantly, sparked new ideas and thought processes in me, to the effect that I’ve been pouring over slow-motion YouTube videos of the world’s best athletes, as well as creating conversation with my fellow sports performance professionals. Lee is a first-class individual, and whatever your mode of coaching (strength, track and field, physical education) I know you’ll love this episode! Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster www.simplifaster.com, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s guest is Ron McKeefery, vice president of performance and education at PLAE. Ron is also the author of “CEO Strength Coach”, a bestselling manual for coaches on the art of being a technician, manager and entrepreneur in the field. Ron has been a part of Just Fly Sports through a text interview in the past, where he answered questions on all facets of the career track of strength and conditioning, such as aspects of the profession not learned in school and the personal qualities required for success in the field. Ron’s background in the field is extensive and covers all facets of the industry, from the NFL and MLB, to training special forces, as well as several long stints in the NCAA. One thing I’m learning more and more is that long-time strength and conditioning coaches are some of the wisest human beings I know, and Ron’s answers in this particular show are a testament to that. Today we are chatting on topics of the career track of sports performance, ideas on team culture, perspectives and reflections on Ron’s own career, and much more. I’m excited to bring you this episode, since I believe that it builds on another fantastic show we did a few months back with Mark Watts, which was about the professional aspects of the field we know as strength and conditioning/sports performance. Lots (and I mean lots) of people want to get into this profession, but do they know what it takes, not only to get a job, but to make a career out of it, and actually “retire as a strength coach”? (not many people do) Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s guest is Dr. Ken Clark, professor of kinesiology at West Chester University, PA. Ken is one of the top experts on speed in the world today, both from a research and practical perspective. Ken is not only a researcher, but is also a coach and consultant in the world of speed, so he is able to apply this work in a practical setting. I’ve heard Ken on a number of performance related podcasts, so I was excited to get him on mine and answer a number of questions I had in the world of building speed in both the context of track and field, and team sport. Based on the number of times I’ve heard him on these shows, I can really say that Ken Clark might be the most in demand speed expert in the world. On the podcast today, we’ll cover a variety of topics, including sprint cues, relationships between top-end speed and acceleration, individualizing speed training, sprint drills, resisted and assisted sprint training, and more. Of particular interest is the in-depth approach Ken takes to addressing speed development in team sport through the compete-technique-compete model, mirror and reaction drills, and more. This talk is an amazing addition to the already incredible lineup of guests in the world of speed and power development we’ve had thus far. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s podcast features two familiar faces to the show: Chris Korfist and Dan Fichter I gathered these two speed training experts together because the topic of the day is the Inno-sport system and its derivatives, in context of getting athletes faster and stronger. Back in the mid-2000’s, the “Inno-sport” philosophy started to permeate the training sphere with some very uncommon, and in many cases, never seen before training methods, touting big results in speed and power. Much of the Inno-sport training was likened to Jay Schroeder’s training methods (although it was not Jay Schroeder) which included lots of isometrics, reactive lifting, plyometrics, and time-based lifting brackets, the same methods that afforded Adam Archuleta a 4.37s 40 yard dash, 39 inch vertical jump, 530lb bench press and 663lb squat. Some of the sample terminology and concept of the system are as follows: • Training in two brackets, “An1” (0-9 seconds) and “An2” (9-40 seconds, but generally around 9-25 seconds as far as improving An1 is concerned) • Classification of movement (really the wiring of the nervous system) into duration, magnitude and rate elements • Utilization of “drop-offs” that are tagged to particular exercises in the workout, such as sprinting, jumping, or lifting numbers, that indicate when the workout is over, and when is generally an optimal time to train next (dropping off 6% will require around 4 days rest before training the same muscle groups/motor patterns again). You’ll hear Dan and Chris talk about this in terms of “autoregulation”, or AREG, which determines how much work you’ll do in a day (when you drop-off X amount of performance), and when you’ll train again (the more you dropped off, the longer you have to wait until you can train hard again). Let’s say you were running 10 meter flys and wanted to drop off 3% so you could conceptually be good to train speed again in two days. If you ran 1.00 in the 10 fly as your best, then once you ran a 1.03 or worse, you would have “dropped off” and be done for the day. • The inno-sport system is an entirely neural driven system, not related to the training residuals that classify traditional periodization and planning methods, or on planned overtraining and tapering Dan and Chris spent a lot of time emailing the creator of inno-sport, who was known as “DB Hammer”, and the information they gleaned was far beyond what was contained in the famous Inno-sport book, that is sadly unavailable today. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more

This week’s guest is Quinn Henoch. Quinn is the head of rehabilitation for Juggernaut HQ and his gym, Paradigm Performance Therapy is located adjacently to the new Juggernaut gym. He is also the founder of The Clinical Athlete. Although speed and vertical jump based training, largely in the scope of track and field is a regular topic of this podcast, I think it is truly important to engage all aspects of the field of physical preparation and human performance. Today’s episode covers topics that have roots in both physical therapy and strength training, as well as concepts that speed-power athletes and coaches can take away for higher performance. In that regard, we have the “one-two punch” of strength coach and physical therapist, Quinn Henoch. I can’t think of anyone better to tackle some common questions that physical preparation professionals might have with the flood of corrective exercise and SMR tools available to us and our athletes today. There are so many therapy options out there in relation to athletes, it’s hard to make sense of best practices. Additionally, there are so many opinions on ideals of stretching, posture and breathing dynamics, this is another swamp to wade through to find the optimal method. Fortunately, Quinn is one of the best, practical coach-therapists out there who gets to the root of what we are looking to “solve” in these scenarios, and how to best manage training practices in light of this information. Today on the podcast, we’ll talk about things like static stretching, weighted stretching, foam rolling and SMR techniques, the placebo effect in therapy, and much more. Overall, this was an awesome podcast for coaches and therapists, since it covered as many topics that were “in the middle” of the two arenas of performance. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster www.simplifaster.com, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s guest is Angus Ross Ph.D, physiologist and strength expert working with High Performance Sport New Zealand. Angus is currently employed by High Performance Sport New Zealand in a power physiology and strength and conditioning role, primarily working with track and field. I first discovered some of his work in my own research on muscular overshoot, where I came upon a slideshow he had done on special strength concepts for sprinting and jumping, and it was one of the best I’d ever seen. Angus has also written a couple (1 http://www.mcmillanspeed.com/2017/01/a-coaches-guide-to-strength-development.html 2) http://www.mcmillanspeed.com/2017/02/a-coaches-guide-to-strength-development.html of great articles on the idea of eccentric strength training on Stuart McMillan’s excellent blog, which I highly recommend reading. There were so many great topics that Angus has spoke on across these three mediums, such as eccentric overload, chasing weightroom numbers, building rate of force development, foot training, and more. Angus delivered on these topics in our podcast, and then some! Today, we’ll get into these concepts, as well as some ideas on other strength topics, such as “concentric only” work, muscle slack, core stiffness training, and more. This episode is particularly useful in the sense of how Angus really quantifies examples of athletes who will particularly benefit from eccentric training methods. I can’t leave out the intro without mentioning the kBox, which is one of the most effective, if not the most effective way, to deliver high, specific eccentric loads to athletes. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s guest is DeFranco’s gym director of sports performance Cameron Josse. Cameron is one of the brightest young performance coaches in the industry, and at age 26 is one of the leaders in ushering in data driven work on heavy resisted sprints for NFL preparation. Cameron trained under Joe DeFranco as a scholastic athlete, and eventually joined his staff where he now works with athletes of all ages, including many professionals. Right now, Cameron is doing some of the most advanced speed training around for his athletes, which include a contingent of NFL vets and pro-day hopefuls. Much of this work centers around what he is doing with the 1080 sprint based on the research of JB Morin, Matt Cross and others on heavy loaded sprinting. Heavy resisted loads are quite a hot-button topic right now, as the research suggests their usefulness but there isn’t the practical case study quota right now to really make people jump in on it. Cameron is doing work right now in this regard, and speaks on his exact methods at length on this potentially effective means of getting athletes faster. Outside of this, Cameron is doing great work on “game speed” based training, which goes far beyond linear speed ability, and is very involved, dealing with lots of sensory and reactive aspects. Game speed is a relatively new paradigm in the world of sport performance that is of a very high importance to transfer in team sport success. Our talk today also ranges to vertical jump training and means of building the feet for optimal performance. Overall, this was an amazing talk, and most definitely worth the listen all the way through. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week is a little different on the podcast, as the tables have been turned on me, the host of the show, and I’ll be talking and answering speed, vertical jump and general training questions from users that we received on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. After talking with so many amazing guests, it’s humbling for me to turn the microphone around, so to speak, but I always enjoy seeing what our listeners and readers are looking for, and sharing my knowledge on the subject, much of which I‘ve learned from those who have been on this podcast previously. Questions for the show revolve around jump training, speed and strength development. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s guest is Andy Eggerth, head track coach at Kennesaw State University where he works primarily with multi-event athletes. Andy is also a coaching educator as he is an instructor for the USTFCCCA Coaches Academy and has written the physiology curriculum. I first found Andy through an incredible presentation of his on a variety of restoration means for speed and power athletes through the USTFCCCA website. Andy has been a contribute to Just Fly Sports in the past with a fantastic Q&A on the subject of lactate in speed-power development. It’s kind of counter-intuitive to think that some athletes might actually need a small to moderate dose of speed-endurance work to be at their fastest, or jump highest, but as long as I’ve been a coach, I’ve seen this in action (many of those years without knowing exactly why) for over a decade now. Andy does such a great job of taking physiology and making it interesting in regards to the demands of sport. If my exercise science courses in school were more like the work Andy does, I would have been a kid on Christmas day for each class. For the podcast today, Andy expands on some points he covered in his original article on Lactate, and also covers a lot of other important topics, such as individualization of training, career and seasonal periodization, potentiation, neurotransmitters, plyometrics, and more. This episode is one of the best blends of science and practice that I’ve been able to record, as Andy is such a tremendous resource in this area. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

This week’s guest is Jay DeMayo, strength coach at the University of Richmond, working with basketball and swimming, lacrosse and tennis. In the world of swimming, Jay also spends time with Nova Aquatics where he has worked with Olympic Gold medalist Townley Haas. In addition to his day job duties, Jay puts together the Central Virginia Sports Performance Seminar, and also runs the CVASP Performance Podcast. Jay is one of the growing number of users of the 1x20 strength training system where he gets great results with his athletes with less stress coming out of the weightroom. It isn’t the only method Jay uses, however, as we’ll talk about how this work is used as a tool in the context of long-term athlete development. Ultimately, talking to Jay gives us great insight into what really matters when conducting a strength program for athletes. He is one of the most practical strength coaches I know, and has great insight on the process of developing players. Today on the show Jay and I will talk about a variety of topics, including year to year development of college athletes, daily workout progressions, key performance indicators for basketball, the 1x20 system, aquatic strength training and more. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

31: Bret Contreras | Sponsored by SimpliFaster

30: Mike Young | Sponsored by SimpliFaster

29: Jon Hinds | Sponsored by SimpliFaster

28: Corey Peacock | Sponsored by SimpliFaster

27: Rana Reider | Sponsored by SimpliFaster