Mike Boyle is one of the foremost experts in the fields of strength and conditioning, functional training, and general fitness. He co-founded “Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning” in 1996, a facility offering comprehensive performance enhancement training and personal training to all ranges of clients. Mike served as the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Boston University for 15 years and also spent 25 years as the Strength and Conditioning Coach for Men’s Ice Hockey there. He earned a ring with the Boston Red Sox as the team’s Strength and Conditioning Coach in 2013. From 1991-1999, Boyle served as the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League.
Mike began his journey while studying to be an athletic trainer at Springfield College, which happened to be a hotbed of strength and conditioning at the time. While at Springfield, he formed an interest in strength and conditioning when he volunteered for three years at Boston University, working primarily with the football team. He was named on the 2004 and 2005 Men’s Journal list of the top 100 trainers in the United States. Boyle founded the Certified Functional Strength Coach program in 2013 to provide education and certification to coaches around the world.
This is Mike’s second time on the Just Fly podcast, and he picks up where he left off the first time, talking about what the departure of using standard powerlifting means in training athletes. He focuses primarily on posterior chain development and discusses why he no longer uses the barbell deadlift in his programming. Mike also discusses the biggest differences between the old and new functional training books and dives into the evolution of his sprint training based on the ideas of Tony Holler.
In this podcast, Coach Mike Boyle and Joel discuss:
- His definition of the term “functional training.”
- Potential issues with using only single-leg training.
- Velocity-based training.
- His philosophy on being a lifetime learner.
- Training the posterior chain without the use of traditional barbell movements.
- His thoughts on the use of Olympic weightlifting movements with athletes.
Podcast total run time is 1:04:09
Mike also spoke to SimpliFaster about functional training.
Keywords: unilateral, Olympic lifting, velocity-based training, posterior chain development
