Blog

Making a Difference in Athletic Performance

Strength and conditioning coach, Daniel Martinez, recently talked to a roundtable of seven coaches and trainers from four different countries about several sports science topics. This is the sixth and final post in this series of Sports Science Roundtable articles.

Daniel Martinez: Can you give an example of a dialogue or training process that has made a difference in the performance of either a specific team or individual?

Cory Innes: Being in the training environment and the IAPs gives the perfect opportunity for this. An example would be an athlete whose long sprint performance was limited by their speed. Biomechanical analysis showed force production was compromised by an inability to get into a certain position and redirect force. Testing showed a weakness in over-yielding and lack of eccentric force applied appropriately, so between an eccentric-focused block and technical training around this position, we improved speed significantly, which coincided with an increase in long sprint performance. There are many examples of this easily obtained by being in the field and not guessing at what you are trying to improve.

Cory Kennedy: In sport, the outcomes are so complex that I cringe when we try to imply too much impact from a final result. We have been fortunate to help impact some great performances, but even though we don’t like to admit it, likely the same amount of disappointments. With that said, I believe that the system we have built in-house to collect and analyze data (CMJ, IMTP, and various sport specific tests) has had an immense impact on how we do our job.

Being able to toggle between acute (daily and weekly) and long-term changes (month by month over years, in some cases) gives us great perspective on achieving proper tapers or adjusting training if we are in an extended period of stagnation. Being able to reflect on our training regularly with objective measures is humbling, but extremely important for us. We are very transparent with the athletes on this data, so as we do achieve personal bests and the taper lines up, there is a large impact on their confidence as well. This might be more important than the physiology; we just don’t know it yet.

An example could lie in the development of a speed-based athlete (maybe field sports). Looking closely at the progression of splits on timing gates, jump height/distance, underlying reactive qualities inside a jump, and overall strength parameters, allows us to tease out our training direction. If speed is stagnating or slowing its progress and strength is decreasing, we can likely use more strength-speed focused methods to continue our work. If strength is high, and speed is lagging, we can be very specific with mostly unloaded high-velocity movements.

Some people might read this and say it sounds obvious, but how often do you overlay a year’s worth of data for an athlete on these various physical qualities to see how they are interacting? This is the basis of our process, which we believe informs our best decision-making.

Devan McConnell: The biggest example of significant influence was several years ago, as we were just beginning to utilize an HR system. I had a hunch that the way we structured our week, and especially the day before games, was not conducive to high readiness on game day. In a nutshell, the “traditional approach” seemed to result in slow, lethargic starts. However, when we occasionally broke ranks and deviated from this path, our players seemed to respond positively.

Without data, the idea I had put forth didn’t hold much water, and certainly didn’t result in any long-term changes to strategic planning. However, once I could show objective data regarding workloads, readiness scores, and wins/losses relative to the two approaches to structuring practice throughout the week, we made an immediate change to our approach. Not only did this result in performance improvements, but it was the catalyst to really getting great buy-in from the coaching staff, as there was now direct relevance between my data and what they really cared about.

Mike Boykin: While it’s rarely just one specific conversation that leads to continuous long-term improvement, we take reflective conversations, or debriefs, seriously. All the athletes here have a fairly extensive training age, and with that comes a certain set of epigenetic factors that have to be taken into account. In conjunction with their training history, each athlete has had numerous coaches, various beliefs about how they should train (whether these assertions are correct, incorrect, or somewhere in the grey scale between, is beside the point here), and certain lenses through which they view the world around them.

Upon arrival, or at the start of each year, lead coaches and the athletes they work with sit down and review previous years’ performances, conduct personal and environmental assessments, and build strategies to obtain success moving forward. These are usually (although not with every athlete) multi-layered analyses with simple, yet difficult, questions. Clear communication between the coach and athlete, as well as communal objectives, are crucial for long-term success. These initial conversations are followed up with more targeted and specific debriefs as the year goes on, to help clarify micro-objectives and review current training and lifestyle factors.

With our indoor season finishing up, the past month’s competitions have served as a useful barometer for where each athlete is on the actualization of certain abilities. For one athlete, our general goals throughout fall and winter were to stabilize overall health, build communication levels, and learn to love the sport again. From a training-specific standpoint, returning to previous form in training (the past couple of years had seen a drop-off in certain abilities) was a priority before specific performance metrics became the sole focus.

Consistent debriefs, use of the daily monitoring app, blood work, and days missed due to injury all showed that many of our health and wellness factors were progressing steadily in the right direction. However, we had yet to see performance improvements to go with these. After a careful examination of loading parameters for certain abilities critical in the 200m and 400m, we made an adjustment in the volume, intensity, and density of speed, speed endurance, special endurance, and intensive tempo in the training. While there is still plenty of work to do, the improvement within the last three weeks has been promising.

If you listen to the athlete long enough, they will eventually give you the answer. Share on X

Art Horne, a close friend and mentor of mine, told me years ago that, if you listen to the athlete long enough, they will eventually give you the answer. The past three years of my career have shown this to be true time and time again.

Nate Brookreson: The relationship that exists between our strength and conditioning staff and our swimming and diving staff has made a tremendous difference in the success of that team. They place absolute trust in our training process because it is constantly shared, justified, and rationalized, and it is results driven. The swim and dive staff has a detailed macro/meso/micro cycle process that they detail to our staff, which we then complement in training.

We monitor neuromuscular fatigue through the testing of countermovement vertical jumps and look at decrement over the course of the season and how it matches up to more demanding training cycles. We will then monitor bar speeds in Olympic lifts, ground contact times on depth jumps, and vertical jump characteristics, and we enter late-season strength-speed and speed-strength blocks and provide this information to the staff so they can make changes as they see fit in the pool. We then meet daily as we enter our peaking phases for championship events, to discuss our key performers in detail and make sure we are seeing similar results in the pool and in training.

Patrick Ward: I think good examples here probably circle back to some of the wearable tracking technologies and their utilization during return to play processes. I work closely with our team physical therapist to build out training drills that impose certain physiological loads on the players returning from injury, so that we are more certain that we are preparing them for the demands that they will face in practice and during the game. Building positional and player profiles that are specific to ergonomic needs and demands has helped with a lot of this planning, and has made a positive impact in the process.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. 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. — SF

Building a High School Strength Program With John Garrish

Freelap Friday Five| ByJohn Garrish

John Garrish is serving in his third year as the Director of Athletic Development & Performance at North Broward Preparatory School in Coconut Creek, Florida, and his first as the school’s Head Track and Field Coach. A graduate of Wagner College and the University of North Texas, he is certified through the NSCA as a CSCS and through USAW as a Level-1 Sports Performance Coach. In addition to his role at North Broward, John serves as the Director of Athletic Performance with the Florida Rugby Union’s High Performance Program 7’s team and as a volunteer coach with Delray Beach Sports’ Exhibitors. Coach Garrish has spoken at state and national events and serves as the National High School Strength Coaches Association Regional Board Member for the Southeast.

Freelap USA: Your presentation at the National High School Strength Coaches Association Conference about medicine ball training was well received and very useful. For those that were not there, could you get into the details of setting up throws with teaching, as many coaches forget that “loading supports exploding” with this type of training.

John Garrish: I’m very lucky to have mentors that commit to the throws as a staple of their programming and commit equally as much to educating young coaches such as myself. I’m grateful for opportunities like the NHSSCA national conference to relay the information that’s been passed on to me or that I’ve stolen and made our own here at North Broward. More important to me though is the opportunity to thank and brag about the tremendous people who have “taken a chance on me,” as Ryan Horn puts it.

The happenings of my athletic career were a blessing in disguise. Having played football all of my life and hearing that an injury in college would be the last of my football career, I picked up track and field—in particular the throws—as a way to feed my competitive itch. Beyond the performance improvements that I experienced throughout my throwing career, I had never felt more powerful and frankly as well-wired kinesthetically. It seemed to me that there was something about the sequencing and projection of the throws that helped me in other athletic tasks.

Shortly thereafter, my athletic career ended, and I was lucky enough to intern under Frank Wintrich, who utilized various medicine ball throws included in his sprint, jump, and throw protocol. The combination of the experiences with my throws coaches, Pete Abbey and Brendon Kelso—who used medicine ball throws as a very specific tool for improving performance in the throws—and Frank—who used the medicine ball throws as a general tool to improve total body power and force production—was far more than I needed to confirm my belief that medicine ball throwing or, more importantly, object projection, is essential.

Because I’m a high school performance coach and my passion is the developmental athlete, this has caused me on to think outside the box in many situations. Or, more precisely, “before the box”: I think about what it will truly take for us to prepare our athletes, in the best way possible to get the most out of the program that we’ve lined up for them, and for what they can expect at the next level, no matter what or where that is.

What I found early on is that our student-athletes sequence their throws incorrectly and look “disconnected.” Additionally, I’d see them try to use their lumbar spine as the prime mover, or use their shoulders and distance their hips from the direction of the throw. To me, this seemed like a motor learning issue and our progression has been designed as such—we’re not necessarily periodizing and appropriating the volume of the throws around competition schedules, but instead learning how to throw and how to project an object.

Another common trend I’ve noticed is we don’t know how to appropriately load a throw. In the jumps we teach first how to land and/or load, and once we’re well-versed then, and only then, we’ll jump. The throws typically don’t have a “landing” or a catch, so we miss out on many force absorption opportunities and often have a difficult time of correctly coiling a throw. In my presentation, I used the quote, “you can’t shoot a gun you don’t know how to load,” and I believe this is true of the throws.

Freelap USA: High school strength and conditioning is trending towards having a full-time coach that is a professional, rather than athletes lifting on their own or a team coach performing dual tasks. Can you share how you manage workouts with TrainHeroic or similar software?

John Garrish: I sure hope so. This is the absolute best level to be at and, in my opinion, the most important level to have qualified strength and conditioning coaches. It’s our goal to see the day that every high school in America has a certified strength and conditioning coach on staff. Though that may be a goal out in the distance for now, there’s no doubt that this is the fastest-growing niche in our profession. The only way that changes is when school boards and decision-makers start to see the impact of having true professionals in those roles at neighboring schools.

Our goal is that every high school will have a certified strength and conditioning coach on staff. Share on X

Landing a high school strength and conditioning position, especially here at North Broward Prep, was the best thing to happen to me in my career and rivals some of the best moments of my life. TrainHeroic has been very good to us, not just from a programming standpoint, but also in how they’ve helped our students, our school, and me through their platform and how they’ve promoted us through various means.

TrainHeroic has taken the place of Excel for me. We’re all off paper now, and it helps with what was my biggest limitation in programming. Whereas I felt strong in designing and implementing programs and adequate loads, my weak points were tracking and monitoring daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly training loads, as well as graphing testing data and resulting numbers. The time TrainHeroic has saved me in monitoring and sharing our semester results with our sport coaches is irreplaceable and it has made our daily sessions infinitely better.

Freelap USA: There is a large range of strength levels from freshman to seniors, as well as novices to experienced lifters. Could you share how you manage groups of different abilities without individualizing each rep? Is this where on-the-fly adjustments are the ultimate skill for a high school strength coach?

John Garrish: Our daily, annual, and quadrennial, four-year high school developmental programming relies heavily on auto-regulation. Current semantics and literature on the matter have directed our focus toward assessment and, in turn, adjustment on a daily basis, which IS a part of the direction and progression of our program. However, an athlete-centered and developmentally driven wide-scope approach is, in fact, more important to the success and preparation of our student-athletes.

We want to make sure we’re not throwing darts blindfolded and calling anything that sticks a “bullseye.” We have five approximate developmental stages that vary based on volume, intensity, and exercise progression. We quantify four different “ages” that create the basis for our athletes’ “developmental trajectory.”

The first age is the student’s chronological age: Regardless of a student’s ability or inability, if you walked into our room tomorrow, a 14-year-old wouldn’t be doing precisely what an 18-year-old is doing. However, if this was the sole determinant of our progression through our program, it would surely be flawed.

A student’s developmental age is arguably the more important determinant of progress, as not all 14-year-olds are built the same, just as not all 18-year-olds are built the same. This includes physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive development. Sometimes, a 13-year-old eighth grader steps on campus already more mature than an 18-year-old stepping off it. There are infinitely more variables out of our control than there are under our control.

The third “age” is the student-athlete’s training age. Though sometimes it’s a good thing to hear that we have a young student-athlete coming to campus with training experience at a local middle or high school, more often than not there’s significant “un-teaching” that has to take place before we even think about introducing our own stimuli. Remember, though, that many times the person that’s taught some of those bad habits might be a family member. It’s smart to tread lightly in communication and feedback (this should be the case regardless of who taught them; it rarely does any good to speak negatively about a young student’s former coach/teacher/mentor—we’re all a part of the young man/woman’s development).

The last age is the most important one. Gary Schofield calls this the “Schofield age.” For the sake of the point I’ll call it our “eagle age”—that is, the time spent with me in our program. More important than anything physical, the time spent together answers the most important question I’ll ever ask: “Can I trust you?”

These four “ages” set the general guidelines for how quickly (or slowly) you will advance through our five stages. Technique is of the utmost importance, and a technical progression and mastery of our prerequisites assure me that the student-athlete is ready to load each movement in the manner that I see fit for loading it. That means that a technical progression might be the primary difference between what one athlete is doing from another. For instance, if our primary lift of the day is a front squat, a lower-level developmental athlete might be doing a landmine or goblet squat. Pretty standard stuff there. However, even if two athletes have climbed their way to a front squat, our younger student-athletes will typically be in a higher-volume, lower-intensity method.

It’s important to note that, no matter how “elite” a young man or woman is relative to their peers, if they’re in our room, they’re a developmental athlete. For those that are counting, our five stages of development are: Developmental, White, Blue, Gold, and College Prep. We do not split groups based on these developmental tiers or stages—we have athletes of all different abilities in the room at the same time. It takes efficient communication and responsible programming to make sure we are meeting each individual where they’re at or where they’re looking to go. TrainHeroic helps tremendously with that side of things. Ultimately, as elaborate as we’re looking to be in designing these stages, on-the-fly adjustments occur every single day.

Freelap USA: Conditioning ranges from deep off-seasons to athletes practicing themselves into shape. How do you work with different coaches in a school to ensure overtraining is prevented or at least reduced?

John Garrish: It’s my personal belief that the best way to keep our kids in shape year-round is to compete in multiple sports. Sure “basketball shape” isn’t “football shape,” but it’s a heck of a lot closer than “110 shape,” in my opinion. A healthy, united, and uniform athletic department is the key to encouraging multiple-sport participation and preventing overtraining, staleness, and burnout.

It’s my belief that the best way to keep kids in shape year-round is to compete in multiple sports. Share on X

For the students that do not compete in multiple sports and are preparing for one sport at one specific time of the year, we will prepare them through means of general oxidative conditioning on to a more specific method as we approach that season. For the most part, we keep things competitive and fun. Chances are the best conditioning shape you or I were ever in was when we were 8-18 years old, playing outside with friends all day.

I try not to distance our conditioning too far from that idea and look at it as an opportunity to improve on our movement skills as well. The change of direction, spatial awareness, and agility required to play a giant game of tag, paired with an appropriately designed work (play) to rest interval, keeps it enjoyable and prevents redundancy and/or staleness. Ultimately, there are times in our program for running, touching a line, turning around and running back again and again, but to stay ahead of the concerns I mentioned above, we keep the time spent in that style of training at a minimum.

Freelap USA: Lifestyle is instrumental, as youth athletes need more sleep and better nutrition. But with youth sports looking for the quick fix, how do you work with parents beyond the typical “education” we see that quickly fades weeks after a presentation or meeting?

John Garrish: Social media has worked as well for our program with parents as it has with students. For better or worse, we’re at each other’s fingertips at any given moment and can share, repost, and retweet information that may or may not stick. We send newsletters and notes on a weekly basis, but who’s to say the information is read, yet alone retained and implemented to make a lasting change?

Twitter has taken the place of the 1990’s grocery store bookshelves with men’s and women’s health & fitness magazines from bookend to bookend. The difference today is genuine experts and research-driven professionals don’t have to worry about publishers and commercial appeal that previously kept them off the shelf. Working to build a culture, not only constructed on attitude and mentality, but on habits and choices, is a 24/7 process. It is our responsibility to make absolutely certain that good information is landing on the coffee tables of our parents.

The Best Ways to Get Buy-In

Blog| ByDaniel Martinez

Strength and conditioning coach, Daniel Martinez, recently talked to a roundtable of seven coaches and trainers from four different countries about several sports science topics. This is the fifth in this series of Sports Science Roundtable articles.

Daniel Martinez: What are some important steps you have taken to impact buy-in from other staff and coaches?

Cory Innes: Get into the field and know your sport inside out; visit them often in their sport environment. This not only shows them you really care about them, but will increase your knowledge and allow deeper, more meaningful conversations about performance with the coach. You need to have the ability to communicate on a deep level with the athlete and coach about their sport, as well as see them in their daily training environment, or you will lose their confidence. You also need to be honest, genuinely caring, and knowledgeable, as well as constantly seeking answers.

Another important step is to be open-minded and allow input from coach and athlete into the training process. Help educate them about what you do and invite them into the gym regularly. These ideas go for fellow staff members, too. Take time to really understand what they do and how they contribute. Let them tell you and don’t assume that you know.

Cory Kennedy: There are many different elements that affect buy-in with coaches, so I will outline a few. First, our training philosophy is built on understanding the athlete’s well-being, and working within that understanding to reach our training objectives. You can’t just say you care—you must show daily that you care about the athlete’s health and overall enjoyment of the process. This comes from robust monitoring, and frequent conversations with athletes and coaches, with the monitoring often just serving as the jump-off point for the conversation.

The second element is regular reporting on workload data or other observations. We try to sit down weekly with most teams, often without a fixed agenda, to update on anything pertinent. There should also be a physical or digital report that goes with it. Finally, be very clear with training objectives when you can. Sometimes you are after subjective qualities that are difficult to measure, and that is OK. Other times, when you have a measurable outcome, state it and stand by it. Then update everyone involved on progress. If you are chasing strength, how much exactly? If speed, how fast? Being very clear with outcomes and results buys a lot of trust.

Devan McConnell: The only thing that I have consciously done to create buy-in is to continuously educate both the staff and the players. I think it is absolutely crucial that I bring the info to them in a way that they can understand, and that is non-threatening. A person in my role must never forget that we are the support for the coaches and athletes; we are here to serve. My job is to inform them of the appropriate information and my interpretation of that, and make it clear that moving forward, whatever the ultimate decision is (speaking specifically of the coaching staff), I will be on board regardless of whether that decision is in line with what my data says. This, in itself, creates buy-in: It might look like a big step backwards from time to time when a coach “just doesn’t get it,” but by remembering that it is ultimately his team, and not mine, it usually ends up being one step back, and two steps forward with regard to the overall buy-in and my ability to have significant influence.

Jonas Dodoo: Education towards high performance. Provide transparency and show vulnerability. Love and patience.

Mike Boykin: We are fortunate at ALTIS that the performance model and details described above are embraced by our staff, including the track and field coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, and therapists. Having interned with multiple S&C coaches in university settings and assisted in the development of a variety of Olympic sports, the common denominator among support staff that receives the greatest buy-in from other staff and coaches is the ability to speak a common language. The better you understand what the lead coach is looking to accomplish and the methods they will use to do so, the clearer you can portray your message in a way that is meaningful to them.

The common denominator among support staff that receives the greatest buy-in from other staff and coaches is the ability to speak a common language. ~Mike Byokin

Nate Brookreson: I have been deliberate with my communication and kept ego out of the way. I have always kept conversations focused on the well-being of the athlete so that we avoid agendas that are divisive and opinionated. With regard to staff, I think of it less as buy-in and more as “how are we going to provide the best service for our student-athlete and provide a galvanized message to the sport coach?” I make sure that we address specific topics centered on creating a robust and proficient athlete, and what our roles and responsibilities are in this process. With athletic training, that might be how we can better screen and gather information on the athlete up front and over time, how we can complement each other in terms of corrective/exercise selection, and how to periodize the use of recovery strategies and modalities. With nutrition, it is centered on optimizing blood profiles, educating the athlete on food choices that maximize their training adaptations, and teaching them to create and maintain good nutritional strategies.

Buy-in from sport coaches revolves around asking them to articulate what questions they might have about their athletes and how we can answer those questions using data from practice, competitions, or training; providing a detailed analysis of the yearly plan and our rationale behind our choices in training; and being honest with them regarding practice planning. Buy-in is earned by making sure that their athletes are ready to meet the challenges that they present to them in training, which requires conversation about their goals, training philosophy, and important competitions. No matter how much is going right, concerns will always arise as a season passes. It’s my job to make sure they understand the long-term training goals.

Patrick Ward: We create reports that take the analysis and put pieces of it into a more consumable form for staff and coaches. Presenting information in meetings has been helpful to provide deeper context around what they observe in the basic reports. It also allows for discussions on which players may need more assistance from staff to maintain health and well-being while going through a grueling season.

The next installment of this Sports Science Roundtable series is: “Making a Difference in Athletic Performance.”

The Effect of Monitoring on the Training Process

Blog| ByDaniel Martinez

Strength and conditioning coach, Daniel Martinez, recently talked to a roundtable of seven coaches and trainers from four different countries about several sports science topics. This is the fourth in this series of Sports Science Roundtable articles.

Daniel Martinez: What type of monitoring do you and your staff implement and how does this either inform or alter your process?

Cory Innes: We use an athlete management system (AMS) developed by the Australian Institute of Sport. This tends to be shifted towards being more physiotherapy- and physiology-driven and monitored than S&C for training measures, although a more specific strength and conditioning monitoring system is planned to be released shortly. In the meantime, I utilize Excel for load monitoring in gym exercises, as well as tracking neuromuscular measures.

I also developed a comprehensive monitoring system for badminton, incorporating training load, S&C load, tournament load, and wellness measures. However, any of these measures are only as useful as the compliance from the athletes, as well as “reporting fatigue”—i.e., the athlete’s propensity to return to a standard feedback option—as to whether you can gain true meaningful data. This is the reason we have moved back to basic communication on different training measures, as well as fatigue measures (neuromuscular) and athlete daily feedback as more effective tools to alter training sessions.

Cory Kennedy: For monitoring, we use a few different strategies, and each team will look slightly different. Most athletes fill out a questionnaire (usually Hooper-Mackinnon), and track training load using sessional RPE. This is usually collected daily, but analyzed weekly. Then we use a countermovement jump (typically three to five times a week) with most athletes for an objective performance measure. We have built a fairly robust system that takes into account each athlete’s individual variability, to allow us to view the performance through a clear lens. Finally, we have a variety of tests we collect monthly that usually have a component specific to the sport (time trials, etc.), and we use them as a reference point for the rest of our collected data.

As for process, there needs to be a general decision-making framework, and we discuss this regularly. First, we try to be fluid in our daily choices to meet the athletes where they are. Then we review where we are in the year and how much fatigue we can afford to collect. Finally, we regularly review the long-term view of our physical qualities to see if we are actually making a lasting change, or returning to square one every year.

Devan McConnell: We use a number of tools to monitor and assess fatigue/readiness and development. Subjective wellness questionnaires, HRV, and RSI via drop jump constitute our “front end” analytics. This combination is utilized to have a better indication of where our athletes are at before we begin on any given day, and what the latent cost of previous work was. The “back end” is used to inform our staff and players what we did—what the immediate cost of training was—so that we have a better idea of what needs to be done moving forward. This consists of various internal workload metrics via heart rate, sRPE, and, of course, a host of physical development parameters. These include several jump metrics, strength, and power measurements via tonnage, as well as velocity, on ice speed, and conditioning testing, etc.

Jonas Dodoo: In track, we perform CMJ (countermovement jump testing) weekly in normal phases, and drop jump and CMJ two to three times a week in high CNS stress phases. In all cycles, we will run fast at least to 30 meters through Optojump with a speed gun at least once every three to four weeks, but this can increase to once every 10 days in pre-comp phases. Jumps are mainly for performance monitoring, as opposed to fatigue. We see drops in performance values when we expect athletes to be fatigued. Drops rarely come from a significant reduction in height or stride length, but from an increase in contraction time (eccentric phase) and ground contact time.

We have used sRPE questionnaires in the past a lot, but we get so much more pertinent information verbally from the athletes on a daily basis that the questionnaires seemed like a box ticking exercise. Athletes get on the therapy table with a physio or osteo at least twice a week and this is where a lot of information is collected verbally, as well as through muscle testing, movement analysis, groin squeeze of different lengths, single leg hop or drop jump, and Nordbord.

We get much more pertinent information verbally from the athletes daily than from questionnaires. Share on X

The information can vary depending on the therapist, but is always extremely valuable for letting us know where the athlete is now compared to their norms. Athlete reports and medical reports greatly influence my decision-making around session content. Sometimes a hard day becomes Plan B or Plan C; sometimes active recovery day can actually become a second day of stress. We are constantly learning about the way athletes respond to training, and we are flexible with our microcycles to get the best out of the athletes while keeping them healthy.

These tools are all used in team sports as well. The difference is the flexibility around training content. The good managers listen to their staff and adjust.

Mike Boykin: The idea of simply observing athletes as they go about normal activities (walking into practice, interacting with teammates, etc.) and train was first introduced to me by Jim Snider at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As the strength and conditioning coach for the men’s and women’s hockey teams, Jim is especially attuned to athlete mood and overall energy during pre-season and competitive season, when physical and emotional loads are highest. Central to his philosophy is ensuring that what he does in the weight room is a beneficial stressor versus one that simply adds more load.

This “active observation” of athletes during all activities is our first metric at ALTIS when it comes to daily monitoring. How vocal (or not) an athlete is, the amount of eye contact they make, their posture, their weight shifts, the amount they laugh—it can all be placed on a sliding scale and compared to their normal range to help create a global picture of their well-being.

Because we work in track and field, the training itself keeps tabs on how individuals are progressing simply by timing, measuring, or weighing. While it is not as simple as seeing fly 30 times decrease over the course of the season, observing the change and interaction of various menu items and different bio-motor abilities helps to create a multi-layered understanding of where someone may be adapting versus maladapting.

The final piece—and how many people will want this question answered—involves a daily monitoring questionnaire from Athletigen through their Iris application. The questions asked and information gleaned from the application is similar to the Hooper-Mackinnon or Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaires. Having access to objective data from subjective markers helps us to avoid heuristics and biases that can skew perception from reality. Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is particularly interesting material to read on this topic.

What Athletigen has done particularly well on this front is ensure that the information presented to coaches separates acute and chronic trends from simply noise, or daily fluctuations, which can be expected from a dynamic system. While there certainly may be daily prescriptions that are altered based upon the data from the questionnaire, this will always go hand in hand with a conversation to gain a deeper understanding of why certain acute changes are occurring. The chronic information gleaned from the app allows us to examine weekly, cycle, and long-term trends as they relate to individual athletes.

Nate Brookreson: Because of the relationships that exist within our department, different monitoring strategies are utilized among S&C and their respective sports. For swimming, we examine subjective RPEs and countermovement vertical jumps all year, and look more closely at bar velocities relative to load in the strength-speed, speed-strength, and peaking phases. We also examine ground contact time and vertical jump height with our depth and drop jumps. In the pool, the coaches track starts from the blocks and push times with set loads on power racks, and speed decrement over 25/50s almost weekly to determine progress.

Typically, the information is provided to create context and open dialogue. If we see negative trends regarding our tracking and performance outcomes in dual meets, we sit and have more detailed meetings. This might include ATCs to talk about visits to the training room and nutritionists to discuss most recent body fat testing or blood biomarkers. We try to address the low-hanging fruit first (statistically significant changes in objective/subjective markers, increased visits to trainer, blood/body fat changes). If unclear, we will look at long-term trends in sRPE training loads and vertical jump, along with performance outcomes in the pool, to determine a course of action. Most of the time, issues are caught early because of the consistent communication and fluidity of how both S&C and swim and dive operate.

Patrick Ward: The three main things we utilize are morning wellness questionnaires, GPS/Accelerometer during training, and sRPE post training. This information allows us to quantify the long-term impact of training/competition on the players (wellness questionnaire), as well as what they physically did during practice (GPS/accelerometer) and how hard they perceived the session to be (sRPE). This gets fed through some analysis that allows us to flag players when things don’t look right (i.e., when things are different then we predicted them to be). Doing this allows us to have more specific conversations with the player and plan an intervention strategy, if necessary, to try and get them back on the right track.

The next installment of this Sports Science Roundtable series is: “The Best Ways to Get Buy-In.”

The Relevance of Periodization

Blog| ByDaniel Martinez

Strength and conditioning coach, Daniel Martinez, recently talked to a roundtable of seven coaches and trainers from four different countries about several sports science topics. This is the third in this series of Sports Science Roundtable articles.

Daniel Martinez: What is your view on periodization and its relevance to your team’s needs?

Cory Innes: A well-rounded knowledge of basic periodization structure and the detraining effect of the various bio-motor qualities is crucial. This knowledge should be so well understood that the practitioner can adjust and adapt training both within the wider plan and daily. (For instance, being able to stick to the periodization structure of what you are trying to achieve but being flexible within that process because, in the real world, perfect concentrated loaded periods and deloading periods don’t occur on a constant 3:1 macrocycle.)

There also needs to be reflection on what you expect to see, what you are seeing, what the difference is, and why there is a difference. This helps you understand an athlete at an individual level. There should also be a greater emphasis on skill development so that exercises performed are performed with perfect mechanics for what you have programmed. The “how” is more important than the “what,” and you need a vision of what you want to see in what time period, and what skill progressions you may need to achieve that.

Cory Kennedy: I think periodization is a very important starting point with every group you work with, but it is not final. There are definitely key periods of the year that are pre-defined with a specific type of training, which is probably the case for most people in our field. Early off-season, with GPP (General Physical Preparation), happens close to universally, although what that means can change from sport to sport. After that, we definitely employ a blend of block training with fluid periodization. We typically establish specific objectives for the athlete and the two to three qualities we need to build in the next cycle. Then, using the different monitoring tools at our disposal, we try to adjust our daily choices based on the state of the athlete. There are many roads that lead to Rome, so as long as our destination remains clear, our daily choices can be somewhat adaptable.

’Sport science’ informs the direction that the necessary ebbs and flows of training, practicing, competing, and all other stressors must take relative to the original periodization model. ~ Devan McConnell

Devan McConnell: Periodization lays the general framework for how I structure our training, both on a micro and macro level. I find great usefulness and success in the long-term planning of training, despite this being recently out of fashion. That being said, I don’t think that it is appropriate to consider any periodized plan as “gospel.” The entire point of tools such as subjective wellness questionnaires, sRPE, internal and external load monitoring, and CNS and ANS assessments is to provide relevant, immediate feedback on an athlete’s ability to adapt to stress. Ignoring this information blindly because it does not fit with the pre-ordained, periodized model would be foolish. Therefore, “sport science” informs the direction that the necessary ebbs and flows of training, practicing, competing, and all other stressors must take relative to the original periodization model.

Jonas Dodoo: I have always been a believer in training all components throughout the year in a “complex hierarchy,” where you essentially list all your training components and their objectives. You also list which ones will have primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary (and so on) priority when planning learning objectives, training focus, training time, training stress, etc. It’s always easy to address your primary priority within each phase/cycle, but the problem I encountered early in my career is that it’s easy to overshoot your tertiary and quaternary priorities. This can become a problem, as these priorities can demand more adaptation reserve than planned and lead to over-training or dilution of training. It’s just as easy to undershoot these components, which may have detrimental long-term implications.

Mike Boykin: Periodization, or the structured and systematic implementation of a plan, is obviously exceptionally important, although perhaps not in the classical sense of a coach having all training-related details laid out until the “peak” competition. For our staff and athletes, periodization is more practically applied to ensure that the people involved in an athlete’s preparation understand what the goal(s) is/are for a certain period of time and which objective or subjective metrics need to be monitored most carefully.

This is always dynamic, and it shifts depending on numerous factors including, but not limited to: an athlete’s health (physical and emotional), technical progress, and physical development, as well as time of year. To give a fairly straightforward example, take an athlete who is coming off a chronic injury that has caused numerous compensatory strategies and limited consistent training. Until this athlete has stabilized health factors and mechanics, performance markers (such as times during practice or weight lifted in the gym) are not a priority. Unless the entire coaching/therapy staff is on the same page with this, an athlete will consistently receive mixed messages on what they should be focusing on.

Nate Brookreson: I believe that the planning of a yearly training block is one of the most important processes a coach can go through. It creates communication with sport coaches in determining the most important competitions to plan for, allows you to stratify programming between different levels of athletes, permits you to have meaningful conversations with athletes about how you are going to achieve success and what markers you will use to determine this, and serves as a road map for other coaches who might be assisting you with your team to see your thought process and rationale. I don’t feel that a periodized plan needs to be at the level of individual exercises because I think these will be influenced by what team you are working with and your exercise preferences with them.

I believe in creating a plan based on your training goals (e.g., strength endurance, strength, strength speed, etc.) and then filling in exercises, sets/reps, and percentages based on these goals. I try to be as scripted with the training in the off-season as possible, as there are times when I am trying to create fatigue to target specific adaptations, although within reason. However, when we reach our in-season phase, there are specific competitions at which my objective is to attenuate fatigue, and I am more sensitive to getting feedback from the athletes to manage the training loads and make changes in programming as necessary.

Patrick Ward: Periodization comes down to logical, structured planning. In team sport, I look at it in two main ways—mesocycle and microcycle. The mesocycle is going to be dependent on the phase of the season (e.g., training camp, in-season quarter 1, etc.), while the microcycle is specific to what we do that week in preparation for the upcoming competition. The microcycle layout is critical in team sport, given the frequent competitions and how one week flows into the next. Understanding that weekly structure and preparation is something I strongly believe in. Then, how subsequent weeks feed into a block of time—a mesocycle—helps you take a longer term look at things.

I left macrocycle off the list only because looking at programming/planning from year to year isn’t as critical for us, given that a pro sports team turns over a lot of players each year. There are also coaching changes, and these athlete and coach changes alter the training context each season. There isn’t as much consistency from year to year, like there might have been before the times of free agency.

The next installment of this Sports Science Roundtable series is: “The Effect of Monitoring on the Training Process.”

The Challenges of the Work Environment for Coaches and Trainers

Blog| ByDaniel Martinez

Strength and conditioning coach, Daniel Martinez, recently talked to a roundtable of seven coaches and trainers from four different countries about several sports science topics. This is the second in this series of Sports Science Roundtable articles.

Daniel Martinez: What are the challenges of your current work environment?

Cory Innes: The challenges of my work environment tend to revolve around funding and, therefore, athlete access. The result of working within a government system is that funding is limited, so servicing needs to cover a wide range of athletes. There have been recent moves to decrease athlete-to-staff ratios to provide greater in-depth performance, but this then leaves the developing or non-performing athlete vulnerable to being cut off from access to servicing. So, there is constantly a trade-off between who needs help and how/if they can be serviced. Additionally, relationship building is a key requirement of the position and one of the biggest challenges lies in communication with the coach, other service providers, and athletes.

“Relationship building is a key requirement… and one of the biggest challenges lies in communication.”

Cory Kennedy: Personally, I like to think of advantages over challenges, but I don’t fault you for asking. I would say the largest challenge we face is the allocation of resources. Since most of our funding comes through the federal government, there is a comprehensive process that determines each sport’s level of support from year to year. This means that some sports that have more success will reap the rewards of a higher budget. So, while Olympic hopeful athletes from a variety of sports share the same space, training side by side on a daily basis, our level of involvement is dictated by the allocated resources. Each athlete has a drive to reach the podium, and we like to offer each athlete their best chance to reach those dreams. Unfortunately, we can’t always spend the same amount of time with each of them.

Devan McConnell: I am a one-man show. My primary responsibility is the physical training of the team, but all other aspects of the position still fall on my shoulders. These other duties are often the sole responsibility of other individuals within a larger or more well-funded organization. Specifically, on the sport science side, I find it always a challenge (although a well-appreciated one) to “sell” the usefulness of the data to the head coach. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the complete lack of understanding of my role and/or its significance to the program by administrative-level individuals.

Jonas Dodoo: At Speed Works, the challenge is that we are a registered charity in an amateur sport during a time when sponsors are put off due to the financial climate and the controversies that consistently occur within our sport. So, we are balling on a budget.

High Performance Advisor connects vision and reality for young developing players who are often paid more than staff members. As a result, these athletes have traditionally had more power to decide how they train.

Mike Boykin: At ALTIS, we face similar challenges to what most relatively new companies encounter. Resources are appropriately allotted in order to maintain a high level of coaching and therapy expertise on-site to best serve the athlete population. This means that there are fewer (read: no) individuals here in Phoenix who are 100% dedicated to what most practitioners think of as “classical sports science.”

However, this “issue” is mitigated greatly by the fact that John Godina hired coaches (initially Dan Pfaff, Stuart McMillan, and Andreas Behm) who have a wealth of knowledge and a high level of understanding in areas that are often saved for a specialist. This is why the paradigm of sports science as hooking up a GPS (just to pick one example) should instead be viewed more holistically as the “science of sport,” where the coach is a fantastic generalist with a broad educational background in an environment where they can continue to grow.

The challenges of being a start-up have forced us to adapt. Therefore, many of our partnerships are formed around creating better athlete support systems. One example is the work we do with Athletigen in providing genetic and environmental data to our coaches and athletes. If there’s something we cannot adequately do, there is someone within our network who can assist.

Nate Brookreson: As silly as this might sound, I try to not view anything about my role as a “challenge” anymore. I think early in my career, I definitely had this mentality regarding things like communication between support staff, the lack of understanding with my sport coaches when it came to physiology, and the difficulty in articulating my role in the competition performance of athletes in mixed sports. I am now at a point in my career where I try to be solution-oriented.

I have forcibly increased communication with support staff through frequent meetings that have a specific agenda. I have increased the information I share with sport coaches and attempt to educate regarding weekly practice structure and peaking protocols. I also understand the limitations in trying to explain all performance outcomes, but share the information that I can reliably collect and track using research (whether others or my own) to pick validated indicators of performance. Maybe the only legitimate challenge I still face is time management (knowing when to walk away from certain projects).

Patrick Ward: The challenges are the challenges faced anywhere and are not specific to professional sport. Anytime you have information that challenges antiquity or dogma, you will meet with some resistance. It takes a lot of time to help people understand where you are coming from or maybe even to change their thinking on things. Sometimes it isn’t even about changing the thinking as much as it is getting people to look at things from a different angle and conceptualize things in a different way. So, being patient can sometimes be a challenge, as things never move as fast as you want them to. As they say, it takes a long time to make a right turn on the Titanic.

The next installment of this Sports Science Roundtable series is: “The Relevance of Periodization.”

How Coaches and Trainers Define Success

Blog| ByDaniel Martinez

Cory Innes (Victorian Institute of Sport – Lead S&C T&F/Badminton)
Cory is the Lead Strength and Conditioning Coach for Track and Field and Badminton at the Victorian Institute of Sport in Melbourne, Australia. He provides strength and conditioning support to nationally identified athletes in these sports, and develops programs for training camps and education to national junior squads. Additionally, he operates as the National Sport Science and Medicine Manager for Badminton and sits on the High-Performance Committee, which involves the development of a national structure and framework around strength and conditioning and medical support.

Cory Kennedy (Institut National du Sport du Québec – Head of S&C)
Cory is the Head of Strength and Conditioning at Institut National du Sport du Québec. This role includes being the lead for certain training groups, as well as managing the delivery of strength and conditioning as a whole within the Institut. This means helping to guide other team members in their journey in strength and conditioning, as well as managing the logistics and equipment within the training space.

Devan McConnell (UMass Lowell – Head of Hockey Performance)
Devan serves as the Head of Hockey Performance at UMass Lowell. His role is essentially to oversee everything that goes into development off the ice. This includes strength and conditioning, recovery and regeneration, nutrition, sport science data collection and interpretation, and continuing education for the staff and players.

Jonas Dodoo (Speed Works – Head Coach of Athletics and High Performance Consultant)
Jonas is the Head Coach of Speed Works, a track group based in London. He is also a high-performance advisor to professional sports teams (mainly rugby and soccer).

Mike Boykin (ALTIS – Sprints & Hurdles Coach/Sports Science Lead)
Mike is currently a Sprints and Hurdles Coach at ALTIS, overseeing the development of a group of 200m and 400m sprinters, and 400m hurdlers. He also serves as the sports science lead on The ALTIS performance team.

Nate Brookreson (NC State University – Director of Olympic Sports)
Nate is currently the Director of Olympic Sports at North Carolina State University, where his primary team responsibilities are with women’s basketball, swimming, and men and women’s golf. As a coach, his job is athlete management, which consists of the planning and implementation of training programs; the review of the plans through observation of performance qualities to determine if they are producing expected outcomes; and making changes based on testing, monitoring and performance results. As a supervisor, he assists staff in the: creation of needs analyses for the respective sports; centralization and management of performance and monitoring data; dissemination of information to improve the staff’s knowledge and programming; and creation of opportunities for the staff to complete departmental projects to positively impact the Pack Performance unit.

Patrick Ward (Sports Science Analyst at Seattle Seahawks)
Patrick is a Sport Scientist for the Seattle Seahawks and was formerly with Nike’s SPARQ Division in Portland.

Strength and conditioning coach, Daniel Martinez, recently talked to a roundtable of coaches and trainers from four different countries about several sports science topics. We will be presenting these questions, and their answers, in a series of Sports Science Roundtable articles, starting with this one on the definition of success.

Daniel Martinez: How do you define success for your team and your role?

Cory Innes: Success is defined by performance. If the sport performance is not improving, then
we are not doing all we can to help facilitate that. My role involves helping create individual performance plans (IPPs), in consultation with the coaches, national sport organizations (NSOs), and a wider support team (sport science, physiotherapy, psychology, nutrition, etc.), which focus on identifying areas of improvement within the athlete’s performance and then developing ways of measuring improvement in each area.

This is an integrated approach with accountability from each contributing team member, and these are reviewed and adjusted as required. This allows us to see specifically where or if we have been successful in our contribution to performance. In my role, I look at specific measures that identify whether my contribution is successful at a strength and conditioning level, but also whether this improvement transferred to the sports performance.

Cory Kennedy: Success as a strength and conditioning staff member (or a sport scientist) is difficult to define, as some colleagues regularly remind us. So, we look at success in a few different areas. Approval and trust from an athlete can sometimes be the low-hanging fruit, but it is essential. You need their trust, and they need yours. Matching each other’s expectations is so important. Secondly, you need to have the coaches’ approval. Sometimes we think the coaches are wrong, and vice versa. Yet, we have to trust each other and get along.

Lastly, are we offering something to the sport that they never had before? Is there a legacy that we are providing? We tirelessly shake every tree for research and innovation opportunities, because we are learning new things about different sports, training methods, equipment, and human beings. This means that there will always be opportunities to improve on processes. This could be the way coaches view training and practice, or tests used to identify or track talent, or they could be validating equipment that enters the marketplace.

If we can publish reviews or original research, this is a huge success. Even if it’s not published, if the sport assimilates it into their way of doing things, that is a big win for us. Within those principles, we have an Integrated Support Team (IST) around each sport (think of the different specialists), and we do our best to really get on the same page, collaborate on projects, and share similar perspectives, so we can offer a sport a well-functioning team.

Devan McConnell: Success, in a general sense for our team, comes from the basic premise of wins/losses, just as with any other athletic organization. At the end of the day, our staff and program are judged by how we finish within our league, and if and how we earn an opportunity to compete in the NCAA tournament. On a more specific level to my position, in addition to our team success, the success of my role is reflected by our “man games lost” statistic, or what our injury ratio is. I am also judged, from an athletic development perspective, by how many of our players move on to play professional hockey after their college career.

Finally, in addition to all this, I personally view success as how “successful” my athletes are once they are done being athletes…. Do they leave us as a better version of themselves? I measure their success by how much more mature, worldly, and prepared they are to be productive members of our society; and by the depth of the relationships they have formed along the way.

I personally view success as how ‘successful’ my athletes are once they are done being athletes. Share on X

Jonas Dodoo: Success is always measured by the progression of performance. Running fast and winning games are essentially what stake holders will measure players, athletes, teams, and coaches by. But, within our team, we measure our success by progression towards high performance. Some may talk about this being culture and some may just call this being professional. Either way, we identify the behaviors, processes, and benchmarks of high performance, then work on bridging the gap between where we want to be and where we are now. If we are doing everything in our power to close this gap, then we expect to see more wins, faster times, and healthy athletes.

Mike Boykin: When we sat down as a performance team in September, which was the start of our 2016-2017 training season, the No. 1 goal for this year was international level success of our athletes. While success in this context can be defined numerous ways, in track and field and in our situation, it was simply having athletes performing their best in meets, with a long-term focus on premier competitions, while staying healthy.

There are multiple ways to achieve this and certain landmarks must be hit along the way, as it requires doing things correctly when it comes to supporting the athlete group. Many people have written and spoken about this before and Good to Great by Jim Collins is a fantastic reference on the topic, but it begins with the people involved. ALTIS’ infrastructure was built on high-level coaches and therapists working together with the athlete, in what Dan Pfaff and Gerry Ramogida have aptly termed the “Coach-Athlete-Therapist Triad.”

The keystone to success in this model is the ability of all three members to communicate openly with each other and put ego aside to best serve the athlete and their goals. All other support services are just that—support. Things that are classically defined as “sports science,” whether it be some sort of physiological, biomechanical, psychological, nutritional, etc. information, must inform the coach and therapist, and, where appropriate, the athlete. These support services are present to give the team increased access to a wealth of information that they theoretically would not have due to lack of expertise in a particular area.

Anything that aids in best practice must be put in a framework that the coach and therapist can apply (or at least file away for a later date), rather than an isolated factoid that simply feeds that athlete with additional information.

Nate Brookreson: Success in my role is multifaceted. In the role of support staff to a sport coach, my primary responsibility is to optimize the development of our student-athletes to be able to compete for conference and national championships. While this topic has been discussed in detail in recent months, my success in this role is related to athlete availability and measurable performance improvement. Athlete availability is quantified in missed practices and competitions, as well as missed training opportunities in the off-season. Measurable performance diagnostics are separated into orthopedic, strength, power, speed, and fitness categories, and further subcategorized from there.

Developmental emphasis is placed in certain categories depending on the sport, time of year (i.e., basketball movement/orthopedic early off-season, strength, power, and fitness late off-season), and developmental stage of the athlete. All performance testing is evaluated based on the work of Will Hopkins and his magnitude-based inferential statistics to determine meaningful performance changes. We then compile this information into detailed performance profiles for our athletes that we can share with sport coaches and administrators.

Patrick Ward: Defining success in any support role is always challenging in team sport. It isn’t like individual endurance sports where, as a physiologist/coach/strength coach, there may be a more direct link between what you do and how it impacts successful performances. Team sport is inherently “noisy” because success, in the form of winning games, is dependent on a variety of factors that can often be outside your control.

For myself, I think success is more defined by my contributions back to the four main departments in a pro sports team: Management/Scouting, Coaching, Strength Coach, and Medical/ATC. I look at the role of a sport science department as an information services role (to steal from the business world), whereby you are helping people in those departments answer relevant questions that may aid them in making decisions. If I am able to listen to people in those departments, understand what is relevant and important to them, and then use a scientific approach to answer questions for them and set up analysis that may explain some sort of phenomenon or uncover information that is not directly observable to the human eye that allows them to take action, then I feel pretty successful.

The next installment of this Sports Science Roundtable series is: “The Challenges of the Work Environment for Coaches and Trainers.”

Voice from the Void: The Disappearing Middle Ground of Coaching

ALTIS| ByKyle Hierholzer

Disclaimer: I am not a writer—I am a coach. I have undergraduate degrees in finance and marketing, and a master’s degree in political science. Yet, here I sit at my computer, writing a blog post as a coach of track and field athletes. My initial passion was to be a lawyer. I took the LSAT, applied to schools, and was accepted, but backed out because I was intrigued and excited about a life of coaching. I can tell you it was not the most financially rewarding decision I have ever made, but perhaps the best decision I have ever made.

I worked my way up the coaching rungs one step at a time. I started off as a graduate assistant, then a junior college assistant, and then I took a pay cut to go to a Division I school as an assistant. Now, by God’s grace, I work at the amazing professional training center in Phoenix, Arizona, known simply as ALTIS. Each of those unique environments prepared me for where I am now.

I have been fortunate to have several wonderful mentors, many of whom I spoke to at length prior to writing this article. If you look closely, you will be able to identify their presence in the following lines. These thoughts come from me, but are absolutely influenced by my environment, my history, my peers, my beliefs, my failures, my successes, and, last of all, my hopes. Take them for what they are and, of course, with a grain of salt.

Background: Does ‘Any Publicity Is Good Publicity’ Still Hold True?

It’s March 24, 2017. President Donald Trump has been in office now for just over two months. Regardless of whether you voted for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump, it is obvious that the nation is split decisively (and divisively) between the two political parties. Not only is it split, but the gap between the two parties is so wide that it seems the only voices heard are those from the extreme wings of each—mainly because they scream the loudest, create the most controversy, etc. While these two extreme ends continue to fervently push their respective agendas, a void has formed in what used to be the middle. I’m speaking of a middle ground of thought.

At one time the middle was a place of common sense, and rational, civil communication. It’s where ideas were heard and exchanged, and information was sifted for its value and merit. If it passed the logic test it could be assimilated into a system and used for the common good. Now the middle is quiet. In fact, those few people still in the middle are timid to speak because doing so puts them at great risk of being labeled as some extreme guru, of being typecast, of being drawn into some long argument about why what they are doing is too “old-school” or against the latest research. They’re tired of being lumped into a group that they don’t identify with because they could only explain so much in 140 characters. You get the idea, right? The current culture is polarizing, it’s trending, and it’s leaving a void where there once was a middle ground.

The middle is a place of common sense and logic; where information is sorted and used based on its value and merit.

Polarization is happening in politics, but the same goes for the argument about truth. In Party 1, everything is an absolute (my way of doing it is the only way to do it), and in Party 2, put simply, there is no truth. What about the Science vs Faith argument? Party 1 says that science is the only way to all the answers, while Party 2 says that faith should give us all the answers we need.

Do you see the pattern? One extreme to the next. Extremes are sexy. They sell. They start arguments. They garner attention. Will there ever be an end to “any publicity is good publicity?”

What in the world does this have to do with coaching? Well, to me it has everything to do with coaching. It seems like more and more these days, we coaches are falling into the same traps—myself included! Not everyone that is a member of a political party falls in line with every item on the party’s agenda, nor do they share every belief of the party leader. And they certainly don’t necessarily share the ideals of the extremists.

It’s just like how Absolutists are in a clear and present danger of an all-or-nothing attitude, and the “there is no truth” advocates must answer the question: “Is that the truth?”. Similarly, science must take steps of faith to conduct experiments (gravity will act the same way today as it did yesterday, even though we have no proof that it will), and faith must not reject the reasonable findings of science as an attack on its existence. Coaches must not lump themselves into camps that argue from extreme, polarizing positions.

Coaching: The Ever-Shrinking Middle Ground of Thought and Practice

Where does this happen in coaching? I give you the following examples:

Eccentric vs. concentric vs. isometric training
General prep vs. special prep
Short to long vs. long to short
Speed reserve vs. volume of work
Max strength vs. power
Monitor everything vs. monitor nothing
Force absorption vs. force production
Pro Bosch vs. anti Bosch
Personal coaches vs. national federations
All hurdlers should use a short, fast, lead arm vs. all hurdlers should use a long, slow, swimming lead arm
Manual therapy is the only way vs. manual therapy is for wimps
Fascia vs. everything else

Get the idea? I’m sure you can think of many more examples in your own unique environment, regardless of the industry. These are the conversations that the Twitter warriors live for. As soon as they see a post from a member of the opposite camp, it’s on. Total Twitter warfare has begun.

So far, I’ve taken a current cultural trend as I see it and given multiple examples of the trend in various realms of politics and philosophy. Then I gave multiple examples of topics where I see the same pattern mirrored in the coaching realm. What does that mean though? There is an ever-shrinking middle ground of thought and practice, or, as my friend Brett Bartholomew calls it, “conscious coaching.” (More from Brett later.)

Polarization: Be Wary of Extremes

Back when I was in my twenties, I used to fish a lot. A lot. Like almost every day all summer. I invested in every edge possible to try and catch more fish and bigger fish. I felt that a solid pair of polarized fishing glasses was one of my greatest assets. They took the glare off the water, and allowed me to see more clearly.

Those advocating for extremes may believe that they are seeing more clearly, but in reality, they are missing the forest because of the trees. Let’s take the idea of “minimum effective dose.” It’s a great idea, and certainly one that makes a lot of sense. It’s the complete opposite of the “more is better, volume is the only way, work until you vomit” philosophy, which we saw highlighted recently in Oregon. However, if you focus only on the “minimum” part and forget about the “effective” part, then you are missing the boat.

The idea of “less is more,” when taken to the extreme, can be equally disastrous as “more is better.” Common sense can’t leave the equation. Athletes do have to do some “work” to get better, and what is effective for one athlete may not be effective for another athlete.

A Breed Apart

So, in a world growing ever more polarized…does a middle realm still exist? I happen to think it does. The definition of middle is: “at an equal distance from the extremities of something; central.” I do think the middle is shrinking, and I think by nature people in the middle are quiet, reserved, and perfectly happy to go about their business as usual, regardless of whether the pundits think its archaic or not. I think they respect knowledge, but they respect common sense just as much.

I think, in the middle ground of coaching, there lives a breed of coaches who understand how to identify their environment and employ the appropriate methodology. Sometimes they may choose different strategies for different athletes as they fit best. One hurdler may have a long lead arm, one may have a short. One coach may train one middle distance runner long to short, and another short to long. If they both run fast…who cares?

The Middle Ground

I lived and worked in the Midwest (the middle ground of America) for nearly a decade.
I see strong similarities between Midwestern people (farmers, ranchers, builders, laborers) and the middle ground of coaching. In general, they keep things simple. They stick to the basics, which are the fundamental principles that have worked for decades. They generally take their time introducing anything new. They only integrate it after they have figured out whether it will add value, and have determined how to best use it in their unique environment. They work hard. Yes, that’s right. Hard work is OK.

The Midwesterners I know believe in what they are doing. They know there are things they have to do and things they would like to do, and they know the difference between the two. They know that diversity (especially diversity of income) is valuable. They place a premium on gratitude and helping others.

What I think the Midwestern people (and the coaches in the middle) have figured out is that, at the end of the day, it’s all about production. If you don’t produce, the bank still asks for the loan back. If you don’t produce, you get fired. If you don’t produce, people starve. If you don’t produce, athletes don’t get better. But, not only is it all about production, it’s about consistent production over a long, long period of time. In my experience, coaches who operate in the middle tend to produce at a very high level over a very long period of time.

Coaches who operate in the middle tend to produce at a very high level over a very long time. Share on X

Principles for Staying in the Middle

How can you stay in the coaching middle during this time of polarization and extremes? Here are some guiding principles.

Simple Is Complex Enough

It’s not that complicated. Do the simple, basic, fundamental things well. When you can do them well, do them better. It’s cliché, but it’s accurate.

At a recent ALTIS Apprentice Coach Program, Coach Dan Pfaff gave a presentation on KPIs. The lecture wasn’t filled with secret strategies, state-of-the-art technology, or intricate set-and-rep schemes. On the contrary, it was a simple, almost boring, discussion of how he determined what the key performance indicators would be for an athlete. If anyone else in the world gave that lecture, it would be a cure for insomnia. However, when someone with 45 years of coaching experience, across almost every sport, at all levels, says something is important…you listen. You listen attentively. You discover that what you might on the surface dismiss as simple or old-fashioned, is really layered and filtered through various grids in a multi-faceted matrix of decision-making.

Coach Pfaff didn’t brag about using some ultra-complex system or methodology, or that someone of his intellect is the only one who can do that. What he said was that the simple pieces of programming and coaching are so complex that even he still doesn’t have them figured out. He had to develop a system for properly incorporating basic principles, and that system is still being fine-tuned after 45 years. So how in the world would he feel comfortable adding in a bunch of new stuff that would require even more systems to understand?

‘Buy-In’ Is Crucial

Let’s be honest. There is no such thing as a perfect program or training system. If you are chasing that, you are taking yourself way too seriously. We are human beings trying to predict what other human beings are going to feel like sometime in the future. We can’t predict that accurately for one minute from now, and we sure can’t for four weeks from now. My point is that all training plans have flaws. The successful athletes we coach overcome those flaws because they believe in what we, and they, are doing. The more they believe, the better they will be. Throughout history the most successful coaches have no doubt created the most “buy-in” from their athletes. How do we do that?

I asked this question of my friend and peer, Brett Bartholomew. Brett is absolutely one of the best strength coaches in the business. He is an engaging and entertaining speaker, and he is a genius at building relationships with his athletes and fostering belief in the plan.

Brett is passionate about helping other coaches and has a book just was just published, titled Conscious Coaching: The Art & Science of Building Buy-In. It’s a must-read for all coaches. In one of my favorite chapters of the book, Brett discusses seven key tenets for building trust. One of these is empathy, and I’ve included an excerpt below that I believe should hit home with a lot of coaches:

Trust Tenet #5: Empathy, Implementation

Give Ground to Gain Ground: As coaches, we want to compose rather than control. Don’t forget that humility is the essence of connectedness and if we want to build trust we need to make sure that we aren’t afraid to humanize our interactions with our athletes. Don’t be afraid to show all sides of yourself to your athletes. Being “real” will gain you much more respect than trying to put on a show and constantly psyching yourself up to get into “coach mode” prior to a session. Invoke the spirit of reciprocity by volunteering appropriate personal information about yourself when asked, after all can you really expect them to do so on their behalf if they don’t know anything about you?

Don’t Be Afraid of Criticism or Bite-Back. Just because someone doesn’t appear to be on-board with your message doesn’t make them a detractor. Take a moment and ask them what in particular they have an issue with and get busy finding a middle ground.

Emotional Payments Accepted: Our emotions, feelings and concerns need to be validated. Letting your athletes know that you understand what their hesitations or fears may be ahead of time lets them know that you have taken their viewpoint under consideration and at the very least have done your homework in regards to trying to see their point of view.

Freedom From Rigidity

Give yourself freedom from rigidity. It’s amazing how many times I have caught myself writing a plan a certain way simply because, if I wrote it another way, it would go against some principle that I hold near and dear to my heart. The problem is that what I hold near and dear may not be the best thing for the athlete. If you are a “speed reserve” guy, what will you do with the athlete who needs volume? Will you compromise, or will you shove a square peg into a round hole?

Find the system that works best for your athletes at that stage of your career. Share on X

The problem with being a specialist or only following one line of thought is that you can paint yourself into a philosophical corner and, if you are close to the end of the spectrum, that corner can get pretty small. In the coaching world, find the system that works best for your athletes, in your environment, at that stage of your career. Work at it. Believe in it. Learn from your mistakes, but also learn from what other people who are in different circumstances are doing. File it away for another stage in your career or for that athlete who comes along that doesn’t fit “your” system.

Seek and Give Support

Seek mentors, contribute, give back. Realize that we, as a coaching community, are much better off when we avoid camps, labels, and assumptions. When you see a successful, long-producing coach doing something that confuses you or you don’t agree with philosophically, ask them why they do it. I bet they aren’t as intimidating as they seem. I guarantee you they have a reason for what they are doing, and they would be happy to explain to you the ins and outs of their methodology.

Legendary strength coach, Buddy Morris, gave a presentation at the ALTIS ACP in November 2016, and on one of his first slides he had a list of names of the people who influenced him. The font was tiny, the list was in paragraph form, and there was no space remaining. All the “master” coaches I’ve ever been around speak so passionately about their mentors, their experiences with them, and their relationship with them. They have so much gratitude that you can hear it in their voice when they speak about them. It’s that gratitude and emotion that drives them to take the phone calls, respond to the emails, speak at clinics on topics they’ve discussed hundreds of times, and give back to the sport. I know that I will forever be grateful for the coaches who have given, and continue to give, their time to me.

I would encourage each and every person reading this article to reflect on where you are in relation to the middle. How is that working for you? Where are we going as a community? What can you do to give back? Can we find the middle ground again? Do we need to? Or do we just need to be reminded that it exists? It will always be there waiting for us to return, to refocus, to truly be—as Brett calls it—a conscious coach.

For more coach and athlete resources from ALTIS, see ALTIS 360.

Off the Soccer Field With Dr. Jesse Saenz

Freelap Friday Five| ByJesse Saenz

Jesse Saenz, D.C., CCSP, is Head of Sports Science and First Team Chiropractor at Sacramento Republic FC and has worked in the English Premier League and Championship. He is an expert in soccer periodization and has mentored with Raymond Verheijen in the Netherlands. He was previously appointed Team Physician of Team USA Skydiving and was selected to the USA Track & Field Sports Medicine Team for the National Championships. Dr. Saenz is currently consultant to Hull City AFC of the English Premier League after serving as their First Team Chiropractor during the 2015/16 season.

Freelap USA: Jesse, your team does nearly all of its conditioning on the field. With soccer creating adaptations to the body around the hips, how do you restore the body from pattern overload? With your manual therapy knowledge, could you get into how specific training can be done without creating overuse syndromes besides managing volume?

Dr. Saenz: It’s important to not only monitor physiological loads, but also biomechanical stresses and internal loads. As medical staff, we spend a fair amount of energy addressing players’ individual needs. In our treatment room, you’ll see a lot of soft tissue therapies like ART (active release technique), Graston, and chiropractic care. We want the players to be moving well when they step on the field, so we continually use manual therapies to restore hip and foot/ankle mobility and clear impingements.

Take care of your body—that’s our message to older and younger players alike. Share on X

We’ve also created a culture of proactive care as opposed to reactive care. You won’t see senior players chastising younger players for getting treatment in Sacramento. Take care of your body—that’s our message to older and younger players alike. Every player’s body is different, so we try to address them individually. We help the players prepare for training with daily, custom preact/prehab exercises based on a variety of information, including injury history and pre-season testing data. We consider our prehab/preact program not only performance enhancement, but also injury prevention. Our individualized program was inspired by the work of Cristian Fernández, who I was lucky enough to work with at Hull City. He’s a top guy who’s now at Newcastle doing great things.

Freelap USA: Practice design is paramount between games. Can you share what you do with PLAYERTEK to prepare for the game needs as well as keeping fit and fresh? Can you talk more about your team coaches and their views of what you are doing?

Dr. Saenz: The planning of training sessions is critical. We have to achieve the manager’s vision, tactically, while advancing fitness levels and preventing injury—a massive task. We are big on soccer periodization in Sacramento. Periodization provides us with an objective reference from which to plan: when to condition; when to recover; when to do sprint training; when to have shooting exercises; when to do extensive vs. intensive warmups, passing drills, and possession games: and the appropriate work-to-rest ratios for those exercises. We have tactical goals to achieve in specific training sessions and each session has physical performance targets to hit.

Periodization provides us with an objective reference from which to plan. Share on X

We use PLAYERTEK GPS to record and monitor that data. I think that more data isn’t necessarily better, so it’s my job to present the data in a way that is useful for the coaching staff without giving them a blizzard of numbers and graphs. The coaches like the PLAYERTEK data and will periodically ask for reports on certain players. The data can be helpful when talking to players about their performances and in alerting us to a player that may be underperforming for a variety of reasons.

It is also very helpful when rehabilitating players. We regularly compare pre-injury data to rehab data to see how close a player is to their normal, healthy self. That way, we can return a player to the first team session with minimal risk of re-injury and without bringing down the session quality. For example, we have a player returning from a season-ending lower limb injury who is now on the rehab pitch and hitting top speeds higher than he hit last year while healthy. We are gradually building up his workload. The numbers back up what we are seeing with our eyes, but give us that extra bit of confidence and some objective data from which to advance his loading. We’ve been very successful preventing re-injury using this methodology.

Freelap USA: Eccentric strength is trending again in sports science. Do you use any technique or approach to leverage the adaptations? Is this possible in the middle of the season with athletes that have short off-season periods and hard practices?

Dr. Saenz: Eccentrics have been hot in soccer for a few years now and we absolutely do them. Hamstring eccentrics are part of our hamstring group preact/prehab menu and part of our strength training. Hamstrings are the No. 1 injury in soccer, so for injury prevention, we will plan team eccentrics two weeks prior to a week with congested fixtures and then basically de-load the week prior. Eccentrics are very demanding, so I feel more comfortable doing them post-training as we don’t want to induce fatigue before a training session.

There are two types of hamstring injuries: the slow stretch injury associated with longer RTP, and the one we typically see—the high-speed running injury. Everyone is doing Nordics, which are great, but this injury is most commonly to the long head of the biceps femoris, so we also do exercises that seem to better target the lateral hamstrings. We make sure to mix up exercises that we classify as one of three types: those that favor the hip, those that favor the knee, and those that challenge the tendons. As with any type of strength training, we just need to ensure that everything is done on the appropriate day of the training week. So, we don’t do strength sessions on the day of soccer conditioning or the day after conditioning.

Freelap USA: The day after games tends to range from a day off to some lifting of weights. What do you do after games and does this change much if you are on the road?

Dr. Saenz: In soccer, it would be unusual to see teams lifting the day after a match. There’s so much tissue breakdown during a soccer match that match day +1 is all about recovery. It should be an active recovery day, not a true rest day. For that reason, our players have an “active recovery menu” from which to choose activities. These include pool exercises, light jog or bike, NormaTec recovery session, etc.

Match day +2 is almost always a rest day. In last Saturday’s match, I had players covering 12km total distance and sprinting 1500-1600m. It takes the average player 48-72 hours to fully recover from that load. So, we wouldn’t typically train or lift until the Tuesday after a Saturday match.

Travel in the U.S. is much different than in Europe. Last season, we played away in St. Louis, which is further than going from London to Moscow. We have long flights and hours of travel, so we make sure to do some light exercise and hip mobility workouts upon arrival. On the road, we’ll take advantage of the hotel pool to get a jump start on our recovery. It’s often straight into the pool for a recovery session after the match. At home, the routine is simpler.

Freelap USA: What are emerging problems that you are seeing now more than you did years ago? Are athletes more durable or less durable now than the past? Are the injuries just different or are they basically the same?

Dr. Saenz: Longitudinal studies show injury rates in elite soccer are fairly stable, but the physical performance data has been increasing over time. The game is quicker now than ever before. Players are running faster and running more. So, I have to think players are becoming more durable.

However, we are seeing increasing rates of hamstring injuries in training. We need to look carefully into training loads, but there isn’t much transparency in professional soccer training, so it’s up to the individual clubs to manage those loads. The most common injuries are still strains to the hamstring, followed by adductor, and then ankle sprain. Ankle sprains seem to have decreased over the last few decades, slightly. There is a belief this is due to referees protecting players better in recent years, but that’s up for debate.

Raising the Bar in the Iron Game With William Wayland

Freelap Friday Five| ByWilliam Wayland

William Wayland is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) through the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). He works in Essex, U.K., where he is responsible for the preparation of UFC fighters, professional boxers, world champion grappling athletes, and professional golfers.

Freelap USA: Your videos show a lot of focus on squatting. Can you get into how general strength training is harder to advocate now, as so many sports are seeking out special exercises or quick fixes?

William Wayland: Simply put, it is intense and systemic exercise versus exercises aimed at short-term peaking in specific movement applications. Most strength coaches know the former and amplify the latter; however, special exercises and quick fixes are attention grabbers, and that counts as currency in today’s social-media-oriented climate. I don’t understand why so many are keen to create a dichotomy when we know they are synergistic. You don’t see the time put in on the big movements and get a distorted view of the training environment.

Most of the combat athletes I work with need the robustness and raw qualities that regular squatting brings. I came full circle on the issue, investing more time in unilateral and special exercises for a while, but I later realized the intensity and velocity that squatting in all forms brought was superior to what we could achieve otherwise, especially with limited training contact time. Obviously, athletes with greater training ages and a broad foundation need less systemic qualities, especially when peaking for specific expressions of movement. However, the fire of strength still needs regular stoking and this where a solid squat routine will pay dividends.

Freelap USA: Motor sports deliver unique demands on the body and many of the experts here talk about sustained fitness as a possible way to combat mental error. Can you briefly explain what your program covers and what you just may leave to the track?

William Wayland: Motorsport training convention is built largely around the keystone of cardiovascular fitness as a catch-all quality, mental error included. For many, this is received wisdom, with many riders choosing to ignore those with no skin in the game. Simply trying to change the culture and thinking about their approach to strength and conditioning is, and will be, a huge effort in itself. In a sport where every metric, movement, gear change, and acceleration is data-logged, we know plenty about the bike but very little about the rider.

A 160kg superbike does not maneuver itself around a track. Most riders start out with a chronic lack of general strength that must first be addressed. With motor athletes, two very important areas we focus on are neck and arm strength, and strength endurance. A chronic problem that many riders suffer from is “forearm pump,” numbness and weakness of the hand or arm is not something you want to deal with at 160 mph. The prevalent thinking was that more cardiovascular fitness was the answer, despite many high-profile surgeries to alleviate the issue. Fasciotomy is not something we want for anyone.

Another key area is the idea of robustness; eccentric and isometric strength. Crashes can and will happen. Having the ability to stay tight in the right places and minimize injury is crucial when falling and sliding at high speeds.

Freelap USA: You shared a link to your article on monitoring peak power for a fighter and you saw a rise in power throughout the process. When working with athletes for longer, do you ever see a drop or stagnation? I’m sure length of prep time determines a lot of what you do; especially with higher- and lower-level fighters.

William Wayland: That post was largely illustrative of change over time in readiness using the squat jump. What I’m looking for here is largely suppression of peak power values due to shifts in training load. MMA fighters intensify around eight weeks from competition. Countermovement jump height and squat jump power are correlated to an athlete’s speed (ref).

Borrowing from what I learned from Dr. Dan Baker, if the mean/average velocity is down on most reps by greater than 5-8%, we need to check peak velocities. Paraphrasing Dan, “if the peak velocities are down by greater than 10-15%, it suggests the SSC is fatigued and the athlete is overreached or under-recovered. This may be OK in a hard, training phase, but not in a peaking phase.” I communicate this back to their boxing, MMA and jujitsu coaches, who can then adjust training accordingly. They often corroborate what they see as the subjective change in the athlete’s training quality and movement. Meaning, we can reconcile objective and subjective measures.

Freelap USA: Aerobic fitness for fighting ranges from street jogging or silly circuits with light weights, to intervals and just sparring. Could you share how you prepare the fitness of fighters?

William Wayland: This is another scenario where I came full circle, I saw the over-use of long duration of steady state cardio and bought into the HIIT trend that was pervasive about a decade ago. I finally realized that we were largely dishing up more of the same energy systems training they get from regular sparring sitting in and around lactate threshold. The proverb, “if you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you have always got,” holds true here. MMA coaches and complicit S&C coaches were joining in on collective wheel spinning and then wondering why athletes training “hard” were gassing out.

Training zeitgeists can be problematic when they embed themselves into the culture. Now I encourage a Hi/Lo approach, working both ends of the conditioning spectrum, with a focus on quality sprint work and tempo/VO2 max training throughout the training week. This is tailored to match where the athlete’s strengths sit, which then dovetails into anaerobic conditioning in the remaining few weeks of camp.

Training zeitgeists can be problematic when they embed themselves into the culture. Share on X

Freelap USA: Injuries happen in many ways with combat sports, but could you give the readers how you work around problems from the mental side. A wounded athlete also needs a mental boost when they know training is compromised. Any ideas on the psychological side of things?

William Wayland: Combat athletes thrive on a volume of training not matched by many other sports—missing a single session is considered sacrosanct. MMA fighters have the luxury of focusing on a discipline maybe not affected by injury; single sport stylists do not get that luxury. The beauty of strength and conditioning is that we can coordinate with the athlete to agree on some prescribed and self-prescribed work of some sort.

To athletes that can’t train their discipline, this is never busy work but should allow them to keep a handle on certain base qualities so that, as regular training is reintroduced, the transition isn’t too harsh. I have seen too many athletes take time off completely, often to wallow in self-pity, and return to training with no lead-in period and reinjure themselves. I’m very keen on an athlete-based approach, as increased autonomy and control over the situation generally leads to greater confidence.

An Interview with Coaching Legend, Bob Alejo

Freelap Friday Five| ByBob Alejo

As NC State’s Assistant AD/Director of Strength and Conditioning, Bob Alejo oversees all of the strength and conditioning efforts of the department, and coordinates the day-to-day efforts of the men’s basketball team.

Prior to joining the Wolfpack staff, Alejo served as the Director of Strength and Conditioning for the Oakland A’s, a position he also held from 1993-2001. In that role, he was responsible for all aspects of the organization’s year-round physical preparation at both the major league and minor league levels.

Before rejoining the A’s, Alejo was the Director of Strength and Conditioning at UC Santa Barbara from 2005-2008. During that time, he was also a member of the 2008 U.S. Olympic team as strength and conditioning coach for the gold medal-winning men’s beach volleyball team of Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser.

From 1984-1993, Alejo served as strength and conditioning coach at UCLA, where he worked with 23 men’s and women’s teams, including the men’s basketball team while current Wolfpack head coach, Mark Gottfried, was an assistant coach. During Alejo’s tenure in Westwood, the Bruins racked up 25 national championships and produced more than 100 All-Americans.

Prior to joining the Bruins’ staff, Alejo served as strength and conditioning coach for football at his alma mater, Chico State. He earned his B.A. in physical education from Chico State in 1982 and is a member of the Wildcats’ Athletic Hall of Fame after a successful baseball career.

An accomplished lecturer and author, Alejo is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (through the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s Certification Commission) and holds the advanced NSCA Registered Strength and Conditioning Coach distinction. He has also been elected to three halls of fame: Chico State Athletics, Chico State Baseball (inaugural inductee) and the Chico Professional Baseball “Legends of the Diamond.”

Freelap USA: You drew a line in the sand with making sure coaches knew the difference between a sport scientist and a coach who knows sport science. Could you share how coaches can ensure they are up-to-date on the latest research while not missing their coaching duties?

Bob Alejo: This is a piece I posted on Facebook about sports science: “If you record and analyze athlete tracking data (GPS, player load, etc.), body weight and body composition, training heart rates, RPE’s, averages and standard deviations of physical testing scores, and write and implement training programs while coaching… BUT don’t take muscle biopsies, etc… Then you’re a strength and condition professional! It’s not complicated. Don’t make it. I don’t do scientific research or solve scientific problems… I study the science. What I do is not science, but science-based. There’s a difference!”

The passion drives the thirst for knowledge. Reading the literature and coaching are not separate duties—know the science and be a better coach. It’s a responsibility we have to ourselves and, more importantly, to those we train.

Passion drives the thirst for knowledge. Know the science and be a better coach. Share on X

Freelap USA: Hamstrings are always a big topic, but so are groin injuries now. Could you share why some techniques in the past are now more relevant than ever? It seems that coaches are reinventing the wheel, just with shinier hubcaps.

Bob Alejo: Solid techniques with true positive results are here to stay, because the basics have always worked and will work forever. That’s not to say evolution does not occur, but how different do the bench press and squat look from 50 years ago?! It’s not like the difference between the era of no cell phones and cell phones!! It’s not the movement, but the science behind the programming of the movement.

I’ve coined the phrase, “Tell me what it is and I’ll tell you what we used to call it.” There is more programming made out of the fear of it not being new or different than the fear of it not being good! And, by the way, if you’re using the term “cutting edge,” I think you’re trying to tell me how good you are with an adjective instead of results. Shameful.

Freelap USA: You worked with some of the best pitchers in the MLB when you were with Oakland, and they followed perhaps the most pragmatic strength plan with intensity and volume over a long season. Can you get into why periodization needs to open its door a little to reality instead of only thinking Eastern Bloc countries?

Bob Alejo: The thing I am most proud of is that our pitchers lifted heavy weights, used low volume, and squatted heavy. The squat—front or back—is the most underrated core exercise of all time. We had no oblique injuries, they all threw over 90 mph, and we didn’t do one core exercise or medicine ball twists.

Every coach periodizes, including those who say they don’t. If you train for a given period of time and expect a certain result, then you periodize! Remember Mike Stone et al’s paper was “A hypothetical model….” It was a model but not stone tablets. You don’t always have a hypertrophy phase, it’s not always high reps in the beginning, and the strength phase might last an entire year. I still remain convinced that you need to block off specific periods of time to emphasize specific qualities and, at the end of the cycle, year, or whenever you need to be peaked, tie them all together for the best performances.

Freelap USA: We find it interesting that oblique injuries are a problem in baseball and you found success not doing any specific rotation exercises in-season with some of your players. What are your thoughts on medicine ball rotations in the off-season or as a way to condition athletes in general?

Bob Alejo: General maybe, and not for long. It’s like the goblet squat—that’s not a year-round strength exercise! Know the science. Med ball slams have some of the most oblique activation of several exercises; not twisting. And, unless you use a diagonal pattern, you won’t even be close. If anything, anti-rotation exercises are the key.

In my opinion, obliques are injured not by lack of strength or fitness, but by repetition. So why would you want to do more twisting if that’s the mechanism of injury?! We don’t prescribe more jumping for jumper’s knee. How about lifting weights? Question: How many oblique injuries do you hear from javelin throwers, shot putters or discus throwers? How about almost none, comparatively. They throw heavy implements a lot, but they are pretty strong. Figure it out.

Freelap USA: When you were in UCLA, you did a lot of training that still is part of your program now. Could you explain what changes you have made over 30 years and how you keep the staples in your program? With all of the additions to staff on pro teams and colleges, is a lot of expansion of HR just masking the poor utilization of a strength coach?

Bob Alejo: For sure, I think our contribution is at times minimized and underutilized. I remember, while in MLB, hearing of a team’s strategy to hire more ATCs because of the number of injuries. How about hiring more and better S&C personnel to reduce the incidence, severity, and risk of injury?!

My changes:

Squatting once per week, one leg exercise the other day;
Discontinuing the squat in-season, substituting heavy one leg activity (1-3 reps) and higher intensity pulls from the ground;
Almost entirely deleting the power clean from the floor from the program and substituting high pulls (higher power outputs with heavier loads—see Tim Suchomel or Paul Comfort’s research);
Staples stay because they work;
A more-intense occupation with technical failure in testing;
Research level testing for all sports.

Coaching Hurdle Technique

Blog| ByDominique Stasulli

Teaching proper hurdling technique to a novice track-and-field athlete can seem like a daunting task. It’s not as simple as “step-step-step-clear,” or treating it like a free-for-all obstacle race. Proper form is essential for both the safety and efficiency of the athlete. The instruction of this complex motor skill must be done in a step-wise, simplistic fashion, where each component phase is broken down and trained separately. Difficulties in learning this complex motor skill can arise in a number of ways.

Don’t Overwhelm the Athlete

Over-coaching with too many verbal cues can have a negative effect on the learning process, hindering motor development and reinforcement. If you give too much information to the athlete at one time, it could cause a stimulus overload. If the athlete receives too many cues, then the focus gets spread too thin and becomes lost. Therefore, give one cue at a time between repetitions so the athlete doesn’t become overwhelmed.

Too much feedback between trials has the same effect as an overabundance of pre-cueing. More than anything, a coach’s job is to focus on the intrinsic feedback that the athlete feels: This teaches autonomy and control over his or her own body. One concise statement of constructive criticism every few trials is the best way to ensure the athlete focuses on the task at hand and then listens for when the words do come. If feedback is too wordy or given for every trial, it will lose its effect.

More than anything, a coach’s job is to focus on the intrinsic feedback that the athlete feels. Share on X

Go Back to the Basics

Issues such as weak leg power, hip flexor weakness, ankle instability, and lack of upper body control all affect the underlying biomechanics of the hurdle form. If an athlete is struggling to complete the moves or achieve full range of motion, the coach must go back to the basics of strength development. This will ensure the athlete has the fundamental muscle and tendon power to carry out the technique.

In other words, elastic capability must come first: hurdlers are sprinters first (Rogers, 2015). Deep hip flexor muscles such as the iliacus are responsible for keeping the lead leg in line and tightly adducted (McKinnon & Comerford, 2013). A lack of necessary strength when trying to perform a certain move can quickly lead to frustration and drained confidence in an athlete, especially if not recognized by the coach, or mislabeled as defiance or a lack of concentration.

Difficulty in getting three steps between each of the hurdles can be a function of poor ground reactive force, sprint mechanics, stride power, or rhythm. Rhythm is imperative for running an efficient hurdle race and preserving running economy. Any deceleration in the three-step rhythm can cause the athlete to come up short on the next hurdle; this usually develops with poor flight or landing mechanics. If the lead leg does not follow a straight path over the hurdle, the center of balance will be off, and the landing unbalanced (Rogers, 2015). It is helpful to have the athlete perform wall drills with the lead leg and work on controlling the upper body to counter the lead leg.

Coaches can cue to lead with a slightly-flexed knee rather than the foot of the lead leg, to avoid a straight-legged “braked” landing (McKinnon & Comerford, 2013). The hurdles can also be moved closer together until the three-step technique is mastered (Rogers, 2015). If the struggle is in reaching the first hurdle, there may be poor acceleration or comfort out of the blocks; the starting legs can be reversed in the blocks to add an extra step for the correction and cue the athlete to aggressively attack the hurdles.

Difficulty staying low to the hurdle is usually a measure of confidence and flexibility. Hamstring flexibility is crucial for full leg extension and hip spread. Core strength over the hurdle is essential to balance the limbs and land with proper center of mass. McKinnon and Comerford state that core strength is about “coordination, alignment, efficiency, and controlling the body’s natural compensations for minor restrictions,” which can compensate for a less-than-perfect takeoff or foot placement if necessary.

Running over lower-height hurdles can be a great confidence builder and help overcome the obstacle fear (Rogers, 2015). Emphasis should be placed on “running” the hurdles, rather than “jumping” the hurdles.

Prioritize the Athlete

As a closing note: The athlete’s well-being should always come first. If too many trials are being practiced in a single session, the neuromuscular system will become overtaxed and burnt out. Small gains in training and milestones in skill mastery should be noted and praised in the athlete. As coaches, our first priority is always keeping our athletes healthy and safe.

Consider the other stressors in the athlete’s everyday life that may be affecting his or her training life. When an athlete feels balanced and well-rounded, the focus and motivation on skill development is less likely to waiver.

References

McKinnon, G. & Comerford, M. (2013). “Hip control issues for clearing the hurdle and reducing flight time.” Modern Athlete and Coach, 51(2): 31-34.
Rogers, J. (2015). Track and field coaching essentials: USA track & field level 1 coach education manual. W. Freeman (Ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Making a Difference in Athletic Performance

Building a High School Strength Program With John Garrish

The Best Ways to Get Buy-In

The Effect of Monitoring on the Training Process

The Relevance of Periodization

The Challenges of the Work Environment for Coaches and Trainers

How Coaches and Trainers Define Success

Voice from the Void: The Disappearing Middle Ground of Coaching

Background: Does ‘Any Publicity Is Good Publicity’ Still Hold True?

Coaching: The Ever-Shrinking Middle Ground of Thought and Practice

Polarization: Be Wary of Extremes

A Breed Apart

The Middle Ground

Principles for Staying in the Middle

Simple Is Complex Enough

‘Buy-In’ Is Crucial

Freedom From Rigidity

Seek and Give Support

Off the Soccer Field With Dr. Jesse Saenz

Raising the Bar in the Iron Game With William Wayland

Suggested Reading

An Interview with Coaching Legend, Bob Alejo

Coaching Hurdle Technique

Don’t Overwhelm the Athlete

Go Back to the Basics

Prioritize the Athlete

References

COMPANY

Coaches Resources

CONTACT INFORMATION

SIGNUP FOR NEWSLETTER