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Ken Vick: Training Frameworks & Proactive Approaches
543 Plays25 days ago
In this episode, Les and Danny are joined by Ken Vick, owner of Velocity Sports Performance, to break down the balance between precision and health in athlete development. They explore how overload, youth specialization, and modern training models impact injury trends across sports. From youth stress fractures to the NBA’s rising injury rates, they dive into how coaches can build capacity without breaking athletes down.
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Episode Timestamps
- 00:00–02:00 – Intro and overview
- 09:00 – Balance vs. Precision in performance and health
- 14:00 – Chronic injuries in youth athletes
- 18:00 – Can we “out-train” bad workload strategies?
- 20:00 – Injury spikes in NBA, MLB, and youth sports
- 22:00 – Early specialization and long-term effects
- 26:00 – Training frameworks and proactive approaches
- 56:00 – Data-driven decision making for coaches
- 1:11:30 – Correcting the NBA injury stat & closing thoughts
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Transcript
Ken's Influence and Early Career
00:00:05
Speaker
So Ken, you're the president of Velocity Sports Performance, one of the most influential systems in athlete development. And interestingly, my first job was Velocity Sports Performance. I don't know if you knew that, in 2013.
00:00:17
Speaker
um You've shaped a lot of what coaches are doing now and what the industry looks like now. And um probably one of the more influential people that ah some people haven't even heard of or met yet.
00:00:30
Speaker
which is Which is crazy to me. like I was telling ah ah few people that i'm I'm speaking to you and I was super hyped. Younger guys. And they're like, who's Ken? And I'm like, dude, you got to do your research because most of what you're doing came from Ken.
00:00:44
Speaker
yeah But can you you just give us like a little bit of the brief five-minute history of what you've what you've grown with ah Velocity Sports Performance and and what you're doing now?
Transition to Track Coaching
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah. um So my background started as a weightlifting coach. ah That's really where I was. I was coaching Olympic weightlifters. I was doing that, working with some other athletes.
00:01:09
Speaker
And something we were talking about earlier is that led me into an environment that had a lot of different practitioners. Um, athletic trainers, physical therapists, chiros, the orthos were upstairs.
00:01:21
Speaker
Um, it was really integrated. Uh, so I spent time as an athletic trainer cause athletes got hurt. So I was like, okay, crap, what am I going to do? I got to learn. So I was a student athletic trainer, did the classes. I did not get certified a mistake, by the way, should have done it, but I didn't really care. I just wanted to have the skills and knowledge.
00:01:41
Speaker
um So great working with athletes. Well, guess what? Athletes need to go faster. So for a while, my hammer, right? When all I have is a tool, that hammer, everything's a nail. It was more power, make them stronger, more power, lift more clean. Great.
00:01:57
Speaker
Good stuff until it doesn't work. And so then I went to become a track coach because I had to figure out how to help these athletes get faster. Right. ah Got to work with a good friend of mine who had trained under Vernon and Betta.
00:02:11
Speaker
ah Scott had been a decathlete and a football player, good athlete, Olympic trials decathlete. ah So I got to work with him in track. um That was a great experience. Worked in a high school setting as well as an athletic trainer. Great experience.
Velocity Sports Performance Growth
00:02:25
Speaker
And these came together over the years that eventually I ended up ah partnering and opening a Velocity Sports Performance back in early two thousand s At that time, I had already been working with pro athletes in some different sports. I had done work with l LA Kings. I had done arena football and minor league hockey.
00:02:43
Speaker
ah So I had that side of it. That much of the youth side was new. And that really gave me like this whole bunch of new experiences working with developing athletes.
00:02:54
Speaker
And we grew over the years. We opened a bunch of places. Most of them made money. ah We had one that wasn't good. And we opened one place, ah biggest one we ever opened. It was like 27,000 square feet. It was the fall of 2008. So not exactly great timing.
00:03:13
Speaker
ah We dumped that after about a year and a half or so and knew it wasn't going to go. As we went through Velocity, you know, from the early 2000s, got a chance to learn systems because now we're running multiple
Shifts in Business Focus and Challenges
00:03:28
Speaker
centers. I have people at a distance. We have place in Utah.
00:03:31
Speaker
And that was a really unique experience. Changing my mindset from the systems of just training athletes to systems of managing an integrated staff. ah Really, that was pretty cool.
00:03:43
Speaker
that That took things in a new direction. And over the years, we grew in velocity. We kept training elite athletes, ah athletes in a lot of Olympic sports. Myself personally, 11 Olympic Games.
00:03:56
Speaker
Velocity has had a lot more. ah Training a lot of coaches, right? As you're talking about systems in multiple locations, you have to be good at coach education. And so that really drove a lot of the things to help simplify and make them clear and have better frameworks.
00:04:14
Speaker
And over the years, we kept growing and doing that. And so Velocity asked us more and more to help until one day we ended up buying the company, tried to take that in a whole new direction.
Educational Focus and Social Media Impact
00:04:24
Speaker
we were shutting down the franchise side.
00:04:27
Speaker
We were a crappy franchise, did a lot of things well, but it wasn't a good franchise, ah much better at our education and some of the pieces we had inside. And then that kind of took a little turn with a pandemic and some overseas things. And so today,
00:04:42
Speaker
a little more focused on education. So where we're going, we still have some locations across the country, ah but where we're focused is on educating coaches. So that's kind of where I've decided I need to get out and present this stuff more, speak more.
00:04:58
Speaker
Like you said, I've been pretty hidden. I think I have good relationships throughout the industries, ah but yeah, haven't been really good at marketing. So starting to talk a little bit more.
00:05:09
Speaker
No, your your Twitter's incredible. I've been, I probably retweet everything that you put up and just- Be careful. Yeah, the the graphics are good. the The way you explain things, you could tell that from an education standpoint, like you put a lot of thought into what you put out and and it's helpful.
00:05:29
Speaker
I mean, for guys like me that are ingesting information fast and then going to use it that same day, like it's, that's where it's incredibly valuable. Nice. Yeah.
Eccentric Actions in Sports
00:05:39
Speaker
Like that. um One of the things that really stuck out to me was your recent like post about shocks versus springs and, and all of that. Could you dive in a little deeper on that? And then maybe how do you profile an athlete with with shocks and springs?
00:05:53
Speaker
I know I probably hate that one. No, no, no, no. It's good. I mean, there, there's a lot there to unpack is what I'm thinking about when you say that, look, here, here's here's the the top line. um yeah This comes from an eccentric lens.
00:06:06
Speaker
right? Most of the things happen in sports, the eccentric action comes first and it has a huge impact. And eccentric actions can give you a great advantage, right? It's how you make a faster cut.
00:06:18
Speaker
It's how you reuse energy hitting the ground. So big advantage, but eccentrics can also damage. And a lot of this goes back to my sports med days, like I said, early in my career, where I saw that dichotomy, right? On the one hand, this thing's going to give you an advantage. You're going to be better.
00:06:35
Speaker
You're going to win, get more space on the field. But on the other hand, this is where everybody gets hurt. Eccentrics are where you get non-contact injuries. They're on a D cell, a landing, a cut.
00:06:47
Speaker
Right. So those are pretty serious. ah They happen where sprinting and the hams. Eccentric actions are where stuff gets hurt. They're also where stuff gets hurt over time.
00:06:58
Speaker
It's the repetitive microtrauma, overuse injuries. The damage part is inflicted during that eccentric action. So that was just like kind of obvious ground into me. I saw these rehabbing athletes that eccentric man, we better be ready for that.
00:07:17
Speaker
And on the flip side, then it makes you better. And that was actually kind of where I came from. I started focusing on the eccentric more with rehab athletes when I was seeing problems.
Balancing Health and Performance
00:07:30
Speaker
And that led me to then go, oh, this is great. It's working. But then I started seeing better outputs. Right. So, OK, we're going to take care of this eccentric stuff. We're going to work on these qualities. We're going to get that better.
00:07:42
Speaker
And then as we're rehabbing, you're coming back going, oh, crap, this guy's making this cuts better. He's telling me he feels better in this stuff. So it's like so a huge lens for me. Right. I look at things um through that lens.
00:07:57
Speaker
I believe in movement first. When I'm talking about sports, ah we have the its rule we had to come up with years ago. Everybody's heard of the KISS rule, right? Keep it simple, stupid. yeah Well, the ITS rule was because we had coaches and practitioners arguing over stuff.
00:08:13
Speaker
It's the sport, stupid. Like sometimes we just had to sit back and go, okay, we talked about all this great stuff. What are we here for? What's the purpose? What does this athlete need for their sport, their performance, their style of play?
00:08:28
Speaker
It's about the sport and it's kind of obvious, all right? We all kind of shake our head and go, yeah, but... Most of us at some point ah need that reminder. i know i have many a time.
00:08:39
Speaker
um We got to remember it's the sport, not the part we're doing. And so when I look at that, I see the sport. That means we look at movement. And if we're looking at movement,
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, you're going to see a whole lot of eccentric actions that make all the difference. um So there's a little piece. um where Where do you want me to unpack that? And, you know, how you guys.
00:09:02
Speaker
Yeah, can I got I got a couple of points of feedback on that, man. The the central heuristic that I've really been leaning into, particularly this past year, has been this dichotomy of of balance and precision.
00:09:18
Speaker
and And balance and precision correlate to the health and performance aspects of what we do. and And we all you know kind of have this same charge now of being able to accommodate for both ends.
00:09:30
Speaker
One of the things that Les and I talk about frequently in regards to programming or otherwise is when we need to drive the health status or improve the health status of the athlete,
00:09:43
Speaker
we look towards that balance column. Whereas we know as you were just finishing with there a second ago, Sport is is extremely precise. and And especially with today's world and model of how this is done, it is a just ridiculous amount of precise inputs with tremendous volumes and repetition and overload.
00:10:04
Speaker
And we can take this from the lens of fasciitis and tendonitis and you know common muscle strains. When we see those tendons or those tissues break down, the the resultant priority from my lens is, okay, well, we need to complement that with things that it is not getting and redistribute this, you know, tension compression balance across these tissues.
00:10:29
Speaker
That kind of speaks to what you were getting at there a second ago, I believe, um, But really, that's kind of the the the framework that we're trying to look at is like we can be precise and we have to be precise when we need to be.
00:10:43
Speaker
But we also have to understand that there's a corresponding consequence to that. And if we don't balance these tissues, then we're going to drive problems. it's ah it's yeah As you're saying that, Danny, it's going through my head. A couple of those things like really resonated.
00:10:58
Speaker
um It's a constant. If you look, if you don't see that, you haven't got to that point yet in your vision, your career, whatever. If you think this is only about building bigger outputs for our athletes, that's great. And it'll get you somewhere, and but it doesn't sustain anything.
00:11:18
Speaker
and it And it won't even get you all the way there in some of the cases. Right. So ah eventually, if you keep doing this, hopefully you get that lens and you see that. um I think I was just talking, I talked ah with some of our interns about this just a week ago or so, and then I think I posted something on it. But for me, this in part became a concept of maximal tolerable imbalance.
00:11:42
Speaker
Look, elite athletes, right? We got Olympic athletes. We got world champions in sports. They're way out of balance, like you're talking about, to be what they are. By definition, they're unique.
00:11:53
Speaker
They're at way off a couple standard deviations. Yeah. But to stay there, to keep doing that, how much imbalance in that way can you sustain?
00:12:04
Speaker
Can you tolerate before it breaks you down or it just limits your sport practice, training time, training energy? So when I was talking the interns, I was talking about how very often I would tell them, as you get somebody who's reaching their potential,
00:12:22
Speaker
and That could be in high school, college, pro, whatever. But as they're nearing the window of their potential, it's going to shift. And so we see this in a lot of elite athletes that have already had success. They've already made it.
00:12:35
Speaker
They got the contract. They've won. They're qualified for like whatever that level is, right? So now that they're there performance wise, they have to keep playing their sport.
00:12:46
Speaker
They need to show up every day at practice ready to go with the energy, the capacity, the durability. So our job sometimes on the performance side is no longer increasing performance outputs.
00:12:59
Speaker
And that's really hard for a lot of practitioners to get head their head around. So instead of increasing outputs, I don't need the guy to squat more. Look, dude, he's already doing five something.
00:13:12
Speaker
It's not impacting his power output. Stop doing that and do things that are going to keep his hips and back healthy. Mm-hmm. and maintain the strength, but you don't have to build it farther. So that's, for me, that's the idea of maximal tolerable imbalance.
00:13:26
Speaker
And if I can raise that ceiling with some training that balances things out or some treatments, or I can lower how close to it we are by taking away some training load, dude, win.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah, i don't I don't like to give him too many direct compliments, especially not in public forums, but that's something as a performance cost coach, Les does extremely well. And and i' really I've learned a ton from him on it, to be honest, but to jump back there for
Youth Athletes and Early Specialization
00:13:51
Speaker
a second. So part of the you know work adjustment coming out here for me was now working with a ton of youth athletes for the real first time in my life, which has been awesome. The the terrible side of this, you know where I'm going with this,
00:14:07
Speaker
has been the rate of chronic-based injuries for kids that are 15, 14, 13 years old. And, you know, we're talking multiple stress fractures, sievers, plantar fasciitis, turf toe, and on and on we go.
00:14:23
Speaker
yeah What do you think it it is? where're Let me let meph phrase it this way. From this combination view of performance and health and the roles that we play, what's the best way that we can intervene on this and and go about this? Because, you know, you you know, you know the drill, man. What's the best thing that we can do on this?
00:14:43
Speaker
um I don't know the best thing. I know what I try to do and what we've tried to do in our locations that deal with this. um I start with everything is that we deal with humans.
00:14:55
Speaker
okay So whether it's the athletes or the parents, and most of them have kids. decent motivations for what they're doing. They just don't always know how to use that motivation. So I say this because over the years, a lot of our staff becomes cynical, um becomes looking at the parents as an enemy, right um or like somebody they're fighting against. and And you got to just step back.
00:15:20
Speaker
Yeah, there's some people that aren't great people, but most of them have good intentions for their kids, for themselves, what they're trying to do. So I start there because in all honesty, the rest gets really frustrating and pretty horrible if you don't remember that.
00:15:35
Speaker
ah After that, then it's a whole bunch of work. um Education, engagement, right? Because you can't guide them to other decisions unless you're engaging them. So you got to figure out how you're doing that.
00:15:45
Speaker
What is it that you are building trust and engaging them? Because then we're trying to guide them. Our coaching is a responsibility. We have a huge opportunity to impact them as people, ah to impact them as athletes, which, you know, for me, ultimately, in purpose, we impact an athlete.
00:16:05
Speaker
that impacts them in the community, our cities, our nation, our world. So I think it's about that impact, right? So if you're doing that, we educate them and guide them.
00:16:16
Speaker
um On a practical sense, ah we try to look at the ways we can build more durability and tolerance in their system. I mean, from a down in the weeds coaching side, yeah, we got to sometimes get less of the performance focus and more of the durability. And oof This could take us down a rabbit hole, Danny.
00:16:36
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know where you want to go with this, Les, because, man, I can start. We can go into the fascia. a Don't say fascia to Danny. I know. this is We've already got a part two for me.
00:16:47
Speaker
Oh, dude, there's a whole bunch you can go there with it. So my world got really messed up. um Been a performance
Workload Management and Recovery
00:16:55
Speaker
director, right? So I've been leading for the last decade plus high performance teams that I have chiros and tissue people and PTs, athletic trainer, strength coaches. So I've seen that for a long time.
00:17:06
Speaker
And a few years ago, so my wife is a tissue therapist. um And so a few years ago, we decided we were going to do what we did with some of our pros in one of our centers. And we had a recovery center with the flow pods and we had a four person cryo chamber, which is awesome.
00:17:22
Speaker
ah We had ah just every bell and whistle and we had tissue work. Well, we opened a place doing that as well a few years ago, a recovery studio. And so now my view of watching tissue work and watching hundreds of hours of it and interacting with that in a different way. Yeah, we could go down some bad rabbit holes are here, boys.
00:17:43
Speaker
Don't worry, man. I'm um'm already going carve out time to make a trip up there here soon. We we got to shake this out a little bit. but I know Les has a couple of questions here, but I'm going to circle back to some of that because I do have a couple of follow-up points on on some of that stuff. but Yeah, go, go Danny. He said fashion.
00:18:03
Speaker
like that tickled That tickled you a little bit. so I had that little thing you sent me last up here. It was that warning, don't say fascia. It's right on my computer. And I just ignored it, dude. Sorry.
00:18:15
Speaker
Quick pause here. ah want to talk about the universal speed rating. So many coaches I meet are just overwhelmed. They're running sessions, programming, dealing with parents, and trying to prove their athletes are actually getting faster.
00:18:27
Speaker
One of the reasons why we built USR was to take some of this stress off the table. One software solution to help coaches test, track, and show improvement without adding hours to your week. If you feel like you're guessing with your speed training or drawing, trying to make sense of your data, hit the link in the description.
00:18:44
Speaker
Schedule a free consult and see how the USR can help. So let me let me double back just a second here. that But hearing you talk through that, it made me think about something where we've we've heard the heuristic over the years, you can't out train a bad diet.
00:18:57
Speaker
So my question here is, especially as we think about this with youth athletes, can you out train or perhaps out treatment poor workload strategies? Is that is that the foundational piece to all of this? And if we don't make moves on that, none of it really matters after.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, to some degree, of course. Look, I mean, your simple place to look at that is baseball. um I think there was another article I saw pop up yesterday from SportsMed Doc on the number of Tommy Johns they're doing on young athletes.
00:19:30
Speaker
Baseball is one of the clear, simple places you can't really argue this. The number of surgeries happening on young pitchers is insane. It keeps going up. It is clearly related to the amount that is happening out there.
00:19:43
Speaker
um And yeah, I don't care what you do. You're not going to prevent that if they're throwing too much. Now, after that, it becomes maybe less in some cases where we can help certain things. ah Maybe I can protect that, you know, ECNL soccer player a little bit by building some durability through her tissues, but it's limited. Like, yeah, it's it's definitely limited. Now, oh, I'll really mess with you and say, i don't know...
00:20:09
Speaker
what exactly our epidemic is. um everybody like we We all like to get excited when we see injuries and say injuries are going up and up and up. And there's some things that clearly are. There's others I don't know if they are or not. um you know We had a bunch of Achilles in the NBA last year. Everybody's, oh my God, Achilles are out of control.
00:20:28
Speaker
Eh, they're not. It was a spike. There's some stuff. I think there's real things. But we also have to like take a breath sometimes. So um and don't know. I try to balance it out. Yeah, well, i've I've done quite a bit of homework on this this year. And and you're right about the the spike with the Achilles. It was a tremendous spike in a short period of time. But um but there is an interesting...
00:20:51
Speaker
data point from the NBA side that caught my attention and it was the overall incidence of injuries. And and I'm going to probably screw up the exact numbers on this off top, but effectively it was, uh, there is, there has been a higher incidence of overall injury in the NBA, um,
00:21:09
Speaker
10 of the last 15 years than they had ever seen prior. So in other words, the 10 of the last 15 years were all total incidence injuries. Those rates were higher than anything we had really seen pre like 2010. So something has been kind of occurring in the in the NBA space. Now we have a lot of extraneous factors with the m NBA, but to your points on baseball, yeah, Tommy John's are are truly off the charts, especially at the youth levels.
00:21:37
Speaker
And I was looking at something yesterday that was saying that there' there's estimated 35 to 38% of active MLB pitchers have now just had a Tommy John's. Now, the other kind of caveat to that is that the return to play rate is much higher and it's not the career killer that it once was. So some of these things are almost like the double edge sort of, you know, we we start facing problems we haven't seen before, but then we figure out solutions behind them and we're able to kind of, you know, meet in the middle on how we're able to accommodate these things.
00:22:07
Speaker
But the other ones that are extremely high right now are the hamstring injuries and in Premier League soccer. And then overall, this one is very, very difficult to quantify and track, but overall, youth athletes tend to be getting injured more so today than they did in 2000 or pre-2000. And a lot of those tend to be, you know, kind of like acute on chronic type situations where we're seeing a lot more muscle strains because of apathies and itises and so on and so forth.
00:22:36
Speaker
Les and I, it's another one we've talked about a ton, man, but you know, you're, you're certainly the right person to ask these questions with, with your background, with the youth athletes, how much of that is kind of predisposing or predetermining some of these injury rates that we're seeing at the higher levels. And do you think that this pressure for early specialization is a factor of that?
00:22:59
Speaker
Ooh, yes, yes, maybe yes.
00:23:02
Speaker
Let me get my checklist out. Hey, look, I don't know the answer, right? for sure Like you said some of it's hard to work through, but there's enough data to say, look, the athletes that are playing sports through the middle school and high school years,
00:23:17
Speaker
And the ones that are playing serious are actually fewer in number, but the concentration of play and practice is higher. Okay. We know there's a lot of injuries. So let's just forget everything else.
00:23:28
Speaker
That's real. We know that. um Is that affecting it later on? Probably. mean, think the early injuries, right? If there are low-level injuries happening already in middle school and grade school, yeah we know the biggest predictor of injury is past injury, even if they didn't sit out much or take my But if we're accumulating a lot of that, that's a problem.
00:23:48
Speaker
yeah ah If we have athletes that have specialized and limit their movement library, yeah, we know there's some effects, right? there's some There are some interesting studies out there that back that up.
00:24:01
Speaker
Anecdotally, most coaches, sport coaches, performance coaches, therapists, they see the effects. So, yeah, I think that's probably have an effect. And look, these things are going to accumulate over time.
00:24:14
Speaker
The lack of stuff and the lack I don't want to tie this into like the shocks and springs part we were talking about earlier directly, but I think that eccentric lens for me is still a big thing because as a, as a profession, well, sports medicine is still an outcome based profession. ah Tissue work. You're looking how they feel at the end. If I'm doing performance, I'm doing speed or strength.
00:24:40
Speaker
We're looking at outcomes and you sports, our sports industry are outcome based. We all are. We've come from that. but we're missing the things we're handling to get to that outcome. we We're not tracking and paying attention to how many hours they trained, how many pitches they threw.
00:24:59
Speaker
We are, but we're we cheat and try to avoid it. um I think this is kind of a bigger issue for me ah that I guess ties back to performance, but we look at the outputs instead of the inputs.
00:25:15
Speaker
yeah So we look at how hard you can throw, how fast you can run, how much you can lift. We are very output focused, but the story started earlier. it's I use the analogy. It's like picking up the book.
00:25:28
Speaker
Jump to the last page. And they lived happily ever after. Okay, cool. That's the output. That's the end of the story. We just skipped over what happened. What was the eccentric action? What was the momentum going into it? What were the constraints for time and vector and what they had to do?
00:25:45
Speaker
There's the story. That's the story of performance, how we're going to train them, how we're going to rehab them, what we got to protect. Yeah. But we keep jumping to the last page and talking about outputs. And that starts really young, right? Everybody's doing training now. Everybody's getting extra skills work. yeah We are focusing on a lot of outputs and we're missing the inputs. And I think for me, that's kind of the summary on a lot of levels right now.
00:26:14
Speaker
yeah That's brilliant. Let's double click on the inputs part for a second. what What are those things? We're clear on the outputs. I think most of the people in our industry validate the work that they're doing through outputs. I made someone faster.
00:26:29
Speaker
and made someone throw harder, um whatever it is. But yeah a lot of coaches, including myself starting out, like I didn't understand the inputs. like what What do I actually do there?
00:26:41
Speaker
Yeah. So change your mindset to momentum. I think that's a really helpful ah model for a lot of people. And momentum is the mass and how fast it's moving.
00:26:55
Speaker
So you got a wrecking ball. If you want to take down that wall, you want a tiny little wrecking ball or you want a big one moving fast. you know We all know which one we're going to pick. So momentum matters.
00:27:07
Speaker
And when you go into an eccentric action, whether that's my load in a counter movement, I have my body mass, and then how fast I go through that load. And we all know, or I think it's pretty ah easy to conceive and people talk about today, we have different jumpers, right? There's the guy that goes deep and slower, and there's the guy that goes short and fast.
00:27:27
Speaker
They're dealing with momentum differently. When my, ah you were talking about this guys um momentum in um breaking when I hit the ground, that sprinter, when he hits the ground, he has momentum. He has his mass and the velocity and the faster they're sprinting.
00:27:44
Speaker
the more momentum they have to deal with every time. ah So all these things, right? And this is counter movements too. These are stretch shortening cycles, right? So that volleyball player going up, how much momentum, how much velocity did those tissues have to deal with? So think a momentum lens really helps because this is also what we all know. If if two guys can go into this move and one can break down in two steps and handle the same momentum,
00:28:13
Speaker
He's going to have an advantage over the guy that can't handle the momentum. So for me, inputs are about momentum. And then when it comes to training, that's what we get to manipulate. We get to manipulate the momentum. We get to add load. We get to jump, run into a cut faster. We get to drop off a higher box. We get to start with a higher weight.
00:28:36
Speaker
We're manipulating momentum and then seeing what we can do. So input momentum constraints. What am I asking them to do? Is it fast? Is it through a limited range of motion?
00:28:46
Speaker
What are the constraints? What's the output they're trying to do? And then the output that's just telling me, did it, were they able to handle it? So input constraints where you're looking at the quality of the motion and then did it work?
00:29:06
Speaker
That's probably the simplest way. now We've had like five or six guests on and kind of talk all talking about the same thing, but I like the way that you put the inputs and the constraints, maybe double click on the constraint part. So range of motion is one speed is one load is one. What what else do we have? Ground contact time. So, um, and that's the reality of sport, right? In most sport, you have to react within a certain amount of time to do something. So,
00:29:33
Speaker
One of the places this came up for me, and I think I've shared this before with some people, um years ago we were testing the Los Angeles Clippers. um Great. We're doing all this testing for him. And we had a bunch of different speed, agility, jump test, strength tests.
00:29:50
Speaker
ah In jumping, I think we had an approach jump, a rebound jump, and a regular counter movement jump. OK, great. We also, along with all these performance tests, asked the coaching staff to rate the players. And we gave them simple things, the words we use in real life.
00:30:08
Speaker
Jumping, speed, ah for the Clippers it was jumping speed, athleticism, strength, and I'm forgetting the fifth one. Anyways, so get there that night. We did the testing. We had force plates, we did all this great stuff. This was in the ninety s Yeah, this was sometime in the late 90s.
00:30:26
Speaker
um Put in the data. Oh, crap. The data didn't line up at all. The coaches ratings of jumping ability had almost no correlation with our jump tests.
00:30:40
Speaker
So I'm scrambling. I'm nervous. We're going back. Did we enter the data wrong? No, there was no really, really weak relationships. So had to face it, going to give the feedback reports.
00:30:53
Speaker
And somewhere in there, as I'm doing that, I'm like, oh, fuck. OK, I got to excuse me. I got figure out what's happening here. Right. So I ask him, I'm like, hey guys, so when you're rating players on jump, what are you looking at?
00:31:05
Speaker
And as I hear the coach's answer, I'm like hit over the head with the obvious. Look, it's the NBA. They can all jump. They're tall and they can jump. Jumping ability in a height sense.
00:31:17
Speaker
ah Easy pickings. That was part of the cover charge to get in the door. What they're looking at is who can jump while they're being leaned on, who can take that second jump to go back up for the rebound, who can take the off balance jump, all those other constraints.
00:31:32
Speaker
That's what coaches, the sport coaches knew was the ability part. It wasn't the output of height. It was what constraints they could deal with. So that was the...
00:31:44
Speaker
The, you know, where it all coalesced for me, I'd seen this in lots of pieces and kind of got it, but that one was one of the ones that just made me go, yeah, okay. It also speaks to the danger of using words that we use regularly as professionals, power, strength, speed, quickness.
00:32:01
Speaker
dude when you have those conversations, you might be in a room and five people are talking about five different things and they think they're all talking about the same. Big part of making your teams work together, having a common language for those words.
00:32:13
Speaker
But anyways, last, so constraints, huge. um But that's where we get to have fun. Like, trying to okay, simple example. We are doing a depth jump or a drop jump.
00:32:26
Speaker
Okay, that's what we're doing. and those are different places for me in shocks and springs. ah Again, words to be clear, depth jump, I am jumping for a height. I am coming, I'm going through a bigger range of motion, full range of motion. I'm looking for an output of height.
00:32:40
Speaker
Drop jump, I'm hitting the ground. I am looking for reactive strength, a minimal contact time. So I have a higher ah RSI. So in my language, depth jumps and drop jumps, two different things.
00:32:52
Speaker
um That's a constraint i can use to program. So I got the chance to do a little coaching this summer and I was working with our NHL, our college and some of our junior hockey players.
00:33:05
Speaker
Well, the guys that were profiled in group to need more of that side, this speed and elastic side of the equation versus the guys that needed the ah contractile side. So the guys on the Contractile side, if they needed that, um they were doing depth jumps and they had some constraints. So we had them go up and buy. We had a set box height.
00:33:30
Speaker
They would counter movement jump on the day. What's your height today? Now we're going to add weight until we cut this by 50%. yeah That was during like a really heavy loading phase. And then maybe it later it 30, 15, whatever.
00:33:43
Speaker
um But we're overloading that eccentric job of the shocks. um And I guess I didn't say shocks and springs. For me, eccentrically, shocks are eccentric actions that attenuate and manage forces.
00:33:58
Speaker
That's the function. The main goal is to attenuate and manage force. That's shocks. right Like in your car, shocks absorb. I know the dangerous word of absorb. We get all crazy about in the space, but code athletes understand it. We attenuate the force um and that protects the frame of your car.
00:34:18
Speaker
Springs, on the other hand, help you with handling and keeping that traction. Well, springs in the eccentric model potentiate and reuse energy. So shocks attenuate and manage, springs potentiate and reuse so I have a bigger output.
00:34:33
Speaker
um Sorry, digress. So that was one group, right? They're overloading that, but they have some constraints. um In this place, that's probably not the best example. That's more of an output constraint. um The other group.
00:34:46
Speaker
These guys have a constraint of how much time they can jump. So they're doing a drop jump off a box, hit the ground ah to keep some output minimal. They have a hurdle they have to go over, but they're getting feedback on ground contact time or at some point in the summer on ah RSI, but still with a ground contact time threshold. So we are going up in box.
00:35:07
Speaker
as long as they can handle that constraint. And depending on where we're in the training, that was either under 280, then we were under 220, then for some guys, we were doing some stuff under 180 milliseconds.
00:35:23
Speaker
um And we have some really good, some of these kids were really good. We had some kids that could have gone up more. Like this is also coaching wisdom. Don't do it. Even though it says on the plan, this is okay.
00:35:36
Speaker
Don't do it. Cause we had a couple of young guys who were like, they've been training at the facility that I was at for like seven, eight years since they were young kids. They're in juniors now. They'll go to college next year. They're like 19.
00:35:48
Speaker
um Two of them in particular, They were dropping off 30 inches, which is 70-some centimeter, 80 centimeters, whatever that is.
00:35:59
Speaker
um And they were getting off the ground under 220 over a 12-inch hurdle. Easy. Like nothing. Like... And that was where one of the young guys was like, can we take them up?
00:36:12
Speaker
No, we we don't need to go any farther. They're getting more than enough stimulus. As a matter of fact, we're going to do less of this. ah But anyways, so that's constraints, right? Like you're putting a constraint on a drill.
00:36:24
Speaker
um lot of lot of tools, a lot of things you can do when you start doing that as a coach. You can have a lot of fun that way. I love it. I want to back into how you profile those athletes with the shocks and springs. And also just like how you, I know you've talked a little bit about like looking at the breaking RFD versus impulse and and maybe using that as one way, but yeah, I want to see like, how do you objectively go in that group and decide what people need?
00:36:55
Speaker
i know this is hard. No, it's a great, no, but it's a great question because I think, I just posted something this. Profiling is very trendy in our industry. Yeah. um And in part for good reason. Having a framework, having a heuristic that you can make decisions on is real life.
00:37:12
Speaker
Right. That's what we all have to do. And it lets us do our job a little better and a little faster. So frameworks and profiling are good. ah With that said, ah look, we have a lot of these like two by two matrices. So we have a quadrant and which quadrant are they in?
00:37:28
Speaker
I love it. I've done a ton of it. I use it to this day to a degree. But those quadrants aren't real.
00:37:37
Speaker
They're not four distinct things. It's a continuum in all those directions. None of these things are shocks and springs aren't a discrete place. It changes from one to the other. It's all a continuum. And that's most of our profiling. So profiling is great.
00:37:52
Speaker
as long as you recognize underneath that it's not distinct this versus that, right? The guy that went from quadrant one to quadrant two, what about the two guys that are right on that border between the two quadrants that are only off by whatever test you're doing by small percentages? Are they really that different versus the guys that are like way on the extremes of that quadrant? So,
00:38:16
Speaker
Love profiling. Love it. Just come at it knowing it's a continuum. So you have to use your art. And that's why I share this. Great. I did the profile. They fit in this profile. Don't stop watching.
00:38:29
Speaker
Don't stop listening to your athlete going, on hey, coach, I think I really need some of that stuff something. you know, my, my, my first profiling of an athlete is when you sit down and talk with them.
00:38:39
Speaker
Yeah. yeah That's where profiling is. You sit down and you talk with them and you're going to learn a whole lot about who they are as people, what they need from coaching. And they've probably figured out some things about what they need from training. The guy that comes in and hates squatting,
00:38:54
Speaker
Well, if you start listening and really ah explore, you might find he'd made some good choices. The guy that loves squatting and knows he needs to do a crap ton of it, he maybe be figured out he needs that. So profiling start there. But to the weeds, Les, I want to look at a couple of things.
00:39:14
Speaker
um Are they strong enough? okay So start at basics. Are they strong enough? And how do you know if they're strong enough? Well, there's a couple different ways to go. You can take some body weight things. Great. um You could use DSI. Great.
00:39:27
Speaker
But you better have some way of thinking about strong enough. um And I hate lift tests because to me, ah and and I was a weightlifting coach. I've done a lot of those. I like it.
00:39:41
Speaker
um Using a lift as a test of force is the wrong answer. A lift is an expression of the strength you have. It's not a measure of strength because that back squat has technique.
00:39:56
Speaker
So let's start there. And and I mean, i know it sounds kind of obvious, but I think we forget this. We had... So jumping in my head, we had an athlete couple years ago I had just started working with.
00:40:08
Speaker
So she's out here for a short time, couple of weeks. um She was a track cyclist, ah pretty good Olympic gold medalist. The one you just posted on there? Yeah. Yeah. She's not a normal human.
00:40:21
Speaker
yeah Very unique. um I mean, Kelsey was able to go from not being in the sport of cycling to three years winning a gold medal. Wow. She is going right now from not having done the sport of bobsled to a couple months ago, she did a push camp and now she's on their World Cup team with a shot at the Olympics in a couple months.
00:40:43
Speaker
Wow. These are not normal things. Yeah. Anyways. So she's a good example because she had a friend who's there as well, who was a professional hockey player, female playing in Sweden, um who could lift the house and she's there lifting, doing great. And Kelsey's going, I'm not that strong.
00:41:01
Speaker
Well, when we broke out mid thigh pole and we tested both of them, Kelsey came out stronger, but she was a bad squatter and she felt like she wasn't strong, especially compared to Erica, who was this hockey player and really strong and yeah know good athlete, good person.
00:41:19
Speaker
um But it was a great example. Like here's somebody going, oh, I'm not strong. And if a coach had used a squat as the test would say, you're not strong. Well, that wasn't it at all. So are they strong enough?
00:41:31
Speaker
Okay, great. Pretty basic. More importantly, in most cases, now we need to look at how they're using and expressing power in other movements. Okay. Uh, so for me, my most basic profiling has always been around rate of force development.
00:41:48
Speaker
Can they use the strength they have? Um, my, for me, I was influenced back. Oh man, this is Bosco's work. This is Tahani and Schmidt Bleicher. um Alvar Meal, when I was a young coach, ah somehow I got connected to him through weightlifting. His son was weightlifting.
00:42:07
Speaker
And man, I called him up as a young coach and he's at the Bulls winning all these championships. And he spends 45 minutes on the phone with me. It's just sharing all this stuff that took me down some whole new pathways. So looking at that.
00:42:22
Speaker
I started with squat jump versus counter movement jump. and It's not because of elasticity. It's not because you're storing elastic energy. It's primarily because of a difference in rate of force development.
00:42:36
Speaker
ah Today, we can do that through some different means through um force plates, give us some better measures. But rate of force development is one. So how well do they use that?
00:42:46
Speaker
Same concept as DSI. Right. If you've whole lot of strength and in a fast movement, you can only a little bit. I got a big gap. I don't need to make you stronger. I need to teach how to use it.
00:42:58
Speaker
Vice versa, if you got this much strength and you're using most of it in this fast action, we can work on plyos all day long and other stuff, but it ain't gonna get you better till you get stronger. So that's one of the sides on that ah quadrant.
00:43:12
Speaker
That's one of the accidents. those that need um Those that use more velocity and those that use more force. And this, going back to those like people I talked about, Bosco's work and Tahani got some interesting stuff.
00:43:26
Speaker
um Those same athletes, that profile, not only does it tell you what they need for per performance, but I think for me, more importantly, it tells you what they can and can't tolerate.
00:43:39
Speaker
ah The guys that are speed guys, they man i can't to they can't tolerate that much strength work. They need strength work maybe every seven to 10 days. like There's some variables in here, but They don't need it that often. They need a heavy strength exposure, probably with limited reps. And for them, it's not even the really big numbers. 80% is pretty good, seven to 10 days.
00:44:03
Speaker
But they need some speed work. They need some stuff that's fast every three to five days. Otherwise, they're falling off, right? they Their system ain't firing the right way. On the other hand, you got guys that are on that force side, right? They they need that strength.
00:44:17
Speaker
If they haven't lifted in seven to 10 days, they're probably dropping off their power. They need that strength, heavy stimulus, maybe not a ton of volume, but they need a stimulus probably every three to five days.
00:44:30
Speaker
So there's this big paradox we have. The exact thing you need for more performance output, you probably can't tolerate in very large doses or very often.
00:44:42
Speaker
And that for me was like, that that was a game changer because it's kind of intuitive that, oh, if I need this, I should spend every day working on this, right? I need to improve my speed side of the equation. I need to work on that neuro side. Great. Let's do it three days a week.
00:45:00
Speaker
Well, that big... Lineman, that guy that needs that strength, yeah, he needs to fire a little faster. But if I start doing it to him all the time, he's going to be hurt. His system is going to be burnt out. He ain't performing well.
00:45:13
Speaker
So the exact thing you need, you probably can't handle a lot of. And this comes into some of the art of what we You've got to watch and use your eyes. OK, so that was a lot to go through, just one access in that. The other access.
00:45:28
Speaker
um um RSI, reactive strength. Okay, so there's guys that can jump out of the gym, but they can't do it fast. right, there's reactive strength, and that's another quality. It's related, but different.
00:45:43
Speaker
And for me, those two axis, give me a pretty clear view of how they use their rate of force development and use their force capacity and how well they can tolerate fast stretch shortening cycles and use some elasticity.
00:45:59
Speaker
So those two give me a pretty good profile of what a guy's going to work on to get better. ah But kind of back to our almost you know maximal tolerable imbalance, how much of the thing they're not good at they can take.
00:46:12
Speaker
And probably for me today, guys, the not overloading the wrong thing is probably more helpful than giving them more of the right thing.
00:46:23
Speaker
All right, we got to take a second to talk about the universal speed rating because I literally just found this out and it blew my mind. We just hit over 500,000 verified speed tests inside the USR software, half a million.
00:46:37
Speaker
That's coaches all over the country testing, tracking, and proving athlete progress with this system. It's not just data, it's giving athletes confidence and giving coaches real proof of results. I remember running our first speed lab test back in 2019 in a closet that my uncle helped me build, now half a million.
00:46:55
Speaker
If you're not testing speed yet or you're doing it without a system, this is your chance to check it out. Hit the link in the description, book a free consult, and see how the USR could work in your program.
00:47:08
Speaker
Let's go deeper. Because that's huge. ah Because honestly, like if you think about how most people are profiling, they're they're doing a level of physical profiling. Let's say um at that pool...
00:47:21
Speaker
a counter movement jump and a drop jump. Like let's say that, can you produce high forces? Can you do it through stretch shortening cycle? you produce it fast? What most people jump to is like, okay, whatever they're weak at, we just need to do double of.
00:47:36
Speaker
yeah And what you're saying is that but if they're not good at it, that's that's a quality that they can't tolerate in high doses. So you're actually putting them at risk by doing significant volumes of it to get them better at it.
00:47:51
Speaker
but ah what would be the counter to that? So keep what they're but they're good at and then micro dose or slowly expose them to a thing they're not good at. Yeah. I mean, this is and again, it depends on the level where of athlete. If they're a young developing athlete, all these things are still going up. So I'm not going to over value profiling in a young athlete. I mean, it's a continuum, right? it becomes more important as they get to a higher level or higher age.
00:48:18
Speaker
But yes, I think, and my experience has been that it works better if I can give them small, micro-dosed exposures of that thing they need.
00:48:29
Speaker
um And I do it at the right time, the right time of year. So let's start simple. During a training week, a training b block ah training week um I have some days I think of as stimulus days and others as accumulating days.
00:48:46
Speaker
So on a so stimulus day, you're gonna do the thing you're good at. That's where it fires up your nervous system the way it works. And so if you're that contractile guy, you're gonna get a heavy lifting.
00:48:58
Speaker
Cause it doesn't wear you out the same way. Now I got to manage volume and everything else, but it still stimulates you. You feel more powerful in the days after you had that big squat or whatever, big deadlift, big something.
00:49:10
Speaker
um If you're the speed guy, the velocity biased guy, You need something fast. You need those plyos. You need those high rate of force development things that make you feel good.
00:49:22
Speaker
And this goes back a little bit, guys, to that talk with the athlete. Again, one of my key questions when I'm talking with an athlete is you just finished the perfect workout. This was great.
00:49:33
Speaker
This is what you needed. This made you better. What did you do and how do you feel? And they're going to tell you probably where they are. Not always. there's There's some mistakes in there. But most of them are probably, if if they're older and they've trained, they're going to tell you which it is. So that's stimulus, though, right? They know they feel good a certain way.
00:49:55
Speaker
So that's a stimulus day. An accumulation day is a day we're going to work on the thing we need to get better at. And if this is farther out of season, more GPP-ish or farther out early off season, I might have two accumulation days during the week doing the thing you're bad at.
00:50:12
Speaker
We're going to do little bits of and get better. As we get closer to season, if we get to a taper ah for Olympic athletes or you know whatever, um it's going to go the opposite. I'm going to get a little accumulation.
00:50:26
Speaker
And as I really get late in that taper, now the thing you're bad at, I might be skipping altogether probably during the taper or it's a really limited exposure every Man, some of those things, you can expose them 10 days. Like we got to get out of going in weeks and months. Like use some, use some art and figure out how far it is. So yeah, I think you loaded heavier off season.
00:50:51
Speaker
Don't try to change them, but try to influence them, get them a little better. And as you go towards season, you get rid of that and you do what they're good at. Hmm. It's fascinating. You guys are going through that. So like, what do you see in that, that type of stuff?
00:51:07
Speaker
Yeah. Well, all right. So the the main thing i would probably unpack first is that most people think about programming is like you create a profile and then you write out programming for like the next 90 days and you just like stick to it.
00:51:22
Speaker
And you know, and like, I, I, yeah, like all the time, you know, people DM they're like, Hey, can you give me an eight week program, a 10 week program? Yeah. 12 week pro. I'm like, ah honestly, like business wise, who would be great? Cause I get that all the time, but it won't work.
00:51:38
Speaker
And where Danny and I have worked towards is like this dynamic model. It's always changing based on the dose response relationship of what you're doing. So I look at programming as like interventions, right?
00:51:50
Speaker
So you're you're intervening at some point throughout their dose response cycle and deciding what stimulus you're gonna give them. So the stimulus after the really, really big event that you had is gonna be more tissue based and and more like regeneration based.
00:52:06
Speaker
the one that's going to be before the training, like the big training or the big game is going to stimulate that. And there's things in between. So we look at programming is like this continuum of like making decisions based around what we're seeing.
00:52:20
Speaker
So this, you know, this actually gave me a lot here with the stimulus stimulus day and the accumulation day, um because that's most of what programming is. And I think our, you know, what we, what we started with, with the injuries and and the youth is that there's a lot of games and, and not only a lot of games, but they're all year.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah. So I have, I have athletes that compete 50 weeks a year now. Yeah. It's insane. And they're off for Christmas and Thanksgiving. And besides that, they're competing. So if you're thinking you're going to do like a 90-day offseason program and build all this stuff, like it's just it just doesn't exist. And it's the same thing for for all the all the sports.
00:53:00
Speaker
And our pros. They have more things in their offseason now. I mean, football is probably one of our few ones that's a little bit more of normal with an offseason. But, man, most of them don't have a lot.
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah. No, I mean, even even football is tough because you go to the Super Bowl. That's um Valentine's Day. Then you start back at OTAs in April.
00:53:23
Speaker
So, like, if you want to – you should take some time off. I tell guys they can't show up. um that first period before OTAs, it's better to stay at your team and and continue what you're doing because you're looking at three weeks of training, you know, and how much you're going to gain in three weeks. Guys in the league hit us up all the time like, yo, I'm trying to get faster.
00:53:43
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, why? ah Second, you're not going to get faster right now. It's just not, you know you don't have the window. um So I think your framework for for thinking about this is something that everyone needs to understand and and undo their level of understanding on periodization because we can't We can't periodize all this stuff. We can't.
00:54:09
Speaker
like There's no way. um And decision-making is is the key point that I think most coaches lack coming out of college and doing CSCS and doing mentorships. And they come out and they can't make decisions.
00:54:23
Speaker
And that's something Danny mentors people on consistently. I talk with people consistently. Um, so yeah, I mean, I want you to keep going. This is awesome. This is awesome. Yeah. A lot of pieces here.
00:54:37
Speaker
yeah what know You hit a good point there, Les. Like, I think the decision making part now to be fair to a new coach. Yeah. They they can't make all those decisions yet. That's okay.
00:54:48
Speaker
Um, But this does get missed. And I think we have a lot of danger in our space right now in that ah we are we have access to technology like never before.
00:55:01
Speaker
right what yeah I'm old enough that I did biomechanics analysis where we had to we still had a film one at Cal State Long Beach. um you know I only got to see it. I didn't have to go frame by frame. But we did stuff tape-wise, videotape, you know still old enough.
00:55:20
Speaker
Yeah. This wasn't normal stuff. We have it everywhere now. Yeah. And everybody's learning it early in school more or more and more, but that doesn't help you make decisions. That's data.
00:55:33
Speaker
That's not decisions. That's just a bunch of information to use it into something that's actionable. You need to have enough knowledge and you need to have frameworks and systems to put it into. um Yeah. so and Here's how I think about it less, um kind of going down that path.
00:55:51
Speaker
I use um a restaurant analogy. ah seen that love so yeah right I I enjoy it. ah everybody I read ger your blog. yeah so Chef versus cook. yeah but That's what I want out of a brand new coach. like Dude, don't come to this restaurant and start making up your own recipes. Follow my recipe.
00:56:09
Speaker
but that's where you're learning. The decision you are making though, as a young coach, brand new, is you're making a decision looking at how they're doing what's on the plan in the moment. So I don't need you to program or know how to adjust profiles or all that crap yet.
00:56:24
Speaker
What I do need is I need you as a coach to watch that athlete over there. Here's what we we're expecting on the plan. And when you see this doesn't match, you have to make a coaching decision. You have to know how to regress. You have to know how to lateralize you in Charlie's term.
00:56:40
Speaker
That's the coaching decision you better learn really early because if you think you're following this plan and that's not what it looks like, um we're talking about like plyo stuff and shocks and springs.
00:56:51
Speaker
Look, that quality piece during the constraints, I have to watch how are they maintaining posture? What's the shapes? What's the action? What's the move? I got to watch quality because if that's gone, the It's not the same training drill anymore.
00:57:04
Speaker
You're training something else. You're doing something different. A thousand percent. And I don't know how I got there. You were asking me to unpack something else. No, that was good. Danny, did you have a follow-up to that?
00:57:16
Speaker
I mean, i'm just I'm still a little bit mind-blown that that Danny mentoring people on decision-making is a real thing. That's that's wild for me to think about. ah yeah Lots of places to go in life, man. Lots of fun to have. You got to balance out all the bad you've done.
00:57:33
Speaker
Hopefully I got a lot of time left. ah No, this is brilliant, man. i don't i don't I don't have anything real particular on this. I mean, I think, you know, as I'm sitting back kind of processing some of this stuff, you know, it's number one, it it definitely corresponds very heavily to what Les has developed with the drip model.
00:57:50
Speaker
And, um you know, and i mentioned earlier that that he does better than anybody I've been around ah such a great job of of managing and and, you know, delineating workloads and cutoff points and, you know To me, that drip framework is a very comprehensive thing that any level of coach or any scale of of of setting, um you know you can incorporate that.
00:58:10
Speaker
I think the the thing that comes to mind here with this conversation is what can we do to be more proactive rather than reactive to these things?
00:58:22
Speaker
and And, you know, and for like and I'll give some context here to like i'm I'm still very much an amateur on the data side and and the sports science side. It's never really been my wheelhouse, not really how I've operated.
00:58:34
Speaker
So I know for someone like yourself and and I know for Les, you guys can pull up the tablet, see some numbers and then, you know, kind of be able to be. you know, preemptive in your decision making, but maybe for some of those coaches that are cooks, not chefs, what are some of the signs or signals maybe that that we we can get ahead of something before it does set in?
00:58:56
Speaker
You know, if you're at that point in your career and you don't know it yet, you just got to watch people move. I mean, that's really the that it's way more important than the data.
00:59:07
Speaker
And eventually the data connects with that, right? But if you're not watching how they move, you don't have context. And I think for me, the content of the data and the numbers is less important than the context of the data and the numbers.
00:59:21
Speaker
that's That's everything, right? Because if I see that data, but I really don't know what's going on in the rest of the sport or what's going on in life, there's no context to how they're responding.
00:59:33
Speaker
um So eyes are first. One of the locations, we have one of our licensed locations up here in El Segundo. They just got force plates a little while ago. So we're working through their coaches, really learning that in the data. And that's where my approach to help them is watching.
00:59:52
Speaker
So let's watch movements and let's start seeing what that force profile looks like. um And and then in doing this, I kind of realized I see that all the time. I've spent enough. I had my first force plate back in the late 90s.
01:00:05
Speaker
I see force traces when I'm watching athletes move like those things make sense to me. And I didn't even really realize that till I was teaching them. I'm like, oh, crap. Yeah, I see that all the time.
01:00:16
Speaker
So I want them seen. I want them being able to watch movement, the way the guy hit the ground, the way he landed today, the way he's lowering during his warmups. the I want you to see those things and understand that, yeah, his breaking RFD is different today. His impulse is lower. Like you're seeing those things. So, yeah, it comes from it it comes from watching. I think watch more sport. I was talking to Mike Robinson on a podcast a couple of weeks ago.
01:00:43
Speaker
Dude, biggest advice, go watch sport, but not as a fan. right Watch it as a biomechanist. Watch how people move. Watch how they're absorbing. Watch what movement patterns.
01:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, i don't don't don't start looking at freaking data until you've watched movement. um On that same one, teaching them to use the force plates, what I've been trying to do is when somebody does whatever test we're doing, don't look at the numbers.
01:01:10
Speaker
watch them do it, then look at the force traces first and look at the shapes of that. Look at the quality of it. Then you can look at the data and the numbers and the outputs. And that's been really helpful.
01:01:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, like if you look at the industry, it's like, most people are are talking in terms of like the metrics they get from the force plates and there's, there's a lot of them.
01:01:33
Speaker
So you'll see a new one pop up every day or, or better. You'll see people call the same thing, something else. And then just, it just adds on top. And like, there's a, there's a lot of pressure as a 23 year old entering the industry to know these things. So I get these interns that come to us and they're like,
01:01:51
Speaker
telling me about these new metrics. And I'm like, I've never heard of that. That's cool. But can you run a warm up? And they're like, absolutely not. you know And it's it's the it's the people skills, it's relationship skills. And then just like, you know ah this is happening in every industry, but AI and technologies integrating into everything, making things simpler.
01:02:12
Speaker
Well, we exist in ah in a world where you can't just cheat in sports to get better. Like you still have to put the time in. You still have to do the work. You see companies popping up with like, new shoe technologies and new things. But like, ultimately you still have to do the work. You still to practice your sport.
01:02:29
Speaker
You still have to put the time in. And that's where a lot of these young practitioners are coming in and, and just thinking they can just jump ahead four or five years just because they know force plays or the 10 80 year, whatever. And there's, they're freaking smart, dude. Like I, I don't even understand half the stuff they're talking about sometimes. Yeah.
01:02:47
Speaker
but it's just like, dude, you haven't even coached someone yet. Like you online, you have a great presence. You have 200,000 followers. Everything you just repeated on that YouTube video was great, but you cannot coach people.
01:03:02
Speaker
And that's what I want to see. It's so common, dude. Les, when you said that, I'm thinking of a couple instances over this last year where some people that had really good pieces when you look at their Instagram or their Twitter or even a presentation on something really seem to know what they're talking about. yeah And then I heard them on a podcast in long form and you start hearing their thinking and talking and you're like,
01:03:26
Speaker
Oh, dude, you're just at the start. You don't know. And and not making them bad people. That's not it. But you're like, no, you don't know what you don't know yet. Just wait till you get out of. And I usually see it in somebody that's been in limited settings.
01:03:40
Speaker
Yeah. Because your biases don't get exposed. if If I was a football player and I go on to become a GA and then I work in football and I've always worked in football. Some of my biases will work and be fine.
01:03:55
Speaker
But if you take me out of football and you throw me into swimming or table tennis or diving or something that you've had no exposure to, your frameworks aren't going to work.
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah. And I think i was lucky. I mean, this has been an accident of circumstance. um I've got to work with a lot of Olympic athletes. I've got to work with, I think we're over at 40 plus sports, different sports, either as a coach directly or as a high performance director. Wow.
01:04:24
Speaker
it blows up your models. yeah it it it You get exposed really quick. ah You drop into a sport. We had this experience in China working with their Olympic committee and we're sending in an integrated support team and they go, oh, surprise, we're going to put you with table tennis.
01:04:44
Speaker
What? what How many of our coaches? No, no. So you got to have some, or go into sports that don't have eccentrics. yeah Most of the things we do have, like I said, eccentric.
01:04:56
Speaker
yeah Cycling. The start, the starting track work, that's one of your pure, or not pure, but your more concentric things. Swimming, that's almost all concentric.
01:05:08
Speaker
Some of your paddling sports have a much bigger and almost all concentric. Cycling, those sprinters, it's all concentric. It really changes how you're looking at some things. And then go ah like freaking skiing.
01:05:22
Speaker
Skiing, man, influenced me purely big time for the eccentric. So big exposures. It blows up your models, but it makes you better. Yeah. Let's I want to finish with like I've been reading about your ah your your cyclist.
01:05:39
Speaker
um is it what's the sport Is it speed cycling? like What's the actual sport? um so Kelsey was a track cyclist. This is a veloid drone. They go in that oval.
01:05:50
Speaker
and She's a sprinter, so she did sprint events. so There's a team sprint, Kieran, but she's doing things that are relatively short, high-powered. what What made her so good? Did she innately have that ability and she just didn't find the sport early enough? Yeah.
01:06:07
Speaker
what What is she was um she went through a pro. So she was a a Canadian in college. She was a soccer player. She was an an athlete. She was a soccer player.
01:06:19
Speaker
um Canadian school, you know, it's not a top D one. So she was a good athlete, but wasn't a great soccer player, not a world class one. Yeah. um Got done with college.
01:06:30
Speaker
She's working. um She was driving a truck at a point. And there's this program in Canada ah sponsored by RBC that does a kind of big combine event.
01:06:41
Speaker
Okay. Come out to this. If you do good enough at something, you get invited to the main one. We test on a bunch of stuff and we say, hey, you could be good at. Yeah. And there was a couple sports she could be good at. Her power outputs were great. Yeah.
01:06:54
Speaker
um mean, I've watched her do a 68 centimeter vertical jump, no hands on hips. Jeez. kind move a jump. Like... Wow. Yeah.
01:07:05
Speaker
Massive power output. um They said you could be good at cycling. She got a chance to try it. She was good. But she was also really good at cycling. So we can say power output.
01:07:19
Speaker
And that's a key underlying factor. But you actually have to have the skill to pedal well and then all the other stuff. I've had some other athletes try to go to cycling, like some former NFL guys, footballers.
01:07:29
Speaker
who put out massive testing wattage on like ergometers and stuff like huge, they couldn't pedal. It just didn't work. So she had that, but that's also what's allowing her to now go into bobsled.
01:07:44
Speaker
She has that power output. Um, looking forward. I haven't seen, cause I'm not working with her right now as she's going to bobsledding. Um, We finished up after Paris, but I, you know, talk with her regularly about stuff and I'm going to get to look at her force plate data from up at CSI in Calgary.
01:08:02
Speaker
And I'm really interested because she's been concentric athlete. for a lot of years. I want to see where some of the metrics are showing up. Luckily, I mean, as a breakman, the start, it's still pretty concentric dominant, but I'm really curious.
01:08:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, Bob said it's interesting um because, yeah, at the start there is, but then there's this – there's this moment where you start to dip over the edge and it's, it's high speed, high eccentric actions. And yeah, Bob said is, is one of the most interesting sports to train for. I've had, I've had a few and um yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy difficult.
01:08:42
Speaker
It's a lot more difficult than people realize. So you can't just be a good athlete and hop in there. Like there's a decathlete that became a, uh, A bobsledder. She went to um Salt Lake in 2002. But yeah, I've seen that transition and it is way more complex than people think. It's, oh, I just have enough power.
01:08:59
Speaker
And that's it. Again, that's a cover fee to get in the door. Then you got to do a lot more after that. Yeah, because every I would ah argue that they all are very powerful and strong and fast, and then there's a skill element, and then there's the ability to do that while also carrying your sled all around Europe for four years. like you know There's a lot to it. People don't know that part of it.
01:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, you don't have a big team. you know Yeah, you're carrying that thing, you're loading it on trucks, you're unloading it. People don't know about that part at all. Yeah, so you almost have to have this like – capacity that you wouldn't, you don't even need to do your sport, but just to endure your sport.
01:09:37
Speaker
Yeah. That's a lot of training, dude. Yeah. I mean, look, I remember going through this with some of our team that um was working with the Chinese wrestling team getting ready for Rio.
01:09:49
Speaker
And we had some new sports med people and coaches that got assigned to that. And And what we had to get their head around was we're not just training for the sport. We're training to be able to endure the practice and especially within their system, the hours and hours of training.
01:10:06
Speaker
Yeah, the event lasts this long. We're training so they can endure the practice. Yeah. Yeah. That's a it's a common thing in college football right now where it's like everybody goes and they reverse engineer the game.
01:10:20
Speaker
But then you get a head coach that practices ah very different style than how they play the game or they they practice to prepare for that in a different way. And it's like you need to profile the game, but you also need to profile the training.
01:10:34
Speaker
And then you profile the athlete or the position and then the athlete and then you just go. but like Profiling tends to happen just strictly on what the game is and what who the athlete is. And there's like, well, you're missing all the stuff in the middle.
01:10:46
Speaker
Like how do you move through winter, spring, summer, fall, camp, all these things. um well It's like that storybook analogy. You jump to the end of the game to tal analyze the ah happily ever after and you missed all the stuff before that. Yeah.
01:11:00
Speaker
yeah And even profiling coaches, dude, I've seen some cases where you can track injury trends across coaches ah because of the way they practice or do things. Yeah. So, yeah. but But it's the it's rule. Go back to the sport and the sport is all the other stuff with it. It's the...
01:11:16
Speaker
Two teams, like you're saying, Les, different coaches have different styles of play that requires different demands physically, conditioning, strength, speed. Like you can't even just say I'm in basketball. You need to know that you got to know in our roles, our job is to serve the head coach's vision of what that sport should be, what that athlete should be.
01:11:40
Speaker
So for me, I got to start there. I got to understand the sport in general, but then I got to go understand what that coach thinks is the ideal expression of that sport. Yeah, for sure.
01:11:51
Speaker
A couple of things to close with and, and Danny, you could hop in. it got a couple of quick questions, but first one is if you had to leave coaches with one takeaway, so like one thing to to take from this and to start implementing tomorrow, what would it be?
01:12:06
Speaker
um Watch the eccentric actions. The one thing you need to think about, eccentric actions cause advantage or they can do damage. and So start watching and thinking about the eccentric action.
01:12:18
Speaker
I like that. I'm taking that. Advantage or damage. Let me write that down. um Where can coaches learn more from you and Velocity's education platform, mentorship programs? We are in the process of changing our website to have all the education piece. So that'll be coming up in the next couple of weeks.
01:12:37
Speaker
ah Myself, I'm on Twitter as Coach Ken Vick. That's where I tend to share a lot stuff. And we'll be moving a lot of that to our education ah profiles, ah VSP Education on Twitter and Instagram.
01:12:52
Speaker
Awesome. Dan, you got anything? Man, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. um This was really cool, Ken. I appreciate you sharing all the insight, all the wisdom. um I don't have any...
01:13:05
Speaker
last minute questions here, but I do have one quick editorial note because I seriously butchered the NBA statistic earlier. So i want to just clarify on this. But I do think that this is an interesting sta stat. So the statistic I was looking for was in seven of the past eight seasons, we've seen 5,000 plus games lost due to injury from 2006 to 2017.
Broad Impact in Athlete Development
01:13:32
Speaker
That happened one time.
01:13:35
Speaker
Well, here's the thing. christian That means we have opportunity. That means there's a need for something to happen. That means every one of us that's in this field and trying to help these athletes, whether it's at that NBA team, at the college, at the high school, working with youth, we all have an opportunity to impact them and make a difference.
01:13:56
Speaker
Without a doubt. Yeah. and And once again, man, i I really, really enjoyed this. And, um, after we hang up here, I'd love to talk about when I can get up there and come hang out with you for a day or so, man, because this was this was awesome.
01:14:09
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. Well, we'll put we'll probably stay on and talk a little bit more, but that's it for today. Thank you guys for listening, and we'll see you soon.