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Stuart McMillan: Strength Training, Braking Forces, Sprinting
1.2k Plays29 days ago
Universal Speed Rating is excited to announce the launch of The Speed Lab Podcast with hosts Les Spellman, Danny Foley, and Cici Murray.
In this episode, Les and Danny sit down with Stuart McMillan, Co-Founder and CEO of ALTIS, a globally recognized leading authority in sports education, specializing in coaching excellence for speed, power, and strength training, across Track and Field, and Team Sports.
00:00:00 Introduction to Guests and Themes
00:01:08 Training Seasons and Athlete Management
00:02:00 Evolving Beliefs in Coaching
00:05:56 Complexity in Coaching Systems
00:13:12 Leadership and Complexity in Systems
00:21:00 Consulting Challenges in Sports
00:34:53 Career Evolutions and Personal Insights
00:51:18 Innovative Training Approaches
01:07:32 Understanding Complexity in Coaching
01:26:03 Book Discussion and Personal Reflections
01:28:05 Upcoming Event Highlights
01:37:21 Conclusion and Future Anticipations
Interested in learning more about the Universal Speed Rating? Click here to schedule a quick call with our team.
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Transcript
Introduction to Guests and Themes
00:00:04
Speaker
All right, on this beautiful Sunday morning, we are very delighted to have our our shaman, our leader, our industry hero, Stuart McMillan, joining us. I thought you referring to Les.
00:00:21
Speaker
Oh, no, no, no, no. his His intro will come in a minute. um Uncle Stuart McMillan. podcast engineer connoisseur Les Spellman joining us as well.
00:00:33
Speaker
And we are very excited to have this conversation. Kidding aside, i know we've we've done a lot of stuff together over the years and um you know we got this this event coming up in in Cayman.
00:00:46
Speaker
And I think, ah you know, this is a cool time of year for us because for Les and I, we're we're starting to kind of gear up and we're getting ready for, you know, combine season coming up next year. And then Stu, for you, you're, you know, kind of coming out of your season and coming down. And I feel like it's always kind of created this little window at the end of the year where we get a good exchange of information and there's some different perspectives that are
Training Seasons and Athlete Management
00:01:08
Speaker
coming to the table. So I know we don't really have a ah formal agenda as to where this thing is going to go today, but I know,
00:01:14
Speaker
Still, you've mentioned a couple of times you're you're, you know, pretty deep right now into some of the complexity sciences. And, you know, on Les and I's side, we're, you know, working on seems like everything all the time, but, you know, really trying to put this whole system together that is going to, you know, build into the combine period. And I know we're going a couple of questions for you.
00:01:35
Speaker
as it relates to those two ends and just this systemized approach, the complex nature of having multiple people involved in one system, you know, the complexity of having 35, 40 different athletes with different archetypes.
00:01:48
Speaker
And really what I've always been interested in is is how those things end up materializing into cut and dry decision making and how we can be more efficient and economical with the time that we do have.
Evolving Beliefs in Coaching
00:02:00
Speaker
So, Les, I know you got a couple of things to add on to that too, but you know those are Those are kind of really the directions that I was i was looking to head in today.
00:02:10
Speaker
and Danny, I want to say that it's great to be here with you. Thanks. And I appreciated the invite and and the introduction. ah uncle Uncle Stu McMillan. that's that My introduction was a little bit better on Outtake 15 when was trying to fix all this, but it's all good. We'll we'll move past it.
00:02:29
Speaker
um Stu, we'll start off with one question. You're going to hate this question, though, so just preparing you. What's one belief you held 10 years ago that you no longer hold today?
00:02:47
Speaker
had to start off with something.
00:02:57
Speaker
Why did you think I was going to hate that question? Because I know you.
00:03:03
Speaker
What was the prompt on JetGPT that gave you that question? Oh, this is pulling directly from a Huberman playbook. Is it really? is that Is that one of the questions he asked?
00:03:16
Speaker
I think so. Something along those lines, but it's like a good little starter, you know? You're putting yourself on the on the level with Huberman again? I mean, in he did a podcast with you. I did a podcast with you.
00:03:31
Speaker
So there's there's levels to it. I didn't have to start Hebrew in this podcast 17 times. Oh, yeah. But you're getting paid for this, which is now why you're here.
00:03:42
Speaker
Which is why you're here, right? Oh, right. Let's talk about that.
00:03:48
Speaker
you'll get You'll get a check. You'll get a check in the mail at some point. But, yeah, I knew you'd hate that question. i um
00:04:00
Speaker
I mean, there's lots of beliefs, right? I mean, there's this, I think the knowledge is, is fluid and we're changing our pains on things often.
00:04:11
Speaker
Um, I think the question is what, what major thing did you think a decade ago that maybe you don't think now? And,
00:04:23
Speaker
I feel like the probably the most primary thing that I thought a decade ago was the importance of
00:04:35
Speaker
a technical model that should be adhered to by most and the role of the coach or a role of the coach.
00:04:50
Speaker
was to try to match the athletes mechanics to that technical model in as great a way as possible. Now, and and and I think if it might it might be 12 or 15 years ago, because I think my you know my thoughts on that started to change when I was in the UK, when I was working with three very, very different elite sprinters.
00:05:15
Speaker
who moved in very, very different ways. And prior to that, I had sort of taught to a model. And then my experience with these three sprinters, Dwayne Chambers, Christian Malcolm, Marlon Devonish, who had all ran very, very fast and had long and successful careers, moved in extremely different ways.
00:05:37
Speaker
Clearly, clearly um produced force in totally different ways, moved down the track in different ways, lifted in different ways. So it made me sort of not necessarily rethink what that I was doing, but update my thinking into something that was maybe a little bit different and new.
Complexity in Coaching Systems
00:05:56
Speaker
And at the same time, I was starting to get into the work of ah Paul gal Glazier, who is ah or more into the work of Paul Glazier, who's a professor at Sheffield Hallam University.
00:06:09
Speaker
and And his work has has been very influential in my thinking around this ever since. So that's probably the biggest thing. There's many.
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah. and and And Danny, like I want you to dive into the complex systems part. Because before we got on, you talked little bit about how that's thing you're trying to understand from Stu. Let's dive into that little bit.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's it's it's obviously and a massive topic. I think the the specific point of interest that I've always had or that I continue to have is how it relates to the chaos factor and, you know, the the trade-off of or the transitioning of complexity to chaos and i think that that's always been kind of the best euphemism for the combine setting is that we're we're never in a controlled state at any point it's it's it's hardly ever predictable right there's there's very little um you know within the combine setting that is automated it's all how we respond and react and there's so many different people that are involved
00:07:16
Speaker
you know, from ah high volume of athletes to an enormous amount of of coaching staff and support staff. And it it felt, you know, particularly last year, it always feels like we're, we're really trying to manage the line between chaotic and complex.
00:07:32
Speaker
And it seems that the more not or the the higher number of people that are involved in ah in a system at large, the more challenging, you know, that balance really becomes because there's so many variables that are a part of this.
00:07:47
Speaker
So and don't know that I have a direct question off of that, but. As it relates to this process of, you know, from the coaching side, from the staff side, what are some of the strategies that we can lean into to help better prepare for this, knowing that it's going to come, knowing that it's unavoidable, but we still have this, you know, three month runway of putting strategies together to be able to manage this well.
00:08:12
Speaker
And I think that's really where my my primary interest lies.
00:08:21
Speaker
Was that a question? Kind of a thought, but but the the question being like, When we look at it as a complex system, we understand that there's difficulty to this. And what are some of the preventative strategies that we can we can lean into to better prevent, quote unquote, things getting chaotic and and spinning out of control?
00:08:45
Speaker
and And how do we understand that things are going to be complex and really appreciate that and lean into it without allowing it to get root to a true chaotic point?
00:08:58
Speaker
Yeah. um First, you you have to kind of leave aside the word control. You can't control complexity.
00:09:11
Speaker
So I think that's yets your first strategy is we don't try and control complex system.
00:09:20
Speaker
Chaos will emerge in complex relationships from time to time. That's just the nature of complexity.
00:09:29
Speaker
But strategies can be put in place to try to limit maybe some of those chaotic moments. And like all complex systems, there's a hierarchy to their understanding.
00:09:42
Speaker
And it's it's why the most highly functioning teams have You know, the most the most common thing that highly functional teams have is a true, deep understanding of their purpose.
00:10:03
Speaker
And everybody within the team is on the same page. like They're all on the bus and and they know where the bus is going and they... and and they All are buying into the direction of this, ah where this bus is going.
00:10:17
Speaker
And if you got one person on that bus who wants to go somewhere else, then through the nonlinear effects that happen in complex systems, it can affect the entirety of the system.
00:10:32
Speaker
So it's first is what is the purpose of the complex system? That's the hierarchical perspective of complexity. There has to be a purpose and all of the component parts need to understand what the purpose is.
00:10:45
Speaker
So that's that's first. Like, do we all know what we're doing? Like, what is the objective here?
00:10:53
Speaker
Understanding also that all complex systems interact with complex systems and nest with other complex systems. So you can have multiple different purposes depending upon how you scale the system. Like at what scale we actually talking to? So, you know, if we zoom all the way out and look at Spelman performance, combine preparation period, what is the purpose of that?
00:11:17
Speaker
And we have... An understanding of that, everybody in the system knows what that is. And then every system that interacts with that and every system that nests within that, what are the purposes of those as well?
00:11:32
Speaker
Identify then all of the component parts within it and have rules of engagement of how all of those component parts ah interact.
00:11:44
Speaker
And then that's how you set up a quote unquote a system. like to lauraa a a functioning system is what are those rules? Are you using heuristics? Do you have models? Do you have mental models that you all adhere to? Do we have, um you know, do we all understand what those are? And I think the, you know, when you're building these models or you're building these heuristics or these, you know, these rules of engagement,
00:12:13
Speaker
um it's really important that we try to limit them To the point where it speaks to the purpose of the system, but doesn't get things too overly
00:12:28
Speaker
complicated. And you're right. Like one of the things you said, the the more, the the bigger a team becomes, the harder it is to control. You can't control it. So we got to put that aside, but the harder it is, or the more complex it is, right? There's more component parts within it.
00:12:46
Speaker
So it's harder for us to understand. those relationships. there's it's It's more difficult. There's more component parts. So there's more areas where this can go wrong.
00:12:58
Speaker
If you've got five people, it's pretty easy for these five people to be aligned on all of the different purposes and the rules of engagement. If you've got every single person that you add, it gets harder and harder and harder and harder.
00:13:09
Speaker
There's more of a chance that somebody's off doing their
Leadership and Complexity in Systems
00:13:12
Speaker
own thing. And we also have to understand that maybe most importantly in complexity is each part continuously and autonomously interacts with each other in totally nonlinear ways.
00:13:29
Speaker
You're right. So it's, yeah, and that's what contributes to the product. You know, the emergence of the, the, the big complex adaptive system. So if I can, if I can take what you said right there and, uh, you know, last one thing we've,
00:13:47
Speaker
talked about, you know, especially as it relates to this podcast thing, is having a lot of transparency with things that haven't gone well or that we we didn't succeed with, right? And I think one of the goals for for some of the the content that we're trying to produce is taking what we've done, auditing it objectively, and then again, being very transparent and like, hey, this didn't work or we didn't do very well with this, right? And we all have, you know, an abundance of those things. But what you said right there really struck a chord because, and still, I'm sure you remember, you know, last January, I'm sitting in dark parking lot, 7.30 at night, just cursing violently, talking about less and all the things that were were seemingly not going well at the time.
00:14:34
Speaker
And having a better sense of judgment at this point now, being able to look back and, you know, again, objectively analyze what occurred. What we, what I felt like we didn't do a good job of last year was this, this period right now, this, you know, three months out, we've got time to put these things in order, organize them and, and, you know, put everything in motion.
00:15:00
Speaker
And I think for me being very plan heavy, want visibility, neat things need to be predictable. Less is the complete opposite. It's give me five minutes, I'll have the plan.
00:15:12
Speaker
We can pick up, get ready and go. And I think inevitably, especially with you know team setting, there has to be some element of both. And I think for the collective group, the one thing I've had trouble with is understanding what is that cold complete temperature of the group so if we have people that are on the side of the spectrum like less people that are on the side of the spectrum like me planned organized reactive pick up and go how do we actually coalesce as a group and find that common medium temperature or is that possible is it just we we have more of a hierarchical flow where
00:15:51
Speaker
whoever's sitting at that top, we all try to match that energy and that flow pattern? Or is it the person at the top tries to kind of dilute and be a little bit more you know common to the group? Do you think there's a ah preference one way or the other on that? Because this is something that affects every team setting. and boom Let me hop in there. Because i I think the piece that you're speaking to really, Danny, is like,
00:16:15
Speaker
yeah when people come into a complex system, sometimes they want to understand everything initially. And it's like, all right, well, here's this big system and you're coming in.
00:16:25
Speaker
It's like, I could tell you what was going to happen every day for 67 days straight. I could tell you exactly what was going to happen. When people come in, they they want to understand it immediately.
00:16:36
Speaker
And they want to they want to study, they want to learn all the facts. And like my my thought process is just throw you into chaos and you'll figure it out because i already know what's going to happen. um But yeah, obviously that doesn't work in a team setting that well. So yeah, like with that context too, I, you know, going back to what you just talked about where you had 12 to 15 years ago, you had three different athletes that all were different people. So you had to come up with some way to, to manage the complexity of that. Like the fact that you could have a team of 15 different people that all move the same.
00:17:08
Speaker
They're all from different backgrounds. They all talk different. You have a complex system of staff. And everyone's trying to understand what's inside of your head as a leader. Like, how do you manage that?
00:17:18
Speaker
how do you How do you lead the people knowing that they're not going to understand? You know what i mean? Yeah, you've got to do a better job of leading. that's that Just throwing them in is not leading.
00:17:32
Speaker
that's That's not the job. The job isn't to just, hey, that these guys will figure it out. like That's just going to be... That just leads to chaos. There's no learning through chaos.
00:17:46
Speaker
So it's, you know, a complex system is a learning system. It learns more and more and more and patterns form between component parts that you understand more and more and more and better and better and better.
00:18:00
Speaker
But if it's just chaos, if there is no defined appreciation for the rules of engagement and the purpose and a conversation around all of these different things, then you're always, yeah these nonlinear effects will always end up in chaos.
00:18:16
Speaker
So it doesn't learn. So to answer your question is, yeah, you you need, and this something that I'm very similar to you, right? Like I'm that way too. And I'm, I've been that way as a leader. I'm kind of still that way as a leader. I'm not good.
00:18:30
Speaker
I have to improve upon that. i've I've often said, well, you just recruit really, really smart people and let them do their job, right? That is a leadership strategy, but it's not a strategy.
00:18:44
Speaker
yeah You know what I mean? That isn't a strategy. I'll just recruit Danny Foley and he's really smart, so he'll figure it out. That's not leading. Like you're you're the leader and you need to you need to lead Like you're the one that is in, uh, leading this complex system.
00:19:03
Speaker
And that means that, you know you are, you are the one that comes up with the models that, that has conversations around that, that talks about whatever those rules of ah of engagement are that lead the, uh,
00:19:16
Speaker
the The debriefs or the daily debriefs or the weekly debriefs that I know that you guys do a lot of, right? I'm not saying that you're not a good leader because you do do you do do those things. But it's having those conversations about all of those emergent interactions that do, that you cannot predict and you cannot control.
00:19:34
Speaker
But you can only have a learning a learning organization, and a learning system if you do actually have conversations about them.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's deep. um Danny, follow up on that.
00:19:52
Speaker
Yeah. not the not the Not the answer I was expecting. We have to also remember, like sorry i to interrupt you, Danny. No, no, you're good. Every system has evolved from a prior condition and is autonomously progressing towards an unforeseeable future state.
00:20:12
Speaker
Right? Always. All systems are... are fluent They come from a place and they're going to a place. And this is one of the, also the, one of the challenges within this, right? They're, they're, you can go to a better place or it can go to a worse place. It can come from a better place or it can come, can come from, have come from ah a worse place.
00:20:32
Speaker
So we also have to, you as a leader, both of you guys as leaders, have to understand where the system has evolved from. What is the prior condition of the system? What is the prior condition of the systems that relate to that system and the systems that nest within it and all of the component parts within them?
00:20:50
Speaker
And then what are you trying to progress towards? You know, because it's, it's, as I said, these all complex systems are learning systems. There, there will be some learning
Consulting Challenges in Sports
00:21:00
Speaker
going on. So it's, you know, we, if,
00:21:04
Speaker
for for good or bad, you know, like we, and and if we really want this to be a functioning learning system, meaning it's getting better, then that's where I think the role of the leader is really important because you can go the wrong way if you don't have strong leadership.
00:21:24
Speaker
So what do you see when you work with teams? Like, i know you've worked in MLB, NFL. What do you see when you see teams and in their systems and how complex they are with the task side and all of that?
00:21:36
Speaker
Is your advice when you go in to consult, does it end up going towards the actual, like, whole of the system? Or is it, you know, ah people hit me up all the time. Hey, can you come and do this speed thing?
00:21:48
Speaker
And it's very targeted. But then you get in and you see this like massive system and you're like, actually, you need to focus your attention on something else. Like maybe it is the leadership like you just mentioned. Like how do you manage that going into a team?
00:22:00
Speaker
And what do you see? That's 100% what it is. this it In the 100 and whatever teams that I've seen over the course of the last 15 to 20 years, Like there's, I can count the amount of highly functional teams on one hand.
00:22:19
Speaker
It's, it's a sad indictment of quote unquote professional sport. It's poor. Like we, we operate through reductionist means cause there is, we have a need to understand, control, and predict.
00:22:34
Speaker
And we're often, You know, whether whether whether that's just from our ego or our insecurity, or whether it's something that's driven from above where I have to justify what I'm doing by this by this thing.
00:22:50
Speaker
But that's that that is the sport. That's that's almost all things, really. you know It's why we're still stuck in in a a reductionist paradigm in almost everything that we do. and We focus on parts rather than patterns and purpose.
00:23:08
Speaker
And what we see in in professional team sport is the bigger the team, the more complexity there is, the more people there are,
00:23:20
Speaker
And they add more things to it. And the more things you've got, the more complex it is, the harder it is for you to understand. So you revert more and more towards reductionist thought.
00:23:34
Speaker
So, you know, you're just thinking about whatever metric it is that you're focused on. And most of these guys are, what are they, you know, what are they measuring each week? How many metrics?
00:23:46
Speaker
You know, it's- A lot, right? It's yeah it's probably minimum. I mean, it's close to three figures, probably more in in ah in many cases. It's it's a lot.
00:23:57
Speaker
And, you know, one of the rules of complex systems is that, as I said, it's a hierarchy. Purpose, patterns, and parts. And all of these systems work on the opposite.
00:24:12
Speaker
They start with parts. And so when you go in or when I go in and they they they expect us to, sit but I want to help, you know, they think we're going to go in and help their they running technique.
00:24:22
Speaker
You know, like that ain't it, man. Like that's so very hard um on the list of of important things that you need to worry about. And I often, like, it's it's funny, like, I go into these teams and and do these events and, you know, like, but i and I do this pretty good now, right? I've got a nice little thing. I've got a good presentation. We have some great conversations.
00:24:45
Speaker
I don't know how many times it actually has changed their behavior. Right. Like, I don't think ever, you know? Like, I think the only time where it's actually...
00:24:58
Speaker
um impacted their behavior in a positive way, were within teams that were already doing that thing anyway. Right. Right? And in teams where they're not doing that, they say, yeah, I agree with all that stuff. That's great. And they go straight back to doing it the way they did.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah. Because that's, I totally get it. It's totally human nature, right? Like we we we revert to simplicity, prediction, control, and understanding.
00:25:30
Speaker
And especially when we're in a big, complex team. the The most highly functioning teams that I've seen, and I'm sure Les and Danny, your experience will be similar, are the small ones with few people.
00:25:46
Speaker
And often the few people, many of those few people are doing multiple things. Right? So you'll have a, ah ah back in, you know, back in my day,
00:25:59
Speaker
You know, the strength coach was often also the physiologist and the sports scientist, nutritionist, and the supplementalist. And in my case, also the physio and the sports psych and all of these other things, the the motor learning specialists, you know, whatever.
00:26:18
Speaker
And now you've got multiple people in all of those different roles, all focused on their thing, all in ownership of their thing. And yet they understand the importance of the relationships and interacting in a positive way and being part of the team and being on the same bus.
00:26:37
Speaker
But there isn't enough understanding of how all of these things relate to each other. And in especially in sports science and the fitness and S&C part where you've got within that so many different metrics that are going on.
00:26:50
Speaker
And you just focus on these metrics rather than focusing on the big bigger picture. this It's impossible often for them to be able to zoom out. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, my experience has been a team will say, hey, we did this testing, don't know, call it force velocity profiling, and we want to improve this one metric on everybody. And it's like, it's so it's so narrow that if you give an answer that's not what they're expecting, not what they can already predict, then it's like, it's not that valuable.
00:27:22
Speaker
It's like, you can't go in there and say, hey, that's not, I would actually look at this. That's not why they brought you in. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And and that's that's a why like I'm really, I'm very clear now. like Why are you bringing me in?
00:27:37
Speaker
What are your biggest problems? What do you think I specifically can help you with with these problems? And there's an understanding. There's rules of engagement here within you know myself and within this complex system.
00:27:50
Speaker
And if it's not if it doesn't align with what I think I i should be talking about, then I'm not interested. Like if your problem is, oh, we think our sprint technique sucks, so we're bringing you in to help with our sprint technique. Yeah, that's that's not a that's not a conversation I'm willing to have. I'm not interested in that.
00:28:06
Speaker
you know And I was thinking about that the other day and I'm not taking a shot at anyone, kind of am, but the industry's kind of developed around what people are asking for, right? So like if teams are asking for sprint technique, well, all of a sudden there's a couple guys that pop up and it's like, hey, that's what I do.
00:28:24
Speaker
And that's that's valuable. And they created an industry around that to to fulfill that need, which doesn't help, right? So it's it's super interesting.
00:28:38
Speaker
um Yeah, it really is.
00:28:41
Speaker
can i Can I ask you about Canada and Matt Jordan and all that? Because I know you guys were collecting tons of data back then. Yeah, but again we were. Yeah.
00:28:52
Speaker
But it was just me and him. And we only had one thing to be able to collect data on. Right? We had a just jump mat. So that's our data.
00:29:04
Speaker
Like that was, the that was us being super scientific and the rest of the data, guess what it was? Weight on bar. And we figured out, okay, let's figure out what weight on bar means. And then there's weight and there's also total weight. So total load and you know, what all of these different things to try to understand what it meant.
00:29:24
Speaker
So it's like, we were, we were governed by trying to best understand the relationship between load and adaptation to that load.
00:29:41
Speaker
And that's it. All What does load mean? And what does adaptation mean? And that drove all of our stuff that we did. And right, so what's load? Well, it's the amount of weight that you lift.
00:29:57
Speaker
It's how often you lift it, how many sets, how many reps, what is the density maybe? What does that mean? So we try to figure out all of these different things to try to better understand load. And how do we how do we adapt to it? So try to come up with ways in which we can better understand that.
00:30:17
Speaker
And that's kind of started... our way of of trying to process and ask those and answer those questions. And all we had, as I said, was we had a position transcer that we use once in a while that gave us some very crude metrics on on velocity.
00:30:35
Speaker
We didn't really use it a lot. What we did use was the what's the jump mat. And we measured that. And we used that to measure all sorts of things every single day. We did that every day with 300 athletes over and over and over and over again.
00:30:49
Speaker
let's it you know um ah Primarily what we were looking at was counter movement jump and and a squat jump. And we just looked at that over and over and over again and tried to find relationships and what was happening based upon what they were doing what Where was the the different levels of relatedness between the different things that we were doing, the different athletes and different sports and so on and so forth. So yeah, we measured a lot, but it was very crude and it was only two of us. So was you know it wasn't all of these things that, we didn't have a force platform. Force platforms back then were thousands and thousands of dollars and they didn't live in weight rooms.
00:31:26
Speaker
They lived in labs. And it wasn't until you know years later where we had access, even access. weight room in the lab. and And that was just very rare. you know um And at that point, no one really knew what was going on. and We could just see, right, that's amount of force.
00:31:44
Speaker
We didn't know what type of force and really what to but to really be focusing on then. like It was very simple and very rudimentary. and and what Yeah, go ahead, Danny.
00:31:57
Speaker
Yeah, if you don't mind, Les, I actually got a quick follow-up on that. So it's interesting to me, like, whenever you talk about that time with Matt, you almost even get, like, a little smirk to you. like So and I feel like that was, like, a really kind of endearing time for you guys, and it was, like, you know, kind of on this cutting edge and just figuring things out and going through these iterations, and I'm sure it was a lot of fun for you guys. But it's interesting to me that from what you just said right there, those origins, one of you has gone on to basically redefine how force plates are used and, and has gone to extreme depths of all the different measures and things that come with force plates.
00:32:37
Speaker
And then the other, i don't know that I've ever seen you use a force plate in person. Is there, do do you have any, like, why do you think that is? Is that bias or is that just the way things ended up materializing for you guys? Like, why do you think that is?
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question. First, side yeah, i have great um memories, and Matt does as well, of those days. like it's I don't know if I've talked about this in on a podcast before, but our office, and there was four of us in our office, our original office was a closet, and we had four of us in this office.
00:33:16
Speaker
And we didn't it they didn it it's not like they gave us an office. there's just a closet in the back of the, one of the speed skating, uh, coaches offices.
00:33:28
Speaker
And there was just a bunch of crap in there. And we said, is anybody using that? Not, not really. all right. So we moved all the crap out of there and put four desks in there. And we had four people in this closet in the back of a room, like no windows or nothing.
00:33:42
Speaker
And it was like, um, three feet by 10 feet. Oh, come on. 30 square foot. That was all right.
00:33:55
Speaker
It was great. And eventually, you know you know, probably eight years later, we had our own actual office and real desks in there. um I feel like to answer your question, that's more one of circumstance, like personal circumstance.
00:34:12
Speaker
And Like, so Matt got married, had kid, so needed to make money. I didn't, you what I mean? So I could still be out here and play and do all sorts of stupid things. And it wasn't, I didn't really, ah wasn't minded, or wasn't really minding whether I made any money on this or not. You know, i was still trying to figure out my ways as a practitioner where Matt was, you know, yeah as I said, yeah yeah he got a wife.
00:34:42
Speaker
pretty early and had a kid pretty early and then needed the stability of having a job and the jobs that were available at the time, you know, were, were, were there at the center.
Career Evolutions and Personal Insights
00:34:53
Speaker
And he was more interested, like he did a master's degree, like right off the bat. I think, I think actually um I met him when he was doing the masters and then, um,
00:35:04
Speaker
And then started his PhD right off of that. so i think and i think you know So that's where personal circumstance where he he got the family right right away. But also his personal interest was was in the science part. And I was more more interested in the practice. and the practice Both of us were really interested in both and felt like that was what differentiated what we were doing at the Oval. And it wasn't just me and Matt. There was lots lots of other people.
00:35:33
Speaker
um And that's that's that that just wasn't differentiating right it right from the jump but also continue to differentiate what was happening at the Oval and the sports center over the the next 10 to 20 years. And all of the people came that came through there.
00:35:49
Speaker
Like it's like, it was really truly, this marriage of science and practice. It was always the most important thing is to let's make sure that what we're doing actually matters practically.
00:36:01
Speaker
Because we're we were all coaches and everybody who that we're doing that work were coaches because of the the size of this complex system. And it was so small, everybody had to do all things all the time.
00:36:13
Speaker
And where Matt was probably more interested in the science, I was more interested in the practice. Both of us were still interested both things. and both He just went that way. That's the road that he took. And then you want your as you go down that road, you just come further and further and further apart from the road that I took, which was going that that ah direction.
00:36:32
Speaker
That's fascinating. So that's kind of how that all happened. That's fascinating. and And how, when you guys were working together and collecting all this data, and you had obviously athletes on the team that were like incredible, good players,
00:36:45
Speaker
And then you had athletes that may not have been great players. Like what differentiated them? Was it, did any of the the data that you were collecting differentiate the best athletes and the best teams and or or not?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, it was what we began to see is like, we we were pretty traditional with how we were coaching to begin with, right?
00:37:07
Speaker
ah you Remember, we're going back almost 30 years. Like it's the 90s, you know, mid mid to late ninety s And you kind of wrote it, the programs were being written at the time around some sort of Olympic lift, some sort of squat, some sort of pull.
00:37:28
Speaker
Maybe you've got some sort of functional things going on that looked and felt a little bit more like the yeah the task or the sport. But that was kind of it, you know, like it was pretty basic.
00:37:42
Speaker
And what we did begin to see in our, in our, some of the testing that any of the concentric measures just didn't seem to relate.
00:37:56
Speaker
Like the the degree of relatedness between this concentric measure did not give us a clue in who was good or bad or indifferent at their sport.
00:38:08
Speaker
Just didn't. But the ones who could jump better. like just seemed like they were more coordinated. They were better. The ones who, their strategy, and this is where Matt really started thinking about jump strategy. And I'll know he's he's written now a bunch of papers on that.
00:38:28
Speaker
That mattered. you know there You know, like the ones who just had what subjectively at the time, and then, you know, later proved to be, you know, significantly more objectively, just seemed to have a ah more effective jump strategy, were really good at their sport.
00:38:46
Speaker
But weight on a bar on a power clean, that didn't really matter. Height of of a squat jump, that didn't really matter. plastic strength deficit didn't really seem to matter. Like there's a lot of things that just, you know what?
00:39:02
Speaker
So, and that kind of led us into, well, if that doesn't matter, what does matter? And this is, this is done like 99, 2000, 2001-ish, maybe four years. And at that time, like this this three or four years and at that time um
00:39:20
Speaker
there was like There was a few really impactful, influential people and things and places One was the Super Training Forum.
00:39:31
Speaker
Like, Super Training Book had come out, right? and But the forum was, like, incredible. Yeah, because everyone was online just talking through that, right? Everybody. Like, that was the only time only place.
00:39:42
Speaker
Oh, one of the only places. There was a few other places. But that was the main one. Like, that was the best one, man. Like, like Mel did a great job of of of that forum or setting up that forum and just...
00:39:54
Speaker
you know building this platform but for people to have conversations. And he didn't have anything other than do that, than to go on that forum. Like it was active and it was always like really good people, you know like really, really smart people, including Mel having conversations.
00:40:10
Speaker
So that was really influential. um Schmidt-Bleiker and our access, not even Schmidt-Bleiker, not even just Schmidt-Bleiker, but our access in the West to what was what had been going on in the East
00:40:29
Speaker
really, really started coming to the forefront. Like that we had much more access to what DDR and Russians and and all these different systems were doing in the past through different means, you know, and part of that was at Skiorsi's book. And so part of it was obviously through, um, through, uh, super training and, and, and, um, Perkoshansky.
00:40:50
Speaker
and Schmidt-Bliker stuff and what he was doing as well in Germany. and And he I remember that he he had a, ah like for me, it was really influential papers on on the SSE.
00:41:01
Speaker
And and he would he would argue that we've been kind of focusing on the wrong S. We've focused so much on the shortening, but it's the stretching part that really matters.
00:41:13
Speaker
And that was, you know, my really simple, simplified understanding of what he was talking about was, ah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And what Zaskiewski Sif were saying, you know, very similarly. And there's ah there's a part of actually in in in their book, I think it one paragraph where he talks about where they talk about reflexive isometrics, which which was essentially just weighted depth jumps.
00:41:42
Speaker
and And the importance of this one capacity, this ability to um attenuate force fast, high forces really fast. So, okay, that's that's that's something.
00:41:53
Speaker
Like, that's really important. Dan put me on to Werner Gunther and, you know, some of the things that those guys were doing. And the the importance of static dynamics and deep different things that, you know, everyone's seen the Werner Gunther videos by this point.
00:42:08
Speaker
But that was all I had. This is really interesting. And, and he was on, on, on Bob said he he actually Bob said it for maybe a year, maybe two years. um I can't remember how many, but I saw him train a couple of times and said, yeah, was freaky.
00:42:22
Speaker
Um, and then funny enough, um, I think this was all one or all two, that ESPN thing was the one that it was an ESPN special and that was minutes long, like was really long to talk about S&C, uh, for minutes on ESPN was huge.
00:42:45
Speaker
Probably the first time ever. Right. And they did a, uh, expose or just not an expose, but ah like a little study of what Jay Schrader strength coach still is a strength coach, but I think based in Phoenix, Arizona and his work with Adam Archuleta.
00:43:03
Speaker
And Adam Archuleta was a football player who went to Arizona State University I think he was okay. I don't think he was great. But he was good.
00:43:14
Speaker
Very good. But he was good. but But I don't think he was seen as being like a ah top draft pick, was he? He wasn't a top 100, but he was yeah was ah he was a baller. Yeah. Yeah, okay.
00:43:26
Speaker
But and he was missing, I think the key part is missing the athletic part, I guess. yeah Right, okay. the Yeah, it's um yeah don't I don't know the the full details of that, but ah but I do remember that through Jay Schrader's work, he went and crushed the combine.
00:43:43
Speaker
Smashed it. Just smashed it and went from being a potential, what, second or third rounder to being in a first rounder, right? Was he first rounder? But anyway, he moved up a lot. And that so this is what he talked about. These really quite interesting and somewhat strange strength conditioning methods that Jay Schrader was doing.
00:44:03
Speaker
So I saw this and said, ah, this is this is kind of, Along the same lines of all these other things that that we've been thinking about. And all through this, we're really starting to lean into the importance of of weighted eccentric work.
00:44:22
Speaker
not just accentuated eccentric work, because that that had come in the past a few years earlier, where yeah i think it was you probably through the influence of Charles Poliquin, who was at this the SportsCenter before i was, or just as just as I was starting there, he but is when he left.
00:44:41
Speaker
And he was big into eccentric work, right? But wasn't big into fast eccentric work. So we started playing with that. And it just seemed like,
00:44:51
Speaker
so The athletes who could do that well were the good athletes. ah You know, and and again, we didn't really have anything to measure this. It just seemed like, all right, the people who can attenuate high forces fast, those people seem to be really good.
00:45:06
Speaker
And this aligns with all of these things that are also going on in this strength and conditioning world right now. and And then we started thinking that way. I said, all right, we're going to stop.
00:45:17
Speaker
doing the traditional way of of training, you know, Olympic lift, a squat and and and a press, some sort of pull and maybe a couple of assistant workouts and now build it around this pretty specific eccentric capacity.
00:45:34
Speaker
And that's when Matt really went deep into that stuff, right? By that time, he he's a he's starting to work on his PhD and blah, blah, blah. So it's, you know, fast forward 20 years and now he understands that like no one on the planet.
00:45:51
Speaker
But that's kind true. Yeah. but all Did you end up doing like, or I guess you you could say like, what is this, 20 years ago when you started the Reflex of Eccentrics piece or was sooner than that?
00:46:03
Speaker
Like what what was the time frame for you? um Yeah, it was right about 2000. Yeah, it was 99, 2000-ish. Yeah. And then i always say that I kind of figured out how to fit it into the system by about 2008.
00:46:17
Speaker
two thousand and eight It took me a long time, man. Like a really long time. did you like over and that' so said again Did you over-index on just removing all traditional strength and go straight into all reflexive eccentrics? No, because we couldn't understand the load properly. like we didn't iowa you know what And how how it's um
00:46:45
Speaker
how it integrates with all the other things. So it's not like we cut everything else out. It's just like, where does this fit? How do we load it? What is the density pattern like? And I remember, like go we didn't have any other way other than just kind of trial and error to figure it out, you know, and what other people were doing.
00:47:03
Speaker
So it's, and, you know, we're having pretty good results, and quote unquote, you know you never know, but it's it's ah it felt like this is working out well. But I feel like I finally got comfortable with it the the longer I got through the O's.
00:47:17
Speaker
And my very, very uh, overly general sense of the, the, the organization of this capacity was, yeah i thought about building as much tension through the system as I could.
00:47:35
Speaker
oh you know, tension is almost a proxy for, the magnitude of the force application, say.
00:47:48
Speaker
and all of the things that come along with that. So I can't undo that. I do that through whatever strategies, right? Accentuated eccentrics being a primary rate within that. Maybe it's some i isometrics in different ways, isometrics at different angles and so on and so forth. But the goal was to maximize that.
00:48:07
Speaker
And then once I felt like that was maximized or at the rate of diminishing returns of that capacity, how now can we, or how then, going forward, can we still reach this same degree of tension, but increase the speed of how we got there?
00:48:25
Speaker
So faster faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. and faster but and And that would lead us into the competitive phase. So that's kind of the the the the way in which I quote unquote, periodize that over the course of time.
00:48:38
Speaker
And then it's trying to better understand when these larger magnitude, ah ah larger force magnitude things were were phased out, how often, like what was the density pattern?
00:48:56
Speaker
That they needed to, or I need to to use them to retain the capacity that we had developed through increasing or so building as much tension as we can.
00:49:07
Speaker
And that's when I really started better understanding the individual nature of this. Because for some, it was, had a cat that I coached named Pavly Jovanovic, who was bobsetter for USA.
00:49:23
Speaker
And he was absolute freak. Freak. Like one of the strongest guys that you'll ever see. And his density pattern was like once every three weeks.
00:49:35
Speaker
Yeah. Like I just had to go to the well and force magnitude once every three weeks. And it would can he would continue getting stronger. And others, it was four days.
00:49:46
Speaker
So the ones with four days, like, all right how do i now work on this? By then we were already talking, were talk wherere we were calling reflexive eccentrics.
00:49:57
Speaker
How do I work on reflexive eccentric capacity while retaining this magnitude capacity simultaneously? So that's when we started playing with complexes in different ways to make sure that we're keeping both kind of topped up.
00:50:12
Speaker
Danny, do you have a follow-up there? I got one. That kind of stuff sounds like a better segue right there. Literally, yeah. No, tell us through about Jetter a little bit. Go ahead. You got more depth on that one.
00:50:27
Speaker
All right, well, this this kid is extremely strong. I mean, he was moving 535 pounds at like 0.8. ah He's incredibly strong. We got to a point where like, all right, this is strong enough and and we're struggling to get you into um and into the higher speed zones. Like we can't get you running as fast as what should be running right now based on how strong you are.
00:50:50
Speaker
And that's where we dived into Matt Jordan's work, understanding force plates. We were looking at different metrics on the force plates, like how fast they can decelerate the rate force development on the braking side.
00:51:02
Speaker
And like we we realized, like all right, we just developed this kid to be extremely strong and explosive concentrically. but he cannot, cannot attenuate forces.
00:51:13
Speaker
And he cannot, he he doesn't move through that deceleration phase very well at all.
Innovative Training Approaches
00:51:18
Speaker
And there's like a bunch of other structural reasons within that, but that's where I started looking into what you've done with the request reflexive eccentrics and Matt Jordan's work and We just implemented a block of it for three weeks.
00:51:30
Speaker
And this dude PRs in everything, like everything. He just qualified for push champs. he's run He ran his fastest 30 meters ever run in his life last week. you know And that's where some of this questioning is coming from, um which you know leads me into, okay, we've we've built him strong.
00:51:50
Speaker
We introduced the reflex of eccentrics. You talked about minimal effective dosages. that keeps you strong. But I think like my next question is like, are there athlete profiles? Like, is the person that's very good at producing eccentric forces fast typically not good at producing high force?
00:52:09
Speaker
um Like, let's say from an accentuated eccentric, like, that is, are they not good at that piece on the strength side of things? And is that what they need to touch on every now and then more often?
00:52:22
Speaker
Or is, or or did you not see patterns within ah those types of athletes?
00:52:28
Speaker
I think it's important for us as coaches to, um, build models to make sense or better sense of the complexity that we see every day.
00:52:44
Speaker
So one of the ways in which we do that is to categorize different athletes as different types of movers. And often the risk here is an athlete could be in one category.
00:53:01
Speaker
but maybe right on the edge of that category and another category ah where another athlete in that category could be on the other edge of that category and a category that's totally different.
00:53:16
Speaker
And yet we train both of these athletes similarly because they're in the same category. And this is where it gets really challenging for us. Like we need to allow space for that.
00:53:31
Speaker
Every single athlete that we train is different. They're all different. So some can attenuate massive forces. Some can also attenuate massive forces fast.
00:53:46
Speaker
Some of those people can also concentrically deliver massive forces. And some of those people can also concentrically deliver massive forces fast.
00:53:59
Speaker
And All of the opposite of all of that. So you've got athletes that are literally everywhere. If you've got a hundred athletes, they're moving in a hundred different ways, delivering force in a hundred different ways.
00:54:14
Speaker
So that's a really hard starting spot.
00:54:20
Speaker
It's an impossible starting spot. So we have to start somewhere and that's where, okay. Different people have been done it different ways, like a force velocity profile and so on and so forth. And essentially what we end up with is pretty delineated dichotomous things. you know You're in this category, you're doing this, you're force deficient, so you're going to be working more force.
00:54:43
Speaker
You're velocity if but deficient, so you're going to working more velocity and both. Even though of the hundred people that you may be force deficient or velocity deficient, one could be only just force deficient and one could be massively force deficient and so on and so forth. right So prefer i much prefer to operate within continuums.
00:55:03
Speaker
rather than categories these days. So when we look at, you know, like James's stuff, you know, and I've contributed to that as much as probably anybody. um the the The four quadrants, which I love, it's incredible. It's really it's extremely, extremely helpful.
00:55:20
Speaker
For anybody who's listening don't understand what that is. It's based on James Wilde's PhD studies. he started his PhD in the teams. He finished it a couple of years back. ah publish started Started publishing on it in, I think, 2022.
00:55:35
Speaker
And it's just looking at um sort of the kinematic profiles of of of how athletes sprint. And it's looking at between ground contact time and flight time and the relationship between step length and step frequency and velocity.
00:55:49
Speaker
and it And it places athletes into a category based upon those different relationships. And you could be, for example, somebody who has um really long step length.
00:56:04
Speaker
It takes you a long time to to create that long step. So that'll put you in one category. On the other end, it might you might create force really, really fast and be off the off the ground really, really quickly and have a really short step length. That's another category.
00:56:20
Speaker
But rather than looking at it as as these is four separate categories for me now, I think it's more useful to look at it on a continuum. So you're looking at the continuum between step length and step frequency, and that's a single continuum.
00:56:32
Speaker
And you're looking at the continuum between ground contact time and flight time, and that's a single continuum. And I think that we that way we can be a little bit more accurate with when some of the ways in which we um use the information to inform our practice.
00:56:47
Speaker
um I've totally lost track of what your question was at this point. That that was that was ah that was great. That was great. I have a follow-up, which will direct it somewhere. don't answered your question at all.
00:57:01
Speaker
i pause but I remember there was a question that it related to that, so just started. No, it it did, because it was really just about, the question was really about just like, where would you put certain athletes and bucket them, as as everybody in the industry says.
00:57:14
Speaker
um Which leads me to my next question. Do you think the athletes that can handle the reflexive eccentrics really well, that are good at that, also handle braking on contact and sprinting little bit better?
00:57:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. like that So going back to kind of our work prior, like the degree of relatedness between those two things are really, really high. Like super duper high.
00:57:40
Speaker
And is it a, does it help them coordinate? Like, I know we've talked about the two mass model. We've talked about the difficulty in coordinating the foot ground interaction.
00:57:51
Speaker
And that's what separates some of the best sprinters in the world from like regular athletes. But do you think it helps them coordinate and and do that? Or do you think that? I don't think it's a coordinated thing. I don't think it's a qualitative thing at all. I think it's strictly quantitative.
00:58:05
Speaker
Interesting. Okay. So, Gaut, Gaut, probably one of the the the future greats. What makes him so... what If you were just to observe him as as a spectator and you watch him run in slow motion, you watch him run in fast motion, you watch him run from the side, the front, the back, what would what could you infer about his physical capacities by how he runs?
00:58:37
Speaker
By how he runs or through other means? Let's say just by how he runs. you You have no other means of understanding any of the data around him, but you did have an opportunity to watch him from the front, the side, the back, from the top, whatever angles you need. but So we and one of the things that we can infer by watching him um We may not have the specific metrics of the specific ability to study or measure these metrics, but we can infer that he has a a significant um step length.
00:59:19
Speaker
We can just count steps over 100 meters and we see that and his step length is really long relative to some other elite sprinters. Mm-hmm. We can see he's on and off the ground really quickly.
00:59:36
Speaker
We can see that there's a fairly small degree of hip extension. So the travel of the thigh bone behind the center mass is pretty minimal.
00:59:49
Speaker
We can see that the magnitude of the front side lift is ridiculous. Like his knee gets up past his belly button on some steps. We can see that he carries himself extremely tall, that there seems to be very, very minimal um
01:00:16
Speaker
depression of the center mass through ground contact.
01:00:23
Speaker
And we can see that his joint stiffness around his ankle is extremely, extremely high.
01:00:35
Speaker
So those are the things that we can look at. We also see that is we can see some more qualitative things too, right? Mm-hmm.
01:00:47
Speaker
We can see that he's really skinny. We can see that seemingly, you know, if you if you're Look at the the spinal final engine um methodology. Not methodology, but kind of, you know, look look at the spinal engine ability, let's say.
01:01:10
Speaker
That looks really good. Like he seems to be using everything
01:01:18
Speaker
to run fast. He looks extremely coordinated from top to bottom.
01:01:26
Speaker
He's very, very fluid, very, very rhythmical. So all of those things are things that we can defer. And you want to go deeper on any of that?
01:01:38
Speaker
But this is, but but again, like it's, we have to be, sometimes we have to be really careful. Like studying outliers is a really, really important thing. Yeah.
01:01:49
Speaker
Like, it's really important for us to understand an outlier. It's really important to understand Ben Johnson. It's really ah and ah important understand Usain Bolt. It's really important to understand Gal Gal.
01:02:02
Speaker
But just because of the, these are outliers for a reason. They're different than everybody else in this, even in this really, really, what you would think is a super homogeneous population.
01:02:18
Speaker
Super duper elite sprinters is let's say there's 20 on the planet. There's 20 out of 8 billion. They're all really different. And the one who's the most different gout gout is very different than all the rest of them.
01:02:31
Speaker
ah It's really interesting to look at all of these things. But we have to be very, very important how we use those differences to influence our our work on other things. Because we don't work with, but but for the most part, we don't work with outliers. We work with people who are way closer, like right here in the middle of that bell curve is what we typically work with.
01:02:59
Speaker
Not these ones on the way, way on the outside edge. Makes sense. Yeah. Danny, did you have anything on that? I do have a follow up there. So what is the important?
01:03:13
Speaker
How do I phrase this?
01:03:16
Speaker
What are some of the things that you're extracting from the outliers and then trans translating or transferring into more of this typical population? Is it to build a better reference? Is it to understand, you know, what these anomalies are, or is it to just simply have an appreciation for like, I think that's something I actually get hung up on a little bit myself is, you know, particularly in this conversation of sprinting,
01:03:43
Speaker
you know we were We were looking at Gaukau's feet for... hour and a half the other night in slow motion. and And we kind of came to this point of, well, this is an extreme outlier. So how does this now correspond to 16 year old, you know, youth female soccer athletes, right? how kind of connect those?
01:04:04
Speaker
and And some of that's like, we're trying to understand what causes that. So like that step length, like what caused that step length and what can we what can we understand about that process that would then transfer over to that soccer player?
01:04:17
Speaker
yeah I think it gives you and ah an understanding of the boundaries of your system. Like what is possible on one end? So there's the edge and that's one edge. And here's another edge and it's way over here.
01:04:29
Speaker
And we know that all the people that we work with are somewhere between these two edges, but it's important to understand where the edges are. And then we can start to, okay, this this person is closer to this edge than they are to this edge. They may not be gout gout, but they move kind of like out gout gout.
01:04:44
Speaker
in ways, like these types of things that really super stiff and blah, blah, blah, you know, really elastic and really, really front side. And okay. So you have something on the edge that you can compare it to.
01:04:56
Speaker
So there's some lessons on that edge and there's on the other edge, let's say you've got ah Ben Johnson, right? the ah The man of the infamous 550 pound squad or whatever.
01:05:07
Speaker
And he's on that end and he's a force producing machine. And he's not. He's also super duper elastic too, by the way. But let's say he he didn't have all this elasticity that a guy like Gaut Gaut had.
01:05:18
Speaker
And all he had was this incredible maximum strength capacity. That gives you another way to do things. So we when we're looking at things, and that's kind of what we do, right? you we we We better understand a thing by comparing it to another thing.
01:05:33
Speaker
that's all That's how we understand the the world. So it's when you've got that's what we use gout-gout for. We don't we don't say, okay, gout-gout's feet does this. So that's okay for everybody else's feet to do this.
01:05:47
Speaker
Or we want somebody else's feet to do this. It's gout-gout's feet, and they do this. And then we, as when we're watching this, and I'm sure you guys do this, Part of our job when we are watching is not just to say, ah, he's really fast or she's really fast.
01:06:06
Speaker
And all of these things contribute to that person being really fast. Some of them may not contribute. So when you look at Gaut-Gaut's feet, for example, the question we we we ask ourselves, is this problematic?
01:06:20
Speaker
And if it is a problem, why is it a problem? And then once we understand or once we've figured out or once we've kind of done the work to better understand maybe why it is a problem, maybe then we can write a little bit of a thought experiment about the strategy that we might put in place to improve upon that.
01:06:39
Speaker
ah And through that process, that helps inform our work with other athletes. So we look at Gaut Gaut and we spend 90 minutes working looking at his feet and we say, right, we think it's a problem.
01:06:53
Speaker
Why is a problem? Okay, we list all of the things, why it could be potentially problematic. Okay. And that gives us now a pathway into better understanding some of the strategies we might put in place.
01:07:04
Speaker
And I think that is a really, really good um good way to learn from outliers, say.
01:07:19
Speaker
and i and And once again, I talked to you long and I forgot your quote you forgot your question. Oh, that was fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, because I guess to kind of tie this back to some of the things that we opened with
Understanding Complexity in Coaching
01:07:32
Speaker
too, right? Like a part of this coaching acumen, coaching eye professionalism is simply just genuine experience a bandwidth of reference, understanding where these these boundaries or edges are, as you described it.
01:07:49
Speaker
And then when we look to this contemporary world of of human performance, where we're in this obsessive automation phase and everything trying to become predictive and, you know, the influences of AI and all these other things. But, you know, what you just described right there is a a perfect example of the artistry of perspective inference understanding discretion and so on and so forth and i think like you know we almost always work it back to these same finality points but everybody always wants to have this cookie cutter you know templated answer for everything
01:08:27
Speaker
And between how you describe the quadrants to how you were describing that right there, both of those are perfect illustrations of not just it depends, which is always a cop-out, but it's ah the it's the infusion of all these different factors and then your expertise or experience in being able to discern how these things may or may not be problematic or advantageous or so on and so forth, right? So I think it's excellent.
01:08:54
Speaker
The... um So in what I do, obviously, i'm I'm integrated very deeply into the therapy space because at the level that I work in, the sport that I work in, the quality of movement is so so much influenced by
01:09:20
Speaker
the quality, and let's say let's say the the outcome of the movement is so influenced by the quality of the movement. And I think for the most part, like the best therapists can really influence the quality of movement better than better than coaches can through their work.
01:09:36
Speaker
So what do therapists, like when i' went and I've worked with thousands of therapists now over the course of time, and of those thousands, i you know there's probably there's probably more than this, but let's say there's six, there's six really good ones.
01:09:49
Speaker
And I look at what the commonalities are between those six. And that's kind of what we do, right? When we look at anything to try to figure out why something's working, we're looking at all the people who do that well. and then we look at the commonalities between those things.
01:10:04
Speaker
And all of those six people, do work in very, very different ways, very different ways, but they can get to the same outcome, which is for me, I want a better quality movement.
01:10:18
Speaker
I want this to look and feel better. And there's six people that do that really, really, really, really well. And what are the commonalities? It's not in the component parts in that system.
01:10:30
Speaker
It's not in the things that they do. It's in the strategies, the patterns, and the purpose that they put in place, I guess, of those things, right? And it it it and just reminds me, Danny, of what you said there about the, of, it's not about,
01:10:48
Speaker
um you went go get let let let's let's let's let's give another example here of of watching film.
01:10:55
Speaker
yeah know You said you took 90 minutes and you and watching film and you saw some things and Chris probably saw some things and Les saw some things. i don't know who else was there, but all of you guys probably saw different things in different ways.
01:11:08
Speaker
We've talked about this a lot. You've sent me film and in the past and i've said I've told you what I've seen and that's often different than what you've seen. In fact, it's almost always different than what you've seen.
01:11:21
Speaker
And I've done the same thing. Like I'll take film of stuff and I, if I can't figure it out, I'll send it out to people. And sometimes I just think something's really interesting and I'll send that out to people. Hey, what do you think of this?
01:11:32
Speaker
And I'll send it typically out to like eight, 10, 12 people. And you know where this is going. And probably if you're listening to this, you know where this is going. I get eight, 10 or 12 different opinions on what's happening.
01:11:46
Speaker
From eight, 10, 12, really, really smart people. Why? Because they are looking at the component parts of this system. yeah Now, if you went and it va way went and coached these people, then they may get to the same outcome, but in very, very different ways.
01:12:03
Speaker
We're all seeing different things because, it goes kind of back to what was saying before, right? Like we, as complex adaptive systems, have evolved from a prior condition.
01:12:16
Speaker
We have a history. We have a subjectiveness to ourselves. Like all of the history of that we have, all of the people that I have looked, that I have watched, that I have observed, all the video that I've looked at gives me this today. This brings me to what I see. And that's very different from Danny. That's very different Les. it's very different from all of these other people that I send things to.
01:12:40
Speaker
And I feel like that's really important to understand when we're trying when we're observing movement and trying to improve movement. There isn't one way to do things. There never is in complexity.
01:12:54
Speaker
um That doesn't mean that we don't go through the process to try to figure out what we're seeing. It doesn't mean that we don't have conversations with others because others will see things that maybe we haven't seen yet, that we haven't been able to understand yet.
01:13:09
Speaker
But all of this, like complexity is subjective in nature. It's relative.
01:13:18
Speaker
Right? Based upon, like yeah if I sent um Nicole, yeah and maybe Nicole's not a good, ah let's you use Triana instead.
01:13:31
Speaker
Les's wife. If I sent her you know of gaugow
01:13:41
Speaker
She's going to look at Gaut Gaut. She'll say, yeah, that good. And that'll be about her feedback. She won't have much feedback because she doesn't have a prior history. She hasn't evolved from from anything where she's done this before.
01:13:55
Speaker
So this is a very simple system for her. And if I sent it to Dan, who's got 50 years of prior history, he's going to give you a laundry list of crap.
01:14:09
Speaker
You know what i mean? And if you're not li ready for that laundry list of crap, then that just, it looks like, ah, you know what He's over-complexifying this. No, he's just at a different level than you.
01:14:23
Speaker
Complexity is subjective. It's relative. It's not complex to him. All of this big laundry list of things that he's seeing, that's just where he's at today based upon his history.
01:14:34
Speaker
Where if he said to Triana, she says, ah, his knees are pretty high. ah good You know what mean? that and that's that's that's we need to We need to appreciate that. and that it's um you know We're all in different places.
01:14:51
Speaker
And we're all coaching people who are in different places to do different things in different ways. It's complexity upon complexity upon complexity interacting with complexity.
01:15:04
Speaker
and yeah that's what That has to be a starting point.
01:15:09
Speaker
Because like, if you ignore that, and this is typically what we do, right? You guys have seen the, yeah there's a famous cartoon of this, ah it's a road.
01:15:21
Speaker
And there's ah there's ah there's a road or a path and it goes to this so ah sign. ah One sign says, i think but ah at the top it says answers.
01:15:34
Speaker
And there's a bunch of people on the road and they're all lined up. And it says on the top of the sign, it says answers. And one arrow goes to the left and it says simple, but wrong.
01:15:45
Speaker
And all of the people are going that way. And then the other arrow that goes right says complex, but right. And it's like one or two people going on that path. because that's kind of what we want.
01:15:56
Speaker
we want so we want so We want simplicity, even when it's wrong. And that goes back to our conversation less, and when we're talking about when we go into um ah ah teams, right? They want simple wrong answers rather than complex right answers.
01:16:13
Speaker
you know We continue to treat complex systems if if if they were simple. We assume that parts are and are independent, causes are linear, outcomes are predictable, But this is not how living systems work.
01:16:25
Speaker
It's not how complexity works.
01:16:30
Speaker
I have so much. Danny, go. Yeah, go. Do you think that that is just a nature of human behavior that like, ah so what comes to mind for me there is the fear of the unknown, right? Like we'll, we'll, we'll take the the known devil, you know, over the, the, the the unknown fear or whatever it is.
01:16:50
Speaker
Right. But like we think about the inducing anxiety that we have, with the fear of the unknown and and trying to create or forecast familiarity to suppress that anxiety.
01:17:02
Speaker
So from a coaching stand standpoint, and this is something that absolutely relates to me in real life, you know I think a part of this demand for simplicity is to reduce the amount of unfamiliarity or or lack of knowing to at least be able to formulate some ground to stand on and have a better sense of comfortability with.
01:17:25
Speaker
It may not be the full truth or the whole truth or the the completely right answer, but it's simplified enough to a point where I can gravitate to it and then feel like I have some sense of ownership in what I'm observing.
01:17:37
Speaker
You think that's kind of what's at play here? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you're still trying to keep a job, too, at the same time. For sure. course sure yeah but but keep You'll keep a job if you do a good job.
01:17:49
Speaker
Sure, sure. And yeah it that starts, as i said. like yeah i I totally get it. It's a very human thing. But it's ignoring reality. And...
01:18:03
Speaker
If you want to be good at this, like you have to start living in the real world first. Like yeah there has to be an appreciation for the world that we're living in And for me, I've never seen anybody who's good at what they do who doesn't recognize that first and foremost.
01:18:18
Speaker
Now, if you don't want to be good, like if you're not that interested and you just want a job and you just like the job how it is and you you know you like using your your force platform and measuring all these things and that's fun and cool, them yeah, go ahead.
01:18:31
Speaker
That's fine. i know and and you There's no judgment there. but if you But if you really, really, truly want to understand what's going on and to try to impact it in positive ways, then it has to start with appreciation of the world that you're living in.
01:18:45
Speaker
It has to start there. And if you don't start from that, you're just going down the wrong path to begin with. You can do cool things on that path. You can enjoy yourself. You can have impact. But it's the wrong stuff.
01:18:57
Speaker
it it's It starts with, you know, and there are there are strategies that you can put in place and you can't just say, ah, it's all complex. I don't know what to do. Like, but that's not, that's just a pop out, right? but But embracing uncertainty is a mindset shift that we start there, right?
01:19:14
Speaker
ah We have reframe how we design interventions. We have to do that. We have to adopt living assessments rather than periodic assessments. We have to start looking at our work as say as as um as as implementing safe-to-fail experiments rather than programs.
01:19:38
Speaker
So, you know, it's for me, it's, it's um yeah, I don't want to repeat myself, but that's kind of where I'm at now.
01:19:47
Speaker
what is um What is your interest right now in learning? Like obviously complex systems, but but what are you learning right now? What are you studying?
01:19:59
Speaker
um i was having this conversation the other day with my friend Marco Arrell. Marco is a Italian sprint coach. who was um He's pretty young in his career, but he's really, really smart.
01:20:17
Speaker
He's a sprint coach slash osteopath. He's his own little system and he's building us building a little system as well, right? He's got three assistant coaches and three assistant therapists. And he's got a group of like eight.
01:20:28
Speaker
it's it's It's great. deep Deep thinker. And um he was asking me about ah supplementation. ah about Because he doesn't do anything with pre-race or post-race with any of the athletes that he works with.
01:20:43
Speaker
So, and he said, I feel like, do I need to know much about that? And I said, not necessarily. But you need to you need to have deep knowledge on probably three things.
01:21:00
Speaker
And you have to have broad knowledge on all the things in your system. So if you've got three things, you're doing great. If you've got two things, you're good. You're in the right right you know in the right ballpark. You're moving in the right direction.
01:21:12
Speaker
And if you've one thing, well, that's that's good. It's a start. You have deep domain expertise on one thing. But to be really good at this thing, you need to go deep on another thing as well. And if you'd be really good, you go and need to go deep again on a third.
01:21:25
Speaker
And what are those three things? If you look at the the health and performance ecosystem, let's say, let's go a little bit deeper into that and say coaching elite sprinters system.
01:21:36
Speaker
And that's your system. What are the things that you need to know about? You need to know a lot about biomechanics. Are you deep in that? Yeah. Okay, good. Are you really, really deep in the health end of things through therapy? Yeah, I'm an osteopath.
01:21:49
Speaker
I'm very deep into that. Okay, cool. Are you a deep into programming? Yeah, okay. So right now you've already got free, deep domain expertise. Now you're, to answer your question then, how much do you need to know about supplementation?
01:22:05
Speaker
Enough. And that's it. You just need to know enough about it. And that's just, you know, you know it's important. And this is why it's important. And then if you need to know more, you have somebody in your network Who has domain expertise within that? That's your job at this point as ah as a coach.
01:22:23
Speaker
You've got deep domain expertise on this, deep domain expertise on this, deep domain expertise on this, or maybe you're seven or eight out of 10 on all of these three things. Now your job is to be two or three out of 10 on all of the other things and build a network where you've got domain experts in all of them that you can refer to when you're when you're stuck and when you need to know a little bit more.
01:22:43
Speaker
So for me, that's, you know, Danny asked what what I'm kind of deep in right now. You know, and this conversation with Marco sort of, I was reflecting on what my, you know, what my domain expertise is. I still feel like I am a, I have domain expertise on sprint biomechanics.
01:23:04
Speaker
I've got domain expertise on motor learning. I've got domain expertise on programming. And I used to have domain expertise on therapy and S&C. I don't anymore.
01:23:16
Speaker
I'm like five out of 10 on those now. ah But I have people in my network that are, so I'm good. I used to have like a pretty good, ah like a five or six or maybe seven out of 10 nutrition supplementation. I don't anymore.
01:23:29
Speaker
I'm significantly less on that now, but I've got other people that I can refer to. So for me now then is is to make sure that I'm still learning enough about those things that I need to know enough about to keep them up to a level where I can understand them in context and go deeper into the things that are really driving me.
01:23:49
Speaker
And for me right now, it's like I'm writing this paper slash book with with Rob Wilson. Um, and on on using a complexity science approach to better understand health and performance.
01:24:04
Speaker
Thus, you know, what we've been talking about a lot over the course of this conversation. So that's been my, that's been 90% of my reading lately. ah let's say outside of that in terms of like the things you listed or let's say strength sports science i don't know what the other categories could be nutrition what's the one piece that you're like and want to spend some more time and and dive deeper into that
01:24:34
Speaker
yeah i I think like the one thing I don't do enough um real research on or reading on is the psychology piece.
01:24:51
Speaker
Like I probably need to be better at that.
01:24:57
Speaker
It's, it's, it's obviously it's so important,
01:25:03
Speaker
but I'm not interested. Like I, well, I am interested, ah but like nothing good's been done.
01:25:13
Speaker
You know, I just don't feel like me reading another sports psych book or another psychology book really helps me that much. So I do a lot of a lot of reading on, you know, philosophy, obviously.
01:25:30
Speaker
And i feel like that helps me. But maybe I need to... also um expand that and read more on general psychology. Maybe I need to do that.
01:25:43
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. I'm reading um my friend Tom Tombleson, who's the yeah director of athletics at Manchester City. used to be the director of performance at England Rugby.
01:25:55
Speaker
he um He recommended a book to me. um Hold on a second. I'll bring it up. And I'm listening to
Book Discussion and Personal Reflections
01:26:03
Speaker
it. He read it. I'm listening to it.
01:26:06
Speaker
And, uh,
01:26:10
Speaker
is that, no, that's not what it is. Sorry. The courage to be disliked. ah And I always looked at that. So, you know, like I, it's a, it's a fun title, right?
01:26:24
Speaker
And I've always felt, I've always kind of felt that. Like, I don't care if you like me, man. I just, I've never really ah attributed that with courage or not being courageous, but that's kind of been a thing that has always been there with me.
01:26:38
Speaker
um And, um but so i so I saw that book and I never really, I said, ah, that's interesting, but never read it. And then Tom suggested that I give it a read.
01:26:51
Speaker
So I'm listening to it. And it's it's written by two Japanese guys. And it's basically taking ah Adler's perspective. So Adler was a psychologist kind of around the time of, um of a what's what's the heck's the other guy's name
01:27:13
Speaker
name? Most famous psychologist on planet. Sigmund Freud? Sigmund Freud. Around the same time. Um, but really, and really interesting, just very interesting. ah it's not a good book. Like I don't I'm not really enjoying it to be honest with you. i'm kind of annoyed.
01:27:26
Speaker
So it's it's about that conversation. It's a, it's a ongoing conversation between this guru, this Adlerian guru. So he's taking that Adlerian perspective on, on life and he's teaching this young guy who's having some issues about how to get through his issues.
01:27:44
Speaker
And I'm really annoyed by the young guy. Like he's just, he's super annoying. i It's taken me a long time to read it. But it's it's given me some interest into Adler.
01:27:57
Speaker
so on the So on the side at the same time, I'm reading a bunch of Adler stuff as well. so There we go. Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.
Upcoming Event Highlights
01:28:05
Speaker
Love it.
01:28:07
Speaker
I got about two, three minutes and I got to get to a session here. I suppose the the natural segue to the conclusion of this brilliant little segment we've recorded here this morning is to remind the audience that we have an event coming up here in Grand Cayman Islands, our second annual TeamSpeed.
01:28:31
Speaker
still we were talking a little bit ah before we started recording about where we're heading with this. And and know obviously a lot of the things that we discussed in the podcast here are all prevalent for us with what we're what we're doing, what we're doing right now. But if we if we had anybody listening to this that was was interested or or curious about this event we have, um what's your 30-second elevator to convince them to sign up for this thing?
01:28:55
Speaker
I think what's really interesting about these events that we've had, and we've had a few of them now, we've had one in Cayman, is the debrief on the last day. And as always, man, like everyone's just, man, this has been so good.
01:29:12
Speaker
So great. and like and and And it's not, they don't say that it's been great because they learned this and learned that and learned this and learned that. It's not about all these specific things. It's like, It's deeper than that.
01:29:24
Speaker
And then what's really cool is to see all the Instagram posts that come over the next course of the next week. And how many comments are something like, man, this is life-changing. Right. yeah You know, and that's what it is. Like it's everybody knows that, all right, Stu, Danny and and Les, they're smart guys. they We're going to learn some stuff about speed and how to apply that and help our athletes get faster.
01:29:48
Speaker
And that's what it's, that's what it's about. But that's not what it's about, is it? It's about so much more than that. Like it's the, we we were talking about before about, you know, what, what differentiates kind of some of the things that we do at Altus.
01:30:03
Speaker
what you guys do at Spelman Performance and Rood Rock and why we've kind of come together and what what how what we do in both individually and together differs from others.
01:30:17
Speaker
And it's that part of it. It's the building of community. And I feel like we've done for, whether that's been explicitly or an explicit goal of ours or not,
01:30:29
Speaker
That's what's happened, right? Like we, it's not about networking for us. It's not about learning this new technique. It's about building a community. And for me, like these, I love these events, man.
01:30:40
Speaker
Like I just get so much from these events and being around these, these, these, these people and hearing them more about their stories and hear more about your guys' stories and working with you guys. And, and it's, yeah, I just, I'm really looking forward to this.
01:30:53
Speaker
I think they're great events. I think these are no brainers. i think the cost of this is incredible. And, and you will get so much out of this sense. So much more than what you think you're getting, even though, even if you're thinking that you're coming and getting going to get a a good deal.
01:31:11
Speaker
if i can If I can tack on to that, I've had probably seven or eight people that have have reached out you know since we made the announcement about 10 days ago. And um you know of course, there's a a promotional responsibility. Of course, we're trying to get people to come to the things that we're putting on. But um right in line with what you just said there, these these people have kind of you know reached out and asked about it. the The response that I've been giving everyone is,
01:31:36
Speaker
I've never done anything quite like this. And here's the reason why. You mentioned the debriefs on the last day. Every event is the always the same. we We got share contact. We got to stay in touch. Let's link up. Let's do something.
01:31:49
Speaker
And you know honest God, there were six people, six of the 12, eight of the 12, eight of the 12 people that we had last year signed up or 15 that we had signed up.
01:32:01
Speaker
I still communicate with regularly, like multiple times. I still communicate with you. and And we go to, you know, Jordan Fairclough was one that like, that's like a friendship that has evolved. the The, you know, JT and DJ and Nick and like, that's a relationship that's evolved when they were in San Diego, they hit us up, you know?
01:32:21
Speaker
So I think besides your, to kind of, you know, ah you know, capitalize on your point there. It's a real relationship builder. We're really going to manifest something out of time like this ah that will continue beyond a four day event for sure.
01:32:37
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it's life changing. I mean, Jordan works with us in some capacity. Bex has come down. yeah i mean, it's it's an it's insane. like just Which led into the the one that we had in Chicago, the Altus event, where you saw some of those people when we got to catch up with them.
01:32:54
Speaker
Like, bro, have you been up to? Oh, man, i ah you know I left Liverpool and I started my thing or I developed my own system. Like, there's so much that came out of that from a life-altering standpoint. It was the catalyst for a couple of life-altering events for some people in our network. So I know the reasons.
01:33:14
Speaker
know It's been really influential for us too, I think. Oh, hugely. it's in Grant Kamen. andison grant kaman It's incredible. Like part of it is that. Part of it is is is what we're putting together and the the individuals.
01:33:29
Speaker
But part of it is a special place. You don't know until you're there. Like it is a special place. Yeah, that's our whole families are coming because I wasn't allowed to go without them. They were like, all right, we're all coming. my My daughter still talks about this boy that she met a year ago.
01:33:49
Speaker
No. And she's like, is Mason going to be there? I was like, i hope not. Like, you knew I'm not developing a long-term relationship here. No, but it is special. The people there are special. I've never been to a place like that. I've been to a couple of cool places, but ah the community around it, just the hotel, the staff that works there, it's everything that wraps into it. Palm Heights is amazing.
01:34:11
Speaker
Right. Yeah, the food. So, you know, this is we all agreed to do this, which is funny, whether or not people were coming because of how badly we just wanted to have an excuse to be there and to learn from each other.
01:34:25
Speaker
um But then you add on the other group of it. There's no like hierarchy and learning. Like everyone's at the same level. I'm sitting there learning from Stu. Danny's learning from me. I'm learning from Danny. Like it's we're all together and we're all sharing.
01:34:39
Speaker
I think the most important piece that that I took away was the conversations that we had in between the presentations. Presentations were fine. They were great. But everyone learned during the conversations that we had in between presentations, the ah sharing, the questions, the answers, like,
01:34:55
Speaker
it was It was so cool just to hear everyone's perspective, especially when Jordan started talking. And, um you know, we we had Dusty hop in. We had Bex hop in. Like, that's where the learning happens. And it gives you the opportunity to spend five days with people to do that.
01:35:09
Speaker
It's more than just presentations. So, yeah, i'm I'm super excited about it. That's the, and yeah, that's the advantage of having the intimate setup to this, you know, like Chicago was fantastic. that was an awesome weekend, but you know, there's a big difference in takeaway when you have 300 people versus 15 people.
01:35:26
Speaker
And I think that actually just changes the dynamic of what people are, ah you know, actually able to take away unless like, you know, one of your favorite heuristics is, you know, so what about Monday morning, right?
01:35:37
Speaker
You know, we spend this money, we take this time, we travel to these events and, It's a lot of great information, but like, do I go back and then Monday morning, do I do something actually different based on this event that I just went to? And I think if you go to this and you're not doing at least one thing, two things different on Monday morning, then we just, thought I don't know what to tell you. you you're We're going to change something about the way you're going about this ah immediately. It's effective it's effective immediately.
01:36:06
Speaker
thousand percent. Yeah. ah Well, Stu, we've taken couple hours out of your day. know you're probably missing the Liverpool-Arsenal game right now. Or you're just watching it.
01:36:16
Speaker
I'm just watching it right here. It's in the 92nd minute. There's five more minutes of injury time to go to Liverpool. One, Arsenal, nil. There we go. Solid.
01:36:28
Speaker
Are you Arsenal fan? No, I'm a Man City fan. we yeah We lost today. We lost to Brighton. It wasn't it. We won't talk about Manchester United on this podcast um after what what happened the past couple but this this past week.
01:36:43
Speaker
but ah But no, thank you for having the time to be on here. This is incredible. Learned a ton from you, just continuously learning from you. ah You don't even understand how much you've impacted my life and I'm sure Danny's life as well. Just you you gave me so much, I can't even repay you. We always we always have conversations like, what can we do for Stu? like How can we pay back Stu? And we're still trying to figure that out. Don't give me money. but Just give me more money.
01:37:09
Speaker
ah Yeah, I've given you a lot. i Just run a check. yeah
01:37:15
Speaker
but Danny has all the money. He controls the finances for this. um he's got He's got control of the the bank
Conclusion and Future Anticipations
01:37:21
Speaker
account. so he'll So he'll send you a check in the mail. y all want it was ah it's ah it's ah It's a pleasure being on the very so so that an officer the very first, but it's a pleasure to be on Danny and show.
01:37:34
Speaker
And it's a pleasure having you guys in in my life, personally and professionally. And I'm looking forward to seeing you guys again in six weeks. Can't wait, man. I really can't. Six weeks.
01:37:47
Speaker
All right, let's do it. I'm bringing all my kids too, you can babysit, Stu. Can't wait.