E23 | Zack Zillner: Anecdotes and Lessons in Sport Performance

Donnie: Welcome to the team behind the team podcast. I am your host Donnie Maib. This is the monthly show focused on building conversations around the team-based model approach to ethic, performance, strength, and conditioning, sports medicine, sports science, mental health, and wellness and sports neutral.
Hello, welcome back to the team behind the team podcast. I’m your hose. Donnie Maib. And we are so excited about this month’s episode for a couple reasons. First and foremost, I’ll let Mike Hanson talk about this, but we are officially back in studio, not on zoom co tainted. How does this feel to you today?
Mike: I’ve never thought I’d be this excited to see people’s mouths and noses and face to face versus looking at a screen. So it’s definitely nice to be back. Absolutely,
Donnie: man, I’ll tell you what, uh, this has been a buildup in to our studio here, uh, that, that organize and edit. I was so excited just to be in the room and see, see them in smiles and just human interactions.
So special. Thanks to our studio and to Mike, you’ve done a great job of just keeping us going through this pandemic. So hats off to you, my friend. So you’ll be back with that. We’ll jump into this episode today. To me personally, I know Mike is a, it’s a special episode. It’s one of our very own coach. Zach Zilner is a house called Zach, say hello to the listeners.
What’s up listeners, but, uh, we’ll have a little fun today since we can see each other, we may prod a little bit. So that’d be part of the show and glad to have that back, Zach. So thank you for being on making time to do this. We’ve been looking forward to it.
Zack Zillner: Thanks for, I mean, this is awesome. The studio make, I feel like a Eminem and eight mile down here.
This is, this is legit. You’re gonna bust out a little rap.. Exactly. Maybe at the end, if you guys are lucky. Right? Right.
Mike: What have you been up to this summer? I know you’ve been there. You can ride the bike or, you know, me
Zack Zillner: riding the bike around Austin, seeing the sites, um, trainin’ the lady Longhorns and, uh, enjoying all the breakfast tacos I can get in Austin.
Donnie: I know you can not to the listeners. If you’ve never been to Austin, you got to come get food. It’s not our fault. If you put weight on though, right? You need to train, right. You gotta get the bike ride. So Zach, thanks for being on and, uh, super excited to interview you today. Just a little bit about Zach, and then we’re gonna kind of jump into that first question.
Zac, uh, is going into its fifth year here at the university of Texas as the head coach for women’s basketball, athletic performance does an incredible job. He’s currently been, uh, managing through a coaching transition. He’ll talk about that in a minute, but been in some great stops along the way. He’s been at Kansas.
He’s been at Illinois and in Southern miss. What I love about Zach you’ll hear today. He’s just worked with a ton of different sports, different experiences. That brings a lot of value to the way you look at coaches, the way you look at athletes and the way you just train in prescribed performance. And so with that, Zach, your first question, just take a minute for, for everybody listening, kind of introduce yourself.
Uh, where are you from? What is, we talked about your role? Like, how did you get here? Give us a little more details on that. And then, uh, any coaches that kind of have influenced you along the way to get here?
Zack Zillner: Yeah, for sure. Um, Zach Zellner, like coach said, I’m from Kansas city. I did my undergraduate work at the university of Kansas.
Um, how I got there, like anybody else was strength conditioning. I think we had a love of working out. For some reason. We just enjoy pushing each other, pushing ourselves, um, me to like places I’d never been before. Um, I think it was more of like a mental, physical type outlet thing. Um, and. Back when I was in high school, I was trying to describe that I wanted to work with athletes and I don’t think that was very popular at the time everyone was like, so do you want to be?
And I thought a trainer and I’m like, no, I don’t. I want to teach people how to lift weights, run fast, jump high. And like, well, you want to be, you know, a physical therapist. I was not a lift weights. John Pye ran fast. And so it was funny. My seniors, a year in high school, I’m going into my freshman year of college.
Uh, my mom, uh, she had a marketing agency at the time and her receptionist, uh, retired. And so she was like, Hey, you’re gonna work for two weeks till we find a new receptionist. I was like, oh, perfect. I get to answer phones all day and whatnot, but it ended up, uh, turned out to, uh, make my career actually take off.
Um, one of the women that worked for my mom, uh, she was asking me, what did I want to be? And I was like, you know, I want to train athletes. I want to lift weights, run fast, jump high, all that stuff. And she’s like, my brother-in-law actually does it. And I was like, no way. She’s like, yeah, North Carolina. And I was like, well, North Carolina that’s big time.
And so she gave me his email address. I emailed him and he actually knew one of the coaches at the university of Kansas, Derek Arnold. So I, as a young guy in high school guy just emailed. Derek was like, Hey, I live down the street. We’d love to come up and visit you. Um, show me the facility, do whatever.
And like huge Jayhawk fan. I’d love to, you know, see what you guys got going on up there. And I got a lot. I lucked out and he returned my email. I went up there, he gave me the tour all around and I was like, coach, I’d love to intern. He’s like, well, you gotta ask the boss if you can do that. And then the boss at that time was Andrea hoody.
Um, so I knocked on her door, introduced myself. She was like, well, We don’t really do that stuff until you graduated. And I was like, well, I’ll do whatever I’ll clean. I’ll do grunt work. Like I can do that kind of stuff. And she’s like, all right, well talk to Derek, figure something else out. And, um, her joke was basically, she was just trying to run me out.
Um, she was like, well, you can’t do any teams until you’ve cleaned the whole weight room in our weight room. If you guys have seen it, it’s like a football weight room. It’s huge. So I was like, all right, well, the teams work out at six in the morning and basketball works out at two. So I need to get there before the teams at six to start cleaning so I can watch those morning groups and then go to class and just somehow sneak back, clean a bunch so I can watch her coach men’s basketball cause Kansas that’s that’s king out there.
And so, um, lucked out. She didn’t end up firing me or getting rid of me. Um, and then about halfway through my sophomore year, we had a bunch of the Olympic coaches leave and take new jobs. And so at that time it was her and myself, she’s in the middle of hiring everyone. So she was like, Hey, you’ve watched enough people like, let’s start coaching, let’s get it going.
I was like, all right, let’s go. And so anything I learned in those first two years of freshmen, sophomore, um, I just tried to keep my head above water and not screw up too bad. So my responsibilities at the time were cheer dance and then I assisted with track and then obviously basketball and all that.
So it was a crazy cool experience. She’d probably get mad at me for saying this, but I tried to skip class. If I knew that a certain team was coming in, that I wanted to work with or certain coach was working. So I tried to finagle the system of running a class run there. Um, but that’s kind of what taught me the importance of reps like coaching reps.
Um, the only way you get better at coaching is actually coaching. So if I want to be a good coach, I need to actually coach. Um, so I graduated from the university of Kansas. Um, then I left. One of the basketball coaches to Southern miss. Um, I was the director for, uh, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and volleyball.
Uh, it was 23. Had no idea what I was doing. I’d never been in charge of anybody or anything, but you’re the director. So you gotta fake it, fake it till you make it down there. So I remember going down there and we had three players on the men’s basketball team who were older than me. I had, my GA was older than me.
Um, so I’m like, how am I going to come here and convince these people that they need to listen to this short guy from Kansas? So luckily I had some great coaches around me. To kind of help me going, um, get going. But I think the biggest thing was building relationships with those athletes as far as, um, let me teach you why we need to do this stuff.
Um, how’s this going to help you be a basketball player, a better volleyball player? Um, I think definitely I’m a teacher first when it comes to that kind of stuff. Um, and then from there an opportunity to work at university of Illinois, I did women’s basketball, volleyball. Both golfs. Um, I ran some cool, uh, mentors up there, Randy Ballard.
He’s now their director of sports medicine. He was the athletic trainer for volleyball there. And I lucked out that the head volleyball coach was Kevin Hambly who’s now at Stanford. Yeah. So Kevin, unlike most sport coaches, he’s a huge sports performance nerd. Like probably loves this stuff almost as much as we do.
So we’d sit down every week, Kevin, Randy, and myself, we’d go over the whole training of what we were going to do sets and wraps exercises. Um, and so I had to be on my a game as far as I’m presenting every single workout to the coach and I need to have rationale and he’s going to ask intelligent questions of why am I programming this?
Why am I not programming that, um, that have, you know, most coaches, they’re just like, well, let’s get stronger now. Okay. What’d you do? But this is what we need to do. Um, Kevin was different, which was awesome. Um, then towards my tail end, Adam Fletcher took the men’s job there. Um, he showed me a lot about, you know, coming into a new situation, um, bringing a new training culture.
And how do you get these athletes that don’t want to work out to work out, especially in the men’s basketball space? Um, he was a huge help. Um, just as far as that kind of stuff goes and kind of navigating the politics that go with college athletics of who you need to talk to, what kind of relationships you need to make.
Um, and then from there I got my, uh, what I thought was my dream job. Um, coach Judy called me back to hire me at the university of Kansas to work with women’s basketball. Did softball, golf, tennis assisted with men. So bunch of sports. Um, and I thought just being from Kansas city, he got to work with my Alma mater.
Um, what better way than to work at the university of Kansas. So I was there for 10 months. Um, then I remember she knocked on my door and was like Karen Aston called from the university of Texas. Um, she wants you to interview. And I was like, oh wow, that’s cool. Like, you think I should do it? And she was like, it’s Texas.
I was like, okay, cool. I interview. And then I called her. I was like, Hey, I got the job. Um, what should I tell her? She’s like, it’s Texas. You go. And I was like, all right, well, see ya. So, uh, yeah, moved down here. Um, Austin’s a great city, um, worked for Karen for three years and now coach Shaffer for one, um, and starting my fifth year here at the Longhorns, just working women’s basketball, which has been awesome
Mike: down
here with us.
Now
Zack Zillner: I’m down here with you guys, so that, that wouldn’t be doing this right now.
Mike: There’s so many lessons that you just shared. I mean, you probably could do this with anyone’s coaching journey, but like there’s so much to unpack there. Like, you’ve talked about the importance of building relationships within an athletic department, because politics is a thing they don’t teach you in school.
Um, you talked about the very beginning, how you were just an intern trying to clean, right. You set yourself for opportunities and then all of a sudden the door opens and now you’re able to go through it. Um, so yeah, I just wanted to point that out. That that was really cool that you just highlighted all those things, talking about why you’re doing things and having to present it on a week to week basis.
Um, it’s just cool to hear.
Donnie: Yeah. And that stood out to me too. Mike, when he, when he was given his whole kind of timeline was. I, and I never knew that about you, but that makes, I mean, that makes sense with your DNA of kind of who you are just. Hey, I’ll clean and do whatever, just so I can get in the door.
And I just don’t know that people or young professionals are willing to do that as much as they used to be. I would say, I mean, that was kind of when I first started coaching, that was pretty normal, but that’s, that’s pretty awesome.
Zack Zillner: I got lucky that both my parents were super hard workers. My mom’s entrepreneur and my dad, um, same thing.
He did a lot of, uh, construction stuff. So every job I’d have to do. He’s like, Hey, come help me at this job site. Like, you’re going to clean, you’re going to move this. You’re going to move that. So I was used to grant work and he’d always tell me, he was like, you know, if you can outwork somebody, it doesn’t matter how smart they are.
If you can outwork somebody you’re going to like where you end up. And I had that mentality going through pretty much everything I do was well that, you know, even with athletics. So he’s taller than me. He’s bigger than me all at work. I’m like, uh, he’s smarter than me while all at work. Um, um, and I think that mentality of in the weight room, cause I remember there was a couple other interns, but they weren’t willing to.
Clean, all this stuff, right? No one wants to do like that stuff sucks, but I was like, that’s my one job. And if these coaches are judging me off of one thing, I better do that really well because that’s my only skill that I have to offer. Right. Yeah. At
Mike: that point. And that’s, we were just talking about this in the office a couple of weeks ago is we had an intern maybe two years ago now, and he’s always been truthfully one of my favorite interns that we’ve had.
And I promise you, he, like, he didn’t know where to start with X’s and knows, you know, he had barely been, you know, through a physiology college course, but like I said, he was one of the best interns who probably came through because he had that same mentality. So I think that piece of advice, or even that, that anecdote of yours.
Hey, I’ll just do what I can control and do it as best I can, like that serves interns way more than I think a lot of
Zack Zillner: them realize, well, a lot of them, they try to impress you with, like, I read this book and I know this training methods like dude, everyone knows.
Mike: I know the answer too. Cause they’re, they’re trying to highlight, Hey, I, you know, I read this too.
Zack Zillner: Everyone’s read that book. We get it. But like, what are you doing? Like, especially when interns, when there’s more than one of them, it’s like, you guys are buddies. Now you work together. But at the end of the day, all three of you guys are how many you’re going to be in competition for the same job. And so you should know all the methodologies, the science, all that.
Stuff’s a prereq in my book, but who’s willing to do the extra stuff to take it to the next level. And your first job, it’s going to be one of those jobs where like, no offense, if you can’t train somebody out of the weight rooms we work at at Texas or Kansas, like you don’t have a prayer, right? Cause like these smaller schools where you get your first job, like.
At Southern mess, we had two racks, some dumbbells, and that was it. And it’s like, how do you get 30 athletes through here? Right. And you got to get creative and you know, different stuff gets started. And how are you going to adapt to those different situations?
Mike: For sure. And I
Donnie: just, yeah, go ahead, coach. Don is going to change topics here for a second.
Um, go ahead. Did you have something
Mike: else? No, just continuing to, I guess, beat the dead horse of like, it’s the interns who come in and they don’t understand. It’s like, no, what we’re looking for is like, you know, everyone can read a book. Like you can get that along the way, but who is showing up before I am to have the room set up without being asked.
And those are the things that I think always stand out and actually contribute to the value of the team. More so than, you know, asking you a question you may know the answer to because you read a book. Yeah.
Donnie: I mean, I like to kind of reiterate both you and Zach what you’re saying. I remember one of our head coaches, um, this is a little bit of a parallel little off to the side, but he was talking about.
The difference between, you know, recruits that come in and become athletes here at Texas, that you want to bring on your team to do a great job and are much easier to manage and build a better culture for the team. He said this, he says, he’s narrowed it down to one thing. Like I’m looking for kids or athletes that when they come here, they want to give back more than we then they’re taking from Texas and that’s.
And I say that point to the interns you get, we get, I’ve seen people even recently, they want to come and intern with us, but they’re coming want to take from us. They’re not wanting to come give, they want to learn what you’re doing, or coach Anna Craig or clan or male or Joe or whoever Zack, what they’re doing.
They want to take from us. But they don’t come with that mentality. Well, you just say like, Hey, I’m coming just to give. And if I get something in return, that’s cool, but I want to give more than I’m taking. I think that’s something that a, it’s hard to find with, with young coaches and you gotta figure out if you’re
Zack Zillner: young, I was talking to coach an intern the other day, she’s at Yukon.
And she was like, well, I feel like I’m, there’s nothing I can do. Like, I’m just an intern. I don’t know anything. And I was like, well, where do you create value? Right. And so my value in the beginning was cleaning. And then as I got better at that, it was like, well, I’m really good at relationships. So I can pick up on when a kid comes through the door and they’re not acting like they usually do.
I can tell whatever coach I’m working for. Like, Hey, I talked to this athlete, they seem a little off, I’m just letting you now, um, different things like that. So it’s like, where do you add value? And that works with along the whole spectrum, whether you’re an intern or a director, like where do you add value to the department of the university is different than an intern does, but it’s values value.
Yeah. I mean,
Mike: new hires. I think that’s the same lesson is you come into a place that you haven’t been. You’re not quite sure, you know, how things operate there. It’s I think a big piece of success. And when you, anytime you take a new job, Observing listening and finding where are those spots that I can add value?
Like knowing myself and knowing what this place is, maybe, you know, where they need help or where they’re lacking. Where can I insert myself to actually help, you know, the overall
Donnie: cost? That’s true. It’s a struggle. Yeah. For definitely people. For sure. So good step, a little change. The topic for you, you should coach.
So look at your, the span of your career. How has your philosophy changed? Is it changed at all? Is it, uh, with how you just prescribe, you know, layout program?
Zack Zillner: Yeah, I think he’s changed a lot as far as, I mean, the bare bones are still there. Like ground-based multi-joint movements like hardworking. I think the hard work stuff doesn’t replace it.
Anything. Um, I think I’ve been lucky to be exposed to different technologies, um, whether it’s forced to plate velocity based stuff, um, workload management that kind of helps me rethink and then honestly getting older myself, um, I’m not able to get away with the same stuff I could at 18 training. So now I’m an old 31 year old that, um, you know, things aren’t when you’re younger, it’s like my warm-up is put the bar on my back and roll.
Now it’s like, all right, if I do that, I’m gonna be in trouble for a couple of days. Um, but now I kind of feel like, well, some of my athletes, you know, they come in and they’re hurting and hollering and it’s like, okay, well, your knees hurt when you do that. My knees hurt when I do this, what are different ways you can reverse engineer it.
So I think when I was a younger coach, it was more like we’re going to get in and get after it. Um, Like let’s put some weight on the bar and train, and now it’s like, we’re going to do that same stuff, but we’re also going to throw in some more recovery stuff, more mobility stuff, um, things to help prep, um, the big, nuts and bolts that we’re trying to do before.
Um, so I think like with anything it’s reps, the more athletes I see and work with, I was lucky to work with track and field. I think everyone should try to work with track and field just cause you’re going to work with athletes who are, you know, tall, short, big, tiny, skinny, good athletes, bad athletes. Um, And that’s just a lot of different variety and the end of the day, their sport, and, you know, it’s time to measure it and you can see the weight room numbers went up, did their sprint time go down or up and why?
Donnie: And on top of what you just said in Mike, you know, this you’ve worked with track and field w those different body types and backgrounds, but also the different philosophies. Good and bad for sure. With track, track and field coaches. I mean, again, there was some really sharp track coaches, but there’s some other that sometimes they just don’t know that they don’t know.
And you know what, I’ve always, this is just my kind of thought in my, he may have a little different look on it, but it’s not always fun when you work with a coach that maybe doesn’t know what they’re doing, but you know what that makes you a better coach, because you gotta learn how to manage and educate and sell your program to maybe somebody who doesn’t believe in what you’re doing or doesn’t understand what you’re doing.
And that takes a different, uh, leadership style and trait to do that. So it’s good for you. It doesn’t always feel good, but it is good.
Mike: For sure. Um, and then like, we’ve been talking about all these coaches and experiences, um, that you’ve had sheep collaborated with a ton of sport coaches, seemingly a bunch of staff from sport, med, sports scientists, et cetera.
Um, what are some characteristics of those high performance teams that you’ve worked with, whether it be, you know, helping with men’s basketball at Kansas. Um, but also, yeah, I also want to play the flip side to that in drawing from your experiences, you know, what are also the characteristics of underperforming performance teams?
So high performance teams, what are those look like underperforming teams, and then, you know, once you kick it off, I’d also love to hear from coach mayb. Cause you’ve worked with plenty of people as well.
Zack Zillner: I think the biggest thing you’ll see. Especially head coaches that are super successful is they know themselves as a person.
And as a coach, like they’re not trying to be anybody else or worried about anybody else. They know who they are as an actual person. So they know like if they’re, uh, what personality type they are, if they’re outgoing, introvert, whatever, they’re very self-aware. And I think with that allows you to be super consistent.
And so you’re consistent apart, across all parts of your life. Like you’re emotionally consistent, you’re consistent the message you give at practice. You’re consistent with the message after practice, you’re consistent off the court. And I think your athletes are going to feed off whatever you are. So if you’re a very unpredictable and all over the place, your athletes are going to be unpredictable and all over the place.
Um, and then just a good person. I know it’s so basic, but it’s a coach athlete relationship, but they’re not less than you because they’re an athlete. You’re not better than them because you’re a coach and the head coach isn’t better than you because he’s the head coach. It’s like, you treat everybody.
Equal and I’ve enjoyed working for bosses like that better than just somebody on at me. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. No, that’s so true. I feel like at every level is just treating people like people and I think maybe younger coaches to generalize get caught up in that. And like, they may want to work with Kansas hoops.
Cause that’s where they’re at for their first internship. But in reality, it’s like, you’re going to get just as much experience, potentially more working with Kansas women’s golf, you know? Um, but yeah, it’s kind of, if you’re chasing those names or those experiences, I’d think you’re going
to
Zack Zillner: learn a lesson pretty quickly.
A lot of these, especially when I was younger, like I didn’t really know who I was as a coach. Like I would see work with a bunch of these different coaches, like, well, I like that about her, that about him, but I don’t know if I can do those things. And then I remember sitting down, it was in coach Judy’s office.
So we went over like, what am I good at? What am I bad at? What am I good personality traits, whatever. Not as positive ones and you know, what things does she see that I’m good at? And what things does she see that I’m need to work on? Yeah. And I think that brings it to the forefront of like, Hey, I’m a big personality guy, like interacting with everybody.
That’s my strength. So use it, don’t go to a place that wants their strength coach, just to be like a drill Sergeant or whatever, if like, if they want that, uh, I can’t give them that and be true to myself. Right. So I can give you that for a couple of weeks. And then I’m going to look in the mirror and be like, you’re a failure and they’re going to see right through it.
Yeah. And it’s like, I’m the way who I am. And this is I’m going to present myself. And I think athletes and everyone else picks up on authenticity more than anything. Like if you’re a fake tough guy and they see it, like you’re done. Um, exactly. But I think really sitting down and knowing who you are. And I think after you graduate, you’re really going to find out who you are because you’re going to move somewhere where you don’t know anybody you’re going to make no money.
Um, And it’s gonna be hard and you’re gonna be a new situation. And that’s, you know, you never grow unless you stress yourself. It’s not an exercise. You gotta stress the system to adapt. Yeah. It’s no different, um, in your personal life, you have to stress yourself to grow. Um, so I think if you put yourself in these uncomfortable situations, you’re going to be a better coach and better person at the end of the day.
Coach, what about you?
Mike: Characteristics of high performance teams that you’ve been on, but also teams, I mean, over your course of your career, you’ve probably seen some underperforming
Donnie: teams. Yeah, no, I was listening to, I thought that was really, really a good Zack. I think you, you kind of triggered a thought in me when I was listening to you, but it’s not.
This is for, for me over the years. And I think both of you guys can definitely empathize what I’m about to say that the, I feel like the cornerstone of any successful team, if you’re a performance coach or strength and conditioning is you’ve got to have your head coach buy into you as a, as a, as an individual, but then the system you want to run with that team, um, I know I’ve been in, I’ve been coaching now.
It’s about 27th year in the years that I’ve had the most fun, probably had the most success with a team is when the sport coach bought in to what we’re doing in the weight room. Because if they don’t, here’s the deal, right. If they don’t buy into the weight room, they’re not going to be there checking on the kids, the kids going to pick up on it.
They’re not going to be invested. They’re not going to give the effort. You’re going to be pulling teeth. Right. And so I felt like the backbone of any kind of team like that. You’ve got to have the full support commitment of the head coach behind what you’re doing. Doesn’t mean you can’t be successful.
It just, it makes it a little harder for sure. So I think that’s one, I think, secondly, What I’ve seen over the years is, uh, whether it was football or golf or tennis, volleyball. I feel like you’ve got to have a team that kind of a, it’s a, it’s a player run team or play an led team. And I don’t mean that the team has, is like running the show, but the team is setting the tone and the example of the work ethic, their attitude, their efforts, if something’s not going right, your captains or your older kids are addressing those issues and fixing that within the team.
So the coaches and always trying to prop everything up and keep it going. I remember when I was with football here at Texas, and it was 2008 and we had, you know, we had a morning workout, you know, at dark 30 here at one time in one of the, the older defensive backs was. Kind of like slacking off and was skipping stuff.
And we called him and called him out on it. And we were headed down to the field and, uh, we’re going to do a little extra reminders as we should say to not do that again. But you know what? One of the senior defensive players stood up and kind of checked him and addressed it and fixed it. And he addressed it with the whole team.
Wasn’t us doing it? He was so upset. And so, uh, enraged that somebody was missing reps and not committed to being the best team. It could be that from, I’m telling you from that point on, for the rest and through the summer to the fall, we had no more issues. And again, that guy good. He did it in a, in a way.
I don’t know that I would prescribe the way I can’t get into the details of it, but I don’t know if I prescribed the way that he did it, but it was, you know, what it was effective for that time and season for that team and the person that leader that was doing that he had the credibility and he stood up and nobody, nobody was going to challenge he’s being an alpha so to speak, but we never had another problem.
And you know what, he, that did two things. It got rid of the cancer, but it also solidified him as a leader for the team that got everybody in line. So that really set us in motion to have a successful team. So I think those two things are huge. I love hearing
Mike: that story because I’ve heard you say that a couple of times the unfiltered, I
Donnie: gave you the little bit about the G rated version there, but
Mike: I’d like to go back to the first point you made.
Right. And not to take away from Zach. I’d like to hear from him if he can add to it too, you talked about head coach buy-in right. Buying into the program and you, I think that is such a. Such a maybe problem or obstacle. A lot of coaches deal with, you know, around the country and at every single level. So I’d like to peel back one more layer and you said, you know, establishing buy-in from those coaches.
Well, what are some strategies to do that? And then exactly you can reflect on your experiences to add to that,
Donnie: to all. I want to start help with, uh, be a little vulnerable here, but I would start off with the biggest mistake I’ve made in my career. And I encourage you. My listing is just that you can make and doing that is just taking it personal.
But coach doesn’t like you, they don’t want to do the lift you want to do, or the run you want to do or whatever you can fill in the blank. You just, I took it personal before, you know, and it’s not about me. It’s about that coach and the team. And just so I think you’ve got to, you know, whether you they’ll cliche saying, put your ego aside and kind of humble yourself and just kind of get back to like, basic, like what can I do to connect with this coach?
It may be grab a coffee, you go grab a, a beer. It may be. Showing up at practice and not, I remember true story. I don’t know if I’ve told you this one. I was at Colorado, a seal, Barry who’s retired now was the women’s basketball coach. And I got assigned to work. She hated the weight room. She didn’t believe in what we did in the weight room.
She didn’t like, she didn’t want to talk to my boss about it. So I got assigned the wonderful task of getting up at five 30 in the morning, five in the morning, going to the track where they did track workouts for basketball, which were not great. Right. And all I had to do was I sat on, I sat out in the dark cause they didn’t have lights back then.
And this like random track out in the middle of nowhere in Boulder, Colorado, it would cheer them on. I was a cheerleader and I was like, why am I here? And what happened six to eight weeks go by. And what was happening was I was building rapport with the kids. They started liking me being there because I brought a little energy and just did the best I could seel Barry walks up to me after, but eight weeks in the weight room and she looks up to him and she goes, you got next week.
I want to see what you can do with him. And I was like, Well, I was a 24 or 25 year old coach. I was like, what just happened? I about freaked out and like passed out. And then from that point on, I worked with them and I didn’t know what I was doing, dude. I really didn’t. I was clueless young coach after I got done.
It was right before I came to Texas. She was wanting to hire me as a full-time coach just for women’s basketball. So there are some things you can do on your end that you can kind of, I say, move the needle to win coaches over it. And it may take longer than others. I don’t have the rule book on that.
Some are very, very difficult and I’m aware of that and I’ve definitely dealt with that and some will move a little quicker. So, but I think there’s some things you can do to, to massage that a little bit and helping them along.
Mike: Yeah. And when I hear it from that as is, I think, again, this is, this comes back to I’m big on like things they don’t teach you in college, or even sometimes internships is like, you can’t just show up to someone else’s program.
Right. It’s not an art program, right. Someone else’s program and just expect them to trust you when they don’t even know. Right. Like that’s, that’s, it’s unrealistic to walk up to a stranger and be like, Hey, listen to me, this is what we’re going to do. And then to just automatically listen to you, it’s kind of the same thing.
It’s like, you have to earn that trust and whether that’s being a cheerleader or explaining week to week, Hey, this is what we’re doing. Y um, just some way you have to connect, because I just know a ton of coaches deal with that. Um, with that being an obstacle of, I can connect to my head coach. They don’t trust me, there’s this.
Um, I guess they silo each other and rather than combat it by kind of like you’re saying, like finding where you can fill in, fill that void.
Donnie: To give to our it head coaches, a little bit of benefit of the doubt. Like they’ve been burned some of them. And so you don’t realize that they’re like the cat that touched the hot stove.
Right? I know my head coach here at Texas. One of my work with, uh, with, with tennis years ago, he had one of his cute little stuck kids when he was at KGU. He got hurt in a way. And so he didn’t like some of the things I did with him. And I didn’t understand that at first as a young coach, but then as I got to know, coach and understood kind of, he told me more of the story now I understood why he was so jaded on why we, and so I, it took a while I had to kind of back the train up a little bit and do some things I didn’t really want to do at first and slowly kind of educate him and win his trust over to be able to do more things I wanted to do.
So.
Zack Zillner: Yeah, I think my biggest, um, kind of similar theory when I first job at Southern miss I just some 23, I get done with my time at Kansas. And I was lucky enough at Kansas where I was brought up under these really good coaches that all the sport coaches like, so hoody or Luke or Joe was like, Hey, Zach’s going to take over softball today.
They’re like, well, he’s approved by you. We’ll love it. We’ll love to have him. So I was used to every coach being like, we love what you do. You’re great. You’re so smart. You’re so good. And I get to Southern miss and the men’s basketball coach. He brought me there. So he’s like, do whatever you need to do. I support you for sure.
And then the women’s basketball coach, she never worked with me before. She’d use, she’s used to the Shane coaches. They’re two years leaves, two years leaves. And so when I show up I’m young and she’s like, I’ve been coaching longer than you’ve been alive. And she was like, every year in August, you run two miles.
And that’s our fitness tests. And I came in and I was like, I’m going to get her not to run the two miles. So I come in with my little fact sheets of how that’s not applicable to basketball and here’s what we’re going to do instead. And I was at Kansas and we won this many big 12 championships and I’m so smart.
Look at me. And she was like, that’s cool, but we’re running the two miles. Yeah. And I remember I was like, all right, well, I’m going to regroup, come back and present it again. She’s like, yeah. She’s like, you don’t understand. I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I’m not, not going to do it this year. So we’re going to run the two miles.
And I was so mad. I took it like as an ego thing. Like why would she listen to me? Like I’m so I’m so smart in this area. Yeah. I used to take the coach in basketball. I have a degree in this. I’ve been interning for six years. Like I’m so smart. And then I remember we ran into the miles and the whole time I was like super negative about it.
And I asked one of the assistants. I was like, what’s the deal? Why she want to do that? And he’s like, you understand, it’s not for two mile times, it’s what kids are going to actually finish this race that has nothing to do with basketball between their ears. Like, it’s a mental thing too. Can you run for 15 to 16 minutes?
I was like, wow, smart guy. You didn’t even think of that. Right. And it’s not like we were training them to be really good at that. Cause I was like, I want everyone to be knocked us out of the water, knock it out of the park. And um, yeah, once I heard that, I was like, wow, you didn’t even think. Other stuff into what you said.
Like, she has no reason to trust me. Like, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m, and she’s trusting me with her whole team of developing them. Um, so after that I was like, okay, well maybe I can pick and choose different things. And then to go along with it, you’re saying like to win these head coaches over, they don’t really know what we do.
They have an idea of what we do, but we work with the athletes the most. So if I can win over the athletes and they had talked to the athletes all the time, athletes are like, I enjoy working with Zach. I feel like I’m getting better. This feels better. Um, Then you’re going to win over the coach.
Donnie: Yeah. And I think to your point, coaches, some sport coaches put a lot more value on mental toughness and performance.
And so that’s just the culture of their team. Like they run that’s the way seal was. Yeah. And seal did not speak to me until that day. And I was so intimidated and like, I was so scared as a little tiny lady, like when she walked up to me and said that I was like, oh my gosh, she just spoke to me. And I have her team.
I was so afraid of failure. And, but, but the cool thing about it, I had already won cause I’d won the kids over, so I’ve won her heart. And so I think there’s a, there’s a piece to it there, you got to always keep in mind. It’s not about what we do. Uh it’s about how we do it and how it impacts the hearts, minds and emotions of these kids because coaches like their paycheck.
Yeah. And if you can win them over that influences them too. So you gotta be practical with it.
Mike: Yeah, that was awesome. Um, I’m going to. I think this next question personally is a little fun because it is personal for you, Zach. Oh, perfect. Uh, you posted three weeks ago. Oh yeah. We’re getting, getting technical on this training posts, food posts between us talk for football, but you posted a few weeks back, a video of a squat clean squat in a row and you captioned it basketball, specific training.
I thought it was genius. So, yeah. So I want, what I’m getting at is I have a couple questions here to unpack. Um, can you expand on your thoughts to specificity? You know what there’s gonna be in basketball or another sport training it. Um, does it warrant consideration in the weight room and also are there prerequisites to specificity, uh, in the setting of
Zack Zillner: the weight room?
Yeah, I think, um, my big shot with that is people overcomplicate everything. I’m kind of poking fun of. You know, a couple of emails a day from college coach, high school coach, a dad of some kid is going to be really good or any one of these basketball people. And they’re like, can you send me a basketball specific workout?
And I’m like, well, it’s about like, what do you mean? You know? And so I think, and I get it like on Twitter, Instagram, people like to show things that I think are so far off base because it’s new and novel. They’re venting the wheel for stuff, but I think people don’t take enough time to really work and hammer on the basics.
So like, you don’t need a lot of variety. Um, if you do everything, the basic stuff we know that works, it’s backed by science. Um, that elicits the greatest response. You don’t need all the fluff stuff, if you can master those basics. And I know that gets over and over, people talk about it, but I very rarely see people.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard. It’s like, you need to progressively overload those movements that we know that work over time. And at the end of the four years, you’re going to be a way better athlete than you were before and you got to be robust, um, and not injured. Right.
Mike: Right. And I think, uh, something I thought of literally when I saw that video is I had recently looked through our own Instagram posts on Texas athletic performance.
And I was like 80% of our pictures, uh, where we showcase kids lifting is like using hex bar deadlift. And it just goes to show it’s like amongst 15 sports, just about all of us, if not all of us hex bar deadlift. For sure. So it kind of comes back to what you’re saying is I’ll try it. It’s
Zack Zillner: like think like these kids have so much else going on in their head, in my area.
Like some really like lifting weights and some it’s like, I got to get through this 30 minutes, this hour weightlifting session. And then I got to worry about the a hundred plays I need to. Now I got to watch film with coach. I got a biology test tomorrow and. If they come in and we’re doing the same exercises all the time, like I know how to squat, we did this yesterday, just a different variation.
I know how to dead lift. We did this the other day. Just a different variation. It’s not over-complicating it. So they have to come in and be like, wait, is this the one where I grabbed this implement and tie it here and step with this leg and come here. Like, let’s not over-complicate things like let’s move the big boulders.
I think to people, too many people are worried about the 2% and forgetting about the 98% of what makes you bigger, faster. Right,
Mike: right. But like, kind of what you were saying at the beginning is so on social media, we get to see the 2% 98% of the time. So that’s what we, you know, a lot of coaches and even myself sometimes I’m like, dang, is that, is that really the direction we’re going?
Like, like, should I be thinking more outside the box than I already am? And I think we just missed that point sometimes. Yeah. I just want to
Zack Zillner: try to get it out there more. So coaches that don’t have the advantage of our background can see. And if they’re the head varsity coach, but they don’t have a strength coach and all they see.
This stuff that I, I wouldn’t agree with. Um, and they’d look at, you know, clean squat bench, pull ups as a football workout. I’m like, no, it’s not it’s basketball. It’s good training. Right. Um, so I kind of want to put more stuff out there. So they say like, okay, like this should be the bulk of my training, not this other tying a band
Mike: to your
Zack Zillner: wrists.
Yeah, exactly. Which I think there’s a time and a place for that kind of training, but it shouldn’t be your majority. And I don’t want people thinking, like, that’s the majority of that my high school freshmen, B team needs to do. Right, right. I
Mike: think that’s really valid.
Donnie: That’s a great question, Mike. Um, just had this conversation with one of my athletes yesterday in the weight room and this athletes been away training in a different place.
Um, brings back. He’s like, man, we did all this band stuff, blah, blah, blah. So I said, well, what’s the name of the person? Like show me the account, looked it up and. Ends up being like, basically the sport is tennis. They’re just doing a bunch of motions banded up. Instead of like, it’s a racket, they’re doing swings with these bands, which again, I get that, but it’s trying to be more specific.
It’s more like they’re thinking it’s more specific to tennis, but the key element, all of our conversations here is the athlete believes whatever it is you’re doing. That’s
Zack Zillner: what I think me. Like I wanted to be a teacher. Um, but then I was like, teachers don’t make any money. And then I was like, I’ll be a strength coach.
And then I realized they don’t make any money either. Um, but I, I felt like the best way to go about it, um, is to educate these kids on like, Hey, I know we saw like, you know, they’ll put a video of what LeBron’s doing and I’ll be like, here’s what he’s trying to accomplish with this. Here’s where he’s at his career.
And this is why it makes sense. And here’s what we’re trying to do. And here’s why it makes sense for us. And then I think if you, these kids, they go to the university of Texas. Like if they go to these big schools, there’s a level of competence and you can draw it out for them and be like, this is why I know you hate hang clean, but this is why we’re hand cleaning.
And like I tell all our posts players, the reason why we snatch is I’ll be like post up on somebody. And it’s the same position that they catch a snatch. Is that why we do snatch now? But if they can put it together, like, oh, that’s exactly why we snapped. I’m going to try harder. Cause that’s exactly for my position.
Mike: It’s funny. I’ve taken that same approach as far as using, it’s like maybe a little bit different, the same concept, but a different approach is like, you know, oh, I think, I think, I mean, Tom Brady does the TV 12 though. And then my approach is like, you know what? I want you to go do the TB 12, do as long as you want.
Right. You can come back when you let me know you reached that level because that’s not what makes Tom Brady, Tom Brady. And to try to add a little bit more content to his, like. When you take, like what you’re referencing coach with tennis and bands and replica, trying to replicate the same motor patterns.
It’s like, if you get too close to trying to replicate motor patterns and you do it with an athlete, especially who’s not ready enough in the wrong stimulus, whether it be a bank. Whether it be chains, whether it be some type of implement where it’s going to mess with your balance is like you can actually screw up their neuromuscular system in terms of the coordination of, and biomechanics, the coordination of that, that they’ve been working on in practice when they’re practicing post-sales.
And now you’ve tried to do some fancy exercise you might’ve saw, um, that you think is replicating it. Like when, when not all the stimulus is that the variables are the exact same. It’s like you actually getting a different motor response. And so that’s where you have to be really careful when you are, if you are.
Trying to approach that level of specificity in the weight room. And like Zach, what you’re saying is like, we don’t need to do that. 98% of what we do is actually this basic
Donnie: reason, oh, God, caveat to this little, this is a great topic where you go on the whole shell on this. But, so I do think there’s a little bit, um, my experience just with my tennis guys, you gotta build, like you’re saying Zach, I feel like you’ve got to build this foundation of strength and movement in a base.
I do believe like a Tom Brady. Once you get older in your career, you’ve been training for, you’ve got so much volume in reps and in kind of a track record behind you, of training, you can do more things that maybe it’s not as hard on your body. Cause you always got that to fall back on. But these younger kids, they don’t need, they don’t need a bunch of this fruit, fruit looking stuff on Instagram.
Like that’s not going to make a more explosive, more durable, uh, help them recover, better, doing a bunch of crazy stuff like that. But again, so what I, my point is like I have one kid, uh, from Japan. Who got him here was doing some Olympic lifts and stuff ended up having a, uh, his first year have a back problem, went back to Japan.
They evaluated him, told him he didn’t need to ever lift again. So I had to deal with that problem. So I had to kind of think a little differently on how I could get him to buy back into lifting and training with me. So I had to kind of back it up and kind of do some different movements that were a little more functional, you know, that buzzword looking a little more functional, but I kinda got him, you know, by the time he was a senior, got him back healthy again, put on lean mass and bought back into training.
So sometimes in this kind of like coach athlete process today, and you guys know this, you kind of got to get a little bit of feedback from those athletes and kind of meet them in the middle of it. Biggest thing.
Zack Zillner: And that’s how you create. Buy-in like a lot of our freshmen, like, I don’t give them a lot of choice.
It’s like, this is what we’re doing and stick within that. Um, but at my upperclassmen, it’s, we’ve built. Enough trust where, you know, our point guard can come out and be like, Hey, we’ve been gone like crazy at practice. Like my knees are bothering me. Okay. We probably don’t need to back squat you today.
What do you feel like doing what exercise do we do that really helps you a lot? And she’s like, oh, single leg RDL helps me a lot. Let’s hammer that today instead of, you know, back squat on the sheet and they know that I’m willing to make these changes. Um, so they’re more open the dialogue’s better. And I trust them that they’re not just coming in and be like, oh, this is sore.
I can’t do anything to get out.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s not so much about the weight room and what’s on the sheet. It’s about, what’s gonna make me feel good so I can be,
Zack Zillner: yeah. At the end of the day, like I care, like I know these big boulders, they need to move. Um, and I’ll give him some options of, you know, Hey, if this doesn’t make you feel good or like, you can watch a kid and see if they’re comfortable doing it or not.
And if it doesn’t make you feel good, what else can we do to accomplish that same. Goal and the farther they get, like you were saying, like, what do they need? What do they not? But most freshmen, um, need to clean squat and row.
Mike: I love that you did that. It’s like, you’re saying sometimes you gotta be flexible with the plan.
Like you’re not going to go on a road trip road, shut down. Cause the bridge broke. You’re not just going to be stubborn and go right off the cliff or that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you. It’s like you gotta be flexible and find detours when it happens.
Donnie: Good stuff. Little change the topic. Uh, let’s just, this is one of my favorite ones.
This is another kind of MythBuster kind of topic here. But with all your years, you’ve worked with a lot of different female athletes. Uh, what have you seen coach? Zilner that makes the biggest difference in helping them become better athletes. Do you have any key performance indicators you look at maybe different sports to you consider as you do that, anything.
So what makes them better and then kind of what are some, give us some specifics.
Zack Zillner: Yeah, I think, um, female athletes, I’m not going to say like female versus male or anything like that. I think freshmen, basketball players feel male or female. Um, don’t really like the weight room and I, and I think for them the biggest piece is their mentality.
Like between their ears, like how hard they actually need to go to play D one basketball. Um, in high school they could take off wraps just cause they’re head and shoulders above everybody in their state. At least the kids that we get. Come to Texas. And so they’ve never really had to go hard and high intent, every single rep, every single down, every single thing they’re doing.
So they always think that I’m giving him a hard time that even during the warmup I’ll make them redo stuff or this needs to be faster or whatever. Um, and that high demand of it’s not perfect redo it. It’s not perfect redo it. Um, that’s their biggest shock of what they’re getting. Like it’s getting coach, like we call it getting coached or they take it as being personal.
And I think it comes back to they’re the best player in the state. And so their high school coach probably isn’t going to coach them hard because they need them for that team. Their skills trainer is going to tell them they’re great because they want that check and the parents are going to think they’re great.
Cause like everyone else is telling them. They’re great. So these kids are always been told. You’re great. You’re great. You’re great. You’re great basketballs, which really get out. So they get in the weight room where these guys aren’t designed to lift weights. They got long lamb, short torsos, like horrible.
Exactly. And so they come in with me and they can’t even do body weight squat or the running mechanics, like we want to do or how to throw a med ball or any of this stuff. And so they get frustrated. And so it’s like, how can you persevere, um, to this area that you don’t want to do it, you aren’t very good at.
And I think it kind of sets the tone of everything else. Cause they’re going to get to coach eventually and not know how to play defense the way he wants to play it or how to run the plays that we need to play it. So can you handle, handle that mental load? Um, I guess the best that’s good.
Mike: Um, so in terms of, so you’re kind of getting at again the mental load piece.
Um, are there any key performance indicators KPIs to these kids, um, in basketball that, that you’ve identified? Um, not necessarily when they come in, but as they come in and they progress over a few years, you’ve said like, maybe mental resilience might be one, but is there anything else that’s like, Hey, the ones that succeed, they have this
Zack Zillner: um, like if you want like nuts and bolts and like how much you need to squat or clean or that kind of stuff, that’s what a lot of people want to know.
And Dr. Kramer, um, for those that, um, is part of pretty much every strength conditioning study around, um, him and doc fry, but he was saying we had him on the phone the other week and basically people that aren’t cleaning at least their body weight and that’s women. And aren’t squatting between 1.5 and 1.8 of their body weight.
Still need to work on strength till they get to those numbers. I like it. That’s
Donnie: specific. Yeah.
Zack Zillner: Which is a lot. And I think cleaning the body weight, or that’s like body weight or body weight in a quarter, um, has been our biggest thing that we’ve seen when players can do that. They can do pretty much everything really well.
Um, this is for the queen. Yeah. For the clean just mentally, like you see the weight on the bar, you do. That checks a box then physically, if, as a woman, if you can clean your body weight, you’re pretty strong. Well for your body, which a lot of good things happen. Um, squat 1.5, 1.8. I’m don’t take as much value in that just because anthropometrics and whatnot.
Some of these kids just aren’t built for that sport. Yeah. And so we’ll do dead lift and said, or, um, single leg stuff, just depending on what fits them the best. So I’m not going to try to shove a square peg in a round hole. If it’s not going to work.
Donnie: Um, one thing cleans a box or floor. Let’s get a little, so
Zack Zillner: I like somebody fired up today.
It’s not the correct term. Uh, I’m a big hang power clean. So start from the hang catching the power position for you. Is that what
Mike: you use for like the one to 1.5 body weighs the hang power cleaner.
Zack Zillner: Yeah. Hang power clean. Um, we’ve gone off the floors just enough. So hard, so tall and tall
Mike: girls. You’re not the purist who writes the questions we still receive to this day on our social
Zack Zillner: media and yeah, clean, it’s a power it’s like, who cares?
She just
Mike: cleaned her body away and squat depth. This is the one we get quite a bit. Well, that’s a
Zack Zillner: big thing for us too. Like I used, that’s the one thing we talked about philosophy changing when I was younger, everyone was like, but to the ground squad that makes you a good strength coach. If you can make everyone do that.
And so I would, well, I would waste all this time trying to get my athletes to get all the way down. And then at the end of the year, I remember one year I looked and I was like, we did all these regressions. And now we’re finding at the point where he, or she can front squat the bar. And it’s like, what did I do?
What’d you spend that time? And so what I’ve done now is I, instead of starting everyone at the huge regression, I start them with the bar. And what I’ve realized is most of my athletes, I probably have like one or two who are not as good at that, that they need to regress and everyone else. We’re good to go ready to roll.
And it’s like, wow. Before I would waste six weeks doing a goblet squat progression that they didn’t need to do. Right. Um, and so yeah, now I’m not as picky with the depth. And if you look at, I think you guys had a post on it and I was like, what quality are you trying to exude from this exercise? And it’s like, well, if I’m trying to work, you know, specific joint angles and a higher range of, uh, motion might be better if I’m trying to create stiffness for more reactive athletes, more load, less range of motion is going to make them more reactive.
If I want to make them more compliant, I’m going to do more of a full range of motion type squad.
Mike: Yeah. And the best, the best picture from that post was actually we had, I don’t know which post it was. Charlie. Yeah. Charlie. Right. And Charlie for listeners, number one, overall draft pick, she’s doing a back squat from the pins at like, gosh, maybe it’s 120 degrees that are yet.
And so it’s just funny, because again, I said the purist earlier’s, you’re telling me that the number one basketball, like it’s not
Zack Zillner: good enough for her. Well, if we would’ve squat it all the way down, she would have been a higher. The number one pick, probably
Mike: this ties back into the specificity is like, you know, she’s not a power lifter, or she’s not, she’s a basketball,
Zack Zillner: 65, her legs, I’m five 10.
Her legs next to me are almost up to my shoulders. She and her torso is shorter than mine. And so this is the worst person that you could have squat, a ton of weight. Cause her femurs are so long run. So we found with her pin squats for the best and from our forest data, her reactivity and stiffness, she became a better athlete by not squatting full range of motion.
Mike: It’s like, if you just look, if you just look at where the joints are with some of these longer athletes, you haven’t been volleyball. Um, I have a few in rowing, which is a little bit different cause you need them to get in those deep angles. But if you just look at it, it’s like, all right, if you want to Charlie to squat, The eyes parallel to the ground.
Well then her torso flection, you know, our Tauruses will be pinned right against her femur. And she’s going to be at 30 degrees torso, flection, which most people
would identify as equals,
Zack Zillner: but we’ve kind of found, um, those pin squats. Cause I, when I first saw pin squats, I remember we were doing at Kansas with hoody and I’m like, she’s lost her mind.
Like, what are we doing? Like, we need to be squatting all the way down. I’ve read these articles that if your hamstrings not covering your calf, like you’re not doing a squat. And we started one of our bigs, um, Penn squats and then every week she would lower the pins and then eventually he could squat parallel.
And I was like, wow. Usually everyone’s like from the ground up. But we were taking the pins down, but he was still keeping the same load. So he had the same stimulus instead of doing, you know, a 30 pound goblet squat, which what’s that really doing. Right. Um, and trying to work yourself up to the bar, which is 45 pounds.
It’s like, well, what are we really doing? Like this, guy’s a power five athlete and we’re having the gym. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I thought it was interesting just the way you kind of can reverse engineering depending on what quality you want that athlete to have.
Mike: Yeah. And sticking on the topic of kind of, I guess these hot topics, I suppose, in string, the conditioning is I’m not going to ask you either or, cause I think all of us here and hopefully most people listening know unanimously that it’s not.
Either bilateral training or unilateral, right. That’s, that’s been a hot topic, which just seems foolish and a waste of time to discuss, but I would like to know, um, can you share when, in why you decide to choose a bilateral exercise back squat, deadlift, whatever, or a unilateral exercise, whether it’s a split squat, reverse lunge come what times of year or what situations with certain athletes and why do you, why you choose those?
Zack Zillner: I
think like what you said, you can use them all the time. It just depends on what you want. And so like for a bilateral squat, I mean, to me, I think if you want to build overall strength and power, like that would be the one exercise I would choose over a split squat. Um, but within that, you know, if I want to create stiffness, I could do that partial range of motion with that.
Or if I want to create compliance. I could do that full range of motion. So same squat getting different attributes. So stiffness versus a more compliance split squat. Um, I like it for my, uh, stiffer athletes just cause it, it takes longer to do so. Like you can’t really pump those out like you would squat.
And so that longer time under tension and everything is going to, um, help with their mobility and stuff. So guys who are super stiff, um, A lot of our men’s players are like women’s players that are super twitchy. Um, and you know, these guys, they been their knees, a quarter inch and touch the top of the back board.
Um, we want to kind of slow them down in the weight room. And so their way to do that is overhead split squat. So if I have a bar of my head and I’m split squat and I need to go slower to come all the way down and touch my knee and come up so that they like doing stuff super fast. So this is a way to slow them down.
My athletes that are super slow, we need to load them up. They need to be under load all the time. So bilateral might be a better option for them. Yeah. And then we’ll use them different times throughout the season, just to help, like I was saying, being old and lifting. Um, if we have a big back squat day, that day, I might warm up with some split-squat stuff or single leg things, um, before we do it, um, or if I went in the summer, if I want to get more volume, we can start with, you know, bilateral movement for strength and then load up a bunch of walking lunges at the end of the.
Session. So it’s just different time of year, different, whatever you need, whatever, call it.
Mike: One thing you said, like you’re talking about an overhead split squat is Dan Victor talked about is like, you, you throw something overhead, which is going to be unstable for a lot of people, right? They’re gonna have to try to stabilize that it forces the lower body to kind of course correct.
And have to slow down, which is what you were getting at, uh, and stabilize. Because if it doesn’t, obviously you’re gonna tip over, you have a heavy weight above your head. So it was just a concert.
Zack Zillner: Know what I’ve heard? Uh, the men’s players last year, the guys who were super twitchy and athletic, they were horrible at balancing on one leg.
And it was like being slow is what they don’t want to do. They’re a hundred miles an hour on the court. And so it’s like, how can we offset those reps in the court and the way. And it’s like, they can touch the top of the backward. I don’t think strength and power. Development’s probably an issue, but to keep them healthy, we might need to work on more full range of motion.
Um, Sophie get them feeling better if they feel better, like those guys are tied all the time and their knees and back hurt ankles hurt. It’s like, how can I get them feeling better? They’re probably going to perform better. So what different exercise can we do to slow them down to make them feel?
Mike: Yeah.
And that’s that spring concept of when you have someone who, if you look at the muscle intending as a spring, the tendon spring is gigantic, right? These huge shocks, but then their muscles, just this tiny bicycle. So that’s where you might run into some tendon issues. And that’s where, that’s where you’re kind of saying slow it down and try to build maybe upon the muscle.
So that there’s somewhat of a compatible, I guess you could say ratio between muscle tendon. Yeah. What about you coach? What’s your experience with like unilateral bilateral exercises when you choose one versus the other, because I’ve seen you do quite a bit of variations of both in the weight room with balls.
Donnie: Yeah, this is again, one of my favorite topics. I’ve probably early in my career. I was more of a bilateral squat, squat, squat, you know, and now as I’ve gotten older and, you know, working with different sports, especially my two teams right now are tennis and volleyball with volleyball. It’s been interesting working with our sports science, uh, staff, Travis and all those guys.
They do a great job. They’ve really helped me kind of pinpoint when a certain athlete has had enough bilateral, like they’ve reached a certain level of like rate of force development, bilaterally that maybe they’re lacking single a and so I’ve gotten even this summer where a couple of the girls like I’ll do a lot more single leg work with them, variations whether that’s, uh, A rear foot elevated.
I love that again. Kudos to you, Micah. I love the, uh, safety bar, uh, split squat with a lot of eccentric work in that that’s helped them a lot. So I think for me, testing has helped with volleyball on the backside of tennis, kind of where I pick for volleyball, but for tennis, I’ve almost gotten away completely from, and I don’t, I just don’t put a bar on their backs.
Um,
Zack Zillner: uh, sorry. I was like rotational sports. Um, I had the same thing with golf at Illinois that what’s like a, what’s a big load on your back. Good for creating stiffness. And what do you not want? Like you need thoracic stiffness to be a good back squatter. And what do you not want as a golf? Like drastic stiffness.
I just felt when I went to the TPI course, they had us do all the rotational stuff and I was so bad at it all. And I was like, oh, this is why I suck at golf, but
Donnie: you know what goes back? I felt, you know, early in my career I felt bad. Cause that’s the other, you know, tennis string coaches. They got him squat like 300, 400 pounds and I’m like, what’s wrong.
I must be terrible as a shrink coach. Right. So alvelous learned. That putting the axial loading with the borrower. Back’s not good for their shoulders, other spine lumbar spine, but we still got squat. Mike, we still gotta work that pattern because those guys are usually really stiff in the hips. Cause they’re on concrete.
They don’t ever get real low. Uh, so you need to work on their mobile. You need to work on just having some power and range of motion down in those low positions, but I can’t load it. So trap bar dead lifts have been great. COVID squats, single leg variations for tennis guys are crucial because they serve a lot with a rider left-handed.
And so that fascia line from their hand, all the way through there, their front and the back, their hips get rotated. And so now a single leg exercise for them will actually kind of manage that gap of those imbalances and keep them healthier. So what those guys, I like to use a lot more single like work, uh, oftentimes in volleyball, again, there are some exceptions down with volleyball, with testing.
I may, uh, do way more with, with one or two athletes than I do the other ones, depending on where they are in their development. So it just depends. Yeah, that’s
Mike: big. I just, I mean, at the end of the day, I wish we could steer the conversation versus, you know, either or which we all know is pretty foolish to well, when and why?
Because I think the why piece, which has been kind of a common themes sack started out. It’s like what it comes down to is why we’re doing it. And not too many people seem to be
Donnie: transparent. Well, to kind of circle back to your point, Zach, our freshmen come in, they haven’t lifted much. They need a lot of bilateral work.
They just don’t have any power strength, or on top of that, they’ll lean muscle mass. There’s not much down there for just for just being durable, you know, more resilience. So you got to build that up before you start kind of like, oh, let’s do all this other stuff. So yeah. Anyway,
Mike: Zach, I think we’re, are we close on
Donnie: time?
We got to land the plane here.
Mike: So where can people connect with you, find you if they want questions? Is it email? Is it social media?
Zack Zillner: Yeah, I’m not big with email, you can ask any one of these guys that email me. Um, but I’m pretty good on social media, Instagram and Twitter, the same. It’s Z S Zillner and that’s Z I L L N E R.
Um, I usually put up, you know, different things. We’re doing training wise. Um, I’m pretty good about, uh, answering any questions or comments or DMS or anything like that. That’s awesome.
Mike: Um, we already kind of covered like advice that you would give to younger coaches or even interns. We, we hit that pretty hard, but, uh, um, I guess what resources have you used or would you recommend to
others?
Zack Zillner: I think the biggest resources are, um, people. Yeah. And I think the biggest stuff I learned wasn’t. On the floor itself. Like of course I learned how you should command a room and coach and whatever. But I think the most stuff I learned was behind closed doors. When we’d be done with a session, listening to the two full time strength coaches, talk about what went well, what didn’t go well, how they dealt with this coach, how they dealt with that coach.
I remember being an intern. I sat at a chair and Luke Bradford’s office and Joe stop’s office. And I would sit there and after every session I listened to Luke talk about, and he asked me what went well with that session? What went bad? Um, Joe, same thing with track and field. And I was lucky enough that they would bring me to their coaches meetings.
So I could see, like, this is how you talk to a coach. This is how you don’t talk to a coach. Like, um, this is how you talk to administrator. How do I, what do I need to wear? If I’m, you know, meeting with the, or somebody super important, how do I need to act? Um, what’s appropriate. I think those skills were better than any book.
Kind of tapped me for sure.
Donnie: I got one more fun question and then we’ll land it. But favorite go-to food in Austin
Zack Zillner: foodie. Yeah. Yeah.
Donnie: Yeah. If you don’t follow Zach, you gotta follow me. He, he makes me want to go get a meal. We didn’t have to go eat there.
Zack Zillner: Uh, I’ll give you a couple options. You can go on like a barbecue.
I like Terry blacks or Valentino’s and us too though. Yeah. And then a burger spot, probably Juba burgers. I
Mike: haven’t been yet.
Zack Zillner: It’s basically it sets real good ingredients then basic. Fantastic. It’s unbelievable online, but worth it. Uh, tacos. I
like Pueblo Viejo
Donnie: these are, this is news to me. Um, this is good for me.
You follow me?
Zack Zillner: I love wings. So wings are my jam and Tommy won’t wing his best wings in Austin.
Donnie: Never had, I need to make this list. The, all these places.
Mike: Have you been to LA barbecue?
Zack Zillner: The barbecue is legit as well.
Mike: I haven’t been there either. It wasn’t in your top two. So
Zack Zillner: even before, so now they have a brick and mortar before it was like, the line was ridiculous.
We’re not getting
Donnie: paid for this. This is just fun.
Zack Zillner: So they want to sponsor me.
Donnie: Oh man. It’s been fun. Uh, coach Zilner thanks for, uh, for being on the show. Uh, good, good talk. So thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun and the cotenancy you’re the man. Always. You always the person leading the ship. Well, that’s it from Austin on the team behind the team podcasts. We’re back in the studio.
Do us a favor. If you haven’t done this yet, go on to iTunes, give us a rating and review, help us keep putting out good episodes with great people and coaches like coach Zilner. We’ll keep this thing pushing from Austin, Texas, coach Donny, Zach Zilner and Mike Hanson hook ’em horns. Y’all have a good one.
Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this episode of the team behind the team podcast for future episodes, go to iTunes, Spotify, Google podcast, or Stitcher. We definitely want to keep having great guests on the show and great content. So if you have a moment, please go to iTunes, leave a rating and review and let us know how we’re doing.
I’m Donnie Maib and thanks so much.