E29 | Dan Fichter and Chris Korfist

Welcome to the Team behind the Team podcast. I’m 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 nutrition.

Hello, and welcome back to the team behind the team podcast. I’m your host, Donnie Maib and Hey, we are well into 2022. This is February. And this past month we hosted our, uh, UT AP clinic. Last year. It was virtual this year back in person. And not only I’m excited about that, but more importantly, I’m excited that we were able to bring in two very distinguished, special guests.

We’ll get to in a minute. But before that coach Joe Krawczyk, our cohost is in the house, Joe. You’re back from. Baby duties. How how’s things going at home, Joe? Oh, um, sleep is no longer a thing. Uh, he’s an eating machine. And so he wants to eat a lot early and often. Um, but I love it. I love every bit of it.

Uh, you know, it was that, that time at three in the morning, you, you, uh, you’re like, man, I could really sleep right now. Then you look at him and you’re like, that’s not so bad. Um, so it’s great. It’s great. But it’s also really good to be back at work. How’s that sleep pattern going for your coach? It’s just nonexistent.

It’s not existing. It’s not there. So you’re just living on like, what’s your, what’s your go to power drink? Uh, I got Zions today. We’re not getting paid for that by the way. They’re all. They’re all fair game though. They’re all. If it’s, if it’s a $2 coffee or. I guess I shouldn’t say the next brand, but, um, yeah, they’re all fair game.

Awesome coats. Good to have you back. Congrats on Ms. Kristin and Mr. David. I know it’s exciting time. So welcome back, uh, without let’s introduce our special guests. And again, these two guys, uh, one of them has been here previous, so we’re glad you’re back, coach. We’ll get to you in a second, but we couldn’t ask for two more, not only, uh, super smart and, uh, two game changers in our profession leaders, I feel like, um, Chris Korfist and Dan Fitcher, welcome to show how you guys doing, doing great.

Enjoying the Texas hospitality and the nicer weather, nicer weather, nicer weather, Victor. What’s that mean? Nicer? Like, well, we had a foot and a half of snow in Rochester last week, so, and the sun’s out. So this is good. Yeah, it’s definitely, uh, I think it was like we were at the eight. Before these got these kinds of

It was 80 overnight. It dropped to 30 and we were kind of like, whoa, where did this come from? But that’s Chicago, except we go from 20 to 10 below. Now you’re living in our world and my folks live in south Detroit area. So that’s cold too. Yeah. That’s where I grew up. So now I’m well aware of what it’s like, Karen I’m like eerie.

Actually. You had it right earlier for me. It’s. Well guys, welcome to the show I want to do before we get into questions. Just a brief introduction on HIV. Just so our listeners know if they don’t have never heard you speak or know about you a little bit. So Chris Corpus coach is a high school educator who has coached track and football for for 30 years.

He also owns a slow guy speed school, which is a private training facility that deals with athletes from all levels in sports. He has trained and coach 110 Allstate athletes, 86, which are all state sprinters. He’s also coauthor of tri phasic training for football and the tribe. Uh, try phasic sprinkle model.

He owns. Football consortium. Yeah, there we go. Dot com, which is a bi-annual clinic that hosts outside the box thinkers who support multi-sport athletes. He is also co-author of the co-founder of the reflexive RPR reflexive performance reset, uh, courses, which are real popular in definitely in demand. Um, the technique where the, the, the athlete can reset their own nervous system for peak performance.

So coach. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yes, sir. Coach Dan Victor back for a second, man. Coach. We’re so glad you’re back. It’s great to be back. I know we made some tests. He’s got Texas gear on. He looks good and make it look good, but real quick, just, uh, coach Dan, Victor, just a guy we love and adore and glad he’s back.

He owns it operates want to get fast power, speed training, a performance training business in upstate New York area that offers training to elite athletes. Uh, Fichter has traveled to countries speaking to numerous coaches in for own speed training, strength training in nervous system development. Dan has coach football at the high school and the college of four for 17 years.

And is currently the head coach football coach at Aronda Rhonda quit high school, Rochester new. I struggle with that. So, but I it’s okay. He did a great. Anyway, welcome to the show. Guys just wanted our listeners to know a little bit about you before you kind of get into your questions. Um, Joe, I’m all, let you kick off the question.

So you get a start. Appreciate it. And, well, Chris, this is your first time on the show. So you get the honor. Um, can you take us, take a moment to introduce yourself and talk about your career path and you know, how’d you get to where you are now? Well, I grew up playing football and I was always interested in developing speed because I think I understood that if you run fast, you do better in football.

And I think not that my high school coaches didn’t do the best that they could. It’s just, it, wasn’t what I wanted. And, uh, I’ve always been researching back in high school, how to get faster, you know, I had the speed city. Catalog. And that was my Christmas present every year, whether it’s an overspeed rubber band or some kind of made up vertex machine.

But, uh, I played football at Northern Illinois, uh, in GA there instill that was kind of my passion and then got a job teaching high school. And they hired me as their strength, coach football coach and track coach. And, you know, I went with what everyone did traditionally. We’re going to get in the weight room and work hard and all that stuff.

And I was getting my butt kicked and I thought I got to change. I’ve got to look at some different ways to get faster. So our program can get somewhere. And that’s kind of where my path has been going for the last 30 years. Uh, trying to find ways that I could prove that people got faster. Put an electronic timer on someone.

Let’s see if what we’re doing actually works. And that’s kind of how I ended up here is a lot of trial and error. Um, a lot of questioning, a lot of getting rid of stuff that doesn’t work and bucking the traditions. And, you know, they say this exercise works. It’s great. It might work for them, but it’s not working here.

And maybe it’s time to move on. Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of funny how it always. It goes back to our high school days, like our first experiences in the weight room. And you think back like, okay, like this is the way to go. And then, you know, everyone’s like, it seems like that new generation move for like, no, it’s gotta be different now because you know, it’s just not, you know how it should have been an hour.

Um, you know, that’s no knock on any coaches back then, but, um, um, yeah, it’s amazing what you grab onto as a young age. I remember I was in eighth grade and we went to the university of Illinois football camp, you know, cause you went to your state football camp and we went into the Illinois weight room, which is back in the day underneath the stadium, you know, nothing like what they have now.

And a strength coach got up and said, Mitchell, Brooklyn’s our fastest guy. He’s a 4, 4 40. And he squats 500 pounds. Therefore we all need to squat 500 pounds. And I thought in the back of my mind, I’ve got to find a way to get to 500 pounds because then I can run a four, four. And you know, I heard it from the university of Illinois strength coach back in 1980, Two or 81.

And now that was something that kind of rolled with me all the way through, until I had the courage to say, you know, what had to it was wrong. Yeah. No, I, I don’t, I don’t see it that way anymore. Yeah. We’ve come, you know what? We’ve come a long way in this field. Um, you know, you made me think about, you know, back when I played football at Georgia and coach Dan, you can appreciate as a football coach back then, we had our shrink coach was from Pennsylvania coach, John Casey, and they didn’t want cameras in the room.

And they lit, they literally cleared out this storage shed under the track stadium that had no windows and they could get us in. And work on us and do all kinds of stuff to make us tougher. And I mean, it was just a different, like today you have trainers and social media and all that. It’s just that this has come, it’s just changed so much.

You know, again, back then it was more about the toughness and into, can you outlast? There was really not a lot of science to it, so it’s come a long way in good, good ways and bad, obviously. So. Yeah. And then Dan, I know you’ve been on the show before. Um, once again, welcome back. Uh, if you could just give us a quick recap of, uh, kind of where you came from, but a twist to your, to your question here is, uh, what are some of the new things you’re diving into?

Like what’s, what’s kinda got you excited right now. Uh, oh boy. So, so my, my career started same, same path as Chris playing football in high school. And, um, I was the guy who was allergic to weights in high school. Kids just started lifting weights when I was in high school. And, um, they were getting some pretty good results.

I wanted no. Um, but I was always pretty fast, got to college, um, played a little ball in college and started to find the weight room and got really fast. So my thought process was the exact opposite. Like I got strong and I got faster. So then I started hitting those four or 5, 4, 4 times. And I said to myself, you know what, I, I like this.

I think I can make myself faster. So I kept getting stronger, kept getting stronger and I wasn’t getting any faster again. So I kind of did the whole cyclic thing I came back to. Okay. Now I gotta go back to what I was doing before, which was playing a lot of basketball, doing a lot of jumping, doing a lot of sprinting.

Then when I went on after college played in the arena football league, I signed a contract in Canada to play with the rocket Ishmael. Um, actually had a faster, yeah, I remember him. I was actually at a faster 40 yard dash than him in training camp. So that was, that was great. So then I got out and it was a passion.

It started chasing Bigfoot. I call it. And I say with Chris all the time is we’re constantly looking for what is the best way to improve human performance. And, um, it’s, it’s something I wake up thinking about it in the morning and I’m teaching all day long physical education, along with running a gym, I’m watching kids move constantly.

And wondering what separates the elite movers from the normal movers are the kids that struggle. Um, so that passion is with me every day. So the new stuff, how the brain is in charge of everything. And, um, that’s been the quest for the last five years. And, uh, we’re finding out some really cool things about your neurology and just restoring that, that neural hardware in you.

I’m curious though, what, I mean kind of a side topic with the brain, because I’ve read some books over the past couple of years on this kind of where’s this. Like with kids that I was, and I’m kind of jumping ahead here, a little bit less social media, and now the phones, like, how’s that? What have you guys seen?

How’s that impacting the brain? Well, first of all, anytime you’re on the phone, you’re not moving how’s that we’ll go with the basics. You’re not as good. Right? So navigating either, you know? So, so kids got their heads down. Their eyes are converging and their brainstem is getting overloaded on top of blue light.

On top of it’s disrupting sleep patterns. They’re not moving. Like they used to move when I was a kid, we didn’t sit around, we were outside playing. And if I came home, my mother was like, yeah, go out and play more. Um, so I try to, you know, in our phys ed classes, we’re talking, put the phone. Give us 45 minutes where there’s no phones in your moving, because ultimately it’s going to help your, your classroom teachers.

Because if you move your brain operates better, you think, you think clearer, you think more creatively. So that, that part’s been neat to tie in what I do at the school. Cool. We’ve been doing stuff down in Jasper, Indiana, uh, and we started adding, you know, really basic RPR stuff and then get up and you do figure eights around chairs and do figure eight patterns in the middle of class.

Uh, they have brain timeouts where kids get up from their chair. They go in the back and they’ve got figure eight patterns to get up and walk around. Uh, and when they feel like they got it, they come back and sit back down and they’ve been having these incredible changes down in that school district. So it’s kind of cool.

Just waking some brains up, just waking them up, you know, there’s the assistant superintendent there. His name is Glenn , uh, used to be powerless bench, press champion of the world. I think he’s the first guy to 42 that benched over seven. Uh, but he’s into, you know, what can we do physically to make our kids better?

And so he’s bringing in all this stuff and, you know, instead of talking about it, we’re going to do it. And so he’s a superintendent walking around, set up the chairs. I don’t care. We’re going to make these kids move. We’re going to do this stuff. And so completely throwing away traditional school and we’re going to move, get up and move in the middle of math class, get up and move in the middle of literature, whatever you’re doing.

Get in the middle of science in third grade. Uh, and he’s been having these great. Improvements, despite the phones and COVID and the lockdowns and all that other stuff. That’s just so important because Dan was with you when I learned this, um, you know, from birth till about two years old, that that input from blue light is a, about as addictive as cocaine is.

And so, I mean, you have iPads these days where parents kind of, you know, have their kids watch a little movie or something and calm them down. But you know, what they’re really doing is they’re just addicting kids, these screens. So it’s unfortunate, but for a lot of kids, it’s probably not in their fault, you know?

And then they come to us at a later age, whether it’s eight years old at 12 years old or whatever. So I think it’s awesome that some teachers are out there doing that, get them to move because we kind of have to correct that in a way, you know, if we want them to be able to learn or, you know, whether it’s mentally or physically campus look, watch, who’s looking down at their phone while they’re walking and watch how they can’t track.

They drift. Once you look down at your phone, you instantly start to do. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a, it’s a neat time for you with your son. Oh yeah. So now you can watch the motor patterns develop. You can watch the neurology develop right in front of you and it’s like a teaching. Just watch it. It’s great.

Yeah. It’s, it’s been fun. I was telling Chris, uh, earlier, you know, whenever he starts eating solid foods, I want to get in more textures. Um, I can’t remember who she was, but we, we kind of touched on this a while back, just every little different type of texture foods, even that plays a role in a lot of their sensory.

And, um, I’ve got the neuro spike ball and I’ve got, uh, anything that feels funny, different, you know, that’s, that’s different than what you normally would grab like a bottle or something put in his hands and let him play with it, you know? And you know, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but kind of desensitizing that, that tactile sensory.

So it’s been, it’s been cool. It’s been really cool. Chris’ question for you. You’ve, you’ve done a ton of work that involves kind of outside the box, kind of thinking and training. What have been some of your struggles in just selling those methods to athletes, but coaches as well? I think as time goes on, you know, it gets more difficult because kids look at their phone and see what’s going on on social media and think that that’s, that’s the way it is.

And for most athletes, it’s not, uh, in fact, we only see a snippet of that athlete moving and jumping onto a box or something like that. Uh, we don’t see the whole big picture. Um, but I think part of being a good coach is sound kids and on what you’re doing and communicating and showing them, you know, this is why we’re doing this, and this is maybe why.

Uh, fancy guy on Instagram is doing this and you shouldn’t be doing that. And here’s really what we need to do to get you to where you want to go. So I think if you, once you make that a, a group effort, you know, you’re on this journey together, you know, I think it it’s an easy sell. Do you ever, what about parents?

You ever giving them pushback from sure. You know, cause dad did this back in high school. How come you’re not doing this? And I said, I kind of, at that point, my career where I can say, well, how many people have you coached? Look at how many people I’ve coached and look at my records. And that’s great. You did this in high school, but science in athletics has changed.

You know, what we know about how to move is changed in 30. Uh, and I’m, and I’m afraid. That’s where what’s one of the problems with our profession is we are stuck on tradition. We like to do what people have done traditionally because it’s safe and, uh, it’s tried and true for most people where, you know, that’s what everyone’s doing.

How do you know? Well, I mean, remember back when Nebraska was winning all this national championships, everyone did what Nebraska was doing because they were winning national championships. They forget that, you know, these they’re recruiting these phenomenal athletes as well. And they’re going to end up to be a freak athlete, no matter what.

Yeah. You know what, I think this is just what I’ve noticed over the years. It’s like this profession we’re in, it’s like some people just are really good salesmen, you know, in this able to put the right wrap and sales pitch on that and the hook on that product, even though it may be. I mean, you go back all the way back to Husker power.

I mean, obviously that was, you know, coach Eppley pioneered and sure. Set the tone for so many people, but, but even back then, they just, they were genius at, you know, marketing and pitching that Chris and I always joke. We’re not very good marketers. No. Yeah. My dad always told me you could be 90% marketing, 10% content or 90% content, 10% marketing.

You can’t be somewhere in the middle. Well, that’s not good advice. It’s true. And I always thought if you’re a true master, you’re 90% content and that should, that should be enough, right? Yeah. That was Mr. Miyagi thing. Yeah. You go back to those, that, that phone thing, the kids on the phone or the iPads, and you talk about the laws of motor development.

We want gross before. Fine. Right? Gross motor development before fine motor skills were reversed. Genetic code right now with the phones and you see kids type in texts, right? So when you develop that, that’s a scary thing because now your physiology better match that when you get older, are you going to get hurt or you’re not going to be able to move.

So it’s a scary time. It’s a scary time. I tell my son all the time, put the phone away. We’re moving. We’re not going to start getting out of line with developing fine motor control first. Yeah. And you can even trace injuries back to when kids were a little babies and Shane, once again, we’ve watched videos on this where babies don’t crawl, you know, in a symmetrical, perfect way.

And, um, maybe like the left or right leg is kind of lagging behind a little bit and they’re crawling sideways and 10, 15 years later, they’re, they’re playing a sport in that leg. That wasn’t it goes out and you wonder why. And everyone wants to pinpoint it on something. I think people like to play the blame game a little bit, but it’s like, oh, you got to go back to the roots and that’s the stuff to do.

Yeah. At a question for, for coach Victor, um, you tell him about crawling last time he visited with us. It’s kind of stuck with me, Dan. It’s just the whole. You know, the gate patterning of, you know, the, we, we were kind of talking about as a staff before this podcast today, but, but it’s, it’s definitely something I’ve taken away from you with my tennis guys, getting them out of that, just bilateral position and more, more split standards.

Can you kind of elaborate again on kind of like the thought process behind that and yeah, we’re hardwired for gate. I mean, it’s the most, if you’re going to evaluate somebody’s brain and see how healthy it is or how robust it is, it’s how you walk, right? So when you put one foot in front of the other and your brain has to communicate right hemisphere last time, Sarah cerebellum, all these things come into interactions with muscular system and skeletal system.

It’s, it’s a very complex system that we take from. And we don’t ever program for it. We’re always programming bilateral movements, or when we’re doing unilateral, we have no idea of what part of the brain we’re affecting. Is it the PMRF and the stabilization side for the muscular? Is it the voluntary movement we spend most of our time training, the quality of voluntary motor control.

We spend very minimal time training the reflexive side of your body. So if I’m moving my left hand, that’s controlled by my right brain. Okay. That initiates the movement. But that right side of my brain fires down my brainstem and creates all the stabilizers. So when I reach for something, I don’t fall over that company.

In strength and conditioning is hardly ever trained in it’s 90% of the output, 10% goes to voluntary movement. That’s a scary equation when we’re spending the most time on the other side of the equation. So I can get more bang for my buck on the reflexive side, that intrinsic firing pattern that happens in thousands of a second, which actually initiated the whole process and everything that we do when we’re forcing it, you know, putting weights on our back or lifting and all that other stuff happens.

We kind of skip over that and that’s not necessarily for that movement, but what do coaches always want? We want the twitchy athlete. We’re looking for the twitchy guy. And really when you’re in the weight room, you kind of bypass that, that entire intrinsic contraction. Yeah. Reflexive system is so paramount in, in training.

Well, Chris, you had mentioned this and it just occurred. You were, uh, you were visiting our staff and just to bring that up, uh, this, how we quantify things in a weight room to justify our jobs, but this was not too long ago. I remember, you know, working with football and every year we had to have, you know, offensive, defensive, large book of everybody’s picture in their numbers over their career to see if they gotten stronger in their numbers, you know, and that, that better, you know, you better gotten higher and higher each year, if not, your job was in jeopardy.

And so that that’s kind of know the model that we’d come from, you know, so, and it’s safe that way. And, and the athletes want to see improvement too. I mean, we want to show them that your hard work is resulted in this kind of improvement, and it’s easy to quantify, just lay down and push the weight or stand up with the weight.

Uh, but I think we all know that most sports come down to speed and sometimes those two don’t. That’s good. Yeah. Um, real quick, Krista, just to touch on another topic, um, can you tell us a little bit more about your spring ankle model? When and how did that come about and in what are some key milestones progression markers you look for?

Well, as we were talking about earlier today, uh, you get to the point where you have a lot of film and a lot of people, and you have some people that run pretty well. And you’re trying to come up with some similarities, like what do all these, what traits do all these people have in common? And you can see people who have big knees coming up or their knee drive.

Isn’t so great. Or they’ve got a big kick out the back, but yet they’re running the same times. And then when you start to pair it down and really focus in, you start to realize, wait a minute, they all have very similar. And it’s hard to watch because you know, a lot of times people look at to still to get their idea of what’s going on.

And it’s hard to focus in on feet when you videotape and that, but when you start to focus in, you start to see a lot of similarities between people who can really run. Um, and so we just started breaking that down as to how can we get those qualities? And that’s where we came up with spring ankle model, where I think all movements are going to start with isometrics.

And there’s some basic positions that you can be in and you start having kids or athletes stand up and go, all right, can you do this? And it’s like, I can’t hold my body weight for five seconds in that position. But wait a minute, I’m asking you to do eight times your body weight in that position, you can’t hold yourself.

So maybe we need to work on that. Uh, so we kind of put together the three different positions and then we’ve kind of added to that since then, because we’ve got to the point where, okay, great. I can hold this and now I can hold some weight, you know, how are we going to progress that, how are we going to continue to get there?

And so that’s kind of how we continue to build on it. Uh, then we added in some ankle movements, you know, some ankle rock or four-foot rock or toll rocker, uh, to try to build on that stiffness and you get some pretty good results. Um, yeah, that’s kinda how we got there and it, and it worked pretty well. I was telling you guys earlier about the athlete that had really bad feet, but he had a great vertical jump, 40 inch vertical jump for a high school kid.

That’s pretty good. Uh, but he was not fast and he did not have a great long jump. He was a long jumper, jumped 19 six, which is good, but you’re not going to score any points at the state meet. And all we did was. Foot isometrics with them. I mean, we figured you can already jump. You got plenty of power, you know, if I make you jump 42, I don’t think I’m going to make any faster at this point.

Uh, we just did foot stuff and he jumped 22, 6 put three feet on his long jump. I mean, you gotta think about, you made me if you ever worked with throwers. Right. And we, we we’ve got an obstacle, a really good throw here trip, um, uh, Texas and we, Ryan crowds were through here, but those guys could you ma I mean, you imagine when they’re throwing that 16 pound implement.

Right, right. And it’s that last bit where they flick it with her hand to get that snap for it to sail. Right. But think about your feet. It’s the same thing where you don’t have that dynamic in your feet. Like your feet are shut off or just weak. And you’ve got this big engine up top. And then if you ever, I called a directional foot and it’s something that we’ve been working on recently, but where your foot is pushing you to, like, if you can’t make it through to your big toe or inside edge or whatever you want to call it, you’re pushing somewhere else.

And, you know, even a two degree difference. I mean, if you’re shooting a gun or launching something to the moon, two degrees is going to make you miss by a lot. Um, so the more we can get you to push straight ahead, off your foot, the less the rest of your body has to guide to where you’re going to that target.

So. The more we can get our feet to do the more the rest of your body can play the sport. And that’s kind of how we, it’s how I communicate that with, it’s almost like a leak down there. Like you goes wherever, right. Water, finding a crack, right. You dump water on something that’s going right to the crack.

It’ll find it right. And that’s what energy is going to do. It’s going to spill out the leak spots. And I’m not saying people go out there and say, I’m just going to change my foot pad. And when I go a sprint and consciously do that, that’s not going to work. That’s going to slow you down. I mean, there’s a process.

You have to earn the right to get to that position. And I think that’s kind of what we tried to build in the spring. Ankle is a developmental process to get to that point where your feet do most of your work. Yeah. We had a, you know, as a young coach, this is a kind of a funny story, but we had this young lady from Hawaii back when I first started coaching that had Colorado and she was from there and went to school there.

And my wife and I were good friends. And one day she came in and, uh, she had sandals, like she had some like flip flops on or something. And I looked down at her feet and I was like, oh my gosh, what’s wrong with her feet? And they were just completely like splayed open real wide, like, like duck feet. And now as I’ve gotten older and you know, obviously learn more like our feet are so unhealthy when you see those toes just all cramped together.

And he’s all these fancy like shoes we wear today. Where’s your jammed into the front of the, into the front of the shoe. Anyway. So you made me think of that. Like our feet are so like the, the, what we put on them, they’re just, they’re just set up for weakness, you know? And it’s the first thing that touches the ground.

So it’s the first ground interaction for your brain to perceive as a threat. So instantly it’s going to start the chain of, oh, what’s going to go wrong. I mean, the bottom line in all training is, is your body’s ability to absorb force. If it can, you’re going to do some good things. If it can’t bad, things are going to happen.

Yeah. It’s going to display somewhere else. And then it all goes to hell in a hand basket. And if you watch a good football player, hit somebody right there, they are, their ability to absorb force is more than the person they’re hitting so bad things happen. Yeah. And it, you know, in my opinion, a lot of like the overarching theme.

So we talked about the ankle, uh, the spring ankle model, but with like RPR neuro warmup, um, neuro testing, like what we did, uh, about a year and a half ago, it seems like a lot of this is very, like, there’s all proactive stuff that we’re doing. Um, and, and I kind of a two-part question for you guys, um, as much proactive as it is, why is it always feel like we’re so reactive with no, the bad things happening, right.

It feels like we’re always kind of correcting stuff. When on some of these meds, I feel like man, you know, if we could just get to these athletes earlier, and obviously we can’t, we work with a certain population and at some point their kids now just get weird, but like, you know, it just always feels like is as proactive as we are.

We’re always a little reactive, you know? Why, why do you think that is? I think when the that’s a good question. I think when, when things come out, like let’s just take a look at the posterior chain, right. Everybody’s training their posterior training. I don’t think there’s a group out there now that’s saying don’t turn your posterior right.

Have our hamstring injuries gone down. I don’t think so. So, okay. Let’s check that off the box. That ain’t it. That could be a part of it. But my thing is, is I, I think that’s controlled in your brain at the brainstem level. So your brainstem is responsible for that flection extension synergy in your body.

And if that is disrupted by a faulty gait pattern or a compensation pattern that sunk in, I don’t care how much of your posterior chain you train the body is going to go with what it can do and where it feels the same. And if you get really strong in a bad pattern and you’re just really strong in a bad pattern.

Um, so I think as, as RPR kind of spilled out onto the scene, we’re starting to understand that you can make these neurological jumps and, and create this neural organization to your gate that makes you more efficient as a mover, forget a weightlifter, forget whatever else you’re doing. Just a more efficient mover.

Um, With a healthier brain will create less injuries because now your body is able to withstand the purchase of patients that are going to happen in sport. Where, you know, if you’re doing just weight room work, your body is not prepared to go every which way. It’s just not right. I think we get this desire to get strong and we grease the groove and that’s not what support is all about it.

You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have a groove greased if you’re playing sports, because if something goes wrong, misstep, miss time, something like that. That’s where, yeah, it’s interesting. My, you know, my background isn’t necessarily exercise science. You know, I, I went to college, I policy degree just so I could get in the Marines and get moving on with my life and just get out to the Marines.

That’s what I wanted to do. And then I did my masters after that and came here and intern and everything. And it’s interesting when I talk to interns now, you know, something I learned along the way is not many interns know the difference between a closed skill and open. And what you guys are talking about.

The differences right there, like the weight room is very close skill movements. You know, where the, the barbell is going to go. It’s not going to juke you out, but the men you get on the soccer field, you have no idea what this, this athlete is going to do, come at you with the ball. And, you know, they go left, you try to go left and you’re on your back, you know, grabbing your knee and they’re going around you, you know?

And so I always find it interesting. I even, even some of the kids these days coming up through the circuit of exercise science and everything, they still kind of struggled to grasp that close skill versus open skill concept. And, um, I feel like a lot of your stuff really starting tackle that, you know, you know, what’s interesting too, to look at is when I first started out in this field, Rehab and performance training.

We’re at a, this right there. We’re there, we’re at each other. I don’t want to do that. You guys do that. You guys do the Swiss ball and if you tried to do the sweet spot, they came after you. Or if you tried to chop, if you tried to go to the other side, it’s like, yeah, I saw that in physical therapy. I’m not doing that crap, but now I think it’s making a full circle.

Like if you look at it now, if you take a look at just concussion research, okay. Well, people who can see better, don’t get concussed. Hmm. That’s not strong neck muscles. That’s your body’s ability to absorb force when you can see it coming. Right? So if your periphery has expanded or if you’re tired and your periphery decreases because you’re fatigued, you’re more susceptible to a head injury.

So the guy from Cincinnati is doing some great research with that, but I’m looking at it from a performance standpoint going if I can increase periphery, if I can increase these neural sensors, I’m going to be a better. Period. Forget the head injuries. Yes, that’s great. Right? And that’s from a rehab site and our protection.

That’s great. But from a performance side, you know, the more we can see, the more we can react to the world and the more we can in part our will on the world. If we can, I can see it. I mean, it’s one reason I really like overspeed training, whether it’s sprinting or agility or any of that things, it’s just, it’s a stable system.

It’s training visual system to happen, to be feel safe when it’s going faster. I mean, you guys don’t remember the first time you went skiing, right. You know how fast you’re going when you’re skiing and when it’s too fast, you suddenly shrink down or, and you stand up and you’re going to jump off something.

And it’s a little high, you kind of squat down a little bit. So from a neurologic standpoint, it doesn’t look as far. Same thing when you sprint. I mean, if I can pull you fast and your body says, Hey, I’m alive and I’m going really fast. Maybe I can do this on my. Uh, there’s a guy in Japan who, I don’t know if he’s published this yet, so I don’t know if I can talk about it, but, uh, has been doing research with overspeed training and a release mechanism.

And did you know it’s at Rio Naga haras place in Japan, so everything’s measured and he said, the best thing you can do for spring training is get him pulling, hit that release button and then see what you can do. And you’re not getting pulled really cool research. Uh, I did a 10 80 thing and he was before me and I’m like, wait a minute, pause, pause.

It’s alive. I can’t pause. No dude, I got these questions, but no. So I, I don’t know if it’s out yet, but that’s what he was talking about. This really cool stuff. But from again, from a neurologic standpoint, reduce threat, reduce threat you when. Yeah, figure out different ways to do it. Reduce threat. I mean, that’s why like when, when, when RPR and Douglas heal and in Sean Sherman and Mapplethorpe, they start talking about reducing threat to the brain and your perceived threat.

I’m listening. I’m going like that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And again, it goes back to what I say all the time. You’re never going to jump 40 inches in the air unless your body believes in your brain believes it can land safely from 40 inches in the air. I’ll give you a good story about that.

This has happened over Christmas break, so we want to scoop it up. I like to scuba dive. I know he’s afraid of the water and down deep, down deep. Oh, I’m good on that one. So we’re in, we’re in Belize and, uh, beautiful reefs and all that. And on our second day dive and we go down and I’ve S sharks have been in the water with me before, but these nurse sharks, 6, 7, 8 feet.

They’re like dogs and they’re next to you and they bump you and they get they’re bumping you. So the first and that first time that that had happened, I can’t tell you anything about that dive, because I was conscious about that shark bumping into me all the time, but then the second time I went down there, they’re waiting for us again.

And the second time I was like, oh, I missed all this stuff last time. I was afraid of the shark. The shark was bumping me. I wasn’t sure what I knew it wasn’t gonna bite me, but still my periphery went like this. And one time my wife caught me because I thought they were gone and I’m looking around. And then here he comes right in front of my face and I kind of jumped into my wife’s like laughing at me.

And it’s like, but it’s a shark. It’s a big shark, swimming close to you. I couldn’t tell you anything about that. Dive anything I saw other than the three large nurse sharks and they don’t attack people. I know that, but still, yeah. And again, with sharks pumping you, 30 football players are going to come in and do the same workout in the weight room.

Chris looked at that shark and went into a freeze response. When his wife is laughing, you’re telling me the results going to be the same. She’s ready. Never said that, but that’s how you explain training. There it is right there. You reduce this threat and you’re, you’re in a good situation. You’re swimming in a good world.

It all boils down to sharks. Anyway. That’s right. I’ll live through you, coach 10 sharks. Yeah. There’s a lot of hammerheads down in Hawaii guys go the next to them. And it just cruised by, we were in about 20 feet of water and there he went. No, he was good on that one. Um, so knowing what we know now, what are your thoughts on using some of these methods with kids in sports?

Like say middle school in terms of, of increasing the ability to move and, and reduce the threat? I think it’s great. I think it’s awesome. I, I, I tell our kids all the time. I track them hand-eye coordination stuff, right? Brain left brain activities. Um, I just trick them. Cause at that point they don’t really know what they’re doing.

They’re just know they’re moving cleaner. They’re they’re behaving better. Um, I do it with my son all the time. Like Chris was talking about infinity walks. He spends a lot of time with different colored glasses on doing infinity walks in my kitchen while he’s reading while he’s dribbling his basketball, anybody walks, what does that word?

It’s figure eight complex movement pattern. That’s constantly have your highs flips the sides, your brains. It’s good. That Corpus callosum it’s working on both sides of your brain. That’s all I do for Jody work. I’ve seen some of this. Um, it was one of our Cal calls. It goat training drill. I’ll tell you what though.

It’s you can just walk backwards. Walking backwards is a phenomenal neural reset. Fantastic. We do it in between our flying tens. We had our phys ed class do it. That’s part of their warm down. They walk backwards and the kids love it. They’re laughing. But some kids struggle too. They’re constantly looking over their shoulder, but your brain’s got to concentrate and exactly what’s going on.

So now we’ve got increased cerebellum activation. If you think about the foot and how it’s going to hit the ground, when you walk backwards, it’s exactly what happens when your sprint. Yeah. You’ve got to, when you’re walking back, especially like, I’ll, we’ll use that on, like he’ll try and walk them backwards.

You definitely gotta lock in and mentally you’ll, you’ll be on ground. I have the parents, the middle school athlete, parents that show up with their kids to do assessments and things like that. And so coachable, what, what can we do? What, you know, I want my S my son wants to be this. How can we get him there?

So go to the jungle gym, go down to the. Hang around make obstacle courses, how fast you can get through the obstacle course, go out to the forest reserve, go sprint through the forest because now your periphery has to pick up all the branches and eventually going to have to pick up your head, to see where you’re going to go.

And you just kind of create the sense, this awareness of everything around you while you’re trying to make things happen fast, and you learn, you learn where to put your foot, you learn. Well, that’s a big thing. I got to jump that differently. Uh, and that’s the ultimate. And basically what, what we do. I mean, you watch a dog go sprint through the forest.

Have you ever seen a dog look down to see where its feet are going? When it sprints through a forest? That’s ideally what we want to develop and you’ve never seen your dog trip, have you? No, I have not. You kind of remind me of the story you’re telling when you’re talking about sharks again, don’t you? No, I’m good.

I’m going to live through you, but some of the old, like Russian training tapes, some of the Soviet and like they out in the woods, you know, running across logs, grabbing trees, swinging, jumping off ledges on an athlete. Yeah. And for lack of a better word, because it’s the most popular word in training right now, robust, you’re trying to become more robust of a mover in terms of all the different environmental factors that go into where your foot hits the ground, when it hits the ground, disturbing, that process makes you again, help you prepare that threat level.

Yeah, we recently had, I can’t remember I’m blanking on the guy’s names, but we had the rogue, um, strong man. Those guys were in town just to a couple and I’ve never seen the most massive. Human beings lift this weight. And it was kind of interesting. Uh, Brian Shaw was the, he’s like one of the big names. He apparently he trains like with all the technology, he’s got all the bells, what got the fancy gym and I forget the other guy’s name.

He trains just so like medieval, but he’s, both of them are really good at high level what they do. One that uses different methodology, other one, a different kind. But I don’t know. I find it interesting. I think, um, futuristic, I think we’re getting back to some of the stuff that like, Hey, we kind of left this stuff.

We really need this, you know, with all this technology and these fancy social media and GM’s, and like we’re missing these big pieces. That was, you know, they actually worked in the body. The body needs that country moving piece. Right. It’s crazy. We’re moving my coaches and we’re not. We need to move. Yeah.

I’m curious for you, Dan, like even talked about this before, but with your guys, what do you do? Simple things you do in the weight room. You mentioned like marching before anything else? Yeah, our whole weight room stuff during the season for football and on the football coach is outside. We, we train outside during the season.

So we have water bags. We have plyometrics stations. Wait, go, go a little further with that, like water bag. So it’s on your back. Maybe weighs 15 pounds, but it’s got water. You can change the, so I actually, the more water there is in there, the slower it happens. So the less water in there, the faster, yeah.

Th the weight shifts. So, so most people, and I tell people this all the time. So when you train acceleration, right. And everybody trains it, you either have your hands against the wall and you’re doing your, your normal track drills that you do, where you punch your knees up, or you’re pulling this. Or you’re running uphill.

Those are the ways that people train acceleration. Right? So what we’re trying to say is why don’t we take the upper body, make that unstable, then watch what happens from a motor organization of your lower half, right? So when you put that water back up top and all those co contractions of the spine take place, the lower half of your body, the lower shanks, they behave, the way survival should behave.

They stiffen up tendons, stiffen foot placement becomes proper for survival. It makes sense because the upper body’s on stable, right? We spend so much time in therapy or whatever, doing our lower body unstable. That does nothing for us. So, so now we have. We have no stability. When we accelerate in sport, we have to lean and we got to go hope we don’t fall on our face, but we train it with all kinds of stability.

We lean on stuff. We hold stuff behind us and pull sleds. That’s all creating a platform in which we can lean on that we don’t have in sport. So we use the water bags. Yeah. And I remember Chris had a good example of this is when a quarterback throws a pass and receive returns to catch it in the past goes a final reside.

It’s just his inability to turn and turn and spring upper body, lower body separation. Nobody trains it. Right. Nobody transit. So we do all those things in season, out on the field. We don’t even make it back to the weight room and take that’s. When the big jumps we had when I worked with David Montgomery, I still work with them.

But, uh, when he came from his first year at the bears and came to me, and that was one of the things that I identified is first of all, can you take your upper body and take it off your lower back? I think when, uh, the Jags figured out back when Milo was there, you know, 30% of a football game, you’re not, your torso is not squared on your hips that you’re off, but yet we never trained that.

And then we made his upper body unstable. So his lower body became more stable and I call it the Victor drill. Uh, you take a stick, you need to take rubber bands behind in a, goes to a rope and you hold the stick out and you can do one, hit the one leg, it hops or acceleration. You pull back and forth. And in a running back, your upper body is always unstable.

He’s got all kinds of people hitting you. So we’ve got to make that lower body more stable. So when you get hit in the upper bodies, keep going forward. It’s amazing when you put those, when you put a stick on somebody’s back and you put two rubber bands on it and you stand behind them, like you’re controlling the horse and they run it.

You don’t tell him anything about accelerate. They get into that position. You create the purchase missions and you watch just filming their feet. They’re perfect. You’re not coaching it. It becomes perfect because it’s a survival mode. You have to put your foot in the right spot at the right time with the right stiffness or you’re going to fall.

And if not, I mean, I’ve got video of David doing it on my phone, where the first time we did it, his whole upper body compensated to try and get the foot to hit in the right place. And he took the whole thing off to the side and you actually see his torso pulled 20 degrees to the right, trying to get his foot in the right place.

But then the next rep, he came back, you know, I made fun of him and then he comes back and then he learned, he learned how to move the learning process. He learned right away, and then you’re in it. You’re going to learn fast. And that’s one thing that I think differentiates the levels of athlete is how fast you learn in those difficult situations and how fast you can make those adjustments.

Uh, and that’s really what we want to have happened because we want. Well, now he’s got to play 17 games that we want those guys to make all 17 games. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve always thought too, I’m a big hockey nerd. So I even think to now take a sport to implement in your hands and a moving park. That’s moving way faster than a ball.

I’m talking about that tomorrow. Okay. Awesome. Well, I’ll, uh, I’ll let you save some for that. Yeah. I mean, it’s just, I mean, the speed of the game, I, when I started playing, when I was getting a little older and eventually had to stop because I just wasn’t good enough, but I mean, the speed of the game is so fast.

And to have that ability to do that, you can see the difference between the best players and the worst players, like a karmic David DZ example. That’s why you can make any Joe players just look so silly. Cause I mean, you can just keep going and he’s looking the other way. I broke into the business train and hockey players and I knew nothing about hockey, so I had to go watch games.

So the first time I went there, I’m watching them and I’m watching it and watching it. I get, we get done. I I’m asking, these are three pretty well-known players. I’m like you guys play for 30 seconds. How hard could it be in that laughing? They’re laughing. And then I started to study it a little bit and I’m like, wow, it’s a pretty dynamic game.

And you got to have your head on a swivel, your periphery better be good. Your hand-eye coordination better be there. Your stiffness better be there at the right time. So there’s a lot of different qualities to go into it. And, uh, you take a guy like Brian Johnson and you put him in a 20 yard dash and he’ll blow everybody’s doors out.

He’s unbelief. He could be a punt returner in the NFL. It’s how fast he was. Oh yeah. Um, and that’s how he played on the ice. It was unbelievable. Yeah. There was a video of Gretzky racing through their athletes. I can’t remember their names off the top of my head, but I mean, He blew them all away. None of, none of them, hockey players, one of them was more of a runner than anything.

Brian Geontae again, I was training some fast dudes at the time and Brian Johnson would come to those workouts and run with those and then an athletes and athlete. Yeah. That too athletes and athlete, they can move and they can adjust to whatever their environment is. I’m curious, the part of my kind of story of get into performance years ago was just kind of like the weight room was starting to really take away from just being a good ballplayer.

I mean, in your guys’ experience, like what, what are some things you, if you, you, you see a kid like maybe this, this pro football player that you worked with, what was his name you gave Montgomery? I’m sure this guy is strong. Right. And he’s a 60 foot shot. Putter. Yeah. How do you know, like, whether it’s you throw it.

Yeah. That’s a lot. Yeah. What is some things you look for? Maybe somebody is overpowered or they’re just not, the weight room are starting to take away from, from the actual game. Like what do you, how do you recognize? I said, is it powerful enough? Like if I made, if I took someone like David and I made him stronger, I don’t think it would improve his game at all because he’s already strong enough.

Can I make them move the bar faster? Well, he already moves the bar really fast. So I don’t think he’s done that already. And I don’t have actual numbers, but when you watch it and you’ve seen other people move the bar, you go. Yeah, that’s good enough. You know, I don’t know, but when you watch a move, you go, ah, there’s something, there’s something, there’s something.

So you actually watched them move and you film it and you break it down and say, here’s something, here’s something, here’s something, um, DB hammer came up with. Are you a neuro rate athlete where your body can turn on and turn off very quickly where you are neuro duration athlete. That is just pure, maximum strength, right?

And then there was right in the middle of this neural magnitude. Explosiveness. I think you can actually watch somebody walk and tell which side of the equation they’re on. Like you can watch David Montgomery walkies right in the middle man. He’s he’s right there. He’s strong enough. He’s got the Twitch.

He’s got the ability to turn on and turn off rapidly. You watch some of these high school kids that come in that are really strong. They’re stuck on the floor. They’re stuck on the floor just by the way they walk right there. Their neurology is just slow because they’re bilateral movers. Um, so I think watching people move gives you a great idea of how you should train them.

And even when they say you can only see how someone stands you go. Yeah, I got an idea what this person does. And my fear is with high school athletes, especially the high school football players is I see this can’t straighten out. Senator in constant flection and then their shoulders, all four, because they’ve bench pressed and curled way too many workouts.

I know that kid can’t move just from his shoulder posture. He’s going to be tilted over way too far. And he’s never going to be able to sprint. He’s going to kick everything out the back and almost fall he’s in. He’s in a true stumble pattern instead of getting up and I, in our small little world that we have with Cal and Chris, myself, Matt van Dyke, we call it one set of one set of one.

You walk around like this, that’s a one set, a one set of one guy. That guy is not going to be running away from anything. He’s running two instead of 1, 1 7 1 like it. So, I mean, I feel like I’d say the, say a great deal of your work involves, you know, a much deeper understanding of central nervous system and the brain is it relates to, you know, development performance.

You know, I, you know, my question is where do we go from here? I mean, I feel. You know, athletes today have a lot different habits and patterns and athletes 10 years ago, three years ago, three years ago. Uh, you know, beside, we were touching the lack of tendon strength that was not developed from not walking for 18 months, because you’ve been locked in your basement in front of a computer.

Yeah, absolutely. We saw that coming out of track season last year, where we were locked down a year and then the lovely state of Illinois gave us a seven week season in June last year, but we had to deal with kids that hadn’t done anything for an entire year. Oh yeah. And how are you going to bring them back to that in, in what happened to muscle atrophy, uh, tendon strength, ligament, strength, uh, aerobic systems, you know, all the different cycles and think the junk, they pumped in their body staying up till three in the morning, every night, just completely wracked.

And I think we’re going to feel that pinch for a generation. And I don’t care if you’re a kindergartener or a ninth grader, a senior going through that. I think that is something that’s going to leave a lasting mark on our athletes. And I think that’s going to have to be a prime concern for strength.

Coaches is we’ve got to really go back to basics here. I know these are great fancy exercises, and I want to be pumped about them and I’ve seen them on YouTube or whatever, but I think we need to go back to basics because of what they lost in those 18 months. And think about the cognitive impairment that’s been going on with young kids in school, not being able to see people’s faces and how they react.

And in Spanish development and body language from the mass, I’m a school teacher. Uh, halfway through the school year. I don’t know half my kids, cause I can’t see their face. Imagine a young kid who’s trying to learn and look at the mouth move or the reactions of people or the smiles. You know, many times I walk in the supermarket and I’m smiling at somebody and I don’t even say hello, I’m just smiling.

And my mask is covering it. They can’t see me. Right. That’s a big deal. And that, that, we’re not going to feel that tomorrow. We’re going to feel that down the road a little bit, these kids, and I feel bad for that. But as coaches, we’ve got to address that. We got to move. We got to get back to movement. Yeah.

It could be basic stuff. Really basic stuff like lineup. Let’s do a whole bunch of line hops today, just side to side or front to back really fast for 30 seconds. Get those Springs working again. And that’s what we had to go back to. Yeah, that’s, that’s a good point. I, we talked to coach Dan path during the COVID break and he mentioned, uh, the internal biological clock of an athlete and how the season goes.

And so we’re used to, I’ll go back to hockey cause I love that sport. So summers. Fall-winter we’re playing Springer, probably going on vacation, some of your back to training. And it’s been that way for these guys, their entire life. I grew up in Russia. He’s been that way since you were two years old, probably.

Um, so you know, now COVID hits the season changes and, um, the NFL season changed too. And he predicted at the time it was just a slew of injuries and sure enough last NFL season, I mean, I was watching ESPN and they just went down the laundry list of injuries. It was crazy. It’s crazy. Well, if you think about it, who’s the guy who does the tendon research, David Barr.

Is that his name? BARR. Keith. Keith, Dr. Keith, Keith Barr. Yeah. Fantastic stuff. Right. And so you sit around those, those tendons stiffen, then you go run tear, right? You do want stiffness, but you got to make it. You got to make it get into shape a little bit, middle, middle part. It’s not completely Steph that’s a big part of it.

Back in the day for the hockey players. It was if you won the Stanley cup and you’re coming into your training late in the season, right. Because you’re going to start back up again. So that was trying to navigate that stuff. Now it’s, nobody’s doing anything and it’s funny. People wonder too, you know, with like championship teams win and they come in the next season may start a little slow and then one’s like, oh, you know, they’re tired.

They’re not going to do, you know, do well again. It’s like, eh, to give them some time to catch up, but, uh, Yeah. I don’t think people, obviously we never had Michael Jordan while why that was so amazing because they did it year after year after year. And that’s a really long post season. Yeah. Yeah. I know we’re going, you know, we’re we just started a new semester here, but I know one of my teams volleyball, we’ve gone through 18 months of just being in season.

We had a fall season when COVID first hit. So fall of 20 spring of 21. And then we went back into fall of 21. So we went fall spring. We had three seasons back to back to back and we’ve literally got one of the kids, said it today in the gym. She goes, you know, I’ve never been through an seat. She’d been here almost two years.

That’s crazy. That’s scary. And I’m just like, but that hit me. Like I need it. Remedial, like, don’t think, you know, well, here’s the thing too. And it happens a lot with basketball players and I’m going to take a group of female basketball players, especially with the ACL injuries. They’re in the last 10 years, female basketball, if you watched it, it’s incredible.

Like the skill level of, of these young ladies is incredible. So what happens is if your physiology isn’t prepared for the skill level you have in your brain, you’re going to get hurt. So if you go back to back seasons and you haven’t prepared your body for it again, your brain still thinks it can do that.

I had a girl that was in high school, probably the best basketball player, male or female that I’ve ever trained. She could have been a starter on the guys’ team in high school. She went to duke. Six ACL tears. I got her on her, I think, going into her and she was unbelievable. So she comes into the gym, right.

She comes into the gym and I interview her, I watch her move and her mom’s like, she’s got this ACL tear and the surgeon did this. I’m like, oh my goodness. She said, what do you think? I go, we got to work on our feet. She’s not home. She tore her ACL six times. I’m like, okay, we’re going to work on her feet.

We all we did that off season was strengthened her. Vertical jump one up. She’s like, I’ve never, I never felt too good. My knees feel great, but so her career ended because one of the, one of the screws in her knee rusted had an infection and then had to go back in and clean that out. Then she was done, but she put on four inches in our off season of just stem in the bottom of her feet, getting in sand and getting her feet strong when people were telling me, no, you can’t do that because we’re doing it for a different reason.

Right. So we developed her feet, knee issues gone. Oh yeah. So you have to prepare your body for, for what skill level you want question kind of to add to that. Where’s your thoughts on this? Like multi, like young kids. Multi-sport, it’s kind of like I’m playing sports instead of just one. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple seasons change.

These things. Change sports, take a play in different environments. But this, I had to travel, you know, you were asking. Adolescent kids to go travel and go play seven games in a 20 or a 48 hour period of time that I’ve taken that class. That’s no fun. That’s what professional athletes do. I mean, that’s really what differentiates professional tennis players, golfers, even NFL players is how well do you travel to play one game?

And we’re asking our kids to play 6, 7, 8, 12, my son, this weekend played 14 volleyball games and uh, 48 hours. It’s ridiculous. What are we, what are we putting our kids through? Here’s what I tell Mike. Yeah, he plays basketball, lacrosse soccer, flag football. He plays everything. And on a Saturday I get up in the morning and I don’t stop moving, taking him places.

At the end of the day, we go into. And he asked me, what am I doing? I go, I don’t care about what you’re doing right now. I care about preparing your body for what you’re doing, because you’re not doing that. You’re all you’re doing is playing. We got to get, make sure you’re ready for it. And it’s not like we lift heavy weights.

We just do movement things, make his brain work, understand that type of communication that needs to happen between his growing body and his brain. And some of the coaches will look at me. Oh, you’re at that desk. And no, no, no, no. I’m doing it to protect against that because what his schedule is will hurt him down the road.

Yeah. Cal kind of put his son through that where Cal was overseeing all these games and all these travel games and was putting all, let’s say a mega, he was a mega waving him to check them and all that. And Calvin poem, he said, you’re done. Here’s dad cook. We’re going to whatever. No, you’re not, no, we’re staying home this weekend.

So you have a trip to the ER. Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy more of the money driving it. Not it’s the revenue, not what’s best for, I found this out this week. Does anyone in Chicago? This guy told me who’s one of these coaches club coaches. He’s making $200,000 a year at being a club soccer coach. Are you kidding me?

How did I miss that boat? I want to get out of that.

Yeah, because unfortunately the parents would definitely they’ll they’ll sign up for it. Oh, they’ll do it. So let kids be kids go play. So you got us rambling. This is not what we came here to talk about. Well, this is, this is my world too. I mean, I have four daughters, one of them’s in the clip system right now.

And so, you know, you hear different philosophies and thoughts and being a coach, you know, you definitely wanna help you try to help your kid out because they have dreams and goals. Like with my children, they didn’t want to have anything to do with my, my trajectory of formula. I had to have, my daughter said this to me freshman year.

Good. Really good. And right. How good it was. She goes, dad, I’m just letting you know right now I have zero intention to play basketball or any sport in college. I’m just playing sports to have fun and be with my friends and have a good time. Freshman year, she came out and told me that that’s so good.

Yeah. And I had to cause, you know, as a dad and you know, I’m this strength and speed guy, you know, I had these dreams, a train on my daughter and you know, just like every other parent, because I wanted her to have the same experience that I had in college. And, uh, she came out freshman year and said, yeah, I won’t be training with you.

Um, I play to have fun and you’re going to have to learn to live with the dad. It’s one of the worst mistakes I ever made was trying to coach my daughters. That didn’t go well, Dan Dan’s lucky. Colt goes along with it and he loves it. He does. That’s a rare, I feel like, uh, I did it for a little while, but just, I don’t know, for me, I was just not as patient with him, you know, as you would be with like your normal athletes, but cause that, cause I live with them and obviously in their day I told him I took him to a guy to work with him.

Like, yeah, dad, we, we like working with him better than me. He’s nicer. He’s nicer. Yeah. And my son picked a sport. I know nothing about, and that’s what he went with. Yeah. Um, one more question one more. Well, at least we might have more of it. So the information, uh, in work, you both present stems from a deeper understanding than most about the body and more specifically brain function as it pertains to athletic performance.

So for our young listeners out there, all right. Um, where’s a good starting point for them. Before they just run out and do like an RPR certification. Like what would you recommend kind of where they start before they go too deep? Well, I think the best thing to do is to get out and coach. I don’t care who it is, whatever grade level they are, if they’re good or they’re bad, you know, if they’re good athletes or if they’re horrible athletes get out and put your eyes on people and start watching, um, if you have to film the workouts and then go back and look to see what’s happening with the exercise, um, there’s tons of courses out there, you know, at TFC we’ve recorded.

All those Dan said the other day, a young coach, they could just listen to TFC lectures from all the people we’ve had in, in do great, but I really think get out and coach whoever you can watch things move. Don’t just watch people move, watch dogs, move, watch cats, move, watch how the bird takes off from the ledge.

You know, look at that stuff because there’s carry over into other things and just get, develop an eye for watching people move or watching things move, be patient, sit and watch people move sitting at the airport, watch him walk, watch people, walk by, see what you pick up. Know, that’s, you know, that’s early, early in my coaching career, I started taking some neuromuscular classes therapy, and that’s what we learned a lot was just watching gait, patterning.

And you can, and it’s funny how you can see things that your eyes starts to pick up of what’s going on, but you’re not, I’ve always felt like our interns, even our young coaches here, they do, they, the best ones are taking classes in courses, but they’re also coaching and they’re getting both they’re, they’re taking them and you got to be immersed in it to see how it says, a lot of people will come out and have all this knowledge and you still have to apply it to a human being and have an interaction with them and be able to coach them and teach them and guide them.

That’s a huge part of coaching, right? You can be, you could hold all the knowledge in the world. If you can’t communicate with people and, and get your passion. And have them by light their fire. You’re going to struggle. So I’d say, learn how to interact with people, learn how to learn. Go listen to people, understand how they coach might not be the way that you coach, but take something good from it.

I’ll tell you why. I I’ve never been to a course. And I’ve been in a lot of different courses where I haven’t learned something. Even the stuff that I don’t like. I studied Olympic lifting. I don’t have any, my athletes do Olympic lifting at all. I sat down with a pretty high level Olympic lifting coach and we went tit for tat talking about technique.

And he’s like, why, why are you talking about this? You don’t even do it. I’m like, it didn’t mean I didn’t want to learn about it. Right. I want to know why I don’t want to do it, or I want to know why this, I could use this variation of it. So learn your craft and then learn the communication part. I think that’s the most important part is how you develop relationships in that weight room.

And don’t be afraid to break the mold tries. You know, I’m very open with my athletes. I said, we’re going to try this. I got this idea. Here’s what I see. Here’s what I think we can try. Let’s see what happens. And most of the time, like, yeah, we’ll give it a try. I don’t travel it. I used to try. Cause I made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’ve jettisoned a lot of stuff that you know, is not going to go, but it’s still fail. Don’t be afraid to fail. Nobody’s going to quit and not come back. If you picked a bad exercise, you know, if, especially if you’re opening those. Yeah. That didn’t work out very well. Did it. Now we won’t do that again.

And, and, and the fundamental thing, when people talk about programming, this is as simple as it can get. Athlete comes into your gym. And I say to them, what hurts? Oh, this hurts this, what have you been doing? This, this, this, this, okay. We’re not doing that. It’s that simple. We’re not doing what you were doing to hurt you.

We’re doing something. So therefore you won’t be hurt. Ah, okay. They start doing it. They get better. That’s how simple it is. I know that maybe crushed a lot of, he goes and stuff. So that happened to me. We had a great tennis player from Japan. Uh, his name was Dane was he’s graduated now. just a phenomenal athlete.

Been his dad trained him from when he was real little had videos of it. And so when he came to to the U S here at Texas, didn’t, didn’t really like the weight room ended up messing his back up some stuff I was doing with him. I was like, wait a minute. He went over to Japan. They, they did evaluations on, came back.

He’s like, I’m not falling away some more. So I was like, great. I just lost this kid. He’s not going to do anything there. So I had to re kind of had to do different things with him and basically. He had to feel better, like whatever was bothering him, we had to not do that. That made him hurt. And so I had to kind of re-engineer and kind of try some different things with him.

He had his own little program and I did, I had to switch up some other guys, but he ended up man having a great career here. We end up winning the national championship in 19. But, but again, a guy that like, to your point, Chris, like, you’ve got to, you know, when you make mistakes, I think that takes some humility for sure.

To be like, yeah, that was not good. I need to kind of back up. Yeah. I mean, in the moment you were probably like, oh, this is tough right now. You’re going, you know what? I learned a ton from that and then figure out why it didn’t work. And always question what you’re doing. I mean, you have to be your hardest judge.

Uh, don’t wait for social media or anything like that question, what you’re doing and think about what you’re doing and why am I going to do that again? Why am I getting rid of that? And I think a lot of people just get set in this. I got a six week program and this is what I’m gonna stick to. I’m going to see what happens at the end of the six weeks by week two.

It’s not going well. What do you think is going to happen? Week three week, four week, five weeks. It’s not going to get better. I got a story. I was at a high level institution. I was listening. I went into a meeting, they had me up to talk more, more along the rehab side and I’m sitting in the meeting and they’re talking about.

And I’m getting nervous. Cause I don’t understand half the numbers are talking about nor do I have. How did you come up with that? So we leave the meeting and the guy who brought me in was like, w what were you? You were like fidgety in there. I’ve never seen you. Like, I, I got, I got nervous, all the numbers, we’re doing three sets forth five.

We’re going to round this one and we’re going to go here 70%. I’m going, how do they know all that stuff? Like, did somebody give them the answer key? Cause I’ve been looking for it for a long time. It’s not that easy people change. People adapt. And hopefully it doesn’t work out that way because you’re adapting faster than what tutor Pompa figured out in Bulgaria back in 1972.

I don’t think that stuff is. I got, I got a fun question before. I know we’re getting close here on time, but so both you Dan and Chris had a crystal ball, where are we headed in performance? The next five, 10. Dan. And I are both going to be retired from teaching here in the next couple of years. I’ll be moving down here.

We have plans that are going to build a complex down here, and we’re going to bring our dogs and train people. My wife doesn’t know this yet, so she never listened to any of my podcasts. Say Cal said, he’s coming down to, uh, I, where do I think it’s going? Um,

I think we’re all big enough. We’re all strong enough. We’re all fast enough. It’s can we trick our nervous system to display that? I think it’s all brain-based. I really do. I mean, I w when you have an 80 year old woman gets out of a car and flips it over to get somebody, their grandchild out of the car, everybody has to do that for the YouTube video on that.

It’s out there. So my video, you can’t hide nothing today. It came, granny flipped the car over. We’ll find it. Yeah. But I think it’s all trusted. They’d say it’s all. Uh, it’s all doctor. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine. I just think somewhere along the line, when you’re dealing with the reflexive system, we’re talking about strength levels quick that we’ve never seen before.

Yeah, we did. I read a book with our, I forget the name of it. It’s it, it makes my mind, but they’re seeing this gap in these world records are getting, it’s getting longer and longer between these, these sequential years of things being, you know, because the ceiling just think about the, you know, like, like a new same boat, you, same boat.

I mean, breaking that record. I mean, how often does a guy come along and his Jeanette, his genetic potential, but then can train be trained right? To break those records. I mean, know, I think we understand how, what incredible feat that was for him to run those. Right. I don’t think the general population gets how incredible that Olympics was for him, where he broke all those records and what a freak.

I mean, when will the gods live like that again? You know? I mean, anyway. Yeah. It’s a, it’s amazing. That’s I think that’s, what’s fun to do as you think about once you have the knowledge base that we all have here and you see what some of these people do, and you’ve seen like some great athletes, you’re like, that’s not even close to what they had do.

Did that’s incredible. And you see some of the things that they do and it’s like, humans are really amazing, really amazing creatures, kind of like, that’s a good question to end on because that’s our story we’re chasing. And I say all the time, we’re chasing big foot. I don’t know if it exists and how far we can get to it or how close we can get, or if we’re going to get real footage of him.

Well, we’re chasing them the book real quick, uh, endure Alex Hutchinson. I think it’d be, if you all read that book anyway, he talks about it’s a lot on the mind and brain, but just, I keep hearing our time with you guys is just the great coaches can get those kids to that. Just get that next year, you know, whatever that is.

And that’s, that’s, that’s what keeps us all going. I feel like, oh yeah, I think personal relationship and yeah, the shared journey. Yeah. Why? I think it’s interesting. You said new chasing Bigfoot. The funny piece on all that is the information is out there though. I mean, it’s all here. I mean, you know, when I did a lot of that work with you and Matt, you know, we’re, we’re pulling information on the brain from stuff that neurosurgeons are reading and you know, I wouldn’t call it routine surgery, but they’re there.

They already know it’s already published and it’s it’s there. It’s just, I think how willing are we to reach out to these places that no one else is looking like, what rocks are we not looking under? You know, it was funny because when I first started doing some neurology stuff at these TFC conference people, ah, that’s the voodoo man.

You, you do voodoo. I’m like, ah, so now I’m okay with that Cajun food too. So now we’ve got names for its, if I increase your range of motion by doing some type of neurological tricker hack, that’s a motor performance that I just increase. You string a whole bunch of motor performances together that becomes motor learning.

And that’s the thing. And I’m the voodoo man. That’s what I’ll do. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Well, I think we’re getting close to the end here at coach. Uh, you know, someone want to reach out to both of you guys and contact you for more information. What is the best way to do that? Crystal stuff? Uh, slow guy speed.

School is my website. It’s about 10 years old and really bad, but it does have my phone number and my email address. There’s a link somewhere on there. There’s a link somewhere on there. I don’t even have the password anymore. So I really don’t know who controls my website. It just keeps sending you money.

That’s okay. I don’t get it. Um, I’m not huge on social media. I’m trying to get away from that as much as possible. Cause I don’t think it helps coaching at all that I put some fancy exercise out there that I’m doing for one particular athlete and I’m going to wreck 10 complete strangers that I’ve never seen before because someone saw it and says, I got to try this great.

And on the flip side of that, I love the comments I get from some people on some of the posts that I make. I, I laugh, I do it sometimes to make people comment, but yeah, I’m at WGF one on Twitter and same thing on Instagram. Um, our websites under design, it’s been under design for 10 years. Well, they have a ton of content on the track football consortium, website, uh, articles, uh, all of Dan spoke at every TFC.

We’ve had. I miss Tampa. You miss Tampa where I had my gym. Yeah. Um, and then I, two guys instrumental for me outside of the RPR stuff is, is Sean Sherman. And Matt bullae with the dip course, imposter, ecology, and Sean doing this is square one. These things are they’re game changers, they’re game changers in the neuro world.

And, um, it’s just, it’s a matter of time before all becomes, you know, it’s going to be out there and people are gonna understand it. And it’s a brain game. Yeah. Well, good stuff. Well, coach Chris coach, Dan, thank you so much. We’ll hopefully get you some good Texas food while you’re in town here in Austin.

Barbecue. Here we do got barbecue. We can get into some controversy with North Carolina. I know different people back home in the south. I grew up in the south, but I’m definitely partial to Texas. Barbecue members. Got good barbecue till I know you just want to stick to find something that he can cook a mean steak.

I like it. Yeah. So Austin’s become a, definitely a big foodie place. But, uh, yeah. Anyway, we’ll, we’ll try to get him taken care of culture. That sounded like a good plan, but we got Friday night and Saturday night. We got it. I think we can get it done. We can do it well. That’s it for the team behind the team podcast again?

Donnie, may Joe Cross Dan Victor coach Chris coffers. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll catch you on the flips. You’ll have a good one. Hookem welcome.

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 Mae. And thanks so much for tuning in.