E32 | Zach Dechant: The Baseball Guru

Welcome to the team behind the teen podcast. I’m your host, Dani may. 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 MAPE and man, this month, the month of may, the semester’s drawing near to him. We have got an incredible guest for everybody today. Just super excited. Uh, we’re going to get to him in a second, but first foremost, Joe Cross, our co-host is in the house.

What’s up, Joe? What’s going on, coach. How’s it going? Good, man. Uh, you ready for the summertime coach? I am. I’m ready? What you got planned? Ooh, let’s see whole lot of nothing right now, which is not a bad thing. Uh, looking to take a little vacation and a little downtime, a little downtime, um, spend a lot of time with, with the kiddo.

So I’m excited for that. Good, good stuff. I don’t have anything planning to Joe, hopefully a little rest, little RNR, hopefully for the strength coaches, staff. So we’ll see. But, uh, but with that, uh, let’s introduce our guests and just welcome him to the show. Uh, coach Zach daycare is here from TCU coach.

Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, man. We are just coach. We, I mean, we’ve been talking about this for awhile. I think you’ve been one of the most anticipated guests. So thank you for making time. He just got into town, correct? Was it last night? Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, we’re here for a baseball trip and I was, you know, supposed to be on in January with you guys and, and, uh, ended up missing the, the, uh, conference because I got COVID right, right.

Good to be here. Good stuff. Well, coach, uh, before we get into it, just a little fun question here. Um, you’re married got an eight month old Noah, so you and your beautiful wife coach, what’s it like as a, uh, you just got promoted to so a lot of changes here, assistant athletics director over human performance, TCU.

Congrats, big time promotion. Well-deserved what’s it like doing that? And now you’ve got this eight month coach. Give us a little insight. How’s it going? It’s managing time. Is really the priority. Now when I was younger and I didn’t have a wife and a son, you know, you could, you could spend 12 hours in the office.

You could work on all your systems and, and just lose time, lose track of time. And now what I’ve realized in the last eight months is how Uber efficient. I have to be with every minute of my time, because anything that I’m wasting in the office, just sitting there or, you know, whatever I’m doing, I sit there and think I could be spending this minute with my son at home.

So being very, very efficient with time has been the biggest change. Yeah. And I know Joe, you can speak to this too. That’s that’s good. You know, I mean, I’ve got four girls are all older now, but I remember those early years have a tough day where you come home, Joe, right? Oh yeah. That little kid old man.

He’ll just all the clouds just seem to kind of go away. Don’t they? And it’s so I have a four month old right now. And so it’s like. You know, if you don’t, if you’re not thinking about, you know, when you’re working at the office, you’re like, okay, I could, I could be home right now. The, the wife is always ready to send that friendly little reminder texts like, Hey, uh, where you at time, what time you coming home today, honey, who’s really means is like, you should probably come home now.

Right? I’ve been through those four. Yeah, it’s good though. It’s good to get home and spend time with them. And, uh, and I’ll be honest, I’m, I’m older now. And I think that has played a huge benefit into my understanding of prioritizing time, because it’s just, I realize it’s, it’s not, um, endless, right.

There’s a finite amount. And so, uh, that has really, really helped me because if I had a kid, when I was, you know, my early twenties and just starting my career, I think I would probably handle be handling it very differently. And so I’m very thankful that, um, I’ve had him when I did have him. Okay. So that’s so awesome.

Congrats coach. And, uh, one more fun question, Joe, before we get into the, the notes here, but. TCU horned frogs, nothing but respect for you guys love you and your staff. And of course our AED, Chris Del Conte CDC. Everybody knows him as CDC here doing a fabulous job at Texas. What’s your kind of funniest, coolest story.

I know you, uh, worked for him there and know him, CDC store. Give us one quick story. We’ll get into the show. We go back all the way to probably 2010. So this was probably 10 years ago now. Uh, we had a, uh, we had an athletics department fund day or something that I don’t remember what exactly they called it, but they did relay races and everybody teamed up and you did just a bunch of random stuff in may, may day.

Um, and so CDC and I got matched up in a pie, eating contest. Hands had to be tied behind your back. You had a cream pie stuck in front of you, and it was, it was just who could finish the pie first. And so, uh, I finished it by first. I, I, I had to, I had to put down the hammer and I had to whoop him. But, uh, you want to talk about a belly that hurts.

Like you wouldn’t believe eating a full whatever, whatever type of, oh my gosh. My stomach hurt with all that sugar in it. My stomach hurt for like six hours after that it was brutal. It was like a legit pie though. It was a legit pie they bought from, you know, from Tom thumb or HEB or wherever it was. And you had to finish the entire pie and no hands.

So it was brutal. The CDC talk a little noise. He, he had to talk. We were talking a little trash. I think so. Yeah. I, I had to turn it up a notch. That’s hilarious. We’ll have to, off to bring it up to him at some point. Just poke at him, but I’m glad you won. Cause that’s right. String coaches. We gotta represent.

Right. That’s right. So thanks for sharing that, Joe, with that let’s get into. These questions that I see what’s going on. Yeah, it was Zach. I’m glad we’re finally able to get you on, like you said, we were, uh, we were missing you in January, not only from podcasts, but uh, the little clinic we have. W so, uh, we’re, we’re glad you’re finally here, but let’s just start by diving into your background, you know, where did all this begin and, you know, how did you get to where you are now?

Yeah, so I actually, uh, I, I grew up in a small town, 300 people. We didn’t have a weight room. My dad always told me, he said, if you want to be a, if you want to be a great athlete, weights are going to come into it. And so when I was in eighth or ninth grade, I worked on a farm, um, you know, made, made summer money.

And so I bought my own rack and started reading muscle media magazines and whatever flex magazine, whatever you pick up. Yeah. That had anything with lifting in it and just started learning. And that’s really where it started. I got to college and I had no clue what I wanted to do. And again, my dad came, came into the picture and he said, um, You love lifting weights.

Why don’t you just teach people how to lift weights, beat, be on that side of things. And I was like, that’s genius. And that’s where it all took off. I was a sophomore in college at that time, trying to figure out what degree plan I was going to go into. And the incident he told me that I wanted to become a strength and conditioning coach.

That’s crazy. So that was your dad? Yeah, and my dad was not really an athlete in high school college. I mean, he, he didn’t go to college. Um, he, he didn’t have an athletic background whatsoever, but just observation. He saw that I loved it. I spent, I spent time in our basement every night, lifting weights after practices.

When I was in high school, I, you know, read up on nutrition and would make the craziest metric shakes and all this stuff back then. And, um, so it was just him observing what I loved and, and bring it to the forefront. That’s interesting. The cool thing about that story I love is that it’s, and I’ve had these moments in home career path as well.

Like it just comes down sometimes with somebody, whether it’s a mentor or a father figure like that, like a family or a friend that sees something in you and they just say one thing and it’s often it just clicks and it puts you on this trajectory for your career path. So anyway, that’s super cool. And that’s kind of how it happened sometimes.

Yeah. And so from there, you know, just to give a quick background, I, uh, I played football at Missouri state. Everything I had studied because Louie Simmons. Louie Simmons is, is one of the greatest to ever do it right? And so we have to acknowledge him because he means a ton to the strength and conditioning world.

I read everything I could get my hands on because he was really one of the only people that put content out way back then when the internet was first coming about really? And so I got to Missouri state and my strength coach there loved the west side system. He knew Louie. He, he trained in that system.

I was very familiar with it. So I signed to play football there with them. Uh, from there I went, uh, by way of a strength coach to the Anaheim angels for a couple of years, and then made my way to TCU as a baseball and football guy. It was a perfect scenario because baseball, when it’s somebody that had had been, had been in pro baseball, football wanted somebody that knew collegiate football, I’d played, I’d played college football, spent years with the angels.

And so I was, I was the perfect fit for that situation. Kind of cool point here, Joe, real quick on this and we’ll let you move forward, but yeah. So look, obviously Louie Simmons recently passed away. So rest and power, Louie. We appreciate everything he’s done and we’ll continue to do for a lot of us. So may me growing up little opposite of you.

Uh, I started at Colorado under doc crease, which again, he is another, uh, legend had just passed away. So we’ve lost some great minds and people here recently in the strength condition, where on a dock was my mentor and train me in college when I was at Georgia at, from middle Tennessee state. But so my, my kind of view of Louie.

So Fred Hatfield, who is gone, he would come to Colorado and train and do these clinics. And I don’t know if you people listening to this know, but like Fred and Louie kind of butted heads, there was, you know, basically who was the best. You know, it was always the battle of the egos. And so I always had a different view of Louie before I actually met Louie.

And then it was kind of as my career developed and I kind of learned more about Louie and his systems, one of my best friends, Jesse Ackerman, who has been in the pros for awhile, NFL, like he trained under Louie and learned from him as well over the years, I learned a different respect for that system and understood it better.

But anyway, it’s just funny how we all raised and he’s these giants, these legends influence us to some degree. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, every one of us honestly owe something to the legends that came before us because we all take pieces of their programming. Right. Whether it’s the terminology or whether you’re actually still doing some of the system that they, that they implemented principles.

Yeah. We, we all use, there’s nothing new in this field. So we do owe a lot to them. That’s good. Yup. Yeah. My, my biggest question is how how’d you end up in Anaheim and. Right now you’re most well-known as a, as a baseball guy, you know? So it kind of being coming up through football, you know, how how’d you really just become this baseball guy.

Yeah. That’s I never, ever expected to be that whatsoever. I, at the time, my mentor, Rick Perry at Missouri state was taking a job at Notre Dame, uh, under the Charlie Y staff and I had been accepted into. The internship or whatever, it’s a paid internship, but to be an intern for the Anaheim angels. And so I just, it was a change and I needed to move, I guess.

And, and so I took that job and I never wanted to be a baseball guy, so to speak. I always sat for some, you know, eventually I will be a football guy down the road. Right. But what I did was I brought, um, football and track and field and all of our training principles that, that football quote unquote strength coaches would utilize with their athletes to baseball.

And nobody was doing that baseball, you know, in 2006 and 2007, when I was with the angel. The training was so antiquated. We had 15 hammer strike machines or something in the weight room, in a line. And your workout was one set of 12 to 15 reps on every machine through it. And you would know, and I was like, what are we doing here?

This is the most ridiculous thing. The cream just rises to the top is essentially what they were expecting. Right. We’ll get some great draft picks somewhere. Eventually they’ll rise to the top, but we’re not worried about developing anybody. And I thought that was the most asinine way to look at the minor league system.

You know, it, it’s just crazy that we’re not developing these athletes. You pay them this much money and we don’t really truly develop any physical qualities whatsoever. And so when I came to TCU, I, I implemented those, you know, those out of the box at the time, um, methods with, with baseballs speed training and jumping and, and, um, and lifting heavy and getting strong.

And those were really considered out of the, out of the box. And, and so that’s how it all started. And I, I just, I started talking about what we were doing as baseball athletes and it really just blew up. Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. If you I’d say even just to watch pro baseball now, and you watch it for maybe 10, 15 years ago, um, even if you don’t really know much about it during the conditioning or baseball in general, I mean, you can just look at their bodies and kind of see how everything’s kind of changed over time and, you know, They just look a lot different, you know, they look way more athletic, someone look a lot leaner, but they’re still cranking balls.

And, uh, no, I think it’s been, it’s been awesome for baseball. Yeah. The game has changed a ton at the pro level. So you can’t say that that’s really what professional baseball is anymore. As far as development goes, because they’re, they’re hiring the best, the brightest, and they’re implementing some really impressive systems right now.

So it’s changed a ton in the last, you know, since I was in a 15 year. Right. And now, I mean, looking at your career, you know, you’ve got your own kind of like private business going on. Uh, yeah. Baseball summit and everything. I mean, what’s, what’s been the driving force behind brick and both collegiate and privately.

And you know, how do you, how do you manage the time? Yeah, that’s a good question. And the kiddo and the kid, the in season, if you want the truth right now during the in-season period for me is the best time of the year. So I really have to do a lot of the work during that time when I’m, whether it’s writing articles or writing, uh, writing a new book or a new product.

Um, it’s the in season that I do that because just like yesterday, we had a four hour bus ride here. Traffic was terrible. So I was sitting on a bus for four hours. I’m going to go back to the hotel after we’re done here and I’ll have three hours of downtime. Um, so I use that when I’m on the road to do a lot of those, a lot of those tasks that, that are going to be out on the, on the internet somewhere that we’re going to try to sell possibly.

Um, and so, uh, as far as the, a private business, I run camps in the summertime. I run camps for a high school and junior high kids. Um, and again, it’s, it’s, I have to schedule that. Around around everything that I do at TCU. So usually that’s very early mornings. We’ll get the baseball kids in early and they’ll train in our camps, uh, super early have practices in the afternoons that that’ll be Monday through Thursday, and then they’ll go on the road and playing select games and things like that.

And we get them back in Monday through Thursday, early in the morning because the summer hours for us at TCU, all of my baseball stuff happens in the afternoon. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s being very, very efficient with, uh, with your time. Yeah. And I hear you a little bit, two buckets. I hear coach is working in your business and like working on your business and like, it sounds like it’s a little bit more, depending on what season your own, can you shift.

Focus in on that spectrum. So that’s good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what it is. And here’s the other thing. So many young strength coaches have to work so much, have to put so much time in the system that they go, they don’t get to work on the system. Right. And so you’re on the floor coaching for eight or 10 hours.

How many, how many hours do you actually get to develop better programs? Do you get to learn how to implement a better return to play protocol for your athletes and things like that? So there’s really, that’s something I think strength coaches really need to work on is better time management, but us as directors really have to develop a way for our coaches to be able to work.

In the system and on the system at the same time, so that we’re not burning them out. And just coaching athletes, you know, for 40 hours a week. And to your point, I mean, this is my I’ve been doing this a while to coach. This is my 27th year. And the older I’ve gotten, the more to your point, I’m gonna piggyback for a second is the thing that helps me stay kind of like a fresh and excited.

Like I got to work on me still. And I think, you know, what happens is strength coaches. We have a tendency to tell, we serve other people, but we really don’t take good care of ourselves, whether that’s self care or knowledge or learning something new or doing something different, we’re always given out.

Right. But we’re never like taking in. It’s like, what’s that, that, that metaphor, the, the, um, the dead sea is dead because it never gives out and it never received. Right. So it’s always just stagnant water. And so I think, you know, that’s a kind of a good metaphor for us as we give out like a cup, we need to pour, have something coming back in so we can stay fresh and not get burned out.

So that’s kind of way I see it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was interesting. Um, and we, we just got, I’ve experienced it almost the opposite of that spectrum where, you know, COVID hit a lot of downtime. A lot of folks were kind of running like little online seminars and stuff. So we had all this me time during COVID and no athletes, so apply it to, so it’s almost like a complete 180 for a little bit.

And then we’re, you know, coach, we talked about it when volleyball started, I think in July, like we were just dying to get back in the weight room, get on the floor cause we couldn’t apply anything, you know? And so it’s just so good that, you know, maybe that’s where a lot of our lessons were learned. Just reflecting during that COVID era, just saying, Hey, like we there’s so much, we could still learn, but now we need to, how can we balance it post COVID?

So it’s good. That, that was interesting. Got a good topic for you here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, your coach, um, overhead athletes. Definitely. I mean, I’ve worked with overhead athletes. Obviously you work with some elite level overhead athletes in baseball, and you know, if you mess that shoulder up or I’ll, I’ll say this, let me say, let me back up.

If the shoulder gets hurt, it had to be something in the weight room because it wouldn’t have been nothing on the field that caused that. So question for you, coach Zach is talk us through a little bit of your lens of how you evaluate a shoulder. What do you see that depending on pathologies imbalances, and then what do you do to either strengthen it, correct it, fix it, keep it healthy for the long-term talk us through some of that.

Sure. So I’ve tried every, everything that you can think of imaginable as far as screening for the shoulder, the scapula, uh, we’ve tried everything over the last 15 years. And the things that have really stuck have been total motion for us on the table and looking at total motion, internal and external rotation with a goniometer.

Um, we’re always, if you want the truth, one of the best screening tools that you can do is just ask your athletes. Have you had pain here? Have you had previous injuries here? Because previous injury is the number one predictor, it’s the number one predictor of an injury, right? And so just talking to your athletes, but the things that have stuck, like I said, is total total motion.

We’ve looked at, you know, raising the arms, overhead inflection, um, out to the side and AB duction and looked at this gaps and see how they, they roll up on the, uh, on the rib cage and see where they end up and things like that. And a lot of that stuff, if you want the truth, I just haven’t found a high correlation with injuries with any problems.

And so. We use a goniometer the most, and we do some, some dynamometer test and what I can actually talk about something that we’re looking at, um, bringing into the program. I shouldn’t say looking at it, I ordered it. It’s it’s coming. Um, it’s it’s arm, health.com. They have a, uh, basically it’s a, it’s a dynamometer that is, is self.

Uh, the players can do it themselves. It ties into an app and it was a lot of strong research behind some of the, some of the things that they found. So go out there and look@armhealth.com. That’s that’s what we’re about to start utilizing here in the next couple of months. Um, but, uh, yeah, uh, I forgot where else I was going to go with some of this stuff, but, uh, Jumped back into where, uh, where you want me to go real quick.

Yeah. Just, you know, I was talking like what kind of screening processes. I know where I was going to go. I’m sorry. I, no worries. Is it, to be honest, as far as training the shoulder, most of the injuries that you see are fairly preventable when it comes to the shoulder, the elbow, I would say less. So, but the shoulder with the labor, it’s really a preventable injury.

We train the shoulder, just like we train any other, any other joint, any other, any other like principle to the body? We have our high days, our low days, our high days, we’re going to attack the, uh, especially external rotation. Right? Um, the external rotators, we’re going to attack those with heavier loads, with, um, shorter tempos.

We might use overloading centrics. Um, on the low days, we’re going to attack those with long duration, isometrics, 30 to 60 seconds. Submaximal submaximal intensities, and we’re really going to train the shoulder just like we would any other joint, the thing that, um, I utilize a ton of now is we train it in all planes.

So if I’m doing any type of horizontal row, uh, I call it the reverse pull up. Um, we’re gonna, we’re gonna challenge the serratus at the same time. So I superset and build in a serratus exercise. So it might be are, you know, kettlebell waiter walks. It might be an overhead press. It might be a landmine press, something like that.

You know, 10 or 15 years ago, I used to shy away from overhead pressing, but now we’ve actually found that for the some populations it’s really, really, really good, really necessary. Um, I used a, uh, a research grade EMG machine with our interns. This was probably about eight or nine years ago. And we looked at every exercise we had in our menu for low trap and serratus activation.

And of course, I mean, we, we all probably know this, but the more the, uh, humorous gets above, um, the, uh, In a press action, the more active the serratus becomes. And so your pushup plus exercise where you’re just doing a scat pushups, things like that, that we used to use only for this radius, because we said now we can’t overhead press.

Those are actually a big, big piece of our program now. So yes, I overhead press a lot of our athletes. Now we can screen out some of the athletes that have limitations, inflection, overhead, where the chromium might be causing them to, uh, to not be able to get that range of motion. In those instances, we’re going to use something like a landline press that takes a little bit of the, uh, flection out a little bit of the elevation, as far as how far you can go up with the arm.

So the one big thing that we’ve changed in the last decade has been the addition of a lot more serratus, serratus pressing work. Yeah. I want to add something because you hit on some too, man. Hit on some good points here. Thank you. I think. W two P two pieces of this for me, that’s kind of influenced my thinking on has been Dan path who coached here for years, uh, sprint coach, but Dan would always talk to me.

He would work with Jeff was in shot putters and, and would always talk to me about, um, overhead strength and just like any other exercise or part of the body. Like if you don’t have anything over here, like weighted up there, like it’s not going to improve your shoulders. I’ll get stronger. Second piece I got on that was to your point about the cereus.

I mean getting overhead, uh, art active release therapy, Dr. Keith pine, when he used to come here years ago all the time, and I would just pick his brain and he would talk to me about it’s your shoulder health in that the only really the only way you can strengthen or stabilize that front head is by getting that mid trap activated.

And you only do that by having something overhead, typically like a dumbbell snatch or some kind of overhead press and said, if you don’t do that, you really can’t strengthen that, that area. So it puts a shoulder at a deficit. So to your point, yeah, absolutely. I mean the big three that we focus on in our programming are going to be low.

Low trap, mid trap, and then serratus as well as the, uh, the cuff. Right? So those are going to be in our program every single day in some aspect. And a lot of times you’re hitting both of them. You’re hitting several muscles with one exercise, I should say. So I don’t have to have an exercise for each one of those necessarily, but we look at it two ways every day for the most part has a static exercise.

And when I say static, I’m calling static just your regular external rotation, a a Y or a kettlebell weight, or walk. Um, anything that doesn’t have the addition of dynamic stability. And then we have our dynamic stability exercise would be. Perturbation type where you have to actively stabilize the head of the humerus and the joint.

So we’re doing some form. Um, we’re doing both of those forms every day that we train on a high day, especially low days, I take out the dynamic stability work, and those are going to be more of our submaximal long-duration ISO is higher rep type stuff. Um, but that’s how we look at it. Static and dynamic.

We want to challenge both of them because just doing ER or wise or whatever serratus activation you have isn’t necessarily enough. We want to, we want to challenge the head of the, uh, humorous to stabilize in that cuff. And you only get that by dynamic stability. In my opinion, w one more question here.

This is, this is a great topic or touch hallowed ground here. A little bit bench press. Yeah. Give us your thoughts. Yeah. So, uh, you know, I’ve actually been known for a long time as the guy that doesn’t bench press, but baseball players, but you’d be surprised that virtually all of our baseball players bench press will use football bars.

So neutral grip. I like that, but I start everybody out in our foundation program learning the pushup because there’s too many good things about the pushup when it comes to the serratus, you know, trunk activation, yes, torso, stability, all these things. And so we start everybody in the pushup and then based on where they go in our program, as far as novice, intermediate advanced, then they will advance into the bench press.

And there’s been studies that have shown the bench press. I shouldn’t be telling you guys this, you know, but you guys are going to take a step up in the, in your throwing athletes. There’s been studies that have shown that the bench press is very, very. Strongly correlated to throwing velocity. And so, oh, interesting.

We’ve looked at a lot of that stuff and um, so yeah, our, our athletes, they, they, they will bench. Yes. But I think bench two. Right? Uh, thank you for sharing. I think bench two, it’s all about, I think, you know, the frequency, but also push, pull ratios, right? Like it’s not, it’s not, let’s say a bad exercise. I know I kind of hit on it sometimes.

Cause I think it’s been. Over prescribed so to speak. But I think you gotta, you gotta have some balance in there and like your prescription. Yeah. It’s, it’s just another tool in the toolbox. That’s all it is. Right. And, um, you’re absolutely right. You have to have balance. So we’re, we’re going to pull more than we, than we probably push on that side.

We do it one time a week. Okay. I still do believe that there is there’s some stuff to it, but I still have guys that do loaded pushups. We use a pitch shark all the time to load the pushup so that we aren’t just doing a body-weight push-up for the four years that they’re at at, at TCU in our program. So there’s a lot of different, there’s a lot of different ways.

Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. A quick question about the acromion joint, uh, You know what you guys do for, like you mentioned, if they have some pain there, you kind of restrict, I’m like, what do y’all do for them when they got pain? So if you want the truth, um, subacromial impingement is usually the issue there and you can screen this out and see if they, you know, if they have lack of overhead mobility.

I mean, there’s so many, there’s so many rabbit holes to go down. When you start screening, something like that. Thoracic spine mobility comes into play. When it, when it goes, when you start talking about overhead flexing and how much you have, but what I have found with anybody that gets subacromial impingement, generally we drop pressing exercises.

This is just a, kind of a simple heuristic. We drop pressing exercises and we will pull them any type of a low row or anything like that. Um, I’m not talking pull-ups now because obviously that’s putting you back in that overhead flex position. Yeah. And we. Rowan for the next two weeks straight work on cuff and, and low rows.

And usually if you want, the truth is subacromial impingement will clear up pretty fast. Let’s go to jail real quick. That’s called, took the head of that humerus and shifted back. Cause that’s what happens with impingement. The head gets kicked forward is catching. Uh, so, so yeah, I mean you can have several things.

I mean, the deltoid could be overpowering the rotator cuff, right. And when the deltoid overpowers it, I mean, we know everything in the body is, is equal and opposite. So when that deltoid is, is yanking up too much, you’re doing too much Delt work. Um, the, the cuff can’t stabilize the head. And so yeah, you can right up into the acromion a little bit, but again, some of it can be anatomical.

A lot of the problems that we find in our athletes are more anatomical based than they are soft tissue based. So that’s something to be aware of. That’s a good point. Yeah. I’ve, I’ve read some interesting stuff is actually a little book on it. I, I wish I had the title with me, but the, the chromium, sometimes that little bone there I’ve read that sometimes it gets bent a tiny bit.

And so that’s what also creates the impingement. So there, there a prescription for that would honestly be hanging. You can kind of almost bend that bone back, whereas a lot of guys get that bone shaved off in surgery. So they’re there. Their thought was, and what they’ve done is they’ve, they’ve done research where they’ve put, um, they’ve put athletes inside of an MRI machine and basically tied their hand up to a rope, pull their arm back so they can simulate overhead.

And there’s like a weight and a pull you going outside the back of the MRI machine. I’m an old reposition and they’ve done the MRI to show that like, if they can prolong it, it can send it and start to move. That really, I’ve never heard of that. I was going to question that all day long, but, um, but yeah, you’re right.

They do. So the chromium process there’s one, two and three, right. One is basically a normal, a chromium process type three is kind of a beat where the bone is, is curved over and, and more downward where the head of the humerus that basically runs into it when you get overhead. And so that’s why an athlete like that.

You have to give them a lot of T spine extension so that they can so that they can clear that and get posterior tilt through the scapula. So they get overhead motion. Yeah. So I think it’s obviously also situational base, you know what I mean? You know, but it’s interesting that you were saying too, that you just use exercise to kind of clear it up when it’s, it’s almost the, you know, I think we’re talking about almost the same thing, but it’s, it’s crazy.

A lot of people just rush, rush to surgery to try to fix a lot of stuff. And it’s like, yeah. Now if you just change your tactics a little bit, you could probably clear it up, you know, Healthier way. Yeah. Pressing is usually that, that problem that we see what’s there. What about, um, little shift here on the topic, but just to talk a little bit about baseball super long season, they have summer ball, like right on the tail end of the season, collegiately kind of what’s your opinion?

Uh, the culture of like college baseball just compete, compete, compete, and we see this in other sports as well. We’d love to hear your thoughts on that a little bit. Yeah. It’s very difficult because obviously our job, it makes it difficult because of our job, because we want to, at some point have a long development window so that we can train and get some of these, get rid of some of these overuse injuries that you see continually.

Um, but at the, at the same time, you’ve got young athletes that might not have played during the, in season, um, on the team. They might not have been in. They were practicing all the time, but they have to go somewhere and play in the summer to get better. And so ultimately skill development is what’s going to be the limiting factor for anybody to play.

And so I do understand it now 10 or 15 years ago, I hated it. I absolutely hated it and was against it 100%. But now I’ve realized this is just, this is a necessary evil the system. It is, and we’re, we’re going to have to deal with it. I’m not going to change it. And so what do I have to do? I have to adapt our programming to fit the, uh, the, uh, amount of skill development that they’re doing year round, essentially.

So we use a vertical integration model, but. A lot of time in the fall, we’re running an in season program. My in-season and off-season programs are very, very, very similar, you know, I don’t want to have this perfect periodization scheme format that you would read in a book and say, oh, I know what’s going on here during this block and this block and this block it’s it’s if you want the truth, most of my program is autoregulated based on how the player feels for them, right.

Because they’re competing all the time. And so that’s just what it is. Our higher level athletes that play a bunch in season. We’ll stay on campus in the summer, which is awesome. And we get a little bit longer window to work with them. Um, but, uh, yeah, it’s just a necessary evil and I’ve figured out that I just have to roll with it now.

Yeah. To your point. And turning with baseball few years ago. And I mean that fall ball. I mean, it’s literally just about 30, 30 days of just straight up in season. Yeah. It’s 40 it’s 45 days actually 45, 7 or eight weeks, seven weeks, 45 days. I think you can have 30 practices over that time, but when you start counting the skill hours for individuals, that’s on the front end, the back end.

So they are, they’re playing baseball the entire semester. There’s never a no. And interns, that’s something we have to preach to interns to now, as they come in from school and they’ve seen this linear periodization scheme where you do, you know, um, work capacity or whatever it is that starts out accumulation or whatever they’ve learned.

And then you do this phase in this phase, in this phase. And you’re like, it doesn’t work like that. We’re in season, essentially year round. So you have to, you have to adjust your thought process. Super. Yeah. It’s really super good. That’s good stuff. Yeah. And you know, with, with a lot of the, uh, You know, baseball, just moving, you know, year round now and everything.

I mean, UCLA injuries are still commenting in baseball and I it’s, it seems like there’s almost been like a, like a surgeon in them again, I don’t know if it’s maybe like related to pandemic or anything, but, you know, w what are your thoughts on that? And you know, what technology use to maybe track athletes readiness to try to prevent a lot of UCL stuff?

Well, we’ve, again, I’ve gone down every rabbit hole to, uh, to, to protect the arm. We use the motive sleeve at times. Um, and then they started having bad problems with their chips and things like that. So we went away from that, but we did learn some very valuable things. Um, the biggest thing that I think people don’t understand with UCL injuries is it’s, it’s your workloads.

It’s the ramp up period to throwing programs. And this is where high school athletes get in so much trouble is they play all summer stop in July or August. Parents want to shut them down. We got to give the arm some rest. So they read. And you have your biggest showcases. Usually in October, that’s when perfect game is.

And all these baseball, you know, showcase things are where they have a gun out and they want to see how hard you can throw on. So what happens is these athletes shut down for eight weeks and then try to ramp up to throw their hardest in a two week window, which is, it’s just absolutely not safe whatsoever.

And so that’s why you see so many mid-fall UCL injuries in high school baseball athletes. And it’s the same thing in spring training. It’s the same thing in the NFL with hamstring injuries, with, uh, with ACL injuries, they have not prepared for the demands of the sport before they go into their sport.

And. You, you have to hit volumes and intensities that you’re going to utilize when you first step into whatever pre-season, it is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a soccer athlete, a tennis athlete base, it doesn’t matter. You have to prepare for the demands of the sport. And that is the biggest, that’s the biggest issue that we see with the UCL injury.

Um, and it’s multi it’s it’s it’s, multi-faceted, there’s the workloads, intensities and volumes. And then you get into the biomechanics. That’s a whole nother talk. You get into, you can talk about the physical side of things. You know, a guy that’s that’s fatigued or whatever, but the weight room is so minimal in the grand scheme of a UCL injuries, because the speeds, the forces, the velocities that happen when you’re throwing a baseball are so it’s not even comparable to anything you do in the weight room.

And so the biomechanics of things, the workloads, all those things are bigger factors than what happens in skill development. They’re bigger factors than what actually happens in the weight room. So. Coach just doing this long enough. I could ask you surely you’ve dealt with like coaches blaming it’s the weight room.

Total have you navigated some of those fun conversations? Um, well, to be honest, I used to be one of the, when I was a young strength coach, my first couple of years at TCU, I brought in, you know, we started screening guys. They had never been screened and we didn’t have any injuries. I swear for the first two years I was at TCU.

We were the healthiest team in that. And so I thought, oh my Dunning Kruger effect, right? I was like, I’m a genius. I know everything. This is so easy. And then the next five years or whatever, we were more injured than anything you’ve ever seen in your life. And so my program changed and I got off track and, and turned into a physical therapist and went down different rabbit holes because I thought it was my fault because I was, I wasn’t knowledgeable enough at the time to know that, you know, what, what they do on the field is way more.

You know, extensive and, and has way more volume enforces and higher speeds and all of these things, then what we do in the weight room. So I always sat, well, it’s my fault. And there’s a muscle that’s not activating, or I didn’t do something in my program. Or I had something that I, you know, I should have taken this out of the program.

That’s my fault. And so I went down all these rabbit holes, and then I realized that it’s not the weight room’s fault at all. And so it was, it was a long battle with our coaching staff and. You want, if you want the truth, it was really educating our coaching staff as much as possible about critical. It’s so critical.

We brought it in the motor sleeve. And so then I can educate them about workloads and look, this guy had this monster workload, and then we actually saw an injury out of him. He went way over his, you know, if you believe in the, uh, AC uh, ratio or not, whether regardless his workload was way too high for this window of time.

And just after that he had an injury. And so things like that can kind of prove some of my points. Right. But it was communication. And a lot of times we have our orthopedic surgeon, we have our PTs, we’ll sit in a room and we had meetings. We would go over the programs. We would go over exactly what I was doing, um, exactly what we’re doing with our skill side of things and say, okay, let’s look at this.

Let’s look at this and just meet as a staff and everything was out on the table. And so the orthopedic surgeons could say, well, it’s, it’s, it’s not the weight room stuff that’s hurting these guys. Our volumes are way too big here or whatever the case is. So all minds in the room. And we would just communicate, I think, to your point too, and correct me if I’m wrong.

But I think guys going from college to pro a lot of them stem from, uh, rotations being a lot different going from like a seven day rotation to a five day rotation. Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, that’s part of it too. Your workloads jump up, but here’s, I mean, I’ve got 30, some athletes, 37 pro guys in the off season.

I don’t necessarily anymore because of COVID, but before COVID hit, I would have 30 to 35 pro athletes that would train at TCU. And so I, I handled throwing programs, everything. And what you see across the board with pro athletes is it’s all on themselves. It’s all on themselves. So if they don’t handle their volumes and intensities in the throwing program, I can’t make you throw a hundred percent in a bullpen.

And oftentimes what we would see is guys will throw somewhere in the 80, 85 to 88% range in our bullpen. All the way up until they left for camp. And then the first day of camp, they might have a SIM game or something like that, where they’ve got to show, show a GM’s that they’re ready to go and that they want to be on the team this year or whatever the case is.

And so guess what happens? You’re 85 to 88 goes to a hundred percent and you end up getting hurt. We would, none of us in this room, I shouldn’t say none of us, all of us in this room would say the same thing would happen if you took an athlete and sprinted them at 85% for the off season. And then they took off and ran a hundred percent in their sport for the next seven days and got hurt.

All of us would say, well, yeah, no kidding. I saw it happen all the time of football here early on when we’d run hundreds or one tens all summer. And then the first week of wheat back then was two days you’re running. Probably more than a hundred percent sprints because your, your receiver’s locked down on DB and you got that physical intensity.

And next thing you know, like about REL third, fourth day, somebody start, they start pulling up coach and then the head coach is so mad. So saw it all the time. Just crazy. You have to be prepared for the demands of the sport, regardless of what sport you play. That’s just, that’s, that’s the foundational principle for us.

Yeah. Yeah. There was an article. I can’t remember the title goes something like this, like sprinting is the vaccine for hamstring injuries a hundred percent. Um, I think, I think that’s the title, but, um, yeah, it’s essentially exactly what you’re saying. And Mike, Mike Boyle, uh, brought it up in his CCCA conference speech, I think.

Uh, three years ago, two, three years ago. Um, he brought that article and ever since I was like, wow, you know, that’s true. And he does a lot of flying times and stuff like that. And he has gym. And just to keep him from getting hurt, really the PR the principles that we have behind speed development, since we’re talking about it, I’ll touch on it.

It’s fast, fresh, and frequent. We want to run as fast as possible. We want to be as fresh as possible when we, when we do those fly tens or whatever, whatever max V work that we’re doing, and we want to have them frequent. If you don’t do it every seven days, you’re losing the training effect, Vladimir issue.

And, you know, talks about that in block puritization with residual training effects and the residual training effect of max velocity work is usually between two and eight days. So we say seven days, you need an, you need exposure to that every seven days. And that’s the same way that I would approach a throwing program.

You need exposure to high intensity, um, high intent, uh, max velocity throwing every seven days. Right? That’s good stuff. Yeah, no, no. Yeah. Spot on. I think we’re kind of getting out of the topic here of, you know, a lot, a lot of different things coming from different realms and you know, how we collectively, uh, you know, get better in, in right now you have a summit, you know, where you communicate with a lot of your peers, you know, can you, can you tell us more about the summit?

You know, One, will you have more? Will they ever be live? But you know, w what’s your goal at that? Cause it sounds like you had a lot of great minds coming together to, to achieve. Yeah. So the baseball performance summit was, uh, essentially it’s a, it’s, it’s an online, you know, zoom format of the 15. Really, if you want the truth, it was the 15 brightest baseball strength, coaches, minds, whatever you want to say in the game that I wanted to learn from 10 years ago, I had this vision of having a baseball specific conference.

Basketball does one, I think in may in Vegas, and maybe it’s moved around now, but everybody always talked to that, went to this basket basketball, specific strength conference was like, man, it’s, it’s the best conference I go to. And so I had the vision 10 years ago, or so to have this for baseball and with COVID hitting and you know, the advent of zoom, it just, it made sense to have this on zoom now.

And so to answer your question, no, I probably won’t ever have it live because I think, I think it. To me, it’s so much more useful with having it at your fingertips whenever you want it to, to learn whenever you want, because you and I both have small kids. I don’t want to go to conferences right now. And miss four days with my kid, I would rather watch, you know, an hour and a half zoom at nine o’clock at night when he’s in bed and I can do it at my own pace.

So no, it’ll probably never be live. Yes, it’ll, there’ll be more, we have the two, 2000, uh, th the 22 lineup already, already, uh, uh, figured out, but it was really just, I wanted something for all levels, high school, college professional. I wanted people from all levels to be able to talk about their program and what drives the principles that drive their program.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s awesome. We have, we have our clinic too, and that’s some of my favorite times of the year, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s convenient cause it’s here. So like, like to your point, I don’t have to travel. I can just get up in the morning and coming to work. But, uh, but yeah, I think like some of these smaller conferences now, you know, where you get, you can almost.

I guess we’re handpicking people who we want to hear from and stuff, but I mean, it, it just, it makes a lot more sense, you know, and it’s, it’s kinda nice to just have these small in, in, you know, in person we’re not in person, but, uh, I mean, honestly what you want, but what’s your confidence, you know, you love it because it’s people you want to learn from, right.

That’s what you do. You bring people in that you want to learn from. Right. And it’s nothing against having an in-person conference, but for us to have 15 speakers that, you know, an hour presentation, each that’s going to be a multi-day conference. And so. It’s difficult with baseball coaches because we have so long seasons that at the end of that long season, the last thing I want to do is travel and be on the road and go talk more baseball.

And so I didn’t think it was feasible to have him in person. Yeah. And so, yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I’ve done the clinic long enough, especially if you start the higher, the level of the presenter, it’s really hard to get them to align for like a one weekend deal. Right. So to your point, I mean, that’s so much more doable to have them like work around the schedule, package the content and then roll it out so you can learn, uh, the, our, our clinic to, you know, it’s more about the networking and learning from people and like just you even being here today, like, man, it’s just so cool just to see you in person.

So you got to work around people’s schedules out to your point, you know? So yeah. Pretty awesome. Yeah. And it’s not that I don’t have anything against like the national conferences or anything. Those are, those are great too, but it’s also overwhelming, you know, like you said, it’s like multi day. There’s, there’s usually three presentations at once.

You got to pick one and, uh, and there’s just a lot going on. So it’s just, it’s nice to have like these just smaller summits or conferences or clinics that you can, like you say, you can interact. And then like you were saying, you can, you can access it whenever you want to, to manage your time better. So, yeah.

And the thing that I’ve found is that we’re so much, so, so many of us are on social media now that you have connections with people that you never would have 10 years ago, you never would have had a contact list. And so you can make that connection very easily now. And, and so that’s one thing that people say as well.

I love going to conferences to make connections and, and I do too, but at the same time, You’re basically a button away from talking to somebody on Twitter or Instagram. And most of us in strength, conditioning will respond. You know, I don’t think there’s that many coaches out there that are, that are like, no, I’m not talking to people.

Everybody wants to give out their information. The pandemic totally changed that for everybody. Like you can. I mean, you, you may not be able to sit down with somebody in person, but you can zoom now. I mean, you can get on a zoom and zoom. And I mean, we did have with a couple of different staffs across the country, over the pandemic.

And I mean, I’ve got a better relationship with him because of that. And there’s been some, you know, over social media I’ve connected with, so yeah, you can have these professional network on different levels that you can keep growing and keep learning from people that you may never meet in person. So it’s a great time to be, be in this profession for sure.

Um, piggyback that I got to, this is a fun, this one I’ve been waiting on. He’s got a couple of books out. And, you know, I’ve been working on the book during the pandemic as well. And so for me personally, just want to hear your, like, what was that process like? Was it hard, difficult? Is there any new ones coming out?

You got something new coming out, like give us a little bit of a. Sure behind the scenes on that. So how the book came about was just over my, at the time, it was probably 10 or 11 years at TCU and the number of emails I got on how to train a young athlete, how to send me a workout for my high school baseball kids send me a workout for my high school baseball team.

And I kept telling them like, I can’t do that. You know, my, it would be like reading Chinese. It would be like reading Chinese for you. You’d have no clue what’s going on. If I send you my workout and you try to implement it without context in your situation. So it really came about is that every team that I’ve ever had since I was a GA I, I ran this foundation program and all it was was teaching the fundamental movements, squat hinge, um, upper body push pole, the scapular patterns of the upper body and sprint mechanics, jump mechanics, those things.

It was just the fundamental principles that I need to do to learn so that you could eventually. Train in our weight room and develop over four years. If you don’t know those, if you don’t know how to hinge correctly, you’re not going to be able to advance into a higher level program at, at any point. And so I had that all created, all I did was sit down and write it out.

And that was the hard, that was the hard thing. So it took me probably about 14 months, I think, to write the entire book. Well, here’s the caveat. It took me three months really to write the book and the first 11 months staring at a word document because I stare at. Not knowing how, or, or what to write, because I didn’t want to give away all the secrets.

I didn’t want to tell people everything. You know what I mean? I wanted to give them enough, like, here’s my program ish, but I didn’t want to give, give away all the secrets. And the day that I said, you know what, screw this, we are going to, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write from day one, exactly how I handle the foundation program.

I’m going to write exactly what I do. Um, I heard it was a, the famous coach from LSU one time, skip Bertman. I think it was, uh, you know, national championship baseball coach. And back in the eighties and nineties, he was using psychological training with his athletes, mental training, and he sold a, whatever it was at the time, a tape or something with all of his methods on it.

And the reporters and people started coming to him and saying, you’re giving away all your stuff. All of these teams are going to take it and start beating you with it. And he said, no, I am the only one that implements it the way they try to implement it. And when I heard that it was just a light bulb that said nobody’s ever going to run this the way I run it, they’re going to use their own spin.

They’re going to find something unique about it and change the way it happens. And so from that day forward, I sat down, wrote my entire program and it was, it was done. And it was done in probably a couple of weeks, not necessarily three months, but some of the corrections and things and, and editing, uh, it took, it took some time, but that was the light bulb that changed everything going forward.

I said, you know what, I’ll just give everything away and they’ll do with it, what they want. Yeah. Co-chair, that’s something just even talking to you today. I mean, I kind of like stumbled on you a while ago and just like, who is, who is coach sag, kind of a social media site. I kinda like this guy, I don’t, I’ve never met him.

And now I sit there and talk to him and I’m like, there’s part of me, like, I’m listening to you and like, you have a heart to give back. And I think that’s so important. Um, that’s why I loved like, damn path went out. We was here at Texas years ago. He was, he would say the same thing about track coach. Like, why would I hide anything?

Like, I’ll share everything I know with you. If you want to, if you got the time to sit down and learn, he goes to your point, you’re not going to apply it. Like I would. So you, that it took me years to learn how to apply what I know so I can share it with you, but you still got to learn the secret sauce of how you apply it to each individual situation in athletes.

Yeah. And more, and we’re continually learning. Right? That was the other thing somebody told me. They’re like, You’re going to learn new methods in the next six months that you’re going to change from what you did in that book or change the way you think. And so you’re continually, we’re all continually learning new things.

So it’s, who cares if he give some of it away, you’re still going to learn. You’re still going to change and adapt and build new systems. And, and so yeah, take it all. Yeah. I was thinking it’s funny. And you know, if you look at social media, someone’s applying, like there they’ll say, oh, applying the try phasic model or something like, it’s like, it’s a very unique model.

It’s like, do you really think that’s how Cal leads does it? You know, you can only put so much of it in a book, you know? And it’s, so I, you know, that’s something I learned is just as an intern, you know, Hey, like stuff that’s published, isn’t exactly what they’re doing. They’re probably giving you the big, the big, you know, broad strokes of it.

But you gotta, you gotta take like your piece of it and yeah. Implemented and to make it, you know, your own. And I mean, I’ve only been doing this for a few years, so I’m, I’m still, you know, really working on it, you know, compared to you guys. But, but I mean, if that’s, if that’s something anyone could take away is just a, you know, Zac stuff for Callista, for dining stuff.

Um, you, you can only take away so much of it. You just take your, like your, your piece and apply it to how you can, you know, don’t, don’t try to just take everything, even though it’s a good model, you know, but, uh, I think too, just one more thing on the book and then we’ll, we’ll get here. We’re almost done with it.

We’ll get here near the end. What I hear too about the book. It cause I’ve been working on one. I like what you said about, you kept getting all these emails. So at the end of the day, right, it’s about solving a problem, right? And so once you start hearing enough people asking questions and this kind of continuing theme comes up, like, wait, there’s a problem that can be solved.

And that’s really how you, you kind of start with that and you start to kind of work backwards and in formulate this plan, like you said, and you start to whether it’s a book or maybe it’s a curriculum or a, uh, I know a lot of online classes are big, the summit, like you got. But I think again, I think that’s a big piece of just giving back and solving problems a day is it’s helping people.

And so I like that. Um, any other new books coming out, um, eventually there will be it’s this won’t be the title, but it’ll be movement over Max’s too, because I get hounded about that all the time and essentially what that will be. I haven’t written it, but it’s just a part of the system that I utilize.

Right. It’s it’s um, it’s. Lateralization I guess is the best term for it. How do you lateralize in a team sport? So you’ve got somebody, your intermediate athlete that does a front squat. He might be focused on strength in the front squat. How do you lateralize that to a, um, a novice athlete who might not need strength?

He might need the most minimal program ever. You lateralize it through maybe a regression as a goblet squat and a one by 20 program or something like that. You lateralize it to the advanced guys by using, um, you know, maybe some of your try phasic means or something with a super maximal east centric or something like that.

So it, it, it will talk about lateralization and using that in the team setting, because most of us have to train in large team settings. Right. We don’t get it individualized one-on-one, um, things like that. So it it’ll be about lateralizing your programs and how to build levels within the, within your, within your team.

And that’s relevant to your point earlier. You know, there’s a lot of sports voting on this stuff at NCAA of just getting more time for S for practice. So you’re going to have to have some solutions, because like you said, the system is not changing. You’re going to change and adapt or you’ll be gone.

That’s going to be a great, great book when you finish your coach. Yeah. Good stuff. We’ll see. Well, Zach, you know, you have a lot of your own resources that you’ve created, which is awesome, but what, what resources maybe from the outside would you recommend to your peers or up and coming professionals? So I think the best thing for young strength coaches, and I recommend this to our interns all the time is a strength coach network, you know, uh, care when and flat, uh, the rugby strength coach, uh, however many names he has.

He’s got the, a, that strength coach network I think is, is as good a resource as you will find. It’s, it’s got webinars every month with great, great coaches that focus on a different topic. There’s there’s forums and boards in there that you can go post messages on. They talk about the professional development as far as the resume and, and your cover letter and things like that.

And I, I think that’s the best thing out there. Awesome. Good stuff. Awesome. Well, we’re almost done here. Um, so. If the listers are, are out there today, they want to reach out to you. Follow you more, give us some of your social media handles. I know. Maybe talk a minute about your website, what you got there, give us some kind of ways for people to connect.

Yeah, I mean, they can always reach out on social media, Zach Daikin dot. Well, I should say just Zach Daikin on everything. Social media wise, a website is Zach daikin.com and you can find, you know, I’ve got free stuff on there. We just released a crawling ebook. That’s free public. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve got another high-low manual that’s coming out in the next month.

Um, that myself and an intern wrote there’ll be free to the public talks about our philosophy with just a weekly setup. Um, but you know, on there you can find movement over maxes that details. Exactly. Like we’ve talked about exactly what I do with our incoming freshmen and Juco transfers from day one.

Uh, I’ve got our 3d movement prep on there, the baseball performance summit there, there’s probably some other stuff I’ve got to speed a speed course on there as well. Um, but yeah, we write, we write blogs, um, my interns and I’ll post blogs on there all the time. All these podcasts that I’ve done, yours will be on there as well.

So that’s all Zach daikin.com. You know, they can reach out to me anywhere and they’ll find me and, and I’ll, uh, I’ll talk to anybody. This occurred little selfish question for we in here. Like what’s one of the best books you’ve read recently. Not necessarily. You don’t have to be straight to conditioning.

What do you think anything that comes to the top? It could be two or three, but like, um, let me think here. I can’t even remember. I cannot remember the name of it. It’s called, uh, I think it’s called fill my bucket maybe. Or how full is your bucket? How full is your bucket? Just a quick little, I’ve got Joe, you can read that in like a couple of days, a couple of days.

I shouldn’t even say that you can read that in a couple of hours and it’s really about giving back and, and it’s giving back to other people. And as a director, this is great in our situation because it’s about valuing your employees and making them feel good on a daily basis, essentially, because how do they work hard?

They work hard for. People that value them. And I can’t think of the exact terminology that he uses in that, in that book, but it’s, it’s fills their bucket, make them feel good. Kellen, they’re doing a good job because at the end of the day, that’s really what matters. It’s your topical meds. You know, everybody wants raises and this and that, but they want to feel valued.

That’s really what it is. And so that’s what that book talks about. That’s, that’s one of the, uh, more recent ones that I’ve read. If you want the truth. I haven’t read a ton of books recently because, and this is, again, goes back to I’m working a lot on my system. And so when I’m walking on booze and working on my system, I don’t, I don’t read books because in order to produce content and you know, whether it’s writing a book or whether it’s writing better programs for my athletes or finding a better system to, uh, to screen them with, I kind of shut out the rest of it and try to eliminate.

Taking it in. That’s a great, that’s great wisdom though. Honestly, coach, you gotta, something’s gotta go on the back burner if you don’t do good work with something else. So yeah, if you’re producing content, you can’t consume content. It gets in the way. Well, even when you produce you, I mean, you’re always, you know, anytime I write something or whatever, you’re always referencing something.

So I mean, there, there is reading going on. It’s just not like a sit down, like, you know, we all picture it like, okay, I’m gonna read book covered, cover. Like you’re still taking a lot when you’re, when you’re trying to produce something. Yeah. Um, but coach, I gotta, I gotta throw this in there really quick.

What we got, what we got Zach. Uh, so you might not remember this. It was 2017. I was still in the Marine Corps and I had no idea what I was talking to, uh, coach Mel about, uh, you know, resources and things like that stuff to read. And, uh, I called you, I was sitting in the parking lot of the, of the base because I think we scheduled a time to talk and.

And the only time, you know, like the cars at the only quiet place you can go. Like, if you’re a platoon commander, I mean, you have Marines constantly on your, on your butt. But, um, so we’re, we were talking and you asked me you, like, if I was reading anything, you know, just give me advice for financial and ship.

And I was like, yeah, I just bought the book super training. And I hadn’t seen the book yet. I just ordered it. And you’re like, Ooh, that’s a pretty big book. And so you’re like maybe, maybe try something a little bit shorter. And then, uh, coach Mel sent me, uh, some, some shorter books to check out, but that was, that was, uh, one of the first conversations I had with the string coach back in 2017.

You gave me that advice so, well, hopefully it was, hopefully it was a good conversation. No, it was good. Yeah. I learned a lot. Yeah. Did you ever, did you ever read super training? Uh, not covered cover I’ve referenced it. Yeah, but there are so many hidden gems in that book. It’s honestly, to me, it’s, it’s the Bible of training.

That’s what I was going to say. A lot of it, a lot of it, I don’t know if you can use with most of our athletes, but there are so many, see, every time I go back and read that, there’s something more so it’s yeah. I’ve definitely read large portions of it. Like if I ever needed like any, any specific, like, we’ll just say east Centrix.

I mean, there’s like just as the Tawny centric. So I read everything you sent tricks out of there and yeah. Everything in that book. It’s amazing for how old that book is for what they knew. It was. It was so ahead of its time, it just shows you there’s nothing new in our field. You know, I know we’re getting close to time, but FRC, we know what functional range conditioning is.

They talk about that in, in super training. He talks about that exact method in super training. It’s crazy. There’s nothing packaged it. Everything’s like you said to your point earlier, there’s nothing new. It’s just all getting re repackaged. So yeah. Any closing thoughts as we wrap up, Joe, you got anything else?

No, that was it. I just, uh, I thought it was funny as it’s been like what five years. And I, it just kind of funny, like some of that, some of the folks I was trying to call just to find a way to break into the field. And so, yeah. Thank you for doing that coach by the way. So you never know you’re going to meet that guy.

I know I’m scared to find the person that I forgot to email back or something like that. You are such an yeah. Well, uh, hopefully that doesn’t happen. No, I had a lot of conferences. Man, this, this feels great in that aspect. Like so many people want to help out. So it was awesome. What called Zach? It has been an absolute honor and privilege to have you on thank you for your time.

Uh, I know we’ve got a big series with you this weekend. Take it easy on those horns. I might say the opposite, right? I know, but, uh, Hey, I can’t say, uh, we, we’re not going to get into a pie. Eating contest with CDC will definitely, uh, we’ll. We’ll brag on you to him when we see him. So, uh, that you’re doing just an incredible job, but what a great coach, great.

Even better, man, in my opinion, and congrats to you and your family. So I appreciate you guys. Let me, uh, let me come on today. And then he was a real joy. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for being here. Well, that’s it from Austin, Texas. It’s the team behind the team. Danny made Joe CrossFit, coach Zach Daikin. We are in the house and we’re outta here.

Catch you on the floor.

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.