Flight Performance and Fitness

Cultivating the Optimal Training Environment

                                        

 

       In the fitness industry, it is widely accepted that our wellness isn’t solely about our physical ability. Wellness is viewed as being multifaceted; its about our social, physical, and emotional wellness. The list goes on, but the three listed above are three of the facets we see as coaches most when it comes to cultivating the optimal training environment for our clients. Our ultimate goal is to be a guide in our client’s journey towards achieving their best multidimensional being. 

      There are 5 pillars I refer to when building a training environment that supports growth in the physical, social, emotional wellness categories. These 5 pillars are: ProvideSafety, Share Authenticity, Provide Support, Develop Resilience, and Promote Learning.

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    First and foremost comes safety of the patrons and employees. We must provide an environment that promotes safety within the three facets of wellness above everything else. The longevity required to keep our patrons coming back to the gym relies on their ability to stay healthy. The physical safety spectrum runs from assuring proper technique is used while performing a movement with an external load to making sure there is no extra equipment on the floor where a client or athlete may be exercising. The increased risk of tripping increases risk of injury. Obviously, a lot more plays into an optimal training environment than just awareness of objects on the floor and movement competency, as these things pertain mostly to physical wellness. The following pillars address how we can provide a safe environment for our patrons, which pertain a little more to their emotional and social wellness. It is of utmost importance that we provide a safe environment that allows our clients to express themselves as who they are.

      The second pillar is authenticity. I choose this as my second pillar because I believe it is equally important for the gym to run as authentic as they can to their mission statement. It seems these days that people are better at picking up on falsities or fakeness, for lack of a better term. Beyond a patrons ability to read whether or not the gym is an authentic place for them to grow, authenticity helps to breed confidence in employees. This confidence will create a snowball effect in that, employee confidence will pour over into their work and will support growth in patron confidence. As coaches or trainers, we attempt to build a system that is true to our beliefs; we set ourselves apart from other coaches or trainers through personal experience. There is something to be said about being authentic to the differences between humans when it comes to their definitions of wellness, as those personal experiences set us apart from other trainers and coaches when it comes to what our clients want and need. It is important that we encourage each and every member that walks through the door to be authentic to themselves, the best way to do so is to create an environment where everyone feels supported.

      The third pillar, support, postcedes authenticity because we must be willing to support our patrons in their genuine form (ie. Personality type, strengths, weaknesses, etc). We must be considerate and supportive of all walks of life. Not all people were cut from the same cloth so it is up to us to figure out what makes each person unique and to help them foster growth where they deem fit. This cultivates an environment of open expression. As our patrons feel more socially supported, they will feel more comfortable expressing who they really are and where they want to go. Another way to provide support is to create a motivational environment. In order to create a motivational environment, it is important to build an environment where failure is seen as an opportunity to learn and success is celebrated and shared, even at the lowest level. This motivational environment will also help to build our fourth and fifth pillars: developing resilience and promoting learning.

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      As coaches, we are physically developing resilience of the tissues so that the athlete can withstand the particular forces in their sport. However, developing resilience is about a lot more than building physical resilience. 

 

Have you ever felt way in over your head; like someone considered all your weaknesses and then threw you in a pool of them? 

 

Did you sink or did you swim? 

 

How did you manage them? 

 

What did you feel like after?

 

      As humans, we are wildly resilient, regardless of successes or failures. When we learn to walk we often fall down. Does that stop us? Typically not. We carry on with alternative methods until we find the one that sticks. Emotionally and psychologically speaking, resilience allows us to carry out learning without getting too discouraged with ourselves when we encounter the inability to complete a task successfully. We have the ability to overcome a wide array of adversities. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be the top of the food chain.

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      The weight room does an incredible job teaching clients and athletes just how resilient the human body is. It arguably does an even better job showing how resilient the human mind is. We must be pushed out of our comfort zone in order to learn and experience our own resilience. This is not possible without providing a safe, authentic, supportive environment for our patrons to feel comfortable enough to take a risk and reap the reward. 


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Variability in Strength and Conditioning: The Newest Misunderstanding



            The concept of variability in training is a hot topic in strength and conditioning right now. Unfortunately, I believe a lot of coaches are using too much variability in training their athletes and clients without an understanding of the correct application. Variability seems to be the new buzz word used as an excuse to add complexity or progression before fundamental skills and movement competency are learned. Some coaches even seem to use the “need for variability” as an excuse to be less detailed oriented with their coaching and programming, as if there isn’t such thing as a “bad” movement strategy. I will tell you right now, there are plenty of bad movement strategies that athletes and clients use every day. It is our job as a strength and conditioning coach, performance coach, physical preparedness coach, skill acquisition coach or whatever the new label is, to take the athlete or client through appropriate progressions and positions to improve the likelihood of them using the most efficient/powerful strategy. Sorry folks, but this is without a doubt NOT going to be at full speed, in multiple planes, with a competition or a decision-making element. The poor movement strategy will likely never improve if you load it differently every time you do it.  
 
 Is it more fun to have every exercise be loaded in a different way every week? Probably. 
 
Is it more fun to add a competition element to drills?  Yeah.
 
Does every movement need to be “perfect” before adding progression? Of course not. 
There is no such thing as a perfect movement. 
 
Should there always be a reactive element if you’re training athletes? Yes, but skills and movements need to be built separate from the reactive component first. 
 
 How much variability do athletes and general public clients need in their training?  Now that is the million dollar question. 

 Before we can answer this question, we have to determine who we are working with. 
 
What are the goals of this individual? 
What is their training experience? 
What is their level of movement competency?
What is their affect toward training?
 
            If we are talking about training athletes, then ultimately, you want them to train in all positions, planes, and velocities, with varying intensities.  I use the word “ultimately” because starting out a new athlete doing all these things would actually be detrimental to their progress. 
 Imagine you have a new 15-year-old athlete come through your doors with no weight room experience. On that first day, they might be able to display some athletic qualities such as speed, relative strength, agility, maybe even rate of force production. They were either given these abilities genetically or they gained them playing their sport. Either way, the odds are that they also have some inefficient strategies that they use to display these qualities. The goal of the first block of training for this athlete should be building competency in basic movement patterns. If you have been coaching long enough, I’m sure at some point you have started a client or athlete out on an exercise that they were not prepared for. 
 
What happens?
 
You end up beating your head against the wall trying to get them to do the exercise correctly and they usually don’t really get better at it. 
 
            They don’t get better at the exercise because they didn’t go through the prerequisite movements that give their brain context for how to display this movement correctly with the right musculature being used. If I get an athlete or client really good at goblet squats, the transition to a barbell front squat shouldn’t be that difficult. They have built competency in the movement pattern of squatting. They know where to put the weight in their feet. They know how to keep the pelvis stacked under their ribcage as they descend, and they also know how to maintain that stacked position while they drive their feet into the ground and come back to the start position.  The athlete no longer has to think about these cues or technique points because it is drilled into their wiring. We call this stage of motor learning unconscious competency.  Meaning, it’s automatic. The pattern does not go out the window when you change the load slightly from the goblet position to the barbell front rack position. However, you changed a variable. So, for a short amount of time the athlete might have to think about the cues again… BUT, because the main pattern is so locked in, this should be very short. 
            The same goes for non-traditional weight room exercises like jumping, running, and change of direction.  The need for open loop speed and agility work is obviously important to have somewhere in the program for an athlete. Creating a more chaotic, reactive environment with training is definitely valuable but I would argue that drills or exercises done in this fashion serve better as assessments to drive your exercise selection than actual exercises themselves.  
            Open loop drills are a chance for the athlete to blend all the specific skills they have worked on in more game-like situations. Due to the increase overall demand of these drills, the athlete’s weaknesses should be more apparent, giving the coach a good idea of what skills they need to break down and spend more volume and time on with that athlete. 
            This concept is easy to understand if we take it back to our weight room movements.  A lot of lifters will squat with good technique up to a certain percentage, then they will compensate in some fashion. Let’s say that percentage is 90%. This compensation strategy that the lifter is using is the result of a specific weakness in that movement pattern. For example, imagine a lifter that pushes their hips back as they come out of the hole in a back squat. You might have the lifter lighten the load and work on extending their knees to drive up. Or you could have them do more front squats to work their quads. The point is that the demand of that over 90% back squat highlights the weaknesses of that lifter.  Knowing the lifter’s weaknesses is extremely important, to reduce/ eliminate compensation at higher intensities. Putting high enough demand on the lifter was important to be able to clearly see their weaknesses, but that doesn’t mean you should have your lifters squat over 90% every time they lift.  The 90%+ squat also didn’t do anything to fix their weakness in that movement pattern, it just exposed it.  If the goal is to squat more weight, the lifter needs to be exposed to high intensity work often. But they will not actually get stronger or more resilient unless they spend a lot of time and volume building the foundation by addressing their weaknesses. Spending inappropriate time at high intensities will be teaching their body to use the compensation strategy whenever the intensity gets high. The overall 90% squat is just like the use of open loop drills to build speed and agility. They will expose weaknesses. They are needed to give you a taste of the full speed competition. Most importantly, if you train open loop drills for the majority of your training you will not get better at the skills it takes to be successful because you aren’t building competency, you are testing it.
            High level movement competency drives good movement variability, not the other way around. Consider coaching a youth quarterback in football how to pass. When you first start coaching them on proper mechanics, they will have no consistency. The movement will probably look different every time they do it and the ball may rarely reach the target. You could consider the variability too wide with this young athlete. The more the athlete practices efficient mechanics, the more consistent the throws will get. As the young quarterback starts playing real games in Pop Warner he will be put in different circumstances almost every play. Some plays he will have to change his throw to get over a defensive lineman that is tackling him. Some plays he will have to throw on the run. If you build the basics of the movement pattern to an extremely high level with an athlete, they will be able to take the fundamental core of the pattern and alter it to match the situation. This is the variability that we are looking to build as coaches.  On the flipside, if you put the athlete in those difficult circumstances before he engrained the proper motor pattern, he would have no fundamentals to call upon and the intensity and variability of the situations would never allow the athlete to build enough consistency to be effective. The athlete would just be left with variability, which by itself does not lead to better performance. 
 
            The job of a strength and conditioning coach is not to put clients and athletes and difficult positions and expect effective  “self-organization”. It is our responsibility to use specific exercises at the right time, in the right progression to build performance. This is the sweet spot of coaching! If you want to help your clients and athletes get better at moving at any level, focus on building high levels of competency in the fundamentals and you will give them the tools to have true movement variability. 
 
 
 
        

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Four Principles of Effective Coaching

            Take a moment to reflect what you define as an effective coach. This can include qualities of a coach who had a particular impact on you or qualities you’ve learned through coaching. What are some qualities of coaches that have made incredible impacts on their communities?
            Aside from the fundamental knowledge required to be a competent coach; including human biomechanics and physiology for strength and conditioning coaches, sport theories and game play for sports coaches, or macronutrient and micronutrient knowledge for nutrition coaches, there is a required knowledge about people and their behaviors. The common end goal amongst the coaches listed above is to positively impact someone’s mindset and behaviors. Creating a true impact on someone’s mindset and current behavior requires the coach to possess a certain set of competencies, skills, and behaviors. Surrounding these are four principles that define effective coaching; building trust, unlocking potential, creating commitment, and executing goals. 
            Building trust is the coach’s entry fee. Trust is the pillar in which the other principles are built upon. If our athlete or client does not trust us, how can we expect them to commit to us? Trustworthy people demonstrate integrity, honesty, and sincerity repeatedly. Integrity being the most important of these qualities. Many times, coaches face clients or athletes who share things in confidence with us. Our integrity is defined by what we do with that information. It is after a coach gains the hard earned trust of an individual that a coach can get to experience their true potential.
            Individuals seek out coaching because they have a particular problem in which we hold the particular solution. Therefore, our goals as a coach are driven by the goals of the individual we are coaching. This means guiding them in finding, understanding, and growing their own potential around the goals important to them, which can be done by asking insightful questions. By asking insightful questions, coaches can gain a deeper perspective on the individuals deeply held beliefs or values, or paradigms, surrounding these goals. Oftentimes these paradigms are negative in nature and are holding our clients and athletes back from reaching their potential, or readiness and openness to accept change. A common faulty paradigm coaches hear is that setback means failure. We must challenge these faulty paradigms, despite the challenge, by creating a new lens for the individual. We can look to reframe experiences through a series of questions highlighting the positive outlooks on past experiences. Our ultimate goal for our client or athlete is to get them to think in terms of the heights of potential rather than the valleys of limitation. Now that they are fully aware of their potential, we need them to commit to their goals.
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            Commitment is internally driven. Therefore, the only thing we can do is to ask the right questions in order to drive commitment from the inside out. The three areas of questions that we focus on include defining the goal, defining howto achieve the goal, and obtaining commitment. At first, it is important that we challenge their purpose and desired benefit of the goal in order to provoke deeper thought surrounding their goal. We often encounter people who haven’t thought about WHY they want to achieve their goal. After we’ve allowed our client to tell us about their specific needs, issues, opportunities, or achievements, we will start to ask questions about HOW they believe they are going to achieve that goal. In getting an individual to advance on commitment, it is important we ask questions that allow them to anticipate any potential barriers that may hinder their achievement. If they can predict what may go wrong, they can plan an alternative route around that obstacle. Finally, we need to obtain commitment by asking questions that narrow the focus of the goal, provide next actions to be taken, and summarize how they can achieve their goals. Once we’ve asked for and received commitment from an individual, it is our task to aid them in executing their goals.

            This is the sweet spot of coaching. We get to implement our expertise to guide an individual through the execution of their goals. It is up to us to utilize our knowledge to guide our clients through methods that will work best for that person. Ultimately, our job as an advisor of potential never stops. It will always be up to us to reframe the mindset of our client or athlete when the inevitable “one-step back” happens. This requires trust from our client or athlete at all times, as they will most likely seek us out when they experience a pitfall in their mindset. By asking insightful questions, we can allow our client or athlete to reframe their mindset and therefore regain control over their actions. 

            At the end of the day, we all have our niches: be it powerlifting, nutrition, sport, finance, or life, we are all coaches. It is up to us to gain trust, challenge paradigms, seek commitment, and support execution of goals. We can be successful by showing integrity throughout the entire process. We can ask questions to provoke thought and encourage proactive behavior in order to challege current, unsuccessful paradigms of the individual. It is only after we achieve commitment, that we get to employ our specialty knowledge in guiding them past the finish line.



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Training with knee pain

Check out our video about training with knee pain


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The Ins and Outs of Back Down Sets


 
 
What are back down sets? 
Back down sets are a programming strategy that we use to increase the amount of quality volume done by the athlete at higher intensities. The strategy is based on the principles of post activation potentiation. High intensity (heavy loaded) strength exercises recruit high threshold muscle fibers. As the intensity increases, more of these muscle fibers are recruited. Studies show that these high threshold fibers (explosive fibers) could stay stimulated for up to 30 min following a high intensity set (Chiu, Fry, Weiss, et al., 2003; Rixon, Lamont, & Bemden, 2007)..  Do to the increase in muscle fiber activation from the heavy loading, lower intensity work should be easier for the client/ athlete to complete. Long story short, doing a heavy set of a strength exercise should increase your ability to be stronger and more explosive at lower intensities within the same session.  
 
The beautiful gift of back down sets is their versatility.  The use of PAP for building power is pretty well documented with methods like the French Contrast System, but drop down sets can also be a great tool for strength and hypertrophy. It’s all in the application.  Below are a few examples:
 
Powerlifter looking to improve maximal strength:
Heavy sets: 2x2 92%, 
Drop down Sets:3x2 88%
 
Football player looking to improve basic strength:
Heavy sets:3x4 88% 
Back down sets: 2x6 85%
 
Hockey player looking to build muscle: 
Heavy sets: 3x5 85%
Drop down sets: 2x8 80%
 
     Powerlifting is a sport that tests maximal strength. For the powerlifter, the back down sets only added 6 more total reps but the key is the quality.  If the powerlifter had tried to do 5x2 at 92% it would have been extremely stressful to the system and their would likely have been a drop off in technique as they got past the second or third set.  The drop down sets allow the powerlifter to add sets to their overall work, stay at a high percentage, and assure that the quality and speed of the reps stay the same throughout. 

     The football player in this example needs more basic strength. The goal for the back down sets are going to be to stay in an intensity percentage that will stimulate strength  (>80% )but also get more reps per set so they can get enough overall volume to stimulate hypertrophy (>20Reps). 

     The hockey player is this example is looking to build muscle. Given the athletes goal, the percentage drop off for the back down sets is higher compared to the powerlifter and the football player as we aren’t chasing intensity as a priority. This larger percentage drop allows you to add a greater amount of reps per set and accumulate more overall volume, thus driving more of a hypertrophy stimulus.
 
Psychological Gains: 
Along with the physiological benefits via PAP, there are also psychological  benefits to this strategy that are worth noting, Two of the biggest factors in an athletes ability to lift heavy loads is the intent and confidence they have going into the exercise. For most athletes, this confidence takes some time to build. Doing lots of volume at high intensities can be extremely taxing from a central nervous system and joint perspective, but it can also be extremely taxing mentally. Doing back down sets allows the athlete to build confidence and skill at higher intensities , while  decreasing some of the injury risk that is adherent with increased physical and mental fatigue as the number of sets proceed.  With most athletes, you will see confidence and focus carry over to the slightly lighter sets giving the athlete a mental advantage as well as physical over the submaximal loads.
 
Technique  Gains:
When your dealing with high intensities, it is likely that there will be some technique breakdown. We are looking to minimize this as much as possible, but the reality is that any weakness you have will start to show as the intensity increases. High intensities don’t lend themselves well to conscious correction of technique because your focus and attention needs to be on being as powerful as possible to complete the reps. Back down sets are effective because they give you an opportunity to immediately address any technique weakness that manifested in your heavy sets with a now slightly lighter, more manageable load. 
 

To sum it up,  drop down sets are a great programming tool that you can use in your own training or with your  clients and athletes regardless of training goals. The key with any training method is always in the application.  Figure out what the goal is and apply this principle to whatever main compound exercises you are using. I think you will be pleased with the results. 
 

 

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Strength Coaching a Professional Team

           
When working with my clientele I assess their needs from a very broad level. I am looking into what sport they play, their training age, how well they move, and what the next step is to bring them to where they need to be.  In assessing this, I often fall back on the four stages of motor learning: 

Unconscious competence,which basically means they don’t know what they don’t know. 

Conscious incompetence, where they seem to know what they’re doing wrong but can’t quite figure out how to adjust. 

Conscious competenceis where they start to turn around and we can start hitting them with some more advanced training.  This is where they can take your coaching cues and really apply them as they are aware of what you want and can respond adequately.  

Lastly, we reach the mastery phase ofunconscious competencewhere execution is automatic.   

The relevance here is that being a strength coach for the last 10 years I was starting to think of myself as towards the last two steps of motor learning with my profession.  By accepting a job with the New England Free Jacks, I thought I was also served a large serving of humble pie. I realized I was no different than one of my athletes struggling to do a bodyweight squat on their first day at Flight Performance.

Going into this I felt pretty comfortable with where I was at and my knowledge base on up to date strength and conditioning. Having spent the last 12 years playing rugby and the last 6 writing programs for and training other rugby players I felt as though the step wouldn’t be too far outside of my wheelhouse.  I was fortunate enough to have great resources as well as an exhibition season with the Free Jacks to orient myself to the new environment.  I am not suggesting that I have all the answers, but I am confident that I am between conscious incompetence and conscious competence.  

One of the biggest elements I underestimated was how much of the team decisions fall on the role of S&C.  My input is required in areas I previously hadn’t been responsible for. I am a Performance Coach but at the professional level my job description fits better as a “stress manager”. Everything that a professional athlete does on a day to day basis is adding stress to the system. Not to mention, professional rugby is in its infancy, meaning that many of the resources of established pro sports are not yet available.  Once I realized I wasn’t just screaming at the guys to get an extra rep or push harder (not really my philosophy anyways)and more as a stress moderator, I was able to dive deeper into my role.  

How many hours of sleep are the guys getting? Did they eat anything before practice? After practice? Are they nursing an injury they don’t want to tell me about? Are they stressed about something outside of rugby? Are they not as in shape as they should be? If they’re not as in shape, can I ask them to do the same thing as the guy who is? Will this make them more susceptible to injury? How well are these new players accustomed to the weight room? Are these lifting sessions going to add unmanageable stress accompanied by on field sessions?  

One of the greatest lessons I have learned from managing employees and athletes is that expectations cannot be assumed. Providing people with extreme clarity of expectations puts the ball in their court to show up. The biggest thing for me has been systems.  How are they feeling on a given day? Fill out a daily wellness survey.  Show me that you are doing the workouts, fill out your sheets.  Put the GPS units in the box right after training, if I have to chase these down, you’ll clean something in the gym.

What I have already jumped into is simply day to day stress, as I found out quickly there are much more things a professional side has to deal with that can affect their performance.  Even five years ago something like flying across the country had no effect on me.  Now a days even though I am more conscious of health and wellbeing it wrecks me.  I get off the plane stiff in the hips, my neck is tweaked from sleeping a funky way, my ankles are swollen despite wearing compression, and I’m severely dehydrated even though I drank one of the massive smart waters.  Ok now go play an 80-minute match against the best in the country! I think not.  My point here is this plays a massive role in mapping out our training weeks due to game travel.  What modalities can I use to offset these effects?  How soon before/ after flying can I train the guys?  I plan to use ice baths as frequently as possible post-match, post flight, and post heavy training sessions.  There are a lot of people that do not believe in this method but I read a few great studies that Alex Ross passed on to me that have some pretty conclusive benefits.  One is using with the Chiefs of super rugby and a whole thesis paper written on the effects of CMI on countermovement jumps.  This paired with band distracted mobility work will help me keep the players from developing too much inflammation from the travel stresses. As mentioned above, in the first year of working with the free jacks I was lucky enough to have been given the connection with Alex Ross to pick his brain on the ins and outs.  I also was given the opportunity to go out and work with USA Rugby as most of the squad was in Fiji for the Pacific Nations Cup.  While I was there, I was able to work with the injured players left behind and help facilitate the beginning of the world rugby camp in Glendale, CO.  Both opportunities have yielded me quite a bit of experience that would have taken a few years to develop on my own.  That being said there is a reason why myself and Dylan wanted to get into the private sector of strength and conditioning. 

 Lack of job security being one point but the biggest thing we take pride in is our coaching abilities and the product we put out there every day.  Coaching our athletes to make them fundamentally strong and doing the movements with competence is the most important part for us. The “varsity” weight room approach makes this tough and often times most team strength and conditioning coaches have one assistant and a couple interns to help them coach the room.  The problem here is there can’t be enough time dedicated to attention of detail, there simply isn’t enough eyes.  

Like anything a strong foundation builds a stronger sturdier house.  Most athletes are crappy weightlifters and have terrible habits of slapping too much weight on the bar.  We get our athletes to put their ego aside and learn proper technique.  At the end of the day they are professional rugby players not professional weightlifters so I like to relate it to rugby skills.  If you are passing the ball incorrectly or striking the engage of the scrum in the wrong position would you continue to do it wrong? Or are you going to drill and drill the proper mechanics until you do it properly, I’ll ask them. It is the same thing in the weight room, lifting weights is technique and skill and frankly the load really does not matter that much if its compromising form.  

Once we get technical mastery we can dive into the more exciting protocols, dynamic effort, VBT, or percentage-based training.  This is where I want to make a big change in the field, assessing each player building a needs analysis and see where they are at from a movement competency perspective and get them to the end goal.  As much as I want the weight room to be a place where the guys can get after it, be a bit more primal, and enjoy their off-field time I want them to be eager to learn and do things right.

I haven’t really discussed much of actual application in this scatter of thoughts but there will be more to come on that. In all this has been and will continue to be a massive learning experience.  Standing still is something that has always bothered me so finding the next challenge to rise to will always be something I seek.  Until next time.


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