Barbell Shrugged - True Speed Training

Episode Date: December 14, 2016

This week on BARBELL SHRUGGED we interview PJ Nestler of Velocity Sports Performance. We talk about speed training and misconceptions around this training adaption. We discuss: What true speed training looks like How to test if your athlete is ready to work on a speed training session  How to apply speed training in your program  

There is a general misunderstanding of what speed actually is. And to me, I've said this, I think actually on this podcast before, that speed is the most misunderstood and misused of all training adaptations. And I think by a long shot. What do you mean it's misunderstood? So what I mean by that is people generally don't understand what true speed training is and why that actually matters. And so people think they're doing speed, but they're not actually accomplishing those goals.

And because of that, their performance is being limited or they're not reaching their true potential because they haven't identified that into the spectrum. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe, standing here with Doug Larson and Andy Galpin. And we are up here in Orange County visiting PJ Nessler, strength coach, trains UFC fighters. And today we're going to be talking about speed. And I think a lot of people in our audience, a lot of coaches aren't training speed or might be calling something speed that's not quite speed. And I think that's why we want to talk about this today.

Yeah. To chime in on that, there is a general misunderstanding of what speed actually is. And to me, I've said this, I think actually on this podcast before, that speed is the most misunderstood and misused of all training adaptations. And I think by a long shot. What do you mean it's misunderstood? So what I mean by that is people generally don't understand what true speed training is and why that actually matters. And so people think they're doing speed, but they're not actually accomplishing those goals. And because of that, their performance is being limited or they're not reaching their true potential because they haven't identified that into the spectrum. So quickly if we look at human performance if we look at sport if we look

at health and we look at our abilities over this huge spectrum and if we start on one end with with endurance right the furthest end of the endurance spectrum would be your ability to sustain action over 30 60 90 200 hours it doesn't matter right sustained activity as we slide from that spectrum more towards the middle of performance, we get to endurance, but maybe endurance with heavy, maybe endurance with intervals. This is more of a CrossFit AMRAAM. This is these types of things. You get closer to that strength spectrum, and there's maybe even some strength endurance, and then you keep going, and you're at true strength, and this would be like one repetition

as heavy as you can do. Well, most people stop right there. And they'll play a bunch in those endurance ends. They'll do a bunch of different types of endurance, but they stop at the true end of the strength spectrum. They don't keep going to still not tired, but not heavy either, where I'm truly moving fast. And so most people think they're doing speed because they're doing things, trying to go fast, but they're getting tired.

They're doing big volume. And that's not really truly speed work. And so because of that, I think they're missing speed because they're doing things trying to go fast but they're getting tired they're doing big volume and that's not really truly speed work and so because of that i think they're missing a lot of the limitations for sport performance and even for general physiology right we were talking earlier about uh you want to be able to catch yourself from a fall that's predicated by your speed your foot has to be able to get out in front of you in the right position now once you get there you have to have the eccentric strength to be able to get out in front of you in the right position. Now once you get there, you have to have the eccentric strength to be able to brace the load to not land. But if your foot never got there in the first place, that's a speed issue. So the ability to just simply move fast but not tired

and not with a bunch of repetitions, that's really speed work. And the problem with that is, and the reason why people generally don't do it is, you don't get tired. You don't leave the gym like smoked. A lot of times you don't feel like you did a lot. If you just run a couple of 10-yard sprints with a two-minute break in between, you're going to walk away from five

sprints and be like, I didn't do shit. People like to feel wrecked at the end or else they didn't do anything. One of the reasons we brought PJ in is because you are training UFC fighters and MMA fighters who probably don't... If they don't crawl out of the like if they don't feel if they don't crawl

out of the gym they didn't feel like they put in a workout there's like a there's a psychological aspect here absolutely and I think that's one of the biggest things I see in my field is you know everybody who comes to us they want to just get smoked you know they need to get crushed to get something out of it and that's part of the educational piece for me you know in working with athletes working with MMA fighters or working with anybody is understanding that there's different adaptations that we can train for, and you don't have to leave here feeling worse than you came in.

A lot of times you come in and you can still leave here feeling great and you still got something out of it. So, you know, I think trying to get people to understand that is always a challenge early on. But, you know, they have to know what they're training for. Right, and we can dig into some of those methods as we go through the show. But let's rewind for a second. You know, what's your background?

How did you get into this? Who are you? Like, kind of just tell us about yourself. Yeah, so I am a strength and conditioning coach. So I've been doing this for about 10 years now. I've worked as a college strength and conditioning coach. I've worked as a personal trainer. I've worked in the private sector.

And I now run a couple sports performance gyms in the private sector. And, you know, I primarily work with NFL, NHL, and MMA fighters at this point. But I've worked with every, you know, everybody. I've trained little kids. I've trained, you know, older adults. And I worked with a lot of athletes from all different levels. And, yeah, so I've been doing this for about 10 years. And this really what I do now is the education side of it as well.

You know, I educate a lot of coaches on how we do what we do so they can understand how to train athletes and how to train people and get them better. Yeah. Who's your favorite to train? If you were to pick one of those categories, who's your favorite? Like fighters, NFL guys, kids? I'm partial to fighters just because that's my favorite to train? If you were to pick one of those categories, who's your favorite? Like fighters, NFL guys, kids? I'm partial to fighters just because that's my favorite sport. But favorite to train would probably be NHL. Oh, really?

Yeah, those guys. They show up a half an hour before you're supposed to train. They do all the stuff they're supposed to do. They've got their own foam rollers and equipment, and they do their mobility work. You know, they're always on time. They always do what they're supposed to do. They're just very humble. You know, they're not caught up in being famous and doing any of that.

They just come in, they do their work, and they're awesome, you know. So dealing with other professional athletes, you can run into the guys with the egos who show up a half hour late and they're at the club last night. And NHL guys, I've never had a hockey player who doesn't show up and get his work done. So they're a lot of fun. You started actually as a Division I Strength and Conditioning coach. Yeah. Give the audience a little bit of a background between what the difference between being a Division I

or a private sector Strength and Conditioning coach is and if you ran a CrossFit gym or something like that. So how is that Strength and Conditioning different from a normal or a CrossFit Strength and Conditioning? Yeah. So the biggest difference between collegiate and private sector is probably that, you know, collegiate, the teams are required to come to me. So I work with the coaches and they send me the athletes and I train team after team and it's in a much big, it's in a group setting. Whereas the private sector, obviously people are paying to be here. So, you know, I have to then recruit them to come here. I have to keep them here, um, train them in a lot smaller groups. Um, and then, you know, similar to probably the difference between us and, and, uh, CrossFit is we do a lot more small group specialized training

where, you know, specific sport performance is the goal. Um, not as much larger group where, you know, fitness is the goal. So that's probably the biggest difference between, you know, what we do in the private sector, strength and conditioning versus, you know, fitness is the goal. So that's probably the biggest difference between, you know, what we do in the private sector strength and conditioning versus, you know, CrossFit. So this is primarily individualized programming as almost everyone here have their own set workouts that you've written specifically for them. Yes. Every single person has their own workouts and we'll have, you know, I train in small groups. So some of my fighters all train together. They all have a similar goal. You know, we might be training for the world championships But each fighters individual and what they need to get there and what they need to get better for that

So that's where they'll get individualizations for for each of them Yeah, so fighters given that the whole sport is trying to hurt somebody they're often hurt probably more often than not They're almost always hurt. Yeah. How do you how do you program around that to make it where you're able to give them some amount of progress, but you're not exacerbating any particular injury that they come in with? And it changes every day. For sure. That's huge. They are hurt always, always, always hurt.

So I think I tell fighters that that's one of the biggest things that I do is anybody can write a program. I could hand you the program I'm going to write. The difference with training with me and doing my program is I'm going to modify every single thing because I understand what the goal was. So if you came in here and your ankle's banged up, we're still going to get faster. We may not be jumping on that foot,

but I'll find something else we can do to get to the adaptation we were looking for for that day. So that's one of the biggest things is you have to know the fighter and you have to know what the goal is so that we can modify around it but still get to where we need it to be. How do you overcome, I guess, the psychological aspects behind doing speed work? People don't, like we were talking about earlier on, is I don't feel tired. And I know fighters are probably the most notorious. I mean, fighters and CrossFitters.

Yeah, it's going to be the same, right? If you're not smoked, you're not enjoying it. How do you have those conversations with those athletes? You know, I think it starts with building trust early on, and then it's an educational piece. You know, as you go through, it starts with giving them a little bit of what they really think they need. You know, when they walk in the door,

I'm going to give them a little bit of what they think it is because if they just walk in and say, you know, I want to get crushed and trained. And then all we do is very low level speed stuff. And they feel like it wasn't anything. They might not come back, you know, and we're in the private sector. I got to get them to come back. So I have to give them a little bit of what they think they need. And then you're going to lie to them. You're going to flat out lie. Pretty much. Gotcha. Lying is key in any relationship. Pretty much barbell business. The next episode, lying to your clients. Sorry.

How to do it successfully. So you can continue to piece it in. You have to build that trust and give them a little bit of what they think they need and what they think it should look like. And as they start to trust you, you start to educate them on, hey, we don't need to leave here feeling dead because I need you to understand that this is probably the least important in what you do.

You've got to do all your other practices as well. So I want you to get faster and still go to jiu-jitsu tonight and be able to train and get something out of it. I was talking to our coach earlier this week, and he was talking about he was putting a program in place, and an athlete was five days into it and was telling him, I really don't like this. He goes, oh, what's going on? Why don't you like it?

And he goes, well, I'm just not as sore. I don't think it's working. I mean, how do you handle that? Yeah. I mean, you know, early on, if you're not completely wrecking somebody, and that can be dangerous. If you're wrecking somebody in their first work of training to try to make them happy, like, I guess you got to

kind of ride that yeah fine line and it's funny because dealing with fighters is a lot of them know that they don't want to come in and get smoked they just think that they need it so when you start to educate them on it a lot of them are like okay yeah that makes sense all right yeah because they you know you know some of the guys they come here straight from sparring they just sparred for two hours. They don't need to come in and push a sled back and forth for half an hour. And they think they need it, but when they can trust me to say, hey, you don't need this, let's do something else,

and then they feel better. And then a lot of it is because I've worked with a lot of fighters now, they can kind of trust what I say. So they're like, oh, thank God. I can just step back, and I don't have to be crushed all weekend. And they know that there's times that I'm going to crush them. So those little times, I'll educate them beforehand and set that expectation. You're going to be sore tomorrow.

My jiu-jitsu guys, none of them are competing right now. So we're doing some muscle endurance, and I said, you guys are going to be sore tomorrow. Take care of yourself. This is going to beat you up. But I set that expectation at the beginning, what it should feel like during the workout, what it should feel like after the workout,

and what you should feel like tomorrow. And because they know that that was the goal the whole time, then they're not as worried about it. How would you modify that? So say you're not a professional athlete, you've got a normal client. Maybe they only get to work out three times a week, maybe four. But maybe by the end of this podcast, you convince them to do some more speed work. But they don't want to be like, hey, I've got three times a week to work out three times a week, maybe four. But maybe by the end of this podcast, you convince them to do some more speed work.

But they don't want to be like, hey, I got three times a week to work out. I can't just leave the gym not burning some calories, not getting tired. How could they integrate the speed stuff but still get that fix? Because they're not going to go do sparring. They only got three times a week they can work out. Right. I mean, I think a lot of the people that I work with will incorporate some of that speed stuff early on. And that doesn't mean you have to have a, just a speed day. You know, if you're a professional athlete and you're looking

to peak at the highest level, then we need to be a really specific on what days, what, what we're targeting and what we're focusing on. But, you know, we use more of a mixed program for someone who's just looking to be fit, you know, move better, feel better. So they can do some of their speed work early on. But, you know, again, the goal is just understand what the purpose of that is. If we're doing speed work at the beginning of the workout when we're fresh, we can still get into speed adaptation. And then you can still throw some stuff in later on. And it's not going to take away from that.

But that piece can still be speed work. Later on in the workout, in that same workout. Yeah, later on in the workout, you can still do something that um you know it's going to get you a little more tired but again your ultimate goal is not to be running to you know 100 meter dash in the olympics so you know as long as you know that everything doesn't have to be super fatiguing and everything doesn't have to crush you you know just just pick the times when we do need to get crushed and then know that there's other things we can train for throughout that workout, or, you know, maybe we have one day that we have a different focus.

You know, speed is the focus that day. So a lot of folks in the CrossFit space, they hear speed work, and they think, like, oh, I'm doing snatches. That's speed work, because I'm moving something as fast as I possibly can. I'm doing a single rep, so that counts as speed work. But in your case, what are you referring to when you talk about speed work? What are examples of exercises? Like, how do you incorporate speed work. But in your case, what are you referring to when you talk about speed work? What are examples of exercises? How do you incorporate speed work into your programming? Can you give us a tangible example of what speed work looks like? Yeah. So speed work, I mean, on the continuum, speed work is going to be something that's

completely unloaded and that's really, really fast. So for us, because we're dealing with athletes, a lot of speed work is going to be running, sprinting, jumping, you know, anything unloaded where we're going to be moving really, really fast. Or we'll do some stuff on the speed strength continuum where it's going to be, the focus is still speed and it's going to be very, very low resistance. So that's where light med ball throws and things like that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Unloaded plyometrics or very light loaded plyometrics, medicine ball throws, jumping, bounding. We do a lot of band resisted stuff. So, you know, we'll incorporate bands where we can still really focus on speed, but we'll still do speed work with the bar, you know, as long as we get under the bar, but we know that the focus is we're going to do a couple reps. We're going to move the bar as fast as we possibly can. And then we're going to shut it down and we're going to rest and we're going to do it again. And we'll get a lot of sets of just moving that bar fast and you should feel great when we're done because we're really not taxing you that much but we got what we wanted out of it are you talking like jump squats with a bar or just like uh yeah it could be jump squats

or it could even be just regular movements you know we'll do um you know bulgarian split squats is one of the movements i use a lot with some of my hockey players and some of my fighters because we don't do a ton of loaded back squatting stuff. So many of them are jacked up and I have such a short window. I got to find different ways that I can load them. So we'll do Bulgarian split squats and we'll do speed focused on those. And sometimes I'll add band resistance for it. So we get a little bit of resistance as they go, but the focus is still speed, how fast you can move through those wraps. I'd imagine most of the fighters that come in,

they want speed for increased punching power or explosive takedowns, things like that. What do people most commonly come in and say, hey, I want to get faster for these reasons? In particular fighters or just in general? In general, but I happen to really like MMA, so I like to hear about the fighters. Right. But yeah. You know, the fighters, they want to throw faster kicks, they want to throw faster punches, and they want to throw them harder. So they think

speed is also power, throwing it harder and more powerful. So I do get a lot of fighters who need to move faster. You know, some of the fighters who come to me and they're getting stuck, they don't get in and out fast. So they need, you know, they think of foot speed is actually speed. You know, that will translate into moving in and out faster. But so that's usually what the fighters want in terms of that. And then any other athletes, they just want to run faster. They want to be the fastest one on the team. They want to get to the ball faster.

They want to get across the finish line faster, whatever it is. They want to do it a step ahead of everybody else. And sometimes that's linear speed. Sometimes that's change of direction. Sometimes they else. And sometimes that's linear speed. Sometimes that's change of direction. Sometimes they don't know what that speed actually is. But that's usually what they want. They want to get there a step ahead of their opponent in whatever that is.

My strength coach that I grew up training with, he trains a UFC fighter who I'll mention his name on the show. We can talk about it afterward. But he's primarily a jiu-jitsu guy. No explosive power whatsoever. His vertical jump is like eight inches. But he's a UFC fighter. He was probably top ten in the world at one point. But he's just not strong and not fast.

In my opinion, it's one of the major things that's limited him. He's really good at jiu-jitsu, and that's great. But if everyone else is really good at jiu-jitsu too, and you're not very strong and you're not very powerful, well, now you're at a super disadvantage because you're just not as athletic absolutely and that's going to be a limiting factor in anything because you know i say i train a lot of jiu-jitsu fighters as well and i see that a lot they're they're not very explosive they're i have a lot of them they're really strong but they don't produce force very quickly and you know for jiu-jitsu itself that's actually okay because it's a sport

that they're grappling they're on the, they're usually connected the whole time. So they don't necessarily have to be able to produce that much force. But in MMA, they start on their feet. So if you have an MMA fighter, they have to be able to move in and out quickly. They have to be able to exert power very fast. You know, it's such a dynamic sport. So if you're going into that not that strong, not that athletic and not that fast, you're going to get caught. And that's where we see, now that we're seeing more and more athletes in that sport, the guys who are starting to dominate, the Demetrius Johnsons of the world, the Conor McGregors of the world,

they're fast. They're really fast. And they're fast the whole time. How would that be important? Or why would that be important for not MMA? So pick your example, weightlifter, powerlifter, crossfitter, normal person. Why would they ever need to be able to run five meters fast, change direction, and come back? Why is that ever going to help a powerlifter or a normal person?

You know, especially in weightlifting and crossfit, the ability to exert that force fast is going to, you know, especially in a CrossFit competition. You know, if we train a, people think, you know, I train an endurance runner. What would be the best way to get them better? Well, we need to improve their ability to run longer distances. But in reality, there's nothing I can do in the gym that's going to improve that. So the only thing I can really do for a long distance runner is allow them to exert a little bit more force into the ground with every single step, which makes it just a little bit less work that they have to do. And therefore, it's going to be

a little bit less fatiguing and they'll get there a little bit faster. So same thing for a CrossFitter if they're competing in the CrossFit games. A lot of that stuff is they have to be able to do it for a long time. But if you could do each one of those reps a little bit faster and it takes just a little bit less work to get there, you're going to get to that end goal a lot faster and conserve a lot more energy for whatever that next piece is. Right. If someone hasn't done a lot of speed work lately and they wanted to just like kind of take their first few baby steps

into the world of speed, so to speak, like what's a good like beginner workout for someone who's not really done much speed work before? Say they want to be able to run faster, like they're a soccer player or something like that. So step one for anybody that I work with is deceleration training. And deceleration training is great for anybody because most people don't do it. So because you don't focus on it, we've got that potential gap where we can improve really quickly. And it sets the framework for any other speed and power stuff we're going to do later. And that'll translate into your Olympic lifting.

That'll translate into your running, jumping, whatever it is. So we do a lot of deceleration training to teach you how to absorb your body weight and absorb forces in different directions and in the right positions and to set you up for success when we need to then exert that power later on. Let's take a break real quick. I want to get into what the deceleration training looks like. Okay, cool. Welcome back to Technique Quad.

I'm Doug Larson. I'm here with former UFC heavyweight champion, Boss Rudin, and he's going to teach us how to win a bar fight. Woo! Love it! So in a bar fight, if someone comes up to you and they get right up in your face like this, what do you do? The thing, you have to make sure, understand first, if this is going to be serious. If you say, okay, his friends are backing up in your face like this. What do you do? The thing is to make sure, understand first if this is going to be serious.

If you say, okay, his friends are backing up in the back, this guy needs to be cancelled out really fast, really violently, so his friends are going to be intimidated. Headbutt is the best weapon for that. I just need a little bit of this. So if he stands close, the only thing I need to do is create a little distance by stepping back, and right away hit in the face, and then just keep going and drop the guy down. Be crazy. I told my daughters. I said, just headbutt him in the face and be crazy.

Beat the crazy bitch because then you will never fight again. And that's what you do when you are in a power fight. Somebody comes up close to you. Not forehead to forehead, though. You're going forehead to the nose. Forehead to the nose. It's very important. I'm standing here. Normally, I would always stand like this talking.

You know, because this is my defense. If he would do something with a headbutt coming, I can stop him. So the trick is to hit him. You're standing like this on purpose? Yeah, yeah. Just like I'm talking to you. But I'm defending myself now. But I'm just, you know, what's going on?

Once he comes close, you want to hit the nose. If he loads up for a headbutt for me, load up and give me one, I do this. I lean forward and I let him hit his face into my head. Hallelujah. So what if someone comes up to you and they're pointing you on the chest? Okay, what you do then, you say, don't do that again. And if you say that, of course they're going to do it again. And they do the same thing. It's a stupid thing.

So he does it. I said, no, no, no, don't do that again. As soon as they do it again, grab the finger, go all the way back. They shouldn't have pushed you against the chest. Okay, so maybe you're in an argument with somebody else, and one of his buddies runs up behind you and starts grabbing you and starts choking you. Once you start choking, what you want to do, you want to make sure that he doesn't pull his shoulder back and put you against his back.

So right away what you want to do is step to the side, step behind him, and now, whoop, I can lift him and I can drop him or I can drop on him. And on the street, that's not going to be fun for him. Alright, three ways to keep yourself out of a bar fight. Thanks boss. You're very welcome. You bet. Godspeed. Party on. All right, welcome back here with PJ Nestler and we're just about to get in some deceleration. Deceleration. Desalination I think is the word. We're in SoCal, we're running out of water.

Desalination. We have a salt problem. Yeah. What is that, and how do we use it? Great one. So deceleration training is basically slowing down. That's what I tell athletes. It's slowing down. And one of the quotes I usually tell them is uncontrollable power is unusable power, or uncontrollable speed is unusable speed. So a lot of people focus on how fast they can run, how high they can

jump, but they never focus on stopping. And, you know, if you can drive your car a hundred miles per hour, but you can only stop it at 50, you're definitely not going a hundred for very long or you're going through the wall. So, you know, we start them off with, with really, really basic drills that, you know, again, seem simple, just like speed training. It's not going to smoke you. That's not the point. And we'll start them off on two legs and just teaching them how to pull their body down into different positions and, you know, use the right muscles to stop their body from moving and set them up to be in the right position to then produce force. So if it's changing directions, sprinting, jumping, whatever it is, we teach them to be really active in that deceleration, not just jump and land,

but actually focus on pulling their body into that position so they can then get ready to explode out. The forces are often higher during deceleration than during acceleration. So landing from a jump or going to change directions, you're going one way, you've got to decelerate, stop, then go the other way. Like the deceleration phase is oftentimes where the forces are higher, which means that the risk of injury goes up,

especially if the forces are so high that you have to compensate during deceleration. That's why when people tear their ACL oftentimes, it's like they're going to cut, they have to decelerate, and then it kind of overloads their system, so to speak, knee dives in, tear their ACL, and a million other injuries that can happen in a very similar manner. So knowing that deceleration is where the forces get higher is a very good rationale, kind of as you said, to make sure the brakes work before you start to hit the gas pedal, so to speak. Absolutely. This is akin to doing a snatch balance.

This is akin to working on your catching position in weightlifting, right? If you were to do some snatch drops or drop move stuff and your focus was on to decelerate the bar on the way down or to catch it in the best position, that's one example how weightlifters use deceleration. Yeah, absolutely. It's using a similar movement, but then you're saying, okay, let's make sure that we can apply this ability to decelerate

to non-linear, non-one-space movements. So can I use this and then turn and then twist? And can I use this and jump and react and go in different ways? Right. And like you said, you know, it's about absorbing the forces the right way and using the right muscles. And sometimes we'll talk about kind of the leaking of forces or leaking of power. You know, if they're not rigid in the right muscles and while absorbing with the others,

then they're going to leak a lot of that force out. And that's where injuries are going to occur. You know, all these non-contact ACL injuries are from landing or cutting in the wrong way because of how much force is coming down. So, you know, if you can't absorb that the right way, you're setting yourself up for a really, really high potential for injury. And you're leaving a lot on the table in terms of your performance because the forces are so much more. If we focus on that and and if you send me an athlete, and I never have you actually jump as high as you can

or run as fast as you can, but all we work on is stopping and decelerating and all of that control, guaranteed you'll jump higher, you'll run faster. And because it's been left on the table, every coach that you've been working with has probably just been run faster, run faster, run faster, and no one ever focuses on it.

So it's such an easy thing that we can start to close that potential gap really quickly just by teaching these things. And it's going to set you up to be safer. You know, same thing goes for if you're competing in a CrossFit competition. If we're jumping up and down on a box, when I start getting into fatigue, now, if I don't know how to decelerate my body properly, I'm not going to set myself up for enough power to keep going. And I'm going to use a lot more energy to do that same exact movement. So if we

can do it more efficiently, then it's just going to make me save that, that, uh, gas tank for later on. So what does the deceleration training look like for you? Like for jumping and landing or for, for changing direction? Like what is, what does the drill look like for deceleration training? So for a jumping and landing, it can be, you know, double leg or single leg, depending on where we're at. And usually it's really jumping, but not as high as you can. And the focus is just jump off the ground a little bit and then focus on the controlled landing. And I'll teach them exactly where their body needs to be, where their knees and ankles and torso should look like in that position. And then we'll do it.

And we'll do it over time. We'll keep doing it. And then we'll change either the direction or we'll go onto one leg or we'll go side to side, whatever we're going to do to advance that or we're going to increase the forces a little bit. So you now have to overcome more forces. And then same thing with sprinting. A lot of sprinting or change of direction is we're going to sprint to the 20-yard line,

but when you get there, we're going to slow down like this, we're going to stop like this, and we're going to be in control every single time. And we kind of just program that with all of our athletes until they get to the point that it happens naturally, and they don't really realize. They think it's more just to have control over that, you know, everybody going, because it looks better, and we have control over each segment, but then when I need to teach you how to make a high-speed cut later on, you've already set yourself up to get in and out of that cut later. So how many repetitions would they do?

So you're going to do those. I'm going to walk in. I'm going to try this deceleration stuff. How many reps should I do? So it's going to be very low reps, anywhere in the three to six range, depending on if it's double leg, single leg, how many sets we're doing. But it's low reps. How many sets would we do?

We do, starting off, probably about two sets of six reps. And then we build up again, depending on your level, but, um, you know, two sets and we might get up to four or five sets. Um, but I typically don't go anywhere over eight reps, um, unless I'm teaching technique, you know, if I'm really just teaching you and it's really low level, we might do eight to 10, but as soon as fatigue starts to set in, uh, we've lost our focus. So we have to make sure that they're all really high quality. I'd rather get 10 sets of three good ones than three sets of 10, where we start to get fatigued and we're not doing the things the right way. What does fatigue look like? How are you, how are you spotting that? What are

signs as soon as mechanics start to break down? So if they start to, let's say we're landing double leg and we start to see their torso collapse, or we start to see their knees start to break down. So if they start to, let's say we're landing double leg and we start to see their torso collapse, or we start to see their knees start to wobble or anything, you know, if we're watching their normal pattern, they start landing on their toes and their knees are driving forward. So we know that they're an athlete who recruits a lot more of their quads to do the work. So they're going to land on their toes and they're going to shift forward because they want to use those quads to do the work. So as soon as that stuff starts to happen, we're going to break down.

I mean, if it's not perfect technique, then there's no reason for us to be doing it. So we have to stop. And it could be three reps for you. It could be nine reps, wherever that stops. We're stopping there. Let you rest and we'll get back and get some more perfect technique on that. This is common with a lot of training. People are doing reps that are 85% there and either the coach isn't stopping them.

You know, you're seeing like oh they're they're good enough and the older I've gotten and the more I've trained people the more I've trained myself is like if you're not 99% there then I'm like shutting it down because every repetition you're that much closer to an injury and the point of being in the gym is to be creating good movement patterns so that you will move better in an athletic environment it's like this is the place where you should be practicing to move well this isn't the place to do shitty movement like if you're competing and things start falling apart that's the place to do it not in here right because you have an end goal you know you got

to get across the line and at that point get there however you need to get there if you're the first one across the line nobody's going that point, get there however you need to get there. If you're the first one across the line, nobody's going to look back at what your technique looked like halfway through. When you win, yeah. Exactly. But when you're in here, we have to train those movement patterns the right way.

And again, we're going back to speed training. I tell most of my athletes, if you are not at 93%, 95% plus, we're not getting nothing out of it. So when you come in, if you're fatigued when you walk in the door, which a lot of my fighters are are and our goal is speed and power we're not doing it today because you come in and you're you know i test their jumps when they come in just to see where they're at if you've significantly fatigued you're not going to be running at 95 100 you're not going to be yeah exactly yeah so if you're not running jumping or doing whatever at full speed then we're

not speed training. If it's a speed day. Yeah. If it's a speed day. So how are you testing them? So I do a counter movement jump when they come in. So I have a jump mat. They'll come in and I've kind of set a baseline and we'll just do a couple of jumps and we'll see, you know, how their nervous system is firing. And if they're fatigued, you know, if their average is 20 inches and all of a sudden they come in and they're jumping 16. I'm like, well, what's going on? Well, I sparred for three hours today. A lot of it is subjective as well.

You know, it's not all the numbers on the board. But, you know, I got to kind of paint the big picture of how they're feeling, how much they trained, and then use that. But that's the important thing is if the goal speed training, if the goal is positional integrity, then we have to remember that's the goal. And that extra rep, if we're losing that and we're compensating, then it doesn't help. It's actually going to hurt. What's a normal range, though? So say someone wanted to use that vertical jump test. You're not going to jump the exact same.

It's not going to be 20 every single day. Right. So if they're 17, is that bad? Is it 19 that bad? 10? Where is that line generally where you're like, okay, I think something's going on here versus just variability between the day? I'll usually look at it at least like 90%, 85 to 90%. And if they're jumping under 90, I'm looking at it, you know.

Maybe I'll do another one, just see where they're at. Maybe they didn't jump. You know, sometimes you have to tell them, like, jump as hard as you can or this doesn't work. Right. Sometimes you have to tell them, jump as hard as you can or this doesn't work. But, yeah, we're looking at anywhere from, you know, if they're getting more than a 10% drop-off, then we're probably not getting anything out of that speed training. I'd imagine in extreme cases you might just say, hey, man, you're fucking fried. Just take the day off.

But in lesser cases, maybe that person has normally a 20 and they jump a 17. You go, okay, no speed work today, but there's still plenty we can do to get better. And then do you just alter the programming in that case? Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very rarely do I send somebody home. It has happened. And that was because the guy just wasn't sleeping. He was working overnight and he'd come in and he hadn't slept in a week. And I was like, just go home, go home and sleep. There's nothing we can do here. You need to sleep. That's it. But I mean, I'll alter it every time because there's plenty we can do here. You need to sleep. That's it. Um, but I mean, I'll alter it every time. Cause there's plenty we can do. We'll, we'll just kind of go down the spectrum. Maybe we can do a little bit of strength work, you know, probably not maximum strength, but

we can still do some strength work. Uh, we can certainly still do some mobility work and some recovery work. We can do some low level, uh, drills where we're working technical stuff. Um, you know, we can get a lot of, we can do a lot of corrective exercise stuff. So there's plenty we can do to get better. And, you know, especially dealing with, I mean, anybody, any competitive athlete or just general population, there's so many issues they have. You know, we were just talking about how we're all broken. There's something we can do. You know, there's something we can, you're letting out our secrets, you know, when I come in here, I want to run and jump as fast as I can, but there's

plenty of other things I can do that are going to help me and set me up for long-term success. So can you go really, really detailed, like hyper-specific? I know there's a lot of caveats. It depends on the level, but just give me one example of, I want to do a speed day. I've done some of this stuff before. I'm intermediate committing, like walk me through the whole day, sets, reps, the exercise, walk me through it whole day sets reps the exercise walk me through it I want to do more of this stuff. I have some experience but Give me a whole shaman Yeah, so I'll give you an example of a speed power type day that I have with my fighters right now

Which is walk in the door. We're gonna do our testing and make sure we're good to go We'll go through a general dynamic warm-up and then we'll get into a more specific part of the warm-up We're gonna do some some rapid jumps or sprints where we're really going to make sure that the nervous system is firing as fast as it can be because, again, we have to be firing at 95% to 100% to get anything out of it. And then we'll get into some plyometrics. And whatever the plyometrics are for the day,

so, for example, today one of my fighters is going to come in and we're going to do some single leg plyometrics, and it's going to be some bounding drills. So one leg to the other leg to the other leg to the other leg, right? And the goal is getting off the ground as fast as we can and producing as much force as you can. We're going to go for 20 yards of that. Okay, so that would be like maybe 5 or 10 bounds or something like that?

Yep, and then we're going to rest. So that whole bounding drill is going to take five seconds. And then she'll walk back and we'll recover for 30 seconds or so. And usually I'll engage them in a conversation because they don't, they want to go right away. They want to go right away. And then we'll do another rep. So we'll do probably about four reps of that. Four total. Four total. And that's a set. So we'll go four total, 20 yards, shut it down. Then we'll get into, usually I like to pair into my plyometrics

maybe more of an upper body one. Then we'll go over and we'll do something medicine ball. She's going to do a medicine ball rotational toss. We're really working on speed and power so it's going to be a really light medicine ball and she's just going to throw it as fast as she can. And we're doing four reps on each side. Can you describe like quickly the movements for those of those that are just listening here?

What would that rotational throw look like? Yeah, so she's going to start, you know, facing, you know, perpendicular to the wall. She'll start the ball on her outside hip away from the wall. And then she's going to rotate that outside hip towards the wall as fast as she can. I like to tell them like she's throwing her pocket at the wall, and then she's going to rotate that outside hip towards the wall as fast as she can. I like to tell them like she's throwing her pocket

at the wall and just transition all that speed and power into the ball and then release it directly at the wall in a nice straight line. And again, I like to cue to try to break that ball against the wall. So every rep, you've got to have that intent. How many reps? She's going to go four on each side.

And then I'll usually pair in that as some kind of active rest. Again, to keep her doing something, we'll do a core exercise or we'll do a mobility drill. Or I'll just give her active rest. And we'll go three or four sets of that today. So that would be like total of 12 to 16 reps. Yep. Total. And one of those is more of an upper body focus, whereas the other one's more lower body focus. And then we're going to get into more speed strength. So we're going to do some stuff in the weight room, but really the only resistance she's going to have is the bar and some bands. And we're going to do, again, she's going to do a landmine press.

She's going to have a band attached to it on her foot, and she's going to just punch the band up as fast as she can for six reps. And we're going to shut it down. And I'm going to shut it down anywhere. So if it starts to slow down, she's done. Three reps, done. Even if it's good technique, but just starts slowing down. If the speed slows down, we're done. We've lost our training effect, so it's done. Now, because we're using a

very light band, she's going to be able to do it for six reps. But again, the goal is speed. There's a possibility here where someone might be thinking, well, if I did that, I'd get out of shape. Right? Not understanding the context here. You're just talking about the speed part of your workouts.

You still do strength training. You still do stuff to build muscle mass. You still do conditioning. Like, this is just one aspect of a more comprehensive program that you're doing for your athletes. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, on our other day, we're doing a lot more strength training. At this point in camp, because she's getting ready to fight really soon, you know, we're not doing nearly as much.

I'm not trying to do the conditioning, but outside of that camp, if we were doing a lot more, then yeah, we're still doing conditioning. I mean, at the end of the program today, we were still going to do some conditioning. She's going to spar, so we're not going to, but it's still there. So if, you know, if that bucket's not full and we still need conditioning, we're going to get it in. But the focus is going to be speed and power right now. But you just can't combine the speed and power stuff, literally combine it with the conditioning. Exactly. Because that's a different thing.

Exactly. That's speed conditioning. You're looking for maximal speed versus speed conditioning. Yes. Right? That's a different thing. Yep. And there's something to be said there, too, because we have to be fast when we're fatigued. Yep. And there's something to be said there too, because we have to be fast when we're

fatigued. Yeah. So there's times when we're doing our conditioning, we still may have a secondary focus of speed. You know, we're looking at positional integrity and speed and, you know, because it doesn't help me very much if I'm, by the time I get a little tiny bit fatigued, all technique breaks down, all my positions break down. Well, that's, what's going to carry over into what you're doing in your sport or in daily life or in your competition. But yeah, when you're in the speed, that's the focus. Okay. So those three, you had a leg bounding one, a medicine ball throw, and then a single iron landmine. And is that it for the day? No. And then we're going to do a hip dominant movement. We're actually going to do a contrasting set. So we're going to do a... What's contrasting?

So contrasting is another method that I use. And this one's not as much of a contrast as what I normally would use. But contrasting is when we use a heavy loaded movement into a fast explosive movement of the same movement pattern. So what we're trying to do is we're taking advantage of post activation potentiation, which is basically we're using the heavy loaded movement to recruit more motor motor units and recruit more muscle fibers to do the work. And then when I step out and I go into my unloaded movement, I'm going to have a lot more, all those motor units and everything are activated to generate more power. So I'm going to get a training effect at a higher rate.

So again, if I can jump 30 inches and I go do a heavy squat and I recruit more muscle units and now I'm doing my jumps at 30.5, now I've got some training reps at a higher threshold and my body's going to start to adapt to that. And very soon I'm jumping 32 inches. So the set would be heavy squat followed immediately by jumps and then you take your rest break. Exactly. Yeah, so we have take your rest break. Exactly. Yeah, so we have a very small window of rest.

I'll give them 20 seconds, catch your breath, get ready, and then go, and we'll get our jump. So a squat and a squat jump would be one that we use a lot. And it's maybe two or three reps on our squat, step out, and we're probably going four jumps. And I usually don't go over five at the most when it comes to that stuff because we've already kind of pre-fatigued you on that squat. So we're just looking for a couple really, really fast, perfect reps.

And then we'll shut it down for two minutes. And we'll take our time, three minutes maybe, depending on what we're doing. We'll take our time, we'll recover, and, you know, we'll do – I'll throw other stuff in there. You know, again, we can throw plenty of non-fatiguing stuff in there. So we'll do some neck work, or we'll do some core training, or ankle mobility, whatever we need to work on for that specific athlete.

But then we'll get in, we'll get a couple more really good sets. Yeah, I like having an effective use of a rest interval, where you're not just standing around doing nothing. If you're doing heavy squats, there's no reason you can't go stretch your shoulders or do something else where you're being productive and you're not just kind of wasting time. Exactly. And there's a lot of, in our other facility, I had a lot of Olympic weightlifters who would use our spot because we had bumper plates and platforms and everything. I'd watch them and they'd do a rep and then they're just sitting there for

six minutes. That's like the culture. Yeah, totally.'d do a rep, and then they're just sitting there for six minutes. That's like the culture. Yeah, it is. Four-and-a-half-hour workout. Exactly. And you'd be there for three hours, which is fine. If you've got the time, absolutely. Take advantage of it.

Take your rest. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with just kicking it in the gym and hanging out. No, no. My favorite thing to do. Yeah. But with my athletes, we've got such a limited window. I've got to find something that we can get in there. And there's plenty of stuff we can work in. And most people, they don't have three hours in the gym.

So, you know, if you got to shorten it up, you could still get those Olympic lifts in and then work on some ankle mobility and some other stuff you can do in between, still get a maximum rest, but get a lot more stuff done in that hour that you have in the gym. Right. What were some more examples of the heavy set followed by the speed set? So another one that I really like is we'll do some heavy sled work. So we'll maybe do a heavy sled push into a sprint.

So again, more with sprinting athletes, but we can do something heavy where they really have to drive that sled and then we'll use that same exact movement pattern and accelerate. So same positions, move that heavy sled, and we'll go short interval. It's probably 5 to 10 yards, and then step out, we'll get set up again, and we'll go 10-yard sprint, and we'll shut it down.

Probably awesome for football players and similar athletes. Yeah, we used to do it a lot with our NFL combine athletes because we're training for them. We're trying to peak their speed and power to run the 40-yard dash and do their vertical jump and all that. So we did a lot of contrast stuff with them with their speed training later on to really peak them and get them ready for their combine competition. Any examples of upper body or rotational ways you could do that?

Yeah, so in upper body, you know, bench press is always the easiest one. But one of the ones I'm using now because I have to get really creative, you know, I don't have a ton of equipment in terms of all the other little bells and whistles. So I like to get creative. So we're doing actually a, we could do a heavy loaded pull-up. Yeah. Or we're doing an isometric pull-up where she's actually just holding at the top and I'm pulling down as hard as I can and she's holding that position.

And then we'll drop right down and we'll either do an explosive band pull-down or we'll do a medicine ball slam. So trying to use that kind of same movement pattern, same principles, same muscles to do that work. And we went from that heavy loaded pull up into an explosive medicine ball, or same thing with pushing, you know, we'll do a heavy bench press set and then they'll go right into an explosive clap pushup or a medicine ball chest pass, something that's very, very light-loaded and fast. But one of the things I see with the push-up, too, is a lot of times athletes don't have the strength to be able to do that as fast.

So we'll even elevate their hands onto a box or put a band around their chest up attached to the pull-up rack, so it's going to deload some of that weight because, you know, if they're barely getting off the ground. Yeah, it's speed focus. So if they're just going heavy bench press and then they can barely get off the ground on the push-up, we're not getting where we need to be. I feel like the heavy squat followed by some type of jumping or the heavy sled followed by sprinting, those are

kind of obvious why you would want to be better at those things or be faster at those things. Like, I want to jump higher, I want to run faster, that makes a whole lot of sense, but for the pull-up and then the explosive pull, why would any athlete need to be explosive in upper body pulling? I mean, in particular to the athletes I work with, which is a lot of fighters, they're pushing, pulling, twisting, jumping, running, so they need to be able to do all these things. They need to be able to do them fast.

The difference between ripping my arm out when my opponent's pulling on it could make the difference between me getting submitted in an arm bar or getting up and continue to fight. So any of being able to move your body and fire all those different muscles rapidly is going to translate into sport. And, you know, even little things like a soccer player, you know, they've got to throw the ball in. They've got to turn their body fast. They've got to use all these muscles really, really quickly. So, you know, I like to get outside the box and not do everything in a very sagittal plane, vertical, up and down, squatting motion, because those are the easy ones. Bench pressing and squatting is easy.

I don't try to get too far because you can go really far down the rabbit hole when it comes to contrast stuff, and all of a sudden you're not actually doing anything. But, you know, because of the athletes I work with and the people I work with, they have to move so three-dimensional all over the place that we have to find some different ways that we can do that. I would challenge you this. You want to do more pull-ups?

You want to get better at your kipping pull-ups? Have you ever done any upper body pulling speed stuff? Exactly. Generally, no. It's like, what do you mean? Okay, so you work on your upper body strength. You work on your upper body conditioning. Have you actually gotten faster there?

Well, your ability to get up once, or as you mentioned earlier, if I get up there faster, I won't get as fatigued as fast with my multiple repetitions. I'll be able to do more repetitions. If people don't use speed training very much, like I said at the very beginning, almost no one uses upper body speed training, and almost no one, no one uses upper body pulling speed training. You want to get better at your pull-ups, there you go.

Yeah, absolutely. That's usually something that limits a lot of people. That's like the thing they need to get better at if they want to be competitive and more CrossFit specifically. Right. And a lot of people trying to get better at those, they just do more and more pull-ups, which is great. That's a part of it.

I was training my brother who's getting ready for the military, and he had to do his pull-up test. And he just had to do all these pull-ups every day. I said, yeah, that's good, but let's attack it from a couple different angles. Let's do a day that's heavy-loaded pull-ups. So we get you a lot stronger. Now 10 pull-ups is a lot less of your one rep max. So if it's less, it's going to be easier

to get more reps. And then we did some other stuff. Let's work on some speed. Let's not leave anything on the table. If we can develop all these different areas, it's going to make you more efficient, more powerful, and faster to do those pull-ups. And now he went from 8 pull-ups to 25 or something.

What if they're concerned about overtraining? So I'm going to add in the speed stuff. Is this going to take away from the reps I can do for the heavy stuff? Is this going to take away from my conditioning stuff? Because it's so non-fatiguing, it shouldn't really take away from anything. It's going to depend on how much you throw into it. But like I said, those plyometrics work and some of those little sprints that we're doing at the beginning, some of that stuff is just going to help potentiate

and activate my nervous system and get me ready. I'll throw that in on a strength day. We still do some of that, not as much, but we'll throw it in. We'll get your nervous system fired up and ready to go. And it's actually going to help you when you step into the weight room and you start doing your heavy movements as well. Yeah. I mean, as an athlete who I'm not trying to, I'm not a professional level athlete or anything like that. If I do some bounding, like some speed bounding before I do snatches, I was doing that at one point, and all of a sudden everything was – my snatches got easier that day. And I was like, oh, makes sense.

Just add speed work in before you do strength. It's not fatiguing. It's going to be just a little bit longer warm-up, and now you're faster and stronger. Even if I'm not working on speed, finishing my warm-up with something that is full speed, even if it is just like 20-yard sprints, I always go into the rest of my workout feeling like I'm fucking totally ready to go.

I don't feel like I just warmed up and I have to now go to squat or do cleans or whatever and have to get the empty bar and do warm-up reps. I am fucking ready to go if I've done something that's truly full speed at the end of my warmup. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. And I don't think, uh, any athlete that I've ever worked with has understood that, you know, they come in and they do their warmup and a warmup to me means get your body kind of warm and that's it. They, they go through the motions and then it's like, and sometimes I educate them by jumping them back on the jump mat. I have them do their jumps and then I have them, you know, they do their warmup and I jumping them back on the jump mat. I have them do their jumps, and then I have them, you know,

they do their warm-up, and I bring them back to the jump mat, and I say, okay, go ahead and do it. And then we go through some plyos, we go through some stuff, and I bring them back to the jump mat. And they have two-inch improvement. And I say, so guess what? Those first three sets of plyos we did were completely wasted. That was your warm-up.

Because now we're actually at the point where you can exert maximum power, and now we're going to get something out of everything moving forward so and sometimes the light bulb goes on and they understand that and they'll start incorporating that stuff into their warm-up so when they do get under the bar and they do get in the weight room they're actually getting something out of that stuff rather than all right i'm kind of loose i'm kind of warm let me jump in here and just get going and you know half of those people me included you'd get a quarter way into your workout and now you kind of feel like going all right now i feel a little bit better i'm ready to go yeah i get mad at myself if i'm if i'm in the middle of a conditioning session and all of a sudden my recovery improves i'm doing right i'm doing like 10 sets of intervals

and then on the on the sixth set all of a sudden like you feel i noticed that my heart rate dropped much faster on between five and six than it did between two and three. And I'm just like, shit, I didn't warm up enough. I screwed up my warm up. I think that a lot of people don't. Lately, I've been trying to improve my warm up. I'm always looking for ways to improve my warm up. What are all the different aspects of warm-up do you look at because i remember when i was 15 years old my my idea of a warm-up was you

gotta get the blood pumping all right that was it yeah so like what are some other walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes yeah well you know walk on the treadmill and then hit the weight room oh yeah for baseballs like get on the airdyne for like 10 minutes and then start working out like start lifting weights then or go throw the baseball or something like that. What are the different aspects of warm-up? What are you looking to do when you're warming up? And how long does a warm-up typically take? So we'll go through usually four to five different components of a warm-up.

So I go through your thermogenic, and that's usually where most people stop. That's get the blood pumping. Feel hot. Yeah, get warm, get loose, get a sweat going. And you can do whatever you want for that, whether it's running around in circles, jumping jacks, whatever you enjoy doing. Then we'll get into some mobility stuff where we're going to take all the joints through a full range of motion and really get prepped for whatever we're going to do.

It doesn't have to be all the joints, but whatever you're going to be using later on. Then we'll go into some more activation type stuff, specific muscle activation. If there's anything that, you know, is inhibited in you particularly, we'll get into some stuff to really focus on those areas and turn those things on. And some of the stuff can be general because there's a lot of areas that general people need to activate, you know, in terms of our posture. We need to work on activating all the muscles in our lower trap and all that.

The fourth component is then the neural component, like we're talking about, the speed training. Get the CNS, get your nervous system firing as high as it possibly can. So that's that missing piece in the speed. That's where that sprint work might be beneficial, or bounding right before you jump. Sprinting, jumping, really unloaded, but really fast,

and something that you feel. you feel woken up afterwards. And then the fifth component is a mental component. And that's something I incorporate in as well. And it could just be setting the expectation for what you're about to do in the weight room. It can be setting the expectation for that sparring session, you know, that competition. But that's part of it as well. And I try to educate my athletes that, you know, if they're just kind of slap dicking around, talking to each other, going through the motions, that's not part of our warmup. You know, the warmup is part of what we're doing.

And, and it's not just getting warm, you know, it's to prepare you for what you're about to do next. So you have to prepare your muscles. You have to prepare your nervous system. You have to prepare your mind, get all those things ready for whatever you're about to see next. Otherwise, you get halfway through the conditioning, you're like, oh, crap. I wasn't warmed up until halfway through because I did a warm-up, but I didn't prepare for what I was going to see next. Yeah, that mental aspect, one of the things I've been doing recently that have been beneficial for that is nose breathing only during a warm-up, and then focusing on what's happening with my breath as I'm moving so I'm doing my warm-up and am I breathing fully as I'm say I'm crawling or

something like that I'm moving and am I breathing fully each time or what I find is if I stop paying attention if I'm thinking about something else or start talking to somebody I'll notice that my breathing starts getting shallow and then I'm oh, why is my hip popping? Oh, shit. I started thinking about something. Got a shallow breath. Things got disconnected. Yeah.

And that's great. I've never done that specifically, but I think that the mindfulness is what you're talking about is being aware of what's happening in my body, being aware of what's going on. And you can use the breath to do that. You know, focusing on that breathing, it takes your mind off of all that other stuff you had going on. And we'll do that with our general adults because they're coming in here. They're coming off of work. They're stressed out.

They've got all this stuff going on. We want this to be the best part of your day. So when you come in here after work, let's go into something that's going to bring you into where we're at, focusing on your body, focusing on what we're going to do, and you'll leave here feeling a whole lot better. You'll get more of what we did here, and you'll leave here feeling a whole lot better. You'll get more of what we did here, and you'll leave here feeling a whole lot better. So finding whatever those little tricks are to bring that mindfulness into what we're doing and into your body is huge. And I use the breathing for that. It's a little bit different breathing practice, but I use that as well. To follow that up, say, okay, you got me convinced. I run a gym.

It's not really that many athletes. Maybe they're doing some competitions, but it's general population for the most part. My class has got 20 to 30 people in them at a time. I can't do individual programming. Any exact examples of exercises or strategies that, okay, maybe I want to integrate some of this speed stuff in. How could I do this at the 20, 30 person level per class? Yeah. I mean, at that point, it's going to be a lot of body weight

stuff, but I used to run fitness bootcamps for 30, 40 people. And a lot of the reason people liked my bootcamps is because I was a strength coach. I wasn't a bootcamp instructor. We did some jumping and we did some calisthenics and we did some shuffling and sprinting. So again, you got to be careful with your population. If you're dealing with, you know, 60 year old women who've never really moved like an athlete, we're probably not going to be bounding. 30 inch box jumps. But for a hundred, go. You know, you can, you can have that whole group doing different body weight plyometrics in place, squat jumps per se, different variations of that same squat jump with rotations, single leg stuff, jumping out in front of you, jumping over something if you have small things.

And then from there, it's going to be different sprinting drills as well. If you have medicine balls, one of the things I do a lot in those big groups is, you know, maybe we'll rotate into groups of three, and one group is jumping, the other group is sprinting, and the other group is throwing something. So slam a ball, throw a ball, whatever it is, all of those things, as long as we're cuing everybody on doing it explosively and being fast, they're going to get that same adaptation or at least close enough. So similar to the warm-up, what about after the workout? What does that look like for you? What's a cool-down look like? You do mobility work, you do breathing

practices. So we have a very specific recovery breathing practice that my fighters do. When they finish the workout, we might do some mobility work depending on who the athlete is. Or they finish the workout, we might do some mobility work depending on who the athlete is. Or once we finish up, you know, I focus on shutting it down. What they'll do is they'll put their feet up on the wall. We'll put a yoga block or something underneath their hips so that their hips are elevated slightly above their heart. And we do about three to five minutes of diaphragmatic breathing. So I've already taught them how to do that. And then part of what we do is bringing the mindfulness into it.

You know, I have them close their eyes and I have them count their breathing. So they'll count their inhalations. They'll breathe in through their nose, deep, deep inhale down into the belly, try to expand their whole rib cage, hold for a second or two at the top. And then I'll have them hiss that air back out and they'll count and try to expand. I try to make a little competition, you know, how long you can get those exhales to be because we know that that long hissing deep exhalation is going to drive a parasympathetic response and get them into that rest and recovery state. But it also, if they're counting, then it brings that mindfulness in and doesn't allow their mind to just wander onto everything. So we'll do that

three to five minutes of that. And I tell them when they get up, they should feel like they're ready to go take a nap. And what that, what that means is instead of being in that sympathetic driven state, when they get in their car and cause a lot of my guys, you know, they'll go teach jujitsu till 10 o'clock at night and then they don't sleep

because they're so wound up, they can't sleep and they don't recover. So I teach them how to do this afterwards as well. I'm like, hey, by the time you leave the jiu-jitsu school, you should be feeling like you're ready to go take a nap. And that means we're already driven more into that parasympathetic state. And by the time you're sitting in your car, your body is already starting to recover instead of three hours later.

Or if you have that two practices in a day, I want to make sure you're recovering by the time you leave your first practice at 11 AM before you get to that practice at five or six, we want to maximize that recovery time. So, but we do the same thing with all of our general clients as well to get them because stress is stress, right? So when they come in, if they're stressed out from work, they're stressed out from anything, all of those things are going to affect their recovery. So we teach them these little breathing practices they can do at the end of their workout or the end of a stressful

day. And again, we want you walking out the door feeling here better than when you walked in. So what you're saying is, let me recap that. I finish the workout, I'm on the floor throwing up, sweating everywhere. As soon as I'm done throwing up, I walk out. Exactly. Is that right? Is that about right? No, you left chug a shake. Oh, chug my shake.

And take three pictures for your Instagram. Ah, missed. God damn it. I was close. Social posts are key. Social posts are key. Damn it. What were you thinking?

I don't know how I missed that. Yeah, and we'll usually have, I mean, sometimes they are finishing. They're out of breath. They're tired. So I tell them, don't go right away into the breathing because you're not going to be able to do it. Recover, relax. We'll talk for a couple minutes, and then let's do our recovery breathing and then send you on your way.

So you're feeling good. You know, and it allows us to put the cap on that workout too. You know, I think it's really important. Like I said, set the expectation at the beginning and then cap it off at the end. There should be a, you know, that start and end to every single session with me so that they, they know what it should feel like. They know what to expect. They know what we're getting into from the minute they walk in the door

because I've already set that expectation. And then at the end, we're recapping that it did feel the way it was supposed to. You should feel the way that I talked about. And now there's an end to the session and you can go on your way and your body's recovering. Again, you feel good. And that keeps people coming back.

Excellent. PJ. Very cool. Thank you for this. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. It's been awesome. Good to have you on. Where can people find you for this. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. It's been awesome. Good to have you on. Where can people find you?

You can find me online. I've got a website, coachpjnessler.com, which I don't really update that much because I don't know how. But I'm learning quickly. Websites are hard. Yeah. I'm learning how to do it or outsourcing that and bringing somebody in who knows how to do it.

Otherwise, you can find me on social media. I'm really active on Facebook under Coach PJ Nessler or on Instagram at CoachPJNess24. So I'm really active on both of those things on social media. I post a lot of videos and content and stuff. Tell them about that new video series you got on Facebook. I love it so much. Yeah, so I just started a new video series called Training Day with coach PJ on my Facebook page. And it's, uh, you know, it's, it's just, it's exercise that I'm currently using with my athletes, with my fighters, um, in whatever program, whatever phase we're in, I show you one of my athletes doing it,

how they do it. Cause obviously it's a lot better than me doing it. And then, uh, I break down how to do it, how many reps we're doing, why it's important and why you can use this in your training program. And then I'll finish it off with another clip of another one of my athletes doing it. So it kind of brings people into what I'm doing in real time. And then, you know, I try to give them the tools to take whatever it is and use that for themselves or for their athletes, for their clients. Yeah. And if you go to the, if you go to our blog, we're going to put in the show notes, links to everything that you have going on. Great.

Because you also just released a training program for jiu-jitsu guys? I did, yeah. I've released a training program called Submission Strength, and that's on fightcampconditioning.com. So that's for Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighters, really. But, you know, it can be for any combat athlete, but it's a little more geared towards Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And that's a 12-week training program, and it's got everything you need, three days a week of training, anything that we just talked about, it's in that training program.

So really, really good. Just launched that about a month ago, and I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah, very cool. That's one of my main focuses right now is Jiu-Jitsu, so I'm actually really interested to see that myself. Awesome. I'll get you a copy. Very cool. Yeah, and again, we're going to link all this stuff on the blog, so check it out.

You can check out, too. Tell them, actually, about the blog post that you wrote for their blog. Yeah, so I wrote that article, Six Speed and Power Strategies That You're Not Using, which we cover some of the stuff we just talked about, deceleration training. I think I talk about contrast training. Then there's a couple other things in there and that's on the Barbell Shrug website.

So I think if you just searched that title or just PJ Nestler on Barbell Shrugged, you can find that article, which got a couple of videos on there too. So it shows you how to do some of those deceleration drills that we just talked about. Excellent. Very cool. Thanks.

Thanks PJ. All right, thanks for having me. Cool.