Training B Programming

The speaker discusses the process of building a program and the challenges of implementing new exercises or techniques. They emphasize the importance of confidence, execution, and having contingencies for different situations. They also discuss the need for progression and regression in programming, as well as the importance of considering pain and finding alternative exercises when necessary. The speaker highlights the need for a strong understanding of the principles behind exercises and the ability to adapt and adjust as needed. So how do we build our program now? Right, so we know that we are going to select exercises off of this higher level thought process of what do we want to accomplish and then we layer in things like sets, reps, intensity, tempo, rest, etc. Now we're looking at it from really like this is the idea, it's the principles, the practicals, how? Right, and here's the thing that I really look at with strength conditioning and I think it's important because we can get too wrapped up in the subjective. I think football coaches do that and I think it annoys the crap out of us. I really do. Right, you know this too. You know that cringe feeling when a football coach comes in and you got this whole elaborate thing planned out. Let's say it's you're gonna do cars, pails, and rails, some PRI type stuff. You're gonna do some some nuance, right? You're gonna do some things that are outside of the constraints of strength conditioning, right? And then you get the fear of like is this stuff too technical, too slow, too monotonous for a 18 to 22 year old kid who's not really injured or maybe even arguably needs it, right? Like there's an element of that, right? There's an element of some stuff that's better in certain settings like one-on-one rehabilitation. Maybe it fits better there and you just kind of let sleeping dogs lie and you let that be. But you know that feeling of like I took a proverbial risk. I went to a PRI seminar. I learned about left AIC. I learned about this certain posture that facilitates taking that pelvis out of a certain position to create the appropriate length tension relationships off this natural respiration pattern of asymmetry between left heart, right liver, and different diaphragm size, different connected tissue of diaphragm, different contractile rates, different inhale-exhale type of function. And you're like yeah man we're gonna work on this adductor pullback and we're gonna get the guys breathing into a balloon and we're gonna do this stuff. And the coach comes down and he just stops and he goes what in the hell is going on here? And then that has like this burning sensation of you have no idea the level of effort and intensity in which I had to go and understand this. And I'm taking a shot here and I'm taking some sort of proverbial risk with this team because I think it's worth it. I'm aware that this may come off as slow or mundane. This isn't arrogance. This isn't ego that I feel like I can do whatever the hell I want and get away with it. This is a conscious direct decision to go out there and do what's best for this team at the expense of whatever personal feeling someone may have towards me, i.e. my boss. Maybe it's not always that way. Maybe the coach is always like damn this guy's pushing thresholds and boundaries. Rare, but it can happen. But let's say that is the case. Let's say that you come to a place that didn't do Olympic lifts or didn't back squat. Let's say you go to a place that doesn't deadlift from the ground or doesn't do whatever it is. They just don't. They have some sort of arbitrary decision of we don't do that exercise. And it's happened to me everywhere I've ever worked. We don't do that exercise or we don't do this or we don't do that. You're gonna pigeonhole me to certain exercises. Just tell me what exercise I can't do without any context. I just I don't understand that but it happens and quite frankly how do you react to it? And then when you decide that that is illogical, right? That hey I don't generally believe in this arbitrary like one-size-fits-all don't do this exercise like anything overhead or anything from the ground or or anything behind your neck. Again I just don't believe in that and that ethos or philosophy. I just think it's stupid. But when you decide to go against the grain on that or decide to do something with the intent to make a situation better but it's going to come off in a certain way because change and and alterations or breaking the status quo or norm. So I was going to proceed with questions and and angst and potentially frustration or potentially confusion. I'll tell you what shuts everyone up is execution and having contingencies for every situation. You want to make sure that whatever it is that you do to progress your program of all of your program is going to be received in a positive manner. One, be confident. Two, be really enthusiastic. But three, be so good that nobody can question you. That is what the difference is. You can do anything you literally think you can you should do. You go to a conference, you're working with a football team or a hockey team or a team that's like pretty you know alpha and hierarchal and Lord of the Flies if you let it. And you go, okay we're going to do soft tissue or we're going to do cars, pails and rails, PRI, DNS. We're going to do multi-planar movement. We're going to get away from squat bench clean mentality that people are puffing their chest and the biggest guys in the room are the best in the room. They determine what happens when it happens and why it happens. And you're like this is in prison. This is in prison rules. I'm not coming over here knocking out the biggest guy. I'm just doing what I feel is necessary and what's in the best interest of this team to help us win a lot of games. But I'll tell you what man, the bigger the guy and the more you're confident and assertive and the more you're capable of delivering, the more that person will buy in. Everyone. Psychopath head coach, a really really like dominant personality on staff or in the team, they will comply and assimilate based off of your confidence and your ability. And I get it. I get it man. It's like this notion of knowledge on ice is inferior to passion on fire and it comes off as like you know just it's better to be good at things that you already know and understand and never take a proverbial risk. It leads into this perpetuating or a cycle of constantly doing the same damn thing over and over and over again. On the other end though, honestly having the courage to go out there and learn something new but not being able to apply it, it's a waste of damn time. It is such a fool's errand to think that you can go out there and learn these things without no conscious thought of having to be able to apply it and resent the fact that you weren't allowed to do the program that you were wanting to do. I think we need to say it that just because you know something doesn't mean you're good at it. Like I went to a concert and I saw someone play a violin. I'm not good at it. I can't teach a class. I mean that might be a harsh or exaggerated example but doesn't mean it's not mildly untrue. Man, like you go to a strong first seminar which is a good thing right? Like a lot of people do it and they don't, they may come off as like that's a stupid test compared to like a USAW where you just go and you practice and you don't have to be good at it. You just get your cert versus a strong first, an RKC where you gotta do 200 snatches in a certain amount of time. I mean you ain't getting that unless you're going out there and doing the work beforehand. Like you're not gonna be able to do it. Your hands will be ripped up after the first 20 reps. Your back will be blown out. You're gonna be screwed. You got to put the work in. So if you're gonna do a kettlebell work in your programming and you have this gate of I gotta do 200 snatches. God, okay. Like I better start getting my reps. I better start putting in the work. I better be able to demo this and implement this and understand this at a high level. And it gets lost a lot. Like I don't think there's any pressure or onus to learn it right? Like if I go out there and learn FRC and I can't do a car without cramping or throwing up in my mouth, how is that gonna come off to my team? How's it gonna come off to my boss? You mean to tell me you're gonna do something you wouldn't do yourself or you couldn't do yourself or you wouldn't at least give it best effort to apply yourself to learn it, to understand it, to be able to do it? You can't demo it? Man, I didn't see a speed ladder before 2006. I was 25 years old. I never saw this thing in my entire life and it's a huge part of what we do at every place I ever worked with afterwards. And I had a decision to make. Is it my fault that I wasn't exposed to this stuff and I come from a really shitty high school that doesn't have any really good strength and conditioning? It doesn't really believe in that aspect. I chose this profession. This seems to be an important aspect of it between velocity, sports performance, Harvard, Georgia Tech, Ole Miss, all seem to do it. Get up and get off your ass and go to work. And yeah, granted, learning a agility ladder and being really good at it and to be honest, I can do that stuff in my sleep to this day. I'm 42 years old and this is 20 years later. Like I can do that at such a high level with such ease based off of so much repetition. But it wasn't innate. It wasn't like a natural born ability and saying, do the kettlebell thing. The way I was taught cleans was a split clean in high schools and it was a reverse lunge really. Having to reverse engineer that, when it gets really heavy, I shoot my left foot back, which is hysterical. It's like, oh there it is. But working through it, I feel like I'm a pretty competent weightlifter and I feel like I'm very comfortable teaching that and organizing that in a group. I feel like I have a really good bandwidth. I feel like I have a good association with certain progressions that I don't think are good. I don't implement it. You go into this whole philosophy structure of top down, bottom up. It doesn't matter. What does matter is, can you implement it? Can you do it? And there's some good models to think about. Like look at the models of motor learning and DNS. You can look at DNS, which is a huge influence on functional movement systems and that leads into a regression of the DNS, right? So the theory is that when we come out of the womb or we're in the womb, we're floating and that creates this like caudal position that we have to come out and then we all technically go down and to the right as we're exiting the womb, which is a different impact because the liver is on one side and the heart's on another. But what does that do from the first motor patterns and reflexive actions we have when we're now in a gravity-based environment? And you can say, man, that is so abstract. It's so out of like, I'm not. But then you start to do things like ace skips and they start to do same arm, same leg. And you're wondering, what? You're a division one football player. How are you, how, why are you doing that? And you can start to make this concentric circle off of maybe they didn't crawl enough. Maybe they didn't, they didn't do the progression of going from this supine to sideline, to side roll, to prone, to rock, to sideline, to half kneeling, to tall kneeling, to standing, etc, etc, etc. Maybe they didn't go through the appropriate thing because maybe their parents put them in a jumper. Maybe they just started to encourage them to walk way too early or maybe they had a big brother or big sister that was running around and realized the only way to keep up is to stand up. Maybe all these things came into fruition and you look at systemically down the road of like, damn, man, when we do ace skips, they're doing the same arm, same leg. They can't time a hop-hop-bound pattern. There's another thing we talked about, benomenclature. So what do I need to do to get them to be able to do that? Is it just call them an idiot, just devalue them, call them a bad athlete, joke about why they're here, tell them not talk to athletes when we're going to shake after the workout, those kind of things? Or is it, oh man, you know what actually might not be a bad thing is getting in their original strength and Tim Anderson and looking at DNS patterning and looking at different flows or different resting postures from Phillip Beach and going, okay, like, if I wanted to re-engineer this cross-body action and getting the spiral back line from anatomy trains operating functionally and creating optimal length tension relationships and force velocity curves in dynamic subconscious movement, what do I do? Oh wow, look at that four-by-four from Greg Rose and Greg Cook and Lee Burton and go, okay, I'm going to start to get them into a position they can be successful with or I'm going to start to load them in a way that they can be successful with. Essentially, I'm just putting bumpers in the bowling alley so they can hit the pins and then I'll take the bumpers away and then I'll tell them, just slow it down and we're going to work on some other mechanics. We took the bumpers away and we found we didn't fix the problem. Let's get another thing. Let's start to work through this other aspect. But the premise of how and going, I got a contingency, right? So I want to do heels elevated front squat with weight release hooks with a 8-0-x-0 tempo. So unpack that, right? So now, you know, I'm going to my coach and I'm like, alright, here's our progression in the offseason. We're going to work a massive eccentric component for our skill guys. We're going to utilize this protocol of six sets of three with an 8-0-x-0 tempo with weight release hooks, so 120% of their actual front squat max, 20% distributed between each hook. So we'll have 40% on the hooks and 80% of the bar and we're going to do that for three weeks. While we're doing that, we're going to work in some higher threshold plyometrics like depth jumps and bounce. We're going to work in some wicket runs and some time or some gated flying 20s and 40s. We just, and then he's just like, I'm sorry, why do you think you're rewriting the wheel? Why can't we just do three sets of three hang clean, five sets of five squat, run some 110s and call it? Who are you? Like there's a, there is that thought and what the reality is, is you just got to back it up. I went through Tim Cairns course on exercise methods and and I was like, oh wow, okay, like I'm hooked, I get it. That dude knows exactly what he's talking about. But if you listen to that course, you go through all the mistakes, all the areas you need to consider, all the exercises that probably work best based off logistics, right? And I talk about this too with like the bands versus chains. It's not, yes, I do like bands, but the truth is when I look at bands versus chains in a group setting, man, you put a lot of faith in a band made overseas that wasn't really that stable. It snaps quite a bit from doing slow exercises like a hamstring stretch all the time. You're gonna put that thing to maximal tension at high speeds with, with extensive weight on a barbell with people that are doing this part-time. They're not professional weightlifters or powerlifters. They might be exceptional athletes, but truth is, man, that's a lot of assumptions and a lot of risk for something that we can probably get a very comparable outcome from chains with a lot less risk and a lot less potential for them to screw it up. Man, walk out with anywhere close to 80% and above with tension on a band above 100 pounds, man, it looks ridiculous. It looks like they're wearing triple ply suit and they're trying to figure out how to walk for the first time. It's like watching a baby deer take its first steps and do that and it just, and take that sample from one to a hundred and then add in the risk of a band made overseas that snaps doing hamstring stretches. I'm good. I'm good. But the truth is, is why I choose not to do that and why I choose to do chains because I still genuinely believe in accommodating resistance and accentuating this strength curve. I just don't think that something like a band is as good as it possibly can be. And I like a weight-release hook. It's a very small sample. They do that or like a full-speed device, a very small sample can do that. But the point being is, let's say that you do weight-release hooks. Let's say that you do accommodating resistance or let's say you do something like a inertial-based thing like flywheel and you get it going. You're like, yeah, this could be great and running in a group and then you get a bunch of people who can't do it or look like crap. What's your plan B? What's your contingency? And when you have that contingency, you have confidence. Did you progress them to that point or you just threw it in there, right? Like in all theory, we should be really good in this moment because we progressed it. Their patterns are solid. They have a really good squat pattern, really good hinge pattern. So now it's just about adding more detail to it and more nuance to stress it in unique and novel ways to get the most from it, from a tempo or a tool perspective or a rate perspective or a exercise order perspective. There's a lot of variables that we can attach to this to get more from that pattern off the foundation of those the pattern they're good in the first place. Progression is a huge part of this. Regression is a huge part of this. The other part which is really important here is the simple question, does it hurt? If it hurts, don't do it, but do you have another contingency, right? So if they can't do it, you're thinking regression all day, right? What do I need to do to be successful from a pattern, a load, a orientation, or from a simplicity thing, right? Do I just need to lower the weight and say, do this right? Do I need to take these variables of the environment influencing this person to do more weight or at a rate they can't sustain? Okay, let me adjust the environment. But then it goes into, it really hurts when I do that. Okay, what's the pattern, right? It's a snatch and it hurts their shoulder, it hurts their wrist, and I'm working a high rate of force development hinge, a large degree range of motion hinge where they're working very, very, very large degree of hip flexion all the way through to hip extension, maybe even hip hyperextension. And then you go, okay, like I got an idea what I'm doing. Well, does it hurt their wrist, does it hurt their shoulder as they get the barbell overhead? Can I do anything like that below? Yeah, I can do a kettlebell swing. Maybe I do a med ball snatch toss where they just have concentric and they have no eccentric. Maybe I do something just entirely different, right? I get them on a flywheel, I say pull this thing as hard as you possibly can to your belly button. I don't know. I don't care. But what I'm saying is, here's what I want to accomplish with the exercise, right? I want to reach this outcome that we talked about in principles. And I'm hitting this threshold of, okay, I'm really trying to push the envelope. And I'm enthusiastic, I'm positive, I'm confident with it, man. I know this stuff. And then you get into it and you're executing it. And like everything, man, Murphy's Law, what can happen will happen. And if you don't have a good backup plan, a good contingency, just a confident, assertive directive of saying, nope, that's not working. Here's what we're going to do instead. And finding out why. And objectively evaluating. Not just bailing when it's a little bit difficult, right? They're not doing lateral a-skips and going, this looks like shit. Stop. Let's just do low shuffle. Let's just do shuffle. It's saying that there's something wrong here. Should I have progressed a lateral a-march or should I did a lateral crawl? Should I did some sort of frontal plane movement to associate arm and lower action, like a bird dog? Who knows? But the other end, it goes into, okay, well, where do I go from here? Do I come back at this the next week and hope that we chip away at this challenging pattern that we're trying to do in a group setting that people are struggling to do it? Do I have the bandwidth to say, that wasn't a good plan? Or do I have the courage to say, it's a good plan, I just need to execute better. And then from there, I'm like, does it hurt? Is it painful? Yeah, don't do it. What was the outcome of lateral a-skip? It's hurting my foot because I'm getting locked in the eversion and I'm opening up or having this medial ankle pain. Okay, well, let's just do a low lateral shuffle that limits that eversion. My point of all this is, is having a great understanding of not just why you're doing it from an OKR perspective, but also too from a execution, right? And that's the secret sauce here, guys. That's what differentiates the good versus the bad. That's what makes a strength coach that is, one, creative enough and intuitive enough to go, okay, like I need to change, but I can change and I will change. And then has enough ingenuity and enough ability and skill to actually change. That's what the difference is. That's what makes a great strength coach and a great programmer. It's the ability to write it, but also the ability to do it. That's what you're looking for here. Hopefully, that's what you're looking at programming and going, okay, like I know a good one when I see it. Because I'm looking at that program being executed really well and I'm also looking at the program being like, this is a solid program. That is a secret sauce. All right, I'm gonna pause there. Let's get that case study next week because I think that's a really cool one to dive into, especially for programming. It's obviously a passion of mine. So dive into that and then keep trucking through all these modules, guys.