Today’s show is with sports performance coach, Jeremiah Flood.  Jeremiah is the owner of Flood Sports, a sports training company in Southern California whose mission is to facilitate the development of mindful and adaptable athletes.  Jeremiah is a former NCAA D1 defensive back at FIU where he earned his B.S. and M.S. in Exercise Science.

After becoming a CSCS and working with Women's Volleyball and Soccer at his Alma Mater, He found the sport of Rugby, spent some time in USA rugby academy and garnered a professional contract.  Jeremiah looks to enhance the soft skills, such as decision-making and confidence in training the speed of both the mind and body in training.

Strength is a relatively easy quality to develop in athletes, while speed on the other hand, is a more complex, but in many ways, more rewarding venture.  In the realm of athletics, “speed” is multi-factorial, and just because an athlete is fast over 20,60, or 200 meters, does not mean that they will be equally as fast in the speed of a game.  Game-speed involves complex decision making processes, mixed in with emotional management and confidence under a variety of stressful conditions.  To be skilled in facilitating means to improve game speed requires a holistic and dedicated approach.

On the show today, Jeremiah takes us through his unique approach to building the speed of the mind and body.  On the physical level, we talk about his approach to testing and training linear outputs, such as sprinting and jumping.  On the mental level we get into the facilitating of the development of self-awareness, confidence and specific reactivity in athletes as it pertains to sport, and how speed and power can be blended with mental elements.  Finally, Jeremiah gives us some great “nuts and bolts” talk on how a daily training session unfolds under his process.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs.  For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly

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Timestamps and Main Points

5:55 – How Jeremiah pivoted his training as a result of the covid-19 pandemic

7:30 – Training athletes when there’s no official tournaments or competition

10:08 – How to play “Gatorball” & why it’s a great game for young athletes to play

15:05 – Why blend cognitive development with physical development? & Jeremiah’s experience evolving as a college athlete

17:52 – How Jeremiah gives feedback to athletes on self-talk, self-reflection, and having a routine

22:32 – Jeremiah’s thoughts on working with an athlete who doesn’t seem motivated to formally “train” or do particular exercises or drills

27:17 – How often is pure speed the limiting factor for athletes to reach their goals?

33:06 – Basic “game speed” principles and practices

37:25 – The duties of a strength coach for high school and middle school athletes

40:48 – Jeremiah’s approach to testing athletes’ performance

49:44 – Toughness & the significance of doing things you don’t want to do

57:05 – Neural-perplexity: Challenging an athlete’s cognitive load and speeding up the brain’s reactivity

1:02:42 – What does an average training session look like for Jeremiah and his athletes

“If I could go back in time, I would loved to have had a physical preparation coach who not only could’ve helped me in my physical abilities, as I loved, but also to tie that in with the mental and emotional, perceptive and reactive, all those elements that, holistically speaking, can help us maximize our outputs in the games we play.”

“When I was transitioning from college football to rugby, it’s obviously a huge difference in skillsets, perception, action as far as catching, keeping your eyes ahead of you and passing… it really forced me to build that ability to scan the field. I didn’t have that when I first tried to play rugby and I thought I could just use my speed and physicality,