Today’s show is with performance director Daniel Bove.  After spending several seasons with the Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns, Daniel is now the Director of Performance and Sports Science for the New Orleans Pelicans, and is also the author of the book, “The Quadrant System, Navigating Stress in Team Sport”.

As Michael Zweifel has said previously on the podcast, every coach should have the opportunity to work with youth athletes, and pro sports, at some point in their career.  I’ve done a lot of shows talking about youth sport concepts, as well as principles of training through the lens of a child development, but I haven’t done as many shows detailing some of the nuances of working with a pro population specifically.

When it comes to that other end of the spectrum, with professional athletes, the art of strength & conditioning is largely the art of “load management” and stress consolidation, especially over the course of long competitive seasons.  This art of training athletes at the highest level is certainly interesting if you are in the small percentage of coaches who work in this group, but the concepts and ideas behind it can be helpful to understand, regardless of what population you end up working with.

Daniel has come up with a unique system of load consolidation, working with an NBA population that makes a lot of sense.  Not only is “The Quadrant System” a wise method for pro athletes, but understanding the Quadrant System is also helpful from the perspective of understanding “high-low” style training in general (making high days truly “high” and low days, truly “low”), as well as the art of dealing with monotony over the course of long training periods.  On the show today, Daniel gets into his four quadrants of training (recovery, repetition, speed and of course, strength), and how he utilizes these methods of loading through different points in an in-season training schedule, as well as off-season.

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Timestamps and Main Points

4:23 – How Daniel categorizes load for athletes that he works with

14:48 – How the quadrants might alter as athletes get further down away from the pro-level

15:58 – How high-low training and undulation of the type of stimulus players get offers substantial benefits for players, particularly those in the course of long playing seasons

20:22 – Daniel’s take on the “speed day” in the quadrant system, and how that balances with the explosive work and speed players are doing in their practice

25:48 – How the quadrant system may change when the strength coach doesn’t have a “seat at the table” of the sport coaches and practice volumes

32:05 – Validating heavy lifting in season, on the terms of what Daniel is seeing from data and force plates, and what types of volumes athletes are doing for heavy strength work in season

37:05 – How to approach heavy lifting after game-day if players had a poor game

40:24 – Daniel’s experience with buy-in and the spectrum of players responses in regards to heavy lifting on game-days

43:01 – Nuances of the heavy strength day and how Daniel chooses to load athletes on that day

44:45 – How Daniel approaches tendon health and the repetition day/quadrant 2

47:58 – How the quadrant system changes when athletes are in the off-season or in developmental cases in-season

50:14 – Daniel’s view on a daily micro-dosing program, versus a high-low, quadrant system oriented program, and common movements that may actually be micro-dosed in the pro/NBA setting

55:04 – How Daniel uses work that creates more movement potential within the hips, as a preparation for players to use that range of motion effectively on t...