Today’s show is with coach and educator, Dan Cleather.  Dan is a reader in strength and conditioning and the programme director of the MSc in strength and conditioning at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK.  Dan began coaching at Cal State Long Beach, and then worked at the English Institute of Sport.  He has coached national and international medalists across a wide range of sports, and in particular has worked with World and Olympic champions.

Dan is the author of several books on the topics of science and sports performance, including “Force”: The Biomechanics of Training, and “The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom”.  Dan has published over 40 peer-reviewed and scientific articles, and is a founder member of the UK Strength and Conditioning Association.

When it comes to performance training, coaches often cite a disconnect between what they are coaching, and what actually happens when an athlete competes.  We can gain a greater understanding of this issue by simply looking at how movement actually happens in sport, and how athletes actually manage forces.  Many control points in coaching tend to revolve around slow, or easily observable aspects of movement (usually the end-points), when the complex reality of movement renders coaching around these endpoints obsolete, if not counter-productive.

On the show today, Dan will share with us how he views common coaching practices revolving around scientific terminology, such as “force absorption”.  He’ll go into some fallacies around force-based principles involving landing dynamics in sport, deceleration training, and how coaches go about instructing Olympic weightlifting.  Dan will speak on where science, and “evidence-based” practices fit in with one’s coaching philosophy and intuition, and will share his thoughts on the link between gardening plants and coaching athletes.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

4:37 – Dan’s background as an athlete and what got him into strength and conditioning

7:58 – Dan’s take on learning skills as a coach, in order to be a better learning (and coach) of skills

15:11 – Dan’s thoughts on what applying science to training actually is

22:42 – How coaches tend to frame “force-absorption” in athletics, and what it actually is

32:47 – Thoughts on the body dealing with forces from a perspective of being a “machine” or from a self-organizing perspective

41:27 – Dan’s thoughts on any sort of deceleration training for sport, and how coaches tend to spend too much time on versions of movement that are too reductionist

48:20 – The link between seeds, plants, gardening and athletic performance

52:58 – Dan’s take on traditional Olympic lifting practices in light of force development

“The more skills you learn, the better you get at learning skills”

“Evidence based doesn’t mean that the science is prescriptive, we see 8 parts of a 30 piece jigsaw puzzle, which are the bits of evidence we are getting from the science, and we work out the rest of what that puzzle looks like based on our experience, our discussions with the coaches, etc.”

“The scientific evidence is an important part of our philosophy but it’s our philosophy that guides the decisions that we make”

“If you do something because your previous coach did it, that’s the evidence of what they did”

“Coaches find out what works, and 25 years later, the sport scientists come along and explain why… if you had to wait for the science before you were prepared to make a decision then you wouldn’t be able to do very much”

“Absorption implies that there is something you have got that is being sucked up by something, and can be released later”

“We call a softer landing with more flexion of the knees and hips “force absorption”,