Today’s episode features Will Ratelle.  Will is a strength coach, at the University of North Dakota, working with football, basketball, volleyball and tennis athletes. He is also the owner of “W2 Performance”.  Prior to working in the performance field, he spent time as a professional football player, spending time with the Atlanta Falcons, Kansas City Chiefs, and Saskatchewan Roughriders (CFL).

In the supportive role of physical preparation/S&C, it is very easy to partition the process of weightlifting away from the actual needs and demand of explosive, chaotic sports.  It’s also easy to get carried away with excessive auxiliary work, or “atomizing” facets of power work/RFD that don’t end up transferring to actual explosive sport skills.  In this sense, it’s helpful to personally spend time in sport, in skill acquisition, and in strength development one’s self, to intuitively understand the balance, and synergy, between athletic components.

Will’s athletic background, love for sport and play, and raw “horsepower” is a unique combination.  He was a semi-pro athlete, can clean and jerk 198kg, dunks a basketball with ease, and also loves to play a variety of games and sports.  Will has an analytical process to his performance programming, and asks important questions that have use really dig into the why of what we are doing in the gym (and beyond).

On the show today, Will talks about his athletic, game-play and strength background, and how despite being more than physically capable, did not make the pro level of football.  Will then goes into ideas on what we should actually be looking to improve/intensity in the gym setting.  He chats on how to avoid training things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of everything an athlete is asked to do.  Will finishes with his thoughts on the specificity of potentiation, jump and sprint variability training, and then a great take on the “Olympic lifts vs. loaded jumps” debate.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

3:40 – How many “Bang” energy drinks Will believes the typical strength coach should consume daily

4:51 – Will’s background in athletics, sport, and athletic performance

9:53 – The importance of play in fitness and boosting overall athletic qualities

16:02 – Why Will, despite being athletically physically superior to many other football players, did not make it as a pro-football player and what he has learned from that

21:35 – Will thoughts on things he would choose to intensify in the gym, such as barbell velocity

27:17 – Thoughts on “generalized” power training methods

33:39 – Will’s take on not wasting time in the gym, and how to avoid redundancy in the course of training

47:58 – Will’s thoughts on heavy strongman work, squats and deadlifts and the optimal potentiation for sport skills

55:15 – How Will approaches jump and sprint variability in his warmups for training

1:03:46 – Will’s take on loaded jumps versus Olympic lifting, and the utility of Olympic lifting in sport preparation

“It’s really difficult to get people,who are my peers, on a Saturday afternoon, to go play racquetball, or go play pickleball, or something like that…. When you do get a group of people to go play a game like that, they always say, “we should do this more often””

“I think a lot of times (playing) is going to have a better training effect than going in the gym for an hour”

“I didn’t have the (tactical) ability that would have been required for me to play at that level… the general perception action abilities were right up there with anybody else, I just didn’t have the specific perception action abilities”