Today’s episode features Kyle Dobbs.  Kyle is the owner and founder of Compound Performance which offers online training, facility consulting and a personal trainer mentorship.  He has an extensive biomechanics and human movement background (having trained 15,000+ sessions), and has been a two time previous guest on this podcast.

In the world of training and performance, it’s easy to get caught up in prescribing a lot of exercises that offer a relatively low training effect in the grand scheme of things.  Healthy and capable athletes are often assigned a substantial load of low-level “prehab” style and corrective exercises that they often do not need.  In doing so, both a level of boredom, fatigue and just simply wasting time, happens in the scope of a program.

For my own training journey, I’ve seen my own pendulum swing from a relatively minimal approach to the number of movements, to having a great deal of training exercises, back down to a smaller and more manageable core of training movements in a session.  As I’ve learned to tweak and adjust the big lifts, and even plyometric and sprint variations, I realize that I can often check off a lot of training boxes with these movements, without needing to regress things too far.

On the show today, Kyle will speak on where and when we tend to get overly complex, or overly regressive in our training and programming.  He’ll talk about what he prioritizes when it comes to assigning training for clients, as well as a “macro-to-micro” way of thinking in looking at the entirety of training.  Kyle will get into specifics on what this style of thinking and prioritization means for things like the big lifts, speed training, and core work, as well as touch how on biomechanical differences such as infra-sternal angle play a role in his programming.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

3:41 – How Kyle’s run training has been developing, since he has been getting back into his two years ago after being a high level college 400m runner

7:41 – Kyle’s thoughts on where we tend to get overly complex in the physical preparation/strength & conditioning industry

11:58 – How Kyle prioritizes exercises based on the task requirements of the athlete

16:19 – Thoughts on working macro-to-micro, versus micro-to-macro

28:50 – How Kyle will avoid trying to regress individuals to a low-level, rudimentary version of an exercise if possible, and his take on “pre-hab” work

36:50 – The usefulness of hill sprints as a “macro” exercise for glutes, lower legs, and hip extension quality

40:56 – The spectrum of perceived complexity as athletes move from a beginner to a more advanced level

48:40 – Kyle’s take on some gym movements that “check a lot of boxes” in athletic movement

56:01 – How much of Kyle’s programming ends up being different on account of being a wide vs. narrow infrasternal angle

“If we can’t match the stress that an athlete is going to be encountering in their actual sport, it isn’t going to have a huge return”

“I want to be able to pick the biggest return on investment from a training perspective; those are going to go into my primary buckets from a programming perspective”

“If I have somebody who really needs to zoom into the micro, and we really need to get into the biomechanics weeds and decrease the training stress, those are people that we refer out to another specialist… having a good network allows you to focus on the things that you are good at and that you really like to do.  I learned early in my career that, I don’t like to be the rehab guy”

“That’s my problem with the biomechanics led approach,