Today’s episode brings back Rick Franzblau, assistant AD for Olympic Sports Performance at Clemson University.  In his two decades in athletic performance, Rick has worked with a wide variety of sports, as well as gained an incredible amount of knowledge in both the technology, and biomechanics ends of the coaching spectrum.  Rick, as with many other biomechanics topic guests on this podcast, has been a mentee of Bill Hartman, and has appeared previously on episode 94, talking about force/velocity metrics in sprinting and lifting.

There is a lot of time spent, talking about an “optimal technique” for various sport skills (such as sprinting).  We also tend to look for “optimal lifts” or exercises for athletes, as well as optimal drills athletes are supposed to perform with “perfect form” to attain an ideal technique.

What the mentality described in the above paragraph doesn’t consider is that athletes come in different shapes and structures, which cause what is optimal to differ.  Wide ISA athletes, for example, are fantastic at short bursts of compression, have lower centers of mass, and can manage frontside sprint mechanics relatively easily.  On the other hand, narrow ISA individuals use longer ranges of motion to distribute force, have a higher center of mass, rotate more easily, and can use backside running mechanics better than wide-ISA’s.  Additionally, there is a spectrum of these athletic structures, and not simply 2 solid types.

On today’s show, Rick goes into detail on the impact and role of compression in human movement and performance training, the strengths and weaknesses of the narrow vs. wide ISA archetypes, what differences show up in locomotion and sprint training, as well as how he approaches strength training for the spectrum of wide to narrow individuals.  Today’s show reminds us (thankfully) that there is no magic-bullet for all athletes, and helps us with the over-arching principles that can guide training for different populations to reach their highest potential.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

4:00 – How the direction of Rick’s performance testing and KPI’s has changed over the last few years

8:00 – How structure and thorax build will play a strong role in what Rick is seeing from them on rate of development on the force plate

23:00 – What to give to a compressed narrow individual to help them in a vertical jump

25:00 – Narrow vs. Wide ISA acceleration mechanics

34:00 – Thoughts on how to help a narrow ISA improve their ability to get lower and achieve better compression in sprint acceleration, and why Rick has gotten away from heavy sled sprints for narrow ISA athletes on the 1080

44:00 – How a coach’s own personal body structure can create a bias for how they end up training athletes they work with

47:00 – Wide ISA athletes, and why they may have an easier time accessing front-side mechanics in running

56:00 – Narrow ISA athletes and backside sprint mechanics, as well as attaining appropriate range and sprint bandwidths for each athlete

58:00 – How force plate data and structural bandwidths determine how to train team sport athletes for the sake of injury prevention and sport specific KPI’s

1:10:00 – How Rick alters weightroom training for narrow vs. wide ISA athletes

1:17:00 – Rick’s take on oscillatory reps in the weightroom, and quick-impulse lifts, especially for narrow infra-sternal angle athletes

“(Regarding infrasternal angle archetypes) It’s not to claim buckets that people fall into; it’s a spec...