Today’s episode welcomes back coaches Cal Dietz, Dan Fichter and Chris Korfist in a truly epic multi-guest podcast.  The amount of coaching and learning experienced between Cal, Dan and Chris is staggering, and they have been influencing the training practices of other coaches since the early 2000’s.

Speed training is always a fun topic, with a lot of resonance to many coaches, because it is the intersection of strength and function.  Training speed requires an understanding of both force and biomechanics.  It requires knowing ideas on both cueing, and athlete psychology.  Since acquiring better maximal velocity is hard, it forces us to level up on multiple levels of our coaching, and that process of improvement can filter out into other aspects of performance and injury prevention.

On the show today, fresh off of their recent speed training clinic collaboration, Cal, Dan, Chris and I talk about a variety of topics on speed and athletic performance, including “muscular vs. elastic” athletes, the importance of strong feet (and toes), reflexive plyometric and speed training, as well as the best weight room exercises and alignments that have a higher transfer point to actual sport running.  This was a really enjoyable podcast to put together.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course.

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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.

Timestamps and Main Points:

2:50 – Who wins the quality sleep award between Cal, Dan and Chris

5:45 – Looking back on elastic vs. muscular athletes in light of the DB Hammer era, relative to now where we are talking more about wide and narrow ISA athletes

15:42 – Thoughts on athletes who do better to train with weights above 80% of their lifting max, and then athletes who do better with less, and how to train these athletes year-round

19:12 – Dan’s take on altitude drops, and how much athletes can progress into drops, or be more responsive to it than others

22:25 – The reflexive nature of things like dropping, falling and “plyo-soidal” oriented over-speed training

33:00 – Some different strategies Chris sees in sprinting on the 1080 with elastic vs. muscular athletes in mind

40:21 – Foot and toe strength, athlete function, and the role of the nervous system

50:05 – Thoughts on foot positions in light of weight-room work, and its link to sport speed

54:38 – How stronger athletes can manage a wider step width in a sprint start, vs. weaker athletes

1:03:58 – How athletes work off of coach’s mirroring of a movement

1:07:55 – Cal, Dan and Chris’s favorite single leg training movements for speed and athletic movement, particularly the “Yuri” hip flexor training movement

1:18:10 – Moving past “barbell hip thrusts” in training into standing or 45 degree hyper type versions

“I think the elastic component boils down to altitude drops” Fichter

“Everyone is going to deal with that collision in a different way, sometimes it is going to have to do with tendon length, or isometric strength” Korfist

“Isometrics correlated a lot closer to increasing power, after an isometric block with my throwers, than it did my sprinters” Dietz

“The throwers produced a lot more force above 60%, the runners produced a lot more force below 60%”

“I can give you examples where something works for my athletes, and then 16 weeks later, it might make them worse, and that’s the art of coaching”

“Is the hormonal/global response (from lifting heavy weights) going to outweigh the negatives?” Korfist

“We’ve trained a lot of people without jumping at all, just landings” Fichter

“I tested a kid with some reflexes that were off, and as soon as we implemented some overspeed work with the 1080,