Today’s episode features performance coaches James DiBiasio and Collin (CT) Taylor.  James and CT work at T3 performance in Avon, Ohio, and have a progressive approach to athletic performance training, encapsulating strength, movement, athleticism in a holistic manner that fits with the progression of athletic skill, and leveling up one’s abilities as a human being.  James and CT were both college athletes in baseball and football respectively, and CT played arena football after his NCAA years.  In addition to their coaching, James and CT have been running the “Cutoffs and Coffee” podcast since 2020, having interviewed nearly 50 different guests.

It’s been enjoyable to see more elements of chaos, risk, perception/reaction, and overall athleticism, emerge in the sports performance process in recent years.  Humans are the species on this planet with the greatest overall dexterity of skills, and yet, this dexterity is rarely leveraged in the average “training program” to a shade of its potential.  “Training” is something that is traditionally heavy on data, but low on chaos, and yet, sport, as well as the array of FLOW inducing human movement practices, are quite the opposite.  Yes, we still want to perform movements that improve the strength of muscles and tissues, while increasing capacity, but at the same time, we also want to give athletes challenges that allow them to expand their athleticism. 

On the show today, James and CT get into how they have incorporated a variety of athletic skills, flips, and calisthenic movements into their training, how much their athletes enjoy it, and how it links to dynamics on the field of play.  They chat about how to leverage principles of intuition and chaos in the training day, and even week, speed training constraints, and finally, James and CT finish with an insightful view on the role of “difficult” training routines, and higher volume capacity-oriented training sets.  This was a fun podcast with a lot of take-aways, and highlights the ways that the field of athletic performance training is expanding and evolving.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

3:58 – Who wins the “bang energy” drink quantity competition between James, CT and Will Ratelle

6:49 – How James and CT use calisthenics, flips and tricks to level up their physical abilities

13:02 – How training movement skills and a variety of abilities has inspired the linking of these various flips, tricks and skills with traditional athletic performance

26:15 – How risk becoming involved in a skill changes the dynamic nature of that movement

36:00 – How James and CT look at training in its ability to prepare an athlete for working with other coaches, or situations where the work may be unpredictable

38:36 – How James and CT’s evolved training programs are perceived by parents and other coaches, and how they have gained trust over the years

43:05 – Moving through an “intuitive warmup” into a more programmed primary strength training session, and how a powerful warmup with a lot of “human” elements can make the strength training portion much better

52:31 – Changing the environment and the drill to get an outcome vs. trying to coach and cue excessively

1:04:07 – How to put difficult/capacity training exercises in context, and how to utilize higher volume training to athlete’s advantage

“We’ll play around on the bars when we are in a training session with athletes, we’ll goof around and do different warmup styles, front flips and rolls, exciting and non-normal movements that can pique curiosity, and maybe after the training session,