Today’s episode features Tony Holler.  Tony is the track coach at Plainfield North High School with 39 years of coaching experience in football, basketball, and track.  He is the originator of the “Feed the Cats” training system that has not only found immense popularity in the track and field world, but the team sport coaching world as well.  Tony is the co-director of the Track Football Consortium along with Chris Korfist, and has been a two-time prior guest on the podcast.  Tony’s ideas of a speed-based culture, and rank-record-publish are making large waves in the coaching world.

It's been said that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.  In the coaching world, the desire to be “well-prepared” for one’s sport can easily lead to an excessive amount of conditioning and overall training volume done too early in the season, creating ground for injuries to happen.  It’s extremely easy to just “do more”.  It takes wisdom and management of one’s coaching validation to start the journey of doing less.

On today’s show, Tony goes in detail on his evolution in his “Feed the Cats” coaching system, from the pre-2008 period where he had no electronic timing, to some of the worst workouts he had his athletes do before that critical year-2000 split where he removed things like tempo sprinting (the t-word) from his programming, and centered his program around being the best part of an athlete’s day.  We’ll get into how Feed the Cats is working into team sport training and “conditioning”, and then go in detail on Tony’s speed-training culture built on love, joy, and recognition.  Tony will speak on the “art of surrender” in goal setting, his X-factor workouts, and much more in this conversation of almost 2 hours.  When you are speaking to someone like Tony, the two hours flies by, and you have a spring in your coaching step afterwards.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

3:49 – The “worst” workout that Tony administered to his sprinters before the year 2000 when “Feed the Cats” started, and Tony’s thoughts on those kids who “survived” that type of training

11:38 – Thoughts on the “Feed the Cats” system as a “base” system for a college sprint program that will likely have more volume and intensive training means

18:49 – Psychological elements of Tony’s program, and the counter-intuitive elements of “not training” for things like back-to-back races at the state championship meet

24:49 – What Tony did for “feed the cats” iterations before his first timing system in 2008, and what the original “feed the cats” workouts were from 2000-2007

31:41 – The idea of being more “sensitized for speed endurance” through an off-season based on feed the cats

35:50 – Joy and love as a foundational force of speed training in the “feed the cats” system

39:36 – Some other elements of Tony’s early “feed the cats” days compared to now, and what he has cut out of the program

48:27 – How to use wrist bands with 20-24mph engravings to reinforce team culture and motivation

57:00 – Tony’s experience of moving FTC into a team sport space, and stories from team sport coaches

1:06:50 – Thoughts on using sport itself as conditioning and essentialism in sport training and conditioning

1:23:05 – Transcending older programs, thought processes in programming, and surrendering to the results

1:31:36 – The present-mindedness of training, and what it means to train like a child

1:36:11 – If Tony’s arm was twisted, would he put in one of the following: A 20’ meeting prior to practice, 6-8x200m tempo, or weightlifting, in his FTC practice

1:40:15 – Some nuts and bolts to Tony’s X-facto...