Today’s show is with sports performance coaches Nick DiMarco and Keir Wenham-Flatt.  Nick DiMarco is the director of sports performance at Elon University.  He is a leader in the NCAA University coaching system in the realms of high performance ideology.  As a former professional athlete (NY Jets and Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker in 2014), Nick is well versed in the intuitive aspects of what it takes to be a high achieving athlete.

Keir Wenham-Flatt is a strength and conditioning coach and educator.  He has a background in American football and experience within professional rugby for nearly a decade in five different countries: the U.K., Australia, China, Japan, and Argentina. Keir is the founder of the Strength Coach Network and Rugby Strength Coach, and has been a prominent figure in coaching education.  Both coaches have been prior guests on the podcast, speaking on topics ranging from perception-reaction and training transfer, to mental resiliency.

The art of preparing athletes in team sport goes far beyond strength development, and even linear speed.  Knowing which elements of physical preparation are the “lowest hanging fruit” for each athlete, and how to appropriately progress them through their careers is a trademark of an experienced and thoughtful coach.  Many athletes in college football will barely improve in speed versus their high school abilities, especially after their first year of college strength training.

On the show today, Nick and Keir will get into the finer points of off-season and pre-season training for American football, and how to place players in training priority groups based on need, such as strength, speed, or body mass-composition factors.  They also speak on how to utilize auto-regulation to make the process of maintaining (or improving) performance factors as quickly as humanly possible.  Finally, topics of specific conditioning means and methods to meet the demands of the game are discussed in depth, and particularly in how collision sports differ from contact sports in this regard.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs.  For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly

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Timestamps and Main Points

5:15 – Off-season and pre-season training emphasis in American football physical preparation

16:36 – Nick’s different programs and “buckets” for various needs of his NCAA football athletes

22:11 – How to auto-regulate strength, power and speed markers once an athlete already has the pre-requisite levels of maximal strength for their sport

38:58 – Thoughts on the demands of long-drives and the extreme ends of game speed-endurance and its impacts on how coaches should go about a conditioning program

48:24 – Keir and Nick talking about the “Robustness Bucket” in working with athlete populations

56:10 – How Keir and Nick steer training into reactive game-speed oriented tasks as the pre-season nears

“Why do they break in camp? It’s not from a lack of exposure to heavy weight-training” Wenham-Flatt

“Ask yourself, “What do you get most tired doing, what do you do most often, what is tied most to the outcome of the game?” that is the stuff that you need to be a master of, and robust to, in context of your position” Wenham-Flatt

“With regard to the developmental stuff, where-ever possible, the answer would be auto-regulation; if you are auto-regulating every set in a target ability, you are hitting the maximum productive value of that session” Wenham-Flatt

“There are anthropometric barriers to entry you must clear as you if you want to thrive in your position, and they go up, as the levels go up” Wenham-Flatt

“1RM barbell strength is going to transfer to explosive movement to a point, and it’s lower than people think” Wenham-Flatt

“I think one of the reasons most athletes make a lot of progress early on,