In order to get the most out of a sports preparation program, you need to be sure you are doing things like employing the Olympic lifts and avoiding heavy conditioning workouts, right?
Or you could do sets of 20 squats, and a hearty dose of conditioning, like Jay DeMayo does, and end up with this:
I first met Jay DeMayo at the Central Virginia Sports Performance Seminar in 2014. I loved it and came back the next year. Jay is one of the best coaches I know, and he is also a great guy.
Jay is a guy who backs up his work with tracking and data. If he tells you that he is succeeding by doing less in a given year than he has in the past, he can also tell you why. Many people know Jay as the guy who puts together the Central Virginia Sports Performance Seminar, but there are a lot of us who don’t know him as a coach, and his own training methodology. He has learned from some of the best in the business, and we all can learn from how he prepares some of his own athletes at the University of Richmond.
Just Fly Sports: What the physical qualities you are looking for in college level basketball players?
Jay DeMayo: Unfortunately, when it comes to identifying talent, I’m hamstrung obviously, but if I were looking to identify qualities of an incoming player I’d want someone who is willing to work, is coachable, already has a good skill set, and hasn’t trained all that much. We can make a kid a better athlete. I know that this is contrary to what may be popular belief but we can. We can make them move better, jump higher, be faster and quicker. Look at sports that actually “measure” as their sports, swimming and track and field. Do those coaches just pull kids in and say, ok Craig is going to run a 10.9 for us for the next 4 conference meets? No, they train them and they get faster. If they can do it, why can’t we?
Now, when we have them, that’s another story. As we progress through their career we will start to specify more to the individual. How we do that may be a little different. First, we need to know what is required for the sport and/or what are some “bare minimums” we want to look for. An example of a bare minimum is an average resting heart rate over 60 bpm. It doesn’t matter what sport it is, we have found that kids who’s is higher typically have a harder time recovering from bout to bout, probably because they just don’t have the general fitness level, but honestly that’s just a guess.
As they progress through the program we start to tailor the program to them. What I mean by this is we start very general, cookie cutter type approach. This is because none of them (for the most part) have ever trained, and if they have they’ve never trained with me so this is all novel, so we can get quite a bit better doing simple things in smaller volumes and more moderate intensities.
They follow a similar progression in everything, from conditioning, to lift, to jumps/plyo (which is a WHOLE different topic), to specialized exercises. As they develop and we move forward with the program we will start to look more at how they play. Are they an elastic athlete or a “pusher”? Are they really fit, or do they gas out quick? We then separate these characteristics into things that matter or don’t.
So, if it’s someone who isn’t fit, but is elastic, they need to improve fitness obviously, right? So would doing more strength work and long coupling jumping exercises be the best thing to add to that? I’m not sure if they would. So I guess that’s our first separation, what things limit their game, and if we improved those would improve their game.
The second is what do they do well that separates them already? Why do we want to work on what they don’t do if it’s probably not going to show up? Again looking at how they move, not everyone will be “bouncy” right? So if Athlete A is and it is something that shows up when they play, wouldn’t we want that to become better? If Athlete B doesn’t, why would we want to change it? Just because we like it, or someone says you need to do it, it doesn’t matter. KD and LeBron both get buckets, but if you want to tell me their games are similar and how you’d train them is similar then I think you would be making a mistake.
Keir talked about this on a podcast, referring to it as the postcard idea. Write down what makes people in that position special, but you only have the room that you would on a post card to do so. Now we have our general direction right? Then do it for that specific player. What’s different? What’s the same? What’s most important to making that athlete more successful? Figure that out, and do that. We’ve had pretty good success continuing our improvements by leaning more and more towards developing what they’re “strong” at already, sense that’s typically how they play.
Why do we want to work on what they don’t do if it’s probably not going to show up?
Just Fly Sports: How do you go about breaking up the yearly training process? Can you give a snapshot of your off-season, pre-season, and in-season philosophy?
Jay DeMayo: Mine’s kind of different (as EVERYONE says right, but no really it is). With the new rules and summer practice we need to look at that and remember that this is the OFF SEASON. This past off-season we had an awesome plan, and were killing it for 2 weeks, and then the kids started to run out of gas. It’s not their fault, it’s not the coaches’ fault, and it’s the strength coaches’ fault. Yes, you read that right; it is OUR fault if they gas out. Why? Because what we do needs to be complementary.
So what do we do in the summer, in that “off season” mode? We are still in the “20’s” but it’s more technique work. A couple weeks of static-dynamic work where every lift (other than abs) is on a 2 count up, 2 count down for all 20 reps (no, it’s way more awful than it sounds) and try to cover every possible joint action we can in the time we have. The next few weeks are ISO holds for 3-5 seconds (that time held in those positions was dependent upon on my mood to be completely honest, and I have no problem saying that if they were being jerks that was a LONG 5 seconds) at the weakest spot of the lift.
Static-dynamic squat sample. Maximize those muscle energetics for real world gains!
So we are looking at the bottom of a squat (femur parallel ish), bar under your chin but off your shoulders on a standing press, bar touching your chest on a pull down, bottom position of an RDL (I’m sure you get it by now), so that the kids realize what “depth” is and we stretch things out, work on starting strength, blah blah blah, we all know this stuff. If we have time we’ll run our “20’s” for the guys to finish summer so we are “done with” that part of GPP when they get back. If not, when we come back in late August in our “preseason” we start there and run the program. It’s pretty similar to what’s on the YouTube video we put out a couple years back. There have been some additions, but more subtractions to be honest. We build up and typically are cutting to 14’s a little before the start of practice, and 8’s by week 3 of practice, all the while increasing the:
- Cutting work (Dr. Yessis)
- Jumps (Dr. Verkhoshansky)
- Specialized exercises (Dr. Yessis)
We will continue to really train until we hit the crazy period of the fall semester. We all have them, where you have 4 games in 10 days, 2-3 on the road, and they’re all against great teams. At that point we’ll just pump the breaks with the lifts, keep the specialized work, jumps (but drop the volume and slowly increase that), cutting movements in, but really work on quality, not quantity until we get to finals. When we have a week between games we will implement some lower body lifting. The reason we do this is because after NOT squatting or whatever lower body exercise we are doing for at least 10 days I’m not going to use that stimulus if we have a game in 48 hours and risk having these kids be banged up because “Meat-Head DeMayo” said squat, so when we have a 4-5 days before we play again, we’ll squat/step up/glute ham/whatever, but keep the volume low still (maybe 2-3×5 or 1×8 depending on the training age of the kid and how they’re recover). We’ll rock that until we get into league play, and then every week we are taking something out, step by step.
The 2nd half of league play I don’t care if we lift or not to be honest. If they want to, cool, if not, ok, who cares, save it for the games. I know this is against common thought because we feel like we need to do stuff to maintain strength, but personally I just don’t see the pro’s to out weigh the cons. Unless the kids tell me, “I feel week” we don’t need to lift. We need to win games. Do I have some guys who lift? Of course we do. Are some of them “encouraged” to do so? You’re damn right they are. Is one of them my starting 4 man who’s playing around 35 minutes a night who should be a double double (or close) guy? HELL NO IT AIN’T. If he wants to, sweet, come on in, but then the question is always: “What do you need to do to be ready to play the best game of the year the next time we play?” We give them ownership because really they’re the only one that knows how they feel and what makes them feel ready. I know if they physiologically are, and that’s awesome, but them being mentally ready is just as important.
It is OUR fault if they gas out. Why? Because what we do needs to be complementary.
Just Fly Sports: What is something you have learned in the last year or two that you are using right now with your team?
Jay DeMayo: I think that could be answered in the past couple months actually, and they are 2 quotes from our podcast that we started recently. The 1st is from Keir Wenham-Flatt who is the head of S&C with Argentina Rugby. He calls it the post card rule. What is meant by this rule is you would write down on a post card what is required of your position and/or what separates you as a player. So basically we are asking what do you need to be good at or what are you exceptional that makes you the player you are. Now, you can look at this, and have a real simple direction to train in. It’s just a dumbed down needs analysis, but it has really contributed to how we handle our guys by allowing us to really focus on a few characteristics.
The second would be taking a step back and understand what we are trying to look at with our monitoring. This is something I wish I knew 5 years ago, but it’s really changed how we handle all of our monitoring. We have taken a step back and looked at everything we do and said, for example, “with our daily wellness questionnaire, what do we want to look for/learn from it?” In that example it’s abnormalities. When we have a kid who’s usually scoring a 17 out of 25 and then this morning we see him at a 13 we know something’s going on. When we see the 20, we can talk about what was different and hopefully start to educate the kid on how to make better decisions to affect how they feel/play.
The outliers are the influencers, not the norms. That’s a huge lesson because we look at all the numbers and methods you can use to look at “readiness” or whatever and people always try to put people into the same square box, not realizing (or at least at the start I didn’t) that some people are circles, and others are triangles, so they won’t fit. In all monitoring situations, you are looking at an N of 1, not a team of 15. That’s why Kevin Dawidowicz is the man, and CoachMePlus is a fantastic group to work with, because not only do they see this from a billion different angles, but he can communicate it to people simply as well, and they allow you to figure this stuff out on your own.
Just Fly Sports: What types of tests do you use with your team to assess their readiness level? What types of monitoring do you use, and what is your take on it?
Jay DeMayo: Ah TOYS! Not only toys but the sexy ones everyone wants to talk about now. I’m super lucky, as we do a ton of monitoring. I have Omegawave units for all my scholarship guys, we use CoachMePlus to connect all our data, communicate it, and for questionnaires, and we use the Team2 System from Polar to look at training loads at practice. We have had 2 of the 3 for 6 years, and to be frank, we are just starting to communicate with the coaches about some of the info, and even that is limited. We have found different ways to utilize it in training that have helped us quite a bit though. Again, as I said above, making sure that everything we look it is at the individual, not the team, and making adjustments. I think that this actually is way easier than people make it out to be. It’s just a matter of (in training) saying if something is like X we are going to change Y and this is how. We have a few tiers, but typically it’s simply set up as: push it, repeat it, back it down, go home. I do think it’s that simple. Can they do more work than last time, yes or no? If yes, then DO MORE FREAKING WORK! If no, ok, are they ready enough to adapt to the same amount of stress as before? If so, then do the same workout again. That’s where all this stuff fits in great with Dr. Yessis model, in my opinion.
Now, you also need to remember what we talked about before. Is the primary objective of the work something that will fix an issue and/or improve the stuff that they stand out with? If so, maybe that’s a day that you push it right? So, for example, Joe needs to work on fitness, but is a strong guy who moves super great and is very springy. Joe comes in Tuesday and he’s not quite ready to push it, BUT it’s a fitness day today, and tomorrow is mostly a strength day with some elastic work. MAYBE today you take the reigns off Joe and push it (as long as he doesn’t feel like garbage too), and you back off a bit of the strength stuff tomorrow (or at least plan to), so that you pay that cost back with the stuff he doesn’t need to work on? I hope that makes sense, because that’s REALLY changed how we look at things this off-season as well; hopefully we were right with that decision.
How I feel about this stuff is that it’s useful, if you let it be and if you’re willing to learn and try things. It will challenge you to become better, more educated, and seek out help. You also will think you have answers in 2 weeks, only to find yourself sitting there staring at things thinking you’re the dumbest human on the planet 2 weeks later. At least that’s what my first few months were like. You need to have norms before you have trends right? What is the actual real world snapshot of the athlete? What is their typical questionnaire numbers? What are their typical scores on an Omegawave? Once you see those, and now you can see are they changing? Then ask why are they changing and is this a good thing. To me, it’s fun, to others it might be a headache, but I think it’s in the best interest of the kids to have as much info as possible to drive the training process.
About Jay DeMayo
DeMayo is directly responsible for the strength training, conditioning and flexibility development of the men and women’s basketball teams. He also educates the student-athletes on the proper nutrition to make sure their bodies are performing to their full potential.
Jay has presented at 10 different seminars and clinics in five different states and has coached and lectured for a month at Ningbo University in China. He came to Richmond from Indiana State, where he was a graduate assistant during the 2002-03 academic year. The Fairport, N.Y. native played on the soccer team at SUNY-Cortland.
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