Today’s episode features track and physical preparation coach Ross Jeffs.
Ross currently coaches at the regional training center in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Although having a track and field background, Ross has worked with world class athletes from a variety of sports. He has been mentored by Jonas Dodoo within the Speedworks coaching system, and is one of the brightest coaches under age 30 that I’ve read or talked to.
I first heard of Ross just a few weeks ago when his article on “Trainers vs. Racers” came out on Simplifaster. Although this article didn’t get a lot of shares, it was one of the best works I had read in the last year, and one that resonated heavily with thoughts I’ve had on neurotyping system and athlete individualization.
I’ve known through Christian Thibaudeau’s neurotyping, as well as personal practice and reflection, that some athletes just can’t handle as much CNS intensive training, and that some athletes tend to do better with longer times under tension in the weightroom or even in their event specific training. What I hadn’t considered was how this impacted the nature of maximal velocity sprinting and jumping, and how we can practically speed train athletes based on what we are seeing in practice (you don’t even need to know neurotyping to understand how this works, since it’s simply based on practice times versus race times).
For my chat with Ross today, we cover Ross’s background in classifying athletes (such as the muscular versus elastic bandwidth), who the “racer” is in practice, as well as the “trainer” and then how this can be utilized in track and field and team sport performance training.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Key Points
- How Ross goes through a system of classifying athletes and what they optimally respond to (in terms of fascial, muscular, response to plyos, heavy weightlifting, etc.)
- How and why muscular versus fascial athletes respond differently to training
- Who the “racer” is vs. the “trainer” and how to train each of them for speed
- How Ross trains maximal velocity in context of team sport
“I see it as elastic, concentric and fascial. I see concentric at one end of the spectrum and fascial as the other and elastic sits in the middle…. the names aren’t really important, it’s just semantics”
“When the athlete comes in, the first month we might spend building tissue tolerance in the weightroom, some kind of improvement in the soft tissue; that might be spending a bit more time in the weightroom, 60-70% weight plus (and full range of motion), slightly heavier maybe to get some remodeling in the tissues”
“The fast-twitch guys on one type of a spectrum, they might come out of a phase like that (more weights, tissue remodeling) and they might look pretty good, but a fascial guy might look slow, and their ground contacts could look crappy”
“I think as coaches, we change too many variables too quickly”
“We should make our decisions on big rocks (such as heavy lifting versus plyometrics and response) before we go into minutia”
“(Regarding bike sprints and muscle tension in general) The fast twitch guys have a really good ability to tune their system by just having some level of muscular tension, and they don’t need to put their feet on the ground like the fascial guys”
“You have some athletes who can get very close to or even attain their competition velocity in training, as long as they are fairly fresh, while you have others who can’t get anywhere near it… in reality both athletes are giving 100% effort but their speeds are anywhere between 85 to 100% of their actual PB velocity, so the stimulus that is actually being applied from athlete to athlete is massive”
“If you have a trainer who can constantly apply a very high stimulus in training, they are going to fry themselves”
“If they grind out success and have a small graveyard, then you can take something from that program and learn what makes it great”
“A lot of Charlie’s (Francis) stuff has been lost in translation”
“If we take a max velocity task (for team sport athletes like rugby), what I make do is put some mini hurdles down every 5 steps for every 5 meters, and execute the task as fast as possible and with good mechanics, but make micro-reactive decisions based on their external environment”
“If you think doing sprints from a 3 point start gives you the tools to handle speed in those (team sport) environments, then you are lying to yourself”
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