Today’s guest on the Just Fly Performance is Matt Gifford, sports performance coach at NX level in Waukesha Wisconsin. Matt is an expert in the realm of speed, strength, warm-ups, cues, and more. I first met Matt last year at a “Speed Football” consortium, and also was able to catch a workout with him at his incredible facility.
In my experience, Matt is one of the best coaches out there in terms of “creating a story” to help athletes understand and embody performance cues and exercises. 
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On the show, we chat about some of the following topics:
- Commonalities and differences in approaching speed development for football (or field sports) and track and field
- Progression of teaching the start, and why starting everyone out in a 3 point or 4 point start is a big mistake
- Matt’s top sprint and speed cues
- The critical importance of developing lateral chain strength, and getting out of the sagittal plane only mentality
- Coordination training methods in the scope of the warmup process
- The role of aerobic and tempo training for speed-power athletes
- The role of maximal strength work in high school, collegiate, and post-collegiate athletes
- Zones of maximal skill acquisition/optimal flow zone
- The controlled aggression mentality in NFL receivers
“If you select and exercise, you cue it right, and you motivate and inspire; and it still doesn’t look right, then you probably selected an exercise that wasn’t appropriate for that athlete.”
“Build the warmup as a coaching or teaching tool for the athletes to refer back to during their main workout.”
“Here’s something that’s going to shock the world, and that everybody’s going to get pissed off at…. you can use a (speed) ladder in a warmup.”
“If you get kids to back off a little bit, and still be aggressive…controlled aggression, they’ll be in a better positions to hit and feel movement patterns. When you see guys relax a little bit, power output goes up and you see a lot better result.”
Special things happen when aggressive powerful athletes learn to back off just a little bit, so they can feel things out more effectively and establish a certain rhythm.”
Matt Gifford
Matt Gifford has been a performance coach at NX Level in Waukesha, Wisconsin since 2009. Gifford graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he was a starting wide receiver on their 2007 National Championship football team. He is C.S.C.S and is a Structural Elements Level 1 practitioner. Follow Matt on Instagram @coachgiff
Check out his website at Coachgiff.com
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