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, and then stall out later in their career, is that there is really no change in the means that are applied to them” DiMarco
“We’re going to do explosive pin squats for sets of 3, until you drop by .1 seconds average velocity, and he did 14 sets. But when he went back down to New Zealand and tested his max, it had increased by 45 pounds” Wenham-Flatt
“You would be surprised just by how much some athletes need, and just how little some athletes need” Wenham-Flatt
“In the early days of experimenting with this at London Wasps, I had one guy do 3 sets, and one guy do 17 sets (with a .1 drop-off in squat speed)” Wenham-Flatt
“Fly 10’s: if a guy runs a PR on a first rep, he is going to shut him down” DiMarco
“Putting a cap on it, for the (sprint) speed work is helpful… but set a bar speed, and I’ve squatted 90% of my max 30 minutes in a row” DiMarco
“I’m not huge on the actual use of repeat sprint ability within the training session; we’ll do a lot aerobic work and tempo based stuff early on, we’ll do speed on the other end of the spectrum, and those two things make people very good as repeat sprint ability” DiMarco
“All sport preparation, tactically, technically, physically, psychologically, you are trying to answer the question “have I been here before”… and if you haven’t been here before, that’s when things start to break down” Wenham-Flatt
“Most of the time (injury) happens to people who don’t handle volume successfully” DiMarco
“Can a over-zealous sport coach make them 5% weaker within a day of dumb training? Yeah… the greatest return on your effort as a practitioner should probably be on the education, and collaboration on everyone who touches that athlete rather than looking at the perfect rehab exercise (of course what you do in a rehab program is going to be important)” Wenham-Flatt
“From the parkour standpoint, we do some sort of tumbling variation, 3 times a week probably. Almost every single play ends up with somebody on the ground, so teaching something as simple as how to roll forward, backwards, right, left, is important, just to teach them how to land effectively and how to roll out of things, it might be able to able to prevent one injury here or there… it teaches them general skills they might find enjoyable most of the time” DiMarco
“You have these guys who consistently outperform what their testing metrics say they should do, because of their ability to play the sport, and react, and end up in the right positions” DiMarco
About Nick DiMarco
Nick DiMarco is the director of sports performance at Elon University, a position which he has held since 2018. Nick 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.
With a thorough understanding of training loads, and the components behind transferrable agility training, Nick has a unique array of insights he brings to the coaching table. Nick received his undergraduate degree from William Penn, and Master’s from California University of Pennsylvania, both in the sports performance sector. He is on track to finish his PhD in Health and Human Performance at Concordia University of Chicago by early 2020.
About Keir Wenham-Flatt
Keir Wenham-Flatt is a strength and conditioning coach and educator who has worked with professional teams on 4 different continents. Keir has expertise in weight room-based strength and power development, speed, agility, conditioning, and close integration with the football staff to monitor training load, offer sport science insights, and assist in the management of the training process. He is the founder of the Strength Coach Network and Rugby Strength Coach, and has been a prominent figure in coaching education.
Wenham-Flatt 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. Among his career highlights are a fourth-place finish at the 2015 Rugby World Cup with Los Pumas Argentina and a 2014 World Club Challenge win with Sydney Roosters Rugby League.
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