Today’s show is with performance director Daniel Bove. After spending several seasons with the Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns, Daniel is now the Director of Performance and Sports Science for the New Orleans Pelicans, and is also the author of the book, “The Quadrant System, Navigating Stress in Team Sport”.
As Michael Zweifel has said previously on the podcast, every coach should have the opportunity to work with youth athletes, and pro sports, at some point in their career. I’ve done a lot of shows talking about youth sport concepts, as well as principles of training through the lens of a child development, but I haven’t done as many shows detailing some of the nuances of working with a pro population specifically.
When it comes to that other end of the spectrum, with professional athletes, the art of strength & conditioning is largely the art of “load management” and stress consolidation, especially over the course of long competitive seasons. This art of training athletes at the highest level is certainly interesting if you are in the small percentage of coaches who work in this group, but the concepts and ideas behind it can be helpful to understand, regardless of what population you end up working with.
Daniel has come up with a unique system of load consolidation, working with an NBA population that makes a lot of sense. Not only is “The Quadrant System” a wise method for pro athletes, but understanding the Quadrant System is also helpful from the perspective of understanding “high-low” style training in general (making high days truly “high” and low days, truly “low”), as well as the art of dealing with monotony over the course of long training periods. On the show today, Daniel gets into his four quadrants of training (recovery, repetition, speed and of course, strength), and how he utilizes these methods of loading through different points in an in-season training schedule, as well as off-season.
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Timestamps and Main Points
4:23 – How Daniel categorizes load for athletes that he works with 14:48 – How the quadrants might alter as athletes get further down away from the pro-level 15:58 – How high-low training and undulation of the type of stimulus players get offers substantial benefits for players, particularly those in the course of long playing seasons 20:22 – Daniel’s take on the “speed day” in the quadrant system, and how that balances with the explosive work and speed players are doing in their practice 25:48 – How the quadrant system may change when the strength coach doesn’t have a “seat at the table” of the sport coaches and practice volumes 32:05 – Validating heavy lifting in season, on the terms of what Daniel is seeing from data and force plates, and what types of volumes athletes are doing for heavy strength work in season 37:05 – How to approach heavy lifting after game-day if players had a poor game 40:24 – Daniel’s experience with buy-in and the spectrum of players responses in regards to heavy lifting on game-days 43:01 – Nuances of the heavy strength day and how Daniel chooses to load athletes on that day 44:45 – How Daniel approaches tendon health and the repetition day/quadrant 2 47:58 – How the quadrant system changes when athletes are in the off-season or in developmental cases in-season 50:14 – Daniel’s view on a daily micro-dosing program, versus a high-low, quadrant system oriented program, and common movements that may actually be micro-dosed in the pro/NBA setting 55:04 – How Daniel uses work that creates more movement potential within the hips, as a preparation for players to use that range of motion effectively on the court 57:01 – How Daniel views the role of rhythm in training“That’s the goal of the book, how do we consolidate stress, and how do we manage chaos”
“I matched up strength with high intensity high volume (in the quadrant system), and those are our game days typically”
“Repetition days tend to fall at least two days out from competition and those are for tissue quality”
“Quadrant 3’s (speed days… anything above .75 m/s) tend to fall the day before the contest”
“My population views heavy lifts as the most stressful, which is why I place it after a game day”
“In practices that are extremely high load, high intensity, they become your quadrant 4 (heavy strength day) and your game days become your quadrant 3”
“I can’t just do isos with them every single day, because they have 82 games, and they’ll want to rip my head off”
“(By lifting heavy loads in season) I do think you are setting the athlete up for success to be a more robust athlete… when athletes do start to take 1-2 weeks off of lifting, you do start to see force plate numbers go down, the things that help you buffer ground reaction force start to change”
Athletes, in my opinion, are more receptive to training hard on the days that are supposed to be hard…. It’s a lot easier to get them (for heavy lifting) on the day that they are already pumped up”
“On a quadrant 4, we are typically going with a hex bar (on quadrant 2, repetition and tissue health, it’s a more squat, or hatfield squat oriented day)”
“You have to come to grips with, is this player’s limitation physically oriented, or is it skill oriented?”
“The monotony of micro-dosing wouldn’t be great in the (82 game) NBA season”
“One thing I do like for micro-dosing at the NBA level is Lee Taft style change of direction work”
“I like things that involves reciprocal AFIR on both sides, maybe I pair a kettlebell deadlift with a kettlebell self-pass”
Show Notes
Kettlebell Self-Pass Lunge
About Daniel Bove
After receiving a B.S. in Kinesiology from Penn State University and an M.S. in Exercise Science from University of South Florida, Daniel began his career as an NBA physical preparation coach. After spending several seasons with the Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns, Daniel is now the Director of Performance and Sports Science for the New Orleans Pelicans.
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