Today’s guest is athletic performance coach and consultant, Sam Portland. Sam has had a lengthy career in professional sport, and is the creator of “Speed Gate Golf” and the Sports Speed System. Sam provides mentorship and education to coaches, athletes and teams looking to further progress their abilities. His combination of skills ranges from physical coaching, to sport coaching, athlete psychology and beyond.
With the impending AI and technological revolution, we must ask ourselves questions regarding the nature of coaching, training and progression in athletics. On one hand, we have numerical outputs and data points relative to an athlete’s abilities, workloads, and suggested training routes, and on the other we have the social-emotional and intuitive elements that are much more human by nature. In a sense, what is the most human about coaching itself is the “conversation of training” that happens on multiple levels within any training session.
For today’s podcast, we cover the types of intensity and mentality that go into playing various sports (such as Rugby vs. American Football), Sam’s take on sport training technology, such as force-velocity profiling, an athletes “speed age” and how athletes progress through each level, and finally, we’ll get into the 5 types of player archetypes that range from bodybuilder, to sprinter, and how coaches can identify and optimize training for each unique athlete they train. This is a show that highlights how having experience and skin in the game, not only training, but also playing the game
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Timestamps and Main Points
3:29 – Sam’s experience working with, and playing American Football in Europe 8:00 – The types of intensity that is present in different types of sports, such as continuous sports (rugby, soccer) vs. interval sports (American football) 18:12 – Sam’s thoughts on Force Velocity profiling and technology in speed and game-speed training 30:41 – What Sam values in a speed and game-speed training program as opposed to a more data-oriented, mechanistic approach to speed 37:15 – Thoughts on heavy sled training and heavy resisted training in general 44:06 – Sam’s take on “Speed Age” in athletes, and how he looks at speed training progressions over time 59:13 – The importance of complexity and psychology in the process of coaching, and the conversation that happens between coach and athlete 1:06:50 – The 5 archetypes of athletes Sam categorizes and considers through the sport and physical preparation process 1:18:18 – Approaching the “games player” archetype in particular from a physical preparation perspectiveSam Portland Quotes
“With American football, one of the toughest things was that the play wasn’t building in front of me (like Rugby), the play was building behind me”
“How do people become successful coaches? It is intuition, and it is getting reps on the field”
“Nothing’s changed in the last 30 years, it’s the experience of the coach that creates the change, and we should do that by playing, 100%”
“In part, the strength and conditioning problem is that everyone wants to develop speed, but they start in the gym”
“I got more guys that run over 21 miles per hour, just by doing long accelerations, and specialized developmental exercises that I stole from Verkhoshansky”
“I believe we are in the tech age… you remember when the first computer came out, we are literally there”
“Movement is a conversation… everyone watches a wave break, but they don’t watch the magic that happens when it builds”
“I had an athlete who could squat 250 kilos, and that was great, but it didn’t translate. Someone like this I’ll use a stable to unstable continuum. The most unstable thing you can do in moving is over-speed maximal velocity. On the other side is a slow, deliberate wall squat, acceleration type drill”
“We increase instability and add velocity in order to nurture that conversation”
“Big guys struggle to find knee flexion in early acceleration, because they are so big”
“In my coaching, I’m never trying to acquire more information about what I’m doing, until I know what information I have can do”
“People are very attracted to shiny things, not the simple, consistent things”
“You’ve got 4 levels of speed age: Learning to sprint, training to sprint, sprinting to compete, and sprinting to win”
“We’ve got physical capacities, we’ve got technical capacities and cognitive capacities”
“If we can’t find rhythm, timing coordination at sub-max velocities, how the hell are you going to find it when putting your foot to the floor”
“So if slow, heavy sled walks are working, do them until they stop working”
“I had a prop, a big prop forward, and he would literally do 3 to 4 low level drills, and then we would do bouncy runs for 40 meters for his whole session; 10 meter time under 1.7 seconds, over 9 meters maximal velocity inside 40yd, and he was 125 kilos, and that’s all we did”
“You go from bounce runs to high cycling runs, so you train the other side, you are spinning your wheels faster; I’m a massive proponent of running slow with high frequency before running fast, because it’s easier to put speed on frequency, as opposed to frequency on speed”
“The people who understand psychology the most as coaches, will be the most successful coaches”
“If you are not training at sport speed, then it’s not sport speed”
“The reason we need things to be harder is to prove our worth… I’ve made this thing more complicated so it reinforces what I do, my sacrifice and everything, so I’m going to get the most reward out of it because it’s hard… rather than, let’s make this the most simple and easy thing, so I can go home when I’m finished, and I can be with my family, and I can go to sleep. I can tell you my whole system inside of 5 minutes, and if that’s OK with you, let’s give it a go, and that’s what we need to be working towards”
“If you ever consider why a player is disagreeing with you, or not fully buying in, you don’t know how they see themselves, you don’t know the story of how they see themselves as a player”
“Your powerlifter archetype equates strength with performance; you got the crossfit archetype which needs to put work in their body, because they probably come from a background that has been built on hard, high-volume work”
“The sprinter, their linear speed is not a problem, they just need to learn how to play the game”
“Everyone has a story, and if you are living out of your own story when trying to help someone else, you are not helping their story”
About Sam Portland
Sam Portland is an athletic performance coach from the UK, the creator of speed gate golf and the Sports Speed System. Following a lengthy career in professional sport he now consults with athletes/teams and helps guide coaches to happier, healthier and more financially fulfilling careers.
Sam has worked with premiership rugby, American football, Olympic athletes, international competitors across a plethora of sports including hockey, bobsleigh, and track and field. Aside from this Sam keeps in touch with the grass roots aspects of athlete preparation by hosting his ‘combine program’. This program is a long-term athletic development program filling the essential gaps in physical literacy that are not fulfilled at school or by club sports.
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