Today’s podcast guest is Josh Bray. Josh is a strength and conditioning coach, educator, and founder of ETX Training. He serves as Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Bishop’s College School and Universel Academy, where he specializes in long-term athletic development, gamified training, and athlete-centered performance systems.
On today’s episode, Josh discusses how endurance training shaped his coaching perspective, the role of games and hidden intention in athletic development, and how roughhousing and free play build adaptable movers. He also explores bucketing athletes as elastic, muscular, or hybrid, using force-plate data without overcomplicating the process, balancing readiness with meaningful training stress, and employing open-ended prescriptions that let athletes self-regulate volume while preserving intent, quality, and engagement.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength.
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Topics
0:00 – Intro
0:08 – Josh’s Endurance Background
4:24 – Why Conditioning Still Matters
7:17 – Games in Athletic Development
14:48 – Roughhousing and Combatives
20:53 – The Value of Fun
24:35 – Rebuilding Movement Literacy
28:06 – Log Day and Team Cohesion
29:43 – Bucketing Athlete Types
38:43 – Training Strengths and Weaknesses
42:08 – Using Force Plate Metrics
49:06 – Attacking the Ground
53:46 – Fatigue Sensitivity
58:57 – Readiness Paralysis
1:03:44 – Interpreting Readiness Data
1:09:18 – Open-Ended Training
1:17:12 – Josh’s Work and Contact
Josh Bray Quotes
“Regardless of twitch specificity, like you should have a great conditioning base. I think that’s pretty well understood across the industry, but we tend to go away from it, right? Like we’re strength and conditioning coaches, but we tend to forget about the conditioning side of things.”
“My northern star, as far as gamification goes, is like it should fundamentally be about fun, and there doesn’t have to be a direct correlation as to what we’re doing.”
“It’s all about hiding intention so we can kind of force them into patterns we can force them into driving good intent without you know have to justifying it outright, and you just get better buy-in that way.”
“Being able to constrain allowed me kind of add progressions, allowed me to provide education to the athletes and narrow down on the scope of like, what are we trying to feel here from an internal or external cue? And how can that actually translate to the game so that when we can rehearse that, once we do get to the game or practice, it does become involuntary.”
“A lot of these kids come in with like just zero movement literacy… these kids are lacking, you know, upwards of eight years of being a kid. What would you refer to as being a kid, just playing around, exploring and climbing and all these sorts of things. So like, how can we dose them with something that’s kind of going to get them out of those preconditioned states?”
“The hidden intention is just like we’re creating cohesion through some sort of coordinated effort but for them they think they’re just being you know guys being dudes.”
“I just think menial tasks with hidden intention is a great way to develop young athletes in particular.”
“For any coaches that don’t have force plates, that don’t have speed gates, that don’t understand the quadrant system and all these different technical methodological models, you know just get used to looking at athletes. Like that’s my first step in my process is who am I working with? How do they move?”
“There is a high degree of specificity that is needed, but at the same time the goal here is to get as many athletes into buckets that best suit them, not ideally suit them.”
“If we can make their superpower more their superpower under varying conditions and whether it’s strengths or weaknesses, then they’re clearly developing in their superpower.”
“I want my athletes to move economically, which tends to look more in a softer nature and a more relaxed nature, but I think that’s a byproduct of being able to get them to do things with intent and to actually attack those movements.”
“We can’t fear soreness, fatigue, and temporary drops in performance… we’re ultimately resulting in an equation that’s too heavily biased towards recovery and not enough from stress.”
“I look at it through the lens of just self-regulation and a bit of like session flow as well as accumulating volume.”
“The idea between the open-ended is we’re accumulating the volume with whatever order we need based on freshness.”
“They tell you everything. And I mean, I implore anyone to work with high school athletes. Like they’ll teach you more than you ever knew.”
About Josh Bray
Josh Bray, MSc, CSCS, XPS, is a strength and conditioning coach with more than a decade of experience developing athletes across rugby, soccer, football, hockey, lacrosse, and basketball—from youth and club levels to national and international competition. He holds a Master’s degree in Strength and Conditioning and is certified as a CSCS, CSNC, CPT, and XPS. Josh is the founder of ETX Training and serves as Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Bishop’s College School and Universel Academy, where he specializes in athlete-centered programming that blends long-term athletic development, dynamic problem solving, and high-performance preparation. He is also an educator and mentor to coaches, helping athletes and practitioners build resilient, adaptable, and sustainable performance.
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