Today’s guest is Cameron Josse, Director of Sports Performance at DeFranco’s Gym, back for his second appearance on the Just Fly Performance podcast, and this time we’re talking about his results, experiences and lessons learned from heavy sled training, as well as a multitude of other topics on speed training for football players, or anyone else whose sport demands fast accelerative abilities.
In our first show together, Cameron highlighted the use of the 1080 sprint to create a very specific force-based overload to an athlete’s acceleration ability (as well as general protocols for the speed and velocity range a heavy sled should land an athlete). This show tied together many facets of Cameron’s speed building ideology, along with some of the directions that he has taken Joe DeFranco’s legendary training templates. This is a fantastic episode for anyone interested in speed, or who trains team sports competitors.
In this episode, we’ll be covering Cameron’s lessons from his heavy-resisted sled training cycles, special strength for speed, top exercises for speed specific to acceleration with technical considerations of common football sprint patterning, lifting progressions from high school to college and the pro’s, and more.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Key Points:
- Cameron’s summary of the rationale of heavy sled training, as well as his lessons learned from completing a training phase with a heavy sled component
- Motor learning ideals in terms of letting athletes figure out movement vs. when to coach
- What Cameron would change in his next heavy sled training group
- Special strength exercises for improving sprint mechanics
- Cameron’s top exercises for improving football specific speed
- Progressions from single-leg lifting, to bilateral, and single-leg lifting in the professional ranks
“Heavy sleds expose an athlete to the max power environment (in an acceleration) for a little longer”
“JB Morin and Matt Cross specifically say (heavy sleds) is not speed training, but rather strength training that is very specific to the sprinting motion”
“Heavy sleds gives them more chances to be conscious of their issues and try to self-correct them in that (training) environment”
“When my players do med-ball-knee-punch-runs, they all get great frontside mechanics”
“I’ve found a flying 10 is less stressful psychologically and physically than running a 40 yard sprint (for combine guys)”
“I’ve seen a lot of guys improve their max velocity by just learning how to run upright”
“One of my favorite exercises for acceleration specific force is power skips for distance… they see real quick if they don’t have that propulsive ability to launch themselves through a nice launch-point”
“Football players are able to reach 96-98% of their maximal velocity by the 20 yard mark”
“What I do when I do the dynamic single leg work is focus more on the concentric side of it…. I think that’s really helping emulate starting a sprint from a static start”
“The more coordinatively challenging a lift becomes, I won’t put a tendo on… for a reverse lunge that is more stable, or a regular split squat, I’ll throw a tendo on and actually measure it”
“It’s a bit of a bell curve that happens, we’ve been taking a lot of our high school guys and doing single leg strength with them first, and then kind of progressing to bilateral stuff, and mixing in single leg work all the time, and then as they become pro’s, we start moving away from bilateral work again, back to single leg work again”
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