Today’s episode features Rob Assise, track and field coach at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in the greater Chicago area. Rob has been an accomplished writer in the last year, and has been a highly successful coach on the track and field level. His progressive workouts have netted him great success, as Homewood-Flossmoor has been a force on the state track and field level in Illinois.
Specifically for Just Fly Sports, Rob has written, “10 Low-Hanging Fruits to Grab for Optimal Performance”. He has also been a speaker for one of the mecca’s of track and field training, the Track-Football Consortium, and will be speaking at the next iteration this June.
Like Tony Holler, Rob has gone from a more volume-oriented approach that he trained under, to a more progressive, low volume approach that more and more track coaches are utilizing, not only to help athletes to new personal bests, but also to make track and field more fun and engaging for the athlete. To me, it is both Rob’s knowledge and creativity that make him someone I love to sit down and talk about training with. One of the biggest game-changers for me that Rob mentioned was doing curvilinear sprints for his track and field jumpers, which is just the tip of the iceberg in the many cutting edge methods he employs with his athletes.
On today’s podcast, Rob talks about his background, training philosophy, speed and plyometric methods, weight room concepts, the “constraint-based” jump training system (a real gem), 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:
- Rob’s background as an athlete and in track and field coaching
- Rob’s coaching philosophy and how it has transformed over the years
- Nuts and bolts of Rob’s training phases and managing lots of sprinters in a group with athletes of different abilities, as well as how to do a flying 10 workout with 60 kids and one set of timing gates
- Peaking plans going into championship meets
- Rob’s ideas on the perfect world of yearly training throughout multiple sport play in a high school setting
- Rob’s plyometric utilization for his jumpers
- Weightroom concepts for Rob’s athletes
- A “constraints based” approach to jumps training
“I really had to sell workouts to athletes (doing high volume sprint training).. only half of the athletes would be really engaged. I was looking for ways to get everybody engaged”
“When it comes to peaking, it’s all about “what makes you feel awesome””
“Every week I try to do something in the frontal plane that is ankle based (for high jumpers)”
“My long and triple jumpers will do plyometrics on a curve”
“If you just focus on the sagittal plane, that’s ok, but if we can incorporate the transverse and frontal plane as well that creates a more stable athlete”
“I like doing resisted sprint work where the arms are free, that is the ideal”
“Speed drllls are overblown… we do them, but if you’re doing more than 15 or 20 minutes of it in a warmup, you are better off using your time somewhere else”
About Rob Assise
Rob Assise is a mathematics teacher and track coach at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. He also has experience coaching football and cross country. He can be reached via e-mail at robertassise@gmail.com or Twitter @HFJumps.
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