#038 Monday Minutes: Summer Reads and Training Changes

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're introducing the Monday Minutes. These Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day.

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Key Takeaways

• Monday Minutes are quick 10 to 15 minute episodes covering industry trends, research reads, and current events.
• Expect practical insights into the training process Adam is running each week.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Coating Excellence Show. Hey everybody, this is your host Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday Minutes. It is a brief five to ten minute episode where we are catching up on everything that is happening in our industry. Things were reading, things were checking out, things that we are experimenting

[00:00:50] With, exploring and it is meant to just be a quick little summary, little tidbits, little breadcrumbs of things that are happening around our strength, conditioning and high performance industry. Like always, if you enjoy the show, there's a couple of ways that you can support it. The very first thing I would recommend is please head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Pop in your email, I promise I won't spam you, and occasionally about once a

[00:01:20] Month, I'll send you an email, it will be things that I'm reading almost like a monthly recap of these Monday Minute episodes. I think you'll get a lot out of it. I explained to my friends that it is essentially the birch box of newsletters. You don't know what you're going to get, but you know whatever you receive is going to be chuckful of great information. So head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Hey everybody, welcome to the minutes. Like I said in the

[00:01:50] Intro, I'm your host, AdamRingler, and let's get into it. Let's discuss what are some of the current events in strength conditioning right now in our industry. So to keep this matter short, I wanted to discuss two books that I'm reading that I think will deliver a lot of value, right? Number one, range by David Epstein has been an awesome, awesome book that I've been looking forward to, and it was really glad that consumed. I think as a strength conditioning

[00:02:17] Professional, one that operates within industry where it seems like early specialization is happening more and more frequently. This book is the anti-early specialization. It is discussing why some many, many successful innovators and entrepreneurs, and there's many more case examples outside of just that. And why they come from an area of broad strokes of broad experiences of things that don't necessarily seem like they're connected, but actually lead and sort of

[00:02:50] Dovetail one skill into another. Now the second book that I'm reading is Radical Candor, and this book has been on my bookshelf for a really long time, actually. I wanted to say it's been maybe a year or so. Red, a couple chapters of it, put it down, jumped into a different book, and started to, I just, I guess I got busy, but nonetheless, Radical Candor is by Kim Scott, and this has been a book that I, I repicked back up after watching the latest season of Silicon Valley

[00:03:26] And recognizing the Biz Dev guy later in the season, use Radical Candor when they were discussing, I don't know, plans with the Pipe Piper team. And I, it jogged my memory. I said, oh my goodness, I still have this book. I should pick it up and read it. And this has a lot of implications in coaching. And I think it's really important because so much of what we do is build on our ability to communicate with our athletes and with our peers and with coworkers. And so

[00:03:57] Often what I've noticed is I look away from the microphone slightly. Here is, was I, I have their little quadrants wrote down on my board. And I'm looking at it right now, and it's, you know, in the upper left hand quadrant is this ruinous empathy. And then in the upper right would be Radical Candor, in the lower right, obnoxious aggression, and the lower left manipulative insincerity. And as you sort of navigate the vertical axis, let's just say of, you know, these four square

[00:04:31] Quadrants, you know, on the top of it is care on the bottom would be rage. And then on the horizontal axis on the left hand side would be silence on the right hand side would be challenge. So this idea of Radical Candor is when you maximize your ability, a caring about somebody, and you maximize your, your efforts to challenge them directly, you have this Radical Candor quadrant that you exist in. And what's been fantastic about this book is that

[00:05:03] Sometimes when you're in positions of management, where you are required to give feedback and build cohesive teams, and you're trying to, you know, achieve, you know, mission success, which in our world is, you know, winning national championships and conference championships championships. It's built on your ability to motivate and provide feedback, effective feedback to the people that you work with. And in our case, athletes, right. And what we try to do

[00:05:31] With what this book advocates for is that what we try to do is collaborate with our peers, collaborate with others. And, you know, try to offer a way of giving feedback that's done so in a constructive manner. And, you know, so often sometimes, you know, teams will either, you know, they'll recognize something that goes wrong. And they won't say anything. And that's the, the left hand side of this quadrant where you're, you know, you might care about

[00:06:01] Somebody or maybe you don't, whatever case that you exist in, you're ultimately hurting them because your silence is not helping them. Your silence is actually not communicating the feedback that they need to know, right? On the right hand side, when you are actually outspoken and you challenge them, they get the information that they need to know to make behavior, behavioral change. And if you care a lot about them, right? That's where you

[00:06:27] Sort of exist in this radical candor. They know that you operating out of a place of sincerity that your information, your feedback that you're giving them is actually conducive to their own growth and their performance. And then if you're, you know, if you want to operate out of rage, that obnoxious aggression where you just blur something out and you say it, but you, you actually are doing it from an insincere place, right? That's not as effective

[00:06:55] As, you know, operating within the upper right hand quadrant. And so without going so much into it, there's a, you know, you can head over to radicalcandor.com. They have some workshops that they have. They have some resources, podcasts and blogs and services or whatnot. But nonetheless, these have been two amazing books that in my off season summer, I've been reading a lot and have taken a lot of value out of. And maybe just to discuss some of the program implications

[00:07:24] And changes and things that we're doing a little bit differently, at least I'm doing a little bit differently this summer is a few things. Without getting too heavy into the science or the reasoning behind it, just some of the, the global landscape changes that I'm making. So number dedicated session or module in every lower body dominant type lifting session where we're going to end up after dynamic warmups, doing some flying tens. And a lot of this came from the

[00:07:53] Work of Tony Holler and feeding the cats or feed the cats. Took a lot away from watching a few of those webinars about doing some dedicated sprint work. The more and more I hear from other practitioners about doing dedicated sprint work, the more I recognize that, you know, even if we are essentially micro dosing speed or one we have a, not the, you know, obviously the bad kind, but micro dosing the speed training, if you will, to keep it PC, that that has

[00:08:28] One of the biggest effects on one of the greatest stimuli that you can provide on the human body. And so we want to dedicate some time to actually doing sprint mechanics and sprint work. So flying tents, now we perform them in the weight room. We have fortunately a long enough track from door to door, from water wall to be able to, not only have a long enough build up, but a long enough, you know, zone for them to decelerate within. And we still have

[00:08:57] The 10 meter range to do electronic, to do electronic timing, which is great. Much like Tony's philosophy, we record the times, we throw them up on the TV's so that we can create some competitiveness of our athletes coming in. Everything gets recorded, everything gets published and everything is black and white. There is no hiding from your speed. Secondly, moving forward is that we've always done force play analysis through our AMTI plates and our acupower software.

[00:09:28] And we've piped that over to our AMS softwares. But what we're going to do a little bit differently this year, moving forward is that we're going to start to build way more individualization regarding our program design and a corrective exercises based on either our force play analysis, whether it is their Nordboard numbers and any sort of asymmetries in their left and right hamstrings on their Nordic curls or their Russian leans. And then finally, we're

[00:09:58] Going to program based off of VOD performances, growing bar apparatus, their diagnostic adduction and abduction testing system, additional growing or hip work. And this is something that every single one of my athletes is going to have a corrective strategy that they will will be prescribed to do at the end of their lift. And it will target their asymmetrical side, the one that might be their rate limiting factor to performance. And we are going to test and

[00:10:29] Retest this quite frequently. So we'll spend, you know, anywhere from a two to three week phase focusing on that asymmetry, retest everything once again because the testing battery does not take very long for us to do a force play a Nordboard and a growing squeeze and hip abduction. And then we will target whatever their rate limiting factor is. And this has been something that I've wanted to do is actually use a diagnostic testing tool. It's not just for

[00:10:57] Neuromuscular readiness and assessing, you know, peak force drops or, you know, RSI or assessing, you know, RPD, but actually looking at it and using the information to drive actionable programming changes. And this is something that, you know, we'll compare to our EMR, our athlete medical record system and our database and some of the demographic data that we have. And we'll actually track this and we'll see that does these interventions that programming

[00:11:28] Towards asymmetrical rate limiting factors actually drive program changes. And we want to see does it drive, you know, a decrease in injury statistics and, you know, the chance of injuries from occurring and the severity of those injuries from occurring. And can we try to reduce some of the hamstring strains or some of the lower limb kinematic type of injuries or, you know, groin strains or hip strains or anything like that? So, these are just some of the implications of

[00:12:00] What I'm going to be experimenting with, not only dedicated speed work, but really using the diagnostic testing tools to program towards their asymmetry side. And then we'll run some analysis, we'll do some regression analysis and, you know, we are almost a month in with having our essentially our high performance intern, incredibly intelligent with this, it's been teaching me a lot. And hopefully we're trying to extend the offer and teach him a couple

[00:12:27] Things as well. So, that came from, as you guys might have been aware, the AdamRingler.com forward slash sports science. It's our high performance internship that we're offering here in Boulder, Colorado, University of Colorado border. And we hope to continue this as well into the fall and the spring. It's been a great pilot. And hopefully we get some great feedback from this individual of how we can continue to grow this program and enrich not only

[00:12:54] Our sports science program here, but also our data science and analytics program that we are building. So, we want to quantify what really matters. We don't want to just collect data to collect it, to data warehouse it in a server somewhere. We actually want to take that information and drive meaningful change. And that's what we've been doing. So, that is it guys for this and gouse for this Monday minutes. Hopefully the last 13 and 30 some minutes

[00:13:23] Haven't been completely rambling. But like I said, we'll publish this every Monday. And I look forward to sharing some industry trends and discuss some of the hot button issues, the pressing issues that are going on in the high performance coaching and strength conditioning realm. And we'll, as always, we'll share what we're doing, what we're up to, and some of the fun things that we're trying to do out here in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. And until

[00:13:50] Next time, take care.

[00:13:57] Hey, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to this Monday minutes show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at Adam Ringler.com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily notes, things I'm finding

[00:14:26] Fascinating and experimenting with and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my own behaviors, my own habits. But ultimately, to really try to improve my life and get something a little bit more meaningful out of it. So head over to Adam Ringler.com forward slash newsletter, pop in your email. And I promise you, you'll get the welcome email and you'll start receiving those monthly updates. And you won't regret it. I'm not going to

[00:14:51] Spend send you a bunch of spam messages or anything like that. I really think that you'll get a lot out of it and check it out. I get questions every single time we publish, either an article or the latest update to the Decoding Excellence show. And the question I often receive is, how do I support this show? Well, we have a new way that the audience and the crowd and everybody else here can support the Decoding Excellence show. Head over to buy me a coffee

[00:15:22] .com forward slash Adam Ringler. It's actually not buying me a coffee. I know the name sounds sort of confusing or misleading, if you will. But what it is is it's a platform, sort of a crowdsourcing way of donating to the show. And the idea is that you would donate a coffee, right? $5, $4 or whatever to the Decoding Excellence show. And what we do with this is we turn the proceeds directly over to supporting the hosting of the Decoding Excellence show on whether it's our

[00:15:54] Spotify or our simple cast or iTunes and elsewhere. And it supports the hosting fees for our website and the Decoding Excellence Show. So if you want to support the show, you can buy me a coffee. You can buy seven coffees, you buy yourself a coffee. Otherwise, please head over, check it out. It is buy me a coffee .com forward slash Adam Ringler. I'll include it in the show notes. And as always, thank you for supporting the Decoding Excellence

[00:16:25] Show.