#070 - Optimizing Basketball Performance: Workload Monitoring, Travel Training, and Adaptability
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I’m diving into the intricacies of workload monitoring and athlete preparation, particularly for basketball players.
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I’m diving into the intricacies of workload monitoring and athlete preparation, particularly for basketball players. From managing training on the road to adapting workouts to fit within the constraints of a packed game schedule, I break down the strategies we’re using to keep athletes performing at their best.
As a reminder, our Random Shows shows are a quick 15-30 minute episode where I typically discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week.
Episode Highlights:
- The challenges of training basketball athletes on the road and maintaining consistency.
- How to adapt workouts while staying aligned with our overarching training framework.
- The importance of protein supplementation while traveling and its role in recovery and performance.
- Updates on how we're managing training cycles during a busy stretch back in Boulder, Colorado, with two-day game windows.
- A dedicated Q&A segment where I answer your strength and conditioning and sport science questions.
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Key Takeaways
- Training basketball athletes on the road requires adapting workouts to tight constraints while staying aligned with the overarching training framework, not abandoning it.
- Protein supplementation while traveling is a simple, high-leverage recovery strategy when food options and schedules are out of your control.
- Managing training cycles through two-day game windows means making deliberate trade-offs about what gets trained, what gets maintained, and what gets dropped.
- A dedicated Q and A segment answers listener questions on strength and conditioning and sport science directly.
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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 the Decoding Excellence Show and thanks for tuning in I have a great random episode for you. I get into a bunch of different topics I talk about workload monitoring in the sort of basketball, training basketball athletes while on the road and just logistics, some of the things that you have to pay attention to, adapting workouts without compromising on your framework. We talk about supplementation, protein
[00:00:53] Quality nutrition while we're on the road. I do share my insights with having to navigate some challenges for moving from a four day prep cycle to a two day as we've navigated this conference realignment from pack 12 to big 12. And then I shared a little bit about the project that I've been working on behind the scenes, the former athlete society. I invite you to check that out. I have some website and some information that you can navigate to. And then towards the end of this Decoding Excellence Show, this random show, I do answer a couple Q&A submitted
[00:01:25] Questions as it relates to balancing recovery, maintaining intensity during the long season. And what we do are early indicators of some overreaching and detraining and overtraining aspects of it. So without further ado, here's my episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. I know you're going to take a lot away from it. I'm excited that you're here. Thank you. Let's get into it. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. As always, I'm your host, Adam Ringler. And we are live from Salt Lake City. Here we are. It's early in the morning. It's about 10 a.m.
[00:02:00] In the morning. We have shoot around in roughly about two hours. And I wanted to record this Decoding Excellence Show and talk about a few things as it relates to basketball performance. We're in the thick of things. It's February right now. We're in the thick of the basketball season. We're coming down the pipeline, February, Indomarch madness. And I wanted to talk basketball performance training because it certainly is a monopolizing my mind, my attention, and what I'm doing. So I thought I would just jump right into this random show and talk a little bit about
[00:02:36] Various topics on the road training, maybe protein supplementation, basketball performance or performance training as it relates to basketball. I have a couple Q&A questions from the school community that I run, the former athlete society. So I thought I would answer that. And we'll just jump right into it. So the things I wanted to talk about first, right out of the gate, workload monitoring for basketball. So why is it, and I get this question sometimes from sports scientists, though email me at, sorry, I'm so over, I'm so trying to get over this cold. Maybe I added that
[00:03:15] Out and post. I don't know. Maybe I'll just keep the coffin. But I still get this question from time to time. And that is why is workload monitoring crucial for basketball players? So again, I think there's a number of different ways. If we, and I know this seems like a very elementary question, but at the surface while it may seem that there's a lot of nuance into monitoring basketball performance. So I still think from a performance enhancement strategy, as we are working our way through a normal game day prep cycle, whether it's three days out, two days out, if it's prep day,
[00:03:52] One day out, if it's game day, there's a lot of different things that we want to look at. Sure, we could look at total player load. If you're using catapult systems, catapult sports, you could look at accumulated acceleration loads. If you're familiar with connects on sports, you could look at various degrees of high speed running or, you know, like high velocity band threshold running. So I'm a big proponent of having some sort of way of looking at the accumulative effect or total player load or total accumulated acceleration load as a way of keeping a gauge on the total
[00:04:33] Amount of workload and athlete is doing, right? So there's importance in individualization. We know this that some high outputs, higher velocity athletes, higher workload athletes are just going to be sort of your metaphoric workhorses of your team. And it's important to monitor their individual performance, their individual workloads, as it relates to let's say something like EWMA or an ACWR. Yes, I'm not going to say it's predictive of injury by any extent, but understanding the fluctuation of our our high days, our low days and being able to monitor that so that they show up
[00:05:14] On game day, both physically prepared to go to battle against a particular team, but also individually ready to take on those higher workloads that we know are associated with a game day, whether it's morning shoot around, if it's our warm-ups, if it's the, you know, 35 plus minutes that an athlete might play, we want to make sure that they're ready for it, but also prepared. And that balance of preparedness and readiness, making sure that teeter totter is at equilibrium, that they're not overly prepared, but now ill or poorly ready for to take on those loads
[00:05:53] Controversially that they're not super ready, right, because we've taken three days off and now get their socks blown off in the game. So we want to make sure that we're balancing those things that we're monitoring those things and arriving on game day adequately ready and prepared. Now, there's that on an individual on a micro level, on a macro level. We like to look at the team and make sure that we're hitting our marks, we're hitting our strides that are game day minus two is appropriate for high speed running. That's appropriate for, you know, within 10 to 15 percent
[00:06:28] Of our targets for plus or minus four are average loading so that we're on track to arrive on game day knowing what we need to do. So we do those things, we monitor those things. I think it's important for us in addition to that to make sure that we're utilizing different tools, methodology, not only for tracking their readiness, but also their recovery and game day performance. So if we know that we overshoot, let's say 15, 20, 25 percent on an individual level, what are we doing from a readiness standpoint, from a recovery standpoint? Are we deploying the use of
[00:07:09] Normatex contrast, hot cold contrasting? Are we using contrast showers? Are we using supplementation like tar cherry juice? Are we using soft tissue modalities, stretching modalities, breathing modalities to really try to hand some of the recovery? Are we jumping in and doing some BFR with our hydro shorts and doing some recovery strategies there? There's a whole laundry list of different recovery and readiness things that we can do if we overshoot. But also, again, inversely, if we undershoot things, are we getting our athletes appropriate top-ups? Are we making
[00:07:46] Sure that hey, we kind of came under the target and we left some load on the table. So how about we get a on the road workout or how about we do a top-up in the weight room and make sure that we're getting some high-speed running exposure with some treadmill sprints or after practice with some on-course sprints or some change of direction to get those loads in. So we do those things because yes, we have an idea of what the individual target is, the macro target is, and we want to make sure that we're using this workload data in a way that can help guide some of the practice intensities and
[00:08:18] In-game decisions that we might make. So so much of the job as a performance coach is preparatory in nature, right? So how can we prepare the athlete on an individual level to be best positioned to go out perform day after day practice after practice game after game. So for some athletes, it might be doing a little bit more for some for other athletes, it might be making sure that we enhance the recovery, enhance the rejuvenation period, enhancing some of the workload detriment effects associated to their individual workloads to make sure that they show up on game day ready to go. So that's,
[00:08:59] You know, just a question I wanted to get right out of the gate in the first 10 minutes of the decoding excellence show here, and this random show is just again discussing how we utilize some of this workload monitoring. It's not just to restrict athletes so often I hear, you know, juniors or scientists talk about doing less, doing less, doing less, and I still come back to the adage or the common quote or the the idea that ships in the harbor are the safest, but that's not what ships are designed for. We can arrest athletes certainly when we need to, but that's not
[00:09:38] What the athlete is here to do. We want to train athletes. We want to prepare athletes. We want to see the expression of their sport and their talents and their skill sets. So quite often, I don't ever want to be restrictive with an athlete's workload. For me, I want them to go out and do what they want to do, and I want to help mitigate maybe some of the detrimental effects of those workloads or those game day loads by enhancing the recovery strategies. You know, number one, but secondly, maybe making some adaptations to the training program that they would do with us,
[00:10:13] Right? So I'm very free spirited when it comes to practice. Yes, we have guardrails as far as doing too little or doing too much, but if we overshoot or we undershoot, then we as a performance staff is just going to go in and make some changes and making sure that the athlete gets what they need to get in the form of enhanced recovery methodologies or modalities that we might use, but also if we undershoot, making sure that they get the workload that they need from a day to day from a week to week basis. Now, so much as you know, if you're listening, if you travel with basketball,
[00:10:49] So much of you know, it's like, we have to train our athletes on the road. We're on the road quite frequently. Yes, changing from the pack 12 RIP, where we might be on the road from a Thursday night through a Sunday, a four day road trip to the big 12 where we're on the road for 36 hours back home in our beds in our training facilities. We still not going to neglect training for those 36 hours that were on the road. There's a lot of athletes that still need development, that still need top-ups, that still need maintenance, strength conditioning work. And so yes, there's challenges of
[00:11:28] Maintaining performance on the road in the form of limited equipment or time constraints or recovery or travel, all of those things. But our job is performance specialist, a strength conditioning coaches is, you know, delivery of GPP for athletes is we need to find a way, we need to be agile, we need to be creative, we need to be adaptable, if you will, in our strategies for implementing effective hotel workouts or maintaining recovery routines, things like that. So quite often, this is the cold, this is my cough, still getting over, it's been lingering for now, we can have.
[00:12:09] So often, you know, that means that we're on the, you know, the floors of banquet halls during team meals, during film sessions. We'll be doing, you know, on the other side of the court, you know, recovery workouts or return to place, things like that. Quite often, you know, we're in and out of different hotels. So assessing the equipment and the facility constraints of that same hotel that we might be in, if the hotel workout space or that facility is inadequate, then when jumping in, our team bus or in an Uber and we are going to commercial gyms to get the work in, the work
[00:12:49] Is the work. We got to, we have to continue to maintain it. So our jobs, just to facilitate the location, the actual sets and reps and modalities that we might be doing. And then making sure that our high minute players or high workload players are getting the recovery, whether it's stretching, soft tissue work, mobility work, whether it's, like I said, at the top of the show, the use of the hydro shorts from a BFR standpoint, making sure that we get the recovery that we need for those athletes, but also making sure that we get the general
[00:13:22] Physical preparedness that we need or the GPP for some of the development athletes that we need. So it's our both sides, it's kind of polarized in some respects. In the middle, those that are playing a little bit, those that are, you know, maybe not playing crazy minutes. Sure, right? This is what our warmups are. This is what our stretching recovery routines are. This is what, you know, just adequate nutrition on the road does. Those athletes are recovering. For the most part, it's the polarized athletes, the ones that play a lot of minutes,
[00:13:50] The ones that don't play a lot of minutes. Those are the athletes that we have to be mindful of and be very attentive of and making sure that we get the recovery and then the training that those athletes certainly need. Now, in addition to that, whether the facility has pools that we can use pool workouts, whether they have bikes that we could use, you know, hydro BFR biking from flush workouts, if they have access to strength equipment on the road, if the traveling school that we go to doesn't have facility access, all those things like we just got to be agile and flexible
[00:14:27] Enough to make sure that we get what we do. Now, that is some of the uncontrollables, right? As far as the location, the facility access, both on the road, the hotel, all of those things. The things that we can control, things like sleep, things like hydration, things like proper protein intake, those things are well within the control of the team environment. So again, whether it's sleep hygiene or education around sleep hygiene or if it's just logistically, hey, we need to move film 30 minutes up because we don't want our athletes getting in bed by 10, 30 at night,
[00:15:03] Room checks are at, let's say 10, can we move that to 945 so our athletes actually have a wind down period. Can we do some stretching or recovery immediately after film so that now the athletes are a little bit more relaxed when they go to their bedrooms. They're falling asleep a little bit faster. It infects their deep sleep, their REM sleep. They're waking up a little bit more recovered. Can we utilize the hydration, you know, like whether it's electrolyte packets, pre-flight, post-flight. Can we make sure that we're pushing hydration when we're getting into
[00:15:35] Team meal. All of those things are things that we need to consider when we're traveling, just knowing flying in planes, getting into buses, going to foreign hotels or going to different environments. All of those things can affect our sleep and our sleep hygiene or lack thereof. It can affect our hydration or lack thereof. And so those things are well within our controllables. We just got to be mindful of those things. Making sure that we address those things, making sure that we have strategies in place to positively affect, you know, deep sleep or REM sleep or restful sleep,
[00:16:09] Or positively affect hydration so that our athletes aren't going into a morning shoot round or a, you know, a practice or a team meal, inadequately hydrated for the day. This last thing we want them doing is showing up for game day, slightly dehydrated and slightly in a sleep deficit as well. Now, I do talk about quite a bit about adapting workouts without compromising the framework. So we're on a, you know, like now, just knowing how our big 12 schedule is, knowing where we tend to lift a little bit heavy, where we try to induce a little CNS fatigue,
[00:16:46] Where we try to restore some of that CNS fatigue in sort of a high-low Charlie Francis S type model. I need to be mindful enough to pivot training plans when we're on the road. So even our tweener sort of tween minutes, low minutes, but above our thresholds for extra conditioning top-up work, things like that, how do we adjust the schedules or our training plans around that schedule? So if we do leave on a, you know, a game day minus one to go play, are we doing a low CNS type of workout? Still somewhat stimulatory for hypertrophy gains or
[00:17:23] Strength gains or, you know, some level of post-activation potential going into game day, but not so much that's going to induce a CNS fatigue that might detract from their sport, from the expression of their sport, from the expression of their skill sets when it comes to doing their incredible things that they do with the basketball. So there's a level of trying to balance consistency within the flexibility of our own training programs that needs to be taken into account. You know, there's times where I'll have low-minute athletes. They're a little bit more in a
[00:17:55] Developmental plan. Sure, we can induce a little bit more CNS stress with them. If they go into game day with a little, you know, delayed onset muscle soreness from a previous days worth of training, knowing that, you know, our team success isn't solely accounted on them playing 35 minutes, 25 minutes, 15 minutes, that we're looking at, you know, five minutes or less, then that's not going to have such a detrimental effect on team success or team performance. Sure, we would still want them to be fresh and ready and capable of giving the very best five minutes or four minutes
[00:18:29] That they have, but our team overall success may not be necessarily a contributing factor to their performance during their five minutes. Now, that's not to say in the future, it won't be, hence the reason why we're training so much, right? We're developing the athletes to be incredible machines going into their next year. So it's really important future success, much like a farmer would invest in the soil or in their crops for the next year's harvest. Same way as, you know, as coaches, as strength conditioning coaches, we need to invest in the next year of theirs performance. So we
[00:19:05] Have to mind the fields and crops and making sure that our plants are growing and growing stronger and going to have a great yield next harvest season or next basketball season. But we need to make sure that we're providing that stimulus on a consistent basis. Now, you know, balancing that consistency with flexibility in our programming for us is like, listen, if we know that predictably game day minus two that we're going to train and we're going to recover in game day minus one, but we're going to leave to go to say Salt Lake City on game day minus one immediately post practice.
[00:19:38] What are we doing from a consistency standpoint to make sure that our recovery modalities are strategies. What we're doing from a stretching mobility recovery standpoint is on par with what we do when we're home. So that way, there's a routine. We're not getting out of our routine. There's not changes of our routine. In addition, on game days, you know, whether it's our high minutes or low minutes, what are we doing to remain consistent with maybe the general ideas of some of the post-activation potential workouts that we do, whether it's a high-minute athlete or recovery or just getting
[00:20:12] Their mind right from us from an applied sports psychology standpoint going into game day from a routine standpoint. So all of those things need to be considered when we're traveling or we're on the road and we're having to make changes on the fly. So that's super important for us. I do want to kind of pivot a little bit and talk about making sure, again, when we do such a great job. And I'm sure most teams that travel, whether it's director of ops or if it's strength coaches or if it's RDS, but again, making sure that our athletes have consistent access to protein
[00:20:46] And take is critical for us. Just again, so much of what we want from a muscle retention standpoint, from a strength retention standpoint, from rejuvenation and recovery from bout to bout, from training to training from game to game. So making sure that our athletes have access to high-quality proteins, whether that's in the form of natural food, ideally, or if it's supplementation, secondarily. And then just logistically when we're traveling that they have access to that. So whether it's simple, travel-friendly protein like ready-to-drinks or powders or bars
[00:21:21] Or things, that's a sort of on an individual basis. We work with our athletes. Hey, you like the ready-to-drinks? You like the powders that come in a ready-to-drink sort of a protein shaker already like a disposable protein shaker that we have, but you like the bars. So really trying to work with them individually so that they have access to that. Now when we're sitting down for breakfast or team meals in the afternoon or if it's post-shoot around shakes or smoothies that get there, that's again another opportunity for them to have not only some level of protein in their diet
[00:21:58] To maintain some of the muscle mass, to maintain some of the strength that they've built, but also to make sure that they're getting a good mixture of different carbohydrates so that we can replenish some of the glycogen that they might have utilized during a high-intensity session or morning shoot around or a tough practice. So making sure that we look at their load management and then making sure that the loads that are being communicated with our coaching staff, our support staff, our administrative staff, our front office, all of those people that were managing
[00:22:32] And balancing those loads with adequate whether protein or carbohydrate supplementation and fueling strategies. So just making sure that our loading is on par with the calorie consumption and protein consumption and carbohydrate consumption so that our athletes are staying in tip-top shape ready to go with a good sound foundational nutritional strategy and with the nutrients that they need to be able to perform in a high level despite the many challenges of traveling and navigating different hotels and different fueling sources. Now I did mention this already in this show,
[00:23:13] This random show that one of the moves that we've had from the pack 12 to the big 12 is just the navigation of our training schedule. So I think I've talked about this in the last random show that I've had. However, in the pack 12, we would typically have game day minus four, which would be a plus one for us. That's our scheduled off day. That's when athletes aren't required to come in. That typically fell on a Monday for us, but I would still be in office and facilities. So athletes will come in and do some extra stretching. They wanted to do their conditioning. They could do it on that day
[00:23:49] As well based on how their bodies are feeling adapting, recovering, etc. Developmental athletes come in and get extra workout on that game day plus one minus four, but generally for most of our high-minute athletes, it's an off day. So they come in and do recovery strategies and utilize the modalities that we've had. All of that was at the discretion of our athletes. Now the next day, Tuesday would be game day minus three. Now for those athletes, that's our first training day. Sometimes we would approach that game day minus three as sort of like
[00:24:22] A very film-heavy day. Sometimes we would go in and we would kind of shake the dust off of the off day preceding it, and we would just have sort of like a moderate day or kind of a light moderate day just kind of getting into some things technically, tactically. We'd use that day to really load some of the lower workload athletes from the weekend series or games that we would have. And then we would go into our game day minus two. Now we would train on a game day minus three in the weight room. And that would be generally a pretty high CNS day, depending on what we do on the
[00:24:55] Core. If it's a moderate on the core, we kind of kept it more moderate. We tried to consolidate some of our loading strategies. So that would still be somewhat lower CNS if our court loads were somewhat lower. If it was a higher training day, we're going to kind of get after it after the weekend. We'd make that more of a higher CNS weight room challenging day. But game day minus two is typically always our high day. So that's the day where we would really be getting after our high speed running. We'd be going into some full court work. We'd be playing a little bit more live. And most of our
[00:25:26] Game day loads, if we didn't do the high CNS day, the day prior, we would certainly do it on a game day minus two. And then which typically corresponded at that time, that would be a Wednesday for us. We would have a prep practice game day minus one on Thursdays. That would be very heavy from a tactical standpoint of executing scout, understanding what we're trying to do, what we're trying to implement, what we're trying to guard, what we're trying to do defensively offensively, et cetera. That day would be a low CNS training day in our weight room. It'd be very focused on
[00:26:01] Sort of individual things. It would be mostly dynamic effort work somewhat from a post activation potentiating effect going into our game day cycle or a game day zero or true game day. But that would be what that would look like. And then we would go into our first game typically on Friday. We'd have an off day, or actually we would have game day minus one plus one on Saturday, somewhat stimulatory, but not exhausting very technically or tactically heavy in the execution for the scout and what we're doing strategically for the next day.
[00:26:39] And then Sunday would be our game day, right? And then that would be our full cycle. And then Monday would be off. It'd be our plus one minus four. Boy, things change though in the big 12. We do not have a game day minus four cycle. We have a lot of periodic and frequent game day minus two cycles two days in between bouts. So as an example, we'd get Sunday off. We'd have Monday would be game day minus two. It also would be plus two. So minus two plus two. We'd have game day minus one on Tuesday. And then we'd have our game day on Wednesday.
[00:27:19] We'd have again Thursday would be plus one from the Wednesday game, but minus two to the next game. And then Friday would be minus one. And then Saturday would be our next game. So we play games on Wednesday and Saturdays. Our prep practices are Tuesdays and Fridays. And then our real loading practices and some in some respects are Mondays and Thursdays. Sundays are off. So now we move from a you know, a four day cycle to a two day cycle. So it's a little bit more games are further spaced apart, rather than one day in between. Now we
[00:27:58] Have essentially two days in between a Thursday of Friday. And then we go into the next Saturday game. But our loading schedule has to change. And so it has to have taken an account for you know, three days out from a game where we would really sort of get after it or two days out. We now have to be a little bit more strategic with how we do that. So this is just another feather in the cap of why workload monitoring is so important to understand our high days to understand her low days to understand and have some guardrails aren't what we're doing. So the delirious effects
[00:28:32] Of one loading day doesn't creep into a game day. Making sure that our game days are high enough for our players to be stimulatory in effect. But also those athletes that might have lower minutes that we monitor their workloads and make sure that they're getting or at least reaching targets throughout the week to make sure that they stay relatively consistent with the workload or the averages of our team so that they stay prepared in case in case their time comes where they have to contribute a little bit more frequently to the team's success. So it's just really balancing
[00:29:06] Workloads, maintaining the sharpness, maintaining the readiness, the preparedness, first the readiness, that equilibrium that we talked quite a bit about. And that's been working really well. And this is we really leaned on a lot of the workload monitoring throughout this year is we navigate our first year back in the big 12 coming off the pack 12. The challenging is, I mean, as we all know, rosters change, personnel change, scheduling change, style of play can change. So all of those things need to take into account when we're looking at this year's workload averages for game day minus
[00:29:39] Two, game day minus one, what we do on and game days in comparison to the game day schedule or prep cycle that we would use in prior years in the pack 12. So that we've lost a little bit of some of that comparability as naturally as one would with game schedules and prep cycles and roster changes. But still we have a good idea of, you know, what's a hard day, what's a moderate day, what's an easy day. And then we still try to facilitate some of those targets based on a new game day prep cycles. Now that's been working for us. I would be remissed in this point of the decoding
[00:30:14] Excellence show 30 some minutes into this. A, I would be remissed if I didn't mention what I've been building. And this is sort of my subtle nod to everything. I've been working really hard behind the scenes of building a community resource for former athletes that have left university that have exhausted their eligibility that maybe didn't go on and play. Maybe they played professionally and then they they're entered back into the professional work life and now they're navigating life post sports. I have built a community that is perfect for former college athletes who crave
[00:30:54] That same structure and accountability and the coaching that they once had post sports life. And I've built this on a platform called school S K O O L dot com. This is the the community I built is called the former athlete society FAS. And it's my attempt to provide the same quality of coaching that you should have gotten during college to you now post collegially. And so there's several things that set this community apart from others. As far as I'm concerned, I've navigated a lot of different communities. I've learned a lot from different communities. Couple of things
[00:31:34] That I'm doing in this number one, I have the community discussion boards. This is like the forum, if you will. This is what I call the locker room where you get to have conversations with me. You can ask questions in it. You can share your wins, your losses, what your challenges are. We can have this lively conversation debate on this community discussion board or in the locker room, right? Now in addition, I also have the classroom. And this is where I post all of the content that I'm recording that I'm sharing webinars are call recaps. I'm sharing lessons in it.
[00:32:11] It's what you should have learned in college that maybe your shrink coach didn't get to share with you. And I'm trying to share all of this and disclose all of this and give you all of the tools to be successful as you navigate that transition from your playing days to your professional days. Now, I also have twice weekly costs. You can just jump in to these costs. It's on the calendar aspect of my school community. And I have an accountability call early in the week where we set our plans and we share them publicly. And we then go out the remaining of the week and we execute on
[00:32:46] Those plans. So this is what I call my accountability costs. You can jump in. You can share your plans with me. I'm going to share my plans with you. We can build some accountability together so that we stay committed to our goals. And then later in the week, I have a Q&A call. This is where you can discuss what's going wrong. You can ask questions to me and I can bring the almost 20 years of conditioning college, string conditioning experience I have. And I can bring those answers to you and maybe help you navigate some of the challenges that you're facing in your training week.
[00:33:17] In addition to that, I host once a month a deep dive, an hour long deep dive into a particular topic so that we can really dive deep into learning about a particular training methodology, something related to your body and how it adapts or recovers or grows stronger. I talk about nutrition in a general aspects of how you can maximize your nutrition post-collegiately. I talk about principles of applied sparkology so that you can really wrap your mindset around being the very best version of post-collegiately. I talk about recovery strategies, whether it's sleep or how to maximize your
[00:33:58] Recovery from training sessions, from sprinting sessions, from anything that you might be doing recreationally. I also talk about why training is important and I share different sets and reps and techniques and things and master classes on this. So all of that is in the deep dive. And I do that once a month. Everything, whether it's an accountability call, Q&A call or a master class is recorded video. And I share that in the classroom section. So even if you couldn't attend live, you can always watch those video tutorials and those sessions. Now, here's kind of a big part
[00:34:35] Of this is that in addition, every single time you like, you comment, you watch something, you earn points. Now, these points are kind of in the background, but there is a leader board, a community leader board that gets populated from a lifetime, from a daily, from a weekly, from a monthly standpoint. And what I'm doing is I'm giving out perks to those that are leading this leader board on a monthly basis. And the monthly winner, those that have the highest points at the end of the month will get free FRE access to any programming that they want delivered through
[00:35:13] Bridge training app. So this is the app that I partnered with. And I have a series of different training programs. I'm trying to think off the top of my head, jacked and strong. I have a female's program, I have a volleyball program, a basketball program, a general program, a weekend warriors program. So I have access to about six or seven different training programs that you will get absolutely free just by participating in something that's going to help you maximize your training, maximize your performance and help you reclaim the body and the performance that you once had
[00:35:46] As a college athlete. Now, the cool part of it in addition to all of those things is that for the very first 10 community members, former athletes that join this, you get it absolutely for free for life. How cool is that? So you just got to get in the community. And spots are filling up super fast. I think we're at like seven or eight right now. So minimal numbers. But once we get to 10, immediately, this thing converts over to a monthly subscription. So if you're one of the people that are listening to it, you have nothing to lose by jumping in the community right now,
[00:36:23] Signing up, getting armed boarded. All you got to do is enter your email, your name, and your armed boarded. And you get all of this stuff for free. And then in addition, if you are participating in the community regularly, frequently, so much so that you're on the top of the leader board at the end of the month, you get free training access to any programming that you want. So spots are filling fast. So head over to school.com. You can search for former athlete society. If you're like, I don't know about that, Adam, I want to learn more. You can head over to atom wringler.com
[00:36:57] Forward slash boy forward slash school S K O O L. And I have a landing page there that's talked about. It gives you a behind the scene access to what this is. Why have built it? Who it's for? Some testimonials. What I'm offering, you can find out all that information at that website, atom wringler.com forward slash school S K O O L. So that's kind of cool. I've been working on that for a little bit. I do have a couple Q and A session section questions that were submitted through two people from my school community. And I thought, hey, why not on the random show,
[00:37:38] I just kind of answer these. How do you balance recovery with maintaining intensity during long seasons? That's a challenging thing, right? We do have this. We know this as this particular former athlete who may be navigated her career four or five years in college. How do you balance recovery? Well, it's really sort of the understanding of how much are you doing right now? What is complementary to your sport, i.e. What are you doing in your sport natively jumping, running, sprinting, cutting, change of direction, contact, et cetera? What buckets do we need to fill with
[00:38:14] The training that you're not already getting with sport participation? So let's say you're jumping a lot in sports, right? I'm trying to think of an example where you're playing volleyball or something like that. You're jumping a lot. Then maybe in our training, we don't need to jump a lot, right? We can do something that might be stimulatory of a jump or complementary of a jump or supportive of a jump i.e. The structures that might maintain your ability to continue jumping in your sport participation, but we don't need to end up programming a lot more jumping because
[00:38:48] You're already doing all of those things through your sport participation. So some of the balanced recovery is just good programming, good strategic focused programming. Now, in addition to that, we can also look at the things or the tissues or the central nervous system, the qualities of movement kinematics, biomechanics that might support the maintenance of those things. So if we know that for every jump, you're making some ground contact, it's going to be high forces, it's going to be delivered through your anterior chain in a decelerate of nature. Then maybe focused recovery
[00:39:29] Strategies, soft tissue strategies for those anterior chain muscle regions and groups. So you can maintain your ability to keep jumping and handle the ground contact forces that you're going to be exposed to through repetitive jumping. So that might be a way that you balance recovery. Maybe through the use of, again, we talked about soft tissue, but maintenance of mobility and ranges of motion. That might be necessary to continue your participation in the sport that you're playing. Maybe making sure that we have a pulse on different wellness metrics through the use of wellness
[00:40:10] Questionnaires or conversations so that now we know when an athlete is a little bit more fatigued from a central nervous systems standpoint, maybe we have some type of CNS testing that we're doing through the use of force plates or a hand grip dynamometer so that we're maintaining some level of focus attention on an athlete's disturbances to their CNS and then applying appropriate stress or removal of stress during those periods of disturbances. That could be a way of balancing your recovery, but so much of that is individual, right? And having a good idea of how the individual
[00:40:51] Is tolerating the stressors that they're exposed to, what they're doing from a stressor standpoint and making sure that we have appropriate strategies to help enhance that. The last question I want to answer, I'm reading it right now, through our school community group. How do you know when an athlete is overreaching or overtraining? That can be a complex question when we start to look at things like reds or things that are very specific to female athlete population, but as a general response to this question, I will say what we see when an athlete
[00:41:30] Is overreaching is we start to see disturbances in their muscular skeletal testing. So let's say disturbances on their Nordboard or their force frame or groin squeeze will see losses as far as like a relative peak power or general peak power when it comes to a counter movement jump on a force plate. We could see things as disturbances in their breaking impulses or eccentric breaking pauses RNA CMJ. We could see disturbances when an athlete is overreached or particularly more overtrained. Their eccentric duration can be somewhat disturbed and changed. You can see
[00:42:15] Eccentric range of motion decreased as well. So athletes aren't going down as far. So they limit their range of motion. Also, they may take longer on their eccentric. So they're just a little slower going into that eccentric or that counter movement aspect of a counter movement jump. You could see more accelerated or concentric impulse being changed as well as they just don't have the same takeoff velocity that they once had because they're CNS is a little bit disturbed or a little down regulated. Some of the other things you could see as far as overreaching, you have your
[00:42:53] Classic timgabit, different algorithmic calculations that can be highlighted if you will. So something like an exponentially weighted moving average ACWR or acute to chronic workload ratio, you have your classic acute to chronic workload ratio that can at least give some indication that maybe the acute period of training exceeds their chronic training stress balance or their chronic workloads that they've had over the last whatever duration of time that you might want to have this ratio look at whether it's exponentially weighted or whether it's just an acute to chronic period. All of those things
[00:43:35] Can be somewhat indicative of overreaching or overtraining. You could see things like hand grip, detonometer, force production, decrease. So whether it's a dominant arm or non-dominant arm and you're doing a grip squeeze test and you can see total forces start to be diminished through central nervous system fatigue. You could see things just as easy as a wellness questionnaire starting to have whether it's a like or scale or any other modified scale. You could see the readiness to train qualitative question decrease in value so that maybe they just don't want to train.
[00:44:15] They don't feel excited to train. The ability to train or show up to practice is decreased. That might be an indication of overreaching or overtraining and then maybe lastly the onset of some type of immunocompromised condition. So sickness, illness, runny noses, respiratory illness, things like that, general fatigue, soreness, achy joints, all of those things can be warning signs if you will of overreaching or overtraining that we just need to pay attention of as we go through a long season or we go through different intense periods of training. So I just want to wrap the show
[00:44:53] Up. I don't want this to be super long. I wanted to make sure that I put a bow tie on this. We talked a little bit about workload monitoring and basketball, how to navigate training on the road, adapting workouts without changing the complete framework of our training cycles. The importance of protein supplementation and carbohydrate supplementation, whether it's through foods or through supplementation is really important. Some of the changing dynamics of our game day cycles, whether it's moving from a four day cycle to a two day cycle. As we navigated
[00:45:27] The conference realignment from Pac-12 to Big 12, I did want to again just to wrap up about former athlete society where you can find some of that information at mringler.com forward slash school SKOOL and then trying to spend a little time answering some of the school community submitted questions. So as always, I just wanted to thank you for tuning into this show and that's going to be it from Salt Lake City out here in beautiful Utah. And thank you so much for supporting the show and listening to the show. Hey everybody, that's going to be it for this Decoding Excellence Show. I hope
[00:46:05] You took something away from this show. I had a fun time recording it. And just as a recap, we talked about workload monitoring, we talked about training basketball athletes on the road, whether or not you took something away from my discussion about our framework and how we have to adjust and periodize and adapt our training programs around what we're doing and how our travel logistics looks like. I talked about some protein supplementation and real food options when it comes to carbohydrate intake and why that's so important for our athletes when we're traveling and when we're on the road.
[00:46:40] I did share some of our challenges, if you will, from moving from a four-day prep cycle to a two-day and some of the changes and considerations I've had to make. Now, one of the ways that you can support this show. Now, there's two really. You could go to adamringler.com forward slash newsletter. You can sign up for my newsletter. And in this, you're going to get access to everything, the cool things that I discover from a monthly basis, new books I'm reading, things I'm discovering, articles that I've found related to support science that's really cool
[00:47:19] And coaching. So, pop in your email there. And that is just an easy way of supporting the show. And you'll get free behind-the-scenes access to all the cool things I'm discovering. There's a second way that you can support the show. If you are a former college athlete, I invite you to my school community page SKOOL. And it's called the Former Athlete Society. You can sign up. It's perfect for former college athletes who want that same structure, that same accountability, the same coaching. You can head over to adamringler.com forward slash
[00:47:53] School SKOOL. And you can sign up. And the first 10 people that sign up, you'll get it absolutely for free. After that, it's going to end up being $30 a month subscription fee. So, join us now. Spots are filling up. And then, the very last thing I will say is if you took anything away from this Decoding Excellence Show, do me this favor and share it with a colleague. Share it with somebody in our industry. Just send it to them and say, hey, I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. And particularly if they're working in the basketball space, if they've been in college sports for a
[00:48:27] While, all of the things that I've shared is not just specific to basketball. It is applicable to any other sport, any other conference, any other game day prep, all of these things, these lessons are universal. So, I invite you please share it with another colleague in our industry. And let's help each other get better and continue to grow and learn from each other. The wins, the losses, the success, the failures, share all of these things with each other because it makes our industry stronger. So, I appreciate you listening to the show. And until next time, thank you.