Today’s episode features Jake Schuster, sports performance coach, consultant and researcher hailing from Boston, Massachusetts

Jake has his MSc from renowned Loughborough University in the UK and completed work towards his doctorate in New Zealand with the national Rugby Sevens teams through the Rio Olympics. He has published in the on both rugby and force velocity profiling and has several ongoing research projects further detailing what exactly it is that makes people fast, and how they can get faster.

Jake has spent that past year working as the Senior Sports Scientist for Vald Performance, traveling the world visiting elite sporting clients and getting a unique insight into global best practices.

Jake previously appeared on episode #109 where he talked at length on how he was integrating cutting edge exercises and technology into a training model for track and field athletes, particularly sprinters featuring his utilization of Alex Natera’s isometrics and force plate analysis.  Jake’s knowledge and abilities are a very impressive blend of both understanding science and data trends, while also having a creative and integrative coaching mind.  This integrative ability is just one thing that makes me thrilled to have Jake back for another episode.

On today’s show, Jake and I discuss the optimal relationship between sport science and coaching (if you aren’t in a high performance department you may want to skip to around the 30:00 mark in the show), speed development and hamstring injury prevention, evolving thoughts on Frans Bosch work, robust running and water bags, concepts from force plates that show up in acceleration, 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

International differences in sport science utilization
How Jake sees the optimal relationship between sport science/data and the art of coaching
Speed development and hamstring injury prevention in the context of team sports
Jake’s evolving thoughts on the work of Frans Bosch and waterbag training
Force plate’s transfer to other skills aside from vertical jumping and landing
Aspects of force plate measurements that transfer highly to acceleration
Questions and topics for this year that Jake is considering




“The best and first question (in a sport science/monitoring situation) is to talk to the athlete”

“(Regarding the interaction of sport science and coaching) People don’t talk to each other now, we are always on our phones, looking at numbers”

“The teams that have very few injuries, especially running soft tissue injuries, they make darn sure that their athletes are exposed to maximum velocity running very often.  At least once every 5 days.  The teams that say “80%’s fine… they often have more (hamstring injuries)”

“The eccentric hamstring question… if anyone thinks it’s still a question, then they are paying too much attention to twitter”

“We have one identified, modifiable risk factor for hamstring injuries in the literature and that is eccentric hamstring strength, and we have a whole lot of research underneath that that shows that it is fascicle length that is one of the main morphological determinants and we can affect that with eccentric hamstring training”

“One of my favorite variables on a force plate is eccentric deceleration rate of force development; how fast we can brake”

“The countermovement test (on a force plate) is an idiot proof test of neuromuscular status”

“Concentric rate of power development gets absolutely caned on twitter for whatever odd reason… it’s a brilliant metric… if they just named it acceleration nobody would say anything because we are looking at watts per second… when we saw that go up in sprinters their 60m improved and their coach said they were getting b...