Today’s episode features Fergus Connolly, renowned expert on team performance success factors and holistic integration and welcomes back coach Cameron Josse, director of sports performance for DeFranco’s Training Systems.

When it comes to athletics and sports performance, we tend to start in the world of muscles, forces, tissues and exercise physiology.  What isn’t often covered when working with athletes is the multi-factorial considerations that go into actually winning ball games such as game speed, ball speed, technical abilities, tactics and psychological considerations.  One of my favorite quotes on the industry of strength and conditioning is from Mark Watts, which basically says, “don’t take credit for your teams wins when you won’t take credit for their losses”.

Most strength coaches want to be able to play a greater role in what it takes to win a ball game than just getting athletes stronger, since eventually that becomes an end unto itself.  On the flip side, sport coaches having a better knowledge of exactly how strength and fitness (and the specificity of that fitness) fit into gameplay helps the total effort of training athletes become better.  To create a better model that can help all parties working with the athlete work in better cohesion, Fergus and Cameron teamed up to write “The Process”.  which is a follow up to Fergus’s renowned book “Game Changer”, on holistic factors in sport success.

Today’s podcast is all about the big picture in what it takes to win games, write great training programs from a team sport perspective, and integrate the goals of the sport coaches with strength training more optimally.  It also draws many parallels between concepts such as “short to long” in track and field and in the technical development of team sport athletes, as well other similarities in building a “base of technique” and working from “little to big”.  Other concepts discussed include the 4 Coactive Model of athletic success, the importance of a unified model of winning factors, trends in a successful training week, 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.


 




Key Points

Why it is important for a strength and conditioning/sports performance coach to understand a unified model of factors that lead teams to win games
The role of fitness and conditioning in a unified model of sports performance, and how “lack of fitness” often takes the fault in a loss
Trends in a successful sport practice training week in team sports/field sports with the goal of optimizing all four elements in the 4-Coactive model
What a “Morphocycle” training template looks like for team sport training
Cameron and Fergus’ take on building game speed and the role of the strength coach
How to optimize sport movement and game speed training from a “small” to “big” manner




“If we have this game model approach, then we can communicate that to the entire staff” ~Josse

“Nobody asks you what your bench is or your squat is when you walk on the field, it’s can you play the game.  If we focus on adding 5 more pounds on a bench or squat, that’s not really solving the problem” ~Connolly

“I see a lot of strength coaches nowadays that want to have too much control over the whole process (of game conditioning)” ~Josse

“The game is what’s most important so we’re looking at all the layers that go into that preparation process leading into that game, and that’s got to align all four co-activates, and by four co-actives, we’re referring to tactical preparation, technical preparation, psychological preparation and physical preparation” ~Josse

“They are starting to understand two key things (the importance of) the alignment and cohesiveness between all the different stakeholders in the team’s operation, and second, the ability to reduce the total amount of work the players ...