Today’s show features Jeremy Frisch and Calin Butterfield.  Jeremy is the owner and director of Achieve Performance Training in Clinton, Mass, has been a multi-time guest on the show with all-things youth and creative training, game-play and long-term development.  Jeremy is not only a strength coach, but also has skin in the game as a youth sports coach, and provides an incredible holistic perspective on the entire umbrella of athletic development.  Calin Butterfield is the high performance manager at U.S. Ski & Snowboard.  He worked for EXOS for about 8 years as a Coach across all different spaces including Phoenix, Dallas, SF at Ft. Bragg, Adidas America, and the Mayo Clinic.  Calin and Jeremy are working together now on concepts related to long term development of ski and snowboard athletes.

So often, we have our “standard plyometric battery” in performance training, but we cling to these fundamentals hard when we would be served well to be observing jump training and movement in a variety of mediums to create ideas for our plyometric progression.  Studying athletes in sports that demand fast reactions, impactful landings, high risk, and rewards for creativity have a lot to offer when it comes to looking at our own training designs for the athletes we serve.

Together, Jeremy and Calin will talk about their collaboration together with skiing, the use and progression of games with young athletes up to college level, plyometric progressions and advancing complexity, and how the natural warmup process in ski and snowboard (terrain park) can give us ideas that we can port over into how we can prepare athletes for sport.  There is a lot of great information in this podcast that can be useful for sport coaches, strength coaches and skiiers alike.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster.



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Timestamps and Main Points

05:25 – The background of Calin and Jeremy’s careers and collaboration

08:30 – How does gameplay fit into a sport like skiing?

16:42 – When people tend to peak in skiing and snowboarding and how this fits into proportion of game play at different ages

24:18 – The power in connecting to the outcome and having multiple avenues to get to that outcome

27:02 – Attrition from training + creating enjoyable training experiences for kids

36:48 – How autonomy and feedback in the warm-up process changes as athletes get older and the reality of “perfect landings” in plyometric exercise

41:52 – The relationship between landing variability and chronic sport landing overload

45:57 – Reducing training down to information + plyometrics and progressions in skiing and snowboarding

48:03 – Long-term development in skiing and supplementing with traditional land-based training

52:37 – What it looks like to build an athlete up in high-adrenaline sport training

55:22 – How the aerial nature of skiing and snowboarding have an impact on Jeremy and Calin in their training process



“[Skiing is] an early engagement sport, technically, like there’s skills that you have to learn from a sliding perspective, but that oftentimes turns into really early specialization and spending too much time skiing.”

“The mentality of most of the athletes that make it to a high level in ski racing or free skiing… is intense, it’s almost like dare devil, formula one… The game aspect and how it translates into sport, I think, is very much on the physical side. I think the mental side is completely unique.”

“What we try to do… is really just force environments that get them to explore their bodies, their joints, how to maneuver around certain objects or other people, and really just try to get the out of their comfort zone and using games, it’s a lot more fun for them.”

“We so underestimate the difference between a child and an adult and keeping people in flow states. I just think that’s such a mistake that’s proliferated.”