Today’s guest is athletic performance coach and consultant, Sam Portland. Sam has had a lengthy career in professional sport, and is the creator of “Speed Gate Golf” and the Sports Speed System.  Sam provides mentorship and education to coaches, athletes and teams looking to further progress their abilities.  His combination of skills ranges from physical coaching, to sport coaching, athlete psychology and beyond.

With the impending AI and technological revolution, we must ask ourselves questions regarding the nature of coaching, training and progression in athletics.  On one hand, we have numerical outputs and data points relative to an athlete’s abilities, workloads, and suggested training routes, and on the other we have the social-emotional and intuitive elements that are much more human by nature.  In a sense, what is the most human about coaching itself is the “conversation of training” that happens on multiple levels within any training session.

For today’s podcast, we cover the types of intensity and mentality that go into playing various sports (such as Rugby vs. American Football), Sam’s take on sport training technology, such as force-velocity profiling, an athletes “speed age” and how athletes progress through each level, and finally, we’ll get into the 5 types of player archetypes that range from bodybuilder, to sprinter, and how coaches can identify and optimize training for each unique athlete they train.  This is a show that highlights how having experience and skin in the game, not only training, but also playing the game

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Timestamps and Main Points
3:29 – Sam’s experience working with, and playing American Football in Europe

8:00 – The types of intensity that is present in different types of sports, such as continuous sports (rugby, soccer) vs. interval sports (American football)

18:12 – Sam’s thoughts on Force Velocity profiling and technology in speed and game-speed training

30:41 – What Sam values in a speed and game-speed training program as opposed to a more data-oriented, mechanistic approach to speed

37:15 – Thoughts on heavy sled training and heavy resisted training in general

44:06 – Sam’s take on “Speed Age” in athletes, and how he looks at speed training progressions over time

59:13 – The importance of complexity and psychology in the process of coaching, and the conversation that happens between coach and athlete

1:06:50 – The 5 archetypes of athletes Sam categorizes and considers through the sport and physical preparation process

1:18:18 – Approaching the “games player” archetype in particular from a physical preparation perspective



Sam Portland Quotes
“With American football, one of the toughest things was that the play wasn’t building in front of me (like Rugby), the play was building behind me”

“How do people become successful coaches? It is intuition, and it is getting reps on the field”

“Nothing’s changed in the last 30 years, it’s the experience of the coach that creates the change, and we should do that by playing, 100%”

“In part, the strength and conditioning problem is that everyone wants to develop speed, but they start in the gym”

“I got more guys that run over 21 miles per hour, just by doing long accelerations, and specialized developmental exercises that I stole from Verkhoshansky”

“I believe we are in the tech age… you remember when the first computer came out, we are literally there”

“Movement is a conversation… everyone watches a wave break,