How Olympic Athletes Actually Train for Speed | Ben Simons | Ep 62

0:00Ben Simons, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. For the people who may not know who you are or may not have heard of you, would you just be able to sum yourself up? Yeah, so I'm Ben Simons. I'm a former Olympic bobsledder. Online, I go by the name Ben the Bounce. So I put quite a lot of content out around speed, plyometrics, power and strength conditioning on Instagram. And yeah, that's about it really. I'm a coach and former athlete. that's the best way I can describe me. I don't think I've actually seen a person jump as high or as explosive as yourself on the internet. It's crazy. If you look down your feed, like say, if you go to Ben the Balance Instagram now and just have a look at everything that you've done, like it's insane.

0:47Like just watching it. And that's just like one aspect, obviously to know that you're, is it three-time Olympian? Two-time. Two-time Olympian. Which years were them? 2012, 2016? It was 14, 18. Oh, 14, 18. Sorry, sorry. Winter Olympics, should we say. Yeah, two years later. Yeah. Yeah. How did it all start? Like, how did you even get into bobsleigh? Because I feel like bobsleigh is one of them sports that people don't really train for, like, as soon as they get into sport. They kind of fall into it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a talent transfer sport, apart from some, you know, rare cases in Germany.

1:26and I think Korea a few years ago when they were pushing for the 2018 Olympics, there were people coming in kind of grassroots straight into the sport. But yeah, it's a talent transfer sport. And it was the same for me. I knew nothing about it, but obviously cool runners, right? Watched out when I was a kid. That was what I knew about it and what most people knew about it. But then I'd hear rumors about kind of these beasts that did bobsleigh. A big kind of 100 kilo, fast, powerful guys. But there just didn't seem to be any natural entry into the sport. It is a talent transfer sport, and especially in the UK, because we don't have ice.

2:05But what they do do, UK sport and British bobsleigh are good at doing talent ID. So they go around essentially doing combines, where they test a load of athletes, they see what your attributes are, and then they'll funnel you into different sports, bobsleigh and skeleton being one. Those are the ice sports that they often funnel people into. So yeah, I was at university. I was a track and field athlete and I was at university down in Cardiff. And I'm not joking. I saw a poster on the wall saying, could you push for your country? And there was four big guys jumping into a sled and there was some trials.

2:44And I thought, you know what? I'll give that a go. And I knew people that had gone through the skeleton talent ID process from sprinting. And I thought, you know what? I could probably do that. I didn't think I'd make it through to bobsleigh because at that point I was only 78 kilos and traditionally they wanted 100 kilo guys. But the tests look really good. It was like 45 meter sprint, standing broad jump, squat and bench press, if I remember rightly. And they were tests that I really liked. Were you training all these back then? I was already training those like tests. So we did a lot of those tests as a long jumper.

3:22those were tests that we all did like even bench press was something we did just for gross upper body strength but especially a 45 meter sprint and a standing broad jump it's just money i'm like yeah i'm gonna have a go at that just to put some numbers down so i went along to that test and they were so impressed by the numbers they said look you've got the raw ability here for acceleration like your strength is good relative to your size but we're looking for growth strength here so if you can put some weight on over a few years then you've got potential basically so come to bath and push so what a lot of people don't know is that in the university of bath we've got a dry land push track so it's essentially like a sled on wheels there's a little artificial hill that's been made and you can go and test that and there was a certain time that you had to push to get through to the next stage so at this point and it's often the case after an olympic games there's a big influx of people who are interested i think this time around after milan there was maybe 7 000 applicants a lot of people apply and go and get tested and it's like I suppose the x factor at that point people get cut at every stage so the push track was a stage where you've got to hit this time and you can actually get through to the next stage so I hit a really good time straight out of the gate really on the push track and at that point I started thinking I think I've found a bit of a niche here that really suits me and at that point I just had to get in the gym and get some size on me.

4:47So you started off 78 kg. Yeah. How much did that progress over the years? Yeah. So, I mean, I peaked out at about 96, 97 K. How did you even go about that as well? Because like there'll be a lot of people listening to this who struggle to put on weight. Yeah. Struggle to put on weight, especially like in the gym of like, because I assume obviously you're going to put on maybe a little bit of fat, but really it's going to be muscle that you want. Yeah. Yeah. I was quite lucky with body comp. I was always naturally lean back then. I think with the volume of track and field sprint, jump training volume is actually surprisingly high just for the mileage of sprint work and even kind of sub maximum velocity sprint work like tempo work is very, very high volume of training.

5:37And then the culture is obviously to be as light as possible so I think calories were probably restricted more than I considered back then so honestly straight off the bat it was drop the tempo work increase the weight work a little bit it wasn't massive it was just five times five at that point across the power lift so it's really five times five power clean squat bench maybe RDL three times a week then just drop that tempo volume and then really it was just not minding what I ate so like just not even really managing my diet just eating everything that I wanted to and eating as much as I could until I was full because I've never had a problem really with body composition in retrospect I'd have done it cleaner just I think for performance but yeah the first 10 kilos went on pretty quickly so in the first year i put on eight to ten kilos but i was still quite a long way off what they'd want to be optimal as a bobsledder and the other thing that came with that was injuries like putting on that much weight that quickly there's just so much more weight on your frame and so much more forces on your connective tissue that i ended up getting into trouble with injuries at that point i would have done it i don't know if i would have done it slower because i had to because it was within 18 months I was um well within yeah 18 months I was at the Sochi Olympics so I had to do it quickly yeah oh yeah so it was like I showed a lot of talent in the push but I didn't physically have the weight I think what a lot of people aren't going to realize is in bobsled there's a there's a maximum weight of the crew and the sled and if you don't make up that weight in actual crew members you want the sled to be at max weight so you're going to put ballast into the sled so you put like lead weights in there so that was illegal in cool runnings that's what john candy i think got banned for that was a story but actually no that's that's legal in modern bobsleigh and so why did that become legal i think just because they were they didn't want people just being big for the sake of being big i don't know what the actual reason was for them changing it but i think there was a point where the sleds were just getting too fragile for the size of athlete so sleds were breaking because they were trying to maximize the size of the crew and then minimize the size of the weight because that apparently gave the best uh top speed so they brought in like a minimum weight of the sled and a maximum weight of the sled and crew and then within that you're allowed to put weight in i suppose that opens the doors up for someone who might not be physically able to hit them like you say 100 kg whatever it was uh for that max weight and still you know someone who still has talent so it's fair yeah yeah that was it so if you could if you could still perform but with a little bit more weight in the sled then it's all good right and so that was the disadvantage that the lighter athletes were against so for every kilo that i was away from like the optimal weight which would have been 105 kilos there's extra kilo going against me in the sled so you're pushing a heavier weight yeah so it works it works two ways against you really and how tall are you uh six one six one so 105 kg like it's it's big it's big yeah it's big a lot of the guys are taller you know but then you don't you want to be so tall that you're sticking out the sled you know but a lot of the guys are six three six four and you know you get some the the thing is because it's a mat because it's a maximum weight of the crew you might get one guy who's like 115 which means that another guy can be 95 because the average weight is m10 five so you do get a little bit of different stature sometimes but what you're finding is the best crews are starting to all come within a certain kind of weight range from like 100 to 110 kilos yeah no interesting and you mentioned before that to put on mass you was just doing like your typical compound movements uh whether that's bench press uh squat power clean and then i think you said rdl yeah did you find that just doing these three times a week did you have to do much to like much else to withstand and keep your sprint speed because obviously he was pretty fast yeah yeah interestingly no this is one thing that i think is it's an interesting experience i kept getting faster with that extra weight and even some of my teammates had the same experience i had a teammate that ended up running sub 10 for the 100 he came into bobsleigh at 10.5 and within i think four years of bobsleigh and he ran sub 10 in the 100 at that point i think was the third fastest ever by a britain and he'd done the same thing came in at like 80 kilos and was like 95 by the time he ran that that time and so i think the idea that body mass is always going to hold you back speed wise it doesn't quite ring true for some people and it didn't for me but the other thing i want to take into account was i went in at 24 and then was running my fastest uh sprint speeds at like 20 28 29 30 so there was always going to be natural progression there so yeah the extra weight didn't hold me back but was that just natural progression of me maturing anyway but i mean i'll never know but i got significantly significantly quicker despite being a lot heavier yeah yeah i feel like that that just explains bobsleigh like what kind of athlete you've got to be like you've got to be strong powerful but to run a 10 second 100 meter or you know even 11 second or whatever like it's so fucking fast and you're such incredible athletes that are going into that sport i don't feel like people expect that you say that you do bobslaying and they're like all right okay you just must be really skilled at flying down ice yeah but really like you're this athlete that you'd probably beat most athletes whether it's a nfl whether it's football premier league football whether it should be like you'd be a lot more of an athlete than them guys there's there's a lot of freaks in the sport and i think the one of the reasons is because it's so niche of strength and power you can train just for that so you don't get the interference from other elements that other athletes might be training like endurance elements skill elements in like field sports we do just get to train to be strong fast and big which is cool there's not many things that you can do that with and then yeah for people that most people obviously don't know the sport i think they're going to consider it's the skill element of actually driving down the ice but only one person is responsible for that and there's a pilot that sits at the front but he does still have to push as well so the pilots are athletes as well as drivers essentially so they've got both skills and i think it's really only in the strength conditioning community when people people are kind of aware of the level of athlete that they need to be i think social media is helping that a little bit now there's a few athletes out there that are showcasing their strength and power feats of athleticism.

12:51I suppose I was one of them really on Instagram and other socials. People are starting to realize that there's some real freaks in the sport. Yeah, let's just go through your figures for people who don't know. So you mentioned before, broad jump. Yeah. What's your numbers for that? Yeah, 358 is my best broad jump. So three meters 58. Yeah, that's 11 foot something for any Americans listening. I don't know exactly, but yeah, 358, which is probably one of my best performance metrics. What about height? Do you do much height? So vertical, vert is an interesting one, right? Because people will always argue about the way that it's measured.

13:27So when you hear people talk about, I've got this vert, often it's like a high touch in basketball. But if you do a vert on like a force plate, then it usually comes out much lower. So what we call a counter movement jump in testing. So we always did counter movement jumps. and my best counter movement jump was around 78 centimeters um that was hands on hips as well so that's a very it probably doesn't like that yeah it doesn't represent like max max vert but like max vert with um with a run-up was like like height touch just over a meter when i was when i was jumping which is pretty good but one another thing that we now get with social media is we get filtered the most athletic craziest feats of like human performance like every day so whereas back in the day that would be not very common you're going to see a vertical of that height you're getting dunkers now with like plus 45 inch verticals like all over the place i say all over the place i might i might have seen maybe 10 or 12 on instagram but that's out of however many billion people there are in the world because we get to see them all now whereas back in the day, like something like that, you didn't really get to see because it's also niche, right?

14:40You don't see it in the Olympic games, like a high touch vertical jump. Maybe all of those people would have been in volleyball or basketball. So we didn't actually get to see their raw ability, but right now we're seeing some crazy feet. So yeah, vertical jumpers. What about the sprinting? Sprints? Yeah. So when I was sprinting and I didn't sprint after 21, I think I stopped around 10, seven when I was 21. Um, and then I jumped seven, I think seven 20 when I was 21 in a long jump as well. Um, they're, they're all right. Yeah. They're all right. And really my peak. So I got a lot quicker when I came into bobsleigh.

15:20So we did 60 meter tests quite often through timing gates. And I did drop three tents off over 60 within a couple of years, bobsleigh and so yeah like if i'd have carried on in the 100 like uh in track and field i probably would have dropped an all right time but the thing is it would still be nothing of note it wouldn't get me to any national team or any kind of championships or anything like that so i definitely picked the right path for me i was much better at push the sleds yeah because i'd always die at the end of the 100 i'd be out at 60 and then just fall off a cliff it's like someone and put a parachute on me yeah that is crazy and bob's then it's not for the faint hearted like what speeds do you get up to so we actually held the world speed record for a while my crew we were the first sled to ever go 97 miles an hour 97 in this like little container yeah basically a bathtub yeah it's nothing but it's a frame and it's carbon fiber no seat belts no no no comfort either like you i think this is one thing i didn't realize they're just they're because they're so built for performance and because it's only a minute a run they're not worried about comfort if you're getting bruised and banged and bashed around it doesn't matter it's about how quick the sled goes so it's very uncomfortable yeah and the g forces i mean the first run i ever did i'm a bit of a daredevil i like to say that i'm a bit of a daredevil you have to be for that sport do you know what no no honestly i've been really surprised so i went in as this like daredevil first rundown was completely disorientated it felt like i'd been pushed off niagara falls in a wheelie bin i didn't know where i was as soon as the g-force hit it was like there's a fridge on my back i could literally when i kept my eyes open i could see like all of the fluid from my head just draining out of my nasal cavity into like the front of the helmet crazy experience and i thought man if if that was my experience i don't know how some of these lads are going to handle it but some people that you just wouldn't expect to be not bothered by it were just fine yeah i think that i've met so many great competitors that despite the fear and how uncomfortable it is they're just so fearless in the pursuit of greatness they will just they will put themselves in crazy amount of risk and a crazy amount of discomfort just to reach greatness which is really inspiring actually i was so inspired by the guys that i thought that weren't necessarily daredevils and would probably rather be anywhere else in the world than sliding down an ice track but they would put everything into it and wouldn't complain at all just because they wanted to reach greatness simple as that really what are the have you ever measured the g-force do you know what yeah we had um how much did we get we had we did put a gyro in the front of a sled once so mclaren were developing a sled for us a few years ago and they were measuring a lot of the forces and if i remember rightly i can't remember the units i think it was six g's one of the corners yeah i think five or six g's one of the corners that we were testing at it wasn't even the worst track in the world and it was also at the front of the sled there is a whip effect so the sled's pretty long number four that sits in the back gets a bit more of a whipping effect a bit more g-force so yeah it could be plus six i think in some places have you ever been with anyone in your team when they passed out yeah yeah a couple of times what's that like hopefully not the pilot um yeah yeah i've been been in there with a knocked out pilot before yeah what'd you do uh try to shook him awake yeah yeah so there's been a couple of times one time we didn't even crash so when you crash in in bobsleigh it's exactly the same as cool running so you flip off the end of a corner most most of the time and then you have to go all the way down the track on your head with the sled on top of you basically that's what a basic crash is in bobsleigh but this on this occasion it wasn't even the crash one of my teammates who um actually was the gladiator phantom in gladiators last year all right okay toby so he's like six foot five he's a tall guy and we were going down lake placid which is very violent track and just the violence of the corners i think knocked him out so or he passed out so we got to the breaking straight which is where the sled comes to a halt and everybody pulls their head up because the run's over and he's just still kind of just bobbing along and i'm like is he good i'm like kind of shake him awake and he was like yeah i just kind of lost it for a moment there and then another time we crashed and the pilot had hit his head so we crashed and we came back onto our feet and so we come back onto our feet and then i'm looking forward i'm like i shouldn't be seeing the track here and i should be the pilot's head in front of me looking at where we're going but the pilot was just there like knocked out so i'm like shaking him awake and then he kind of comes around pops his head up and continues driving again yeah yeah so there was some hairy moments for sure yeah yeah and what's your experience with the olympics like the winter olympics like obviously you've been twice has it progressed in the time like from when you started in the olympics to now like we just obviously i feel like the whole world watched the most recent winter olympics and everyone got behind it and for and i feel like this is probably every time but for for for them brief periods like the whole world was just watching and in awe of the winter Olympics and saying, oh, I want to, I want to do this.

21:03I want to try this. I want to do that. Is it getting bigger and bigger? Do you know what? I'm not, I'm not sure. I think, I think it's always been big. Like if you look at viewership numbers, especially like Olympic opening ceremonies, they're always huge for both like the summer and winter games. And then viewership is still pretty high. I think the Olympics still have to do a lot to keep up with the way the world of sport is moving. And I think they try that with introducing newer sports and exciting sports. Like in the winter sports, you've got a lot of the freestyle events. It took a while for half pipe, slope style, and a lot of these to come in.

21:42So it's always kind of traditional versus new school battling it out. And they have to give way to some more like new school events to make sure that it keeps people's interest in there. So it's not too archaic while keeping some of the traditional events in there. but I would say it's also interesting how different each one is depending on like the funding of that games. So for example, I competed at two, I was at three games. So I went to Beijing as well as part of the team. But so Sochi 2014, Pyeongchang, which was Korea 2018, and then Beijing 2022. Sochi was crazy. I think it's still the most expensive Olympic game, summer or winter in history there was just so much money pumped into it and the infrastructure they built high-speed rail from the coast into the mountains there was just so much money spent on it and it did feel that way it felt pretty big pretty grand whereas pion chang was a lot more on a budget and it felt that way didn't feel as grand and then beijing again was huge it felt really grand you can feel it in the village you go from like a very uh substantial like three-story building huge village with like an underground um transport system walking system good food hall and stuff like that which was my experience in Sochi and Beijing Pyeongchang was a lot on a smaller scale you know and so you get very different experiences people would talk about old Olympic Games that they'd been to like I think Turin 2006 apparently the village wasn't like fully finished and like yeah you get different experiences at each each games I think depending on how well they do with the infrastructure and building it but yeah it was good to see Milan obviously got it was the first time for me like not actually being there in like three Olympic cycles so watching it from the outside so when you're in the bubble it's really weird because you do feel for like two weeks of your life you're in the center of the universe it's a really weird feeling because it's like all eyes on you you're cocooned in this bubble in this village and this time I was outside the bubble looking in and I was actually commentating on the races as well so that was a really different experience but it was great to see everybody get behind it and I think social media changes things now as well so it used to be okay it's on the tv I might watch it in passing or there might be a couple of events I'm really interested in that I'll actually watch but now a lot of the time it's people talking about have you seen this event have you seen this crazy thing that happened there's a lot more clipping of crazy things that are going on and obviously in the olympic games there's some pretty extreme examples of crazy stuff going on in some of these events you've got um like the snow cross the ski cross and the snowball cross you've got these crazy events with people crashing out of the track and stuff like you've got crashes in Bob's Day and Skeleton.

24:41You've got the stories of these small, like tropical nations that will come and compete in ice sports. There's a lot of like clippable, I think little bites that go into socials now. So I think that ironically is actually keeping interest and viewership up for the winter games. Yeah, you almost can't get away from it. Yeah, when it's on us everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. And what were kind of like the living situations like? with like was it because you get like mixed reviews especially with like the summer olympics like as well it's quite a few people that have been and a lot of people like complained about paris for example um is it is it nice the winter olympics or is it just it's pretty basic yeah yeah it's pretty basic again it did differ the the villages differed quite a bit um the three games that i went to beijing was like a hotel yeah it was really really good accommodation um pion chang was very very basic and they cram a lot of you into a small space as well so you're always sharing rooms and you can be sharing rooms for what two three weeks yeah yeah depending on how long you're there my experience there was different as well like depending on how your team wants to approach it in sochi so in russia we were only there for i think five days total like we'd missed the opening ceremony we just stayed in a holding camp outside the village it was all performance performance performance fly in for training get your race done get out whereas beijing we were there for like three weeks yeah so it can be different depending on what the approach of the team is as well but yeah accommodation wise it can it can differ massively but it's pretty it's pretty crammed in you're very it's not much wiggle room like it's pretty pretty yeah everybody's crammed in like sardines really and then with your team in the bobsleigh obviously there's four of you how close are you guys like within training but then outside do you have to be kind of like best mates what's what's the score with that or is it just acquaintances that's a it's a good question so my experience is you do become good mates like you've got to know people through and through and difficult it's hard when if characters like clash it becomes really difficult because it's not like a relay team where you're just handing the baton off to one another that there's really an inherent amount of danger in there and probably loading into the sled is one of the most choreographed things that kind of 400 kilo blokes could do so you're jumping into this tiny sled you've got to find all your right seating positions in a split second with spikes on they've got 300 needles on the bottom So I've got the scars on my legs to like prove that when everybody's jumping in, you've got to miss each other with the spikes.

27:30You've got to make sure you get your foot pegs and your like handles. Otherwise you're in a dangerous position. So a typical thing would be sometimes if somebody is pretty green or has just had a moment where they're not thinking, they might sit down on their teammate. so especially back in the day with some of the sled designs everybody had to be up in like a kind of um dip position to let everybody's feet in before they all drop down together so if somebody sat down for whatever reason the guy behind them can't get in and so then they're going to go into like a 4g corner like in a half squat position like this far out of the sled which could be like super dangerous the same with sometimes people will slip and they'll be like hanging onto the sled and you'll look down and one of your teammates is like trying to drag himself into the sled so you've got to try and like pick him up and put him in there's a really good clip on youtube of one of the german teams where i don't know how this guy did it one of the guys slips and is holding on to the handle being dragged along the guy at the back with one hand yanks him up manages somehow to throw him into the sled and they get in yeah so it's um as far as guys getting along i think you've you've you've got to get along to a certain degree because there's inherent danger involved and you do hear examples of people where athletes clashed and often they'll just pull them out of that crew and put them into another crew because it's usually a couple of crews per nation so there is like crew synergy is huge it's not always the four fastest athletes it is the four guys that gel as well so sometimes they might pull somebody who's been a diva out of a crew and try and put them elsewhere because they're just not gelling and how much time do spend like training per week yeah so you tend to get like on a world cup week so the world cup runs is like a race every week over the world cup season and you'll have two official training days in the week and then the two man the four man on the weekend so you usually have like two official training days when you're two or three official training days when you're actually on the track taking runs now and you usually get two or three runs per day leading up to that before the actual competition season starts you tend to go out onto the ice and just get runs down track so you'll do a bit of a tour so because the pilots need to learn the tracks we all need to go down the tracks slide them understand how they feel and so you'll get as many runs down as you can but you never tend to do more than three runs a day down the track yeah it's just a lot of logistics getting the sled up there getting it back to the top there's fatigue on the on the athletes as well and i suppose with all the g-force and stuff yeah and just being concentrating i think the concentration is a big one for the for the pilots especially like for that minute they've got to be absolutely laser focused because if anything goes wrong it could be catastrophic so they only tend to take in my experience like three runs a day i've heard stories of like nations with their own tracks like the germans kind of splitting it up and doing six runs a day three in the morning three in the afternoon but that's pretty much what you get yeah and outside of that like the actual training so in the gym on the track like improving your power improving your strength uh for actually pushing the sled like how how much how many times per week are you training yeah so usually i mean it's usually six days a week training you're doing it as a squad as well um most of the time yeah yeah so i've been in the squad when it's been everybody based down in bath i've been in this squad where it's been a bit of a hybrid where people come in they have to be there two or three days a week and then they kind of go and do that their own thing through the rest of the week but mostly most of the guys will train five or six days of the week and a lot of them will do two sessions a day during during that time as well which is kind of typical of a track and field weekly setup so most days you will run and sprint to some degree but it'll be different um intensities so and some days might be a push instead of a sprint so we'll actually go on the push track and push and then there'll be days where it'll be kind of like your more prehab lifting core work stuff like that so it'll still be gym based but very low low intensity and then other days usually at least three or four times a week there's going to be like heavy lifting like olympic lifts power lifts so olympic lifts in your compounds for most athletes three to four times a week sprinting and pushing at high intensity three to four times a week and then like prehab and conditioning usually on the other session during most of those days so it was a very full-on it was full it was full-time it's for nine to five full-time job really and what are your numbers in the gym side so like you say you've got to be strong um maybe yourself maybe other athletes around you what kind of numbers are you seeing in like say the power clean the squat so for me i'm not i'm not the strongest of bobsleigh athletes i I must say my best power clean is 150 best like ass to grass squats 200 best bench is 160 so some strength though you know what for like the average gym goer is pretty strong but in my squad I was never a standout for strength I think in our squad the biggest clean I saw was 180 biggest squat 230 probably 240 ass to grass biggest bench probably like I think a 175 180 but in world bobsleigh there are some crazy numbers I mean I know Blaine McConnell from the US he's done a 200k clean I think his squats probably 250 and yeah there are some 200 kilo plus bench presses in there as well yeah there's some strong guys out there yeah it's a funny niche that attracts some pretty freakish strength athletes i mean back in the day the main russian push athlete was a guy called alexi viavoda who is world arm wrestling champion and they even made a film about him called uh i think it's called pulling john they made this documentary film about him training to go up against this american legend called john something or other and yeah do yourself a favor and go on youtube and if you see some clips from uh alexi viavoda training for pulling john there's some random clips of him training in these russian dungeons and it's just yeah it's pretty inspiring stuff proper like 90s russian dude ponytail um 130 kilos and he used to strip down to like 115 and come out and and do bobslaying um went to sochi 2014 won two golds as a push athlete got popped for drugs afterwards as did the rest of the russians so yeah it's been some crazy stuff going on yeah and then there's that there's a documentary i think i don't know if it's still on netflix called icarus about the yeah doping around that was sochi so that was my first games that's when they were passing the um like doping test through the wall and tampering with them and stuff it's mad that if anyone's not watched that it's a crazy documentary isn't it yeah all from a whistleblower as well i know um but yeah like our team were getting tested there so their samples would have been in and around like these russian ones that were getting like shipped out um and the weird thing was we like we knew it's weird like we knew that they were doing stuff i don't think we thought it was in season but we'd always heard rumors that the culture was just different they really didn't consider it a problem if you were doping away from competition like in your off season and it's up to you that was what we heard the culture was we culture just in like the the russian or like just across the board in the winter olympics no no just the russia just just the russians yeah yeah that's what we'd heard and we we didn't know whether it was the truth or not quite quite frankly it didn't bother me i wasn't like oh there's some people cheating i was really just concentrating on myself so when that when the documentary came out well initially when it all came out and they got their medals taken away from them and we were a lot of our placings were changing so the crew in sochi got a bronze medal because two russian crews got banned uh my crew got a gold medal from whistler world cup because the russian crew that came down in front of us got banned so it wasn't until that domino effect when i'm like wow like this really was affecting like my career finishes and the knock-on effect is like funding from UK Sport comes from your positioning.

36:05So how well you did in a game. It's everything, isn't it? It's your face, it's your personal brand, your sponsorships. And then like you say, the other stuff, the funding from... The funding's huge. Like the medal in Sochi, if it had been got on the day, would have... We still did all right because we got good finishes and we maintained funding over a few years. But the funding package from UK Sport would have been higher. I bet you don't get it when it gets through. No, it doesn't get that dated. and we'd eventually, by the time I think a lot of those medals got changed and a lot of the Russian results got changed, we'd actually lost funding because in Pyeongchang we did terribly.

36:46So after that, UK sport pulled everything. So we had nothing. So it does affect other sports, other countries. Back in the day, I just didn't really think about it. I was just concentrating so much on myself that when I heard these rumors, I was like, i don't know and then when the actual depth of it the level of it came out and the documentary came out i was like wow so it wasn't just like they were doing stuff in the summer when they were training like it was going on the whole time it was being covered up it was state sponsored it was crazy were these guys like when you lined up next to them did they look bigger did they look i mean not it's a different i wouldn't say so no there were freaks everywhere that were just natural and the thing is i think um you'd look at alexi via voda and think wow like he's an arm wrestling world champion which made me think in a sport like that which i believe is like unregulated i was thinking well how do you be successful without some enhancement but i didn't really think about it if anything i was just watching on especially as a young athlete a couple of years into the sport i was just in awe of them as athletes i just thought wow um and obviously they were in front of a whole home crowd crowd in sochi so it was cool to see them kind of play the crowd win the medal even if we couldn't it was kind of cool as a spectacle um so no i wasn't really considering at the time and there wasn't any obvious there was never any obvious signs of it that's why to be honest i don't know if i believe people when they were saying oh yeah i reckon these lot are doing this these lot are doing that i thought like everyone gets tested nobody's doing anything that didn't turn out to be the case that's crazy and then when obviously you you finished up with the olympics was that when did you decide to kind of like retire from the sport yeah so yeah this was up and down so initially after we lost funding after 20 2019 we lost it and i'm like i can't i can't actually do this anymore i've got a mortgage now like i've got to get paid for this and this is actually when i started my business i kind of saw that coming because you get like a period where you like a cooling off period where you're still getting your uk sport funding i'm like i better set something up now otherwise you know i'm not gonna be able to pay my mortgage so i set up the online business the coaching business then so originally i was going to retire then but then the team came through with some sponsors so i could still actually get some money in the bank when i was away competing so then i got a couple of years into the next like four year cycle i'm two years away now I've got to go for it.

39:23So then I went in for Beijing. And then there were two crews trying to qualify. And then unfortunately, my crew didn't qualify. So I actually got pulled over to the other crew to go as the alternate athlete to Beijing, which was bittersweet because I was in great shape, probably in the shape of my life, but didn't get to go as a competing athlete. I competed in the qualification rounds, but not in the main event. And then that's when I decided to retire. I'm like, no, I'm done. I'm 35. I've got other priorities. I've got, my business has taken off. I've got a lot of, I had my first kind of pro footballers come through and want speed training.

40:01So I thought I've got to really kind of concentrate on this now. So then just went into the world of coaching. And then last year, the last minute, I think April last year, I was on a ski lift in Whistler and I was just like, I want to give it another go. so I'd gone over to the US to do a bit of a tour to make content with people do a few podcasts and got training with some of the guys in Austin and I was like you know what I'm 38 but I've still got it and then I'm on this ski lift thinking could I could I not so I basically got in contact with British Bobsleigh again and said you know would you be interested and they said well come in for some initial testing we went make sure you're not completely broken and then we'll we'll give it a go so um went in for some testing they said yeah you can come back into the squad and start training climb my way back up through the squad actually made it back onto the world cup again um to compete and then unfortunately didn't get selected in the racing team i actually got selected as the as an alternate athlete again but at this time didn't didn't take it i thought was a good opportunity for for somebody else i didn't need that experience at this point in my career um and so when didn't go to the milan games and yeah ended up actually doing the commentary instead which was a crazy transition from like being out there competing to back in the studio so yeah i've kind of retired three times but i'm definitely retired now is that it yeah yeah that's a convoluted answer to a very simple question but yeah it was there was basically three points and this is the final one i'm definitely done you won't see me inside the bobsleigh again when it comes to your coaching like you seem so knowledgeable have you always like studied and asked questions whilst being an athlete and is that how you've got so good yeah I think so I was kind of obsessive I think most athletes have an obsessive personality right you know whatever you're into that you're trying to pursue and master you're going to obsess about it I think there's two i think there's uh ones that are like obsessive and one that that obsessiveness probably stresses them out a little bit too much and they can't perform so yeah yeah that's definitely a feature as well i heard more faras kind of like that i don't yeah i've heard just just off a couple of people that he he likes to stay out of it really when it comes to the the training yeah there well there are some there are definitely some athletes that would rather offload that responsibility to somebody else and then they just perform their duties as what's on a piece of paper um but i i do think even they are just still developing such an intricate knowledge of their body and their their sport how to race all of those things so yeah i was always pretty obsessive about performance but then pe was my favorite subject in school went and did sports science at university so that was always the path was going through that because i was interested in it so i did undergrad sports science and went on to the masters as well when i was still competing so i had the background in it from an education perspective and then yeah was just was just interested and that's really when i started posting content and i just noticed that people were more interested in like the reasoning behind behind why i was doing certain things so it started off as me just jumping on boxes right because it looks impressive like got a little bit of traction i'm like cool i'll post more of this what's the highest box jumps you can do um the highest box jump i've done is a 62 yeah 62 inches yeah yeah that's insane yeah i had a pretty good box jump uh i've seen someone do 50 in in like real life yeah it's impressive 62 i want to go down there and try it now yeah yeah i mean i'll be a long way off now but um yeah 62 was was my my best ever um and that was from standing as well not not from an approach there are people out there getting way over 60 now there are some freaks out there but yeah that's a that's a decent box jump not gonna lie um but yeah that was the initial stuff i started posting and then i don't know people were just um i just noticed it was a lot of kind of snc coaches and athletes that were following so i started putting out some more technical explanations to stuff and then that gained traction as well and then before i knew it i was basically putting out loads of strength conditioning content which is what seemed to get everybody going and then that's really what triggered the business i would have never have guessed that that's what i would do as a business especially when i was studying it's like what do you do you try and get an internship with a team or a national governing body as a strength conditioning coach then you climb your way through the system when your athletes do well it was either that or you know do personal training and this the industry has changed so much in like 15 years it's crazy yeah i feel like a lot of people slag instagram off but for that kind of stuff getting visibility getting like recognition out there for obviously a talent that you have like it's incredible absolutely it's given strength and conditioning and coaching in general has been one of the worst paid things you can do for the level of education you need you know you could have a master's degree in sports science 15 years ago strength conditioning and you'd be expected to do sometimes an unpaid internship what what other subject is like that there's not many so now you have this people have the ability to get exposure and so many people can now make like good money or supplement their income through personal coaching and a personal brand i don't get me wrong it's a zoo out there there's some crazy stuff out there but so you're always battling between and i feel like it's starting to it's leaning the wrong way a little bit i think five years ago the the education side was a lot more prevalent whereas now it is definitely clicks and likes and then just the way the algorithm has changed it's much harder to get your info out there people's attention spanners kind of reduced but i suppose the way you look at it is if you're confident in your ability and the product that you are putting out there then then it's you can go after it in whatever way the algorithm kind of um yeah whatever way the algorithm rewards i think is probably the best way to put it there you know and there are some ways to go about it but i do think you have to we're all slaves to the algorithm to a certain degree yeah and that is the shame of like the like you say the last couple of years because everyone's trying to think of oh how what's a new way that i can get people's attention rather than what is the best way or what am i trying to actually deliver here um like i remember watching a couple years ago like squat university any injury that i had i'd go on youtube whatever watch squat university you can still do that but now it's all like clickbaity stuff it's all you're all trying to you're not getting the information straight there it's like an information information to then get you to a landing page to sign up for a course yeah to get money out of you and i feel like there's just so many like yeah it's like i said there's a lot of information and that's what i want to kind of move on to with yourself um at the moment you coach a variety of kind of athletes yeah um track and field obviously bob bobsleigh um skeleton and you coach primarily getting better at plyometrics right and like power and speed yeah so speed plyos and really s and c around um your sport essentially yeah the speed and plyos are my my kind of area yeah so so when it comes to speed and plows there's so much out there um where do people even start like if they just want to improve their their speed first of I probably want to ask this question.

47:53Can you teach speed? Yeah. Well, that's a good question. So you absolutely can. Like everybody has the ability to get faster, but as far as physical abilities go, speed is one of the most genetically determined. So yeah, you're not going to be even a national level sprinter. I think without being born with a certain proclivity to sprinting and And yeah, that is just true in speed and power sports, but everybody can improve, of course. Just like somebody that's born with the ability to be, like for me, I've always had the ability to be powerful, but my engine has never been great. But if I train, then my engine will improve.

48:38Not to the level of yours, for example, or somebody that is genetically determined to be a good endurance athlete. So speed can be trained, but unless you're born with the prerequisite genetics you're not going to be a world beater and where would someone start yeah if they're not used to even sprinting would you recommend they go out and sprint or would you start even basic than that yeah so this is a lot of this age is a massive thing here so i think there's there's a crazy statistic that i don't know the percentage but a huge percentage of adults never sprint after high school yeah the huge percentage a lot of people still run um they'll still kick at the finish of a park run but it isn't all out sprinting you even to be honest guys that keep or guys and girls that keep playing like football for example even five-a-side still have short bursts of speed here and there but like actual all all-out max velocity it's pretty rare after after high school most people won't do it so i think exposure is the main thing in that if you're if you're younger and it's you're not far out of your kind of childhood teenage speed exposure you can get very quickly back into max velocity repetitions and speed repetitions if you're older that needs to be graded and progressed very very carefully so i think let's start with if you're a little bit older because that's what a lot of people who are following me at the moment are interested in how do i get back to being fast being powerful being athletic well you've got to actually reduce your output initially because there's nothing more neurally demanding or taxing than top speed sprinting it's like the highest neural output that you can produce as a human so if you throw yourself straight back in without being conditioned or ready for that exercise people just ping hamstrings they do they will just ping a hamstring if they're not conditioned for it so it's about grading that exposure so constraints are the main thing so for me i like to start people for acceleration on hill sprints unless they've got achilles issues and then i'll go stair sprints but for most people that's going to reduce the max velocity that you get to and it also reduces the impact because you're going up a hill so gravity isn't having so much of effect on the impacts because a lot of the time it's the impact of the ground contact that gets people into trouble as well and then for top speed we can do the same thing we can do a graded exposure with a build-up sprint so with a build-up sprint you just start off slowly and then every stride you get a bit quicker a bit quicker a bit quicker and then you set distances so you start at 20 meters 25 meters 30 meters and you can keep building that exposure out until you get to where your max velocity should be for most people that's going to be within 20 to 40 meters so that's a good way when you're older to grade that exposure and then when you're younger and you're much closer to max velocity exposure so you've kind of come out of school out of playing football whatever games or sports you play so it hasn't been like years and years and years 10 years since you sprinted you can get back into it a bit quicker because your body's ready to handle that and at that point developing speed comes down to quality so it would be same for endurance runners that do like speed reps usually there's more recovery between speed reps because we want as high an output as we can so it's the same for reps when you're improving your sprinting so if you did a 50 meter sprint then you'd want a good rule of thumb is like one minute per 10 meters sprinted recovery so you take five if it sounds a lot but You take five minutes between like an all out 50 meter sprint.

52:24No way. Seriously. Five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Especially for fast people. So that rule of thumb is, I must admit, for like sprinters. So that can be reduced a little bit. So this is the irony is you'd think, oh, the sprinters are quicker and more conditioned for us. They need less rest. They don't. They need more because their output is so much higher. It's actually your central nervous system, like your energy system and your, you'll replenish everything that you need to sprint again in your muscles. so your ATP PC system will replenish but neurally like your central nervous system still isn't there so you need like five minutes so yeah if you're doing like uh all out like 120 meter reps like even it's rare but some sprinters when they're peaking might do some like all out 200 meter reps they may take 20 minutes even 30 minutes sometimes between reps they'll completely rest cool down and then they'll actually warm back up again and do another rep 20 minutes later yeah so i think yeah when you're when you're prepped and primed for it you're still fit you're a little bit younger quality so take good recoveries between your sprints when you're a bit older grade your exposure um so you don't get hurt yeah and if you're just wanting to improve your power maybe uh you're training for let's take high rocks for an example there'll be a lot of people that of training fire rocks and they've heard that player metrics improve your distance running improves your power for the sled push etc or for the jumping within burpee broad jumps how would they even start with player metrics and would they start in a gym or would they start outside or yeah where you do it doesn't really matter i think it's more the dosing so one issue you're going to have is you're already under a really high load so if we think about like your load being a glass of water and the amount of load you're under you've you're under maximum load from other training from all of your high rocks training yeah so you're already like your glass is already full and if it overflows you get into trouble so if you throw in a really high volume plyometric training that's like it's usually people getting achilles pain compartment syndrome stress fractures there are a lot of the kind of overuse injuries that you might see from a lot of running so if you throw in a load of like high intensity plyometrics it's a recipe for disaster so micro dosing i think is the best way to do it for most high rocks athletes so again that's that same principle of quality over quantity like with the 50 meter sprints and taking a long recovery so you want reps below let's take um let's take a drop jump for example and i wouldn't necessarily start with a drop jump with most people but a drop jump i think has been shown And probably more than other plyometrics to improve, possibly improve distance running performance.

55:17So let's say we've got a 20 or 30 centimeter box. We drop down to the floor and we jump as high, but as fast off the floor as possible on each contact. Well, your sets, it's a bit like doing sets and reps of squats. Your sets, you want, if you're working on strength, you want kind of six reps and below. Well, it'd be the same with plyometrics with drop jumps. So you might do two sets of six drop jumps. If they're quality, that might be all you need as a micro dose to improve that stretch shortening cycle, which in theory could carry over into your running. And it would be the same really with the, so we differentiate here, jumps and plyometrics.

55:55So like a box jump or a broad jump is not strictly speaking a plyometric because it doesn't happen quick enough. so you know plyometrics really tend to happen under 250 milliseconds nobody's going to be measuring the ground contact time that you're doing but for a good example a broad box jump would be about 300 to 500 milliseconds a drop jump might be 150 160 milliseconds okay so drop jump plyometric box jump is a jump so and you have to still practice them both they're just like different yeah and it's a spectrum it's just a way of bucketing two different things it's like it might be like muscular endurance versus strength training they're just that's they're just developing slightly different things but in high rocks obviously you've got running ability that you want to improve which is stretch shortening cycle which player metrics improve but then you've got these like burpee broad jumps which a broad jump is a jump and so if you improve your efficiency and a broad jump and like your max broad jump the idea is if your ceiling's higher then every sub max broad jump is going to be a little bit easier because you've got like a 280 maximum standing broad so that makes a continuous two meter broad a bit easier and then you're probably going to work out through the maximal broads a way to be more efficient with your continuous broads so again i would still say um a microdose is a good approach because it's not necessarily like you're not looking for the like chronic adaptation in the tissue we're not looking for like fiber adaptation we don't want to be all fast twitch if we're doing hyrox but at the same time your nervous system can adapt really quickly to like a micro dose so if your nervous system has got more potential in that in that broad jump and you improve your improve your mechanics then in theory your burpee broad jump could be better than over over a distance so i would say on both plyometrics and jumps microdose can go a long way and how often would you do that per week yeah well probably once or twice per week so so not every day no no honestly i think people the lens that a lot of people come from with adaptations to training are from the tissue level and we're really not looking for that here and often the bigger win with strength and power is nervous system and you can get a lot out of a lower dose in in from the nervous system if it's really high quality problem you'll get is people will do two times six drop jumps and they'll just be terrible quality they'll just be pants there'll be no intent so you've really got to go for it on these jumps and there are ways to measure it like nowadays you have um you have like the output sensor that you can put in your shoe you've got opto jump so you've got jump mats you've got a lot of things you could measure your ground contact time with and stuff like that even like my jump too i think on the iphone you can set a camera up so it's always pretty cool to get a little bit of a measure to see how you're doing and then that drives the intent as well so if you're like i've only got 12 reps today like i want to get my reactive strength index really high on these jumps then you're going to maximize those 12 reps with the broadest bit easier because you can just put a chalk mark in the gym it's like if you're going to go into a into a strength session or a technical session or a session where you've got burpee broads it could be like right okay start of the session so this is another caveat always put your pliers or your jumps at the start of the session after warm-up because you don't want to do them fatigued so usually we want to put the hierarchy of our exercises do your power and speed work when you're least fatigued you're going to get more out of them and you're less likely to get injured so then just after your warm-up you use it as like a little primer so it can get your nervous system going a bit it can actually get the dopamine flowing as well so it can actually make the session afterwards which might be quite daunting a little bit more enjoyable and so then you go in chalk marks on the floor you've got three times five or 15 total broads to do you've got to try and or you could even do like an auto reg it's like i'm going to do broad jumps until i stop improving for two reps so like you hit a pr and then you drop a rep drop another rep you're like i'm done let's go into my workout and that's a pretty cool way like twice a week just to get a micro dose in of plyometric jump training and then in theory that's going to improve hyrox performance stretch shortening cycle for your running and jump efficiency for your broad and if you as a hyrox athlete would you bother about doing a lot of like single leg plyometric stuff or would you just keep it to say for example keep it nice and simple micro dose a drop jump and then micro dose a broad jump i would keep it pretty simple and i think one of the reasons is think how many single leg contacts you're getting running it's a lot of volume it's a lot of volume and we what we don't want to do like i said before is throw so much into an already full training schedule that you run into problems the coordination of single leg plyometrics is much much harder as well and don't get me wrong if there's like a super talented athlete that's just like those freak athletes that can do everything really well that's the next level that's that's like the elite level yeah and then it would almost be to say to them oh you can't do a single leg plyometric it would almost be disrespectful of course they can but it's like whether it's actually going to help them along the way when they when you can get more from like a drop jump two feet less risk probably a higher neural output um yeah maybe more adaptations at the central nervous system and then they get thousands and thousands and thousands of single leg contacts in their runs.

1:01:38And it's the same with the single leg power work. When the main jump is abroad, then is there any point wasting any valuable training energy on single leg work? Yeah. No, I like that approach, especially for myself. One thing, and I know you might laugh at this, sometimes when it comes to a broad jump and you're going for maximum distance, I'm scared that I'm going to injure myself. like if i if i land a little bit dodgy my knees might like buckle or whatever like is there anything to make a get that same exposure but make a broad jump maybe a little bit safer absolutely and yeah that's a very good point that like i get knee pain as well like the sheer stress on a broad jump landing is is big and it can be really painful if you've got like patella tendinopathy or patella femoral pain one thing i love to do and i probably should have said this beforehand because it actually makes this microdose really cool as well is if you put like the smallest when you've got like the um the soft boxes that you use in a gym for box jumps if you get like the 12 inch soft box you put that against the wall and then you're jumping to that box that reduces the impact so much and if your knees are still sore you can go a little bit higher it all it also improves your broad jump technique so you're jumping onto the box yeah right so most people jump too flat in a broad jump that also increases the the sheer force on your your knees because you're just hitting the floor like that it's all horizontal that's what i feel like yeah so when you come up a little bit so for max broad like that actual force vector takeoff angle usually the best max broads you've got quite a bit of float okay so there is a vertical component as well most people are just spotting where they want to like get to and they're just going really flat so what it does is it actually improves your max broad jump technique because you're jumping up and out a little bit more but it reduces your landing forces loads yeah like i'm really not feeling my knees when i jump to a even a six inch box so yeah jumping to a box is a is probably the best way to do it jumping into sand always helps or like onto a high jump pit but it depends if you're training at a track or not like if you're at a athletics track then yeah do it into the sand or onto a high jump pit but if you're in the gym it's a really good way of doing it get the six or the 12 inch soft box out put against the wall because this is a mistake i've seen if you put that box on the turf and you jump to it you kick the box out from underneath you and you you land on your ass obviously it happened many times so shove it up against the wall and then you can do like your chalk mark like your mark see how far you jump in by half how far you come back from the box which is a really good way to that's a nice little like challenge it is and that like there's a bit of adrenaline with more like a box jump like you start off and it might be 24 inches then you go to a 30 inch then you add on a little bit more and you end up at 40 inch or whatever it's like the same so you get the progression through the session through the through the sets and you're moving further and further back and then there's also a little bit of uh there's a little bit of play involved it's quite good fun you get a little bit dopamine a little bit of adrenaline because you're like i want to make it and that for me always leads to a really good training session well do you think there's any importance to do like a vertical box jump and and practice that for for someone who is either kind of like a runner or someone who is a hyroxer that is already doing the drop jump yeah and is always already doing the broad jump do you think there's any not necessarily so it's still going to be a good method to develop power and the main thing with a with a box jump is box jumps they give you something to aim for but it also reduces your landing impact so one of the main reasons that they're that they were originally used was that people weren't accumulating loads of landing contacts so you get loads of takeoffs concentric power rate of force development but you're not landing from you know 30 inches whatever your vertical jump is every time so you're not getting the eccentric pounding so people were jumping onto boxes for that reason and then for a little bit of motivation to jump higher on each one what that turned into was obviously max box jumps and a lot of people showing off their range of hip movement basically like how how tall and then small you can get yeah yeah like how much you can flex your your hips and then a lot of people were really like shitting all over that saying nobody's training vert it's just seeing how how deep they can squat but i don't quite agree i think there's a lot of intent to try and get on a box as quickly as possible and also it's really hard to go from triple flexion triple extension to triple flexion really quickly it's just people that weren't skilled at it didn't jump before they flex their hips they just like pull their knees up so that's the reason that box jumps were originally used now the thing is if you're already doing your broad which is more specific to to hyrox itself then is there room for that that box jump now it could be you're using it like i said before for like an activation of primer like i like these things before like heavy lifting sessions because it gets your nervous system going and increases dopamine um it gives you a little bit of there's motivation because you're getting up on the box like it's measurable which helps people as well but i think there isn't necessarily room for it if you're already doing the broads and the drop jumps what's your opinion on contrast training I've seen this has come around in high rocks quite regularly and quite recently where people are doing like a five by five squat.

1:07:08And then after every set of squats, they're going and doing five box jumps or three box jumps. And they're doing this contrast training where they're doing like strength and then they're doing power. If it was up to you, do you think it's better to, like you said before, focus on your power before your strength? yeah i don't often use contrast training and pretty much all of my university research was actually on that phenomenon um post activation potentiation as they call it now the thing is there's nothing inherently wrong with it you can do that workout and not cause any degradation in output on the squat or the jump now the idea is that you're going to augment the jump in between in each squat so you should be able to jump higher because you've had this activation from the squat well the thing is a lot of the research originally didn't use a particularly good warm-up so of course you do a five minute row do a maximum vert or you do a five minute row a squat then a maximum vert you're just more warmed up so if you're in a full training session you've gone through your warm-up maybe through some jumps already and you're like three sets into a squat then you're fully warmed up i don't think you need any more jumps so i don't know if your jumps are going to improve anymore like you're already at your like peak output by that point and i think it's also more fatiguing so the times i do use it is with established athletes that don't have much time to train okay so we're microdosing them a little bit more they might be having 45 minute windows and they can only train 45 minutes a day for example then you can fit more in because obviously doing the players and the jumps, but also you don't have to consider the fatigue as much.

1:08:57I think it's much more fatiguing jumping between those different contrasting essentially. So especially for a high rocks athlete, we talked again about that cup and how full it is with all of your training. So you could throw in a modality like that, which is you're doing the same amount of jumps and the same amount of lifts as you'd be doing if you did your jumps first and then your squats after but putting them in between each other is i think much more fatiguing uh this is something that um there's a coach called christian thibodeau out of um out of canada he wrote a lot for t nation back in the day and he says this that it's um it's quite fatiguing on the uh dopamid dopamidernic if i said that right system and so like you're just taxing yourself more you're fatiguing yourself more by putting them in between putting the jumps in between the squats i think you you bang on there like when i've experienced it if i've just done a five squats and this is like you know you're leaving one or two reps in reserve so you you go in pretty heavy and then you go in straight into the box jumps one you're probably kind of dreading the box but two you've not got that brain power to like think what am i actually doing here how am i executing this and you said before the main point of getting better and the main way to get better at plyometrics is to focus and do everything with intent so it's probably it probably is better to do it if you have time do it before if you don't have time then you can mix it in that's what that's yeah that's what i would say and usually if you don't have time that probably means you're not training at capacity do you know what i mean so i'm not worried about that extra fatigue kind of pushing you over the edge but that's a really interesting insight that you felt that because i think especially when you're when you're a good lifter like when you're strong like i don't want to be confused in between my my reps or if you're a good jumper i don't want to confuse myself in between my reps like you're downloading each set being like this set felt like that this felt this set felt a little bit easier i shifted a bit funny in that third squat in that set which and then you're really in that set and so if you go and confuse yourself in between not just from like like, you know, fatigue, neural fatigue, like dopaminergic system, like away from that, you're just being like confused by the fact that you're doing something completely different in between each one.

1:11:18Because like we all know how good we get at a certain movement. Like you would be a squat, a deadlift. You know, if you go and confuse yourself in between each rep, are you going to take away from the set? Like if I was going to build up to do like a one rep max deadlift or a one rep max squat, I'd want to ramp through a squat session progressively and then get to like my optimum one rep max if you told me now you've got to go and do jumps in between it's going to get you a higher squat I'm going to be pretty confused I mean that now I've got to be zoned in focused on this I find it so interesting like how athletes when you speak to athletes like how much effort and attention they put into every part of their training whether it is a squat session or whether like any strength session you're coming out there probably as much mentally fatigued as you are physically fatigued whereas like if you're a newbie to the gym you're just doing squats you're not even thinking about what you're doing you're not thinking where your knee is going where your where your hips are going are you shifting a little bit or anything like that like and i think that's probably the difference yeah into like your rate of progression um it yeah yeah it is it's insane but no that's super interesting uh i i've been taught that contrast training might limit the amount of hypertrophy you get from the squat so say we're keeping that on the the same example as a squat and then a box jump the box jumps basically you get the strength but you don't get the leg size with if you do them both is that potentially true or not do you know what mechanistically i'm not sure i do wonder whether that's come from contrast training was originally i think used a lot in track and field and so a lot of jumps coaches sprint coaches back then were trying to reduce what they thought was yeah a hypertrophic effect of the strength exercise you don't want to be heavy you want to be as strong as you can but as light as you can exactly so they were really concentrated there was this i think that it was almost fear mongering that it's like yeah if you go over five reps in the gym you're going to turn into a beast and it's not like that like it's hard for a lot of people to get big and unless you've got a massive calorie surplus or if you and it's always going to be undone by thousands of meters on the track in between do you know what i mean that's why i'm like yeah that doesn't quite work that way if you were doing five times five three times a week on your squat you didn't do anything else you might get big but if you're doing five times five you've got two thousand meters of tempo the next day you've got sprints the same day you haven't got a massive calorie surplus and it's hard to eat that much because you're already expending so much i don't think you're going to get big so i don't think i don't think there is much in that to be honest and if anything if you think about it from if you think about it mechanistically if you go in and you do some squats to i don't know rpe8 or two or three reps in reserve and then you jump straight out with fatigue and do some jumps like you're actually getting closer to failure which is what you would want for hypertrophy right yeah so you usually you do the same movement so it'd be a squat jump where you could argue you're accumulating more fatigue then so are you actually creating more of probably less of a hypertrophy effect than if you'd have gone rpe9 or one rep in reserve but would be a more of a hypertrophic effect than if you'd have left the set at three reps in reserve do you know what i mean it's like it's just adding reps you've added more reps to the workout yeah so i don't see mechanistically how how that works to be honest i think that comes from track and field old school track and field doctrine yeah yeah no it is interesting and for the for the runners that are listening or distance runners in particular um if you're thinking oh what what these going on about this isn't going to help me at all i think there was a study done where uh people tested their 5k and then they did six weeks of plyometrics where it was just simple plyometrics what we've spoken about uh a couple of times per week and then they retested their 5k and i think they got like an 11 improvement just by adding in plyometrics yeah i've seen i've seen some of those studies as well what's the science behind that is it i assume it's like stiffening of obviously improving power improving but at contact time and stuff like that yeah so it's improving the efficiency of the stretch shortening cycle so obviously on every contact we do when we're running we go through a stretch shortening cycle a lot of the knee and at the Achilles.

1:16:06So obviously we get an elastic benefit of the muscular tenderness unit. So if that is more coordinated and more efficient, neurally, then you're going to get a more efficient stride. So each time you hit the ground, you're going to get more return from the ground. And then the chronic adaptations over time, there's arguments here as to like how much plyometrics actually affect tendon stiffness and chronically i think they can affect tendon stiffness but how long would that be have to be over well i think it can be months to years to be quite honest okay like i think most of the evidence would suggest that it is strength training that improves tendon stiffness but the thing is there's no point having a stiff tendon if you can't actually coordinate how you're using it i think this is why i keep going back to thinking about the central nervous system before we're thinking about architectural changes at the tissue level because i mean that it's been sport science 101 since i studied that we're always looking at the tissue and the architecture of the tissue and how it's changing but the central nervous system isn't and wasn't as well understood but if we coordinate that stretch shortening cycle better and the reflexive nature of it then we're going to improve our energy return on each stride so i think that's the idea the mechanism behind why the and i think it was a low dose in those studies as well like i mentioned of plyometrics something like a drop jump is more specific to that vertical impulse of a running stride and yeah so really that because it's not a chronic volume the chronic volumes are running so it's going to be creating architectural changes at the tissue i think it's more likely to do with how it's being coordinated and the improved efficiency of the stretch shortening cycle and the reflexes around it as well which is still it's not central nervous system but it's nervous system it's going it's a reflex so it's going from the spinal cord down to the tendon and back again yeah no i find i find it so fascinating now it's basically like again free fitness by just adding in some into your week and what i've found is I've added in, as of recent, I'd probably say the last like six months, I've added in drop jumps, the ones where you drop and stick, what are they called?

1:18:29Depth drops. Depth drops, where you just drop from like a high box and then like either stick, either one leg or two legs, and then adding in strides to after my long runs and just actually practicing. Yeah, you're not reaching an all out sprint, but you're almost there and you kind of gradually building up it's not like from it's from a rolling start just doing six by 100 meters whatever after after a long run but i feel 20 years younger i felt like an old man before starting this my knees were hurting yeah like i'd i'd worry about walking down the stairs whenever i went for a hike or whatever like downhill hurt and then i started adding these things in and i just feel again like younger like nothing hurts yeah and it's really really interesting how like just doing more of the things that you think oh that's gonna hurt my knees like sprinting is gonna hurt you know jumping off a box is going to hurt and these things actually help yeah yeah well i mean the right dosage is is huge for sure um but that's i mean that's great for me to hear because it's what i've been preaching for so long now trying to get people back into more higher output stuff not being so kind of worried about it scared about it like understanding that it can help their performance in endurance activities if dosed right and i mean you're finding that yourself and i find sprinting or for me strides it's it's even better than stretching i used to be a static like a chronic static stretcher and i'd have to stretch for an hour a day to feel good and then i realized it's it's just the exact same the day after the day after that it's the exact same and then i started adding in strides and i realized for running i was actually reaching the ranges that i needed to reach and actually they felt better like my glutes weren't as tight my my hip flexors my sore muscles like they weren't tight anymore and i think it's just actually using that range frequently yeah well thinking about it you go through a much larger range of motion compared to you know a slower running stride when you actually pick that speed up not only are you getting a higher max velocity you're going through more range of motion in your hips especially um so yeah that's an interesting observation from you and it's one that i haven't heard as much actually i don't personally static stretch much i don't prescribe it very much for my athletes i'm more into dynamic stretching um but the fact that you're getting and i suppose like just the tissue activation as well you when you sprint or you run quicker you do activate so many more of the high threshold motor units so there's just more of that muscle tissue getting actually activated so there could be like a perfusion thing there as well you're obviously you're getting activation and blood flow maybe further through the muscle fibers who knows that's purely conjecture but yeah that's an interesting bit of feedback from you yeah and then is there anything when you look at endurance training or whether it's a typical long distance runner uh it might be a 10k athlete or it might be a little bit longer half marathon or you see like a high rocks athletes training is there anything where you could pick holes in the training or you'd think oh i'd do that better coming from more of a sprint and power background yeah so i think i do think that micro dosing in biometrics and power work i'm going to call the jump work power work because you can do it with like medicine ball throws as well i think lifts the ceiling on a few things which could make everything beneath that a little bit more efficient so i definitely think micro dosing in those elements i think probably the the way that they're scheduled into a session as well um obviously putting them early on um i think putting dynamic mobility in early um and appropriate warm-ups as well because you can put in a lot of whatever you're dealing with prehab any issues trigger point release that sort of thing can be really well considered in the warm-up rather than kind of just like gritting through the first couple of miles gritting your teeth through the first couple of miles or the first few reps kind of addressing what would you actually how would you do that so say if my quads are a little bit sore or I've got one tight quad like how would you even go about that warm-up yeah so first things first I'd do I'd make sure that I had some like before and after tests so if I had tight quads I'd probably do some sort of quad test or stretch like a couch stretch just to understand how far my range of movement is away from where it should be so that's going to be an injury predictor as well if you've reduced your range of movement or your hip extension is affected by a tight bit of musculature and that's going to increase your injury risk as well then i'm going to work through my warm-up to try and get that to a point where it's a little bit more free a little bit more open so i personally would use um some trigger point work and some like kind of it's really like a modified art or modified active release therapy so i'd get on a foam roller or a trigger point ball or something like that and I'd go down the quad and I'd search for the tight spots and then I would then flex the knee up and down to try and create some change in the tissue um there'll be some physio geeks that say that this is a placebo and it doesn't work but for me it absolutely did and I would go back and retest this was like Tom Brady's trick back in the day like I think he he had someone he had the luxury of having someone press it in for him so instead of you using like a foam roller or something he had like a physical person who'd go and they'd do a full body scan every day and they'd find a tight spot he'd press it in or like say if it was a quad he'd press his quad in and then you work through it you contract it until it goes yeah we used to we at certain points did have that what we call track side therapy and it's a real kind of track and field thing so like usually coaches would have to be a therapist with a bed set up and the athletes would be getting like an MOT beforehand there should be a range of like muscle relaxation techniques to chiropractic techniques there'd be even joint manipulations and stuff before they wouldn't go out until they were straight now the way that like physiotherapy is moving now that a lot of people are starting to say well that that wasn't true it was all a placebo like they didn't need that but athletes will tell you it really helped them so I came from that background and had that like luxury I suppose it was a luxury so how often will you get in therapy uh every session every single session yeah we we at one point we had like a fleet of therapists we had two physios and then like three soft tissue therapists the bed would be set up um on the side of the track uh so usually come in 10 a.m and it was usually we used to call it mot there'd be a couple of tests that they would do it's usually like sacroiliac joint whatever was usually tight on you maybe lumber and the physio that would then get to know your ranges like they'd do a hip extension test they'd see they could feel more tension than usual if there's more tension they'd start working through some releases some of this would dissipate and warm up of course but i think it was that more before and after test so if you've got that tight quad and it's affecting you then obviously test it to the other side there's a big discrepancy there then working through that quad and trying to get it loose and open and maintaining that joint range and that range through the muscle is a good idea then a reactivation as well so like if you've turned off a lot of tone in the muscle then some people would argue maybe you're reducing the activation in the muscle which is also an issue so then maybe holding an isometric and then actually sometimes an isometric works pnf one bit of testing uh stretching that i do sometimes do is pnf stretching so when you actually stretch contract relax so doing contract and relax uh stretching but a lot of athletes would just have a very in-depth understanding of themselves the ranges that they needed to be um certain of before they trained if this wasn't right and it was always so interesting seeing just how intricate athletes would go into their own body work so my teammates would turn up with a like huge bag within it they'd have lifting bands mobility balls um you've seen the sew right thing that It goes into your psoas, psoarite, massage guns.

1:26:50Some of them went over the top, honestly. But then there was others where it was just like, yeah, I need these three things ticked off. Like I need hip extension. That's not there. Band around the hip, banded distraction. Let's get it open. Drill, see how it feels. Yeah, that's good to go now. Somebody else might be, well, there's some tightness. I'm always getting tightness in this lateral calf. So I'd have, do you remember the stick roller? They get the stick, roll that through. They're like, yeah, that just always seems to loosen it off for me. they just get to know themselves and they have their almost own mot sheet that they run through so i think yeah certainly some um i mean kelly sterrett used to do it the mobility wad for like crossfit athletes where it's like if you've got these common things that are tight before your wad just do like your five minute like mot so i think yeah just some more targeted prehab in um in warm-ups i think would yeah do people a lot of good yeah it's so interesting like i've spent time uh numerous tracks where i've seen like a sprint team there or it might be hurdlers or something and they spend forever warming up like yeah they'll have the music going they look like they're having the best time ever but like they'll have the music going it'll be normally sometime somewhere sunny they'll be on training camp somewhere sunny and they'll be just taking the time and you would have completed your session before they've even started yeah they'll still be doing the warm-up yeah i mean it was always that like when i was like back when i was younger at the athletics club that was always the argument that the distance guys were are you lazy sprinters you spend an hour warming up then you run for six seconds and take 10 minutes recovery and we're already done and then the sprinters would be like oh yeah but you couldn't do this intensity so sometimes they used to do a swap so the distance runners would do the sprint workout and the sprinters would do the distance workout and both would struggle as much as the other so um i remember one of my good friends who's a real good marathoner he's like the the lactic from the speed endurance session was just hideous he's i was puking everywhere but at the same time like i just couldn't fathom the mileage that he was doing when i tried to do a distance workout it was unbelievable so it's just very very different outcomes and yeah the sprint and speed and jump athletes they do spend ages prepping and get ready and the workouts take so long because they're taking so much recovery between workouts those like track and field teams on like warm weather training camp like you mentioned they're just out there for hours your workouts are like three hours long yeah because not just the warm-up the prep you having like 10 15 minutes between between sets sometimes like the jumpers they spend ages so technical pole vaulters you know pole vault competition takes hours same as a high jump competition because the par keeps going up and then you get three attempts at each height some people knock it off and so it can take like three three hours for a pole vault or high jump competition yeah no it is interesting i know uh i've spent a little bit of time with uh andrew butchards and jay whiteman and they'll the things that they'll do is like just simple things like nerve flossing yeah yeah yeah nerve flossing and then they'll roll out the feet and then they're good to go and it's kind of like just they do that every time yeah yeah yeah two two classics yeah roll the feet golf ball in the foot that's So yeah, it's a beauty.

1:30:06Nerve flossing, usually with the lifting band, yeah, getting everything nice and open. Yeah, neural issues are huge in speed and power sports. Yeah, a bit of neural flossing can go a long way. What's your opinion on, so say if you're trying to improve your strength and power, are there certain exercises that you'd say are kind of like your gold standard if you had to pick them? Because for example, I don't deadlift. And I know a lot of people say, you need to be able to deadlift to get really strong. But I just don't think it's worth the risk. And I've had back issues before, and it's just not for me.

1:30:44Whereas I've seen some people say you can get a lot of what you get out from a deadlift, and yes, you might not get the grip strength, but from doing like a jump or a box jump, because you're still getting that hip extension, you're getting that explosivity. Yeah. I can't even say the word, but yeah. Yeah, it's... would there be some exercises that you you kind of think uh kind of like i'd have this in my program no matter what honestly i'm not married to exercises i'm married to the athlete and because i have so many like me for example a perfect example of somebody i'm pretty intolerant to squatting to be quite honest and it's surprising how many like sprint and jump athletes are like i could get to a good level squatting and pretty good strength but the knock-on effect would be huge on my lumbar spine sacroiliac joint adductors it would just i'd always run into problems and so in a case like that it's like why go that's the most efficient probably the most efficient lift to get strong i would say a squat because you have the eccentric element as well but if it's going to affect the athlete if they're not if they're not a power lifter and they've got a squat for their sport then why choose something that's going to harm them and take away from like their other gains so like um like if you're training for high rocks if a deadlift is the most efficient way to get like strong and then improve your grip strength as well but it's ruining you so you can't run or do the rest of your events choose a different exercise yeah i'm never married to a lift and you can get strong in a lot of different ways there are lifts that are more efficient so if we just break it down in a squat a deadlift you're using a lot of motor units and a lot of muscle tissue and just the mass maximum kilos that you're actually pulling or squatting is high okay so the output is high so it's probably the most efficient way to get strong like maximal strength but at the same time what are you getting strong for so if it's to break a deadlift world record or you're a power lifter then yeah of course but if you're a sprinter or you're a high rocks athlete then you're not going to use a lift that's going to take away from your actual event so i'm never tied to a lift i think the way i look at it is more that i'm going to have an output stimulus a strength a growth strength stimulus lower body a growth strength stimulus upper body and then i'm going to have accessories based on the constraints of the sport so the output might be jump throw or olympic lift the strength might be deadlift it might be squat it might be hip thrust there's a lot of people that are intolerant to both and so i throw a hip thrust in there instead then we may get bench or weighted pull-up or both on different days and then your accessories may go around okay so we still need the we need some posterior chain work we need abduction abduction and we need some core and calf work as well so we've got to get the achilles with a load on them as well we've got to get the adductor and the glute med fired up and we need some muscular endurance there so that's really the setup of when i look at a typical ssc session usually follows that schedule output first max strength second accessories and then what lifts i actually use just completely depend on the athlete so like if no if there's no issues at all it's going to be a squat if there are issues that's when i actually start changing the um the exercise to suit the athlete yeah i feel like at that point of just being so person dependent person dependent like i'm exactly the same i don't squat i don't deadlift like i just think i've had them injuries and i want to avoid them at all costs and there's other things that you can do to achieve the same benefits whether it is a single leg bulgarian split squats or whether it is a hip thrust like you mentioned yeah um but no it's super interesting and that that's why i always like try and tell people like just don't follow someone else's program because it's probably not going to be right for yourself like you've got to go into a gym and you've got to trial and ever and you're going to find the perfect program for you and you can do that with a coach yes you can definitely do that but um you need a coach that understands that it's always a yeah it's always a two-way conversation and yeah that those are the best coaching relationships because you get so much from nobody knows their body like the athlete but then athletes are often can be really bad at making decisions for themselves so having a lens like coming out with a lens a little bit wider the coach is looking a little bit more holistically doesn't have the biases of like when i program for myself i always think i'm superman and so i'd love to get someone to look over what i'm doing and being like hey text them out yeah i think you're being a you should be a little bit more conservative there and then i think that's where that relationship coach and athlete really works and especially usually there's a it's a wonderful thing when a coach gets to work with an athlete over a whole career doesn't happen as much anymore but it used to happen a lot in many sports kind of like boxing track and field swimming you get a coach they might pick up in high school with like boxing or track and field sometimes as a child you'd see that whole career from like start to retirement by the time they're in like my old coach and mentor that started coaching me when I was like 16 in track and field by the last few years he's like at this point we're kind of colleagues it's like you're telling me as much as I'm telling you you know exactly what you need at this point and I trust you enough you can make your own decisions on a lot of things but I'm there to guide you and set some guard rails and so it's always it changes over a career as well yeah and i feel like that's such a shame because when that happens a lot of people think i need to move on because i need to get a coach that is telling me what to do and teaching me and and probably there's a right and a wrong to both yeah like you you can be always listening but you can also have too many chefs um and you do you or in one kitchen and it's, yeah, sometimes I feel like I've been at that situation before where I've had too many people giving me advice and then like, you just don't know what to do.

1:36:57Sometimes it's better just to have that one person kind of like guiding you. Going back to your career, what was the highlight of your career? If you could just do one. Yeah. The highlight was definitely first Olympic games. Nothing can top that feeling. just qualifying and attending an Olympic Games is just a dream come true. And I just don't think anything can really top that. You feel, it sounds ridiculous, but you feel almost, I feel differently about it now. I've retired, but that is so big then. You feel almost immortalized slightly by the fact that you've become an Olympian. That was definitely the highlight.

1:37:40Have you got the rings tattooed? Yeah, on my bicep there. nice yeah so i didn't get that until like a couple of years ago it was way after i retired it was yeah i just couldn't get around to it um but yeah that was always just a huge thing ever since i was a child and i never really ever believed i could do it i wasn't one of these kids just full of confidence um so that was the highlight i think close second was when we broke that world speed record in whistler and hit 97 miles an hour and ended up retrospectively but ended up winning that race so the irony is here the reason we broke a speed record but didn't win the race is the race is two runs so it's the cumulative cumulative time of two runs so we broke the track record world speed record run one um we weren't as good on run two so cumulatively we came second russians were doping we got the gold um only last year actually yeah we've got gold medal yeah yeah but they only we only managed to get it off like bobsleigh canada where the it was in whistler canada like last year took like i was emailing them back and forth for years just to try and get the medal no way so you have to do the emailing oh yeah yeah yeah they're not going to just reinstate it if it's not i mean even for the olympic medal the guys were really um john jackson this was in sochi john jackson was a pilot he was pushing hard to get the medals reinstated once the it had been proven that the russians had been doping and it took them years and years and years i mean i've heard i saw a news article once about a shot putter u.s shot putter that i think ended up getting upgraded to like an olympic silver i think i think he'd been out the medals and he got an olympic silver that might not be correct but that's what i remember and he got given his medal in an airport burger king in the u.s so someone flew in from the ioc they'd managed to like retrieve the silver medal from whoever got caught flew in he was sat in a burger king met him there gave him the medal luckily for the british boys in sochi they had a bit of a ceremony with team gb back in the uk but it took him years and years to get it and then for a world cup medal like ours we they just didn't want the palaver of having to send another metal a medal out to the uk such a shame isn't it yeah i mean i fought long and hard and we eventually got it and i was quite proud of that because i had to be really stubborn to do it but for me it was really important and they they didn't see the importance of it but when you put your life and soul into something something as big as we we don't make a lot of money we we don't set up a career for ourselves we do it for the glory and for achieving something that's hard to achieve so that was the first like gold medal the british team had got in but many people from what many people could remember we don't know when the last one was so that was a big thing at the time and then for them to be so flippant about was six years ago why do you want this medal back well because i've retired now and i'm looking back on my career and it'd be nice to say here's a gold medal yeah for sure and so eventually we we got it they sent it over it got shipped in we had to pay tax on it as well to get to get it over yeah yeah and what was your lowest point wow that's a good question nobody's asked me that no never no because there must have been some time where you you struggled well there's a lot of times i guess you can't even count the amount of times that you've struggled within a career because people think that it's so luxurious being an athlete but i feel like it's so far from the truth yeah yeah it's um that's a good question because yeah honestly nobody's asked me that which is kind of surprising but i think you as an athlete you understand which is probably i think it's just like sometimes and this is the harsh truth of sport like you can give your 100 percent your 110 percent every single thing and it's still not good enough and it's just brutally honest like it it really is and do you know what sometimes this I think about this a lot I was I tried very hard I was a good good bobsledder and I trained very very hard but there were some like little bits of luck in there that helped me out and I could have come out from a long career with very very very little not that we get a lot materially but I could have had very few achievements I could have had more you know I could have had a lot more as well but I think lowest points

1:42:23oh wow yeah that was pretty low there was a couple i think the one that really stands out was in 2016 we went to the world championships which were in eagles in austria and we were we were really flying that year all through training we were coming down first we were looking to win this race and in a world championships you get four runs over two days two runs day one two runs day two coming into day two we were lying in third or fourth place i think but we were catching on every run we were catching up and it really did look like if we carried on that trajectory we were going to get a gold or a silver at a world championships gold or silver at major championships would have been huge, not just for funding, but for our own career.

1:43:16And this track, Eagles, is known as the easiest track in the world. Nobody crashes there either. So first run of the second day, going down the track, and you can see people on the sidelines could see the gap closing, gap closing, gap closing. We'd just gone into second place. We're closing for first, and we crash. I couldn't believe it. no one crashes at this track but you you hear you don't realize you feel a little bit of weightlessness and then you just hear and you feel the ice on your head and we crashed i'm like what that we've just thrown a medal away um and then what i realized was i was the only one that had any handles that day because we were so close to weight we had to pull all the handles out of the sled so i was holding on to two handles there i had a guy behind me 110 kilos holding on to me and a hundred kilo guy behind him, bear hugging him.

1:44:10So he went upside down into a corner and I'm holding three men into this sled and thinking, oh Christ, I can't be too upset about not getting this medal. We're about to get pulled out of a sled here and smashed to bits. Luckily, just as my fingers were giving way, the pressure eased off. We went smashing down a few corners, slid into the end. And do you know what? Because we were close to weight, we didn't have burns vests on. so you have back then it wasn't mandatory but now you have to wear kevlar woven vests underneath your race suit because if you go over you get ice burns and you can go right down to muscle a lot of skin grafts happen so we didn't have vests on either so we're getting smashed all to pieces so that actually helped because uh it wasn't like we've lost this medal it was like now i don't want to get really badly hurt but after that was i was pretty low yeah because we just we'd thrown it away and when we shouldn't have done and that would have been like the real career highlight and that was like my peak as an athlete i think i was really on form there and i'd say that was my lowest point losing losing out on that medal yeah it's crazy how everything can change within literally an instance yeah like you train so hard like literally for for well obviously you have the world cup every so often but like uh an olympic time or whatever you have it every four years or every so often.

1:45:35Yeah. Yeah. They don't come across. And do you know what? With, with Bobsleigh as well, a lot of things have to fall into place. Like your equipment's got to be running well. Your pilot's got to have his eye in. The track's got to be a track that suits your pilot, suits your equipment. The start's got to be a start that suits you. So it all fell into place here at Eagles because it was a simple track that the British army spent a lot of time on. Our pilot was ex-British army. So he's great at this track. the start suited us and we had a good start our equipment at that point was running really really well and yeah it all just went in like a freak he's driven that track he's gone down it thousands of times and um yeah we crashed yeah it was crazy it's probably the lowest point yeah no that's that's uh that is i don't even know what to say because uh it's all got in but um now uh obviously now you're you're kind of like full-time coaching you're traveling the world doing seminars um doing incredible things um what is your main goal now that you've retired officially on this podcast you've said that you're retired yeah yeah i am what uh what's your goal with say the the next 10 15 years of your life so i'd say professionally professionally i was i'm as competitive with my performance as a coach as i think i was as an athlete and i do love it and what i'm starting to find is the wins from my athletes are just as good as they were for me as a as an athlete which i never i was never certain that would be the case i was always worried that being an athlete a performance athlete can make you inherently selfish you've got to be very self-centered and self-driven about your performance and so i always wondered whether if somebody else is getting the plaudits and my hard work is part of it whether i'd feel a certain way about it but what i have pleasantly discovered is that i really do get a lot of satisfaction from my athletes doing well i think that culminated recently i had an athlete in the commonwealth games who won the 100 hurdles and i must caveat i'm only the strength conditioning coach so i only have a certain small role to play in the overriding picture the track coach is much more important but still i'm working with this athlete and putting a lot of consideration into her programming and to be track side and watch her win a race and then have a photo with her with the her bahamas flag around her um was just incredible and that was as good as anything that i'd done as an athlete to be honest so it is the next 10 15 years is about just trying to create champions the more people that i can win major championships with increase their prs break world records um the better yeah well you've got you're off to a great start i hope so yeah and um like i say your your socials uh i feel like they're inspiring you know hundreds of thousands of people um so thank you for this chat today it's been a pleasure no it's been great it's been really great I'll have to get in the gym with you do some play metrics and you can teach me a thing or two because I am so shit really?

1:48:57yeah I'm so shit at play metrics do you know what give me an hour mate you'll be a season pro yeah there we go we'll have to book in yeah for sure let's do that thank you Ben thanks for having me