Olympic Coach Stuart McMillan On The Science Of Speed, Unlocking Your Body's True Potential & Why Sprinting Is The Ultimate Human Activity

25:17Like it's almost an inception. Like maybe you are calling all the shots, but you're giving them - Oh, I'm not calling the shots at all. But like, it's like, okay, you said this is what you want and you're sharing with me, these are the ways in which you wanna move forward. And so I'm here to support that. But the idea is being led by the athlete. There's three big things that we talk about at the start of the year. One is we need to figure out why you are really good. And we train you towards that thing. So let's have a conversation about that. Number two is this is a partnership. This is me and you working together.

25:53This isn't me or directing this. I'm helping, I'm guiding you, I'm facilitating this. But this is always going to be an ongoing conversation. And number three is what you alluded to, which is the most important thing is you need to believe 100 % in yourself, everything you do, your support team, all the things that are around this. and me as your coach in the program that you're buying into. Without those three things, you're not going to reach these objectives. So it's 100%. Like that for me is everything. Now, that's a little bit different if I'm coaching 14-year-olds. 14-year-olds is not a 50-50 partnership.

26:29It's probably a 98-2. You know, it's still, they're going to have some autonomy into some of the things that we do. I think that's still important, but it's not 50-50. But the more experience that we have with athletes, So maybe I'm starting with a 20-year-old. I coached a bobsleder named Steve Messler, a three-time Olympian, ended up winning a gold medal in 2010. At the start of the program in 2002, 2001, I was a different coach. I mean, it's a long time ago. I'm a director. I'm telling him exactly what to do. 10 years later, he's telling me exactly what he's going to do. And he won an Olympic gold medal.

27:02You know, that's really, truly, that should be the nature of a coach-athlete relationship over the course of time. So under this rubric, what are the characteristics of the athlete that thrives in that type of environment and the ones that struggle? That's a great question. I've actually struggled with this as well. Because I don't like coaching automatons that just want to be told what to do. Like I don't find that, you know, I can see what they can't see. But they can feel what I can't feel. So that back and forth is really important for me. So when I'm coaching athletes that just want to be told what to do, typically that doesn't work for me.

27:44I coached a really, really elite sprinter who's now got seven Olympic gold medals, or sorry, seven Olympic medals. And he was that way. He just wanted to be told what to do. He wasn't interested in the system or what he needed to know or do to have a long-term sustainable career. And I only coached him for three years because of that. Now he's had a long-term sustainable career because he's found out over the course of time, yeah, this is important. and I need to ask these questions, be a better actor or partner in this relationship. But I find that really, really, really hard. You know, when I'm talking to athletes that I may be entering into a new relationship with, I make sure that they're on that same boat.

28:24Is this something that you're also interested in? Or are you just interested in being told what to do? Because you can succeed both ways. If you are only interested in being told what to do, That doesn't necessarily mean you're not gonna succeed. There's plenty of people that succeed that way. It's just not gonna succeed with me. Yeah. In your experience, what are some of the common mistakes that coaches make?

28:55Oh boy. I ask that intentionally in the broadest of ways. Yeah. I mean, I just feel, I would say, as a preface to that, like coaching philosophy has come a long way, you know, and it seems to me, you don't see like the bad behavior coaches in the way that you used to, but that doesn't mean that everybody understands how to coach at the level that you're coaching. Yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that. I think it has come a long way. And I think it has come a long way, especially in collegiate ranks and maybe Europe and other places. I mean, there's some really good coaching going on, for sure, in all sports.

29:37I feel like there's probably two or three really significant things that I think coaching as a whole and coaches as a whole can do significantly better. One of it is this. Stop being a director and start thinking of your role as being a guide or facilitator. And coaching, especially in this country, has always been, the coach is an authority figure. And there's no autonomy for the athlete. And that can work. And it does work, especially in the NCAA. You've got quite a lot of directors in the NCAA that just tell you what to do. And for short term, that can definitely work. But long term, I don't feel that works well.

30:21Meaning you may succeed that way. But I don't think that's really setting you up to be having a healthy relationship with the sport, enjoying your experience in the sport, maybe even enjoying your life. I feel like that is really, really important. And I think a lot of coaches don't understand that. A coach often sees their role as, I'm coaching you, Rich. I want you to win. And that's it. And forgetting and maybe even ignoring that maybe that's not what you exactly want from your experience in sport. Winning might be important to you, but maybe spending time with friends might be just as important.

30:59Or finding out more about yourself through this expression of sprinting or jumping or throwing or whatever might be more important or traveling might be more important. All of these different things. So I feel like coaches can do a better job of having these conversations with athletes and trying to understand what it is that they are trying to get out of this thing that they're doing. So we can support that. That's our role. Rather than telling you what's important to me and just assuming that's important to you as well. So number one is that. Number two, I think is from a technical perspective.

31:27And we see this across the board in all sports, at all levels, especially at the professional level, is coaches, coaching athletes as if they are the average of all the athletes that they coach. So not coaching individuals, coaching the average of all the individuals. So whether that being from a technical perspective, a programming perspective, a mental resilience and emotional psychological perspective, not treating the person as an individual, I think is the biggest error that I see in all coaching across the board. So those are probably the two biggest things for me. That's a scalability problem though, because not everybody can have their own coach and program tailored specifically for them.

32:08For sure, I agree with that. If you're coaching, say, a soccer team, you've got 25 players, you can't have 25 separate programs for 25 players. But you can still talk to them about what is important to them and treat them a little bit differently, especially at professional levels. And we don't do that well at all. you know like there's some of the best coaches in the world you know that they do a really bad job of that you either fit into the system or you go find another system to fit into and i find you know at least in my experience my opinion that that's not what coaching is coaching is now like if i've got 25 players 20 of them might work pretty well with this system and five of them i'm gonna have to figure out a way to get the best out of those five that's the objective It's not about, all right, get rid of those fives and bring in another five, you know?

33:00That's the biggest issue I have with so many people who've, you know, whether it be Instagram experts or whatever, saying this is how you get better at this thing technically. Right, yeah. Well, how do you - I was gonna ask you about how you navigate the landscape of, you know, online, not necessarily misinformation, but maybe not the best information when it comes to stuff that you actually know about. I try my best to ignore it. I really do. Like if I see something, oh man, like I don't like how you're doing this. I block that person and mute that person so I'd never see it again. You don't have to deal with it.

33:36I've had this conversation with a number of colleagues about whether it's the responsibility for coaches and coach educators to not only point people towards good things, but also point them away from bad things. And that's tricky. because that's a slippery slope when you start doing that. What is a bad thing even? And who am I to even say that that's a bad thing? So I tend to just focus on the positive side. This is what I feel is important. If you don't, that's okay. Yeah, I'm just thinking of Steve Magnus. He goes face first into a lot of these things. And God bless him. That front line is not for everyone.

34:17No, it's not. I'm not interested in it. But great, Steve, I love that you're doing it. In many cases, you or someone like you who is in a role similar to the role that you play, you're the most important adult figure in these young people's lives. Maybe in certain cases more important than their parents. And so there is a role that you're playing and a responsibility perhaps that you're shouldering to mold these athletes as human beings and as people. Like, do you think about that? Do you have a philosophy around that? because off the track, like your influence is carrying into the rest of their lives.

34:56Yeah, it is. It's interesting. I used to be really clear on this, that my responsibility begun and ended with the physical piece or the health and performance piece. And that was it. But you're right. I mean, it's probably more than that. I mean, that's convenient to tell yourself that. It is convenient, 100%. And it's a much easier job. It's still a really, really difficult job, by the way, I'm educated as a coach. I'm not educated as a life coach or a mentor for young people. So they're dealing with things that, you know, that's not my scope of practice here. I can be a good role model. I can have conversations with you and I can be supportive and try to create an environment in which you're a part of and training within that is positive and you can feel supportive and great within.

35:45But I think, you know, Now it's really challenging for a coach also to have a significant amount of responsibility on the other 120, 130 hours a week that we're not seeing. It's hard. But mindset is such a big piece of this. Oh yeah. And however you're carrying that message or trying to instill the best mindset possible for them to perform at that level, that's something that is crucial throughout the rest of their life. and that those people will turn to and rely upon in their decision-making throughout the course of the rest of their life. I mean, maybe it's too, you think about it that way and it's like too much, but - No, but it is the job, right?

36:27It is true. For sure. And so obviously you're teaching them, you know, important life skills in addition to, you know, track and field skills or sprinting skills. I think it's even difficult to disentangle their identity as an athlete and them as a human being. You know, anybody who's a master of what they do, there's a lot of crossover there, you know? I don't know how recent this was. There was an interview with the coach of the Boston Celtics, and I'm blanking on his name. And the interviewer said, you're a basketball coach, and then went to ask his question. And I think his name's Joe. I don't remember his last name.

37:05But he interrupted the interview and said, I'm not a basketball coach. And he said, I'm a human being who coaches basketball. And he talked about this separation. It was actually a really intelligent, well-thought-through answer. But I feel like, you know what? You're a basketball coach. Like, your identity is so entangled within being a basketball coach that it's really hard for you to disentangle that. You know, like, that is it. I'm a coach. I'm a track and field coach and a coach educator. And these athletes at this level are track and field athletes. And their identity as an athlete is so tied in with their identity as a human that that can become problematic.

37:42and sometimes it's a coach's role to better understand when that is becoming problematic and help the athlete disentangle that, that they go out and lose a race and they've just, that ruins their next week. It's just a race, man. Sure, these are attachments, right? Your attachment to your identity as an athlete, your attachment to achieving a certain goal and on some level, these are helpful to anchor yourself in who you are and what you're striving towards, but they become unhealthy when you don't reach that goal and it's a threat to that identity, like who you are as a human being as opposed to something you just did or didn't do.

38:25It's back to the push and the pull, right? Right. As hard as you have to push, you have to in equal parts release. Yeah. And it's also accepting that there's something inherently unhealthy about being the best in the world at almost anything. Yeah, you said that. Like you had some tweet or something like, yeah, this shouldn't be a controversial statement that like being an athlete at this level might not be the healthiest thing for people to do. Yeah, it's not, it's not. So tell me more about that. It's an obsession. You have to be obsessed by it. It's easy to say that you've got to disconnect and be balanced.

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44:13Yeah, you're not winning an Olympic gold medal because you're living a balanced life. No, you're not. You're not. You've got another 80 years to live a balanced life. you know, after that. Now, I'm not saying that balance isn't important. We talk about, you know, as I said before, this five component part health and performance system that there needs to be some sort of dynamic balance between all of these component parts. And within that is included the community that you're a part of and your friends and family and you feel supported. It's really important. But it's also really important not only to be healthy human, but understanding that that being a healthy human, if you're not, it's constraining your ability to actually perform.

44:49Yeah. Also the tension between what serves the short-term goal and what serves the long-term goal. Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. But it goes back to what the athlete's objective is. You know, are you in this to, is it short-term for you? Are you trying to win Olympic medal? Or are there other objectives? And what is the hierarchical list look like for you? Like not everybody's doing the sport to win the Olympics, as you know, you know? So what is it? and we have to understand that and then we support that. And for those that may, you know, I just wanna have some friends, I wanna compete, I wanna find out more about myself, I wanna travel, I wanna do this, great, we can support that too.

45:30When you're an athlete at that high level, does anybody say that? Oh yeah. Really? Yeah. Because I just assume they all are like, I'm going to the Olympics. Oh no. You're the guy who's gonna take me there. That's the story that they've been told since they were five, right? And then they see it and they start living and say, okay, is this really what I want? You know, when they start doing the work to try to figure out their motivation, like why are they still doing this thing rather than just doing this thing because they ended up, they were the best in school at it. And they start asking themselves these more existential questions.

46:01And they say, ah, it isn't that. It's this, this, this, and this instead. And many of them are forced to ask those questions because they're just miserable. They're not enjoying it anymore. You know, they got into the sport because they enjoyed it. Now they're doing it because they want to go to the Olympics. Not everybody wants to go to the Olympics. You have said that sprinting is the ultimate human activity. Oh. So justify that statement. Okay, so I'll ask you, do you know of any single metric that is a better measure for overall health and vitality than the ability to go out and maximally run?

46:43To be able to run maximally, Like go out on the street right now and after a 10 minute warmup, you can run as fast as you can. I mean, probably not. I don't think there is. It's a proxy for so many other different things. If you can do that, you can move your body in so many different ways and you can explore the world in so many different ways. So for me, that's why I feel like it's the ultimate activity. You don't have to sprint. It's not like, okay, you've got to start a sprinting program now and sprint five days a week. It's not that. It's can you do it? Do you still have the capacity to do it?

47:14Most of us lose that capacity at 15, 20, 25, maybe. So this is the answer to the next question, I guess on some level, which is like, you're a sprint coach. My audience is full of average people, many of whom are probably not interested in sprinting at all. Why should we care about this? Why should we care about understanding sprinting? I think you should care about being free to move your body in as many different ways as you want to. And not being constrained by a body that cannot do those things. And I feel like that's really important. You have that freedom when you're young. And then we start losing that freedom.

48:00And we start being dictated to by a commodified fitness industry about what health and wellness and movement is about. And then 10 years later, we can no longer move in free ways. and express yourself with freedom. And that's a very slippery slope to not being able to move well at all. So I feel like it's not, again, it's not about sprinting. It's just about exploring, moving your body in as many different ways as you possibly can. That's the key to long-term health and wellness, you know, variability and adaptability. What is the difference between sprinting and running? And even more than that, the difference between sprinting and running fast?

48:44Let's zoom out and let's say the difference between sprinting and running from a health perspective. Most people who are listening do some sort of running or jogging. And short term, that's a pretty safe activity. It's one of the reasons why we do it. And long term, maybe not really safe. We know the statistics around health of running and jogging, between 40 and 60 % of all runners hurt every single year. That's pretty high. Sprinting is the opposite. Short-term, acutely, there's some danger there. There's some significant risk. But long-term, there's some really, really big upsides. So from that perspective, I feel like, okay, that's one way to describe the differences.

49:31Why is that? Because sprinting, you're applying far more forces through greater ranges of motion, much faster. It requires much more coordination through the entirety of the system. Where jogging is nowhere near as much force, nowhere near as much velocity, nowhere near as much range of motion. And instead of having to coordinate through the entire system, we just have to basically coordinate through the foot and ankle and the calf complex, and that's it. And the rest of the body just goes along for the ride. By the way, I'm not down on jogging. I jog. I run every day. I feel like it's really, if you enjoy it, it's good for you.

50:07It feeds your soul and you can remain healthy, go and run. But I feel like you also need to sprint. From a biomechanical perspective though, there is more difference than I think people would realize between running fast and what would technically be called sprinting. Yeah, yeah, it always, some of it's semantics. Like I get annoyed and that's just me being annoyed for no reason really by the pop scientists espousing a certain protocol as a sprint for 60 seconds and then take 60 seconds on. No one on the planet. The derivative ultimate workout. Right. This is all you need to do. Nobody on the planet is sprinting for 60 seconds.

50:50Shocking that that would bother you. Right, yeah. Or even 20 seconds, you know, you're not sprinting, you're jumping or you're running fast or you're running as fast as you can. So the biggest difference is like the basic one, away from being just semantics, is the amount of space that you're taking up in the world. Like sprinting, you've got, you've taken up much more space. Like it's just bigger range of motion. As I said, it's much more force and much more velocity. For me, the biggest thing or the most important thing, it's sprinting is a coordinative activity, a full body coordination, where running is a little less coordination because you're spending much more time on the ground.

51:25So it's not as important how you coordinate what's going on at the foot and ankle, what's going on in the knee and what's going on at the hip. But for sprinting, that's really important. So that's the main sort of non-semantical, sort of less scientific reason. If you want to call it sprinting, go ahead and call it sprinting. Running as fast as you can, if you want to call that sprinting, you can call it sprinting. I'm not going to get annoyed anymore at that. But the one thing that the elite sprinters do that no one else can do is they create this negative foot speed. So meaning the foot is coming back underneath the center mass, almost faster than the horizontal velocity of the center mass.

52:05So the center mass is moving horizontally and you're moving the foot back at that same velocity and you're creating the secondary mass. It's called the two mass model. It's developed by a friend of mine named Dr. Ken Clark. And the elite sprinters are able to create the secondary mass of up to about 10 % of the total ground reaction forces. That sprinting, that is one model, the two-mass model, that's available to less than a thousandth of a percentage of the population. Everyone else, including me and you, have what's called a spring-mass model where we just hit the ground like a spring and we just spring off.

52:42We hit the ground like a spring and we just spring off. There's no secondary mass. So the most that we can get out of our system is about 90 % of it. That's it. And is that rare version something that can be taught? I wish it was. Or is this a gift? Like this is a gift. It's one of those things where if you don't have the capacity to do that, good luck. It's really, really hard. The ability to time the impact on, and it's not a capacity thing. It's not you just got to get a little bit stronger or work on the velocity of your foot as it comes back. It's a coordination thing. It involves the timing of the impact into the ground that happens in thousands of a second.

53:20It's so hard. It's something that Noah Lyles does better than everybody else on the planet. and that's why he's the fastest man. But it's, and it's something that a guy that can run nine, nine doesn't do as well as he does. It is the differentiating factor in elite sprinting. The difference between really good and the best. Correct. And that gap will never be bridged through conditioning. It's really, really hard, really hard. But we try. Just like a drummer with timing or, you know, a singer with a certain pitch. these things are just things that certain people come into the world. You can get better at them, right?

53:58I mean, you can drum better. Your rhythm can get better. If you can't dance - But fundamentally, it's one of those things like, you know, that woman or that guy has it. Absolutely. Yeah. You can either dance or you can't. And if you can't dance, you can become a better dancer. But you're not going to be, you're not ever going to have the coordination of the rhythm that a great dancer has. Or a singer or a drummer. When you were on Huberman the other week, he opened it up by talking a little bit about you guys being out at the Malibu High School track and you being able to identify, you know, a kid across the track who, you know, kind of stood out.

54:32Like, oh, that guy has something these other kids don't. I'm not saying he had that very special thing, but just an innate kind of predisposition for this type of activity. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty obvious pretty immediately. We had a kid from high school actually join us last year for a, so an athlete that we used to coach, his friend had a kid that wanted to know whether he had a future as a sprinter or a football player. So they asked us to have a look at him for a week and basically give them some advice on whether he should be a sprinter in the NCAA or should he go down the football route.

55:09And he came out and his name's Jeb Moon. And he's like, he's so coordinated. Like he's just, his rhythm and his timing is beautiful. He just bounces off the track. And he's small and skinny. So it was a pretty easy answer for me. I said, all right, this guy can definitely be a runner. I don't know if he can be a sprinter, but he has the coordination, the rhythm, and the timing to be able to do that. And then less than a year later now, like he's getting 30, 40 looks from NCAA programs because he's gone all in on the running part. He's going to be an elite 800-meter guy. And it was clear immediately.

55:42You just watch him run down the track, and you'll see it. You go to any track meet. You go to a marathon. You'll see the guys and the girls at the start of the marathon are just bounced for 26 miles. And the ones at the end, it just looks like a slog. I mean, there's a massive difference. And it's not only capacity. Capacity is important. But most of the difference that we see, the aesthetic differences we see is just, you know, people watching is that coordinate effect or that coordination, the rhythm and the timing. They've just got something that is so hard to coach, so hard to improve. And then within that, there's a whole universe in which you can counsel, teach, coach, and hone and improve technique.

56:25And there's no sport in which technique is coming into play in such a material way as sprinting. 100%. However, you look at eight finalists in the Olympic final, all of them, the eight best in the world move in eight different ways every time. There's a wider variation in body type than you would expect. Massive. Like you look at Noah Lyles and you look at Usain Bolt, they don't look like they're in the same sport. Well, look at Christian Coleman and Usain Bolt. Christian Coleman's 5 '7", Usain Bolt's 6 '5". They're pretty similar performers, or were. You know, they're, yeah, I mean, Zarnel Hughes, 6 '3".

57:07Trayvon Burmel, 5 '7". I mean, they're all over the shop. We are going to move in ways that are determined and governed by the things that we are moving. You know, I'm going to move differently than you. I'm a little bit skinnier than you and a little bit taller than you. Those are the obvious things that we can see. But all these other things as well, you know, what's my joint structure like? What's my fiber type like? What's my force capacity like? What's the stiffness like? What's my coordination like? All of these things govern how we move. And it's our job as coaches is to try to understand what is it unique about you that I can really understand so I can get you moving how you need to be moving, not what I feel like you should be moving.

57:46And that's the hardest thing for me. So in the context of a typical training cycle with one of your athletes, how would it break down percentage-wise between time invested in drills and technique versus conditioning? Everything is everything. Yeah, everything that we do, we're trying to do as technically proficient as we possibly can. So whether that's a walk around the track, whether that's a skip, whether that's a stride, whether it's a sprint and acceleration, any sort of drill. So we don't separate, okay, we're gonna warm up and now we're gonna do some technical work and then we're gonna do the main part of the session when we don't think about it.

58:24We think about how you move from step one to the time we get in the car. There's no separation there. And like back to the actor thing, it's method acting. Oh yeah. You're taking it home with you. A hundred percent. And again, different athletes are at different levels of their journey here. Some of them are technically extremely good. Like if you look at a model of what you would think is the most effective way to make a jump shot or throw a football or sprint, yeah, that person is that. And then at that point, what are we doing? We're just encouraging and reminding and maybe putting in things that ensures that they don't get too far away from that.

59:03But the rest of it is just trying to impact efficiency and coordination in ways where we're gonna challenge that model in a different way. You know what's really ironic about that? Obviously, there's a heightened attunement to technique in sprinting because the smallest differences are all the differences. But if you look at endurance sports like a marathon or imagine a 50-miler or 100-miler, if you paid more attention to technique, you attuned yourself to that, that would translate into just unbelievable gains, right? Like just life-changing amount of improvement. And yet these sports are far less attuned to technique.

59:49It took decades for even the best coaches of middle distance athletes to figure that out. Oh, technique matters. You know, and that's, these are the best coaches of the best athletes in the world. They know that now. And not all of the best middle distance coaches in the world are all in on mechanics, but most of them are at this point. In 100 meters, the fastest men take about 40 to 45 steps and the fastest women take about 45 to 50 steps or about 50 to 55. I don't know how many steps there are in a marathon or a 100 miler, but it's a lot. Yeah, but like whatever tiny marginal game that you're getting in sprinting, If you made a technique shift and it becomes rote and intuitive and it allows you to run more efficiently or more swiftly, yeah, that translates into massive performance gains.

1:00:45And health. And yet it really is sort of an afterthought, I think, still. Which is exciting because once that enters that world, you could expect to see some real leaps. It goes back to kind of what we were saying before. What's the solution for that? There's social media coaches. They say, do these drills. And that's your technical work, right? And that's gonna magically make your technique better. You'll just do five minutes of drills before you go do your run or 10 minutes of drills. It doesn't work that way. You get better by moving in a better way. That's the only way to do it. You actually have to make changes.

1:01:22Now, the tricky thing is, is what does that look like? because we self-organize towards our most efficient strategy. So if we just went out and ran down the street right now, we're not thinking about it, we will run in our most efficient way. It may not be the most effective, but it is right now our most natural way to do that. So the coach's job is to look at that and say, can we improve that effectiveness without necessarily negatively impacting the efficiency of that strategy? And that's really hard. There's always going to be a gap. Improvement of effectiveness comes at the cost of efficiency, always.

1:02:02It's just a matter of what that cost is. Is that cost a year, a year and a half, where you're gonna be moving in a less efficient way? Or is it if you're working with a 15-year-old kid, like a week, you know, because it's so plastic. Right, the neuroplasticity, yeah. Like when Tiger Woods decided he was gonna change his swing, it was like this huge commitment that didn't pay off for quite some time. It's the greatest example in sports. He ruined his career by messing what was already an incredibly effective and efficient swing, trying to make it more effective and ignoring, not understanding how this is gonna impact his efficiency.

1:02:42And it just, it ruined his health and his career hasn't been the same, obviously. Also, when you make that technique shift, it doesn't feel right. it feels wrong. And even if you have a coach saying, trust me, this is gonna make you better, everything in your body is like, no, like I wanna move this way. And now when I move this way, it just feels like the wrong way. Like I'm obviously thinking back on my swimming experience, like very technical oriented sport and subtleties matter. And you can really only focus on changing one thing at a time. And when you begin to make that change, whether it's you're making your elbow a little bit higher or the hip rotation or whatever it is, it feels unnatural.

1:03:27And your brain is convincing you that it's wrong. And it's only through continually repeating it and reaffirming it until it becomes rote that you start to click into a new mode and see gains. But when I look at master's athletes, triathletes, or master swimmers, their technique's terrible. Because they didn't learn how to swim as a kid, right? And so it's really hard to learn it later in life. And they're time crunched. And when they go to the pool, they need to get in there 3 ,000 meters or whatever it is. And there's no time for the technique, but they're so inefficient and they're in a hydrodynamic environment, right?

1:04:06Like everything is exponentially more significant, every poor technique problem. But the resistance to focusing on that ultimately becomes the Achilles heel. And it's like, forget about the conditioning. Like you need to take a year and focus on your technique. The water's not working for you, you're fighting it. And so you're exerting all this energy to go incredibly slow. Yeah, I agree. And so it's not any different in track and field. It's just that you're moving through air instead of water. It's the same in any task that you're trying to improve, any motor task. There's essentially, we've got three buttons that we can press.

1:04:41We can press the structural button, which is your structure, which includes your body weight, your limb length, your height, your muscle fiber type, all of these different things, your joint structure. Some of those things we can impact, like your weight. We can't impact your height, but some of the things we can impact and some of them we can't. There's your function. So those are all the different capacities. Your endurance capacity or your force capacity or range of motion capacity, all of these different things. We can affect that. That's a button to press. And we can improve your swimming ability or your running ability by improving one of those capacities or a few of those capacities.

1:05:16And finally, there's the technical part. the coordinative button and that's your you know your degrees of freedom and how you free them and freeze them and you're you know self-organizing or organizing capacities or your understanding of how to move so it's you know coaching and even when you're coaching yourself and you know many of us that's that's what we're doing right we're just exercising and moving and doing things and trying to improve and really coaching ourselves we don't have coaches but think about it those are the three buttons am i going to get better just by losing 20 pounds do i need to lose that Is that a bigger thing for me than maybe getting stronger or becoming more technical?

1:05:51Yeah, that's probably a good start for me. Or is it, I'm pretty happy with my structure, but I'm really weak. Or I've got no endurance capacity, but I'm pretty coordinated. All right, so that's the button I'm going to press. Or structure is pretty good. I'm lean. There's not a lot more I can do there. I can apply good forces through good ranges of motion. I have good endurance capacity, but my coordination really sucks. So that's the button I'm going to press. What you're saying is most of these athletes, they got this one, they've got the structure, they've got the function, but they're lacking the technique.

1:06:25And I feel like that's where people really get it wrong. What is the solution for that? I'm going to do some technical drills prior to doing this thing. That's not how we get better at anything. We actually have to think about getting better at the thing while we're doing the thing. And that's the hard bit. And understanding, as we said, the gap and how long of a commitment that you're signing up for. And you may even be signing up for a mistake like Tiger Woods did. He wasn't trying to get worse. He wasn't trying to hurt himself. He was trying to get better. So we've got to be really careful first and foremost before we say, you know, I'm going to try and improve my technique by doing X, Y, and Z.

1:07:09We have to be really careful first and foremost before doing that. What is the average volume of the average elite sprinter in terms of the amount that they're running every week? I think that differs from system to system. When you talk about volume, you can be talking about anything from say 65 to 70 % of their maximum sprint speed all the way up to 100 % of it. The amount of time that we spend doing 100 % maximum sprint speed per week, probably less than 300 meters. Like it's not much. And some programs might be maximal about 1 ,000 meters. It's very, very little. Most elite sprint programs are pretty polarized like most middle distance programs are at this point pretty polarized.

1:07:59There's a little bit of high intensity work and quite a lot of low intensity work. It's the same as sprinting. We do a lot of work at 65 to 70%, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of four to 5 ,000 meters a week of that. We do a little bit of work anywhere somewhere, you know, 200 to 500. That's probably about the range of maximal work. And the rest of the work, a little bit of work happens in the middle, but not much. But in terms of the amount of, let's just put it in mileage terms, like how many miles a week? Like a lot of, you know, including like warmup, just running really slow around the track.

1:08:35I'm saying this because I think there is a misconception out there that these athletes aren't doing that much running when in fact they actually are probably doing more running than the average amateur 10K runner. There's a lot of movement. There may not be a lot of just linear running, jogging, but we will go out on the track and we start training at 9.45. The athletes who get there at 9.15, they do about half an hour of prep work on themselves rolling and stretching and doing whatever maybe it gets and getting some therapy we start the warm-up at 9 45 and typically we finish about one o 'clock and there's a lot of moving between that 9 45 and that one o 'clock i'd need to check the gps but i i would i would think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of six to eight miles of movement that's every day yeah you know and then we go to the weight room we do a bunch of stuff.

1:09:26Yeah. So, 68 miles. So, you're looking at like, you know, 80 miles a week of running or of movement, I would say, right? Yeah, 68 a day multiplied by five or six. So, 50. 50? Yeah, 40, 50. It's a lot. Interesting. Yeah. We don't do any jogging. We do zero jogging. Zero jogging. Zero jogging. We do striding and sprinting and that's it. Speaking of jogging, what do you think the, again, back to the average kind of endurance athlete or running enthusiast, what can that individual learn from the world of sprinting? I think endurance athletes, we love our zone too, and we like building our base. And quite frankly, for most people, a lot of speed work, is that gonna make them faster in a 50K when their average pace is 8.30 or nine minutes a mile or something like that?

1:10:24But I think there's more and more interesting science coming out around the importance of doing threshold and speed work in terms of improving your capacity as an endurance athlete. So I'm curious around your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, speed reserve matters for sure. It matters at every event from 100 meters up to a marathon. I don't know anything about any of the ultras, I'm sorry. But typically the fastest marathoners are the people that win the marathon races are also really, you know, they're the fastest people as well. You know, you put them in a 400 meter and they would win the 400 meters. Sure, at the elite level, yes.

1:10:57At the elite level. Like they're doing a lot of intense speed work. 100%, 100%. So the question then is, what is the transference down to the average Joe or Jane? And for me, it's like, are you really that interested in maximizing your 10K, your marathon or your 100 mile? Like if that's really important to you, then try to figure out what you need to do. So capacity is first and foremost, the most important thing. if this is really important for you the performance of this and not just the experience of it or just being excellent or doing things that you really enjoy then find a way to do some speed work within that because that will that increased sort of that increased speed any speed that's below that speed will be at a lower percentage of your maximum sprint speed so you can be a little bit more economical at these various speeds.

1:11:54That's basic, you know? It's just then like, what does that look like? You know, for speed work for us, and this is a speed session, might be two by 60 meters. Right.

1:12:09That's it, that's the session. This is the, yeah, this is the focus of the entire day. Right. We're doing all the other stuff, but it's really just about this moment. We are warming up for an hour and a half. Plus getting maybe an hour of treatment for two 60-meter runs. That's it. That's fucking hilarious. That's probably different from most people who are listening, right? Speed work for them might be, all right, we're going to do some one-minute repeats or 30-second repeats or whatever and take a long recovery. That's the big thing is like when we were saying before about the difference between running and sprinting, if you're actually trying to get faster, Think about the recovery that you have or the density of your programming.

1:12:51Doing 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off for three miles isn't speed work. That's maximum aerobic speed. It's not improving your speed. Improve your speed, you need to look at rest to work ratios of uppers of 10. So if you're running for 30 seconds, five minutes recovery. That's hard for many joggers and endurance athletes. It's hard.

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1:16:32But from a biometric perspective, you're not gonna be able to run fast unless your body knows how to run fast. Correct, yeah. Also, right? 100%. So aside from the conditioning part, there's just a kind of neurological piece there of connecting like just your body knowing that it can do that and what it feels like when it's doing that. Are you familiar with this guy, David Roche? I had him on the podcast. He's a longtime endurance athlete, kind of marathon runner, was a track and field athlete, and has been a coach in Boulder for a long time and had never done anything in the ultra world. And then he decides he's gonna do his first 100 miler, never done a 100 miler before.

1:17:13And he trained for it in a very unconventional way by doing almost not exclusively, but way more than anybody else had before, like focusing on threshold work and running fast and acclimating his body to be able to withstand running at speeds much faster than people are used to running for distances like that. And granted, he had this huge base that he'd been building for, I don't know, 20 years or something like that. So obviously he's tapping into that. But his approach was really unique and it paid off. He won Leadville and just crushed it with an insane time. Did he break the record? I think he broke the Red, Leadville, did he break the Leadville record?

1:17:57I think he did. Yeah, in his very first 100 miler. I think he got injured recently, but then he was gonna go to Western States and try to do it again. But basically, I'm bringing all this up because he's introducing the concept of speed in a world in which, you know, for the first time kind of, or in a different and new way in that world. And I think there is something to be said for playing around with different approaches. And so with you being the speed master, Obviously, your world is like speed in the most finite way. And it's unclear how much that would translate into that other very different world.

1:18:32But I think from a technique perspective and from a biomechanical perspective, I think there's a lot to be learned. Yeah, I agree, 100%. For me, the fastest athletes, even the best athletes in any other sport are the ones who coordinate all the component parts of their system the best. So they may have really strong calves or really strong quads or really strong glutes or great pecs or whatever it is. And all the best ones have that. But the really, truly best are the ones who could coordinate every single component part of their system. So from what's happening down in the foot to the ankle, to the knee, to the hip, to their arms and their shoulders and how they're carrying their head and all of these things, how it coordinates, how the entire system coordinates.

1:19:15Now, each component part of that system is really important. It's important that you've got a really stiff spring at your ankle so you can attenuate some of these high, high forces. But how that ankle relates to the knee and how the knee relates to the hip and how those three joints relate together and how that relates to the entire system as a whole, that's more important. And that's coordination. So coordination, really, what we're talking about when we're talking about 100 miler, that's economy. So if you can be more coordinated, you can be more economical. So perhaps by doing doing more speed work for this guy.

1:19:50He became a little bit more coordinated. He learned how to intuitively, he wasn't probably cognitively aware of this, but his system became more connected. So how his ankle related to his knee, to his hip, to the rest of his system, everything just started working in a much more coordinated fashion. We don't do that when we're just doing zone two work. It's not a coordination exercise. And being able to maintain that for a longer period of time because he trained it. Right, 100%. Now, that's kind of what we were saying before, right? We've got to identify what it is about us as individuals that make us us.

1:20:23What are we good at? And then lean into that. So just because he trained that way doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else he trained exactly that way. Yeah, back to the internet, drawing a reductive conclusion from that. Oh, we're gonna do that now. Like this is the way, it's the Norwegian four by four. Exactly, exactly. It's a different version of that idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How much does technology come into play in terms of how you work with athletes? Like, what technology do you use? Like, I would imagine, you know, videoing your athletes and finding ways to really like get granular about like their technique or how is the body, you know, coordinating from an internal perspective?

1:20:59Is there a way to measure that and to like measure progress? Yeah. A lot. Track and field is the ultimate technology sport. So a stopwatch. And everybody's used a stopwatch for going mountain, you know, 100 years or so. And even beginner coaches have a stopwatch. And now beginner coaches also have a camera. Beginner coaches also generally have a camera and some sort of biomechanical app that they've paid$5 for or whatever, right? So that's where we start. At the higher levels, it's significant. any more than that. So if you look at what sprinting is, or even what running is, ground contact time, flight time, step length, and step frequency, velocity.

1:21:42And velocity is the result of these four things, contact time, flight time, step frequency, step length. If I watch you run out there, I can probably have a pretty good guess of what those four things are, but it wouldn't be a great one. I wouldn't be able to accurately understand the difference between your contact time of 1200s or 1400s, for example. So you need really robust technology to be able to do that. Luckily, there's techs out there now that we don't have to rely on doing that in a lab with a biomechanist. There's different AI apps. In fact, we've got one. It's called Motion IQ, where we just film it with a camera, and it'll tell us what the contact time is, what the flight time is, what the step length is, and what the step frequency is.

1:22:25Now, all of these are component parts of the system. They're called spatial temporal variables. They determine how fast you are. All of them are important. But if I told you that my step length was 250 centimeters, that doesn't tell you anything about how fast I am until I tell you what the step frequency is or the contact time, what the flight time is. So it's always this connection, the interrelationship between these component parts. So coaching at this level is you have to know this data. You have to know that the elite males have to have a step frequency of between 4.4 steps a second and five steps a second.

1:23:03And they need to have a step length of somewhere between 240 and 280. And there's a big range because of the range of the athletes that we're talking about. Usain Bolt had a step frequency and the world record of, I think, 4.38. So 4.38 steps a second, but a step length was 278 centimeters. So if you have a small step frequency, you better have a huge length. And if I don't know that data as a coach, then I'm just sort of blindly thinking about, what am I doing here? What am I trying to improve? And if I don't know the step length and step frequency or the contact time and the flight time, if you've got a contact time of 0.080, for example, which is less than a hundredth of a second, and you're in the air for, let's say 0.15, then that's way too long in the air.

1:23:51And you can kind of see that if somebody's, it looks like he's bounding. but if we've got a way in which we can actually look at that and determine objectively what that is, that for me is really, really valuable information. Wow, that's way more intense than I thought. Is that right? Yeah. No, that's fascinating. And then within that, can you also gauge force? You know, the force at which the foot is - You can estimate force. You can't - You can estimate force - Are there like sort of power meters that you can put in those shoes? You can do that too. There's many other different ways. In fact, J.B.

1:24:22Moran and Dr. Ken Clark and Peter Wayand, many other sort of sprint biomechanists have looked to this. And there is a pretty accurate way to measure vertical force based upon how fast you're running and your body weight. So it's, yeah, and you can estimate that with pretty good precision, actually. And then, of course, over like 100 meters or 200 meters, there's stages within this race, right? And if you were to measure those factors across those distances, it also becomes a factor of looking at when they begin to decline, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And if you don't have that data, again, like we always seeing is with our eyes and the eyes are great.

1:25:02We have a master's program that we've started this year. And a big part of it is the first couple of months is trying to get across to the students the importance of actually coaching. Over the course of the last 40, like when I started coaching 40 years ago, there was no tech. We had no tech. We had a stopwatch, really. And we had a position - You could video people. Yeah, but that was even that. Like you had to have money to buy a$500 video camera. Right. Like it was hard, right? You had a position transducer that you could attach to a bar that might cost 300 bucks. And so we could get velocity from this position transducer, but not much else.

1:25:37You know, it was really, really hard. And now because there's so much tech, coaches are just being inundated with all of it. And they've forgotten, you know, we still have to coach. You still have to develop an eye. You still have to have some basic, some subjective level of understanding of what you're seeing in front of you. And the capacity for many coaches right now, they kind of lose that. It's still really, really important. So when it comes to the fatigue, we can see it. If you've got a good coaching eye, you can see, okay, this athlete's slowing down. And they're slowing down because they're spending longer on the ground.

1:26:10But you still don't know when that is happening, how much longer they are on the ground. what is the second order effects of that and how we can improve it. We've got to be able to come up with ways in which we can measure that. So that's where tech, we can use tech really well. My rule on tech is I identify the tech that is the most important for us and rely on as little as we possibly can. But you can foresee a situation and maybe you already can do this with your AI tool of feeding the AI all the data from a certain athletes, It's training and race performances with all of those metrics that you were talking about.

1:26:48And the AI being able to crunch that and saying, listen, here's what's happening at 80 meters. And if this athlete just shortened their stride length by two millimeters and can basically lift off more quickly or stay on the ground longer, we can avoid this because this person does this every time. And here's a possible solution for you to look at. Is that - Maybe. Maybe. I'm like, I don't know anything. So I'm just like - No, there are tools out there now that it's going that way. Right. I'm skeptical. Yeah. I'm really skeptical. This is a complex system. It's a nonlinear complex system where we don't really understand the relationship between component parts until after the fact.

1:27:35Now, if AI can come in and help us understand those relationships a little bit quicker, great. But it's not gonna make decisions for us. There's no way. No, not in our lifetime in a way. Yeah. It's probably not gonna be able to tell you whether Noah Lyles will be better if he doesn't wear the pearl necklace or brought out a different Pokemon card. Correct. You know? Correct. So I don't think your role is going anywhere. At least for the next 20 years or so. Yeah, humans are incomprehensible in a way that will provide you with career longevity, I think. Good, I'm glad. You know, what do you recommend for somebody who's listening to this who has never really thought about sprinting and is thinking, maybe I should, you know, like, learn more about this?

1:28:20Like, what's a way in? On Huberman, you went way deep on drills and plyometrics and skipping and tools. And I don't want to necessarily retread all of that area. I think, you know, you guys had an amazing conversation. And if people want to hear in detail more about that stuff, they should definitely go and watch or listen to that. But just to initiate, you know, the average human being or that avid endurance athlete, like how do you usher them into the world a little bit? Skip, I think skipping is really important. So I will repeat that. I think skipping is a really nice gateway into sprinting because it's a very similar gait pattern that requires a coordination of the ankle, the knee and the hip.

1:28:59That's really important because that is the biggest difference between sprinting and jogging. Jogging, there's not a lot of coordination going on. is a lot of just, you know, over amortization, essentially. You're spending a lot of time on the ground and you're just rolling through the joints. It's not super coordinated. Where skipping, you have to be coordinated. So I think skipping is a really good way to do it. And skipping to warm up or put skipping into the runs or, you know, every five minutes to a 30-second skip, I do feel like that is a really good gateway into sprinting. Like, what is it doing that is so important?

1:29:31The best things are the ones that teach you without you having to think about how to do it. Skipping is a pretty innate, intuitive gait pattern. You know, so it's something that we learn to do when we're like three or four years old, right? If you skip, if we just went out and skipped down the street outside here, we'd be able to do that. And you could see that the ankle joint, the knee joint and the hip joint all coordinate, meaning they all fire and relax in a coordinated fashion to keep us moving effectively and efficiently. and it's much stiffer than if you were running. You can go out there and run a zillion different ways and you can think about it.

1:30:09But when you're skipping, it's a lot less cognitive involvement in that. So I think just the stiffness, the systemic stiffness, the vertical stiffness, which is the coordination between the ankle, the knee, and the hip is something that we don't improve when we're jogging. We only improve when we're at a higher velocity or when we're skipping. So I feel like that is one way to do it. Another way to do it is when you do do your speed work or when you're doing your inover work or your fart lick or whatever, think about sprinting as if somebody's up in the sky. You've got a rope attached to the top of your head and they're pulling you as tall as you possibly can.

1:30:45So you're always up here. And that just alone better coordinates the lower body joints. because typically running, especially if we're running longer distances, we tend to just shrink a little bit and we go small and we just drop down. Now, if we're going to put in a sprint, we're going to put a 30-second sprint in, just think about being taller, not pushing the chest out, but just being taller from the top of the head. And then think, so that's from the top, that's elongating everything and just forcing a more coordinated spring. And second, being stiffer on impact through the foot. So think in being flat foot on the contact and getting off pretty quickly.

1:31:26So just flat foot, flat foot, flat foot, flat foot. As if you're almost jumping on a trampoline. If you pushed off or towed off on a trampoline, you'd get over-rotated and you'd fall forward. But if you thought about just being flat and just bouncing with a really, really stiff foot and ankle, that's required on sprinting, but isn't required on running, by the way, and that's fine. But just think about doing that. So just for me, there's not drills other than, you know, just doing, as we said, some plyometrics, some skipping, so on and so forth. It's just when you're running, just thinking about it.

1:31:59It's just thinking about being a little bit taller, thinking about the position of your pelvis. Am I really anteriorly rotated here? Am I just sort of, or do I need to tuck my pelvis under? Do I need to be a little stiffer on impact? All of these types of things. Just think about how you're running when you run. What if you're an avid runner and perhaps you do tempo work and threshold work and stuff like that, but you can't remember the last time you just said, I'm gonna run 100 meters as fast as I can. Yeah, don't do it. Even if you're a very fit person, this is not something I would recommend you do.

1:32:32Like you're risking injury, right? So what do you suggest in terms of building somebody up into a place where then they can begin to do that kind of thing? There's a very unique demand on the tissue when you sprint maximally. And if the fastest you've gone as a percentage of your maximum sprint speed is 80, and all of a sudden you go to 100, it's only gonna end one way. Yeah. You know, so it's the same rules as everything else. Yeah. Progressive overload. But we all still think we're 14. We're not. You know what I mean? We're not, you're not. What do you mean? I can go like, you know, I remember when I used to do that.

1:33:07Why can't I do that now? No, no, you can't. You can't. Like that, and that's, you cannot do it. So don't try. But if you've gone to 70%, go to 75 % and do that for three or four sessions. And once you can do that, go to 80%, maybe 85%. Time yourself. This is the only way to get better at anything. If you're trying to get your bench press from 200 pounds to 400 pounds, you don't put 400 pounds on the bar. You put 205 pounds on the bar. Next time, maybe 210. And maybe in three years, you can do 400 pounds. Right. It's the same. I wanna know a little bit more about the world of bobsled and skeleton.

1:33:45So you've coached athletes in this world. It's so interesting. How is getting an athlete prepared in those worlds similar or different than working with a track and field athlete? I love working with bobsledders and skeleton athletes. I started in this business of speed in about 1995, 96. and I started working with bobsled athletes in 1998. So immediately, I was based up in Canada, in Calgary, where there's winter for seven months of the year. There's not a lot of - More bobsledders than track and field athletes. There's not a lot of elite sprinters in Calgary, but there's a lot of bobsledders.

1:34:25You know, we had the 1980 Olympic games there, right? So you've got a bobsled track. So there's lots of people wanting to do bobsled. But the biggest thing, the biggest difference is sprinters or elite sprinters have always been elite. They've always been the fastest kid. So they've always felt like they're the best athlete. Bobsledders are failed athletes in another sport. They're failures. So they've either failed in football or they failed in track or they failed in rugby or they failed in baseball or failed in decathlon or whatever it is. And they pick up bobsled because they couldn't do something else.

1:35:00So you have a certain type of mentality in psychology when you're working with bobsledders, a certain type of humility. a certain type of respect for the process that it was required to be a sustainably long-term elite athlete. And maybe something to prove. And something to prove, 100%, which you don't always get in sprinting because they've always been the fast kid. So you take it for granted a little bit until it's too late. I can't take this for granted anymore. I got to do something else. Bobsetters are not like that and skeleton athletes are not like that. So I really enjoyed working with those athletes because they're all in on whatever they needed to do, right?

1:35:37You talk about marginal gains. They're all in on whatever. What is the marginal gain that I can do this better? How can I get better? Where sprinters, yeah, I'm already fast, man. Like, what are you going to tell me? I coached a kid, Andre de Grasse. He's a seven-time Olympic medalist. He got three Olympic medals in the 2016 games when I coached him. And we're having a conversation at the start of the year about nutrition because his nutrition wasn't great. So I'm talking to him about it and he's listening to me and he's a really nice kid. And he said, coach, last year, I won NCAAs in the 100 meters, in the 200 meters.

1:36:13In the 100 meters, in the final, I ran 975. And then I had a foot-long subway. And then 45 minutes later, I ran the 200 in 19, I think he ran 1957 windy and won the 200 meters. So, and that's, he stopped. Yeah. I get it. You know what I mean? Like it's, what can I tell you? We had a conversation about it. We didn't just stop there, but it's fair. You know what I mean? Like a kid at that level with that type of ability, that type of capacity can go and eat a foot long subway 45 minutes before running like 19.5 in a 200 meters. I grew up with this kid, Mike Barrowman, who went on to break world records in breaststroke and win gold medals at the Olympics.

1:37:02and his pre-race meal was going to McDonald's and he would talk about it in interviews. It's crazy. It's crazy. And the other thing that Bob said that I really enjoyed was, I see this in sprinting as well. It took me a little bit of a longer time. But in Bob said, you don't have to be really strong to be a great Bob setter. But if you're not really strong, you better be pretty fast. You don't have to be really fast, but if you're not really fast, you better be really strong. And apart from that, you may not just be average strength and average speed, but you may be super elastic and you can be elite.

1:37:35So there's many different ways to be super elite in bobsled. And I enjoyed the puzzle of trying to figure out like what makes you unique? What makes you elite at this? And how do we get that better? Well, maybe working on some of your weaknesses as well. Where in sprinting, it's, you know, intuitively you think, all right, they're elite because they're incredibly fast. And it took me a long time to figure out what that was. All right, there's much more to that than just being fast. It's still, as we said before, step length is that frequency, contact time and flight time, looking a little bit deeper into the system.

1:38:07But bobsled was a really simple way for me to organize my thoughts around how to improve different people, whether that be football or basketball or bobsledters. In bobsled, I mean, you have to be down low and you're pushing something. So there's an added dynamic to all of that. But I would suspect that the track and field athletes that are really good out of the blocks, that would be something that would translate into bobsled because you're down in that lower position where you're really driving force forward lower. Yeah, I've coached a couple of really excellent bobsledders who transitioned out of track and field and they were incredible starters.

1:38:49Lolo Jones and Lord Williams. Yeah, I was gonna ask about Lolo. I mean, she's probably the most famous sort of transfer over. Yeah, incredible. athlete, like absolutely incredible. She's 41 years old and she just represented USA. She's still doing it, right? She's still doing it. She was a world champion this past year, pushing the USA One sled at 41. Like really incredible athlete. And the other one who's also incredible is Lauren Williams. Lauren Williams was an Olympic silver medalist in the 100 meters, ran 1084. And she's also got an Olympic medal in bobsled. Lolo didn't - Yeah, there hasn't been any medals there, right?

1:39:21Yeah, but Lorne has two, both in winter and summer. And a transition's really easy. Like if you're, Bob said, it's not that hard for a sprinter to pick up. You're just now running with your hands on something. Then why aren't more people doing it? Like if you're getting fourth at the games or you're going to Diamond League and you're finaling, but you're not winning, like it seems like let's just go over here. You don't get paid. Yeah, there's that. Right, that's, yeah. There is a potential that you can go to the Olympics and medal. And that's great. It's back to your goal too, right? Back to your goal.

1:39:55Is your goal to go to the Olympics? Your goal is you've always dreamed of going to the Olympics for 100 meters or your goal is always to run track or your goal is that. No one dreams of being a bobsetter when they're 12 years old. I bet there are kids in Calgary that do. Maybe. Yeah, there's probably a few. There's probably a few. So it's hard, right? We're going through this process right now. I'm coaching Kaylee Humphries, American bobsetter. and we're trying to recruit. So if anyone's listening here and you think you can be an incredible, Bob said, push athlete, we're trying to recruit a push athlete for her for this is Olympic season in winter Olympics.

1:40:30And we're looking at the track and field lists. Who are the fast 60 meter athletes or a hundred meter athletes that may not be going the world championships in track and field, but maybe could make it to the Olympics and maybe get a medal in winter Olympics. Yeah, it's fascinating. coaching athletes in both of those sports. And in fact, I think, you know, a lot of the athletes will say who've done both, who've gone back and forth like a Lolo, that Bob said actually makes them better. Because Bob said, you know, you're pushing this 200 kilo thing. You've got to be pretty strong. So it forces you to work on that capacity for a year or two, a year or two that you're not doing track.

1:41:10And maybe you even needed that mental break from track, and then you can go back and do it again. I've seen a lot of athletes actually improve. So they've gone out, done the bobsled, come back to track and field, and then done PBs? And been better, yeah. Seen that multiple times, yeah. The Canadian relay coach, the Canadian 4x1, 4x4 relay coach, his name's Glenroy Gilbert, he did that. So he was part of the relay program in 95, 96, 97 for Canada. So he's got an Olympic gold medal in 1996. He went and did bobsled, came back and ran his PR in the 100 meters. Wow. There's quite a few of them have the same story.

1:41:46Yeah, I would imagine there would be even more, but for the fact that, and maybe I'm wrong about this, that most of the athletes that make that transition are doing it in the sunset of their career. It's a way to extend the longevity of their professional athletic career. So the chances that they're gonna do that and then come back and do a personal best on the track are probably pretty low. Yeah, there's less, for sure. Most of the athletes that do this, this is at the end of their, whatever it was in the football career. They failed at something, as I said, right? Some of them are not that. Some of them can, like a Glenroy, and others can do both for sure and come back to it.

1:42:21But yeah, it's a lot of fun working with those athletes. World records get broken with less regularity these days, especially in the sprint world. But what's your perspective on ultimate human capacity at 100 meters? Ultimate. Yeah, like how much faster, what do you think is possible? given the uh the track that we have right now and making some assumptions that maybe that track will improve but not making the assumptions that they will improve it to the point where it actually can be significantly more additive so let's say it's about the same maybe it's a little bit better but it's about the same because you can make a track that just adds to every single step and then who knows right this is one of the issues i have with with the sport right now with some of the technological, super shoes and things.

1:43:14But not even super shoes, but also the tracks. The tracks are going that way. So it's hard. You know, one of the fun things about track is we can compare across, you know, decades and eras. That's fun. That's great. We can't really do that anymore. When in 10 years, and it'll probably be 10 years, maybe 15 years, a male athlete comes and beats Usain Bolt's world record. You can't compare him to Usain Bolt because he's got Usain Bolt didn't have super shoes and had the track that was available to him in 2013 when he broke that world record. So given those constraints, that the shoes don't get significantly better, the track doesn't get significantly better, and a Usain Bolt comes in again, but maybe just a little bit better than a Usain Bolt.

1:43:59And let's say rather than getting hurt like Usain Bolt did when he was 23 years old and didn't really get any faster after that, Maybe he's healthy and continues to run faster for another five, six, seven years. Maybe we see 9.3. His record is 9.58? 9.58, correct. Correct. You know, if you had to replay Bolt in today's scenario with the super spikes and we did a better job, well, not we, but somebody, whoever's involved in the system, were able to maintain his health and he stayed motivated for another five or six, seven years, he would have run close to 9.30, I think. Wow. Yeah. Beyond bobsled and skeleton, like you've mentioned, you work with all kinds of other athletes also though in many different sports.

1:44:48Yeah. Yeah, we coach in person, only elite track and field athletes. And that's fun. You know, I started off as a coach and I really love coaching, but I've done that for 40 years. You know, we also, you know, At this point in my career, I think it's just as fun for me to educate other coaches. So we've got this, you know, a big platform online, a digital platform. We've got a master's degree. And we also consult with a lot of different professional teams and the athletes that they work with. So I just got back from Cleveland. I do some work with the Cleveland Browns, do some work with the Cleveland Guardians.

1:45:24We do a lot of stuff in baseball and help those coaches and educate those coaches and work with some of their athletes on some of the things that they're dealing with. And speed is more and more important in all of these sports now, whether it's soccer or football or baseball or hockey or what have you. And so more and more coaches are reaching out to people like me who are experts, quote unquote, in speed for helping them with some of the challenges that they have. And what have you learned yourself from interfacing with like NFL football coaches? Like I'm sure there's lessons, there's things they're doing that are informing your approach as you're counseling them on speed?

1:46:02I'm not learning a lot about how to coach speed. No, they're not gonna teach you how to coach speed, but just being exposed to like high level coaches in a completely different sport. You know, I've consulted now with over a hundred professional teams over the course of the last 15 years. And the thing, the biggest takeaway that I got is the best, the most successful organization are the ones where all the staff are on the same page and they all have an integrated system where they all, and they work on that. You would think that it would be really integrated. But traditionally, and still to this day, many teams have a very siloed system.

1:46:47Here's the therapists, here's the doctors, here's the strength staff, here's the technical staff, here's the GMs, here's the whatever. And it's very siloed. Or even the defensive coordinator and the line coach. Absolutely, absolutely. The best football teams, the best soccer teams, the best basketball teams are those that are led well from the top. And the person at the top of that system understand the importance of having a truly integrated one where everybody's having a conversation daily and working together daily. That's the biggest lesson that I've taken to our work. You know, I talk a lot about it and people may be getting sick of me talking about the importance of a system and a well-functioning integrated system.

1:47:27But it is everything in sport. at every level, at every scale. So does the athlete feel supported by the entirety of the system? What does that mean? Is everybody working with the same objective, having the same words and same conversations and singing from the same hymn sheet? It's everything. Every time I go into a team that does not have a functioning system, it's obvious immediately. You see it immediately. I'll go in and they bring me in to talk to them about speed or health or performance or whatever. And there might be six people there from the strength staff. Right. And the physios haven't shown up or the ATs haven't shown up and the assistant GM hasn't shown up and the nutritionist hasn't shown up.

1:48:10So, okay, there's a reason why you guys are four and 12, for example. Is there a team that you're comfortable sharing about that does this really well or not necessarily a team that you've worked with, but like look at Premier League or look at different sports and you go, these people have it dialed because they're all like operating as in unison at the highest level. Smaller clubs, smaller teams and smaller sports are forced to do this well because they don't have very many people. So most of the smaller teams and smaller leagues do this well. The bigger the team, the more component parts within it, it's more and more difficult to integrate.

1:48:50That said, at that level, when it's a bigger team, there's two teams that I feel have done this better than anyone. I did some work with the LA Rams a few years back and they're really, really impressive. Like that's, that is a well-functioning team. And then for a few years, I've, I've helped out the guys at Arsenal FC in the Premier League. Oh, that's cool. And that's a great team, like really, really well-functioning. And so, as I said, it requires the right leader to understand the importance of this. And in both cases, you've got the right head coach who understands, oh, this is what this is what is important this is how i'm going to build a sustainable long-term successful team is by having everyone you know be integrated together both of them have at least 45 minute uh morning meetings with i think arsenal have 18 people on that table every morning with the head coach every morning every morning wow you know so it's it's really impressive those guys the arsenal for sure do a great job.

1:49:52It's not surprising at all how well they do. And then I did a little bit of work with Man City for a while. And Man City is a machine. That is a massive machine with a lot of different moving parts. And it's really, really challenging when you've got that size of machine to be integrated. So I get it from their perspective. It's hard. You just have to work harder to get there. I feel like they could be more successful even if they were a little bit better integrated. Yeah. Soccer's your passion now. Oh, it is. Yeah, yeah. It's like if Arsenal said, you know, come on board full time. No, I wouldn't do it.

1:50:28Really? No, I wouldn't do it. I'm a Man City fan. Man City, they're your guys. Yeah, if they called me up and said, I still wouldn't do it. No, I love what I'm doing too much. Even though you can see a clear path to solving the problem and, you know, getting them to - But the great thing about working in multiple sports and the great thing, well, first of all, I get multiple different challenges across these sports and multiple different conversations and multiple different people doing different things. And that's really energizing for me. I love that. But I coach track and field. And I love coaching track and field.

1:51:03If I was coaching soccer and you're a soccer player and we see this problem with how you run or how you perform or what's going on with whatever, and we can improve that. We don't see the direct correlation to your performance as a soccer player or the performance of the team. it may have impacted it in a positive way. We see that immediately in track, immediately. If I make a technical change or a programming change or a change with your therapeutic input, we see that immediately. And that's what I love about track and field. Yeah. The lessons that you learn in sport are lessons for life though.

1:51:38And as much as you bump up against the idea that you're shaping young minds, you are. And I would imagine in turn, you're learning from these athletes and these experiences that you're having and these other teams and athletes outside of track and field that you're working with. Like, what are the lessons that you've taken away through these many decades of doing this that are lessons that you apply in your life off the track? There's not much of an off-life track. Yeah, I know. These things are integrated. I get that. But you know what I'm getting at? Like, I'm trying to like leave the audience with like, you know, kind of the valid lessons for life that are applicable in sport, but are really, you know, guiding forces in, you know, your value system, your worldview, and how you approach decision-making, you know, in general.

1:52:27So I'm going to zoom in slightly and then maybe we'll zoom out. I'm a big believer of first and foremost, when I'm coaching an athlete, of trying my best to understand what it is that makes them them. Like what are their unique abilities? that's so important to me. And I was actually, I was driving over here today. So I have a funny story. I was just thinking about this analogy. So I flew into Burbank last night and I picked up a car, you know, I rented a car. And I haven't driven a new car. I haven't bought a new car since 1988. And I think that's the last time I bought a new car, 1988. I don't have a new car at home.

1:53:06So I'm driving this car and I'm on the freeway and I'm just changing lanes and there's no cars around. So I change lanes and it pulls me back into this lane. So there's this governing system within the car that's trying to keep me here. And then you can push through it. But the whole time I'm driving here, I'm feeling this and it's pissing me off. It's giving you a nudge. It's annoying. Why are you doing this to me? Big brother. Like to the point where I'm getting phenomenologically like uncomfortable through this. Like I want to stop and figure out how to turn this thing off. And I'm thinking while I'm doing this, you know, this is like coaching.

1:53:48So many coaches do the same thing with athletes. You know, they set these really narrow guidelines and they keep them here. Our job is to try to understand what it is in that athlete that made them do this thing. How can they express themselves fully in this thing? And then try to find that and allow that to flourish. and we call that, you know, trying to understand what their unique abilities are and then just feeding those unique abilities. And I feel like that is a lesson for me, like a really important lesson for me. You know, what is it that's unique about me? What is it unique that what is feeds me?

1:54:24You know, what feeds my everything? You know, what's important for me from a movement perspective? So don't allow the, you know, the system to tell me what exercise is or what type of exercise I should be doing. I mean, what's gonna feed me today? What serves me? So I feel like that's one of the biggest lessons that coaching has given me. The way in which I look at coaching towards an athlete's unique abilities, let me come back out. And rather than just falling into commodified exercise routines that the system tells me is the most healthy thing to do, is what do I feel like doing? How am I gonna explore this universe, this space around me?

1:55:01That's probably the biggest thing. Being connected with yourself. And not only that, like listening to that voice. Yes, 100%. For me, it's so important. It really is. But you also, you need somebody outside of you to be able to see that in you and help you kind of bring expression to that, right? at like who's coaching Stu. Right, yeah, yeah. Well, Stu is, right? Right. I think that's part of the problem. We all need a coach. We need somebody, we need some direction. Problem is we're being directed by an incentivized system, like commodified incentivized system to do these things that is confusing exercise with movement and health and fitness.

1:55:45Yeah. That's the problem. But I totally understand it. Like I'm experienced and expert enough where I'm able to coach myself and many others are not. So you think. Yeah, yeah, so I hope. Yeah, because we all have our blind spots. Oh, for sure, for sure, right? What I would hope, and this is one of the factors that I kind of live my movement life by, is I try to do as many different things in as many different ways and in as many different environments as possible. And I think it's that variability that is really important to lean into as we age. You know, we had that when we were kids. We just did everything all the time.

1:56:24And the beginner's mind. Yeah, and it just becomes narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower. And now all we do is we jog and then we lift weights and do some yoga, you know? And I feel like it's important, you know, really health is about variability. Can you do a bunch of different things in a bunch of different ways, being adaptable? Well, this relates to curiosity. And curiosity is something you talk a lot about in terms of making sure that you're approaching the athletes with curiosity, that they're being curious about their own careers. Like the beginner's mind, the staying active, doing different things, the variability is really about indulging your curiosity.

1:57:03Yeah, I think that's really well said. We get this question a lot in some of the education events that we do. Like what is the most important trait that you have or that you think other coaches need to develop? That's always the answer for me. Curiosity. Curious, curious. We bring in 12 interns every year. And I look for the curious ones. They don't need to be expert. They don't need to be experienced. But are you gonna ask questions? Be curious. You can always tell who's gonna be an excellent coach. The head of strength and conditioning at Arsenal, his name is Sam Wilson. He came and spent 12 weeks with us about seven years ago.

1:57:38He was at the time, an academy strength and conditioning coach at Arsenal. And man, that guy didn't leave my hip for 12 weeks. Like he was annoying. Like just asking questions over and over and over. And I loved it. I loved every second of that. And I knew immediately this cat's gonna be a great coach. And now he's head of strength and conditioning at one of the biggest football teams in the world and just killing it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. As we wind this down, I wanna turn attention back to some of the things that we can take away and use in our life. we talked about skipping um is there other sprint oriented running situational sort of things that we could start to practice and play around with with curiosity i think there's two ways to look at this there's one when you look at we want to be high quality movers we want to move in a high quality way generally you don't want to move crappily i think everybody's going to you know admit to that so what is high quality movement so think about it from a quantitative perspective and a qualitative perspective.

1:58:41The quantity we kind of do okay on, mileage, weight on a bar, all of these different things. But quality we don't. So just think about the quality of your movement and try to be generally a little bit more aware of what that is and how I can do this thing, whatever that thing is, hiking, jogging, running, sprinting, lifting weights, yoga. Just think about how can I do this with more quality? And sometimes that's enough. You don't need somebody to say, and hey, Rich, the quality of this isn't good enough. I want you to do it better. You can feel that yourself. I'm going to try to do this with a little bit more quality.

1:59:17Slow it down. Be a little bit more aware of what my body is doing in space and time. So just take the time to pay attention to how you're moving in anything. I feel like that is really important. And number two is the quantitative aspect. Some of the things that we don't do is we do volume pretty well. and we do intensity pretty well, but we don't think about the actual pattern of movement that we're trying to improve. So think about the weights that we do. We think about these six or seven fundamental movement patterns or whatever they are. The one that we kind of ignore is that hip extension pattern, which is so important.

1:59:59The best walkers, the best runners, the best joggers, the best marathoners, the best sprinters, they always have the best hip extension pattern. So find ways in which you can work on that pattern specifically. So that means doing a lot more unilateral work in the weight room. If you like doing weights, go in there, spend time on one leg or a stagger stance or kickstand stance rather than doing double leg work. Do lunges, do reverse lunges, do different things like that where you're working in an extended hip pattern. It's such an important piece. And if you do that through different velocities, different ranges of motions, at different forces, you'll become a much better mover.

2:00:35Yeah, this is Kelly's stare at territory. It is. Kelly and I talked about this a ton. I think he started while he's having a conversation with me on the phone one night. He says, man, we got to start, because this was when Knees Over Toge Sky was just coming out and he was just starting to get popular. And Kelly says, man, I like this cat. He's pretty good, but we need to start a knee behind butt thing. So he's got the Instagram handle, knees behind butt, that's Kelly. I didn't know that. Yeah, there's nothing on there right now. But we've always talked about, let's feed into that thing and make this thing a thing.

2:01:11It is a thing. Knees over toes is important. I think it's a little bit overplayed, but knee behind the butt is really important. Knee behind the butt. Knee behind the butt. How do you get your, how do you, knees behind the butt. So give me an example of that. So doing a reverse lunge and putting this. Oh, I see. Just walking, just walking. Most people when they run, and the knee might just go just behind the butt. And if you don't have maybe the capacity or the flexibility or the mobility in the hip, then just to get it a little bit further, you might get an anterior rotation of the pelvis. And then you don't have a high quality knees behind butt pattern.

2:01:46I see. If you have better structure, better mobility, better flexibility, you can get your knee behind the butt better. Well, I think you need to get on that Instagram account. But on the first piece, I mean, I think that's the bigger piece. When you think of sprinting, you think of athletes who are so finely attuned to their bodies and every detail in every microsecond of what's happening, right? The level that they're paying attention to holistically, everything that's happening is like at such an insane level. And to the extent that we can take some small portion of that and apply it into our daily lives and our physical routines, It's actually a small ask.

2:02:32I know I go out and I run and half the time I'm tuned out, I'm thinking about other things, or I'll call it active meditation or whatever. But if you were to ask me, how's your foot landing or what are your shoulders doing? Like, I don't know, I'm not paying attention to it. You know, the best, we're always aware, it's just a matter of whether we're actually cognitively aware at that moment in time. Where you're focusing your attention. Exactly, exactly. And the elites, it's not like I'm asking athletes to be aware of every single part of their system as they're doing this thing. It's just one piece.

2:03:07And as we said before, sometimes it's just an emotion or a mood. But there has to be a point where you know what you're doing. And I guess here would be the third thing that we can take away, is the fact that the system, the body, is a rotational system. The hips oscillate and undulate, meaning they go back and forth. So there's internal rotation, external rotation, and they also go up and down. So they go up and they go down. And the shoulders do the same thing. They go back and forth and up and down. And the spine connecting them rotates, side bends and extends and flexes. And it's really important for that system, that shoulder, spine, pelvic system to do that really well.

2:03:45So one thing I suggest when people go running or sprinting, is start to pay attention to what that feels like. Can you feel your shoulders going back and forth and coming up and down a little bit? or are you just moving your arms and your shoulders aren't moving? Because chances are, if your shoulders are rocking and rolling a little bit, so will your hip. The hip has to have the capacity to do this. It's typically, this gets worse, but it's not as big of a problem as this, going up and down. Back and forth is something that gets harder and harder and harder for us as we age. But this going up and down is even more problematic.

2:04:22If as you're swinging through, if that side of the hip doesn't come up, That's where we trip. That's where we fall. That's a problem. Can we still maintain the capacity to lift the hip up as we move like this? It's so important. So think about it when you're running of allowing the shoulders to rock and roll a little bit and feel that same rocking and rolling in the hips. So that would be a qualitative thing to pay attention to. You should do a masterclass on running. Yeah, that was pretty good. Thanks. I should do this for a living. I think you might have, Yeah, there's something here for you.

2:04:58Yeah, I appreciate it. No, this was great. I really appreciate it. Any kind of closing thoughts? Anything you want to leave the audience with? I mean, this has been an absolute treat and a pleasure. It's been fun, man. I'm a big fan of your work. It was great to be here. A little bit jealous of your beard and your hair. No, I mean, listen, I'm looking at your beard. No, man, that's a way better beard than mine. We could have a beard grooming podcast afterwards because this is new to me and I don't know what I'm doing. It's really good. Yeah, you're doing a great job. I don't know. Really good job.

2:05:23Well, we can beard out later. Yeah. But I appreciate you. And you've been doing great work for a long time. And you're so full of knowledge and insight. And it was a real honor. Thanks, Stu. Back at you, Richard. I appreciate it. Cheers. Thank you. Peace.

2:05:42That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at mealplanner.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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