The Coach U Podcast
The Coach U Podcast
Unlocking Game Speed with Multidirectional Expert Jason Feairheller | Coach U Podcast
Unlocking Game Speed with Multidirectional Expert Jason Feairheller | Coach U Podcast
In this episode of the Coach U Podcast, we are joined by Jason Feairheller , a multidirectional speed expert and host of the Game Speed Podcast. Jason shares his journey into the sports performance industry, his favorite TV shows, and music interests.We delve into various aspects of athletic performance, discussing the science behind speed and agility, the difference between change of direction and agility, and the importance of training angles in sports. Jason also touches on key training tools and exercises, and the importance of intent in coaching. Watch to gain insights into Jason's coaching philosophy and methods designed to improve speed, power, and agility in athletes.
00:00 Introduction to the Coach You Podcast
01:30 Meet Jason Feairheller : Multidirectional Speed Expert
01:48 Jason's Journey: From College to Private Training
02:43 Personal Favorites: TV Shows and Music
04:04 The Joy of Coaching and Client Success
04:43 Impact Deck: Choosing New Skills
08:03 Understanding Agility and Change of Direction
17:06 Training Techniques: Deceleration and Redirecting Force
21:21 Game Speed vs. Traditional Speed Training
26:06 Skill Development in Sports
26:26 Misconceptions in Speed Training
28:44 Effective Speed Training Techniques
31:19 Importance of Angles in Sports
42:13 Strength Training for Speed and Agility
47:22 Favorite Training Tools and Techniques
50:41 Specialization in Sports
52:00 Key Takeaways for Athletes
53:37 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
GET IN TOUCH WITH JASON
https://www.instagram.com/jasonfeairh...
Hey everybody, this is the coach you podcast, and I'm your host coach you. This podcast is about being curious, learning from others and using what we've learned to evolve every single day. hey, what's up everybody. We're being joined by Jason Fairheller. Who's a multidirectional speed expert. He's a speaker. He's a presenter. He also hosts the game speed podcast. He's a mentor to other coaches and he also offers speed and power training programs. So you can check out the link tree in the show notes. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show.
Jason F.:Awesome. Happy to be here.
Coach U:So tell me about how you found your way into doing what you do today.
Jason F.:Originally decided, you know, I, I think in college, like I want to go into the college strength side and I applied for a job and I did not get it. And I remember thinking after I didn't get it, like I was not ready for this. Like I didn't know what I was going to get into. So I was like, I'm going to go to the private side. I started doing it, working at a sports performance place. And. It was just not being run very well. So after a couple of years, I'm like, you know, I'm going to go with a personal training route. And I did that for a little bit. And when I was there, met a couple other guys and we decided we are going to, we all had backgrounds in sports and training athletes and we all wanted to go back to that. So we said, all right, we, we're going to start our own gym. And we did. And that was about eight years ago, And here I am now. And I love it. No regrets
Coach U:love to hear that. I'm going to give you a couple, before we get into like the nitty gritty, the science of speed stuff, I want to talk to you about some of your personal things. So,, give me your favorite TV show. Seinfeld. I was thinking like, what's the number one show that I've seen probably the most. And it's definitely that. And I've watched it, everything that happens in life. I have a Seinfeld reference for pretty much. So I was like, that's, that's gotta be it. But it does kind of date myself because it is a 90s show. No, no. See, everything's on Netflix. So one knows, no one knows when you watched it. So tell me about your favorite band musician. I love nineties rock. Like I grew up in the nineties grunge and alternative era and. I was thinking like, it's hard for me to even name my top five bands. Cause I'm just like, ah, who do I leave out? But if I had to, I would probably say the offspring just because I. If it comes on, I never turn it off. That's good way to what? That's that's, when you truly love something when it's repeatable over and over Yeah. A hundred percent. That's cool, man. I grew up in the nineties as well. A lot, a lot of the same kind of music and hip hop to a lot of rap and hip hop for me absolutely. You know, I always go back and forth, just kind of whatever mood I'm Hell yeah. That's the same thing for training too. It's like, I think it's hit and miss sometimes. Like I want, I know it's odd, but like even sometimes during training, I'll listen to like classical music. It just depends on my mood. Tell me about some of your favorite things about working in the performance world. for me. The best thing is when, and it doesn't, I do have some like personal training clients too, that I've worked with for like a decade and it really doesn't matter who it is, an athlete or gen pop person, if someone buys into what you're saying, And sees results, that's a great feeling. Especially when they just give you a random thank you, like, I did this this weekend, and I played well, or I ran a 5k, it doesn't matter what it is. But when they see value in what you're bringing to them. And it's just a great relationship then back and forth. Oh, that's awesome, we're going to go into the impact deck. So if I pull a green card, it's an action. Orange card, it's a reflection. Blue card, It's an affirmation. Give them a little shuffle Ooh, how about this one? Choose a new skill you'd like to master and investigate your options for learning it. So the first thing that came to mind was, and this probably applies to any coach that decides they want to do something on their own. You have done a lot of stuff regarding training. You understand programming, you understand pretty much anything. Attention to detail, strength training, all of this other things, all the nuances of it. And then you're trying to build a business and you know, nothing about business. So the skill is going from like trainer to entrepreneur. And. I mean, I've been, I've had my own gym for a while and I'm still going through that process of like creating better systems and things like that. So yeah, there's always something to be learned as far as like tightening things up, creating more time for yourself, making more money and yeah, doing what you want to do, uh, In life because of that stuff. The other thing is, I don't know why I've always wanted to learn how to juggle. So the skill I want is to, and I, I practice on and off a little bit and I can go for like five seconds, but I don't know why I just, I want to do that. I think of like a Rubik's cube, just like random skills that don't mean anything that I'm like, just interesting to have in my back I mean, if you show up at a party with a Rubik's cube and some juggling balls, you might be the life of the party. If you nail it, I might be. Yeah. what is your favorite aspect of training for sport? for me, it's attention to detail. And I think this is what separates a good coach from somebody who is. Uh, an elite coach is just the, the differences in like the slight attention to detail, and I know you had Lee Taft on the podcast and he's a good friend and mentor of mine and you hear him talk, he, you're like, this guy knows a lot, but when you really like dig in, he knows so much about. The way people move and understanding movement. And I think it's that attention to detail, which would then allow you to choose more appropriate drills for your athletes to choose better progressions, all of those things, which would then lead to better results versus you see a drill, you think it's cool. All right. Uh, people are moving fast when they do this versus like they chose the drill and it still might look cool, but it serves a very specific purpose of what you're trying to do with them. It's, it's easy to get into the cool looking things too, because we're surrounded by Instagram, social media, YouTube, tick tock, all these things, right? thankfully you put out videos that are very high quality and yeah. Makes sense. when it comes to performance training. So,, it's nice to know that that attention to detail, you know, is being put out into the, to the social media world too. Cause it's for every, every one of those, there's like 10 of the non detailed things where it is just that fancy. Look at this move. It's cool. I can do it, but is it really translating? But I want to hear how, how do you define agility? It's funny, somebody, messaged me or like wrote in one of my comments, You, you said this is a speed drill, but you didn't do a drill. And to me, speed is fast you can go over any relative distance. So in a lot of time, when we look at sport, you're not running 30 or 40 yards without changing direction. It's a lot of five yards, 10 yards, two yards, very short distances. And the quicker and faster you can do those, it doesn't matter what the You need to get as much speed as you can over that distance. And that is going to be speed. And agility side, it's funny because in about a month, I'm doing a talk for the NSCA state clinic in Pennsylvania, and it is about the difference of change of direction versus agility and why a lot of coaches don't truly understand that. Like they, they will misuse the terms change of direction. Is a rehearse drill. Someone knows where they're going to go. Someone knows exactly when they're going to go. And they know exactly what you want executed with So they're trying to perform basically a very specific skill. Whereas agility involves situational awareness. You're looking at the actual like visual ability. You're looking at. Um, like you're trying to read pattern recognition from the opposing athlete and those things are, are actually agility. So the athlete is reacting to something. So now I'll just give you a quick little rundown. If, if I'm pointing at a cone for an athlete to go to, That only fits in one of those agility categories that doesn't fit pattern recognition because no one on the field is pointing to you where to go, right? It doesn't fit situational awareness because there isn't a score. You don't know exactly like what's, what's the situation in the game and how do I need to react based off that? It is only working the visual ability to pick up something and sprint directly to that point. So even a lot of times when we're training agility. We're only training a tiny aspect of agility. So getting into using athletes one on one, two on one, those types of things, that's when you're truly doing agility drills versus the change of direction drills. And now there's always a battle of like, should you do change of direction? Should you do agility? And I think. Every single drill that you do is an assessment. So you are looking at the physical ability of the athlete to do that drill. And if they don't have the physical ability, then you do change of direction drills to improve their qualities of quickness, speed, time off the ground, how quickly they can rotate their upper body. And once they have those, Those types of qualities. Then you start to layer in some other agility type of drills to see, all right, are they able to use that on the field? Because if you know, they have the physical qualities, but it doesn't transfer to the field, then, you know, it's all agility or perception type issues, and you can work on more of those, but. If you only ever do agility drills, you don't know whether or not they're missing the physical tools or they're missing the perception tools. So you're always just kind of guessing. So I think coaches need to understand the difference of those. And then they also need to be able to know when to choose one or the other. To get whatever outcome you want with your athletes. Let's say you're, you're taking an athlete, uh, through an agility style drill, but you recognize, okay, they're not doing well on this. You want to go back then to, and I'm going to say back to, but now I'm going to go to change direction, maybe to hone in on something here to help them on the agility side. How would you approach that to help them understand like the translation? If you're seeing something not translate well. Here's a perfect example. So I have two brothers. They're both lacrosse players. One is actually, uh, plays defense. One plays offense. So it's perfect. Cause I can always match them up one on one versus each other in different drills. And the offensive player. About a year and a half ago, Torres ACL. And since then, like I saw his film beforehand and he would never ever stutter step, he would plant a foot into the ground and he would make a hard cut and go, and he was able to beat a lot of people doing that, but since he had a surgery, he had a tendency sometimes to stutter step a lot. And when, when you're approaching a D a defensive player and you're stutter stepping as an offensive player. You're slowing down. When you slow down, it allows the defensive player to slow down. And whenever an athlete slows down, they have more movement options. It's easier for them to move forward laterally backward. So I needed to get him to stop doing that. So. We did a bunch of rehearsed drills where we're basically just performing like a sidestep. They might just do a couple of hard steps and then plant a foot into the ground. And then I might have them even make like a cut around the cone. And I might change the angle of the cut on the cones to make it a little bit harder of an angle or things like that. And then maybe I have them cut one direction, plant a foot and cut another direction and go back. So now once he was good at doing those where I, I know he has the To then do them comfortably going right to left, then, all right, let me put it back together in another agility drill. And it was, I worked with him for about like six weeks and every week was less and less times that he stutter step. And actually the last week I had him, there was zero, which was awesome because I'm like, all right, now he gets it. And it went from like his brother beating him most of the time to him. Being able to create some more separation just because he was able to do that. You know, do you know the baseball player Todd Hilton retired? Just made the hall of fame. he said one time after an injury, you know, you have to know your new 100 and. When I, you know, I've had injuries, I'm sure you've dealt with injuries, your brain, your body is a lot smarter than you are. And it will, like you said, the stutter step, I'm sure that happened because the, just the trust in the body and that, that over time, the pattern of hitting the ground probably just Yeah. Right. So I think it's cool. Cause you're taking that idea of progressive overload that you have in weights and taking it into this kind of, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I'm kind of visualizing it. I don't want to knock physical therapist. My wife's actually a physical therapist. I think there's sometimes. A misunderstanding between someone has the strength that they have previously had, and it might be equal to their, their uninjured leg. And they're able to get that back pretty quickly, but I don't think that necessarily should be like the determining factor, the return to play needs to be like an overload progression where, all right, if I sprint two steps and slam on the brakes. Ultimately, I haven't built up a ton of speed. That now is like fairly easy. That's a pretty basic drill. You want to increase that? All right. Sprint four steps. Now you've probably gone like a few more miles an hour. It's harder to slam on the brakes. Now go like seven yards, 10 yards. And eventually the more speed you have, the more strength you're asking the athlete to, to show whenever they're trying to slam on the brakes. So you can overload the drills like that. And when I was talking about attention to detail before, that is a perfect example of it is like, all right, understanding the athlete cannot slam on the brakes well at seven yards. It never, ever happens at five yards. Maybe it happens two thirds of the time. Okay, great. Like they, they demonstrate that they can do it, but they can't do it consistently. Let's see where it's consistent. And then once they get a hundred percent of the time, now they own that skill. They own that physical capacity. Let's make it a little bit harder somehow. So there's always ways to make drills easier, harder, but. If someone owns a skill, you can't, or I don't want to say you can't, you wouldn't want to keep doing that same exact thing because you know, it's basically just keep on doing the same thing over and over again. You're not necessarily getting them any better, so you keep on progressing them in different ways in order to make the drill tougher. Going off the thought of the ability to slam on the brakes, deceleration comes to my mind and I'm thinking about how important it is to you. How do you train it and how does it affect the ability to stop and go After decelerating. So a lot of times when we do rehearse drills or when I see coaches demonstrate deceleration, it's usually. Landing a jump, doing a snap down type of thing or something like that. But that's not how deceleration is expressed in sport. When someone is reacting to someone else, you don't have time to put two feet into the ground. And if you do, they are by you like in a split second. So deceleration is essentially in sport, the ability to slam on the brakes with a single leg. And ultimately you can assess that by looking at what is the Angle of hip flexion and the angle of knee flexion at their deepest range of motion when slamming on the brakes. And the deeper they go, the worse they are at it. Ideally, the best athletes will keep a less knee angle, less knee flexion. At a relative speed and almost think about it. Like if you're accelerating out of the bottom of a squat, that's going to be slower, it's going to take a little bit more time to pick up speed than if you're just accelerating out of a quarter squat, and we want that same sort of knee angle whenever we're changing direction. So when we plant a single leg into the ground. What that does is it allows our other leg the free leg to open up whatever new direction we need to go. So if I need to go behind me and I have two feet planted on the ground, now I'm going to pivot, I'm going around my turn, I'm going to lose my angle. Whereas if I plant a single leg into the ground, I can rotate my hips, rotate my trunk, plant my foot into the ground, and now I have the angle I want to have. Not to say that a jump stick or, you know, those kinds of drills can't be effective or useful, but you're right on the field, on the court, you're constantly moving and being able to be coordinated through that movement and be able to transfer that energy efficiently. I feel like is more important than most of the training, uh, that is shown or taught most of the time. What are your thoughts on that? I like to refer to it as like redirecting force. I don't want someone to think that they are necessarily stopping. They are just changing the momentum of which direction they're, they're traveling. And if, if we think about like jump training, plyometric training, if I'm performing. Two legged jumps. I am telling athletes you are trying to get as much height or as much distance as you can every time. I don't necessarily care about sticking the landing every time. I need someone to demonstrate stability, but ultimately, someone demonstrates while landing like a squat jump or even a little single leg hop over hurdle isn't close to the forces someone is going to need when they are sprinting hard, reacting to someone planning a single leg into the ground and then going another direction. So I almost think of change of direction as. What I'm doing to improve an athlete's stability almost. And then the plyometric training where I'm actually trying to minimize time on the ground, get maximum distance while minimizing time on the ground, that's where I'm focusing on redirecting force. And. In my training, I like to do that in all angles and in all different planes, because that's what happens on the field. We're not always moving straight ahead. We're not always moving laterally. It is a mix of all angles and all directions off the inside of your leg, off the outside of your leg, all of those different things. So yeah, as far as, as that it is, I, and I want them to think about redirecting force. I don't want them to think about. Oh, I need to decelerate and slam on the brakes. Then I need to go the other way because then it just ends up being too slow. They, they sink too low into their hips when they change direction. So, so then what is game speed versus what most people think of when it comes to speed or speed training? So I talked about speed before is like how fashion go from point A to point B. And when I think about game speed, it is a combination of the physical capacity of the athlete. That's your change of direction drill and the perception abilities of the athlete. And that's your agility drills. And ultimately how that is expressed in sport is what is your ability to either create space against an opponent or to take away space against an opponent. So if I'm an offensive player, My job is to create space. Cause when I have space, I can make a play. If it's basketball, you know, when no one's in your face, it's easier to make a shot in football. If you can get open, you're going to catch a pass versus if a guy's on your back, the quarterback's not even going to throw to you. So those are the things I'm looking for. And then if defensively, you're trying to take away that space all the time. An offensive player kind of has the. The edge, because they can decide, particularly even if it's like basketball or football, where they almost have a preplanned route of some kind, like, I think I'm going to try to set someone up to do this and a defensive player. You're just reacting the whole time. So if you can take away that space, you have the ability to slam on the brakes, move, read and react. That's what makes you an elite defender. All right. Now going back to regular speed, most coaches think of speed is just, I'm going to improve someone's 40 yard sprint. That is a huge component of speed because the, obviously the faster your single top speed is. Over any given distance, the more likely you are to either create space or take away space. So that still needs to be trained to say that just having athletes run 10 yard sprints, accelerations, 20 yards, 10 yard flies, 40 yard sprints, whatever those linear sprints are, that that 100 percent transfers and will make someone an elite athlete. I think is there's a huge jump. To that, and I don't necessarily agree with that. I think it gives them the potential to be better, but ultimately moving well on the field is a skill itself. And if I have athletes come in, I can create drills. And I always think of the drills based off of scenarios that happen in sport of like, I'm moving this way. I need to rotate this direction. Oh, they cut back. I need to go back the original direction. So always think of drills like that, and you can create drills. That elite athletes will have a hard time doing well 100 percent of the time. And you don't even necessarily need a ton of distance in order to do that. So in my mind, these are all skills. You can always improve the skill of moving well on the field versus just saying, practice takes care of that. Because if no one's ever necessarily taught how to do a drill, then you just kind of hope that they figure it out. And I mean, this is a. Kind of a huge side topic, but the amount of time coaches or, um, the amount of time athletes spend playing sports now is higher than it's ever been, especially when it comes to specializing in a sport. So for me, why aren't there way more elite movers on every single team? Why is every single player not so much better than they are? There's still that one guy on the team that can Take over and maybe there's like the second guy or whatever, but everyone else is just still kind of average. And to me, I think a missing piece of that is doing speed training with an intent of creating more movement options for every single player. There is, and doing practice, just, it doesn't cut it as much as I think a lot of coaches think it would. I'm trying to get more in with the coaches, like the sports coaches themselves, and saying like, Hey, these are things you should be doing before practice. This is how you're going to get your kids ready to go onto the field. And like, incorporating that speed training, because the reality is, they're not going to see me four days a week, but they're seeing that sports coach four days a week. So if I can get sports coach to just implement just a little bit, five to 20 minutes, something small enough to just get that stimulus, I feel like it's going to help a lot. I feel like that'll at least give them a little bit more than they had. You know, that's, that's a hope, I guess. We don't really have the science for that. Um, Or maybe we do, we just haven't studied it yet. Yeah, and I mean, skill development in sport is huge, and obviously, like, if you don't have the skills to do the actual sports skill, you're never gonna get on the field as it is, but there is a happy medium there between performing the sports skills versus training the actual physical skills to get you better at that sport. When it comes to improving speed, power, change direction, agility, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that younger athletes make about the training they need to do? I would say that the biggest misconception is They don't actually train speed, like speed is done where If I were to time you for a 10 yard sprint and time you again, doing it, that those times are pretty much right next to each other. They, they might be exactly the same. You might improve a little bit, but it's not going to be a big drop off too much of the time. The speed training turns into conditioning. And I see like plyo agility circuits on Instagram and. They're, they probably drive me crazy. Number one, because if you look at them, everyone's doing a sub max effort every single time. So while extensive plyos are great, if you're doing that, that drill for conditioning, but don't say that a 32nd circuit of like, you know, shuffling through hurdles, doing a few hurdle hops, moving laterally, doing all these other Is actually going to improve your speed. Playing devil's advocate. If I have a basketball. Player and they're, they have repeats, a lot of repeats, a lot of lateral shuffle cuts and they got to stay with their guy. You know, there's an endurance factor to that too. So you could argue, all right, so how do we get them to be faster through that? Like 22nd portion of how often they're doing that. I don't think it's actually happening that often, but do you understand what I'm saying? It's like, there's that endurance So how do we get them better at that? without it being just a conditioning drill, All right. So how often is a player in sport moving as fast as they possibly can without slowing down for a couple seconds? say maybe like 2 percent of the plays. Yeah, it's, it's so few. I mean, like even in like hockey, if, if like a team gets stuck in their own end for a while and they get gassed, they're going as hard as they can for maybe like 10 or 15 seconds and then all of a sudden, like they're, they're gassed, they're, they're slowing down. what I would do is keep all drills in the realm of like two to four seconds. So two to four seconds, as hard as you can, you can actually do it more work than it sounds like within that two to four second space, and then you repeat that over and over again, you take, if you did that, like every 30 seconds. You're going to build up some great repeat sprint ability endurance as it is anyway. And the better shape someone gets, the better they'll be able to repeat the more volume they can get in over a speed training session. So while I still want quality to be high, if I'm working on improving speed, I can still get in more volume with athletes that are. Better trained just because they can repeat that ability much better. Um, I don't know if you're like a big kettle kettlebell guy, but. Pavel, Satsulin, like the guy who brought kettlebells to the U S hmm. he talks a lot about like, Not being in that like glycolytic range and the ability to produce repeated power efforts over and over again. And a lot of his protocols are like, you do like five kettlebell swings as hard as you can every minute on the minute for like 30 minutes or something like that, or you do a kettlebell snatch or a kettlebell clean and jerk. It's the idea that you do something explosive. You allow a rest, so quality stays high and you repeat that and over time you build up to that like 30 minute mark, but maybe it starts at like 10 minutes and the volume, maybe you only go two seconds per drill every single time and then maybe you do two seconds per drill. You can work up to 20 minutes. All right. Now we're going to go four second drills at 10 minutes, but the point is you can manipulate the time of the drill and the rest to get an aerobic. Effort out of your speed training as well, just because in two seconds, no one's heart rate is getting to max, but it does raise a little bit. And even if you, you take a short walk after it, a 30 second break, you go again. All right. Now my heart rate's hanging out at probably like 120 or so. For 30 minutes. I'm getting in a decent amount of aerobic base work while still improving my speed. It's not going to affect the quality of my speed training. I want to talk about angles and why angles in sports and practicing cutting and hitting different angles in sports are so important. So I like to divide up my speed training into like three different aspects. Number one would be any sort of attacking drill. So if I have my arms to the side, anything moving forward, I would consider an attacking drill of some kind. And even just linear, linear sprints would be part of that. Then I would have any sort of lateral drill where I'm just going side to side. And then I have any sort of retreating drill, which is anything going behind me. So easiest way to, to think about this is you hone in on what watches sport. Doesn't matter what it is. You hone in on one player and you watch exactly how they move and. I mean, basketball is a perfect example, just because, even within short spaces, people are, are moving forwards, backwards, laterally, they're hitting all different angles, and even, like, uh, an offensive player, if they, they go in and they take a step back, they're essentially performing a attacking drill to a retreating drill. Where they're moving backwards. Whereas a lot of times people might think, Oh, only defensive players need to work on moving backwards. Only offensive players need to work on moving forward. Well, that's not necessarily the case. If we're trying to create space, we need to do that at all different angles. And the more you practice these drills, the more you realize, all right, when I, when I gain more speed for me to go from like a lateral movement to a retreating movement. And it tried to hit an exact 90 degree turn that's going to actually be pretty difficult versus if I were to just go side to side, you're slamming on the brakes. You're coming back. It's much easier to kind of just maintain your position versus adding in that rotational component to it. So when I'm doing drills, a lot of times I might just kind of think it like Different angles where I go to the side, I go forward, maybe like 15 degrees, go to the side, go forward, 30 degrees, go to the side, 60 degrees. It doesn't matter what it is, but within the same drill, if I'm doing three reps, I could hit three different angles. And now I'm improving the ability of the athlete to move at all of those angles. And I talked before about as a coach paying attention to detail, if I have an athlete that struggles hitting a specific angle. Now I know, especially when doing a change of direction drill where it's rehearsed, I might need to focus more on improving that because that is one flaw within the physical capacity element of their game. And a lot of time I see this with defensive players when they need to move backwards with speed. The best ones are so fluid in how they're able to get their hips and their torso rotated the direction they need to go plan a foot into the ground. Accelerate out of every turn. They do that while keeping their vision focused elsewhere on the field versus if you have an athlete who isn't quite as good, there's that little hitch. When they change direction where they plant a foot into the ground and maybe they pop upright a little bit too much. And when they do that, you know, their torso kind of tilts or sways. That's going to make them slower out of that change of direction. And now they've lost a step. So for me, I'm training all angles all the time. If I'm doing an attacking day, I'm hitting a lot of the angles. If I'm doing a retreating day, same thing, hitting a bunch of those different angles, and then wherever there's a weakness, you can just focus on that so you don't necessarily have to change. The drill, if I'm doing like a shuffle into an angled sprint forward any direction, so moving laterally and then I sprint forward at any angle. If I see one part of that where it's all, it's not quite as slow or as smooth as I want it to be, then I just have them focus on that angle a little bit more. And I think that is really where like a good coach comes in versus, all right, this is the exact drill we're running. You're going to run it. If you do it well, great. If not, that's okay. We're going to move on to the next one. Then right after that, anyway, versus trying to get them in a position of choosing a drill where they're able to actually like learn the skill or get closer to learning that skill. What are some of your favorite cues that you tend to use a lot, especially for changing angles? You have to create an athletic position where you're able to strike your foot wide of your center mass. So a lot of times coaches talk about being low and that's great because if, if we're not low, we cannot strike a foot outside of our center mass. And if I think about creating an angle for someone to accelerate from, and this could be another side topic, but training acceleration for athletes. Don't always just have them face straight ahead because a lot of time acceleration is out of a change of direction. So even if we could just view change of direction as acceleration work in a lot of instances. Back to the point of, if they don't strike the foot wide, they're not going to be able to create an angle from their foot through their opposite shoulder, almost a straight line through that in order to accelerate the new direction they need to go. Now, a lot of things need to happen well for that. to happen. They need to be low enough. They need to be able to not sink to have a certain level of strength where they don't sink too low into that turn. But the main part is I need athletes looking the new direction that they're going to go because whenever they're not necessarily focused on anything with their vision, they're just kind of like, Oh, Looking in space somewhere without any sort of like purpose to it, their trunk needs to rotate and actually if they can start rotating their trunk slightly before they change direction, that change of direction is going to be so much more. So a lot of times I might just give them a visual cue, tell them to maybe snap their head a little bit around a little bit sooner just to give them that feeling of like, Oh, this is how I accelerate a little bit faster out of that. A lot of time, even when it comes to like plyo drills, I'm just telling them to be quicker off the ground. I need athletes to learn to be quicker off the ground. So no matter what the drill is, what the change of direction is, the quicker they can get off the ground, the better they're going to be. Are you teaching them to get into the angle before they hit the ground I try to choose the drill so they can get into the angle. So the very first step of getting the angle is getting someone to feel what it is like to hit that angle. So, so first day one. People are getting into athletic position. And for me, that's hips or that's feet wider than your shoulders. If they're at your shoulders and I move and I go to sprint with my feet right under my shoulders, I'm almost pushing completely vertically. When I push off the ground, my shin is, is too straight up and down. I need my feet wider than, than you would think they need to be. And first step is just doing straddle jumps. So from that wide or from like feet right next to each other, Give me like a quarter squat and then get both feet as wide as you can and then bring them back in as quick as you can. And when an athlete can do that well and strike their ground far away from them and bring it back fast. All right, now we know like they have a base of athletic position. Now from there. I might just have them go into a sprint where I'm having them start with their feet right next to each other because in order to sprint to the side, they need to reposition their foot or punch a foot into the ground in order to go the other direction. And I know people are not sometimes a fan of the false step, but if you watch sport, it happens. Every single play all the time. If you were to coach someone out of that, you're, you are making them slower. So I have athletes line up feet right next to each other. Give me a quarter squat. All right. And sprint five yards to the left. Okay. How far away did they strike the ground with their foot? Was it like six inches? If so, that's no good. I need it to be further than that. So they can create an angle. And then I might even tell them, all right, this is where you're lining up. This is where I want you to strike your foot into the ground. Okay, cool. We do that for a few reps. They get the feeling of knowing, okay, that is where I need. To strike the ground in order to accelerate well, and then maybe I have them do a shuffle to the right and then a sprint to the left. And when they plant on that shuffle, I want them to plant with their foot to the side. And when, why would I choose a shuffle? Because they don't have a lot of speed with that shuffle over one single shuffle. So you're just slowly adding speed into it. Then maybe I have them perform a lateral run step, and then they sprint back. Then a five yard sprint, and then they sprint back. But You have to give them a base of feeling what it's like to strike the ground where you want them to and then you can do that and use that same idea as far as moving any direction you want, whether it's forwards or backwards. But when an athlete feels it, they know it. And a lot of times I will ask them like they do two or three, three reps. What did you think of that rep? What'd you think of the first rep? Tell me, tell me which one did you think was faster? And in the beginning, they're always like number two, like they're guessing. They, they, they, they don't know what I want to hear, but then as time goes by, they pick up, they're like, I didn't do this, that rep, I need to improve this on the next rep. Oh, that rep felt great. And that's learning that is learning to move well. And once they learn to move well, then that can transfer to the perception and the agility qualities that somebody has Nice. Love it. so let's talk, let's talk strength, I, I do know strength is needed for speed, but how much, how much are you utilizing strength to help develop the change of direction, agility, speed. for me, strength is the strength. Someone needs in order to improve. Their speed is all relative to their body weight. So I mentioned before about when someone slams on the brakes, I don't want to see them sink really low into their hips. So to me, in my opinion, that is how strength is expressed when changing direction. So it's the ability to decelerate very quickly. And now how you get there is There's a million ways, right? Like that, that's, that is up to you as the coach. I do think that there is benefit to doing full range of motion lifts to doing partial range of motion lifts and doing a combination of those things. But ultimately it is what is an athlete's relative strength. Now I'm always trying to get athletes stronger because the stronger someone is The better, the more capacity they have to change direction. Well, I don't want the strength training to get in the way of the speed training I'm doing. Like I can't have the strength training be so difficult where an athlete is so beat up, where if I see them four days a week, I only get in one quality speed training session. Because the rest of the time they're too beat up in order to do that. So typically I will leave like a, I'll have athletes leave like a rep or two in the tank during certain phases, just because I'm, I'm working on speed development a little bit more. If I'm focusing on acceleration and it's like earlier in the off season, like I know, like. I don't necessarily have their hamstrings developed enough, and I don't feel comfortable them just going out and doing 40 yard sprints right away, then I'm taking that time to do a little bit more strength work just because it won't affect their speed quite as much when we're doing the acceleration type stuff versus some linear type stuff later on. And, uh, I'll say too, like if I have an athlete coming in five days a week and it's the summer and they're able to come in, two of those days are linear speed days. And then the other days are going to be change of direction days. And the volume is going to be a little bit dependent on the phase that we're in, the strength work that we're doing, how the athlete feels. So I'm always kind of juggling all of those things a little bit, but I don't want the strength to get in the way Of the speed. What are some of your favorite Movements in the weight room that you love to go to that help with the power and speed development. So when it comes to like speed development and when you watch an athlete accelerate, you're looking at how far their front knee. Goes towards the ground when they initially take off. And the closer that shin angle is towards the ground, the more strength they have to overcome their own body weight and to push off without falling over. So if you'll notice like weaker athletes, they, they cannot get the same shin angle, which means that they're more upright. And that is a strength issue. So. I love doing muscle snatches and muscle snatch variations because it's a really long lift where they have to continue accelerating for a very long time. So I'm a fan of like those type of Olympic lifting variations. And I do like, Going more full range. If I'm having an athlete do acceleration type stuff, as far as max speed stuff, I know personally when my hamstrings feel really strong, that's when I'm running my fastest times. And I do a lot of like long lever hamstring work. So like leg is just barely bent. I'm doing isometric hamstring holds doing those types of things. And that is a little bit more of like the accessory side of it. I'm still always getting in squats, hex bar deadlifts, those types of things. And yeah, I mean, it's not like I'm doing the craziest exercises ever. It's fairly basic. But I make sure I am doing some hamstring specific work and things where they have to produce some power over that long period of time, like a muscle snatch. Like I mentioned, in order to get a little bit better transfer to specific elements of speed. What are some of your favorite training tools that you love to utilize when training for speed? I'm a huge fan of the bands. Lee Taft got me onto these. free shout out superflexfitness. com. Um, you're welcome. If you want to send me some bands, go ahead, but they are extra long, like the pull up bands you have, but they are extra long and you can get them in varying resistances. And it's just so easy to hook up to a wall, but I love to use them. To not only add resistance to a drill. So like, all right, let's say I'm doing a resisted side shuffle. An athlete is, you know, shuffling away from the anchor point. I love to add them, or I love that athletes do drills where they start with a ton of tension on the band. They go towards the anchor point and then back out. So basically they're getting accelerated into that change of direction and needing to move back out. And especially when you have like a fixed anchor point and like, we just have a bunch of hooks set up on a wall. I mean, I can do those in a bunch of varying and different directions. hmm And it's super helpful. And especially if you don't have a ton of space, it's a great way to add some speed to the movement without needing more space. And with the bands too, you can manipulate the amount of resistance to get exactly what you want. So like if I have someone with a ton of tension on the band and I want them to do a lateral run, Towards the anchor point and then back out. If they can't stabilize when they run in and plant a foot and keep good angles and then run back out, then I have them just start with less tension on it. So it's not like I go from like, all right, now you can't use the band at all. No, we just start with a little bit less tension on it. And you can even get to a point where you accelerate them that by the time they stop, there might be no tension on the band. And then they, they go back out and you just slowly kind of change that resistance. But that is number one for speed training, for sure. Number two would be a timing system. I love. Timing all sorts of flies. Um, I was just doing some sprints the other day where actually I had like an L set up and I was timing and it was back to the point of like a stutter step. I was running that 90 degree cut with a stutter step and then without a stutter step and timing it just as a way to show like, all right, when you stutter step, it makes you this much slower over this given distance. I didn't try to like purposely go slower. I still tried to go at it, but just stutter step. And when people can see their times, it does add more intent to the workout for sure, especially when it's like, all right, who can hit under a one second fly 10, then athletes are trying to really move, especially when it, when it comes to like the summer training and type stuff, everybody wants to be in that club. yeah. Yeah, the competition comes out and I love it because it's an it's an innate thing Especially if you're an athlete you're gonna get after it more a hundred percent Two more questions and then we're out. Athletes should be playing multiple sports, even if it's not in a competitive league. I would say yes to a certain point. I think once they get around that, like eighth grade mark, then I would say, go ahead and play a single sport. And it goes back to the idea of. You still need a high level of sports specific skill in order to get on the field. And I know people like Patrick Mahomes played all different sports throughout his whole high school career. And I think that's great. But as kids specialize in sports earlier on now, the skill level is way higher per sport. Now I don't think their physical capacities are as good as they should be. They're not as strong as. They were 10 or 15 years ago. I don't think they necessarily move as well, but their skill is still high. And ultimately sometimes that is what gets you on the field. So once they hit that, like eighth grade, ninth grade mark. I'm okay if, if they specialize, but before that I want them doing all sorts of different sports, Athletes need to sprint two to three times per week in order to maintain or increase their speed a hundred percent true. I might cut it down to like two times per week, but that has to happen. That, I mean, there is no way around it. You get slower if you don't sprint and by sprinting, that means. Running as hard as you possibly can. And it's like I said before, it can't turn into a conditioning workout and doing that multiple times. In season, your volume doesn't have to be as high, but there still needs to be focused sprint training in order to maintain speed or build speed. All right, I want you to finish this sentence for me. The three most important things athletes need to do in order to increase their speed, power, and agility are Train consistently, choose the appropriate drills and perform the drills with maximum intent. I'm so glad you said intent, because I think intent drives everything. It's like you're coding your DNA. You're rewriting how your body responds to something. You're teaching your brain how to process this and produce it over and over. It's a fine motor skill, just like it would be shooting a basketball or throwing a baseball, all of those things. Are repetitions. It's the same exact thing. So, intent drives everything. And I think that's everything in life. How you, how you go about your business. How you go about your relationships. How you go about, you know, self care. All of those things. It's all intent. So, I think you, you nailed it there, man. Jason this has been a very fun conversation. I have enjoyed learning and seeing how you think. I love learning how other coaches process, you know, their coaching process. it was funny, you said, uh, I don't know if you're a kettlebell guy. I don't think I'm like a guy of anything. I think I've just kind of, Developed and found like the things that make the most sense. I love hearing what other coaches bring to the table because then I can then reform and rethink like how I do things and. You know, like you said earlier, it's a constant, you know, you're constantly learning, you're constantly changing, you're constantly growing as a coach. I appreciate you taking the time to share that with us and the audience. I want to make sure people were able to reach out to you get, get ahold of you. So I'll put all your information in there, but please feel free to shout out anything that you're offering, that you want people to know about and where they can find it. J at Jason Fairheller, J A S O N F E A I R H E L L E R. Probably just easier to find it in the show notes, but that's on Instagram. And that's where I post by far the most. I'm not on Tik TOK. I'm not even on X. I'm not, yeah, Instagram is where to find me or DM me. I do have a course. So a lot of the methods and the things I talked about, I do have a course, um, course 20. With a code for 20 percent off. Anybody wants to use it at multidirectionalpower. com. Awesome,. I'll put everything in the show notes so they can click the links and whatnot so they can find you. I appreciate the conversation today. I hope that you enjoyed it as well. Absolutely. Thank you so much.
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