How to Train Like an Athlete - With NBA Trainer Cory Schlesinger | The Model Health Show

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Today, you're going to get access to some of the biggest secrets that our most prestigious, high -performing professional athletes are using to have the bodies and the performance that is awe -inspiring for so many of us.

we're going to learn from one of the leading strength and conditioning coaches in the world.

He's currently working with the Detroit Pistons basketball team, which has seemingly come out of nowhere and just blown the roof off of the NBA, charged into the playoffs and made an incredible run.

Prior to this, yes, he's had incredible success with athletes at Stanford and athletes at the university of texas but he was working with the phoenix suns basketball team and when he came on board just so happens they went to the nba finals now i'm not saying that this is because of our special guest but the synchronicity is pretty amazing he has some incredible insights he's going to share with you that you can utilize in your own life but also if you know any athletes Athletes, this is priceless, priceless information.

If you have kids who are athletes, friends, family, colleagues, this is information to share because this is beyond the cutting edge.

This individual, not only are his strategies being used and dare I say, copied by many organizations, he knows what's coming next.

And so listen intently, pick up some of these insights because this is a masterclass on training for high performance.

Before we get to our special guests, let's check out the Apple podcast review of the week.

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And without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.

Corey Schlesinger is a world -class coach in the world of sports performance.

He served as the director of performance for over nine years at the highest level of collegiate athletics and is now entering his fifth season in the same capacity in the NBA.

In his time, Coach Schlesinger has revolutionized in -season training for team sport athletes, and his strategies are currently being adopted, practiced, and researched around the world.

He has served in a leadership position for the Phoenix Suns, where they made an NBA Finals appearance and won the regular season title, setting multiple franchise records.

He's trained multiple Olympic gold medalists, NFL players, UFC fighters, won a national championship with Stanford men's golf, and served as a sports nutritionist for Major League Soccer's San Jose Earthquakes.

He is absolutely overflowing with insights, tools, and strategies.

Let's dive in this incredible conversation to understand how to perform at our very best and to train smarter with Coach Corey Schlesinger.

I'm just trying to get a feel for the vibes of the room right now.

We got Seahawks, Nightmare on Elm Street, and then we got Absolute Beast here in the chair.

Corey, I've been excited about this conversation all day, man.

I appreciate it. I'm really excited to be here.

Yeah. So I want to talk about training.

What are the biggest mistakes that you think athletes and coaches are making when it comes to training right now?

I think the biggest mistakes they're making is they're compartmentalizing the technical, tactical and physical aspects of development.

So, for example, like a technical session would be a skill session, right?

Like working on shooting or working on pitching.

Then the tactical aspect, which is practice.

That's what they do as a group.

group. And then of course the physical training and what they do is they compartmentalize those and they think of them as separate stressors.

And the reality is it's like, no, no, no, no, it's all physics and physiology.

They're all stressors to the body.

They're just done in different ways, but they still have an output and an input.

And so when I look at how, why do we compartmentalize those?

Well, that's when we start stacking the wrong stressors on top of each other.

So then they're conflicting opposed to complementing one another.

And that's what I care about.

How do we organize this ecosystem so that whether it's physical training or technical and tactical aspects of sport, they're actually complementing each other for the closest thing we can get to optimization.

That's fascinating.

You know, obviously the beliefs around training have changed dramatically in just a few decades.

I remember having a great conversation with Tim Grover, who worked with Kobe and Michael Jordan and you know and when he shared that they would lift weights before the game I thought he was lying like for real you know and he told me multiple times but I just like that doesn't sound right but the way he was going about it was different it wasn't the typical weight training session that we might conjure up in our minds where we're going and kind of obliterating our muscles they were doing this in a specific way to help the game performance and so this is the way that you're doing this and you're

structuring things how can we help gain performance while advancing that physical literacy and strength and so this concept of micro dosing exercise was brought to me by our mutual friend and sema and mark bell these are my guys great humans and you know this was a couple years ago and when i messaged and sema about you he was like that's the guy who i learned it from and so if you could can you share the what first of all what is micro dosing exercise?

And how can we look at adding that in as a strategy for ourselves and also as advanced athletes?

For sure. So micro dosing in itself is a concept of just spreading out the stressors, rather it's resistance training, physical or skill and tactical sessions.

So essentially what we want to do is what you see in a typical NBA environment is they lift two times a week.

And that sounds good, right?

But if we, those would can be considered mega doses, right so then you have to surf the curve speed power strength accessory work all in one session well there is a consequence to that or there are symptoms that are going to be related to that which is DOMS or delayed onset muscle soreness or neural fatigue when we're in an 82 game season it's pretty hard to pinpoint when to do that without affecting the thing that we care about the most which is in -game performance so instead of hitting all those variables or multiple multiple variables in one session, we're going to spread them out.

And so now instead of doing a 30 to 45 minute lift, we're doing 10 to 15 minute lifts.

But what that does is allows us to actually train with more intense, with more speed, more power, more strength, because you're only tapping one or two exercises, and then you're going to exhaust it.

And within that period of time, I mean, you go to the gym and say, Hey, man, you only got 15 minutes to get your heaviest set set of back squats.

You're probably not going to be able to exhaust yourself, but you'll be able to come back the next day and go, I think I can do that again.

Or I think I can continue to train opposed to, man, my legs are shot, man, my body feels sore.

So this idea of microdosing is truly just taking all these variables and spreading them out.

And then more importantly, intentionally putting them around practice or around the game so that we're complementing those stressors or are complementing those events.

Can you give me, we got my son here, my 13 year old superstar basketball player son, and, you know, he's working with his AAU team.

They've got a couple practices a week, heavy loaded game weekends, as you know, which is, you know, that's debatable if that's even good in the first place, but it is what it is.

And if we're looking at an athlete having having a couple that would just say a student athlete even college right high school and college and they're having we'll just say five practices a week how would we structure intelligently those those physical training inputs right with lifting with plyometrics what would that look like as far as like you know they got their practice right where do we place those respective training modalities so ideally when it comes to let's just say we're doing for general physical quality.

Ideally, I want to do potentiation before they do their actual practice because I want them to have the motor running, if you will.

I want them to be the rut.

The rubber is ready, hit the track and we're gone.

So ideally we're doing more of our speed and power work pre -practice and then post -practice, whatever they have left in the tank.

That's when we're going for our eccentrics or heavier loads.

And then obviously some accessory work because then we'll get more more of a peripheral fatigue or muscular endurance and so that's an easy way of structuring it just from a day -to -day standpoint sprinting plyometrics anything from a potentiation standpoint before the event and then post the event you can hit your heavy isos your heavy eccentrics or your accessory work got it got it and again this is something that we could all take and put into our own training you know respectively you know especially again if we're even weekend warrior you know and just kind of training for our particular thing

that maybe we're interested in you know maybe it's basketball maybe it's tennis whatever the case might be golf yeah and i think that this really does does this have a lot of crossover for those kind of sports i think 100 i think in any form or fashion there's something that can be taken away from it for example even if you're playing golf you still need to do a warm -up you are rotating your spine at x amount of miles per per hour.

That's a lot of velocity.

Now people look at golf as an old person's game or tennis even, but when you see it at the highest level, these guys are becoming so physically fit so they can optimize their golf game.

So if you're doing all of this input, you better believe you better get ready for some output.

Yeah. There's certain people that come to mind who brought that into it in a major way, like Tiger Woods obviously comes to mind.

And it was like, so counterculture to to be strength training at that level that he was doing it.

And look at the results.

I mean, now it's a whole wave, right?

Bruce Lee brought weights to martial arts super early.

And that's where you find it very interesting where track and field did it, martial arts did it, and then football, that's where it started.

And now in team sports, basketball, it's becoming a thing.

Now iron is a part of the culture of basketball, which is super cool because that's what we want.

I mean, look at these we're getting 20 year careers now in the NBA.

I mean, that's fascinating.

You couldn't imagine that years prior.

So just just think what could have happened with some of these careers that you've seen, like Allen Iverson, one of my favorite players of all time, thought the weight room was like getting the flu to a certain degree.

He's not wrong. The reason why I say that is because, well, what kind of weight training were they doing?

What was he exposed to before?

What I always say is the athlete's always right.

They are always right.

But you have to find a way to make it work for them, and that's where I think people mess up.

They don't have that latitude.

They don't have that pliability to make it work for the athlete.

Let's just say he hated the weight room.

Well, I think calisthenics are a great place to still get strong.

I mean, mountain climbers are some of the most strongest human beings, in my opinion, relatively.

You think that would have helped out Allen Iverson?

I'm not saying mountain climbing, but that grip strength and those long lever isos.

Man, I think that would have added maybe another contract to the end of his career.

There's no telling what could have happened.

But that's where you always got to meet the athlete where they're at and what they're willing to do.

And then you get what you want.

Then you lead them to what they need.

And that's where there's a lot of different modalities to get that done.

But I think we get a little short -sighted on our way is the right way.

Reality is the athlete's way is the right way.

That's why they're here.

year. So how do we create a reservoir or a toolbox to pull from so that we can still get that stress response adaptation, but in a way that they're willing to receive it consistently.

Let's, since you opened up this door, let's talk about, again, the athlete is always right.

How strength could actually take away from your game.

Like that doesn't sound like those two things can go together, but if you're training a certain way, I would imagine that this could have some effects on your game that you're, you're maybe not happy about.

I could not agree more with this statement.

Like this one's huge for me because there's all these compressive strategies like barbell, bench press, barbell, squat, barbell, deadlift. We love those lifts because we like lifting weights, but they are unbelievably compressive.

Now for shorter, you know, positions like for us that we can move those loads.

That's why we like them, right?

Because we get to move load.

When you have someone who has a short torso, but a femur, the length of me, a deadlift is a far pool, right?

A squat is a long way down.

Now I look at it like this.

When you watch an athlete train or you expose them to exercises for the first time, if it looks like it's painful or it just doesn't look right, I look at it as you're feeding them a virus, you're feeding them a sickness.

So then you look at, well, now it's exercise selection.

How do I put them in positions to make it clean so that it actually looks like more vitamins for the body, or medicine for the body, so that's where you just elevate a heel, next thing you know, they're sitting down in a nice squat, vertical torso, knees going over the toes, whatever we're looking for, this is where I think the rubber hits the road, where you get athletes to buy in, if they feel this compressive force, I don't think they're, and it's like, ah, this just doesn't feel fluid or right, well then how are you going to load that over time without having something pop up, And that's where,

you know, lately I've probably catch a little flack for this.

But machines, I'm all about machines.

Like the more skilled the athlete is, the more specialized the athlete is.

I lean into machines more than anything.

Because for me, what do I care about the most?

Stress, response, adaptation.

Now, can we argue that a back squat could yield you more whatever than a leg press?

Absolutely. But that is for maximally moving weight, not for playing NBA basketball.

school because they already do that through movement skill efficiency so that's a whole nother word of performance that i'm hoping that we evolve to but right now we're still stuck in the stone age of bigger faster stronger and so back to where strength training will actually limit someone is those compressive forces through those shorter ranges of motion just to move heavy weight well that's now going to get them a smaller range of motion right so don't be wrong that's It's great for moving maximum load.

But if their skill is to allow them to get their appendages as far away from their body as possible, like a pitcher, and there's a fluidity aspect to execute the skill, like shooting a basketball, maybe these compressive forces aren't exactly good for what they're trying to accomplish.

So that's where some of these longer length and calisthenics could actually get us stronger without sacrificing our skill set.

that it makes sense it makes complete sense but I you know this as a coach we tend to come in with our thing right and this is the way that you do things this is the training format and there are appropriate places for that you know especially if you're dealing in um you know uh volume and you've got like a lot of athletes at one time in certain situations you know but if if we're talking about these high levels it's going to be far more personalized and what I hear is you're You're kind of regressing from these kind of more advanced, maybe even risky type of exercises.

So regression is the key word there.

And we're regressing exercises for the most highly skilled athletes in the world.

And you would think the exact opposite.

You would think progressing.

But if I can't get load because of the progression of the exercise, now I'm sacrificing the physiology that I'm trying to get.

Once again, stress, response, adaptation.

adaptation. If I can't get 400 pounds on a guy's back squat, then I'm probably not moving the needle from a physiology standpoint because I need that load.

But if I can't get that load because they're limited by their skill of the exercise, then what am I doing?

Then it's more for me.

My guy's back squatting, my guy's front squatting, my guy's whatever.

Right. Then that's where the ego comes in.

Now, in my early career, if you watched our lifts, it looked like a weight lifting hall.

And that's how it became kind of known early in my career was we were snatching, cleaning, jerking.

And these were guys that are seven foot tall with seven foot, four wingspans.

And they were looking very competent, which was like, Oh man, this guy's a great strength coach. No, I was good at teaching weightlifting exercises.

Once I started getting more sophisticated and getting asset access to technologies and force plates, motion capture, you start realizing, wow, I'm actually like turning them into external rotation opposed the internal rotation and how they move on the court is the exact opposite of how i'm loading them in the weight room so maybe i'm actually conflicting what they actually need so i'm actually decreasing their ability to move to sacrifice so i can get them more load on any given exercise so that's where machines can allow you so many options from foot placement to range of motion and then of course

you're not ever sacrificing load and so when we really look at these high -end athletes they're wired and that's why they're here right they might have some biomechanics things that we can clean up but the reality is whatever they're doing that got them there it's probably working pretty well so then we just look at their local quality so in other words soleus outputs leg extension or their knee quad hamstring adductor abduction and we look at those locally and we go oh where's the limiting where compared to normative data where are they weak and that's when we go oh we're going to go chase that local

tissue quality we're going to go chase that to make them whole opposed to looking at all these global strategies that we think oh they're getting better because they're squatting it's like but if the limiting factors are soleus output or their ability their lower leg strength well then where do you think all that stress shielding is happening it's going to happen everywhere else in the hips and the quads so that's where we can get pretty micro level with these guys and that's where regressing these these exercises is actually the best thing for higher performance yeah i'm grateful so grateful

that plyometrics are like making this huge resurgence right now in sports but in particular for younger athletes but once we get into the level of say the nba for example i would imagine and i'm just guessing right now based on our conversation so far that you would probably because they do so much plyometric type work in the game right you know just again just practically that you wouldn't necessarily do as much as far as your training construction for them doing a bunch of plyometrics?

Or are you doing the same amount?

Are you doing more?

It's a great question.

It's yes and no. And the reason why I say that is, first of all, can you share what plyometrics are?

Oh, absolutely. So plyometrics, excuse me, is think of your running, jumping, change of direction.

So our ability to hop, skip, jog, and then obviously putting those into more complex patterns with more magnitude more variation and then that's when we get into like truly like track track and field rather it's triple jump high jump and sprinting so plyometrics is the action of i'm trying to create as much force as humanly possible with my body to get from point a to point b now how do we actually facilitate that that's totally totally different like questions if you will so when i look at an athlete who does plyometrics all day because that is the sport i go they do those kind of plyometrics.

And so then we look at the space that they play in.

So in a basketball court, we have the court.

So then you have 5v5 within that court.

So how much plyometrics are we really getting?

We're getting a lot, but we're getting a lot of XLD cell.

And then we look at practice and we go, okay, what are they getting out of this?

So they got more space.

So yeah, they're getting a lot of XLD cell, but then they're getting some more higher speed distance.

The one thing they're not getting is truly foundational plyometrics from angling, toe bounds, straight -legged scissor bounding, cross -legged scissor bounding, things that you see in a typical track and field setting where you're seeing from a warm -up all the way to high -end, top -end sprinting because they play in such a small constraint.

So because of that, we don't actually have good sprinters.

We have good XL athletes and good D -cell athletes.

athletes and of course we have our occasional really good vertical athletes but if you test all the NBA athletes across the board you would say not not all of them are great sprinters and actually I would argue that not all of them are great jumpers they're just really long and really fast and it looks like they're jumping high but not all of them are actually jumping as high as you think they are so then when you look at sports like obviously track and field but like football ball.

Those are the guys that have crazy outputs that they're like five foot six, but they're jumping 38 inches.

You don't see that too often in the NBA because it's just their size alone.

And then they play in a small space.

Now, when you look at soccer, that's a big field.

You got a lot of opportunity to sprint.

So they're actually faster than what you would see NBA athletes, but it's because of the nature of the sport.

So in training, so back to yes and and no, no. And the fact of, I can't beat up their joints more, but yes.

And I got to expose them to the things that are outside of basketball.

So in other words, I want to get the top end sprinting.

I want to get outside of 20 meters with these guys because they never get exposure to it.

So if we're looking at the body holistically, now we're getting a lot more gluten ham development because they don't get that in the sport itself because they're doing so much XLD cell.

So that's why you don't hear too many people or you hear knees and ankles.

You don't hear, like, your back.

You don't hear hamstrings.

Now, the interesting part is in NBA basketball, you're starting to see more and more hamstrings.

You're right. Just happen to Steph Curry.

There's a reason for that, in my opinion.

There's more space and pace than there's been in the NBA.

And now these guys, because they have space and pace, they're creating these torso angles that they're leaning forward, but they're still running 16 miles an hour.

So that's like top end sprinting, but they're just your torso angles forward so they can get leverage to get around athletes.

So that's where you're starting to see strain on the hamstring in a different way, which is why I think even more so getting outside and getting to longer distance sprint training in an early off season program, start with tempos, then build out some hollow sprinting.

These are things that I think athletes need more exposure to because they're not getting access to it due to the nature of the sport.

court. Man, that's fascinating.

I love that. I love that.

It's really, that's really zooming out because if I even think about the sprinting that's done in basketball and in the sprints and seeing my son at practice, they do the lines, right?

They sprint from one end of the court and back and, you know, they rest and they kind of repeat that, that format and being able to intentionally add in some longer sprints.

So maybe we're talking about like a hundred meter sprints or 200 meter sprints.

So this would be something to look at early off season.

I think so. I think you build some tempos first. So like maybe like gassers, like what we used to do in football, right?

So you'd be some from sideline to sideline, make it in a certain amount of time, but it allows you to get out in space, right?

And that's where you can introduce from a more intensive standpoint, like straight legged scissor bounding or I've actually seen this and I love is jump roping while sprinting.

And I know that sounds wild, but everybody does jump rope in place, right?

But if you start going into locomotion, well, you have to have a certain cadence and you have to have a certain locomotion to get your knee above your hip and your foot and cast it out just like you would see at top -end sprinting.

So just working on that from a mechanical standpoint, you can do this at certain intensities and at certain tempos.

But these are things that you can introduce into that early off -season.

Now, getting to true 100 -meter sprinting, There's always risk, right?

When we're talking about full out sprinting.

So for me, it's anything above 85, 85 % of times that you find are good.

And you can push that 85.

That's what I feel really comfortable with because I will say this.

Yeah. When you're dealing with million dollar athletes and they pull a hamstring because we're out on the turf sprinting in the off season, you got some questions to answer.

So there is a area where you don't flirt to or close to the sun, but I love that.

Shout out to Icarus.

you got an analogy up in there you know um you mentioned the straight leg scissor bounding and it got me thinking about my track practices and like i always think of deon sanders when i think of that movement right yes so can you describe a couple of like so we've got bounding we've got lateral movements we've got um the straight leg scissor like you just mentioned so these are i think these would be more attributed to like track athlete warm -ups yes correct i mean For me, everything starts and ends with track and field, in my opinion.

If you are not stealing from track and field, you're going to be 10 years behind.

So the research is great.

I'm really glad we have validation.

But whatever track and field is doing now, that is what's going to be researched 10 years from now.

So when it comes to the throwing sports, obviously the sprinting sports and the jumping sports, I'm stealing all their warm -ups.

Everything that they're doing, I am stealing.

because the rhythm and coordination one and then you can always progress and regress that based off of your athletes.

So we can add a band, say we're doing a skips, we can add a band and that's going to give you more ground contact time.

So that's going to be more force into the ground.

But if I need more speed, then I can obviously do the opposite.

I can have something pulling them towards me.

And now it's less contact time.

So now they're going to have to neurally go into to overdrive and that's where you got cool technologies like 1080 sprints or somebody like most people know about parachutes but when you can actually scale it to that to that kind of micro loads that's when you can get some really cool adaptations that's so awesome yeah i just saw some training recently of being able to basically creating a system to where the athlete is moving faster than they normally would and what that requires of the nervous system and it kind of to look like you you know this scene in civil war uh not the civil war but like

captain america civil war with the black panther was chasing after bucky and captain america they're like running there it's kind of like at the airport when you got that that little on the track that little track and it just makes you go a little bit faster it's kind of like they're running on that and i could see where again it's like training your body to go fast you know and so when you're you're going fast, like your normal speed.

It's like your body's been there before.

A hundred percent. And what's cool now is what you're seeing in track and field.

They're actually making these like trailer shields that a car is towing while the athletes running in it to create a draft, just like you see a NASCAR to allow these athletes to run faster.

And that's what the general, the limiting factor is, is being exposed to it.

So an overspeed training is technically what we're talking about.

But from like a plyometric standpoint, that's also regression if you take it to vertical training.

So in other words, if I take a resistance band, loop it over a pull -up bar, I tug down on it and now I'm doing jumps, that's now allowing me to jump way higher, way faster than I could with my normal body weight.

So this overspeed aspect is really good for deloading the body and allowing us to be faster.

And so this is another example of where I say yes to doing plyometrics and no to doing plyometrics with heavily plyometric -based sports.

So that's where when we're doing learning or we want less contact time, doing a reverse band jump is really powerful for guys that need tendon loading and then allowing them to actually learn how to dorsiflex and plantarflex their foot.

These guys live, I mean live, in ankle braces and taped ankles.

So they lose the ability to dorsiflex and plantarflex really fast and rapid.

it. So it's almost like my rule of thumb with whatever sport you're working with, you almost train the opposite of what they do in sport, literally the opposite end of the spectrum.

And you're generally going to help them from a health standpoint.

This is so awesome.

Got a quick break coming up.

We'll be right back.

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All right. So we've got this spectrum, right?

So we'll just say we're doing vertical jumps, right?

We can create a load with that, add in resistance.

So maybe this is a weighted vest, maybe this is some kettlebells.

So we've got that aspect.

Then we've got your body weight.

Then we've got all the way to taking some of your weight out of the equation with a band.

And can you describe that exercise?

My son's sitting right over there because I think that that would be a great input for him to do those banded jumps for sure.

So essentially you'll loop that band over the top.

You'll choke it down to where you have some resistance.

Now with a resistance band, the thing that's interesting is like, how much does the band pull?

Right? So I would say like orange band, green band, whatever.

If you pull it down and it lifts you off, it's probably too much band.

So ideally you should feel like, yeah, I'm doing about to do a tricep extension exercise with this.

So it wants to get me to about 10 to 20 % less of my body weight for it to have a really good effect because anything more than that well then there's not enough load but the cool thing that you can do is just build in higher and higher efforts to get you higher and higher and then now we talk about under loading the body well now we can go directly into and overloading the body is when you jump and you get high we'll let go of the band and now stick the landing and now we have an an overloaded eccentric and that's what you can also do with a depth drop Right.

So you can get on plyo boxes and jump down off of them.

These are things that you can do to manipulate speed and load.

And that's all we're doing.

We're finding strategic ways and different modalities that allow us to rather de -load the body or load the body for any given stress and response that we're looking for, for the positive adaptation.

Adaptation. Awesome.

OK, now, since I have you here, I want to ask you about your opinion on this.

Another thing that's getting a resurgence, but I'm seeing it more in sport, which is isometrics.

So what are your thoughts on isometric exercise?

First, can you explain what that is for sure?

And if this is something that you see as emerging and valuable?

Yeah. So we think about simplicity and simplicity starts with the contraction types.

So we have concentric, which means I'm going up on a bicep curl.

And then we have eccentric, which we're going down on a bicep curl.

And then there's the contraction where nothing's technically moving, technically, which is an isometric.

Now, that's just a layman's way of understanding the contraction types.

But when we're doing isometrics, there's actually a lot of movement going on.

But we still call it an isometric because no one's technically moving.

moving but what's going on under the hood there's a lot of strain and there's a lot of response so we've all done wall sits before that's probably the easiest example right get up on the wall squat down knees at 90 degree and you hold it for as long as you can your quads are burning in that case your muscles start shaking so there is contractions going on and then it's pulling on the tendon so when i think about isometrics i think about it in two ways isometrics is probably one of the best ways to start strength training i think that is one of the best ways to develop strength with newbies i think

it's it's easy it's easy to apply and it's easy to load and it's a high success rate and then you see it in advance like power lifting they use isometrics all the time especially overcoming isometrics to develop overall strength one of the strongest stressors you could ever give the human body in a weight room scenario is a failed deadlift. A failed deadlift is an isometric, right?

It's because you failed, you couldn't move it, but you created so much force that that's what you can do.

Now, with that being said, there's a ton of research on isometrics and there's tendon experts all over the place that are always arguing about truly what's happening with isometrics.

Long story short, and from what I've gathered and what I use anecdotally with athletes is is you have long duration isometrics and then you have short duration isometrics, long duration isometrics is really, well, both are good for tendon health, but long duration isometrics is anywhere between 30 to a minute and a half long isometrics, whether you're doing a split squat, single leg squat, calf raise, whatever.

But what happens with the long duration isos is the theory is your muscles give out.

So then now they're pulling on this tendon and now Now you're getting this this lengthening of the tendon.

The problem is when you're doing shorter activities, it generally bypasses the tendon and it goes more to the muscular or to the muscle aspect.

So for me, if I'm doing early stage rehab or I'm doing anesthetic effect to make someone have make their patella tendon or their Achilles tendon feel better, I do longer duration isos.

Now, when it comes to tendon loading to actually have adaptation, you need magnitude at some point.

And that's where the high force isometrics or the short duration isos come in to where an overcoming isometric, I'm trying to push against something or pull against something and go as hard as I voluntarily can.

And that's going to give me tendon load as well.

So it's not one or the other, it's both.

And so that's where I think isometrics from a positional standpoint make a ton of sense for newbies.

But now when we're talking about, hey, how do you get better as a change of direction athlete or a basketball player or even a pitcher, you can actually get them in those sport like positions and create so much load to where they can actually feel my foot in this inverted sense with my hip and I are, and this has changed the direction.

So now I'm getting this input into the body.

And if I want to make change, once again, it's physics or physiology.

Now physics means I'm not moving.

Physiology means I'm putting load into the body.

I am now learning from a mode of learning standpoint that i can get in this position safely because i'm loading it and now i've experienced it now when i add high velocity it's something i've done before so there's so many ways of using isometrics rather from tendon loading to early strength to motor learning that i think it's to me one of the most powerful things out there right now if applied correctly yeah i just recently what inspired that question was i saw a kid training recently we'll just say 18 year old kid and he was dribbling but he's like pushing up against a car i don't know if you

caught that video i haven't caught that video but i get the idea behind it yeah and of course the car has this little bit of give you know which again i don't know whose car that was but if you're thinking about the force that he's going up against in a standard human right right it's just like it's incomparable to that car that car as far as his ability to move his weight against it right and so would that be considered like an isometric type of exercise that would be like maybe you can put a cool term on it like a functional isometric yeah yeah yeah but we use walls all the time for the exact

same reason we get them in their sport -like positions and then we have them apply as much force against a wall an immovable object which allows them from motor learning perspective learn the position to be in to have the proper foot pressure the proper proper rotation of the hip or posture and then from a load standpoint whether you're doing it for long duration or a short duration we're doing it for tendon loading and so that's where you get so much bang for your buck with isometrics and you you get strong without technicality like look man i love the olympic lifts early in my career i thought

it was one of the greatest things since sliced bread but when it comes to the limiting factor of getting load into the body the skill of the lift is that and isometrics removes that it allows me to teach it allows them to load and it allows me to have adaptations that i can move forward with are there any exercises and i know this is tough i've been i've been asking some pretty tough questions actually but you just demolishing these things are there any exercises that you could say across the board the majority of athletes should be doing sprinting sprinting sprinting is probably number one in my

book mainly because that is the most potent stimuli you can give to the human body and then when you regress because of the ground reaction forces the harder you sprint the faster you sprint you cannot recreate those forces in a weight room you just cannot the amount of force that you can put into a high -speed sprint with one leg is six to eight times body weight what exercise in the weight room am i doing that's equating to those forces none so when i think about what is going to make me quote -unquote a better athlete sprinting and regressions or progressions to sprint training so as the umbrella definitely

sprinting then i guess i can go into isometrics so i hate to use like an umbrella term instead of like a specific exercise but i would say sprinting isometrics and then finding machines that allow me to overload locally and globally and i know that's going to to be the exact opposite of what most people would say.

Most people would say, oh, you need to progress these advanced exercises so that you can look like you're athletic in a weight room.

When in reality, they need to look athletic on the field.

They need to look athletic in the constraints of their sport.

And so this is where I'm hoping the advancement of strength and conditioning gets to is there is a skill acquisition piece that us practitioners, We understand how to teach skill and movement in a weight room.

There is a progression to do that in sport because we understand the demands, the physiology and the physics that go into that.

So that's what I want to advance this career to.

If you ask me, I think strength and conditioning should not exist. And I know it sounds wild, but I think coaches really like strength conditioning coaches.

coaches. What's the difference between us and a sport coach learning general physical preparation?

I think if a sport coach just learned general physical preparation, they're probably the most advanced person to work with any given athlete because they understand the full spectrum.

And this is once again, goes back to track and field.

What were track and field coaches back in the day?

They were the weight coach. They were the nutrition coach. They were the technical coach. They were the whole thing.

So they saw it from point A to point B or point Z, excuse me.

So So that's where you go, wow, like that is understanding the athlete in 3D.

And then it goes back to the very first thing we talked about.

There's the technical aspect of sport.

There's the tactical aspect of sport.

And then there's the physical.

And what's the best thing that coaches and athletes can do now or the best thing they can do for themselves is learn how all of those interact with each other.

And so you can get an optimal skill session, an optimal weight training session, and then, of course, an optimal practice, which hopefully leads to better games.

Amazing. Now, what about, you mentioned deceleration in the context of basketball.

There's a lot of that in, I mean, most sports I can think of, acceleration, deceleration.

Are there any exercises that can help to facilitate, teach our body deceleration?

restoration absolutely um we'll just assume that we have a pain -free athlete when we're talking about this so i like depth drop landings a lot because that is d cell it's just done the vertical plane which is the area that we could probably receive that highest stimuli the most then once we start introducing horizontal right or linear that's when it gets fun right because that's where you see the difference between good and great athletes now good athletes can stop great athletes can stop faster there's a big difference in that because you have your luka doctors you have your nicola yokages you

have your james hardens those guys decel better than anyone else on the planet you don't see them necessarily excelling greater than some of your anthony edwards or whatever but you see them decel and they create so much separation based off of that so there's so many things that go into that there's joint mechanics there's stiffness and tendons there's so many many layers that goes into decel training, which goes back to stimuli.

So how do I regress that to progress it?

I would say depth drop landings working in the vertical vector.

Then you do that. Can you describe that?

Oh yeah. Sorry about that.

So you can get on a plyo box.

That's something anywhere between 12 inches to 36 inches.

You jump off of it and then you stick the landing.

And so for me, that's once again, like, you know, that reverse band thing we talked about earlier, where you jump really high and then let go of the band and then stick the landing.

that is an easier way to how should I say this standardize that now we can do with compliant landings or non -compliant landings so or a stiff landing so if I get on top of let's say a 12 inch box and my goal is to land most people would jump land and they absorb so in other words they bend their knees and then that's a more compliant landing so that means I'm using my muscles to to help me land that but if I ask you to do the same thing but don't let your knees bend when you hit the ground it's like a shock to the body that is a stiff landing that is what D -Cell is all about how stiff can I stop

and that's going to be the difference between a good stopper or a great stopper who's a compliant stopper which takes a lot of time or a stiff stopper which takes hardly any time because they barely bend their knee to be able to push back and that's where you see that step back that's where you see you don't see guys bending their knees a lot on that when they're doing it they got that foot so far outside their center of mass that their leg is stiff and then they bounce back like a pogo and so that's what's really really cool about what you can do with these depth drop landings once again you

get on top of a box scale it from 12 inches to 36 inches and then you work from a scale of compliant landings where i land where i'm absorbing as much range of motion as i want or to stiff landings where i'm trying to not have any give and then you go from bilateral to unilateral and then now i can get out a little bit further and jump off of it laterally so now i'm now i'm getting to the horizontal vector but that's a great way to scale that d cell stuff and then of course once you get to being more sport like that's when we can use that band that we were doing for over speed training same idea instead

of over speeding you to run faster i can over speed you to d cell so i'm going to help you excel cell, which is going to give you a lot of speed.

And then you got to decel that.

So these are ways that you can start progressing from the vertical vector to the horizontal vector.

And that's where structure type comes in.

And that's where there's only certain things you can train.

Like I can train all these qualities and I will get better, but getting two standard deviations better is different.

And that's what makes the difference between good, great and elite.

When you have elite that's mom and dad that's genetics that's how the bones are structure that's what makes them special and why they're able to do the things they do when you watch michael jordan back in the day stop when you watch him move he is so much lower than anyone else everyone else is moving almost like like they got a board as a spine but he's moving in such a different way that people couldn't even comprehend that's why he's getting travel calls and he wasn't really having that much success.

But then as, as he progressed, he was just, he was, no one was moving like him because he had these shin angles.

And that's where we look at the, now the most extreme example of it, which is Kyrie Irving.

That dude shins are horizontal when he stops, like his shins are so low to the ground.

It's like my ankles at the ground.

And that's what allows him to stop better than anyone else on the planet.

And so that's, those are structure types that you just can't train.

So once again, good, great.

Sure. You can train those, but elite it's mom and dad.

Yeah. This is a valuable life skill because you never know when you're going to need to stop.

Oh man. You know what I mean?

So this is important for all of us and we can build this in.

I love it. Even this micro dosing idea of like, you could just sprinkle in little little bits of this in your training and being able to now when you when you mentioned coming off of that box you mentioned jumping so are we jumping or are we stepping off of it or both both I would say once again it's another like regression to progression where you just step off so you don't have your center of mass displaced too high and then when you land you land compliant or you land stiff but if I don't have access to a higher box well man I'm already up 12 inches now i can jump up to 24 inches and then stick

that landing and now that we're on this topic to progress it even more now do a jump after that because we're talking about landing now we're talking about plyometrics so that's where we got to get to all right i've absorbed all this energy now i got to re -release that energy so i can go somewhere and that's where i can just jump in place jump over a hurdle so many things that you can do and i think as aging athletes go through through their journey I think they need to get exploited to these intensive plyometrics and that's where it's a yes and no because yes they do plyometrics in basketball

but they don't do the super intensive plyometrics that you could eventually work to in like track and field workouts or into real jump training programs so that's where you can micro dose that and that's what we tend to do in season is the further along season we go you start seeing us do a little bit bit more intensive plyometric work, low volume, but they need to hit that intensity because we get all this cool game data.

I mean, I'd see everything that the guys do on the floor with XL, DSL jumps, high speed distance.

I see the mileage that they do and the speeds that they do it at.

So because of that, I know if they had a quote unquote light game or not, or if they're within the certain bandwidths.

So then if they're not in those bandwidths, let's say we go through through a 10 game spell and one of our athletes is not getting enough outputs that we know they're going to see in playoff basketball what a great opportunity to microdose some intensive plyometrics so smart man so smart do you ever feel like your brain is running on low battery well batteries themselves provide energy from chemical reactions that involve electrolytes Electrolytes are minerals that carry an electric charge.

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head over there and check them out and now back to the show what about i saw a movement that i have not yet i felt like a kinship with the movement okay i've not yet done until i you know i wanted to talk to you about it today um because of course as i was doing my research and just knowing in sema and mark it was like some kind of a drop lunge yeah that they learned from you as well yeah the kettlebell drop lunge so just to explain to the the audience real simple we all do split squats right slow up and down with a kettlebell drop lunge or dumbbell whatever you have access to it's the same idea the only

difference is i'm trying to fall as fast as humanly possible and then stick the landing and so with this now we have a very high velo eccentric we think about eccentrics we think about really slow because you're trying to wear out that muscle right for hypertrophy but from a magnitude standpoint if we add velocity velocity man we get a lot of eccentric load we're just doing it really really fast so i can actually technically get more load on an individual from a magnitude standpoint than i could with a 400 pound squat because they're falling so fast and they have to abruptly stop so this kettlebell

drop lunge you take your opposite arm opposite leg you drop down you pop back up and then you can switch hands you can keep it stationary where it really came from was this wild stuff i was experimented with in Stanford I was actually throwing kettlebells with a friend we would throw kettlebells back and forth to each other and think of like a kettlebell swing but at first it was like okay this is just meatheads like just trying to find something new they're so bored but we got up to the point where we're throwing a 206 pound kettlebell back and forth to each other and then me and a friend who's

also in the league he uh we threw it 126 times consistently consistently without a break but what we found with this is it was so much eccentric load that i'm like do i actually need heavy weight when i can just throw and like these high velo eccentric because it's giving me so much load to my tissue that i'm like from a magnitude standpoint i'm actually getting that and i'm not getting the crazy doms that i would get from these slower resistance so there was an aspect to that i really appreciated but then with a kettlebell where it evolved to a kettlebell drop lunge i didn't have a partner guy

wasn't there one day so i was like you know i'm gonna throw to myself and then i was doing it bilaterally and then i'm like oh i can get kind of saucy with this like all right opposite arm opposite leg all right let's throw it a little higher catch it let's get a little heavier and it all really stemmed from i tore my achilles so when i tore my achilles i'm like how do i get plyometrics without jumping and that's where it all that's the put a bow on it where it all really originated from was this is high velo eccentrics without getting off the ground oh wow that's i love this because just play

you're basically playing yes and you uncovered something that is extremely valuable and with this drop lunge so basically we're we're standing straight and then we're kind of dropping into like a split squat drop into a split squat and with the weight in your hand with the weight in your hand and then there there is a skill component to this so we can scale it to where we start stationary let's have it in our right hand and then we drop and split with our left leg in front cool stick the landing but then there's a fluidity like there is this rhythm it's almost like a dance where once i get out

of the bottom i pop up and then i need to switch hands so now it's got to float in the air now i have to time it so it's like athletic lifting which is what we see in olympic lifting but this is a way scalable version that people pick up immediately immediately if they have a little bit of athletic qualities to them and i actually done it especially from stanford to a little bit in phoenix where i was doing it with the team at once where we're doing partner passing and kettlebell drop lunges because it was that easy to scale and so that's where it's not the complexity of olympic lifting but you

get the magnitude of the catches as if you were doing olympic lifting but then it's a little bit more and i hate to use the word functional but a little bit more athletic when i can do it in a split stance when i can do it in locomotion opposed to the you know the catch on a clean where it's obviously bilateral amazing i could see the translation with basketball easily here as well for sure i mean you can work directly in a frontal plane where you're doing a drop lunge or you can start spanning out your drop lunge to more of a 45 degree angle next thing you know it just looks like you're kind

of crossing right but that's that compliant landing we were talking about like there's compliance to that that D cell, and there's stiffness to that D cell.

And when they do stiffness all the time on the court, once again, going back to what we talked about before, there's the other end of the spectrum where I got to give them what they don't get, which is those compliant D cells, which is really, really good for tendon health.

Amazing. What I want to do next, since I've got you here and I've got a young son, yeah, I've got a, I've got a couple of young sons, but my 13 year old son here and right now you know there's there's a a trend that's taking place and i'd say maybe the last decade or so where specialization has happened with our kids and they've been and again it's well intentioned to like get extra training with this particular sport right so skilled training you know and just kind of specializing so maybe they're playing basketball year round and now I'm seeing a lot of really superior athletes speaking out

against that like you know of course LeBron has been vocal about and just like playing other sports Michael Jordan famously you know Kobe asked him what were you doing at what kind of skills were you working on with basketball when you were 12 and Michael Jordan replied to him I was playing baseball right and so what do you think about specialization versus diversification in different types of sports that kids are doing yeah I think I mean we have an epidemic in sport related injuries right and we have more technology access than we've ever had in the human history right so we understand tendons

we understand muscles we understand joints we we see it all we we have so much data, but the one thing that we don't really have an answer for is movement literacy and how that happens in the ecosystem in their early development.

And the best athletes you'll ever see are the ones that are multiple sport athletes.

Deion Sanders, I already talked about him before, Bo Jackson, like some of these guys, they were the best athletes in the world.

They just so happen because they're such good athletes that they can develop the skill in multiple sports.

that's where there's a difference because I don't necessarily see the greatest athletes in the NBA I see great specialization or I see great skills right I don't think we would all stand up and say Nikola Jokic is the best athlete you've ever seen right but he has an unbelievable skill set he has unbelievable size but when I think about what is demanded and what is expected is well now we got EAU circuits and we have all this stuff surrounded around athletes trying to to develop so they can be the best basketball player.

The problem is it's like CrossFit.

CrossFit is not the best in the world.

It's survivalist. And I think the same in AAU basketball.

It's just they survived and they overcame in spite of the system.

And that's the part that I'm like, you're churning out so many athletes that are just never going to hit potential because they're just so mangled.

that I think multi -sport athletes is really what you want to be so that you have more of a bandwidth to accept whatever loads are coming down the pipeline.

And I think the later you can go, the better.

Now, I spent a brief period of time at the Olympic Training Center early in my career, and they had this great survey that went out to all the athletes.

And one of the questions was, how many sports did you play up until the age of 18?

And the average answer was six.

And I'm like, these are the most specialized athletes in the world.

Like we're talking about team sports, right?

Olympic sports, it's the javelin, it's the shot put, it's whatever.

But these are the most specialized athletes in the world and they played on average four sports.

So you could say probably six, seven, eight that they probably at least attuned to at some point.

So then I start questioning like, what is athleticism?

It's the ability to do multiple things above a standard deviation than everybody else.

So I look at decathlon athletes.

I go, that used to be celebrated as the best athlete in the world.

Now it's just the 100 -meter sprinter.

But when I think about the development of my child or development of your young child, I think, man, the more things they can do, the better.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Thank you for that input, man.

Again, a little bit selfishly, but also for a lot of parents out there.

going into, again, we got a couple of practices each week, right?

And I want to fit in some training for him, right?

Some strength and conditioning.

And my older son actually works with the team as a strength conditioning coach. That's awesome.

All right. And, you know, he's always learning as well.

And he's just trying to get these inputs into these kids.

And again, we're dealing with conditions where we're not necessarily in a weight room, right?

And so he's just making do with what he has available which is skills and the body what would be ideal for these kids you know like we'll just say high school athletes and they've got we'll just say you know three to five practices a week where would they fit in those strength and conditioning inputs and then so that's question one yeah and then what about that aau weekend where they've got four basketball games like what is the ideal maybe again warm -up inputs and then post game yeah we all used to joke about the warm -up like i remember as an athlete i'm like gosh the warm -up and then you're

just kind of just getting through it i think and this is what i did at stanford and that was the birth of microdosing was hey instead of like me doing that bs warm -up and the guys are not into it and i'm obviously not into it either why don't you just give me 10 minutes more and And let's just turn it into a lift. So that was actually the birth of microdosing was it's just a strength warmup.

So I think something that you can easily do is just build it into the beginning of practice and you need to glorify warmups.

Warmups isn't the thing that we do before the first drill of practice.

Now, warmups is your opportunity to individually get better.

And that's where we can go into potentiation.

That's when we get into medicine, ball throws, like if, especially the age group that you're you're working with medicine ball throws is still one of the best ways you can develop speed and power in my opinion because you can do it in such a multitude of ways and every single track and field expert coach strength coach whatever still utilizing to this day so that's one of the things that it's like it's a staple it's always going to work but then you can get into isometrics right these are things that can actually make the body feel really really good before you actually go out to the to the pitch

or to the field or to the court and then post of course that's where you go So, all right, I'm going to pick one to two exercises.

Let's say, especially if you're young, pushups, pullups, great place to start.

How now? Okay. I've executed pushups, pullups.

Great. I can add a little bit of weight to it or I can tempo it, or I can eventually work to one arm pushups to assisted one arm pullups.

I think calisthenics, there's so much to get out of calisthenics that we're not tapping into.

And then we add resistance training and I'm like, nah, get calisthenics first and then Then add a little bit of resistance or complexity to the calisthenics.

Then let's get into heavy lifting, right?

So goblet squats or RDLs, rows, whatever we want to do.

So I think that's how you can do it is do it pre -practice where you're really, hey, the warmup is real.

Like the warmup is a session.

It is not just the thing.

And then post, hey, pick one to two exercises and whatever's left in the tank, we're going to exhaust it.

And you can do that three to four times a week.

So if you're practicing five times a week, maybe you sprinkle it in the beginning, maybe you sprinkle it towards the end of the week, but whatever is the furthest away from competition, probably start there.

And then now the AAU weekends, I don't think there's anything you can do for that.

it's two to three games per day for two to three days and you're just like oh wow like this is this is the stimuli now if i was in that situation with the knowledge that i have now i would front end all my strength work at the beginning of the week allow a dip so that i could recover and then once i get to those games we can do some potentiation but that's about it like that that you it's, that is the stressor.

And so how do I get myself ready for those multiple stressors?

And it just a little bit of potentiation, maybe some ISOs to make my knees feel good.

And then we're rolling, man.

We're on the same page.

That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that great insights.

And I want to ask you about this because something really remarkable happened, uh, just maybe it was a couple months ago now kind of time has flown by, but as I mentioned, you know my son's 13 and after practice uh again about maybe a month or two ago he surprised him he grabbed the rim and he surprised himself it was after practice and he had never and i happen to be right there and the only one looking at him he looked right at me he's like dad did you see that can you explain like how something like that can happen i was sharing with him the first time i grabbed the rim the same thing like

some this really invigorating experience had just happened.

You know, I just did a bunch of training.

It was actually, it was, it was a dance performance thing at school.

And then I just went and I just, I hit this thing.

That's a 10 foot high light at the school.

And then I was like, holy shit, I hit this.

And then I went to the gym and I grabbed the room and it's just like, I was in this heightened state.

I just finished practicing and training.

And, you know, I was just able to, to, is there something to that?

Dude, there's this guy, his name is Joel Smith.

I think he's one of the most brilliant people and all of sports performance he has this podcast called Just Fly Sports Performance and what he does is he asks people all the time that exact question when's the first time you grabbed rim and every single time it's after practice and the theory to me is there's an efficiency piece to being able to create that kind of force and so it's not necessarily just raw strength when you see raw strength then you see like the football guys who go up and grab rim which is the the most hilarious thing because they i mean asked to grasp to get the range of motion to

use the muscular force to go up and there's just no synchronization at all it's just raw power then you watch like a cheetah and a you know a tiger leap and you're like oh that's fluidity but i think the same thing once we exhaust some of our resources we kick in efficiency and how do i move and synchronize and make this the most perfect output given the circumstances that I'm in.

So whenever you find fatigue, you also find efficiency.

Now, obviously there's a quick tipping scale, obviously, but I've generally seen the exact same response after a practice, after pickup, that's when everybody got their first dunk.

And to me, the only logical response is efficiency.

That makes sense. Again, like again, that magical moment when it happened, And he wasn't necessarily trying to do it.

He's just jumping up, like, maybe to touch the net like he's done a thousand times.

And he grabbed the rim.

Like, I heard it pull down a little bit.

He surprised himself.

And it was so casual how it happened.

And I love that analogy of, like, looking at a football player who's, like, using everything they got to make and do this thing.

But he didn't even really try to do it and surprise himself.

A hundred percent. And that's where, you know, you get lathered up.

You go through all these different activities.

I think there's also a neck up aspect of having all these different stimuli that all of a sudden the simple task of jumping is like, oh, this is all I got to do.

One, two step, go up.

And then bang, you get your first dunk.

That's amazing. That's amazing.

All right. Man, I just want to talk to you forever, man.

This is awesome. I want to ask you for everyday people, you know, just everybody who's listening.

You know, there are athletes in the audience.

There are people who've got kids who are athletes, but we all want to be our best selves.

And, you know, that formula is going to be different from time to time where we are in our life cycle or life conditions.

But are there anything or are there are there are there certain exercises or mindset pieces that you would encourage all of us to implement on a consistent basis?

You know, you've reiterated the the point of sprinting several times.

I think that's immensely, immensely valuable.

And there's so many different ways we can go about sprinting, by the way.

It doesn't have to be on a track or whatever the case might be, which is, it doesn't really get better than that.

But, you know, just being able to get that anabolic input, you know, whether this is like a stationary bike, whatever the case might be, swimming, there are different ways to get that kind of anabolic high intensity input.

but are there any other exercises again or insights for all of us to take on on a regular basis when i think about longevity i do a lot of research on longevity because to me that's just the it's the end goal for all of us anyways but there's a high performance aspect to that so when i think about longevity i think about okay you probably have to have full range of motion in most activities that you do and when i think about people getting older i go well they they get limited range of motion right all of a sudden it's hard to sit down on that couch or you hear the grunts getting out of the car

so you're like okay check that's limited then you go the next which is strength so then all of a sudden you see grip strength being limited right I used to do the things like this I used to carry this over there and now that's a little bit harder so it's like okay so now I got range of motion I got grip strength and then the reason why I keep going back to speed is yeah I used to sprint but then just one day I just stopped sprinting and then And 20 years later, they're like, yeah, I haven't sprinted.

When's the last time I've done any of those activities?

So when I think about fiber typing and all these other things that go with the decaying of a human being, well, how do I prolong that decay?

Sprinting is probably a good one, right?

Because now that's speed.

Grip strength, picking up heavy shit, probably another good one.

So like a two -arm hang is probably one of my favorite tests to see do you have good relative strength?

and how long can you hold a two -arm hang most human beings in my opinion should be able to hang off of a pull -up bar with one arm for 45 seconds i think that's a pretty good standard for most humans to be able to do most humans cannot even come close to that and i go well that from an overhead strength standpoint and a relative being able to handle my own body weight that makes sense and then from a mobility standpoint or a range of motion put your butt on the ground and And can you get up off the ground without using your hands?

And most people cannot do that.

Most people have to put a hand down.

They have to put the second hand down.

They have to use their knee to do this.

And then I go, those are the three things.

And I'm constantly trying to delay as long as I possibly can.

And I think about my mother.

And I think about all my older family members and friends.

And I think these are the things they cannot do.

And one of the greatest strength coaches of all time, his name is Al Vermeule.

he was the bull strength coach during the Jordan era right now Tim Grover was training Jordan but somebody had to be trained all those other dudes and Alvar Mill is world -renowned like he is on my Mount Rushmore of strength coaches and that dude was still sprinting probably five years ago and he's like 86 now something like that he was still sprinting every day amazing because he's like that's the last thing to go yeah so if I'm losing my ability to sprint I'm I'm probably frail.

I was like, that makes a lot of sense from a bone density standpoint, from a tendon and tendon health standpoint, the longer we can do fast things, the better.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

And a lot of times, especially in our culture today, it isn't a matter of our time was up.

It was a matter of us just stopping doing the thing.

Bingo. And that's where the beauty of microdosing.

Everybody can just dose some of that stuff off in their morning routine.

routine you can start off as soon as you get out of the bed with no handed get -ups you can walk after you get out of the shower you can go to that pull -up bar that's hanging above your closet and hang for as long as you possibly can now where you sprint i'll let you figure that one out but everything else it's kind of manageable you can dose it out into your morning routine into your evening routine or to when you're playing with your kids yeah awesome man well this has been amazing again i've got a thousand more questions i could ask you about and it's incredibly insightful And, you know, I shared

this before the show, but just, I mean, the probability, you know, you working with the suns and then going to the finals, you know, and then you go into Detroit and them making this run that they made this past year out of nowhere.

What's the consistency there?

Man, I would love to take full credit for that.

and if any if my president is listening to this sure but the reality is I've been very fortunate to be around a lot of high character high quality people and the stars just came in alignment and I'm just very lucky to be a part of two spots that made that happen yeah well I appreciate you so much is there anywhere where people can like get more information from you learn some of these insights be able to see because again we described a lot of things but you share some visual representations of a lot of the things that you talk about uh, you know, with social media.

So where can people follow you and get more information?

Yeah. I'm solely on Instagram slash strength, S C H L E S strength.

And then, um, I have a website where I sell courses, so it's not done yet.

N D Y .com. Uh, but yeah, those are two places you can find me.

Awesome. Not done yet.

What does that mean for you?

Oh man. Um, it's just never satisfied.

And the evolution of what I thought I was to what I'm going to be still not done yet.

My man, the one and only Corey Schlesinger, everybody.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.

I hope that you got a lot of value out of this.

Share this with any athletes that you know, any friends with kids that are athletes.

This information needs to get into more hands and more hearts.

We need to know, yes, where the puck is, but where's the puck going to be?

And that's what you get with somebody like Corey Schlesinger.

you get to know what is coming next, where is sport and training progressing to and also what are some of these things that we can implement in our own lives so that we can experience a level of longevity.

As he mentioned, we've got people playing in the NBA right now who've been playing over 20 seasons, like at extremely high levels like we've never seen before.

And this is not an accident.

This has to do with training.

This has to do with with nutrition.

This has to do with recovery.

We can do more and be more with these amazing bodies that we have, but we've got to implement some smarter training strategies.

What would be amazing is if you would take a screenshot of this episode and share it on Instagram.

Corey shared that he is exclusively on Instagram.

Tag him. Let him know what you thought about this episode.

Share the love. I'm sure it would do his heart so much good to see that you were listening today.

We've got some amazing masterclasses and world -class guests coming your way very, very soon.

So make sure to stay tuned.

Take care. Have an amazing day.

And I'll talk with you soon.

And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow .com.

That's where you can find all of the show notes.

You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode.

And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well.

And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the appreciate that so much and take care.

I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life.

Thanks for tuning in.

[Mastering High-Performance Training: Insights from NBA Strength Coach Corey Schlesinger]-[How to Train Like an Athlete - With NBA Trainer Cory Schlesinger]

📋 Summary

Masterclass in High-Performance: The Philosophy of Corey Schlesinger

The Fallacy of Compartmentalization

The Concept of Micro-Dosing Exercise

Regressing for Performance

The Primacy of Sprinting and Isometrics

Longevity and Movement Literacy

Conclusion: The Athlete is Always Right

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript