13 Facilities in 30 Days Part 1: Perception Shift

Okay, so before we get into the meat of this article, I want to give you guys a quick intro on why and how this trip came to fruition. And in case you don’t know, what the trip actually was. Here was our route (roughly, there was a little extra mileage added but I’m sure we’ll get into that later):

As indicated in the title, we visited 13 different facilities across the country over the span of 30 days. For context, we went to the following facilities, in order:

1 – Cal Dietz: University of Minnesota Hockey Strength Coach

2 – Driveline Baseball 

3 – P3 (Peak Performance Project) – Santa Barbara location

4 – Patrick Love: Bakersfield Condors Strength Coach

5 – Jeremy Layport (not a facility, he was RPR certified and we wanted to learn more)

6 – PFS (Premier Fitness Systems) 

  • PFS, from my perspective, is most widely known in the movement/injury prevention world. You can find more about what they do here: https://premierfitnesssystems.com

7 – Exos/Altis – Arizona location

  • Exos and Altis share the same location in Arizona. I don’t think either one needs an introduction. However, you can find out more about them at the respective links below:
  • Exos: https://www.teamexos.com
  • Altis: https://altis.world
    • side note: the Altis 360 membership is worth getting. If you are able to and haven’t yet, do it.

8 – Westside Barbell

  • If you don’t know what Westside is, stop reading. Thanks.

9 – Tread Athletics

10 – Chris Korfist: RPR Certification – Oak Park High School (Illinois)

  • The jury is still out on RPR, and I’ve had minimal exposure to it thus far, so I am not going to comment much on it. What I do know, is that it has helped me and the few people I’ve exposed it to. I’m excited to use it further. You can find more about it here:  https://www.reflexiveperformance.com
  • Also, Cal does a bunch of stuff with it as well. There’s a lot of info on his youtube page, which I referenced above.

11 – Premier Neuro Therapy

  • This one was a nice surprise. They’re doing some really cool stuff with the ARPwave in terms of helping guys come back from injury and retraining the body to lesson the chance of said injury occurring again in the future.
  • You can find more about the ARPwave here (it’s expensive): https://www.arpwave.com
  • And you can find out more about the facility itself here (they do more than just ARPwave): https://www.premierneurotherapy.com

12 – Champion Physical Therapy and Performance

13 – Cressey Sports Performance – Massachusetts location

  • Again, if you don’t know about Cressey, stop reading.

What the Hell Was I Thinking?

So, now that you have a general idea of where we went and what they do… What the hell was I thinking? Why would anyone want to drive 12,000 miles just to see a couple facilities? Great question!

It all started on a tree farm…

(actual picture of where the idea was born)

I’d been working landscaping for close to 3 months, most of it in this lovely, expansive, piece of land: 7 AM to 5 PM. Everyday. It was great to be able to take that time to listen to podcasts, books, etc, but… eventually they all begin sounding the same.

Anyway, some time in my boredom I came up with this crazy idea that I should just go places and learn from them. Weird, right? To make a long story short, 3 weeks after my light bulb moment on the tree farm, myself and my (now) intern, Jarod, were packing our bags into the car and heading out to Minnesota for our first stop. That didn’t take long.

Expectations:

Before leaving for this trip, I thought I was pretty well versed in the training of athletes. I had just graduated with a degree in exercise science. I read books, articles, listened to podcasts, etc. I had been training myself for 8 plus years, putting into practice that which I had learned. My honest expectations for the trip were as follows:

-we’ll see some cool stuff

-our access will be limited

-we’ll learn a lot about good culture

-there was going to be a lot of driving (there was)

I was excited for the trip, but careful not to set my expectations too high. I didn’t know how open the people/facilities would be, or even how much time they’d have to devote to a couple random kids (we’re 22 and 21) coming by for a visit. Would we even get to talk to anybody? I didn’t know.

“We don’t warmup, we don’t cool down”.

We show up to Mariucci Arena, our first stop, at 6:30 AM, as Cal indicated that’s the time training would be starting. We walk in, introduce ourselves to Cal and his interns, and check the place out. Explaining all the different tech and measurement tools they had available could be a blog post in itself, so I’ll suffice it to say they had a lot of cool stuff, but whatever. Cool stuff that isn’t used is worthless, and we didn’t know how well, or if, they used it yet. We take a seat in the corner of the weight room by Cal’s office and begin talking to a couple of the interns there. Athletes start trickling in. As we’re talking, I can’t help but notice the flow of the workouts. There’s no loud music blasting. There’s no athletes yelling and screaming. There’s no warmup. There’s no… wait what? There’s no warmup? We’ll get back to that later because currently, one of the interns is telling us that bracing the core is detrimental to performance and he’s telling us to stand up so he can prove his point.

Jarod’s first.

“Do 5 squats, bracing your core as hard as you can” Okay.

“Hold your arm out straight to the side. I’m going to try pushing it down, you resist me”. Okay.

Jarod’s arm goes down like a noodle.

“Now, march in place, pumping your arms and legs for 5 seconds” Okay.

“Hold your arm out again”

Jarod’s arm doesn’t budge. But apparently he wants to prove his point further because he tells Jarod to do 5 squats again, bracing his core as hard as he can. Jarod does.

“Hold your arm out”.

Noodle arm.

I’m up next. In my mind, I know I’m not budging on either one. Sure he moved Jarod’s arm, but he won’t move mine! Right?

Same result. Noodle arm with a braced core, steel cable after marching. Perception #1: shattered.

*Important side note: I later thought about this test and thought the test was skewed. I thought we should be testing using the same exercise. In other words, we should be either marching or squatting, with the only thing changing being the bracing of the core or the absence of bracing the core. After we left, Jarod and I tested marching with a braced core versus a not braced core. Same result (braced core produced a weaker arm).

We walk back over to our seats where the notepad comes out and the scribbling begins. Before long, guys are holding onto resistance bands on what we later learn are custom squat racks, with elevated poles that extend their height, allowing them to hook up bands higher than you otherwise would be able to. I’d heard of overspeed training and assisted jumps before, but not at this level. Guys were jumping through the roof, scissoring in mid air, only to come back down and land in perfect position. They were doing uber fast scissoring things (best name I have for now) in between bands stretched across the squat racks, attacking all angles of the hip: front, back, side, and side. And all of this was being done with a nonchalant, no big deal attitude from the athletes. The scribbling continued.

Eventually, the men’s team finished up and left. Literally. They finished their last exercise, grabbed their stuff, and left. No cool down, stretching, foam rolling, etc. Nada (outside of one or two very specific cases, which is important to mention. If an athlete needed it, they did it. But the majority of them didn’t need it).

In walks the womens’ team. Surely, they will be treated differently. Warm up, cool down, no extreme plyos, the whole deal. Nope. They go through the exact same thing, with the same amount of fluidness and precision as the men’s team. Okay then.

Eventually the women leave, and the pro hockey players start rolling in. Same deal. As they finish up, Cal walks by, confirming we’ll be in tomorrow. Yeah, we’ll be in tomorrow.

“Okay, we’ll talk then”.

Tomorrow comes and we are told to head upstairs. It’s 6:30 AM again. We walk upstairs to find 4 machines laid out on a track, one intern per machine, typing away at an iPad that’s apparently connected to the machine. The athlete’s finish their warmup, yes there was a short warmup today, and then hook into the machines. Cal instructs them to sprint roughly 60 yards.

“The machine goes that far”?

“Oh yeah”.

Okay.

One by one they take off, releasing the cord around their waste at the end so the machine can pull it back in for the next athlete to use. They go through a couple rounds of sprints, using progressively heavier resistance. They finish up and head back downstairs to do the rest of their workouts.

The machine was the 1080 Sprint and it was awesome. It is able to provide variable resistance to the athlete during their sprint, adjusting as they gain speed so as not to mess with technique once they get close to max velocity. I later learn it is also a great tool for overspeed training, as you can program it to pull you just 5% faster, pushing your body to a new limit, while not pulling you too fast, which would ultimately alter your running mechanics and have a negative impact on the athlete. Anyway, Cal has a lot of tools, but Cal uses his tools effectively. Moving on…

We see more of the same today, however it’s now an upper instead of a lower body day. They go through eccentric benchpress with weight releasers, assisted pushups, hyper speed wrist flicks in the bands (again, I don’t have a better name for it yet), among other exercises. We are more accustomed to it because of what we saw yesterday, but other people in this space are not doing these types of things. I’m excited, and slightly nervous, to talk with Cal and figure out what’s going on. I’d read his Triphasic Training book (find it here), but he’d obviously progressed since then.

Finally, around noon (I think), he walks up to us.

“Alright, let’s go”.

He leads us to the far side of the weight room, through a hallway, and into a room. He takes a seat, we take a seat.

“So, what you got”?

Alright Brady, don’t freeze. What I really wanted to ask was, “what the hell did we just see and explain all of it, please”. Instead, I asked him about how they train the foot, how that protects the knee, and how we might be able to train the hand or wrist in the same way and would it have a similar effect on the elbow? “Nope, the fingers need dexterity. Russian scientist so and so (forgot his name) tested that out and found that it reduced finger dexterity which then had a negative impact on the last part of the chain when throwing, the fingers”. That’s somewhat paraphrased, and definitely not word for word, but you get the point. The man has tested everything. Anyway, I won’t go into everything we talked about, but I’ll leave some of the specifics we discussed below:

Important consideration: I do not necessarily agree or buy-in 100% to all of what’s below. They are simply points that challenged my thinking and forced me to dig deeper. 

  • the pallof press, and any core exercise, is pointless unless it mimics the force, velocity, speed, or stress, that actually occurs in sport.
  • RPR is their warmup, and he’s seen 1 soft tissue injury over the course of 4000 workouts since he’s started using it (he wasn’t sure on these numbers, so take them with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, his injury rates went down substantially once he started implementing it)
  • heavy lifting is not sport specific. It is pointless unless you find a way to take what you’ve built and transfer it into sport by doing exercises that mimic the activity that occurs during sport. My interpretation of this is that he didn’t mean movements, but he meant specific muscular. actions. Their workouts didn’t really represent anything specific to hockey. Instead, it mimicked what the body would be asked to do in hockey. Hamstrings rapidly contracting and relaxing, absorbing large amounts of force, etc. It wasn’t the movement that made it specific to sport, but what the body had to do that made it specific to the sport.
  • the big toe and the foot are the foundation. They are often times the only thing in contact with the ground and they are what gives the rest of the body it’s instructions during dynamic sport activity. Bad feet means a bad athlete.
  • bracing is overly coached. He put us through the same test his intern had the day before. His biggest point here was that bracing may be good for injury rehabilitation after some type of back injury, but that it can be detrimental in the training of athletes and in their sports performance.
  • breathing is important: better breathing, or being able to go from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state quickly, will allow an athlete to recover faster. The faster the athlete can recover from a set, a workout, a training cycle, the harder and faster you can push them. The harder and faster you can push them, the more stress they’ll be able to accumulate. The more stress they can accumulate, the more adaptation there is. The more adaptation there is, the better athlete they’ll be. Breathe.
  • speaking of progressions, they’re stupid. If the athlete can already do the last exercise of the progression after a quick coaching point or neurological unlock, what’s the point of the progression?

I could go on for a while, but we’ll stop there for now. We walked out of his office, got a free bag of protein and carbs, thanked him, and were on our way.

Now, it’s going to be tempting to think I’ve fully bought into everything I’ve mentioned so far and that I’ve become a “faithful disciple of Cal Dietz”. That’s false. I’ll repeat, that’s false. There, said it twice. I haven’t bought into all of the stuff Cal says or does, but I have bought into the fact that everything should be challenged and tested. Literally. Everything. Cal takes what many people in the industry accept as fact, and puts it through testing. It made me question a lot of what I do and a lot of what I have my athletes do. I do not have it all figured and I need to continue learning and growing, as we all do.

So, to wrap up this much longer than need be article, I am not going to completely change my training or programming because of any of the stuff mentioned above. That would be stupid. However, I am going to begin tinkering. Changing, testing, one by one, so I know whether something works or doesn’t work. Keep what works, discard what doesn’t. Learn, then move on.

Ultimately, I came out of that first visit pleasantly surprised and very happy that it was our first stop. It forced me to change my perceptions. It opened up a whole new level of depth that I hadn’t been exposed to before. The athlete, the human body, is extremely complex. Anyone that trys to tell you they have it all figured out is lying because they don’t. So now, as we approached the next 12 facilities, I had this new lens to look through. I had better questions to ask: How and will that transfer to sport? Is there a way that could be done better? How much energy and time are we wasting with progressions or exercises that are too easy, too difficult, or don’t have an impact on the athletes sport? These were all questions I could now add to my list to test the validity of any exercise or program we saw.

Anyway, that concludes part 1 of this article series. I doubt anyone made it this far, but if you did, you’re a warrior. In part 2, we’ll be looking at culture. We’ll be talking mostly about our time spent at Westside Barbell and what we can learn from how they do things. See y’all then.

Questions or comments? Shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.

 

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