Today’s episode features strength coach and sport scientist, John Kiely. John is a senior lecturer at the university of Lancashire, a strength coach with extensive rugby experience, and also a former boxing champion. He is one of the most intelligent minds in the field, and is widely known for his ideals on periodization and planning.
As much as I love talking the organization of training, John’s experience and knowledge runs much further than periodization, and some of John’s work on running and coordination have been some of the most memorable articles I’ve read in my experience as a coach.
To that end, I’m thrilled to have John Kiely talk about some significant pieces of training that I think go under-appreciated. These are the topics of variability and its impact on the brain, how to optimally train coordination in athletes, and also how we as humans differ from the animals in our running and locomotion. It is these concepts taken full circle that I believe can give any coach or athlete a much fuller appreciation and depth to how we as a species can be trained to our fullest potential. Coordination and variability are really the links to that zone we often refer to as the land that sits between rehab and strength and conditioning where so mamy performance gains are often made.
On today’s show, we also get into the concepts of reflexes in sport, as well as internal versus external cues, given the rules of coordination in training.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Key Points:
- Differences between humans and animals in build and performance
- Role of reflexes and their development in training and performance
- How the human brain prioritizes efficiency when it comes to repeated movements and what this means for training
- The widening and narrowing of the nervous system and what it means for athletic skill performance
- The difference between slow reflexes and fast reflexes in sport
- Checkmarks to hit when trying to maximize the coordinative benefit an athlete gets from exercises
- How internal cues impact the athlete, and the spectrum that is best to apply them on
Quotes:
“As humans, we are master adapters in running… in terms of tissue plasticity, we are nature’s superstars in being adaptable”
“We are the only efficient runners who run on two legs (in the animal kingdom)”
“The stability challenge (of running on two legs) isn’t trivial”
“I think coordination is one of the last unexplored athletic frontiers in conditioning”
“You keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, the edges creep in and it becomes a rut”
“The more you move, the more you start to plastically change the way the neurons in your motor cortex relate to each other”
“In musicians cramp… you can’t execute something that has been over-practiced”
“For too long strength training has been too constrained…. (people saying) just get strong”
“There is no accurate athletic movement without really well calibrated interpretation of sensory information…. how you execute is totally dependent on how your central nervous system interprets sensory feedback”
“What we should have as coaches is this big box of training tools…. There are other dimensions of training that can meaningfully contribute to athlete movement proficiency”
“One of the things that happens with injury is you lose the ability to interpret the sensory information coming from that injured tissue”
“For me using internal cues to recalibrate the brain and spinal cord with the previously damaged tissue… internal cueing is really important if not essential. You go into more complex sport specific movements and you don’t, you focus on the outcome”
About John Kiely
John Kiely is a senior lecturer at the University of Lancashire. He has extensive athletic performance training experience with athletes across numerous sports. His Ph.D research has focused on the topic of coordination.
John has been the strength and conditioning coach for Irish rugby, amongst other sports and competitors. John has also won multiple titles in kickboxing and boxing in his time as an athlete.
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