Today’s episode features UK physical preparation coach Sam Portland.
Sam has been a strength coach on the elite level for nearly a decade, working with premiership rugby, Olympians, and international competitors ranging from hockey to track and field. He was first introduced to me by Keir Wenham-Flatt in our podcast together, where Keir mentioned Sam’s experience with “speed gate golf”.
Sam is a forward thinking coach who got started in the coaching game very early and has a knack for the intuition of developing athletes. In speed gate golf, Sam found a method, not only to essentially eliminate injuries from his speed training program, but also get athletes faster than they have ever been in the process.
I’m very interested in the ideas of getting faster and jumping higher without “trying as hard” and I think nothing speaks to that more firmly than studies like Rewzon’s famous (at least in terms of how often I use it) long jump study where jumpers who jumped to “targets” in the landing pit that were not necessarily their maximal distance, would jump further in the end than jumpers who jumped as far as they could every leap.
Sam has taken this idea into speed training in a creative way that helped field sport athletes (rugby) get some tremendous results, and this method is a motor learning gem that can speak volumes to physical preparation, track and sport coaches alike.
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
- Sam’s background as an athlete and what got him into the physical preparation field
- The birth of “speed gate golf” and how it was able to get athletes very fast while minimizing injuries
- How Sam changed his language in the weightroom to improve the athletic development quality of it
- How Sam would program speed into the context of sport coaching if he were a sport coach in a “Global Dynamics” of coaching model
Sam Portland Quotes
“If you look at coaching, we are academics in a kinesthetic world”
“Every time speed gates come out in professional environment people get hurt (pull hamstrings)”
“(By doing sprint and technical drills through the gates) their feedback loop is always positive”
“(In speed gate golf) It became a really competitive game because people wanted to run slow, instead of all wanting to run fast, the goal was to run slow, but run slow technically well”
“(In speed gate golf) We used rank-record-publish”
“(Using speed gate golf) We didn’t have a hamstring, calf, groin issue at all out of 28 players, and we were knocking boys down into the 10 meters into low 1.6’s”
“Any time a guy ran a 2 second 10 (submaximal, accurate running), there was a picture of me and him shaking hands going on my Instagram”
“From there, we just built our process of intensification, they’ve showed me that they respect it and understand it…. we just took our rhythm from our a-skip drills and bounds and put that into the gates… show me your a-skip, show me the bound, and now just speed it up a little bit”
“Speed gate golf is a 2 second day in trainers… we’d go back to those extensive qualities, then we’d go to intensive qualities”
“When you start looking as training as an organism in response to oxygen, then you are going to go a long way”
“(In regards to relaxation) Athletes always want to be “on”… nah…. be “off””
About Sam Portland
Sam Portland has been a strength and conditioning coach at the elite level for nearly a decade with a vast array of experience. Sam has worked with premiership rugby, Olympic athletes, international competitors across a plethora of sports including hockey and track and field. Aside from this Sam keeps in touch with the grass roots aspects of athlete preparation by hosting his ‘combine program’. This program is a long term athletic development program filling the essential gaps in physical literacy that are not fulfilled at school or by club sports. A highly rewarding process on par with working with some of the elite athletes in the country.
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