Today’s episode features Jake Schuster, sports performance coach, consultant and researcher hailing from Boston, Massachusetts
Jake has his MSc from renowned Loughborough University in the UK and completed work towards his doctorate in New Zealand with the national Rugby Sevens teams through the Rio Olympics. He has published in the on both rugby and force velocity profiling and has several ongoing research projects further detailing what exactly it is that makes people fast, and how they can get faster.
Jake has spent that past year working as the Senior Sports Scientist for Vald Performance, traveling the world visiting elite sporting clients and getting a unique insight into global best practices.
Jake previously appeared on episode #109 where he talked at length on how he was integrating cutting edge exercises and technology into a training model for track and field athletes, particularly sprinters featuring his utilization of Alex Natera’s isometrics and force plate analysis. Jake’s knowledge and abilities are a very impressive blend of both understanding science and data trends, while also having a creative and integrative coaching mind. This integrative ability is just one thing that makes me thrilled to have Jake back for another episode.
On today’s show, Jake and I discuss the optimal relationship between sport science and coaching (if you aren’t in a high performance department you may want to skip to around the 30:00 mark in the show), speed development and hamstring injury prevention, evolving thoughts on Frans Bosch work, robust running and water bags, concepts from force plates that show up in acceleration, and more.
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
- International differences in sport science utilization
- How Jake sees the optimal relationship between sport science/data and the art of coaching
- Speed development and hamstring injury prevention in the context of team sports
- Jake’s evolving thoughts on the work of Frans Bosch and waterbag training
- Force plate’s transfer to other skills aside from vertical jumping and landing
- Aspects of force plate measurements that transfer highly to acceleration
- Questions and topics for this year that Jake is considering
“The best and first question (in a sport science/monitoring situation) is to talk to the athlete”
“(Regarding the interaction of sport science and coaching) People don’t talk to each other now, we are always on our phones, looking at numbers”
“The teams that have very few injuries, especially running soft tissue injuries, they make darn sure that their athletes are exposed to maximum velocity running very often. At least once every 5 days. The teams that say “80%’s fine… they often have more (hamstring injuries)”
“The eccentric hamstring question… if anyone thinks it’s still a question, then they are paying too much attention to twitter”
“We have one identified, modifiable risk factor for hamstring injuries in the literature and that is eccentric hamstring strength, and we have a whole lot of research underneath that that shows that it is fascicle length that is one of the main morphological determinants and we can affect that with eccentric hamstring training”
“One of my favorite variables on a force plate is eccentric deceleration rate of force development; how fast we can brake”
“The countermovement test (on a force plate) is an idiot proof test of neuromuscular status”
“Concentric rate of power development gets absolutely caned on twitter for whatever odd reason… it’s a brilliant metric… if they just named it acceleration nobody would say anything because we are looking at watts per second… when we saw that go up in sprinters their 60m improved and their coach said they were getting better out of the blocks”
“In our group, the one who was better than everybody else at that variable (concentric power) was the one who played football”
“It is really valuable for practitioners to find out, what does their sport coach, what does my CEO, what does their general manager think their job is, and what do they hope to achieve”
About Jake Schuster
Jake Schuster is a Sports Performance practitioner and researcher hailing from Boston, Massachusetts. Despite his recent interest and skills in data management, Jake’s greatest area of interest is speed and power development. In the 2017-18 at Florida State University Jake supported more than 30 All-American (top 8 nationally) performances from the Track & Field team and helped the Tennis team reach the national “Elite 8”. Behind star track coach Ricky Argro, Jake supported Andre Ewers to break both ten seconds in the 100m and twenty seconds in the 200m for the first time that season (a combination which fewer than 40 people have done, ever) and is guiding Andre as he prepares for the 2019 IAAF World Championships where he’ll compete in the 200m for Team Jamaica.
Jake has his MSc from renowned Loughborough University in the UK and completed work towards his doctorate in New Zealand with the national Rugby Sevens teams through the Rio Olympics. He has published in the on both rugby and force velocity profiling and has several ongoing research projects further detailing what exactly is is that makes people fast, and how they can get faster. Jake has spent that past year working as the Senior Sports Scientist for Vald Performance, travelling the world visiting elite sporting clients and getting a unique insight into global best practices. Through his research and practice, Jake avidly explores how our field can grow and advance.
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