Today’s episode features Miguel Aragoncillo, strength coach and skill acquisition specialist based out of Boston, MA. Miguel has worked with athletes of all levels, and now specializes in working with baseball pitchers where he is getting serious results through integration of skill and motor learning tools. Miguel has a significant background in PRI and worked as an assistant in multiple courses. He also has a unique athletic backstory, as he was a break-dancer before moving into a coaching role.
Miguel is one of the most intelligent and innovative coaches in the field. He is pushing human performance forward by integrating what he has learned in the world of strength and conditioning, neuro-mechanics and skill acquisition, and is using that to get results such as tacking 5-7MPH on pitching speed in a matter of minutes.
Our field is still growing at a rapid rate. Although hard-line definitions of the scope of a strength coach definitely exist in the university and professional sectors, there is no doubt as to the inter-disciplinary nature of sports performance, as well as the impact that the wide-scope of S&C related concepts can have on the next level up on the performance pyramid, that of sport skill itself. This is something that Mike Guadango mentioned in podcast #151, and has been resonating with me for some time.
Miguel’s intelligent take on the performance industry has been on my radar for some time. On today’s show, Miguel and I chat about guiding athletes in the process of skill acquisition, through processes on creating drills to improve sport skills, integrating biomechanical and PRI based concepts, and also setting up sport skill training through sensory contrasts.
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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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Miguel Aragoncillo’s Key Points
- How Miguel got into strength and conditioning, and eventually, into coaching baseball pitchers
- How to guide athletes correctly in skill acquisition without over-cueing and over-coaching
- Miguel’s thought process on creating drills to improve sport skills
- Integrating biomechanics and PRI based concepts into a sport skill teaching process
- Setting up sport skill training through sensory contrast
- How Miguel sets of resistance training for young athletes outside of actual skill coaching
Miguel Aragoncillo Quotes
“If I’m trying to help individuals to throw faster, I can get them to deadlift 500lbs for reps, to have vertical jumps and bounds for so many feet, we can do RSI, etc. etc., but what happens when someone simply doesn’t know what it means to throw”
“You don’t need a lot of drills in order to improve one’s relationship with one’s own body”
“When we do any movement, I show them the movement, and then I ask them, “what do you feel”…. “where do you feel”, “what do you feel”, why do you feel it””
“I’m allowing the individual to self-organize on the context of building a better mental representation of what their body is doing”
“Internal cueing, in my head, is a good thing… because even sometimes the experts will need an internal cue to be more aware of something that they are lacking”
“The funny thing is you are always using some type of constraints, but you are not really thinking of it like that”
“I will literally just say, do you want me to explain this drill, or do you just want to do it”
“Pitching is both a frontal and transverse dominant plane”
“When you do a non-manual technique of some sort to gain range of motion, now you need to go through a guided discovery process doing the terminal skillsets with different constraints, and that’s where it gets fun”
“If you ever watch me coach, I almost never say no… I’ve read a lot of research speaking about negative feedback. It’s something I’ve picked up and I found out it works really well”
“We will do an integrated movement, we feel certain things, we sense certain things, then we’ll get into the lifting side of things as well. So the A1 might be a 1-leg integrated RDL, and then after we’ll go into A2, maybe a max bar effort trap bar deadlift”
“(Integrated movement training) might make them more powerful, because they sense more of the ground, they sense more of their body”
“I think the lateral line hop is good because you are moving your body left and right very quickly while maintaining a stable torso position… in sprinting it helps out in the frontal plane in that regards”
Show Notes
83-85mph to 90mph in 40 Minutes of Work: A Pitching Case Study
About Miguel Aragoncillo
Miguel Aragoncillo is a S&C coach and skill acquisition specialist based out of Boston, MA. He has worked with professional athletes, collegiate level athletes, high school athletes, and even youth athletes. He received his Bachelor’s of Science in Kinesiology in 2010 from Temple University. He has worked with several high level athletes, along with working with athletes to recover, and learn new skill sets all the same.
Likewise, he has worked in several physical therapy locations (as a personal trainer) in order to better blend the care of patients as they recover from injury and/or surgery. Also, he has presented in several states along with assisting with anatomy continuing education courses all across the United States.
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