Today’s episode features Erik Korem and Keir Wenham-Flatt. Erik Korem is the associate athletic director for student athlete high-performance and Keir Wenham-Flatt is the coordinator of football performance. Erik and Keir are a veritable all-star team of athletic development, with knowledge spanning all arenas of performance that transfers to the field.
Erik brings nearly two decades of national expertise to his current position at William and Mary at the professional and collegiate levels, most recently, serving as the Director of Sports Science for the National Football League’s Houston Texans, and previously, the high-performance coordination at the University of Kentucky football. Keir has extensive experience in rugby physical preparation, and recently has expanded his repertoire to American football and University Olympic sports in his employment in the USA, in addition to his founding of rugbystrengthcoach.com.
As we’ve talked about on other shows, strength, and even speed, is only a part of the equation on preparing athletes to be their best on the day of competition (albeit, an important part). This podcast goes in depth on how Erik and Keir approach those two facets of performance from a perspective of maximal efficiency and effectiveness.
The show expands to more “global” topics of high performance which includes the specificity of “mental toughness” and performance in high-pressure situations, as well as the role of emotional state in long-term sport success. We also cover ideas regarding a global model (James Smith’s book “Governing Dynamics” is a big one here) of sport training that can help synchronize sport and strength coaches in their combined efforts. We also get into the data provided by GPS, focusing on how team speed readings are an indicator of the flow of game play.
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.Key Points
- Erik and Keir’s thoughts on agility and change of direction training on the field of play
- The use of maximal speed training for the sake of injury prevention in American football
- How GPS and game speed and acceleration can be a significant factor in looking at the strategy of how a football game is played
- How Erik and Keir utilize athlete performance logs and wellness readings
- The specificity of “toughness” and resilience in high pressure and over-time play situations
- How the “Governing Dynamics of Sport” is impacting conversations that Erik and Keir are having with the sport coaches at their university
- The importance of mental and emotional factors and sport success, especially at higher levels
- Year to year progressions in strength training for athletes for maximal long-term development
“You can have two athletes in the same position, with different physical gifts who solve a problem with two different means, and what we try and do is provide them with a guided learning environment to discover what works (for change of direction in a game like setting)” Wenham-Flatt
“How many times do you have to see an elite athlete do something that’s “wrong” before you understand that they are probably doing it the right way” Wenham-Flatt
“There are three ways to win warfare: More force, more speed, or misdirection… when everybody is different, everybody is going to be naturally geared towards solving sport problems by different means. The less you have of one thing, the more you need of the others” Wenham-Flatt
“For the most part we are getting guys to that 90% (sprinting in season) threshold or greater, our skills and our mid-skill positions” Korem
“In games, it’s not always great to say “oh! We had all these players run over X amount of speed” because it could mean that they are chasing somebody” Korem
“Bryan Mann released a paper this year from his days at Mizzou, where the KPI for on-field minutes for the bigs was strength, and for the mids it was the broad, and for the skill players, the fly 10’s or the 40 yard dash. If you are closer to the snap, you need more force, if you are further, you need more speed” Wenham-Flatt
“What’s driving more change (than GPS workloads) is the wellness questionnaires and the acute/chronic stuff” Korem
“Toughness is task specific” Korem
“We don’t want our coaches to rely on specialists so much, we want them to understand the global constructs to put the pieces together themselves” Korem
“If you value someone who is tough-minded, how are you recruiting that quality instead of just bringing them in and then finding out they are soft as Charmin?” Korem
“People are rarely drafting athletes and saying “he’s a bust because physically he is not what we thought he was”. It’s in the personality aspect or maybe the ability to execute tactically under pressure” Wenham-Flatt
“Fatigue (the athlete) and then, it’s called training you on the edge of your ability. Put them in a scenario, push them to that (fatigue) point, and then have them solve a technical or tactical problem” Korem
“When every day becomes a kick in the nuts, then you essentially have lost all meaning” Korem
“There are athletes out there, where the degree of stress required to see a further increase in movement speed is so great, that it starts to tap into the other training” Wenham-Flatt
“We will absolutely ride it till the wheels fall off in 1×20… if they don’t progress two weeks in a row, we drop it to 15, don’t repeat two weeks in a row, drop to 10.” Wenham-Flatt
“If you can achieve a double body-weight squat, we don’t train strength anymore, we just maintain it” Wenham-Flatt
About Erik Korem
Erik Korem was appointed William & Mary’s Associate Athletics Director for Student-Athlete High Performance in May 2018. Korem brings nearly two decades of national expertise to the Tribe at the professional and collegiate levels, most recently, serving as the Director of Sports Science for the National Football League’s Houston Texans.
Korem is responsible for all areas of student-athlete performance, including nutrition, sports medicine and strength & conditioning.
About Keir Wenham-Flatt
Keir Wenham-Flatt is a strength and conditioning specialist at the College of William and Mary who has worked with professional teams on 4 different continents. Keir is particularly well versed in physical preparation for rugby, as he is the founder of rugbystrengthcoach.com, the web’s leading provider of rugby strength and conditioning information, discussion and online coaching
Keir worked with the field hockey and tennis programs while assisting with the football team at the University of Richmond in 2018-19.
Wenham-Flatt joins Richmond after spending two years as the head of strength and conditioning for the Toshiba Brave Lupus Rugby team in the Japan Top League.
Wenham-Flatt also spent three years as the lead strength and conditioning coach at Union Argentina de Rugby. He helped the program to a third-place finish at the Southern Hemisphere Rugby Championship and a fourth place showing at the Rugby World Cup in 2015.
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