Today’s show is with coach and educator, Dan Cleather. Dan is a reader in strength and conditioning and the programme director of the MSc in strength and conditioning at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK. Dan began coaching at Cal State Long Beach, and then worked at the English Institute of Sport. He has coached national and international medalists across a wide range of sports, and in particular has worked with World and Olympic champions.
Dan is the author of several books on the topics of science and sports performance, including “Force”: The Biomechanics of Training, and “The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom”. Dan has published over 40 peer-reviewed and scientific articles, and is a founder member of the UK Strength and Conditioning Association.
When it comes to performance training, coaches often cite a disconnect between what they are coaching, and what actually happens when an athlete competes. We can gain a greater understanding of this issue by simply looking at how movement actually happens in sport, and how athletes actually manage forces. Many control points in coaching tend to revolve around slow, or easily observable aspects of movement (usually the end-points), when the complex reality of movement renders coaching around these endpoints obsolete, if not counter-productive.
On the show today, Dan will share with us how he views common coaching practices revolving around scientific terminology, such as “force absorption”. He’ll go into some fallacies around force-based principles involving landing dynamics in sport, deceleration training, and how coaches go about instructing Olympic weightlifting. Dan will speak on where science, and “evidence-based” practices fit in with one’s coaching philosophy and intuition, and will share his thoughts on the link between gardening plants and coaching athletes.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
4:37 – Dan’s background as an athlete and what got him into strength and conditioning
7:58 – Dan’s take on learning skills as a coach, in order to be a better learning (and coach) of skills
15:11 – Dan’s thoughts on what applying science to training actually is
22:42 – How coaches tend to frame “force-absorption” in athletics, and what it actually is
32:47 – Thoughts on the body dealing with forces from a perspective of being a “machine” or from a self-organizing perspective
41:27 – Dan’s thoughts on any sort of deceleration training for sport, and how coaches tend to spend too much time on versions of movement that are too reductionist
48:20 – The link between seeds, plants, gardening and athletic performance
52:58 – Dan’s take on traditional Olympic lifting practices in light of force development
“The more skills you learn, the better you get at learning skills”
“Evidence based doesn’t mean that the science is prescriptive, we see 8 parts of a 30 piece jigsaw puzzle, which are the bits of evidence we are getting from the science, and we work out the rest of what that puzzle looks like based on our experience, our discussions with the coaches, etc.”
“The scientific evidence is an important part of our philosophy but it’s our philosophy that guides the decisions that we make”
“If you do something because your previous coach did it, that’s the evidence of what they did”
“Coaches find out what works, and 25 years later, the sport scientists come along and explain why… if you had to wait for the science before you were prepared to make a decision then you wouldn’t be able to do very much”
“Absorption implies that there is something you have got that is being sucked up by something, and can be released later”
“We call a softer landing with more flexion of the knees and hips “force absorption”, but we are not actually absorbing force when we do that, we are reducing the likelihood that we will have high peak forces”
“Your muscles don’t absorb force when you land, they produce force… if you didn’t produce force you would collapse into the floor”
“There is research that landing drills with at-risk populations will decrease their injury risk”
“We have to remember that, in many cases, landing slow, in competition is a disadvantage”
“I think it will be those kids who haven’t done that sort of play (jumping and dropping off of things in play) where you have to do more regressive things and teach landing mechanics”
“As a profession I think we tend to over-teach things, we want to drill and control movement, where you need to make sure that your athletes are safe, but once you’ve done that, letting them work things out for themselves is more effective”
“I’m not sure we’re mitigating much injury risk by having 80 players do something that most of them do fine (regressive drills)”
“If things look too pretty, the athlete isn’t being challenged enough and they aren’t learning anything. Keep pushing the envelope of what you are asking the athlete to do until they are not looking pretty anymore”
“We can help ourselves to self-organize, or we can help our athletes to self-organize, but if you think you are going to control them, or they are going to control them, you are mis-informed about how systems work”
“I do feel like gardening is a good practice for S&C coaches”
“For me, weightlifting is jumping, and everything is built around that skill”
“What people see in Olympic weightlifting is the end of the second pull because athletes aren’t moving there and they are about to go down again. Inexperienced coaches can see that and so they then try and coach that, but the problem is they coach that with reference to what they are seeing, and why you are in an extended position is because of what happened earlier in the movement. You don’t coach an extended position by saying “hit and extended position” you do it by having them do things earlier on”
“When people cue people to hit a fully extended position, they are actually asking them to try and exert force at the point when they should not be exerting force and being ready to catch the barbell, and you see that a lot”
“Loaded jumping and (Olympic) weightlifting are not the same movement”
About Dan Cleather
Dan Cleather is a strength coach, educator, author and scientist. He is a reader in strength and conditioning and the programme director of the MSc in strength and conditioning at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK. Before joining St Mary’s he was employed as a strength and conditioning coach at the English Institute of Sport.
Dan began his coaching career as a volunteer assistant strength and conditioning coach at California State University Long Beach. He has coached national and international medalists across a wide range of sports, and in particular has worked with World and Olympic champions in track and field athletics, rowing, canoeing and rugby. Dan is the author of several books on the topics of science and sports performance, including “Force” The Biomechanics of Training, and “The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom”.
Dan’s PhD is in biomedical engineering (from Imperial College London) and his research interests include musculoskeletal modelling, functional anatomy and strength training. He has published around 40 articles in peer reviewed scientific and professional practice journals. He is a founder member of the UK Strength and Conditioning Association and currently serves the organisation as Director of Finance and Administration.
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