Today’s episode brings back Rick Franzblau, assistant AD for Olympic Sports Performance at Clemson University. In his two decades in athletic performance, Rick has worked with a wide variety of sports, as well as gained an incredible amount of knowledge in both the technology, and biomechanics ends of the coaching spectrum. Rick, as with many other biomechanics topic guests on this podcast, has been a mentee of Bill Hartman, and has appeared previously on episode 94, talking about force/velocity metrics in sprinting and lifting.
There is a lot of time spent, talking about an “optimal technique” for various sport skills (such as sprinting). We also tend to look for “optimal lifts” or exercises for athletes, as well as optimal drills athletes are supposed to perform with “perfect form” to attain an ideal technique.
What the mentality described in the above paragraph doesn’t consider is that athletes come in different shapes and structures, which cause what is optimal to differ. Wide ISA athletes, for example, are fantastic at short bursts of compression, have lower centers of mass, and can manage frontside sprint mechanics relatively easily. On the other hand, narrow ISA individuals use longer ranges of motion to distribute force, have a higher center of mass, rotate more easily, and can use backside running mechanics better than wide-ISA’s. Additionally, there is a spectrum of these athletic structures, and not simply 2 solid types.
On today’s show, Rick goes into detail on the impact and role of compression in human movement and performance training, the strengths and weaknesses of the narrow vs. wide ISA archetypes, what differences show up in locomotion and sprint training, as well as how he approaches strength training for the spectrum of wide to narrow individuals. Today’s show reminds us (thankfully) that there is no magic-bullet for all athletes, and helps us with the over-arching principles that can guide training for different populations to reach their highest potential.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
4:00 – How the direction of Rick’s performance testing and KPI’s has changed over the last few years
8:00 – How structure and thorax build will play a strong role in what Rick is seeing from them on rate of development on the force plate
23:00 – What to give to a compressed narrow individual to help them in a vertical jump
25:00 – Narrow vs. Wide ISA acceleration mechanics
34:00 – Thoughts on how to help a narrow ISA improve their ability to get lower and achieve better compression in sprint acceleration, and why Rick has gotten away from heavy sled sprints for narrow ISA athletes on the 1080
44:00 – How a coach’s own personal body structure can create a bias for how they end up training athletes they work with
47:00 – Wide ISA athletes, and why they may have an easier time accessing front-side mechanics in running
56:00 – Narrow ISA athletes and backside sprint mechanics, as well as attaining appropriate range and sprint bandwidths for each athlete
58:00 – How force plate data and structural bandwidths determine how to train team sport athletes for the sake of injury prevention and sport specific KPI’s
1:10:00 – How Rick alters weightroom training for narrow vs. wide ISA athletes
1:17:00 – Rick’s take on oscillatory reps in the weightroom, and quick-impulse lifts, especially for narrow infra-sternal angle athletes
“(Regarding infrasternal angle archetypes) It’s not to claim buckets that people fall into; it’s a spectrum…. You can have wide ISA’s, somewhat narrow, and narrow as hell”
“Understanding where an athlete’s center of gravity is, forward, back, left, right…. And how they get there is affected by their structure… from there what shapes can they and can’t they produce, through their foot, their pelvis, their thorax, and all these things influence how they produce and dampen force, and their idiosyncratic movement in sport”
“A narrow (ISA) is going to be really good at rotation; they have leverage through the external obliques, pulls the ISA down, compresses the viscera, which pushes the guts into the pelvic inlet which opens up and allows them to rotate better”
“So if I take a skinny tube of toothpaste and I squeeze it; compress it from up top… that’s the only way a narrow, narrow person will be really good at high force in short windows”
“If I’m a wide (ISA) I’ll have more of a nutated sacrum… so I’ll have all of this space to move into posteriorly, that’s why a wide is better at deadlifting”
“If I’m a narrow, that’ll create a concentric posterior pelvic floor and an eccentric anterior pelvic floor… they are good at vertical hip displacement, a true squatty squat”
“A narrow may be able to create some good vertical jump height, but their rate metrics are not very good…. They’ll get a second positive double bump on the force plate graph”
“If a narrow is in a rate-dependent sporting movement, they are going to be very compressed”
“Let’s say I have a soccer player, a winger, if they have a big jump height and a lot of relative motion, which may not play well in their sport, some anterior to posterior compression is going to be a good thing”
“What shape changes can they make, what do they need for their sport, and for their structure individually, and understanding from there how you are developing a plan for them”
“A wide ISA, inverted pylon has the steepest RFD ability”
“A narrow, their center of gravity is higher; a wide’s center of gravity is lower”
“It’s the narrows who have to orient the pelvis more down (in acceleration) and that’s why you often see these backside mechanics… we’d be trying to clean it up, but a lot of times, it’s structure”
“That’s what his structure (narrow ISA) is going to dictate (backside mechanics) for him to get force down into the ground (in acceleration)”
“We don’t want to get rid of your superpower (if you are a baseball player and it’s rotation)”
“Can you give (a narrow) access to IR positions which will help them compress a little bit better”
“One thing I’ve steered away from is (very heavy sled resistance training) with narrows”
“The reason someone would create anterior orientation of the pelvis is to put force down into the ground… it puts them forward so they get closer to max propulsion quicker”
“If I’m a wide and I have a bigger IR space (acceleration) is right in my wheelhouse”
“If I take a narrow ISA and I do a shit ton of trap bar deadlift, long slow heavy grindy stuff, that’s going to compress them on top, that’s going to push their outlet way down, and they don’t have that space, so they are going to run out of room at the pelvis so they are going to create the IR top-down from the spine”
“If you want a narrow to lose every bit of rotation in their body, trap-bar deadlift the hell out of them…. For a wide-ISA, a linebacker, a position player in baseball, could be a good exercise for them”
“I wide doesn’t have much access to late stance, so they aren’t going to hang on through the forefoot”
“A lot of narrow-ISA Olympic sprinters will pull pump-handle down to get compression”
“On sprinters you are often going to have low hip IR values”
“For a pitcher, more output may not have anything to do with lifting, but we give them more early stance ER and IR, they can expand and rotate better, and they have more of an on-ramp (into their throw)…. ”
“You need ER to superimpose IR on top of it… I need space to create the downforce”
“What happens with powerlifters? That’s the most anterior to posterior compressed sport”
“We need to be careful with wide-ISA that they maintain enough ER bandwidth to store and release energy (since they are better at lifting and can do more of it than a narrow)”
“If I don’t have foot (tripod) contact, I don’t have relative motion”
“If there was a simple line for everybody, this shit wouldn’t be any fun”
“Getting a wide ISA just back to mid-stance is often enough for them to be able to release energy from their connective tissues”
“With our narrows we don’t trap bar deadlift anymore; we do a split deadlift with an open ended bar”
“If you take someone super narrow, and have them do a bilateral barbell RDL, 1 they are not going to maintain their lordosis because they can’t nutate worth a damn, or if 2. they find a way to do it, they are creating the most compressive strategy in the lumbar spine… so that’s out of the program, first thing is do no harm”
“If you are super super narrow, that’s when we are doing shorter impulse type stuff…. With a really narrow person, you should never see the sticking point. If you see the sticking point, the impulse was too long and they are really going to push into late-stance”
“Say I’m a pylon; that’s a ton of downward velocity, those are people who are going to have a hard time over-coming gravity”
“To blanketly (make RDL a staple lift) across all populations is going to do a lot of harm”
“A great thing for narrows is to get on a trampoline or gymnastics floor to develop timing (and to “catch” the concentric element of the pelvic floor)”
“Wide ISA’s may do hurdle jumps with a longer contact time to learn to use connective tissue energy release”
Show Notes
Femke Bol: Rate-Dependant Sport Athlete: Narrow ISA needing compression to apply force to ground rapidly
Ricky Henderson (wide ISA) vs. Billy Hamilton (narrow ISA)
Flo-Jo (upright quickly in sprint; narrow ISA characteristic)
Shuhei Tada: Narrow ISA Lowering Center of Mass in Acceleration via Unconventional Strategy
About Rick Franzblau
Rick Franzblau is the director of Olympic sports strength and conditioning at Clemson. He is responsible for the supervision of the assistant strength coaches, graduate assistants and volunteer interns. Franzblau oversees the strength and conditioning for all 14 of the Olympic Sports that train in the Jervey weight room. He is directly responsible for the strength and conditioning efforts of the baseball, men’s soccer and track and field teams. Prior to becoming an assistant coach, Franzblau worked as a graduate assistant at Clemson where he worked with football and Olympic sports.
During his time at Clemson, Franzblau has worked with 10 ACC champion track and field squads. He has also worked with 8 individual NCAA champions, and 7 Olympians in track and field. In 2013, he worked with Brianna Rollins, who set the American record in the 100-meter hurdles. In 2015, Franzblau worked with Matthew Crownover, the ACC pitcher of the year, who was also one of 4 Clemson baseball players drafted in the first 6 rounds of the MLB draft. Franzblau also worked with golfers Ben Martin and Corbin Mills, who participated in the prestigious Masters’ tournament while still competing at Clemson. In 2014, Franzblau also assisted with ACC champion men’s soccer team.
Franzblau graduated from Colgate University in 2006 with a degree in history. At Colgate, Franzblau spent 3 years as a student assistant strength coach after his football career was cut short due to injuries. He is a certified strength and conditioning specialist through the NSCA and also holds the SCCC certification through the CSCCA organization. Franzblau has also taken the Myokinematic Restoration, Postural Respiration, and Impingement and Instability courses through the Postural Restoration Institute.
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