Today’s episode features Rett Larson. Rett is a physical preparation coach with an extensive and diverse background. He has worked internationally with the national volleyball teams of Germany, Netherlands and China. Rett has also worked with professionals, down to athletes of all ages, having prior experience as Velocity Sports Performance’s director of coaching in California. Rett is a student of movement, having studied not only the top minds in sports performance, but also in general movement training such as taught by Ido Portal and in the scope of physical education.
The evolution of sport is one of integration, and not separation. Currently, the “silos” of sport coaching and then all of the “supportive” services (such as S&C) don’t tend to have much interaction with each other beyond a conversation. The fact of the matter is, that when an athlete hits the field (or court) of play, they are operating within all facets of their humanity. Their physical, tactical, technical, emotional, social and deep psychology all impacts their performance on the field. The ”sport-warmup” may be the one place, in all of an athlete’s training, where the maximal amount of silos can be integrated. Athletes can use strength, physio, games and sport-constraint oriented methods to not only prepare them for practice in an enjoyable way, but also form a “melting pot” of all aspects that make an athlete.
On the show today, Rett Larson takes us through his evolution as a coach, and how his warmups and training has evolved over time. He covers the highest transferring abilities he sees from the gym and warmup sessions, that are embodied by the best players on the team. Rett also covers the important interaction that must take place between the physical preparation coach and sport coach, to create buy-in, and move the warmup process forward. After listening to Rett speak on his approach to training athletes, it’s hard to think differently about our own process towards the evolution of our athletes and training programs.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
4:23 – What Rett has learned from other cultures, traveling and coaching abroad, that he has been able to integrate into his coaching repertoire
17:45 – The role of maximal strength training across various countries and cultures, and how to utilize data to help coaches understand what really matters in transfer to on-field performance
24:13 – How to design weight training sessions from a perspective of being able to “level up” regularly
27:43 – How Rett’s approach to the warmup process has changed over the years, and main factors that led him to where he is at now
34:49 – Rett’s athletic background, and its influence on him as it may pertain to his coaching
45:00 – The main box that Rett is trying to check in his warmup process for team sport, the “thermogenic” box
53:06 – Scripted vs. unscripted elements of the warmup for Rett’s work
56:04 – How exercise done in more of a “game oriented” state may not register the same way as more formal training, and how play or challenges can allow for more physiological work to be done
58:42 – How Rett incorporates and considers rhythm and dance-oriented components into his work
1:03:46 – A sample pre-sport warmup session that Rett utilizes with volleyball athletes
1:15:24 – What Rett has learned from Ido Portal in the course of training and athletics
1:25:03 – How Rett communicates with sport coaches to optimize his initial warmup process for the athletes
“The coach is telling me, my girls are stiff legged on defense, and so what if I constrained them under the net (for the warmup)”
“I told the coaches, please pick out who your best 5 volleyball girls are… and they were the weakest (squatters) on the team… then I had them jump as high as possible with 40kg on the bar, and 6/8 of the best in that test were our best players”
“When I am designing their sheets, I always have their personal best on the sheets so they have something to go for; it’s all about that gamification of the weight room”
“I wanted there to be weird stuff on the floor every time (when athletes walked out for the warm ups). I wanted to figure out all of the ways to accomplish a movement task”
“My warmup doesn’t just have to follow this small list of activities that look like skips and crawls, that I could make my head coach happy if my warmup looked more like sport training”
“I went from getting 7 minutes to warmup a team, to 20 minutes to warm up a team, because my coach stopped seeing that my warmup time was at the expense of his volleyball training time, because I’m doing volleyball training too”
“I fully feel that the warmup is a place for designed, controlled chaos”
“When I start with a team, most of my warmups look like mini strength sessions because everyone is weak!”
“If there is core stuff that doesn’t fit very well into the weight room, it gets shoved into my warmup”
“Before we head into the weight room there is, by necessity a lot less variety to that warmup”
“Stretching is something that has gotten way lower on my priority list the longer I have been doing this”
“We’ll have them get into an iso lunge, and see who can have the most medicine ball passes to their partner in 30 seconds”
“If I have 15 minutes to warm these girls up, then my thermo circuit will take about 5 or 6 minutes”
“I spend as much time creating my warmups for the week as I do my strength training sessions”
“I think with sports like sprinting there is a much better correlation between the better dancers and the better athletes, because I had some pretty horrific dancers who were pretty amazing volleyball players”
“Ido Portal is one of the greatest source of information when it comes to movement puzzles”
“When you are playing a video game, not knowing what is coming up next is a big driver of engagement”
“Buy in has never been a problem, because before I start working with the coach, I ask, what are the biggest hand-brakes on our team, what is keeping us from being on the podium”
“I use frisbees, because to catch a frisbee thrown by someone that sucks, is really difficult”
“When it comes to these puzzles and it comes to the buy-in, by and large, the girls who are good at solving these puzzles are our best players”
“Warmup is my chance to play and fail also”
Show Notes
Ido Portal Training
About Rett Larson
Rett Larson is currently the strength coach for the German Women’s Volleyball Team. He previously spent seven years in China, first as Project Manager for EXOS-China working with several of the Chinese Olympic teams in their preparation for the 2012 London Games, and later with the Chinese National Women’s Volleyball Team, which won both the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio. Following the Gold Medal victory in Rio, Rett worked for two years as the strength coach for The Netherlands Women’s Volleyball Team before leaving to join Team Germany. Prior to his international work, Rett worked with Velocity Sports Performance for 10 years, where he became the Director of Coaching at their headquarters in California.
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