This week’s podcast features two familiar faces to the show: Chris Korfist (slowguyspeedschool.com) and Dan Fichter (wannagetfast.com). I gathered these two speed training experts together because the topic of the day is the Inno-sport system and its derivatives, in the context of getting athletes faster and stronger.
Back in the mid-2000’s, the “Inno-sport” philosophy started to permeate the training sphere with some very uncommon, and in many cases, never seen before training methods, touting big results in speed and power.
Much of the Inno-sport training was likened to Jay Schroeder’s training methods (although it was not Jay Schroeder) which included lots of isometrics, reactive lifting, plyometrics, and time-based lifting brackets, the same methods that afforded Adam Archuleta a 4.37s 40-yard dash, 39-inch vertical jump, 530lb bench press, and 663lb squat.
Some of the sample terminology and concept of the system are as follows:
- Training in two brackets, “An1” (0-9 seconds) and “An2” (9-40 seconds, but generally around 9-25 seconds as far as improving An1 is concerned)
- Classification of movement (really the wiring of the nervous system) into duration, magnitude and rate elements
- Utilization of “drop-offs” that are tagged to particular exercises in the workout, such as sprinting, jumping, or lifting numbers, that indicate when the workout is over, and when is generally an optimal time to train next (dropping off 6% will require around 4 days rest before training the same muscle groups/motor patterns again). You’ll hear Dan and Chris talk about this in terms of “autoregulation”, or AREG, which determines how much work you’ll do in a day (when you drop-off X amount of performance), and when you’ll train again (the more you dropped off, the longer you have to wait until you can train hard again). Let’s say you were running 10-meter flys and wanted to drop off 3% so you could conceptually be good to train speed again in two days. If you ran 1.00 in the 10 fly as your best, then once you ran a 1.03 or worse, you would have “dropped off” and be done for the day.
- The inno-sport system is an entirely neural driven system, not related to the training residuals that classify traditional periodization and planning methods, or on planned overtraining and tapering
Dan and Chris spent a lot of time emailing the creator of inno-sport, who was known as “DB Hammer”, and the information they gleaned was far beyond what was contained in the famous Inno-sport book, that is sadly unavailable today.
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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Key Points:
- How Dan and Chris discovered “DB Hammer” and the subsequent Inno-sport training methods
- Main tenants of the Inno-sport system that changed the way that Chris and Dan thought about training
- Ideas of “factorization” and how to break down weekly training based on small % drop-offs
- Case study of an all-state athlete Chris trained only one day per week (with one competition)
- Working with “drop-off’s” in the DB Hammer based system to fit a high school track competition schedule versus training an elite athlete
- How the “An1” and “An2” brackets worked based on neural and physiological aspects of training
- The greatest value of traditional “up and down” weightlifting
- Ideas on 30-second lifting sets
- Some favorite Inno-sport methods and exercises that have stuck with Chris and Dan
“With the AREG stuff, if you go and do 3 sets of 10 or 4 sets of 5, you didn’t know what those kids were going to come back like in a day or two for the next workout. But when you AREG stuff, kids came back and they got better every workout. You could figure out when to cut people and know when they were going to come back.”
“Factorization, we did that with Viktoria the long jumper, we did that with her going into the European championships”
“Based on AREG, I knew this was a once a week kid, and I just had to deal with it… and I would have never known that if I didn’t use autoregulation with him… if we did 23 second runs or 150’s it took him too long to bounce back… he would do (10m) flys on Mondays and we raced on Friday’s”
“The better the athlete, the more you can factorize it over the course of the week”
“Our (boys team) practices are over as the girls team (separate coach) is still warming up”
“We would do 350’s on Mondays, and we would have the Charlie Francis 20 minute rest. That was the day where we would practice, and it would be a 45 second practice, everyone would be throwing up and then they would go home. If they didn’t beat their time from the previous week, then they had to do a second one with 20 minutes rest.”
“I think a chemical change in your muscles is a change in environment. That’s what DB hammer was talking about, when you dump some lactic acid in your system, you muscle becomes a different thing”
“DB Hammer was the first guy who brought in “Oscillatory Isometrics”, which was a game changer…… he did that years ago, and now it’s starting to catch” “I incorporate that with pretty much every kid that walks into my gym”
“When you squat, it’s upside down, the force-time curve, you’re slowing down”
“Isometrics…. we use a lot of it, especially when we want to gain strength fast”
“The drop-offs for training sprinters are huge, I still do drop-offs, I still do fly’s, every workout I do is dropped off…..It’s the groundwork for telling an athlete you’re done.”
“When I was starting to incorporate some of these methods with our distance kids, I found out they couldn’t break their speed barrier because they were so programmed in their nervous system to run midrange that they had to be there for a while and on their 20th one they would break through the barrier, but if we only ran 10 we would have never known.”
Show Notes:
OI Bench Press
Chris and Dan’s videos on inno-sport speed training
About Chris Korfist
Chris Korfist has been getting of people faster for the last 25 years. Whether the athlete is a middle school or professional athlete, Chris has experience helping all age groups of athletes. His website, slowguyspeedschool.com offers video assessment for individuals or teams as well as online workouts. He is also the Director of Reflexive Performance Reset which is a process that gets athletes nervous system ready to performance at a peak state through a sequence of manual therapy. Courses are available throughout the year. He is also the co-owner of Track Football Consortium which is one of the leading sprint/strength clinics in the nation. They are currently held bi-annually in Chicago.
About Dan Fichter
Dan Fichter owns and operates WannaGetFast Power/Speed Training, a sports performance training business in Rochester, NY and Tampa, FL that offers training to elite athletes. Fichter’s clients have included pro hockey players Chris Thorburn (Winnipeg Jets), Stanley Cup champion Brian Gionta (Buffalo Sabres), Ryan Callahan (Tampa Bay Lightning, US Olympic Team), Shane Prince (Binghamton Senators), Olympic track and field star Victoriya Rybalko from the Ukraine, NY Yankee shortstop Cito Culver, UFC fighter Mike Massenzio, Oakland A’s 2nd baseman Andy Parrino, Washington Nationals Infielder Chris Bostick along with Washington Nationals pitcher Brian Dupra. Dan has coached athletes in all sports from all over the country. Dan is in two different Halls of Fame for his own athletic prowess in football.
Fichter is presently the head football coach at Irondequoit High School in New York.
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