Our guest for the Just Fly Performance Podcast #5 is Chris Korfist. Chris has been a huge influence on my coaching over the last decade, and I’ve had the pleasure of presenting alongside him at the last 3 “Speed Football Consortiums”.
Chris is one of the best sprint coaches in the nation, and has relentlessly tinkered and adjusted his process over the years to arrive at his current winning methods of training.
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This article is sponsored by Exxentric, makers of the kBox inertial training platform. The kBox is changing the way many coaches are thinking about resistance training and building strength. To check out more about the kBox, check out exxentric.com or email Andreas Ahlström at andreas.ahlstrom@exxentric.com
Also, for those interested, Chris has converted his old speed training DVD’s to electronic downloadable format, which you can purchase.
Below are some of the key areas that Chris and I covered through the course of this podcast.
Key Points
- How to make agility maximally applicable to on-field performance
- The importance of the visual field and recognition cues in agility training
- Chris’s thoughts on the speed ladder
- How to create more extension power by ratcheting the hips in agility movement
- Chris’s personal progression from powerlifting to his current strength methodology in building speed
- Chris’s essential 3 strength exercises for building sprint speed
- The origins of “DB Hammer” and who he really was
- Why the 4-way hip gets a bad rap, and how to use it properly for speed building
- Chris’s approach to strength and speed training for athletes in the off-season
- Chris’s concepts on overspeed training
- The neural effects of correct overspeed training
- Chris’s ideas on volume and the minimal effective dose when training the nervous system
- Environmental changes during maximal velocity work
- The further adjustment of mini-hurdles/wickets to eliminate crossover running and improve performance
- Vision training and its effect on speed and power performance
- The importance of continual stimulation and challenge in human movement and speed performance
For those of you not familiar with Captain Morgan’s that Chris references, here is a video below.
I also took a piece of something I mentioned regarding the minimum effective dose, comparing a 1×20 program vs. more traditional 5-3-1 or Westside programming and it’s effect on athletes from this great interview with Jeff Moyer that Jay DeMayo did for his own podcast.
Regarding agility “With agility drills, there needs to be some kind of recognition or reaction to what you see, because in sport, you react you what you see, especially in team sports. You’ve got to recognize that something’s going on, and you have got to get there”.
“When you’re braking, cutting, or even accelerating, a great cue is how much separation are you creating between your knees”
“I don’t think you can get married to any exercise or anything, you have to keep searching, and then every individual is different, you have to find what works for the individual”
“I think the 4-way hip machine gets a bad rap”
Regarding off-season training: “If I have 2 days to work on speed, one day we’ll do a fly of some sort, probably 10 meters, and then we’ll do an acceleration day, and we’ll keep doing that until the weather turns crappy. You can build on your flys by doing other exercises and other things, but those are the basis of what I want to improve on. Because once the weather turns crappy, your done, you need to do some isometric work, some other stuff. You can’t work on those things (speed and acceleration) anymore as I’ve lost my space”
“Regarding my athletes who have been around for a little bit, we’re either doing overspeed (on the 1080 sprint) or we’re accelerating.”
“You can jack up peoples numbers/performances by changing the way that they perceive the world through color”
“Remember, everything you pick up is through vision, and your brain is going to respond to vision first”
Chris Korfist
Chris Korfist has been coaching track for 22 years in Illinois. He has coached at Hinsdale Central, Downers Grove North and York HS, producing 59 All-state track athletes, 3 individual state champions, 2 team state champions, 3 second place team finishes, and 2 3rd place finishes. He owns the Slow Guy Speed School which is a gym that focuses on running and athletic development from which other All-state athletes have trained. He used to run the Inno-sport website and wannagetfast.com with Dan Fichter. He also had the opportunity to work occasionally with some Olympic sprinters and other professional athletes.
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