Today’s guest is Cal Dietz, returning for his second appearance on the Just Fly Performance Podcast. Two of Cal’s books, Triphasic Training (the original) and then the Triphasic Training manual for Football (written with Chris Korfist) have had a huge impact on my program writing. I’ve seen Cal speak several times, and have always walked away with great new ideas on training and performance.
Cal Dietz has been the Head Olympic Strength and Conditioning coach for numerous sports at the University of Minnesota since 2000. He has consulted with Olympic and World Champions in various sports and professional athletes in the NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, and Professional Boxing. He runs the website xlathlete.com, and is one of the founders of the RPR (Reflexive Performance Reset) system. Cal has been a mentor to dozens of up-and-coming strength coaches in the field, including 2-time podcast guest, Matt Van Dyke.
In this episode, we get into a lot of nuts and bolts of Cal’s views on speed training, particularly assisted and resisted methods, jumping and plyometrics, cueing in the weightroom, as well as all topics of lifting and the posterior chain. We’ll also get into training the feet, which has been a large interest of mine in the past year.
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:
- Assisted and resisted sprinting in the context of French Contrast training
- Banded overspeed jumps
- Coaching foot contacts in jumping
- Lower leg strength building
- Specific foot cues for squatting
- History and application of oscillatory isometrics
- Benefits of advantageous vs. disadvantageous ranges in lifting
- New thoughts in hamstring training
- What it really means to have weak glutes
Cal Dietz Quotes
“Squats are more for acceleration, hurdle hops are more for top end speed”
“After that 3rd step there was nothing much I could do to mimic in the speed of the weight room, so that’s why I knew I had to unload the athlete by hooking the bands to the ceiling and do jumps”
“We squat and we land with our knee in front of our toe, holding the arch of our foot up so it doesn’t collapse”
“If that (foot) arch collapses, you go valgus, and then people blame the glute medius”
“I’m not a big fan of drive squats through the heels, I think it drives the wrong pattern. We keep the toe up on the way down, and then we squeeze the big toe into the ground and drive up which helps fire the glute and increase hip extension, and in every case, the bar moves faster”
“For oscillatory isometrics, bench pressing is good, squats are OK, but I’d rather do an oscillatory heavy pitshark…. I like a single leg hex split squat”
Show Notes
Banded hamstring exercises for speed and power respectively.
About Cal Dietz
Cal Dietz has been the Head Olympic Strength and Conditioning coach for numerous sports at the University of Minnesota since 2000. He has consulted with Olympic and World Champions in various sports and professional athletes in the NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, and Professional Boxing. During his time at U of M, he help founded and chairs the Sport Biomechanics Interest Group with its purpose to explore the physiological and biomechanical aspects of advanced human performance encompassing the various aspects of kinesiology, biomechanics, neuro-mechanics and physics. Dietz has also given numerous lectures around the country, as well as publish several scientific articles and dozens articles on training. Most recently, Dietz co-authored the top selling book, Triphasic Training: A systematic approach to elite speed and explosive strength performance. You can find Cal’s excellent book via his website: xlathlete.com.
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