S&C Lesson's From The Most "Winningest" Teams w/ Simon Thomas (SSOF Ep 134)

Simon Thomas1:56

Yeah, it's good. It was one of the things I wanted to look to try and achieve when I came over there last time, was spend some time sort of building up rugby as a sport there, and then look for a door into one of the major sports. And so it's just been great to go through the process and get an opportunity to get inside a pretty well-storied, pretty well-storied team and brand and in a very traditional sort of sport over there. So really looking forward to it.

I've enjoyed sort of the way they operate, the way they're thinking behind the scenes and where they're sort of going. But yeah, like I said, there's I've sort of noted plenty of different crossovers that you can take either from a performance or even just a people perspective there.

James de Lacey2:41

It's the same. You work with rugby players, collisions are involved. Working with boxers before, and collisions are involved, and there's a lot of crossover and different things we can do. And even in baseball, there's collisions between a bat and a ball. So you're just trying to create impulse and power and collisions.

We'll dive into that, especially within the programming portion of this. But I want to start with, you know, I mean being with the team like the Crusaders—being one of, if people aren't familiar who are listening, a Super Rugby team out of New Zealand that's, I guess, the most successful Super Rugby team in terms of titles won, especially with their long winning streak. So in your experience there, what is it that made them so successful as a team?

Simon Thomas3:05

It was probably, I think, what it was was probably a little bit different but the same across different eras. So when I assisted within the program for four years, but that was sort of within an eight-year title drought. We made a couple of finals in that time but didn't quite get across the line for a championship.

And so, and then when we took over the program in 2017, we were fortunate we sort of won five in a row in my time that I was there, and they continued to win three more after I left. So what we sort of revisited at that time was the Crusaders of the past that had won three titles in a row and gone back-to-back and been really successful.

They sort of built the culture around the people that they had within the building, and then that was sort of who they were and who they became sort of came out of that. And then there was probably a period there where they tried to mirror a little bit of the successful processes that worked for the group of the past with the groups of the present.

And so we started to strip that back and dial down to building the team out of who was in the building again. And there's different people, people with different skill sets and a different demographic, but it was—so it looked and sounded a little bit different, but the process was the same: who do we have that determines kind of who we are and how we play, that leads to how we prepare and sort of follow that process, and not trying to squeeze people into the box that fit for people in the times before.

So having said that, there was—it was only really fine margins in it in terms of those years that championships weren't won. It could have gone either way and it was really very close. But yeah, it's a well-established culture and it's a culture that knows how to win.

And then there's just so much knowledge and experience passed down, and everybody makes sure that the person comes in after them is better set up than what they got when they got there. And so that the place continues to grow, and that's probably what makes the success sort of sustainable. When you win, people want to come, and then you get good quality people and they bring the best out of each other and they make sure they pass it on to the next one.

And so every player and coach and staff member coming through that has stories of how they were well set up by the person before them. And nobody's gatekeeping information or blocking anybody from progression because everybody just wants to see the place get better. And so that's probably one of the key sort of not secret secrets that are there.

And I just remember players would come from other environments, and coaches and people would come from other environments, and you're sort of living it for a little bit and [they'd say], "Oh, I get it now," because all the things people put on the wall you're actually living. And some people just leave the words on the wall and don't actually sort of live those things.

So that's sort of the beauty of the place, is that it's a place in a culture that kind of knows what it is and is just driven to get better all the time. And so that's the kind of people you get in the door, the ones that just want to keep getting better. And so they do.

James de Lacey6:10

You know what? It reminds me of Ted Lasso. I don't know if you watch Ted Lasso at all, the TV show?

And that's probably the most—to me, that's probably the most accurate representation of a professional sporting environment that's ever been done on TV, just how you mentioned how coaching was for the people, bringing the team together, the culture, not so much about the skills and tactics, all that kind of stuff. It's the head coach bring everyone together, and then just all the stupid silliness that goes on in the back that people don't get to see, you know, the camaraderie and stuff.

I mean, successful teams I've been part of, the same thing as what you're saying. Everyone's so close-knit, almost just it's just friends hanging out every day.

Simon Thomas6:31

Yeah. People care, deeply care, rather than just talking about it, and really do genuinely care about people around them. And your success is our success, and so if one person's successful we all are, and you kind of genuinely buy into that.

And you allow people who are a little bit weird to be a little bit weird and being [different]. It was probably frowned upon to be an individual for a while there and it became a bit robotic and dry. And so it was okay to—if you bring yourself and the best of yourself, the team gets better because you're bringing something of yourself to the team, therefore contributing and it grows.

And so it was a really good sort of evolution back to that way, which was what the—there were some Crusaders of the past that had some real characters in the team that brought a—

A lot of points of difference just in their personality and some weirdos and some strange cats in there, but it creates stories and that's what you do. You create stories and you build moments and memories, and the other things people remember is the enjoyable moments and how much they care about each other and the trophies are in all the photos, but they're not really the things that people remember.

So that was easy to say when you're winning them, but it's definitely like, yeah, you just get a feel for that's where it comes from. Some teams love going to work every day but don't get the opportunity to lift a trophy. It just depends how you measure success.

James de Lacey8:06

It's definitely an enjoyable series to watch that one. There's definitely plenty of little bits in it that you look at and see familiar and just the different pressures that go with it and the stories you kind of create. That was certainly some pretty cool adventures that we got to go on and enjoy as a team.

Last question on this topic so we can move on to the programming side, but in the state, I guess, American sports culturally, at least in my opinion, you can speak on this how you like as well, but to me it's very different to say a rugby environment. Rugby is very, very team sport orientated, everyone's coming together.

In America, I think there's a lot of what I've randomly coined recently as main character syndrome or main character energy, where it's kind of like most of the sports are built around a superstar or superstars. I think a very easy example is if you're watching football, a defensive player makes one tackle and it's like they won the game and the way they're celebrating, or everything's hinged on the quarterback, or basketball, everything's built around one player kind of thing.

So I don't know, I'm assuming it's probably not as bad in baseball, I don't know you can probably speak on that, but is that something then that makes it challenging culturally?

Simon Thomas9:20

I'll get a real good insight, a good feel for it within baseball, because obviously it's a, you've got teams playing, but then a big chunk of it comes down to your individual contribution. When you're batting and defending in the field or base running, or you're out there pitching, yes you've got plans in place, but it becomes a sort of one-on-one battle and it comes down to individual performances within a team context.

But yeah, I mean, that's probably one of the things I enjoyed going across, working in rugby in the US, because it's Major League Rugby but it's on a minor league scale. It's a growing sport and it's very sort of still under the radar, but people who were involved in rugby over there genuinely loved it. They found it and loved it.

New Zealand and Australia, you can kind of be born into the game, you're sort of in it by default. And people there had not felt the love in football and found rugby and felt the love and just, so people just loved the game. And so the team and comrade side of it was probably quite similar to back home, because people had found this family.

James de Lacey10:33

They inherit the rugby culture too, right?

Simon Thomas10:33

Yeah, and us flying in and running programs the way that we have at home and cultures the way we have at home probably influences that a little bit as well. But yeah, didn't really want to dampen down too much of the individual contribution side because it is a big part of the culture and that's what you see around it.

I remember seeing a presentation from somebody working in the NBA just describing exactly that. Was like a Venn diagram sort of slide with, well, you've got your mega star and so the bulk of everything sort of rotates around their involvement, and then you've sort of got some best supporting actor, they sort of like medium-sized sort of stars around it, and then all the rest are just in the sky, they're all interchangeable.

The ones in the sky, they become pretty critical in a glue sort of sense. But yeah, there was probably only really a couple of eras where it went sort of wider than the one star when you looked at like some of the semi-recent Golden State Warriors kind of runs, where there was a little bit more level across the board with either multiple stars plus a glue guy and sort of a bit more of a team dynamic, or at least projected it that way.

But yeah, it comes with pluses and minuses. New Zealand, you're very, it's driven by a very sort of British colonial stuff. A lot of like, be humble, don't get too tall. Tall poppy, if you get too tall and stick out too far, we cut you down. You need to hear talking about that to get another perspective on that sort of view, but you've got like, that has its downfalls as well.

You've got crowds that sit there silently and if you happen to earn a clap, they'll clap for you, but they're more likely to tell you what you've done wrong than if you happen to earn praise for doing something right, because that's sort of the culture. And you go over to, in American sports, and you just look at the celebration and the fandom and the way people engage with a genuine personality, because there's not a giant, there's not a wall between you and your team or your players, because there's a bit more transparency around who they are or what they're doing.

And so there's, or people just, they tend to kind of connect to personalities a little bit more through that model as well. So yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. So there was a little bit of a, probably a balance of it within rugby, but I'm looking forward to being within another sport that operates in a very more sort of traditional American sports dynamic.

And behind the scenes, the way we operate there traditionally, we're very small close-knit organizations that just collaborate by default, and then you go into much larger organizations that have more people in different pillars who do a great job but often can end up in silos and not working alongside each other. Or the individualism of it drives ego to get in the way from an athlete perspective, or that's a fuel for performance. So yeah, it's a nuanced conversation, but it's an interesting one.

James de Lacey13:03

Yeah, neither way, neither way is good or bad. There's doses of either that kind of lead to what makes either side great.

Simon Thomas13:32

If you sort of, you generally get to build a very much, we're all in it together, family type vibe and culture sort of within rugby and within sport sort of this side. But it doesn't mean that people are now learning the value of personal branding.

You have a look at it's like one female rugby player goes from the US and goes and plays over in the UK, all of a sudden they're having to change stadiums because they're selling out. And then she's willing to sit there and do a two-hour press conference afterwards and just give a master class on being authentic but branding at the same time. And all the other English players are trying to get away from the camera and the microphone as fast as possible, and if they've been there for more than 30 seconds it's getting in the way of life.

So there's some good lessons to learn either way.

James de Lacey14:22

I love that. And yeah, that's a great insight into the different culture areas, but I'm sure this potentially Americans are sitting there, we talk about American sports being, like, what the hell are you on about?

So I want to move on to, you mentioned about developing similar to sports collisions, right? We're talking about impulse, power, and momentum, I think you mentioned as a three. So let's start there. Maybe just give us kind of, break those terms down, what impulse, power, momentum is, and then what you're looking to do to develop those so it can transfer to, let's just say combat sports in this instance, since that's our topic on the podcast.

Simon Thomas14:45

Yeah, I'm getting up to speed on the baseball side of it and it's diving a lot more into the physics and the math. And I've always been more at the social sciences end of the coaching spectrum, and I hire really intelligent people to dive into the maths and physics and simplify down for me around what we flag and what we can make actionable.

But we've kept it pretty simple, within a rugby context, just looking at momentum and just looking at mass times velocity. And like, we can increase your momentum by making you bigger and moving at the same speed, or we can increase your momentum by having the same size but moving faster. And acceleration into contact and collision is sort of the critical part.

And there's been some really good learning around the baseball side of it, when I think in a rugby context as well, around where you, we on that sort of that time trace or time stamp that you can kind of create impulse and change momentum and get as much acceleration as possible immediately before contact to transfer into the other human that's on the other side of you.

In a collision sport, there's obviously a lot of coordination, a lot of skill that goes into it. But if we can develop the qualities behind that—so go back to the rugby context—we probably came into, if I use a western Force example here, it was a very young, small team that wasn't very big and powerful and didn't have a lot of physicality to it. And so we've had to really put some time into developing that over three years.

If you want big, powerful players this season, you're going to have to go and sign some. Otherwise, you're going to have to give us three to five years to grow these young kids into rueful men who want to go out and hurt people. So it's been a really good process there. We've been able to sort of develop that over time.

And for some of them, it's just overall mass. If we can still have you, it's a difference having either the lean mass that'll produce force or just general mass that we can move faster to win collision. But then having the intent is sort of the other side of it as well.

You could be big, strong, powerful, generate a whole lot of force at the perfect moment, but if you're not genuinely trying to win a collision and you're a little bit contact shy, then you're going to come second best to someone who's smaller or someone who's not moving as fast because they just have more venom right before point of contact than you do because you sort of put the brakes on a little bit. So the will to want to go into a collision and win it and not be afraid of it becomes such a major determining factor as well.

We've got a couple of young but big, powerful guys, but they just don't play like big, powerful guys. They'll play like they're a whole lot smaller, and that's the mindset piece that we need to change as well. So there's been a real mindset driver behind that project here as well.

It was a group that didn't really genuinely, I'd say, have an innate hunger to compete like I would be used to seeing back home. And it's an interesting puzzle over here in Australia—to get to the top within Rugby Union, there's probably not as much competition as there is in some of the other codes. And so some guys get there without the same level of having to compete to get to their spot.

And then rugby back home, you can't get to the top without having to fight your way there. So say it's probably drift—it drifts away from the science and the application and some of the training side of it, but without that sort of key fundamental piece, then it all becomes null and void anyway. If you genuinely don't want to hit someone harder than they want to hit you, then whatever you've got behind it kind of doesn't matter, or at least up until a certain point.

So that's been a real key driver for us. We just sort of pick that up—just a willingness to compete and a willingness to want to hit and not be too careful about it. And we kind of had to scratch the surface of that and go a little bit deeper while we were just building some of those key qualities.

So even just foundation strength, so just ability to produce force—Rob Fels, who's head of S&C, is just taken over from me at the Western Force's head of performance, puts together a quadrant. And he was looking at momentum as well, in terms of force and velocity, but also looking at impact versus repeatability. So what kind of impact you can actually have physically, and how repeatable is that?

Are you just repeating a whole bunch of non-impactful rubbish and then we just need to increase your impact by increasing your brute force and ability to be powerful? Or are you, say, incredibly powerful, but you can only do it once, and we need you to do it more than once? And so then we need to work on your repeatability. And so just how we place them into those quadrants to figure out what to focus on while keeping their strength was a key part of just determining what we could attack.

But we did find the training age—you pack guys up within Rugby Union in New Zealand, they've come through a pretty good process of a school and an academy program and a provincial sort of semi-professional competition that'll—they get to the professional level genuinely sort of physically ready and well hardened. And here in Australia, some of those development pieces are missing on the way through.

So you can pick guys up at a professional level who are almost at a zero training age in a proper, hard training environment. And that was a little bit of what we had. So stripping right back to basics and just building general mass and ability to produce force, and to want to lift to get stronger—not just lift what the guy before used, lifting and use the same weight on the bar and get the session done because it's on the schedule. We had to unpack a whole lot of that sort of stuff too.

Yeah, say, force is mass times acceleration, and we start there and build our way out.

James de Lacey20:32

Well, you mentioned about getting size. I think a lot of, even fighters that are looking to add muscle mass, they run into problems, I think, where they think if I get bigger I'm going to get slower, or they start using, I guess, training routines that are probably going to end up with that outcome because they're looking at—you know, you search online to get bigger and it's mainly body parts but bodybuilding routine.

So how are you organizing programming where, okay, we talked about momentum, we're trying to increase mass, but we don't want to lose the velocity side? So what is it that you're doing within training that allows you to either maintain or improve that velocity side while still getting bigger?

Simon Thomas21:02

Yeah, it was always a really interesting conversation with—so Bowyn Morgan was a boxer back home in New Zealand that I did a bit of work with, and just working in the triangle with him and his coach around, well, if you get him in the gym, he's going to get slower, so he just kind of needs to go out and run roads and skip and box and just to work through sort of some of those scenarios.

And having, working our way along the curve and always having the intent to move fast—whether we're lifting heavy and trying to recruit type two fibers that move slower, but the intent to move fast and get stronger, and making sure we've got some genuine speed work in there.

We're actually working on footwork and we're trying to get a bit of transfer. And having enough, a dose in each session that looks and feels like the sport, I found a really good way just to keep that door open. I think if there's sort of the understanding and trust there that, look, you can get stronger without getting bigger, but you can also get bigger and stronger without getting slower—but if that sort of general understanding isn't there in the first place, then we just got to navigate that really carefully.

And kind of at least give every session an opportunity to show that we're also trying to get faster while getting more powerful and more explosive and have more weight behind things and more force behind the things that we're doing. Even within a rugby context sometimes, if guys need to put on lean mass, we won't necessarily follow a bodybuilding program. We'll train for strength and eat for size.

And generally sort of get a little bit of hypertrophy just from that caloric surplus and from increasing cross-sectional area of the muscle to get stronger and just by lifting and playing with the range a little bit as we do within that space. So yeah, it's been—it was a really good experience because within rugby it's probably well established and well accepted the way that physical training and our S&C work kind of contributes to performance.

And you might come across a few sort of old school mindsets that think, well, if you lift heavy weights, you just get slow. But only if you're trying to move slow, you'll move slow. Try to move fast, you can still improve your ability to move fast, even if you're moving a little bit slower. So it's just boiling down some of those kind of critical little concepts and keeping that really, really, really simple.

But as I said, always making sure there's a little bit of explosiveness and speed and power just to feel like a little bit of zip in each session. So there's a feel for the athlete—okay, I'm not getting slower here. I feel like I'm getting faster, at least I feel like I'm still fast. And for coaches to have the understanding that you're not going to take them and hide them away and bulk them up and send them back unable to move—and sometimes that's the mindset thing.

Which is, probably coming through a team sport, within rugby I've always been rugby first and how does our programming make them a better rugby player. Because you can make them a better athlete and they're still no good at rugby.

Good at rugby. So if we haven't made them any better at their sport, then we've just like, we might have made them more healthy. There's still probably some benefits, but we haven't actually improved what we're there to improve because we're not just training them generically. So the same goes across every sport. So it's just having that understanding that what we're doing needs to be at least having some carryover to improvement in their actual sport. Otherwise, we're just making a better athlete but not a better player or a better boxer, a better fighter, or whatever it is.

So I think just building that trust and understanding early that we're actually here—we're here to be a best supporting actor for what the athlete and the coach are trying to do in the sport. We're not trying to set S&C's and get all these great numbers and jump online and say we're the best trainer and S&C coach in the world because all of these numbers have gone up in the gym, but they're not getting any better over here.

And that can be a risk sometimes, because that's what some people build a reputation on is how much better they can make somebody's athletic qualities, which is great. But if it didn't make them better at their sport, that was kind of what we were hired to do.

James de Lacey25:05

I love that. I love that. I'm on the same boat as you with all of that. And I wanted, I want to touch back on just for the listeners as well, just to reinforce what you were saying about, you know, for some of you guys, they train just for strength and they eat in a surplus.

And I think what a lot of people get wrong is they go, "I'm going to get bigger, I'm going to do more volume," and they look at maybe—there's so much information obviously just on bodybuilding—that people look at, "Hey, what is the optimal amount of volume I can do to maximize muscle growth?" But it's like, that's not your goal as an athlete. You don't want to optimize and maximize muscle growth. You want to get bigger, but you still have other qualities you need to train for and a sport you need to train for.

You can't go and go, "I'm going to do 20 sets of chest and then, you know, 15 sets of back." And it's like, bro, there's no way you're doing that in a training week and then also going to do your technical training, and then also trying to fit in some of your speed and power work, and then also trying to fit in your—it's impossible. You just can't do it. And as you mentioned, you will potentially end up slow.

Simon Thomas26:09

Yeah, if you've only got a dollar to spend and you spend your entire dollar just purely on—there may be a window that you do focus in on that, but you spend that whole dollar on just building size and mass without strength, power, and transfer to your sport, then it doesn't mean you can't spend a quarter on it. You put 25 cents over there and you kind of add a little bit of hypertrophy, and you try and find the right volume to stimulate some muscle growth while the other 75 cents has gone towards getting better at your sport and getting stronger and more powerful and getting your conditioning and your skill work and everything out, the mental side and all the other things that come into it.

But yeah, if you just have that sole focus and you're kind of, you're not keeping the main thing the main thing. So it's around, if you do need to add some lean mass, then there'll be a way of doing that that's an accessory to the bulk of your work that's focused on getting better, unless there's a window of the year where you get to go past that 50/50 balance on it and then take some time to transfer it later.

But quite often, unless you're able to kind of do that generically through youth, the windows just get smaller and less frequent as people progress through their careers into professional. And then they're in season all the time and you're just trying to get incremental gains rather than—I hate the maintenance mindset. You can't maintain. It's just you're just going backwards, but slowly or quickly. But you just want to make either incremental gains because you're also focusing on performance, so you're never really trying to maintain. You're either trying to peak or you're trying to improve slowly.

Yeah, that's definitely where it got to within rugby anyway, if you got guys that are kind of playing 11 months out of the year with a month off, and you don't have a genuine in-season or an off-season. And obviously within the fight game, it's a little bit different. You always kind of got to stay 80% ready, and then when the call comes, you get a countdown and you just got to be ready to go. And you can't afford to go back to square one and go back to your building blocks. You've got to stay ready so you don't have to get ready.

James de Lacey28:06

You've talked a lot about transfer and carryover as well. For you, how are you looking at making sure what you're doing, say, in the gym or even doing conditioning, speed, whatever, is going to transfer and carry over to the game? Is it—has it come down to exercise selection for you? Is it something else?

Simon Thomas28:27

Yeah, it's probably a little bit of guesswork, using coaches' eye and making sure they're actually talking to athletes and talking to coaches is the thing that we're trying to improve. It probably starts with the question. So a player's got a certain work-on, coach might give them feedback that gives us the information to work with on how we might have a piece of that puzzle and make that quality better. So whether it's the change of direction, whether it's explosiveness off the line, whatever it may be, we'll come up with a solution to try to improve that.

But then the, whatever we're actually measuring in training, in the game, in the sport is what's going to show us whether that's working. So the coaches are either going to see a visible difference, athletes are going to feel a visible difference, and we can just kind of try to connect the dots. Because if it's something that we're measuring through GPS in our team sessions, we can at least kind of see, have an idea of the metrics that we're trying to improve and watch their acceleration or max velocity go up.

Or if it's a conditioning factor, their work rate or whatever it might be. Looking at, if we're looking at using a load cell and looking at punching power, whatever it might be, are we actually seeing it in the context of what we're doing?

If you look at it, the coaching, do we want someone to have better knockout power, to knock someone out? Or part of that is actually, there's timing and technique is a huge, huge element to it. But if we can improve, if we can improve power, we can say we may have kind of contributed to it a little bit, but it's not, it's never 100%.

But if what we're doing isn't making somebody worse and it's not getting somebody sick and injured and it's safe, then it's likely going to be a positive contributing factor. And if we're seeing the improvements in the thing that we want to be looking at that we measured to find a deficit in the first place, then we can at least safely assume that there's some carryover into that thing that we're trying to influence and make better.

So for a generic, very, very generic way of answering the question, but that's at least the concept rather than just chasing random stuff. Is find out what we're looking for. Well, there's some sort of measurement that told us that it's not good anyway, so when we remeasure it that way, are we seeing improvement?

James de Lacey30:22

Yeah, you answered it perfectly, because then obviously you're continually monitoring those things. Obviously if using GPS, you get to—in combat sports, you may be doing something else. It could even just be general jump test or something you may be monitoring or whatever, if you're looking at power or impulse or anything like that.

But as you mentioned, your change of direction example, maybe it could be technical. But, you know, if you're doing maybe more lateral jumping, strength work, whatever, maybe you're just doing general strength in the legs and you're seeing changes or quantifying changes with that, you can be like, "Okay, this is working and it's transferring." And if it's not, then you might be looking at, "Maybe it's technical or something else." That could be it and maybe that's not the issue, and at least that gives you an idea, right?

Simon Thomas30:46

Yeah. I think that's the key part that we probably just working within specific sports, is that's what we should be measuring our impact and our influence on is making those kind of positive contributions to the actual performance in the sport, whether it's in the ring or on a field or a court. Are we actually helping influence performance in the sport, or at least helping people thrive with availability to be out and practice and train and play their sport?

James de Lacey31:38

Perfect. And you mentioned as well in your original Venn diagram or quadrant, I think it was around repeatability. So someone who maybe has that one effort but then can't repeat it. What are you—I guess it kind of comes down to just, quote unquote, conditioning. What are you doing in this instance or...

Simon Thomas32:05

It probably comes out of a little bit out of what we're looking at. So we try to measure both parts of that spectrum or both parts of that quadrant whenever we look at something. So for even when we do on-feet conditioning test, we run a Bronco just to check their running capacity as a baseline marker. So five reps of a specific shuttle and then we'll measure that in terms of repeatability, even though it's not necessarily a repeatability measure. That's what we use at that end of the spectrum. And then we'll just do a single rep of a single rep Bronco.

So to do five reps continuous you kind of got to pace yourself a little bit, and we know what you can sustain in terms of your anaerobic threshold and your maximum aerobic speed within that. But then in a single rep, instead of the five reps, just go flat out for that single rep and what can you do one rep on and what can you do five to get a little bit of a ratio between what you can do once and what you can do multiple times.

And then the same on a 6-second peak power Watt bike versus a 1K Watt bike. So we can look at what can you just produce as a single hard effort in terms of power or fast output for your impact. We're trying to just look at the concept of you can have an impact on the game with an impactful moment, but then what can you actually repeat and where's the deficit.

So you might be through the roof in terms of your Watt bike peak power test. So we know with what we do in the gym that's an area of strength for you, but your 1K is terrible. So we need to work on your repeatability or your conditioning or your threshold or whatever it might be to get more of that sort of single effort stimulus and power out of you.

And so we'll look at each thing with at least try to look at it through both lenses and try to plot you somewhere on that quadrant and go, "Right, this is where you sort of sit, so we know this is your strength and this is the bit we want to work on." So let's keep that your superpower, but we need to bring that up. So you're very impactful and because we can't have somebody who just cherry picks in a game and has a significant moment and then goes invisible for 20 minutes and then appears again 20 minutes later.

But we can't have someone who just runs around and traces the game and covers. They cover the most miles or kilometers in a game out of everyone on the team, but they never had an impact because they never actually had an impactful moment. They just tracked the game and chased it and they're super fit, but they didn't actually contribute anything of real significant value at a collision or in an impactful moment. So we just want to make sure that we identify where you sit on that and then bring you up by working on whatever your sort of key work-on.

And that is just to round you out because it's definitely more of a hybrid sport where we've got to have a little bit of both. And one feeds into the other. You can't have repeated high-impact events if you can't have a high-impact event to start with. But without repeatability then we're just going to have to wait too long for the next one.

That's generally the concept, and then that just steers us towards what do we focus on in the gym. If we've got four sessions to spend and somebody's incredibly strong and forceful and powerful but just rubbish in terms of their repeat efforts, then we kind of know we don't need to chase their strength and power for diminishing returns in that space. Because as soon as they've had one or two events in a game, it's useless to us anyway because it's gone and it's no longer available because they're tapped out. So they're just energy set.

So they'll have a bit more of a power endurance focus or a bit more of a metabolic type program through the gym, just to build their capacity to bring those repeat efforts more often or vice versa. Someone who's incredibly fit, but we just need to get some mass on them and some gas into them and get some strength and power and a little bit of size that comes with it so that they can be more effective with all of the different events that they're getting to.

James de Lacey36:04

To give an example maybe of those four, just one week, a very generic example of that first example of someone who maybe is powerful but doesn't have that capacity, so they're doing more, as you mentioned, of those power endurance or metabolic type sessions.

Simon Thomas36:04

I found that's one to get quite creative with. You play around a little bit with what works just along that, whether it's energy system development and a little bit more of an aerobic perspective. If they just don't have any kind of aerobic conditioning base to draw from to recover between high-intensity efforts, we kind of got to go back to basics and build that to a certain degree.

But if we're looking at sort of big, heavy, strong guys, we can't always do that with running because then we just take too much out of every other part of training they're doing through the week, or they just don't have the capacity to maximize that. And so we take it off feet because if you look at somebody who's incredibly big, strong, powerful but maybe not so well conditioned on their feet, but you chuck them on a rower or a ski or a Watt bike, once you take carrying their body weight out of the equation, they're actually aerobically pretty fit because they've got a big engine underneath because they're pushing a big body around all the time.

So you just try to bridge the gap between those. And some guys are a little bit more, some respond better to a little bit more endurance work or sort of longer repeats with shorter rests. And others, they just lactate out so quickly that we're better with repeat power.

And so I need you to be explosive more often and we'll give you more rest and then we'll just gradually shorten those rests and get you fitter that way. So we either get you gradually working longer and longer and longer from an endurance perspective and we increase the length of your intervals, or we just know that you respond better to repeat power circuit type work and repeat sprint type work and hard efforts that have a longer rest.

And we gradually shorten the rest and train your aerobic system to recover between those efforts that way. It's hard to do that without a base behind it still in the first place, but sometimes we just don't get time to go back and build that base again.

James de Lacey38:03

Does the zone two craze or the low-intensity stuff ever come into that program? You mentioned about building that base, I'm assuming that's what you're referring to for when you, if you don't have time to go back?

Simon Thomas38:03

I think just in that range or that spectrum of your just low-level, submaximal aerobic continuous, long effort and sort of long distance or long effort training, so just to build the engine on the inside and your aerobic capacity. Your body's ability to utilize oxygen to actually recover between the hard efforts, if that's the purpose that we're going for.

If you're not an endurance athlete, but you still need your fitness and your capacity is a recovery tool, part of things looking into baseball at the moment is very much a repeat effort power sport. But your aerobic capacity, if your floor, if your floor is too low and you're not fit enough and you don't have that capacity to recover between innings, between games, between pitches, whatever it may be. And every three days, aren't they? I'm looking at the schedule now: every day it just gang, gang, gang, gang.

It's an awesome challenge. That's the part I'm looking forward to, going from a one game a week sport into a multiple games a week sport plus travel, plus figuring out workloads and rotation. And where and how do you train to get better? So it's a really good, really different, really good challenge.

So other bits that are exciting me as I dive into them at the moment, because the way we go, the way to go about it is quite different because the sports are different. I'll be surrounded by experts though, so I'll be lucky I get there with a very good director of S&C there and some awesome S&C coaches sort of in the majors and the minors to work alongside and learn from. And I'll be surrounded by a million baseball experts and coaches that I can soak that information from, and then they'll be...

Parts that I see a little bit differently, and once I understand the context then I can ask some wise questions, and why this and why that. And if the answer is that's because we've always done it that way, that's not always the best answer. So I can come with a different perspective, which will be good. But I need to get a good level of understanding first so I actually ask smart questions.

James de Lacey40:14

Perfect. And just to circle back to some of the conditioning, I like how you mentioned about the repeat power stuff or the longer intervals, that it keeps it so simple too, just especially when you got a large squad like that or if anyone's listening and wants to make their conditioning really simple that could just be an easy way you do it.

But in terms of just maybe just a quick rattle off some numbers for ratios for anyone, you mentioned obviously say a 6-second watt bike power test versus a 1K test. Do you have like a ratio there that you deem as someone who might be powerful versus maybe more endurance-based?

Simon Thomas41:00

Not specifically. It's probably, as you go to plot them on the quadrant, like I'm quite—this for just me—I'm quite visual. I'm like less spreadsheet and numbers based and more visual. And then I'll look at, well if I'm talking to you, this is where you sit on that end of the spectrum compared to that end of the spectrum.

And so because you're down in this bottom right corner and we want you in the top right corner, that's why we're going to work on this thing. So I probably lean away from some of the numbers just because it's sometimes open to interpretation, sometimes it depends on the context. And so like for a different type of athlete in the same sport or in the same position, it's probably just knowing what your job is within your sport and then like a little bit of archetype as well, a little bit of athlete type.

Like there might be some guys we're never going to build a strength power athlete into a marathon runner, but we don't want to, we don't need to. But if we can bridge the gap between the two because we need them to be a little bit more repeatable but not blunt their main sword while we're at it. So I was trying to find, like for you, if that's actually genuinely what got you in the team, we don't want to take that away from you just to chase this thing on the square.

But what we do need is more of that from you. So it probably comes through a bit as more vague, but it means it's just the concept that we want to sink into is like trying to find that sort of constant improvement.

And it's really, if you sort of visualize it based on plotting the whole group on a graph and you can, or your positional group, and you can see where you sit, if you want to drive a bit of competition or even just tracking your own progression, and then we can start to see, well, most of our guys are now up in this top right corner and you're kind of still lagging down the bottom left there.

So we need to shift that right. So how we going to go about that? Well, this is what we need to work on now. This is how we're going to go about it.

And so just creating that mindset to want to get improvement and shift and keep kind of going up and to the right and up and to the right as much as we kind of can to have the best of both worlds within reading with the conversation of, oh, I don't mind you being a little bit further sort of to the left as long as we're going up, because that's where we're trying to get to, or vice versa.

So again, probably not so much of a detailed or numbers based answer, but it's just genuinely that sort of concept that we've really wanted to kind of drive. And then as long as your numbers or your sort of the ratio is closing and your numbers are kind of getting better, like we're not really—we moved a lot, we moved away a lot from sort of specific number targets and more progression targets.

And so if we—we wanted to work more rather than what do you want me squatting, well, you might not squat what he does. So rather than set a number or a target, what I want you is squatting more than you did 3 months ago or squatting the same weight you did 3 months ago but doing it faster. And so depending on what we're trying to chase, so it's looking at that percentage progression type goal setting sort of model.

So like, as long as you are making improvements, then we're having success. And as we start to see those improvements slow down, then we either change what we're doing to kind of break through a plateau and keep going, or we've sort of reached a point of like, okay, we're strong enough now, let's chase something else but keep that where it is.

And so as that progression and improvement percentage target gets smaller, it doesn't mean you're failing, it just means you're getting better and you can't always get 50% better. Yeah, your first couple of months of structured training when you just learn to move better and you just get that sort of neural patterning that brings your early sort of strength gains, and then you got a good sort of few months or a couple of years of sort of hypertrophy and development, and then we start chasing all the fancy stuff after that.

But it's looking at your improvement against yourself as a marker of a percentage of improvement rather than did I get to 200 yet, what am I going for, 250, 225. So that's probably where we sort of shifted some of that concept as a different way of looking at it. The same as we would, like a relative strength, like a strength to body weight sort of ratio if we wanted to compete. And so the small guys at least get to kind of feel like they're as strong as some of the big guys.

James de Lacey45:16

No, that's perfect. I that's a great way to end the podcast as well. Where can people find and follow you? Are you—you're not very active on social, are you?

Simon Thomas45:16

Not too, no. The store performance coach on Instagram, a little bit on there. But LinkedIn I probably put more of professional stuff in and around through my LinkedIn. And then sort of Twitter/X, I mean I've got one and I follow stuff on it, but I don't really post anything sort of on there anymore. It used to have a whole lot of training content, now it's all just political stuff so it gets a bit cluttered at the moment.

So generally more so sort of on Instagram and LinkedIn sort of where I share a bulk of the professional stuff. And Instagram's a little bit of a hybrid between business and personal.

James de Lacey46:03

I'll link those in the description for everyone as well. I appreciate you coming on and sharing everything. That was solid. I like them, and we'll keep in touch.

Simon Thomas46:03

It's good to catch up again, even this way. I think it was Torres' Tacos in Austin last time, just before I left. So I have to make sure we catch up and reconnect if I get back across that way after I make the move back.

James de Lacey46:24

Perfect. I appreciate it, we'll catch you soon.