Training Olympian Throwers & What Translates To Combat w/ Mike Schofield (SSOF Ep 149)

Mike Schofield2:47

And then I had three at Commonwealth games. So, including the New Zealand record discus holder at the time, who I'd coached for a long period of time, and those guys were people that I'd worked with sort of since they were between 14 and 18 through to sort of mid-20s.

And sort of my role was predominantly at that elite level. I think that this stat is 2021, maybe prior the Olympics, had a squad of seven throwers and I think all seven were in the top 100 in the world. And I think between five and six were in the top 50 or top 30 in the world for a period of time there.

So it was sort of at an elite level for them which it was really fun and I've been kind of on that journey from sub-elite or even development through to that level for the prior 6, 8 years with them. And I still work with Maddie and a couple of others via distance and I go up to see them regularly to kind of see where we're at.

James de Lacey4:28

Nice. It's interesting as well that you do the actual skills or or biomechanical coaching of throws plus the S&C which is actually quite unique. Which might be interesting actually to to dive into as well because I think even throwing there's probably some similarities at least with striking combat sports in terms of the rotational component pushing through the ground, et cetera.

So it'd be cool to actually maybe dive into that a little bit as well around how you end up I guess marrying the two together, right? Because you can find coaches in a couple of camps where it's all technical and the strength conditioning is kind of like a separate thing that maybe doesn't matter so much, or you get the other camp that's like get stronger at all costs, squat, power clean, whatever.

These numbers need to go up and then they will transfer over to throwing. It's been interesting to to kind of see where you fit along that spectrum and and how you use strength training I guess combined with the idea of improving I guess technical throwing.

Mike Schofield5:36

Yeah. So if I probably can go back a little bit even a little bit further to my PhD. So my PhD was in tracking strength and conditioning variables and and 3D kinematics across 18 months in in elite throwers. And so within that I tracked kind of maybe 150 strength conditioning variables.

You're looking at kind of I think the move factor X guy talks about early epoch. So we were tracking that back in 2016. Kind of that eccentric early concentric velocity tracked all that across four or five throwers across a bench throw, bench pull, squat jump. I had optimal cadence urgs in there, some ball throws and and across loads as well.

And then I tracked 3D kinematics for those that probably don't know. A whole lot of dots and a whole lot of cameras and basically a little human stick figure moving and getting joint angles, joint velocities and stuff like that. Following that, I found that nothing actually mattered, which was highly disappointing when you're kind of thinking that your career matters.

So within that across those guys, none of the S&C variables tracked well or at all with performance. So I then got down this route of well what matters, like why why do we do this? Why would someone step in the gym?

And I suppose the the answer to that is more theoretical in nature. So there's probably there's some relative truths in biomechanics. You need to be able to move the limb faster than it needs to go in order to perform at a certain level. So if you want to throw a shot put at 14.3 meters a second, your limbs need to be capable of moving at 14.5 because you need a certain amount of acceleration or speed in reserve on top of that speed to be able to apply force.

Those joint speeds are determined by sort of the fiber type, muscle fiber type and tendon qualities and some neurology and actually some some sequencing. So you then you then kind of go well rather than chasing numbers you're chasing physiology.

And so from that I sort of developed a model and for those interested I think my PhD is open source now. So you can just search my name and my PhD and you can have a read. It's about chapter 9 out of 14 or something. And we followed this kind of periodization model that assumes some sort of systematic layering of adaptation and it's an assumption but there's there's also some validity to that.

So you take sort of high velocity eccentric work has been shown to to shift some fiber type qualities. High frequency electro stimulation velocity based training, et cetera, shift some of these fibers type qualities alongside shifting some of the force metrics. Long duration stretching seems to to depress tendon stiffness.

So it's it's not necessarily about finding the numbers but matching the physiology with the biomechanics of the movement. And that allows for some sort of efficient or maximization of force transmission within within a movement.

So then you kind of trace that back to develop a model and you kind of remove a whole lot of stuff from your I suppose your training vocabulary to be able to target these physiological adaptations. And you start to marry up the the biomechanics and the S&C.

And so for those that kind of know throwing or don't know throwing, power clean, bench press, back squat have these really high correlations to to performance in track and field, super high. And most of that is derived from programs that power clean, back squat and bench press a lot. And so kind of a little bit of kind of no science, there's going to be a correlation there. When you get a whole lot of people, you put them in and the people that are the strongest and they throw the furthest. Carry on. You got it.

So there's, so you kind of find these these correlations that are a function of of sampling bias. We we don't really have the sample size here in New Zealand to follow those modalities hoping that one out of a hundred will will become elite as a function of chasing these numbers.

But the the kind of reality of movement is that some of these spot characteristics, tendon qualities, kind of movement sequencing and and I suppose some people call it like fascial development determine performance and we can chase those. And we can have a look at the biomechanics and we can marry some of the the fiber type qualities, the temporal qualities with tendon qualities, we can then adapt them and we can create some hypotheses around how to throw really.

So coming back, my throws group was probably the weakest throws group in the world. The kid who broke the national record in discus, he benched 130, which is mediocre for an elite discus role when you see these guys benching 250, 200. Had a hammer thrower that threw 70 plus without being able to power clean. They just weren't important and we haven't found yet that it's important.

But some of that as well is it's important when you think it's important, and these kids are chasing these numbers based on perception. If you think they're going to make you better, they probably will.

So I suppose drawing it back more into the fight world there. When I was working with Junior prior to the Parker fight, we looked at some stuff that was needed to execute a fight plan. So the kind of target for competing and or beating Joseph was was a second phase. And so being able to kind of step out then step back in, the temporal requirements for that were really short. So the time space between stepping out and stepping back in were really short.

Predominantly came off as trail foot Achilles. And so he needed to be quite stiff. But if you make someone really stiff that needs to bounce for a long period of time, you increase the sort of the metabolic demands on the Achilles or calf complex. So we had to also have a balance there between sort of some of the the stiffness qualities and the metabolic qualities and neurology.

So I never really found that it was chasing metrics and I still don't chase metrics. We chase physiology that allows us to throw far and a lot of that stems from the bias that was developed in my PhD where I couldn't find associations.

We found that sort of strength needed to be at a certain level. So you needed to be able to bench, for like Maddy to throw 19 plus she needs to be able to bench over 110, 120 roughly in the ballpark. That was that was about the only thing that we found. Her optimal cadence needed to be above 127ish. Some of the boys needed a 150 optimal cadence, but some of the strength didn't matter.

One of the young hammer throwers needed to have really good eccentric qualities. And that was predominantly related to the way that he throws. Being shorter, he required higher eccentric sort of force or the ability to stop quicker on contact because he had a a shorter temporal window to apply force because he was shorter in nature. So yeah, I suppose that's a long-winded version of saying that we never really got to the point where we married them up. We just chase something different.

James de Lacey14:37

No, that's perfect because you have essentially summed up what I've been trying to push on this channel as well around this idea of everyone chasing numbers, squat, bench, parking, whatever, and how it's not the numbers and the lift that's important, it's the adaptation you're trying to get out of whatever's there.

But I actually wrote down a few different notes from what you said. So I'm just going to roll through some of these. But you mentioned around kind of fiber type is one of the main, I guess, muscle qualities you're looking to to target in training. Is that the main thing you're looking to change or at least stimulate within your weight training or is there more around muscle morphology or architecture that you're also looking at?

Mike Schofield15:06

So I suppose we removed training modalities that didn't fit with the the entirety of the adaptation we need. So if you want to move really fast, you need really high fascicle length or large fascicle length. Generally, pennation angle is slightly lower and the fiber type is really good.

And if you go through and you kind of go through all of the the literature on what stimulates what, you find that general strength training, let's say 5x5, will generally depress fiber type, won't change fascicle length. Pennation angle will generally increase due to kind of sort of your your sarcomeres being layered. So you're probably going to not induce really a really fast muscular tendinous unit by that. So you remove that.

And then you go kind of the high speed eccentrics. Okay. So there's you'll get more fascicle length, pennation angle might change and fiber type will either be preserved or upregulate. Velocity based training stuff. If you can do the set at a at a a 20% threshold or more maybe you preserve fiber type. So there's your kind of tapering and or your method and that fast slow eccentric stuff might form your kind of strength training because you do also need to be really forceful.

Force isn't ultimately the, or force is ultimately the end goal but it's the what is underpinning those force measures that that kind of matters. And the the saying I used to give to these guys is it's not the metric that matters, it's how you get there. So we sort of removed all these measures.

We did a little bit of overshoot stuff, some of the the fast isometric stuff, long duration stretching, hot water immersion, all sorts of stuff to try and stimulate these byproducts. Looked at, I mean, we looked at kind of trying to make people pre-diabetic because there's some sort of insulin pathway there that, like it it got kind of weird for a while. And so we I mean we've done all sorts. We we've had, I've electro stim people at 2 and a half thousand hertz. I've been biting on towels and and all sorts of stuff like that's, it is volitional.

I I will say that it was not me doing it to them. It was hey here's a modality that might help us. Would you be keen? Yes was the answer. Or no, I'm not keen. So that's for ethics. Just just for ethical reasons there. It wasn't like this is what we're doing, strap in, bite on the towel, and away we go. But but we tried everything to get better and induce some of these adaptations and fiber type fascicles were something that we targeted.

We targeted some of the fascial lines that we thought were important based on some of the I think it's Calvaris work that that came out must have been 10 years ago now. So we could link some of these rotational components together, so to speak, and and allow some of this these muscular adaptations to be almost transferred through the system.

So yeah, we we kind of fiber type was the key thing, but it's not the only thing. I suppose some of that as well is like there there's a high neurological component to that and and there's a management of volume, intensity, etc. that comes with that to try and allow them to also throw far because if you become gym centric, you lose some of the art of throwing and and vice versa.

James de Lacey19:14

I fully agree with that. I made a post a little while ago about this idea that as you mention as you become gym centric, you start to lose this ability to dissociate upper and lower body. You get so good at just stacking ribs over pelvis and having that rigid spine, you lose that ability to move well. And it's not like you do a few squats a few times a week on top spot that it's going to happen.

But if you become really gym like you're like into it, like that's like becomes like almost more important than the sport, then you can start to go down that road and it's not it's not a good thing, not a good adaptation for speed.

Mike Schofield19:53

And and there's with that there's an understanding of how speed is developed and and biomechanically. So in throwing a lot of people chase a bench and and I'm sure similar thing was found in boxing, a lot of people are chasing kind of these high rep benches to stimulate pressing musculature. And in in biomechanics we have this kind of kind of phenomena called induced acceleration and what induced acceleration is is if I take one of my little people here.

So, oh, you really are a biomechanist having those around. There you go. So if this foot here is swinging forward and I I move the leg backwards at the hip, the knee straightens. So if I constrain this here and and that'll be constrained by inertia of a swinging limb and I move the knee backwards, the leg straightens and that knee will be moved backwards by the hip.

So we have the same thing in boxing where as you sort of adduct at the shoulder the elbow straightens and what you find in biomechanics is the elbow power is negative. So the the the power at the elbow is is negative. So the the elbow is trying to stop itself from extending but it's being forced into extension by some sort of adduction at the shoulder. So potentially targeting some of these like eccentric bicep qualities is really critical for these high-speed punching throwing actions that that we don't kind of tend to target so much but we do target the pressing musculature.

James de Lacey21:22

Interesting. I like that. I like that little little concept there as well. And for you obviously mentioned that you know you guys weren't maybe the strongest team of throwers and you say that they're not strong but when we talk I guess when people talk about strong they think traditional lifting right, squatting benching or whatever.

But I mean your guys are probably very strong just based on the fact that they are put through, they're still they're still strength training because they're going through high force movements in the gym. Right. You got, you mentioned you're doing like a lot of overspeed eccentric work which is obviously probably higher force demands than a lot of traditional stuff that people are doing.

So it'll be interesting to kind of go through even if we can go a little deeper into some of those movements and how you're programming them and what you're kind of looking at doing within them because you mentioned as well like, hey, that's maybe some of your how you I guess how you're fitting that within—

The training, because you mentioned about tapering and maybe the more strength training stuff, where that kind of fits. Because I'm assuming that a lot of that really high force, high speed-centric stuff maybe isn't used too close to competition, just because of the potential fatigue on the other end. Or well, maybe it is. You tell me.

Mike Schofield22:46

I probably don't have a fantastic answer for you there, because people do—in my experience—people perform strangely and not necessarily strangely in non-logical patterns. So we expect people do some high speed eccentric stuff, performance goes in the toilet while they're doing high speed eccentric stuff or slow eccentric stuff.

And I suppose to clarify that when we're talking about high speed eccentric stuff, we're talking about induced muscle lengthening. It's not taking 80 kilos when you can squat 140 and dropping down doing a fast eccentric. We're talking about—so I suppose for example I have a young hammer thrower that he back squats roughly in the vicinity of 200 and he'll do a one down, blue up squat on a Smith machine at sort of 220.

So he's on one limb, he's taking down 220 and then he's got some assisters helping him lift it back up. Benching—and maybe it's weight releases. You might be able to bench 110 and you'll take 180 down with a couple of reverse bands to kind of control some of the eccentric cadence.

So I've had people throw really far in those blocks because of how you set up the week. So in general, a week for us will be Monday will be a heavy throw day. So that's where we'll try and throw far or maybe we'll try and throw something heavy with high intent.

Then Tuesday will be a heavy gym day. Wednesday will be some sort of technical day because there's no point in doing really anything of intent or intensity in relation to throwing far because you just can't. Thursday will be some sort of hybrid day depending on how they feel.

So they might throw at a reasonable intensity. If they feel really good, they might have a crack at something. And then Friday will be another gym day. Saturday will be another throw day and it'll be technically based. So when you go through that loop a few times, sometimes you find that week 12 of a really heavy intense period, they throw really far on the Monday when they should be really cooked.

Other times you find that people throw really poorly. So sometimes you find people throw really well in these heavy eccentric blocks. The explanation for that is just probably a bit above my pay grade, but potentially it's to do with the fact that some of the technical elements are lacking at speed and so some of that fatigue brings them back to a rhythm that they can throw really far.

Other people you find that they just throw terribly the whole time. So we generally do the high speed and the high load eccentric work relatively far out from competition. Then probably 8 to 12 weeks we take that eccentric dominance out. But what we sort of found—and some of the Nordic research indicated this—was that you need one set of four in there a week of these heavy eccentric contractions to maintain fascial length.

And fascial length and fiber type will give you contraction velocity. So we just put one set of four in of whatever it is. Maybe it's a bench, maybe it's a squat, maybe it's whatever. And then within that kind of 8-week period—maybe it's 12, maybe it's 16 weeks for some people—and you learn this stuff based on history.

There's kind of a calibration time where there's a difference between enhanced kinetic ability or physical ability and integrated physical ability. So you give them enough time to integrate and then you can layer it in again.

And I think when you give people enough time to integrate and figure out how to use their new abilities, so to speak, they maximize them and then they don't have to be as strong over time because they're squeezing the most out of their physical capacity.

So we do these really long kind of tapering periods or—I mean prior we tried some overshoot stuff where people would have these 70% reductions in gym and throwing volumes. Some people that was good, some people that was bad. Some people I ruined their seasons, some people threw really far. And so I don't really probably have a good answer for what we do and how we do it, just a few things that you probably shouldn't do and a few things that work for a couple of people.

James de Lacey27:44

Nice. Around the eccentric stuff as well. So you mentioned obviously a lot of the eccentric work you're doing like massive overload, two up, one down, weight release a bench, et cetera. Does I guess higher speed eccentric work ever play a role? For example, if you have no equipment, like drop catching, I don't know, Bulgarian split squats with some load or altitude drops I guess is probably another example. Or even like eccentric overload like flywheel work at high speeds—does that also come into play during those phases?

Mike Schofield28:18

Yeah, we're sort of lucky. At High Performance Sport, we have a whole lot of equipment that some of it we've built over the years and so we haven't needed to modify it. We've done some drop jump work, but some of these guys are really big guys and dropping off a box of whatever depth is generally pretty taxing on feet, knees, backs, et cetera.

The flywheel stuff is something I'm curious about. There was a paper a while ago that looked at isokinetics versus flywheel type work and showed that isokinetics was slightly superior in sort of power adaptations. So we kind of ran with that and we have a device that we can induce that's very similar to that paper and so we follow more of the isokinetic work.

We also have some assisted machines that lift stuff up and we've developed pulley machines and all sorts of stuff. So we haven't really needed to play with some of those kind of—I suppose they're quasi eccentric methods. The drop drum stuff I think is also interesting in the fact that it might not be an eccentric contraction but just a really high eccentric load.

And I guess some of that stuff as well relates to some of the muscle stiffness qualities. The ability to kind of have the muscle-tendon unit lengthen while there's no contractile tissue length and a lot of that length change is in the pennation angle shift.

And maybe it trains that and maybe you train the ability for the pennation angle to change without the length of that changing. I don't know. But we've played around with some of that stuff but haven't really gone all in on it because we haven't needed to yet. It's something I'm certainly curious about looking at as we kind of need other stimulus.

James de Lacey30:14

Regarding you mentioned as well about you kind of give time to integrate I guess the new qualities developed in the gym into their throwing or their sport. So how much does I guess specificity in the gym matter to you or does it not matter at all? You just chasing these physiological adaptations and then eventually you're seeing them translate over as they perform their sport.

Mike Schofield30:38

Yeah, that's a good question and I've sort of gone back and forth on this quite a lot. When I was young in my career and I started with these guys, specificity was the thing, right? We hammered medicine ball throws. I mean I had parachutes on bars and people spinning around doing resisted turns and all sorts of stuff. We hammered it. Absolutely hammered it.

James de Lacey30:59

You would have been massive on Instagram if you filmed that back in the day. You would be the throws guy.

Mike Schofield31:16

I was looking at some of the stuff that we—that are on my old camera rolls and when the iPhone first came out and you're taking videos of all the stuff—and some of it was pretty out there. Some of it was cool and probably it's likable, but is it effective? I don't know.

So I guess as I went through this kind of journey of learning and experience, I've sort of shifted to somewhat of a middle ground. I think there are times when you need greater specificity for some people.

And there are people that don't need it. And I think those times are determined by what is happening in the sport. So I'm fortunate that I write the entire program. So I write the throwing side, I write the gym side, and I can kind of align and integrate the two.

And in throwing, throwing is a loaded throw. So there's almost no difference between a medicine ball throw into the wall and a shot put. It might be a 4K implement or it might be a 6K implement, but it's a loaded throw.

So if they're not getting enough volume of specificity in their sport, then maybe there's a case for more specificity, but ultimately your body distinguishes between sort of movements. So if you take a baseball thrower and a javelin thrower—and there was a study done on this as well where they've put baseball throwers and javelin throwers and javelin throwers and baseball throwers in together—there will be some sort of what they call co-action.

So some sort of crossover, but it won't be very good. And you might get to a reasonable level, but it won't be this direct crossover. And so over the years I've played with no specificity, high specificity. Really, I haven't noticed any appreciable difference in change.

I guess the thing is is that people need to be able to move. And generally people that move well, they perform well. And so when we look at kinematic changes and how people change kinematics or skill, you sort of draw on prior experience and prior movement experience.

So if you've never done a lateral lunge and you've only run in a straight line, teaching someone to side step might be challenging. But if you teach them a lateral lunge and a really powerful lateral lunge, there is the potential that that individual uses that prior experience to shift their own movement map or their neurology around that movement and they can learn the skill better.

So potentially integrating some stuff that gives someone some prior experience that is towards the kinematic change that you're after in the skill helps with crossover. But that's not for everyone because some people don't need that or some people don't draw the parallels subconsciously between that movement experience and this movement requirement. They just they're too different or who knows.

So, I do a little bit of specific work with some people, but I do very little with other people. And I guess I still haven't got past the fact that you need some of those physiological qualities just to be able to move fast. And then you figure out how to organize them in training and there's a paper golf did a lot of this.

So golf was highly specific and my background was golf years ago. And the only paper not to show an increase in club head speed was the only paper that people didn't hit golf balls. And so maybe just doing the sport is enough for that crossover. And like we were talking about before, not getting too gym-centric and keeping on doing your sport, you'll probably find that it'll cross over. And targeting the right qualities probably helps as well.

James de Lacey35:47

That's a great answer. I like that and hopefully the listeners got a lot out of that, too. I also wanted to go into this idea of asymmetries because I guess as throwers, you're only throwing off one side of your body. You know, as always, the asymmetry debate kind of goes up and down through the years of arbitrary left and right imbalance percentages and what are they actually tracking in terms of qualities for the asymmetries. Do asymmetries ever play a factor in your thinking within strength conditioning with throwers?

Mike Schofield36:14

Yeah, it's a good question. And I actually had a guest on a while ago that talked about asymmetries and essentially highlighting if you're weak, you're weak. And doesn't matter whether you're symmetrical or asymmetrical. D-training a limb doesn't and draining a limb for injury prevention doesn't work. So I quite like that.

And so for us, what you find is most elite discus throwers have functional scoliosis towards the throwing side. So they're asymmetrical in nature. Probably if you try and undo that, you ruin their careers. Probably. I don't know.

Elite golfers have a huge right side bend at impact and probably if you try and remove some of the precursors of that, they have no right side bend. They don't hit it very well. Elite shot putters have a massive right hand. If you try and undo that, probably not a good thing.

And elite hammer throwers generally on the left side or the foot that doesn't move have sort of a high amount of pronation in standing and that's so they can get the surface area of the foot down as they're rotating. So if you throw enough, you probably develop some of these what you'd call functional asymmetries. And if you try and undo them, you might make them healthier and you might make them generally more symmetrical, but you'll probably undo some a lot of what is elite performance.

So I guess in that context, we try and keep them within a bandwidth. So, we're not trying to give people massive right hands when they're a shot putter or we're not trying to make people or or induce functional scoliosis to where everything is pulled to the right. So we try and control some of the I suppose the movement within towards an upper bandwidth, but we don't really know where that bandwidth is.

We're not going, here's the edge of here's the edge. When you go past here, you're probably going to break. But we do do things like big tall discus throwers that have functional scoliosis. We're probably going to belt squat instead of back squat. We might shy away from high axial loading. Doesn't mean we're not going to do it.

We might just shy away from it a little bit and we might look for an alternative that allows us the same adaptation at a sort of muscular tendonous level without some of the loads that may induce some injury risk on those sorts of spines and bodies and all like.

So I see the asymmetry debate and I think some of the asymmetry debate stems from people's bias towards thinking that we are symmetrical and humans are not symmetrical. We never will be and we have one heart placed to this one side. So we're probably never going to be symmetrical in nature.

There's always a bandwidth to this stuff. And I think when you try and pull people into the bandwidth, you might ruin their gift. We don't know what makes these people in elite sport great. But we do know that generally when you try and pull something back into a bandwidth, something else will need to shift. They're not isolated adaptations and so I think there's danger in people chasing symmetry and I think there's danger in people not worrying about it as well.

My question is where's the bandwidth for that individual. And at the moment I've got a hammer thrower that his foot is when he stands his net foot is highly pronated. Now am I concerned about that? Not particularly. If he wants to go and run a marathon, yeah, I might be a bit concerned about it. And I'm probably going, "Yeah, this is going to hurt a lot."

But he's not training for a marathon. He wants to be a great hammer thrower. And that sort of functional adaptation allows him to get a little bit more surface area in a rounded foot on a rounded shoe and control his pivoting action. And he's developed that over many years. So yeah, I probably I'm somewhere in the middle and I'm not in either camp. And I think there's benefit to both camps.

James de Lacey41:10

Yeah. Very diplomatic answer. I like it. And I have a final question final question for you too around I guess the training emphasis from you mentioned obviously you've been with a lot of these guys from when they were in their teenage years through to the elite level and we've talked a lot about kind of the adaptations you're trying to get out of, I guess, physiological adaptations trying to get out of these athletes and a lot of the methods used to do that are pretty intense.

So at the maybe at that younger age or younger level or even someone who's older but coming in from a lower training age I guess what is your training strategy in that instance? Are you just starting with basic strength training and then moving to some of these more advanced things or are you looking at straight away trying to induce some of these adaptations through some of these more advanced methods?

Mike Schofield42:04

Yeah, a good question. So by no means are any young kids doing these kind of aggressive training modalities. And how I look at I suppose development is development's kind of like playing poker, right? So the way I look at development is kind of like playing poker. You've got to have a card to play and some of these more aggressive modalities, they're your final hand to play. We're sort of also trying to find cards as we're playing our final cards.

I suppose in the younger years with young people, their hormone profile will protect them from a lot of these I suppose the detrimental adaptations at a muscular tendonous level of strength training. So the other part to that is if you learn to do something strong, you will struggle to find or in my experience, people struggle to find finesse.

So when people learn to do things weak, they figure out how to be effective. But if you fire your strength bullet really early, that's the bullet they fire for the rest of their life. And you can only be so strong.

So I think with real like we're talking probably in the 15 to 18 age range almost giving them the appearance that they are getting stronger by just putting a carrot in front of them every now and again and trying to get them to move really well. So probably how I've used it is I've looked at strength training in those early years like developing strength because they're not stupid. They're out there looking at these elite guys going they're really strong and so you need to give them the feeling that they're progressing towards that.

How fast you do that you can control. But what they won't see is the elite guys are movement masters. They are really able to move. And so strength training often gives you the ability to develop a motor vocabulary.

And when I talk about that, I'm not talking about kids standing on a beam trying to touch cones and stuff like that. I'm talking about medicine balls, running hurdles, power snatch, power clean, back squat, deadlift, trap bar, deadlift, lunges, lateral lunges, random stuff that is filling their motor vocabulary. So when we talk about changing their skill, they have movement experiences that they may be able to draw on.

And that can be a large portion of those early years. And as a coach, that allows me to create a movement master or have someone who's this efficient really good mover because they have a broad movement vocabulary that was developed in their early years. It also fills some of the training so that we're not developing these really strong 18-year-olds that can't move and you have the strength card to play. And then you have the high plyometric card, you have the drop jump card, you have all these cards that are still up your sleeve ready to play.

So we did when these guys were young, we did a lot of random stuff. Like Maddie can kickbox really well. When she kicks you on the pads, it hurts. It's pretty cool. And so could a lot of the other guys, and they could do handstands.

They can do medicine ball throws. They can do a variety of medicine ball throws with really high fluidity and efficiency, meeting some of the sort of markers that we set for what that skill should look like. And so then when we got to kind of 20, they were strongish.

Like when I say strongish, they might power clean 130, 140. And these are the 100 plus kilo kids. They might bench 120 to 130. So they're strongish, but they're not the kid that's benching 200. So that when they stall in their throwing, we go, here's the next strategy, and they go, I can see a clear relationship between that and my future goal.

That then allows you kind of that has a motivational and a buy-in effect on them, but it also is a real card to play because you haven't hammered the crap out of it. What I see a lot of is people hammering a variety of things, and then when you get to, so you hammer the movement, you hammer strength, and you just bash them throwing or in whatever sport.

Then when they stall, you go, here's, we've got to get stronger, and they go, we already tried that one and it didn't really work. But it didn't work because there was some sort of convolution of adaptation. So I'm really big on developing, like using the gym to provide movement experience young while developing skill.

So can they power clean really well? And we used to have really clear markers and like you back when we were at university, we were both weightlifting, and so it was like Olympic weightlifting style markers that you had to meet.

You had to develop really efficient skill in that movement. It was never about chasing the movement, but often it was about going, hey, you have to be really effective at this skill before you can go heavy. And some of that filled that or gave them time to figure out how to use some of the strength that they were developing so that they weren't the kid that was really strong that didn't throw far.

James de Lacey48:35

I don't know if that answers it, but it's a long-winded version saying, yeah.

That's good. It's one of the reasons as well why I hate starting strength and stuff for beginner athletes because it just puts you in this box of three or four lifts and you do that for X amount of time, but you don't have any other movement options to draw from.

You just get really damn strong at squatting three times a week and benching twice a week. And as you mentioned, you need to do a bunch of different movements at that age so you can kind of learn them, so when you eventually come back to doing them, you at least know how to do them.

Mike Schofield49:12

And I think with that there's two camps there, right? There's the starting strength guys and there's the movement exploration guys where these kids are standing on two opposite ends of the spectrum, and it's like, hey, this is the standing on the beam trying to touch a cone with one leg, that's like when you're at school and you're like, look, I can stand on this branch, that's where that's developed.

And I don't think that doing that in the gym allows people to develop really good skill as elite athletes. And I don't think that starting strength allows that, but there is some halfway house in the middle where you need to be able to be a really efficient back squatter, deadlifter, bencher, power cleaner, power snatch, medicine ball thrower, runner, single leg balance, like a range of skills, but it is not either or.

It's some combination. And I think we have a tendency to try and separate these things out. In my experience, I haven't seen a really elite person come from either camp. They've kind of, they may have started here and kind of done this and this and come up.

But we're just so spectral in our views that we sit here or here. And when you get into it, it's not there and there. It's kind of like there's a nice happy halfway house in the middle for all of this stuff.

James de Lacey50:59

You could do a whole other podcast on that whole thing. It's crazy the camps that are going on now. But that brings us up to an hour. I know you got to head to work soon as well.

Going to the good old uni days where it was just like go to class, lift weights, eat Subway outside the gym, or outside Millennium. Easy times back then, man. Easy times. It was, you basically live as a full-time athlete while you're at uni, because all you do is just train, study, and eat.

Mike Schofield51:10

You do. Yeah, bring back those days. Yeah, that was good.

James de Lacey51:30

Where are you active anywhere on social media? Where can people find or follow you or contact you? You might get some people contacting you on various different things.

Mike Schofield51:30

So I now have a website thanks to my beautiful partner who's made me a website. It's called sportsperformanc.com I believe. And I am on LinkedIn. I'm somewhere on Twitter or X. I have an Instagram page with no posts. So yeah, I probably will start to post a little bit more.

I'm, yeah, no one will even know who I am because I don't really post anything yet. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me through my website. I think there's, I've got an email address in there and a contact form page.

If anyone's got any questions yet, feel free to reach out. Find me on LinkedIn, find me on X, I think it is now, isn't it? I think my handle is rotational performance or something similar. I'll send you them and you can put in rotational PF.

That's me. Probably one post in 10 years or something. So I haven't been very good at engaging on social media, but yeah, that's certainly something that I will do in future.

James de Lacey52:51

Sweet. I'll link those up in the description too for anyone who wants to get in contact with you. But I appreciate you coming on, Mike.

Mike Schofield53:08

Good, thank you. Appreciate it.