Wrestling S&C & Why Youth Combat Sports Training Has It All Wrong w/ Justin Gosselin (SSOF Ep 208)

Justin Gosselin0:33

I read that cover to cover three times and then continued annoying him. And then the only other real person that I've had the luxury to be in contact with on a semi-regular basis was Dr. Mike Israetel back in the day. He used to talk on Instagram. He was a professor at Temple. So I used to annoy him at his office hours and stuff. And one of the kids that I played a mentorship role for actually ended up going to Temple and studying under him and Hoffman. So that was a cool little full circle event.

And then I got really into, I started teaching kickboxing classes and doing personal training and stuff and slowly started to accumulate a client base just like anybody else. And then my first three real youth athletes, big shout out to Alex, Danny, and Logan.

They're the three best, met at my wedding. I love these kids, and you know, I've been with them since the end of 8th grade, and now they're knocking on the door, graduating at college. Logan wrestles at Lehigh. Alex wrestles at Maryland. And our boy Danny wrestles at Sacred Heart.

And so, you know, from there, just like any other small business really, you pour every single thing that you have into the very small book of business that you have and eventually it grows. And since then, I've been very fortunate to kind of been the guy in my town where, you know, if you're dead set on making it to the next level for athletics, to college athletics, for whatever sport, you kind of come to me a little bit without sound like patting myself on the back too much.

I'm also super competitive, so I train with these kids and I'm still beating them in 40s and vertical leaps and stuff. I kind of got to manufacture my own training partners which was, you know, for a kid who grew up on Dragon Ball Z is the best. And so yeah, that's kind of my background and now we're just in it.

I really try to, I was very fortunate in 2020 my wife and I moved to Colorado, just kind of in the pandemic we're like the world's ending we might as well go see something cool. And while I was there I got to work at, are you familiar with a guy named Chris Knott?

James de Lacey5:19

No.

Justin Gosselin5:20

So he is probably one of the, maybe the top ARPwave guy in North America. Are you familiar with ARP?

James de Lacey5:29

What is that?

Justin Gosselin5:30

Yeah. So it's basically as far as I understand it, it's like DC electro stem therapy. So it feels like you're getting struck by lightning. And it has an interesting way of kind of, I don't really know how to describe it, but basically it supercharges the information highway between your brain and whatever you're trying to train.

So, you know, for him, his top clientele have been guys like Chase Young, Odell Beckham Jr., his first big guy, I think, was Brandon Marshall. He was the strength and conditioning coach for the Broncos when they won the 50th. Is that too loud by the way?

James de Lacey6:09

Oh, you're good. You're good.

Justin Gosselin6:10

Okay, cool. And so I got to hang out at his gym, see a lot of those guys. And the way he does it where he kind of just brings that mentorship, strength and conditioning coach, one-on-one type thing where, hey, you're unique individual. Yes, we have all of our lovely frameworks and standard operating procedures and things, but we're really just going to kind of give you that one-on-one attention.

I saw that and I really tried to bring that to the youth athletic development stuff that I'm doing now. It was a huge influence on me because where I'm from, to be frank, is, you know, upper middle class. A lot of the kids grow up in homes with three-car garages and are good at math. So there's not a ton of just raw athletic talent here.

And so if I was going to do it, it was going to have to be that way. There's a lot of these little group fitness classes or speed schools or whatever the case may be, but they're basically just doing some speed ladders, doing a couple sprints and sending them on their way. There's no real development.

So I just try to scale the unscalable and give these kids the one-on-one attention. And luckily, you know, a lot of the families are friends and things. So we've developed a nice little community here where, you know, at any given time, a lot of times during the summer, we'll have groups of six to 10 guys. They all grew up together, we're all training, competing, have a good time. So that's kind of, you know, without getting too much into it, my background. I got my CSCS in 2014. So way, way long ago this day and age.

James de Lacey7:44

Awesome. Now, it's funny you mentioned the golden age, kind of early 2010s, even late 2000s. Like yeah, you read everyone's blogs. The only sensationalist stuff you'd find would be like a T Nation article or headline, but it would still be packed with good information.

You learn from reading everything and applying, and it was just you have raw training footage on YouTube of weightlifter an hour-long session of just weightlifters and stuff. You're like this is the dream. This is, that was peak internet.

Justin Gosselin8:06

I agree. I agree. There was something so raw about it. The lack of production value, the hard work. I mean, my general rule of thumb is if you've never watched Pete Rubish deadlifting 800 by washing machines, I don't want to hear your opinion on overtraining. I'm sorry. These are different definitions to different people.

James de Lacey8:35

Yeah. I used to watch the hour-long Ilya Ilyin snatch sessions and stuff like that, hour-long hookgrip and all things gym training halls and stuff before training.

Justin Gosselin8:40

Oh, hell yeah.

James de Lacey8:40

It was like...

Justin Gosselin8:40

Dude, I spent a thousand dollars on green 50 kilo Ivanko plates just because I watched them in Dan Green videos back in the day. That's, you know, when Dan Green and Stan Efferding was doing his thing the animal cage was at its peak. That was a great time. And then unfortunately just like everything else, you know, money gets involved and people are, "Oh, I can build a business off of this" and then just the tsunami of horseshit comes.

And even, you know, I have, Dr. Mike is a great example of somebody who maybe because he got famous famous within the last four or five years. People don't realize he's been giving out information online since, I don't even know how long. I think I've heard about him in 2014 and like...

You know, people go, "Oh, Dr. Mike says some crazy stuff now." It's like, well, he said everything already.

He said what you needed to hear 10 years ago. We can't just repeat the same thing over and over again.

James de Lacey9:48

Three plus million followers.

Justin Gosselin9:50

And so now I find myself in a situation where I'm predominantly working with kids and I have to find a way to translate this information in a palatable way that lands. And one of the kind of aphorisms I love the most is you don't know anything until you can teach it to a 14-year-old, right?

And so that's kind of led me to thinking about well okay what is a model for training that we could really that is both practical but then also allow somebody to fill in the gaps with their own information cuz all these kids are spending all day doom scrolling fitness crap and it's like okay well if I can provide you at least a working model of how to think about stuff and then you can start to put the things that you see online into its place now I'm also educating you to make your own decisions later on.

James de Lacey10:43

So, how are you structuring your youth athletic development? Because you see, as you mentioned, there's all these kind of quote-unquote speed schools, whatever. They take credit for this athlete running faster, but it's like, bro, this kid just went through puberty, right? And you could run a really simple program. It would be boring, but you could just have them squat bench dead and they'll probably improve everything as they go through puberty. So, what is your approach for youth athletic development overall?

Justin Gosselin10:57

Well, the first thing is we start with the model, right? So, the way I explain it to the kids is this is at the end of the day, it's their body, it's their training, it's their relationship to what they're doing. And as a combat sports guy or anybody who's wanted to be good at anything, you really do have to develop your own personal relationship with this stuff. So, I'm really I take a lot of effort into educating them.

And the way I describe it is this. All training is is we are stressing your physiology to drive it to adapt and improve itself in case that stress happens again. That is all we're doing. If you go for a run, your body doesn't know if you're an angsty teenager whose parents are getting divorced, you got a fight coming up, you're getting chased by a cheetah, it just goes, "Oh [expletive] we should probably improve lung capacity, decrease blood pressure, blah blah blah blah blah in case you got to go run again."

If we lift weights, your body goes, "Oh [expletive] we should probably get bigger and stronger in case that happens again." So, it's really just that stimulus recovery adaptation concept in the vocabulary of a 14-year-old. And then we go, okay, so that's all training is, how should we think about it?

Well, these are, in my mind, the five basic facts we got to know about training that could be applied to really anything. There's a minimum amount of work you got to do to get better. There's a maximum amount of work you can tolerate before you start getting worse.

Training either has to get harder or more specific as time goes on. That can't go on forever. Not all training makes you better, but all training causes fatigue.

Everything else in my mind at least when talking to these kids is diagnostics and right tool for the right job. And I think that's where actually a lot of the wisdom really lies. And it's one of the things I appreciate about your content is it's really okay, how do we diagnose what the actual constraint and problem is with this athlete and then what is the most sensible way to get them past that. I think that's a really important thing that we're doing and you do a great job of it not being intellectual masturbation, but how are we actually solving these problems?

Cuz I see so many guys they cosplay like they're coaching LeBron and it's like dude most of your clients are 14 what are you talking about. So that's a long winded way of getting to what your actual question which is how do I structure this and a lot of times it depends on the athlete.

I would say the number one competitive advantage for youth athletes is physical maturity. I'm not going to size or strength or speed or anything because physical maturity if you spend any time around youth athletics, you know it when you see it.

You know, it might not I got two brothers, Logan who wrestles at Lehigh and his little brother Kaden, who's also a fantastic wrestler, top contender for a state championship in New Jersey this year. Kaden is the younger one is weight room stronger than his older brother was at this age, but Logan was a little more physically mature. It's just his just tendons and body is just more put together, you know? I know that's not very scientific, but when you're talking about teenagers, when you see it.

And in my mind, power bodybuilding is a great way to accelerate that. Unfortunately, I don't know if it's whatever's in the water that's making the frogs gay or whatever, but a lot of these boys are not starting puberty until 15 or 16 years old. So, you know, when we want athletes to not train like bodybuilders and it's like, well, well, okay, but Buddy plays sports 12 months a year and is 122 pounds. So, what are we talking about?

James de Lacey14:56

Does he own a case?

Justin Gosselin14:58

Exactly. I hope I wish. I talked to are you familiar with Brick Chavez?

James de Lacey15:04

No.

Justin Gosselin15:05

So, he is team evil GSP on Instagram. In my opinion, maybe the North American expert, maybe the world leading expert in performance-enhancing drugs. He's completely batshit insane, but also one of the most down-to-earth sense-making people you ever meet.

And I asked him, I said, "Why are these boys starting puberty so late and girls starting puberty early?" And what he told me was body fat percentage and diet. If a young boy is basically malnourished, why would their body then go and release all of these anabolic hormones that are really resource intensive, right? That's going to be delayed.

And conversely, with young girls, if maybe they're a little heavier and can carry a baby to term for all of human history besides the last hundred years, that would probably be a good idea to turn puberty on so you could find provision and protection and make it through the winter, right?

So, we have this issue where these kids are playing more organized sports than ever and they're the least physically developed ever. So, my sarcastic question is, well, if this kid is on two soccer teams and three baseball teams, why do we need to do more extensive plyometrics and hopping around? Let's just get him in the weight room, feed them right, and let nature take its course.

I think we really got to start identifying the big buckets of what we need to accomplish with these athletes, which in my mind, the most simple version of them can be boiled down into seven real components, right? We have, and I'm going to misuse some terms here, but again, I'm usually talking to kids, so they also have geometry and [expletive] to worry about.

So, we have rate of force development. How quickly can you produce force? Sprinting, jumping forward, jumping up, that kind of a thing, throwing stuff. You've got maximal strength, which is how much force can you produce really without a time constraint.

We got muscular endurance, which is producing a little bit of force for a while. And then repeat plyoability, so football, doing explosive stuff over and over again. You got a couple high-intensity energy systems. You got your VO2 max and you got your aerobic endurance.

Those are in my mind the seven big buckets that when we're thinking about, okay, what stressors does this athlete already have and where is it my job to fill up those buckets and create a more well-rounded athlete? Because if you've ever sent a kid from high school to college and god forbid the college to the pros, you're going to realize that none of these high school athletes are that good. Some of them are, but I'm not coaching them. I mean, I've coached a couple, but they're unicorns.

So, most of the kids are not that good at their sport until they get to a high D1 or the pro level. So, if the competitive advantage is physical maturity and physicality, how do we need to think about that?

James de Lacey18:06

Now, sport specialization's funny as well. Our daughter, she's three and a half now.

She does gymnastics and we go once a week and they I mean anything they do once a week they improve like crazy.

And I think at around five they can go into essentially a higher level gymnastics class and obviously gymnastics is very well known for over specialization at a very young age. And so they would go, I think it's starting five years old if they were going to look to go to college for gymnastics, three hours of training a day, five days a week.

And I was me, my wife, and I she loves gymnastics, but we don't want her to do that. That's [expletive] crazy. You're literally going to be by the time you get through college, you're broken. You have no other sport skills because where else you fit anything else in? You're just so over specialized.

Justin Gosselin18:59

If you don't make it, then you're screwed.

James de Lacey19:02

Absolutely. I think that's a huge problem. Especially with all the professional athletes talking about early sports specialization and things like that, I kind of see both sides of it. Because on one hand I've coached kids like my boy Alex was a three sport varsity athlete as a freshman. This kid benched legit 350 as a freshman. He was 210 pounds, 15 years old and deadlifted 650 on a hex bar. So just an absolute unit and squatted 425. So just an absolute unit.

And we kind of had to start having that talk like, hey man, you can do football or wrestling or lacrosse. Like what do you want to do? And then there's the other kids who by the time you start puberty, you have to, or get into your freshman year of high school, you kind of start having to make big boy decisions about what you want to pursue because you're probably not good enough to play multiple sports in high school and get to the next level.

Now, is five too young for that? Hell yeah. We are not doing that at five. But by the time puberty starts rolling around, then we can start having that conversation about what do you like? What are you naturally good at? How do you want to spend your time?

But when you're five years old, I mean, before puberty, do as much as you can. Jump off stuff, hop, play as much tag and dodgeball as humanly possible. Like, just have fun using your body. I would say maybe the one thing parents could index for a little bit is getting their kids exposed to basic movement patterns like squatting, pushing, pulling, things of that nature, some hex bar deadlifts, but also bounce. I think one of the things that is really underrated is the plyometric tendon stretch shortening cycle stuff when you're a kid.

You can see it in kids who only wrestle. They look ridiculous when they sprint or try to do anything else. And I think I'm 34, running a 4.5 with a vert in the high 30s, sometimes 40. And so I get a lot of clients in their mid-20s who did the powerlifting and bodybuilding thing and they're like, "All right, now I want to sprint and jump." And it's like, well, okay, you didn't play sports your whole life, so you don't have that underlying base of bounce and rhythm and sprint.

So now we do need to do a lot of the Matt Watson extensive plyometric stuff, but when you're a kid, that should be... Oh, dude, you want to hear a good story? So I was in the weight room with our football team a couple years ago, the best team in North history. And this kid, oh man, he was doing barbell rows, this big black kid, one of the strongest, naturally strongest kids on the team. And he was doing barbell rows, form looked perfect.

And I'm like, "Bro, you should totally go up. That looks amazing." And he just goes, "Well, I just want to be safe. I don't want to hurt myself." And he goes, "Dude." And I go, "Dude, like all the stuff you did as a kid, jumping out of trees, that's way more dangerous than lifting weights. You'll be fine." And he looks at me dead in my eyes and goes, "I was an inside kid."

So I think if parents are going to index towards one thing, jumping out of trees, trampoline, parkour, whatever you want to do, I think that stuff as a youth athlete, but up until puberty I think we should try to be having as much fun as possible.

Justin Gosselin22:36

It's funny, I don't know if it's only in the southern hemisphere but everyone plays a summer and a winter sport, so you have variation. I don't know if they do that here in the States.

James de Lacey22:42

You have summer camps. Like I remember going to the gym Christmas day. They have Christmas camp, a basketball camp over Christmas. So kids are in Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day doing basketball drills and I'm like, "Holy shit." And the kids and their parents are standing there watching them. I'm like, what are you doing?

Justin Gosselin23:07

I mean, I think a lot of that too is just pressure, right? In the United States. And especially where I'm from in New Jersey, a lot of these travel leagues really play on the fear of missing out thing and everybody's an elite 12-year-old and blah blah blah. I think all that's crazy.

I think a lot of parents have dreams they didn't accomplish that they're trying to live vicariously through their kids. Dude, I can tell you straight away the parents that I work with that have actually accomplished something athletically are the easiest to work with and the parents who fell short are the most difficult. It's clear as day.

I think also there, I mean a lot of kids where I am in central New Jersey area, they're playing one or two travel teams all year round and school sports and stuff. Like I got a girl right now, she's on a travel soccer team, a travel softball team, and runs cross country for her middle school. And people wonder why these kids are getting hurt.

And she's doing, and dare I say if she doesn't get hurt and continues on the path, she's a stud, don't get me wrong. But people wonder why these kids are getting hurt. It's you're trying to run software that their hardware cannot tolerate.

One of the ways I try to, it's one of the metaphors that I use with a lot of these parents is strength and conditioning is managing your hardware. Sport practice is software, and then things like small-sided games and cross training is your firmware, right? That's why I try to get a lot of these kids boxing in their off seasons because boxing in my mind is one of the perfect cross training sports.

You don't have to spar if you don't want, but conditioning, rotational power, footwork, hand eye coordination, dealing with stress, blah blah blah blah blah. It does that stuff in a way that other sports don't do.

Very similar to the way that Kyrie Irving is running routes with a quarterback in the offseason because basketball is smaller circles, more looping movement. Football is sprint cut, sprint cut. Those are complementary stimuli. And then so if I can, I'll try to work with the families to organize stuff like that. A lot of them just want their kids to do whatever and then my job is to just do the best with what we got.

But a lot of the time it really just comes down to basic strength training, monitoring their dose response relationship to training. A lot of the, if you work, I'm very fortunate. I'll get kids for three to five years in a row. So they become part of my family and vice versa. And I'm there for a lot.

And so a lot of that's where programming versus coaching becomes a very important distinction because a lot of times I'll roll into a session with a vague idea of what we're supposed to do. But it's like, oh, they had to do XYZ in gym class today. They have a huge test tomorrow. Sometimes we got to pivot. So having a good working model and then a real deep relationship with your clients is always going to outperform being a PubMed nazi 100 times out of 100.

James de Lacey26:28

I want to go deep into wrestling strength and conditioning but I wanted to start with your brother example. You mentioned one of them was weight room strong and the other one is wrestling strong. And I think that that's common, not common but anyone who's been around professional sport and collision and contact sports knows or has met someone, worked with someone where they're just menaces on the mats or field, they can't lift for [expletive]. And all you think of is like, what's going on? Like why is it like this? Why?

And then I guess my question to you is does that influence or change anything with what they do in the weight room based on that? Or is that just kind of like well this guy's just strong. He's still got to get stronger in the gym and vice versa. Maybe the guy who's already strong in the gym. I don't know. Maybe he's doing more wrestling stuff. You hit me.

Justin Gosselin27:14

So, I think there's definitely a couple things going on there. One, it's a temperament thing. Some people when they have something competitive going on in front of them, there's just a switch that flips in their brain and they become that menace. And then without that, they're a chill guy, right? So, I think that's part of it. I also think it's just about what you do every day. A lot of those guys that are menaces on the mat don't like lifting weights. They like wrestling.

And I mean, you would not believe how many wrestlers I got to truly bully into lifting weights properly. It's insane. All they want to do is wrestle. And so I actually use wrestling as an example with a lot of my lacrosse players, football players, soccer players because wrestling in terms of those seven big buckets that we talked about, it is the most complete athletic stimulus, right?

You're getting tons of aerobic fitness. Each match is a VO2 max test. Basically, you got tons of high intensity energy system use, you got tons of, wrestling the entire sport is static, dynamic, static, dynamic, static, dynamic. You've got tons of muscular endurance. The only thing that you're really missing from a wrestling practice is the purest expressions of rate of force development and maximal strength simply because there's no rest.

So then we got to go, okay, how do we maintain, how do we develop and maintain those adaptations throughout the course of the season? And to be honest with you, my wrestling training in season is basically like, okay, we're going to do the shortest sprint warm-up humanly possible. We're going to do three to four 20 to 40 yard sprints, maybe some broad jumps and other stuff, and then we're going to go lift.

We're going to do a heavy top set of one to six, maybe a back off set or two if you're more developed or we have an extra day before the next competition. And we're just organizing that around the principle of stimulus recovery adaptation. So wrestling practice is the hardest two hours most high school kids will ever have to go through, right?

So then we go, okay, that means even though the day of the match there's the most pomp and circumstance, it's by far the least effort bioenergetic. It's the least going on bioenergetically. So that would actually be at the bottom, right? So the freshest they'll ever be is the day after a match, provided they didn't have to cut crazy amount of weight.

So typically, hopefully they did well. So practice is medium or high intensity and then the lifting is the heaviest and the most stressful, right? Maybe not the most voluminous in season because again sport practice is backfilling so much of that. But then maybe we'll do a day where we get some sprints and some broad jumps. And then we do a bench pull-up squat or hex bar deadlift situation.

And then the next day, maybe we do some dumbbell jumps and vertical jumping and we'll do overhead press, maybe an inverted body weight row, maybe we'll throw some drop catches and push presses in there. And then we'll do a Romanian deadlift or maybe if we hex bar deadlift it on the first day, we'll do something that's a little less axial loading.

And then by the time those two days are over, they'll have just an only practice day and then the next day is their competition. And that small micro cycle managing those things. Sometimes we only have time for one workout because they compete multiple times a week sometimes, right?

James de Lacey30:57

Oh yeah. And sometimes, I mean, a lot of these event days are like five, six matches a day.

Justin Gosselin31:05

Yeah. Which, have you seen, there's a clip that usually makes the rounds every couple months of Firas Zahabi and Joe Rogan talking about the difference between the Eastern model and—

James de Lacey31:13

No, I don't think I watched that one.

Justin Gosselin31:15

Oh, it's really good stuff. Firas Zahabi is an interesting cat because I don't know that he has a formal background in exercise science, but he comes to a lot of really good conclusions just naturally. And those guys in Russia and a lot of the Stans, they train 10 hours a week, two hours a day, they'll taste the intensity of competition every once in a while, but most of it is skill-based and development.

In the United States, you have the club atmosphere where you'll go and kill yourself three days a week and then you've got three really hard days and then you go, "Oh, well, if I'm going to club practice and killing it those three days, I'll lift the other days." And now you're just at this new steady state of always killing yourself all the time.

And when you zoom out, there actually is a lot less work done under curve when you approach it that way. So yeah, I mean, in the thick of the season, these kids are competing two to three days a week. If they have tournaments and stuff on the weekends, that's going to be, you're literally there from like 8 to 5. It's crazy. And they'll have like five to seven matches that day sometimes.

James de Lacey32:29

It's a huge workload.

Justin Gosselin32:30

Yeah. And I think when we're—I've worked with a couple of ROC programs and college programs to rethink that stuff because the way I look at it is sport practice should fill a lot of that aerobic endurance bucket. You talk about all the time, do fighters need more zone two? And it's like, well, if you train 10 hours a week, probably not.

I get a lot of these kids that are gassing out in wrestling matches. It's like, bro, you go through two hours of the worst practice a person can imagine. How are you gassing out in seven minutes, 6 minutes? It doesn't make any sense. And the only things I can come up with are a couple. One, you just panicked. You got nervous and you had an adrenaline dump.

Two, you're just straight up overtrained and we need to pull back. Or three, you have the gas tank, you just didn't use it correctly. But I just refuse to believe if you could bust your ass without thought, just totally getting after it for two hours, you can't wrestle for six minutes. That's crazy.

And in boxing, it's an even better example because how many punches do you throw in a three minute round of sparring? Maybe 40, 50, something like that. You cannot tell me that bioenergetically that is more taxing than running as hard as you can for three minutes or getting on an Airdyne bike for three minutes. The thing that makes it tired is this, right? It's not the actual physical nature.

Wrestling is a little different because there's just so much strain. But so then we have to address the psychological and the skill components. The answer for wrestlers is always just work harder. And it's like, well, maybe let's start getting smarter as you get more advanced. That works to a point.

James de Lacey34:18

Yeah, there's also the fact that people doing two-hour practices, they never really hit the max intensity stuff or missing that from their conditioning. You're doing two hours. So, there's just no way you can get those really hard repeats in to the point where you could do it on a bike as an example.

So, that could be another thing that ends up being undercooked from these—because obviously everything is synonymous with volume. It's just time and volume on the mats and just grind, the grinding culture of wrestling is huge. So that's another I guess that's another thing on there.

But are there—because obviously US collegiates it's mainly freestyle but is there—do you work with any Greco Roman style? Is there a difference in programming maybe between the two styles?

Justin Gosselin35:05

Not really. So we do a lot of—they do that as cross training so they'll do the Greco and other stuff in the off season. And with a lot of youth athletes they have just such glaring deficits of size and strength. I can't speak for everybody, but where I'm at in central New Jersey, I got a lot of kids who are good at math. They're just they're not what you think of when you think of genetic specimens for sports.

So they're not from North Dakota, from some cornfield or something. No, no, they're not from Nigeria either. Got a lot of British people here, the descendants of the pale whites that are not naturally the best at sports.

So a lot of times their glaring deficits are just like, "Okay, if we could only accomplish one thing. If we put 20 pounds of muscle on this guy and the strength commensurate to build that tissue and kept everything else the same, how would they do?" The answer is probably pretty great because they do all of the lessons and the travel and the thises and the thats.

So, when we're talking about what are we actually going to accomplish, a lot of times it just boils down to getting bigger and stronger and then sprinkling in those other things, the repeats, certain types of cross training, contrast training, if I can identify a specific deficit within an athlete, but the core foundation of try to get bigger, try to get stronger, try to improve your ability to try hard.

That's another thing with sprinting and jumping that I've noticed is that a lot of these kids don't—one of the reasons why I'm fast and can jump high is because I can summon an immense amount of anger very very quickly. Right? A lot of these kids don't have that. So when I try to explain, hey man, I need you to try harder, it sounds patronizing and insulting.

And what I'm really trying to say is, hey, there's a horizon of effort that you do not know exists that is available to you, but I can see it in your body that you're not doing it. And so then how do I get them to do that? Also, coaching versus programming, right?

So, I would say those are usually more often than not the biggest things that we have to address with a youth athlete where, if I only get them one maybe two hours a week and then they're doing their own stuff on the other side, when they're with me specifically, we're lifting heavy, we're trying really hard, I'm trying to get them to do contrast training. So we're exposing them to that horizon of effort. And then a lot of the other stuff is more grunt work, you might say.

James de Lacey37:28

How does it change or look in the offseason or pre—I don't know if you call it preseason but essentially just anything before the season. How does that programming change or look?

Justin Gosselin38:06

That's a great question. So with wrestling again it's just the best example because the sport itself is so complete. So wrestling season in New Jersey starts the week after Thanksgiving and they're going to be responsible for 10 hours of wrestling practice per week plus or minus. And then for the school team, right?

Because wrestling is actually really the last sport where your performance on the high school team matters for recruiting. Doesn't really matter for much else. Football, you're going to camps and combines and stuff. Everything else is travel basically. Basketball is AAU.

So we go, okay, if you got to be responsible for 10 hours of wrestling first week of December, but you only go to club two to three hours a week. That is where we need to start exposing them to some generic zone 2 circuit training and stuff.

So that way their work isn't going up 300% overnight, especially off of the weekend of a holiday here in the United States, right? So then we go, okay, so maybe the week before Thanksgiving we'll do 7 to 9 hours. Maybe we'll try to get you to an extra club practice. Maybe I'll program some zone two multi-directional circuit training type stuff where we're trying to get them in, we'll do the aerodyne bike for a minute and then kettle bell windmills for 30 seconds on each side and then a medicine ball slam. Low medium effort, nothing crazy, but just getting them used to doing stuff.

And we backtrack that down to September. If by the beginning of the school year, end of August, early September, they're only doing two to three hours, we slowly try to progress them up in that so that way they're not just surviving the first couple weeks, they're thriving. Because once you dig that hole of fatigue, and you got to cut weight, it's impossible to dig your way out of that.

So that is one time where I will start to actually program legit zone two, but once the season comes, all that stuff is out. And then typically in that same time period, we'll start, let's say in the off season we're doing traditional high bar squats and Romanian deadlifts. Maybe I might transition them into some kind of box squat or a Smith machine box squat where we're pushing a little bit more weight, but we're only doing sets of two to five maybe. So that way we can improve just those kind of explosiveness metrics.

And slowly tightening kind of the exercise selection, bringing volume down, making things obviously you can't make it more specific, but more specific to what we're trying to do, right? A lot of these kids, they have such a game of catch-up to play for their physical maturity.

I'm having them do a lot of power bodybuilding style stuff where an upper body day is going to be four, three to four sets of four to six reps on bench. Same thing with weighted pull-ups. Then we're going to do some lateral raises and we're going to do some curls and we're going to do some triceps.

And then we start taking the accessory work out, maybe shifting to more of a top set, back off set paradigm. So that way, and then when we get to the season, we drop a lot of that stuff and kind of refresh and reorganize from there.

James de Lacey40:56

That top set back off set is so slept on, man. That was, I mean, I still use it all the time. I use it in a bunch of my programs with my guys as well. And it was probably, again, back in the golden age, it was probably more popular back then when it was talked about more.

But it's so good because you get that you work up to that nice high intensity set. You get to feel some heavy weight. You're not going to a max, but you do three reps that are smooth, heavy, don't need to be psyched up on. Then you can autoregulate the volume when you're doing the back offs. And it just gives you everything in such a short time frame.

Justin Gosselin42:01

And you can use it forever. You can use it forever.

James de Lacey42:03

Oh yeah. And those qualities drain quickly. One or two weeks of [expletive] off in the middle of the season can [expletive] the whole thing up.

Justin Gosselin42:11

So how do we get athletes to accomplish that without them, a lot of these kids don't like lifting weights the same way that I do. So, I got to figure out how can we split the difference instead of just being the come on, you got to do more type of strength coach guy. That's not my personality, but these kids a lot of times grow up with way too much freedom to make their own choices essentially.

So, they're coming to me and they're like, I'm paying you. We're electing to be here. Can we find a better way? This is not the Eastern block where if you miss your list for that day, you're not getting dinner. That's not how this works. I'm usually the last, I'm usually one of the first things to get cut when schedule becomes tight, money gets tight, whatever the case may be.

So, I have to more look at it from that lens. And then when the season comes, that's basically just, okay, that's when we're really trying to monitor your dose response relationship to especially the strength stuff. Because in wrestling, in every sport, you can be a little more efficient in practices, you can dog it a little bit, but the weight room is really the only place for the objective feedback of are you recovered or not.

If one day you come in and you can only do 70% of what I thought you could, okay, maybe you had a rough couple days of tests, maybe there's some stress at home, whatever the case may be. But if that happens two to three sessions in a row, red light, red flags go up and now I got to now we got to start making some choices about where we're going to pull back on other things.

Because a lot of times it's not that top set of two to three that sent you over the ledge in terms of not recovering. It was that extra sport practice. It was staying up till 2 am with your friends on Halloween. So, you just got to work. You actually have to work with what's in front of you instead of operating in fantasy land about what would be perfect if I was working with somebody who isn't actually a real human.

These people, most people are not working with professional athletes. So, like,

James de Lacey44:24

And even professional athletes, dude, these guys party so hard.

Justin Gosselin44:31

Tell me. What are we talking about? Perfect program.

James de Lacey44:34

You think James Harden gives a [expletive] about his program when he's turning up to a strip club in Atlanta for the 19th night in a row? [expletive] no.

Justin Gosselin44:44

Oh man. Yeah. Anyone who's worked in the pro sport environment understands what Justin is talking about, man.

James de Lacey44:51

Dude, think about how locked up you feel after a 4-hour flight and then do one of those twice a week. One because you had to go for work and the other one because you wanted to go to Miami for the weekend and then let's talk about extensive plyometrics. Okay.

Justin Gosselin45:07

It's crazy.

James de Lacey45:08

Do you ever get a chance to collab or collaborate with the sport of wrestling coaches to help with the kind of scheduling and programming or is it kind of these guys kids come to you and you just kind of have to figure out what they've done?

Justin Gosselin45:08

So I definitely have found a lot of push back with certain high school coaches. Which is crazy to me because with all due respect I don't pretend to know [expletive] about teaching social studies. Why do you pretend to know about my job?

James de Lacey45:46

Did any school they don't have strength and conditioning programs? They're kind of smaller schools or

Justin Gosselin45:51

No. So, the strength and conditioning landscape, especially in New Jersey, a lot of the southern schools are starting to have a guy who manages it all for the whole school. But unfortunately, New Jersey is a pretty blue state and sports are taking a bigger and bigger back seat where they're much more concerned about other things at these schools than they are about Friday night lights. So it's definitely been very difficult.

But I would say football is a pretty easy sport to program for, much to most people's confusion. But with wrestling, thankfully, a lot of them don't really do strength. Strength and conditioning happens when they're doing sprints in the upstairs of the high school and they're just doing push-ups and pull-ups. The big thing that I've noticed with high school wrestling programs is the 30 minutes of CrossFit-esque circuit training at the end of practices that I find just absolutely detestable.

Even just, let's just sound it out. All right, you just wrestled for an hour and a half. You're tired. You're stressed out. Watch them do the medicine ball slams and the battle ropes and the kipping pull-ups and the thises and the that. Does it look like when we strip the movements away, does it look like any stimulus that they're deriving from that circuit training couldn't have been accomplished by more wrestling?

If we're going to do that stuff, we need to do it at the beginning of practice and we need to do it fresh. And that is probably the biggest thing. But otherwise, I don't have to deal with it that much because they don't do it. Football, lacrosse, baseball, those are usually the sports where there's a little bit more confusion, but especially New Jersey, it's one of the best wrestling states in the country. Besides Pennsylvania and California is so big that we don't even count them.

Dude, New Jersey has one state tournament. It's the densest, most stressful competition. Even Pennsylvania has two or three, I don't remember, but two or three state tournaments. New Jersey only has one. So, it's a different vibe here.

And I would say New Jersey is actually the best youth athlete sports state in the country. When we're talking about all things considered, we got some of the best football programs. Not all of them, not even most of them, but we got a couple of those. We got some great basketball programs. We have tons of kids go to the majors out of high school from baseball, lacrosse, you name it. In terms of on average, I think New Jersey is absolutely number one.

And so it's usually those other sports outside of wrestling that I'm dealing with the most push back on.

James de Lacey48:41

Makes sense. I had a comment in the chat here from Tyler T. Frisbee saying, "Dudes, Justin gave me a consult years ago before I became a pro disc golfer. He spoke to me about the training philosophy needed to use the weight room as a tool and some of the psych aspects of golf."

Justin Gosselin48:54

Oh, dude, I remember that. That was awesome. Hell yeah. What a small world. Yeah, I remember. I was living in Colorado. That was 2020 or 2021. Dang. Got to do a shout out on the pod there.

James de Lacey49:06

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I grew up competing and playing golf and that's when I was a kid that in, 10, 11, 12, it was kind of my dad and I's dream. We were making clubs and stuff and then the game, dude, I walked into high school at 5'11 and 215. I was a big boy, dropping 30 in church league basketball games. And when you can't athlete your way to being a better golfer, it just breaks you. So I have a bit of insight on that.

Nice. I do want to round this out on this topic a little bit on the specificity. Obviously talked about specific for the goal, but wrestling is a pretty heavy isometric sport, too. So are there any isometrics you use with your younger wrestlers? If so, or if not, why not? Or why?

Justin Gosselin49:54

It depends on the time of year. So, if they are in the middle of wrestling season, probably not because it would be redundant a little to in my mind. But preseason or off season, sometimes I'll program them as games, hey, can we just beat our record on this kind of like an inverted body weight row ISO is one of my favorites. Because they're so hard. But you can see when you start to fail and the kids start fighting it and all that kind of stuff.

Where I usually use isometrics is in contrast training. So, I try to identify what type of athlete I'm looking at and whether they need more strength yielding or more strength to overcome or a pre-activation to overcome, right? So, for me, I'm 6'2, 220, was 250 for a decade. My constraint when I'm striking the ground and sprinting is yielding to that impact force and then turning it around.

So, some type of maybe extreme iso lunge with the barbell under my leg. Hold that for 5 to 10 seconds and then do dumbbell jump, some kind of dumbbell split squat jump or something of that nature. I've had a lot of success with that.

I really like overcoming bench press isos with plyometric push-ups, whether we're using a band assisted across the chest or things of that nature. I try to keep them relatively similar to the movement patterns. I don't get way too in the weeds with certain things. If we got to push this way, it's all right, well, let's just do it on a bench then, or maybe we'll do a hang up here into a drop catch. So that way we're training that static dynamic static dynamic situation.

I love isometrics. They've definitely become super popular in the last couple years, which is great. I also think they're really important for again teaching that horizon of effort. The bar slows down a little bit as you approach failure, but when you have somebody screaming in your face and you're trying not to fall, an extreme iso lunge, that's a different thing.

And I think I'm not going to be hitting a 12-year-old girl with that necessarily, but some people need to go through that in order to get them over the hump. And it might not even be data related. At some point you work with enough people where you just go, I know what you need today.

James de Lacey52:24

How are you figuring out who needs or who needs what regarding you mentioned the yielding versus overcoming, I guess, iso strength.

Justin Gosselin52:24

So, typically bigger, stronger athletes will have a more difficult time dealing with impact. So more often than not, and you can kind of see it when they run, if their foot clamps, if they do that clampy thing, when you see Usain Bolt strike the ground, he strikes and then it's just off, right? If they get that kind of clappy thing, we could go back to the extensive plyometric thing and try to build more capacity, but more often than not, it's a feel and sensation thing that I found, especially if you're playing a lot of sports all the time. So that's a good way.

Sometimes if we're dealing with a horizon of effort issue or we need kind of a shortcut for a warm-up, one of my favorites for a lot of these skinny white kids is doing a quarter squat into the spotter arms with on a squat overcoming isometric three reps of three seconds and then I'll have them altitude jump off of a bench so that way they're getting both sides of the stretch shortening cycle.

Dude, do two supersets of that with three reps each and then you're ready to jump. I only got you for an hour and I go to people's houses and stuff. So I don't have all day. We got to get in and get out.

So it just depends. I would say most people need dealing with impact a little bit better especially if you're bigger. But it just depends on what goal we're trying to drive. Beginning of the session overcoming isometrics. Maybe at the end of the session we'll do the yielding type stuff.

James de Lacey53:42

Nice. Yeah, that sports go one is one of my favorites too with the barbell between the legs because you can load the [expletive] out of that. And if you're holding for, I mean even the short durations you hold longer ones, 20 to 30 seconds man, that's a [expletive] killer.

Justin Gosselin54:23

Have you seen all of the Jay Schroeder [expletive] coming out over the past five years? So that guy that I mentioned Chris not he was one of Jay Schroeder's disciples and does a lot of that stuff and that stuff works with his athletes because I mean it works for everybody but it works with his athletes because they're already pros. They're doing this under extreme basically electrocution that's supercharging that information highway so they can get a lot of juice out of that squeeze.

There is a big difference in my mind between building the Ferrari and maintaining the Ferrari. I am mostly in the building the Ferrari business. And so we just got to think okay what are our peak thresholds for performance? What are the capacities that we need to understand on a weekly basis? I do some selection prep for military guys.

Perfect example, and this would be maybe what we end on is a lot of these Navy Seal guys, they go, "Okay, I gotta run 50 miles a week at an eight minute pace to get ready for buds." And it's "Okay, great. That's 400 minutes of zone 2 at an 8 minute pace, whatever the case may be."

Problem is, first of all, you got two weeks of admin when you get there. So you start to drain after that. You show up in your best shape, but then you start to drain. But how about before that maybe we do 300 minutes worth of the running, 100 or 200 minutes of off feet zone two and then 100 to 200 minutes of rucking where we're actually increasing the demands on those connective tissues and your architecture.

So that way now all of a sudden instead of 400 minutes you're walking in with 600 minutes per week. You've got an excess of cardiovascular adaptations. You got an excess of architectural adaptations and then if there's a week or two of admin or suboptimal training you're still over you're still overprepared so you have a little ways to go down.

And if I but you still got to be able to run that four miles in the sand in your boots in 27:15 so how do we organize for those peak performance values as well as what are you actually responsible for on a weekly basis, JJ DJ Ratic, basketball player.

James de Lacey56:42

No, my basketball knowledge I mean I saw him, but my basketball knowledge ain't that good.

Justin Gosselin56:46

Fair enough. He was a top pro in the NBA for 15 years. He's now the coach of the Lakers. He was very famous for, he said in an interview once that he didn't retire because he couldn't do another season. He retired because he couldn't do another off season because the off season was in excess of those demands.

So I try to take a very similar approach with my youth guys are hey we if you want to have a really successful year this year we have to start with that six months out slowly building those capacities so that way we have something to take away from. All these studies online 6 weeks 12 weeks blah blah blah blah blah, it's bro I'm training guys for five years at a time, a six week study means almost nothing to me.

And that's where the more traditional periodization information becomes maligned, I think, because of all the studies that come out and people like to feel like they're reading. But they just don't work with people long enough for it to really matter.

James de Lacey57:50

Yeah. I put you on the firing line here to finish, but on the topic of the NBA and pros when when there was, I'm sure you saw I think was it Kevin Durant that was doing all the fashion up that went around. I would love your take on what's going on there and your opinion.

Justin Gosselin58:06

Yeah, I think there's a most charitable version and a least charitable version to any charitable version is that we don't know what the hell Kevin Durant does on a daily basis, or these guys who post about athletes who get hurt and then they post two seconds of a shitty training session they did once where some guy had a camera and it's like, see, if they did it the way I do it, they wouldn't have gotten hurt. It's like, well, you're a piece of [expletive]. Don't do that. And then we can have a real discussion.

So the most charitable version is that he is doing normal strength training somewhere and we just got what they thought would look cool for Instagram because that's what everybody does. The least charitable version is he's getting some bad advice and just a lot of these guys again building the Ferrari, maintaining the Ferrari, right?

Would it sound good to say that oh putting on 10 pounds of muscle for Kevin Durant and getting appreciably stronger in the compound lifts would positively impact his game? Yeah, probably. But also, he's a billion dollars worth of industry. I just know if Kevin Durant's people called me and said, "Hey, Justin, love what you're doing with all those 15-year-olds. Why don't you come train Kevin?" I go, "Okay." And then I'm gonna what risk a billion dollars worth of industry because I wanted him to squat all the way down?

That's crazy. So I think when these guys, it's a gift and a curse. The best athletes in the world have the most coaches and the worst athletes in the world have the least amount of coaches, right? So, if there's not some guy who actually knows what they're doing, the athlete themselves is usually the information scrambling node there.

A lot of them need one big homie who actually knows his [expletive] who can then bring in different guys for different things. I hope that that's not all the strength training he's doing. Could we say that he would be much better if he was doing different stuff? Probably. But I don't know that if I got KD on Monday of next week that I'd be doing things much differently than the way he'd been doing them.

I'd probably try to find a very slow way to progress him towards proper strength.

James de Lacey1:00:31

And I can imagine a lot of those high-profile guys that are maybe going to different things, there's probably some kind of terms in place around injuries as well. I'm sure because there will probably be hey if he gets hurt training with you you're paying.

Justin Gosselin1:00:51

And the NFL is the perfect example. One of the reasons why a lot of these guys get hurt is because they don't train at the campus off season. They go, I don't understand. Well so if you get hurt off of campus your contract gets voided so these guys don't really have a ton of incentive to train risky or that hard or to push themselves.

James de Lacey1:01:17

They also cannot train on campus, right? Isn't there rules? It doesn't make any sense?

Justin Gosselin1:01:21

Listen, I don't work with a ton of NFL guys. I've been very fortunate to observe a bunch of training sessions. I'm not in that world like that. But yeah, it's kind of ass backwards and then you want to have them playing on a different surface every day or every game and it's like, well, no [expletive] these guys are getting hurt.

I would say basketball players are probably it's a little more lifestyle and it's a little more I don't want to lift heavy. I can already jump 42 inches. Why do I need to squat more? And it's like fair enough, man. But yeah, the pro sports thing, it's like we want to talk about the X's and O's of sport physiology, but these guys are some of the hardest working, but also worst lifestyles. Not from a drinking, smoking, partying way, a little bit, but just unpredictable.

If KD wants to take a private flight to the south of France on a random ass Thursday, he's doing it. And then I'm a straight ignition guy to go, "Okay, Kevin, does the Airbnb have kettle bells?" I don't know.

I can't even imagine what kind of job that is. At least with these kids, I know what they got at the house. Usually, I'm the one who told them to get XYZ. And I can go, okay, if you're at the crib, I know you can do XYZ. We're going to have you do that. Oh, you're going to this gym five minutes from my house. Okay, I know what they have. I can tell you to do that.

I cannot imagine what it's like trying to wrangle cats that are these NBA players who don't even really give a [expletive] about lifting weights anyway, with a preseason that's two or three weeks long.

James de Lacey1:02:55

Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Justin, where can people find and follow you? Keep up with everything you're doing.

Justin Gosselin1:02:58

My website is justingoslin.com. On Instagram, justin_goslin if you guys have any questions or want to talk [expletive]. Feel free to chat in the DM, whatever you guys need. And thank you so much, James, for having me on. I love doing podcasts. It was great to get to talk shop and I'm happy to do this again whenever you want.

James de Lacey1:03:21

No, perfect. I appreciate you coming on and I'll link everything down in the description for anyone who wants to get in touch and there'll be clips and all sorts put over social media. So, make sure you guys following the Instagram page and everything else so you can catch it all. But anyway, we'll keep in touch anyway and thanks for coming on.

Justin Gosselin1:03:21

Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate it.