Athletic Performance Podcast
The Athletic Performance Podcast: we discuss all things performance-related, with a focus on pushing the boundaries of speed, power, and strength.
Athletic Performance Podcast
018 - Jason Feairheller on Developing Multidirectional Game Speed in Athletes
Jason Feairheller is the Co-Owner and Strength Coach at Function and
Strength in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania. When Jason began his training
career, he had an interest in speed training, and over the past decade,
that interest has turned into a passion. Jason has developed the course
“Improving Game Speed Through Multidirectional Plyometrics,” which can
be found at multidirectionalpower.com. He is also co-host of the Game
Speed Podcast.
Here's a quick overview of our show:
✅ Why his athletes not getting faster led to him investigating GAME SPEED
✅ Shin angles for Change of Direction tasks
✅ Building a speed training program
✅ Assessing the game speed ability of his athletes
✅ Ideal footwear for Change of Direction training
✅ ..and much, much more
To follow Ryan on the socials, please visit his instagram @jasonfeairheller.
Visit @coachryanpatrick for more updates on this podcast and human performance.
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Ryan Patrick:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the athletic performance podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Patrick. I am super excited for today's guest Jason Fairheller. Uh, he's someone that I followed on social media for quite some time. I've been a customer of his. I've taken numerous courses, um, bought some, you know, programs from you and I love what you do. And I know today we're going to dive deep into a topic or topics. I feel like you are really a stand out on and that's speed training and especially game speed. So, you know, before I get too far down this rabbit hole, Uh, for anyone who doesn't know you, could you start by telling everyone a little bit about yourself?
Jason Feairheller:Sure. Um, former division three athlete, like probably a ton of strength coaches out there. And I guess what kind of got me into strength training, sports performance training in general was I always thought that my I, I never performed as well on the field as I thought I could have based off on, like, the work that I put in outside of the gym. And I always thought like, what am I missing? What is it that actually gets someone to reach their athletic potential? And, Got far into like the strength training side, then Olympic lifting, then in the speed training. And then I went to Lee Taft speed retreat, which was like at his house, you spend a weekend and it's like full immersion. And it was awesome. Like I had a decent, what, what I thought was like a decent understanding of speed before that. But after that, I was like, Oh, there's way more to this. And I just started going down this rabbit hole further and further and further, looking at speed training through the lens of. Almost like corrective exercise, using it as an assessment tool, using it to fix certain issues that you see. How do you incorporate it with agility training and change of direction training? How do we improve power amongst all of those things? And another thing that kind of. Got me into this whole thing was we were training a hockey program at my gym. And basically we had a contract where we trained them all year round and hockey players will practice like three or four times a week. They were a tier one hockey team. And I'm thinking for as much time as they put into their practice, like why are some players elite? And some players not because if the argument is just you do strength training And you let the game take care of the speed work. Why are there athletes that are still slow, like significantly slower? Why, why can't they change direction as well? I know, like it's different, like hockey, the idea of like skating is a skill within itself. But for the amount of time, these athletes were putting in, like, they should have been better, like quote unquote athletes, and you can apply that to any sport. It's like every sport now is pretty much all year round. So. Why are there not actually like better athletes out there? And then starting to incorporate a lot of these speed topics and speed ideas into a training model. Um, what I'm seeing is a lot of them aren't necessarily good, what I would call movers on the field. Meaning they, they don't transition well, even within close change of direction drills. So if someone isn't performing that well, how can I expect them to move well when it comes to any sort of reactive scenario? That's kind of where, where I am right now and what really got me kind of thinking about all of these things.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, I went to Lee Taft's, um, in house experience too, and I feel like anybody who really gets into multidirectional skills, especially if they're American, you know, we have this pedigree of strength training, bigger, faster, stronger, uh, putting more weight on the bar, and I think for a lot of young athletes, we'll, we'll unpack this a little bit more later, but, I think that's probably a fair starting point, you know, you need adequate force production. But to your point, I think a lot of us get to a place where adding, adding five pounds on the bar is no longer useful. It's not making a better athlete. It's not making a faster athlete, a more robust, a rapid change of direction, you know, type of type of athlete. And so, you know, he was really one of the first ones who. Kind of flip the script and we can start to use speed as an assessment to use speed as not just a training, a thing that we need to train, but as a diagnostic and there's there's so much power in that. And man, I could go in a bunch of different directions, but, you know, I definitely want to lead off, you know, continuing this conversation about change of direction. So, um, can you 1st talk about. You mentioned good movers. So when you're looking for an efficient change of direction tasks. What are kind of the big rocks for you?
Jason Feairheller:For sure. So some of the, the main things are, you need to have an athlete that can create a shin angle. And what I mean by that is a more positive shin angle that allows for better acceleration out of any sort of change of direction. So in order to have that, they need to be able to have a wide foot plant. Outside of their center mass. And if they don't, that kind of is going to lead to poor, I don't want to say bad acceleration, but not as optimal acceleration across the board. So that's step one. And then along with that, we want to see very little knee flexion. So they don't want to strike the ground with a leg. That's totally straight. It should be just bent a little bit because you can produce a lot of force over a very short period of time with very shallow angles of knee flexion. And if we go into deep knee flexion, then it's just going to take longer to accelerate out of that. So we're not going to be as good changing direction out of that. And we just kind of like keep working. up the chain. Um, what is the position of their, their trunk when they're changing direction? If it's lagging behind, you know, their foot is going to strike and their upper body is going to kind of like sway to the side before it kind of gets going the direction they need to go. And then along with that, we still need them to be able to create good propulsive force and have decent amounts of just speed in general. To accelerate out of any change of direction. So that is kind of just the general basis of good change of direction. And from there, how do, how do we even apply that? So we, we look at sports and I can't tell people enough, just watch athletes move on the field and It's not as complicated as you might originally think it is. There's only a handful of different movement patterns that athletes will go through on the field, but the combination of how they perform those and link those different movement patterns, the angles of them, the speeds in and out of them are that's where. You can kind of really create a ton of variability and create what I would call like a good mover is someone that can create force and power out of any change of direction out of any movement pattern and anybody that's not familiar with what I would call like movement patterns, people think of movement patterns, they think of like strength movement patterns, like a squat, a hinge, a press, a pool. No, but in terms of movement patterns for speed, we're talking about linear speed. Curve a linear running. So any sort of running around a curve, a shuffle, a lateral run, which a lot of people term a crossover run, but you you've been to Lee's course, you know, like he, he mentions that it's called a lateral run because you're not actually crossing the feet over the hips will turn, even though the shoulders are staying relatively square, the direction they need to go. a back pedal and then a hip turn is kind of like a repositioning step. So if I am transitioning backward in any direction, I'm going to strike a foot into the ground. That's going to allow my other leg to pick up off the ground and reposition whatever direction I need to go backwards. And athletes perform combinations of those things. So when you start looking at sports and speed and you look through the lens of those movement patterns, you can learn a lot more about the athletes that you're training.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. One of the things you allude to here is, um, transitions, right? There's, there's kind of these base movement patterns and really game speed is about how efficient is an athlete. Transitioning through all of these things. And so when it comes to assessment, you know, I'm, I'll use myself as an example. I am oftentimes stuck in the gym. Love to go watch my athletes play. We try to make it a priority to go see each of them during the season, but sometimes I don't have the luxury of assessing them in real time. You know, I have to make. Uh, some kind of informed decisions inside of my environment, which, you know, can be challenging, right? It's, uh, they're running around on turf. There's no opponents, maybe no ball, maybe no shot clock or some kind of urgency, very decontextualized. So, what kind of drills and tests do you find valuable to discriminate the capabilities of? of some of the athletes that you're working with and decide where to start to, you know, create this intervention in terms of what they need from a speed or game speed standpoint.
Jason Feairheller:So first thing I would do, I would say like, how is anyone setting up their speed program? And in general, how I would set up a program would be. I would have, and we'll call this like a three day a week program. I would still have a day focused primarily on linear speed. And then I would have a day where I'm doing attacking drills, which I would say any direction moving forward. And then a day of like side to side or retreating drills and retreating any direction, moving backwards. Now, when we are doing attacking drills, that doesn't mean that today we are only doing a shuffle. Or we are only doing curvilinear running. It should be layering in the drills over the course of that speed training session that you're doing that day to make them tougher in terms of you're adding more speed to the change of direction. You need to increase the level of coordination to execute the movement skill well, and then. You can start off with something very basic. Let's just say I'll use a side to side or a, yeah, a side to side type of speed training day. I'll just say, first thing would be a shuffle out and back. That's very simple. All right. What am I looking for first? Can athletes cover some distance with a shuffle? Are they executing it based off of the model that I have in my head? And the model that I have, athletes need to start low, they need to start with their feet wide to create a shin angle, they need to push, Off of, if I'm going to my right, I need to push hard off of my left, pick my right foot up, turn it to the side a little bit, and pull with my right foot. It's a push and pull gait pattern with a shuffle. Can they do that without their head movement going up and down? All right, let's say they don't. All right, now I'm giving them a correction. All right, stay in a tunnel. Something simple. All right, they are thinking, all right, I need to stay, pretend I'm in a tunnel, I need to stay in there. Can they execute the movement skill well? Yes. Okay, good. Now, what might be lacking from that? Maybe they're not covering as much distance as you want to. So now, maybe, I just add a tiny bit of band resistance, where now, they, they feel a little bit of an initial pull. But I need them to cover some more distance and they are subconsciously thinking I have a resisted band here I need to get to a certain distance. I really need to push and pull In order to do that. All right, and then maybe we take the band away and we go back to that All right Now that is one tiny example of a drill that covers Maybe like two to three yards one direction two to three yards the other direction but we can apply that kind of model of You Can they do the movement pattern well on its own? If they cannot, we, we need to start there because if they can't perform a shuffle well, they don't understand the model of a lateral run, even a curvilinear run. It's going to be very hard once you start to layer in different skills. And we talk about linking movement patterns all the time. And now, a lot of that can just be done within the first five minutes of learning. of a training session. We do each of the movement patterns individually. Cool. We shuffle out, we shuffle back. All right. Now we might go into a shuffle into a sprint, but we've just worked that individual movement pattern before we layer more stuff on. But then from there, once we have, once an athlete's have basic understanding of the movement patterns individually, Now we can start to link them. And the first thing I would say was, over shorter distances, it's always going to be much easier to change direction, to move well. And the reason for that is because over just a few yards, Athletes don't have as much speed. They, it's just impossible for them to gain a ton of speed. And it makes it then easier for them to transition or to decelerate, even redirect force, slow down. And then once they can do that over shorter distances, now we can add more speed. Or more tougher angles of change of direction. So there are a few different ways that you could make change of direction more difficult. You can add, and I'll start off by this saying about seven to eight seconds is the max that I will typically do a drill just because after that, the quality of the movement goes down and if I'm training speed, I need athletes moving as fast as they're capable of moving. So I don't want it to turn into a conditioning session, where, okay, we do a 10 second drill, next guy up, they go, all right, first guy's right back up, where they're already tired, and now we're just doing conditioning. We're not actually improving their ability to shuffle faster, to perform a lateral run faster, any of those things. All right, so now we, we have that down, so we have our, our limit of time. Drills will typically be like one to two seconds initially, and that means that they are just covering short distance with maybe a change of direction. But if I want to make it more difficult, I add in more total distance within the drill, so that could mean Maybe I'm going three yards instead of just out and back. I'm going out, back, out, back. So I've layered in more distance that way. And that makes it more intense just through more change of direction. Within that I could make the angle of change of direction faster. If I am sprinting straight ahead and I just make a like 15 degree cut to the side, it's virtually nothing like you can continue with a ton of speed doing that. But if I'm sprinting straight ahead and I want to angle back at like 45 degrees, obviously that's going to be much more difficult. And we look at how long it takes an athlete to decelerate. How many steps are they taking when they're trying to break down before they redirect force and come back the other way. So those are all of kind of the general assessments of where I start, but I always start with individual movement patterns over short distances. And once athletes understand, okay, I need to move fast, I need to cover some ground, I need to be quick off the ground, then that is kind of the foundation of which you can start to make things more difficult and progress. However you need to.
Ryan Patrick:So I'm imagining walking through a session that you just kind of outlined. Athletes come in and you're using some of these basic movement patterns, whether it's a shuffle or lateral run as part assessment, part warmup and part patterning for the athletes at the beginning of the session. Is that, is that what I'm hearing?
Jason Feairheller:Absolutely. So like a good example would be, all right, let's say I'm performing a lateral run and I'm just doing, I always. Use examples of like side to side drills, because it's just easy for coaches to kind of understand what I'm talking about. But let's say I have an athlete who is pretty strong. And can get off the ground pretty quick. And I'm having them perform a lateral run out and back. We've already done our warmup. Now our gym is about like 20 yards of turf by like eight yards of turf. So we don't have like a huge amount of space. It's plenty to get done, whatever we need to get done. But it's not like I just have endless amounts of space. I would have them. Because they can be quick off the ground already, and because they have pretty good amounts of strength, perform the drill with a band around their waist. Where they are doing like a band accelerated lateral run, where they are running towards the anchor point first, and then away from the anchor point and doing that, and you can adjust the amount of band tension. That you have to kind of accelerate them more and to create more force over very shorter distances. Now let's say I have an athlete who is the opposite where they're not quite as strong. They have a pretty poor start. They, they need more of a push. I would have them do the opposite where, okay, everyone's doing the lateral run. Some are doing with a band, whether it's accelerating them into the turn, but that, uh, athlete who's not as strong with the band around their waist, they're moving away from the anchor point initially, and then coming back. So when they move away from the anchor point, they have to push against resistance to try to cover some more ground. But then when they come back, the band, because the tension increases, actually assists their change of direction and gets them moving back faster. And then over time we can manipulate that where they don't need to have as much band help when they're doing that type of drill. And that's just like one example of how you might do that. Within a group of athletes, but they kind of have different needs. And I mentioned before about utilizing the total distance that you're working with an athlete might, if someone is a little bit slower and I need them working on just getting out of changing direction quicker, it might just be. Perform a lateral run, one direction, which would cover like two to three yards. And then sprint out of that. Whereas an athlete's a little faster. You're just going to go five yards before you change direction and come back. Just because the intensity is slightly higher because they're able to have more speed prior to that change of direction. So you don't necessarily have to make every drill like that much different. You just know, all right, here are some of the ways that I can easily and quickly progress a drill. And then just go apply that on the spot right there.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, so I love this because, you know, one of the things I think, you know, you and I both follow Lee. One of the things he does so well is he does this whole part whole approach where he's able to understand what an athlete is. Needs in real time based on whatever deficits he perceives or coaches listening, whatever your movement model is, where the athlete is falling short and then able to make the adjustments and then kind of revisit that movement pattern. I'd love to hear you riff on this because I think one of the challenges, especially with larger groups is having, uh, I guess maybe the framework to do this, but also how to recognize some of these. Deficit. So when you're coaching your athletes, are you, is this an emergent strategy for you in terms of how you're implementing some of these? Uh, correctives and all correctives, not in the movement sense, but say, you know, adding the band as assistance or resistance. Is this something that, you know, in your head, you've got a model and you're making these adjustments in real time.
Jason Feairheller:I do make the adjustments in real time, but I'll even back up a little bit where the 1st thing I need athletes to understand when they come in, and this is even before the individual movement patterns is. Really understanding what is an athletic position and athletes will come in and they'll typically have their feet right underneath their shoulders and their knees will be bent a little bit. But if I have an athlete accelerate out of that position, one of two things will happen. Number one, They will perform a false step in order to go into a sprint, any direction they needed to go, whether it was like forward, backward to the side, doesn't matter, and that is actually a correct strategy because they're trying to find a better shin angle or the thing that isn't good is if they just push from that position, because their shin is almost vertical, they have no shin angle to create any sort of push from. So first thing I do is. Always have them start every drill with making sure they're in the right position prior to the drill. So if I have them set up, it's going to be feet wider than their shoulders, Bring your hips straight down. That's going to bring your knees forward to load up your Achilles. And then we lean forward a little bit from the trunk from there. And if you look from the side, it creates like a W position. And that is the standard because if you don't set athletes up the right way, and especially with a team, because it's usually like. Somebody goes, the next person goes, the next person goes. But if, if they don't actually like set up the right way, they're never going to perform the drill how you want them to perform it. And I need to get athletes used to pushing from these lower positions. It doesn't necessarily mean deeper knee angles and deeper ranges of knee flexion. It just means get used to pushing from lower positions. And, depending on the size of the group that you have, and the overall ability of the group, I'll usually manipulate the starting position. So, I'll have them start there, or even if we're doing like a half kneeling start, Instead of just, all right, we've all done like a half kneeling press and a half kneeling, uh, stuff like that, where one knee is on the ground and the other leg is kind of right in front of you. What I like to do is the leg that's in front, put it further to the side, angle their shin, so they already know, like, this is where I need to push off from. And, If athletes have a hard time pushing from there, we'll just say a team in general, because it is, you will progress a team slower than smaller groups. It just happens that way. There, there's no way around it, but if you can kind of figure out, does this team need more kind of, I'll even say like strength work or more development of like a force and just getting a push, or do they need more elastic qualities? And I would still work on both of these things all the time. Um, But that dictates a little bit of where my session is going. And then from there, there's always going to be a quickness element to my training session. And I know like we wanted to bring this up at some point, but using like quick feet drills or drills where, you know, I'm tapping the ground as fast as I can. I like to use those drills to get athletes to get used to moving fast. And I don't think athletes truly understand what their capabilities are, unless you put them in positions where, all right, I need as many foot contacts as possible over five seconds. And if they're not getting in at least three or four per second, then that's something they need to start figuring out and to move a little bit faster. All right, so now we've got them used to moving fast. Now this is where I might start to pair athletes together a little bit of about equal ability. And even doing a change of direction drill, that's a closed drill, you can, let's just say I'm just reacting off of someone, but the rest of the drill is just a closed drill, even just that little bit of a start, they still are thinking about what they need to do a little bit, always helpful in terms of getting them to move faster. So the number one thing I'm looking for is. Finding ways to get athletes to get used to moving really fast. I don't want to see anybody perform drills at even 80 or 90%. Many faster.
Ryan Patrick:A hundred percent, man. You've already dropped so many amazing tidbits here. So, uh, one area that you start to talk about just to add some context to this. Right. So, uh, I'm going to give you just an example of an athlete. Uh, kind of 2 sides of the spectrum, right? So, uh, there's 1 that comes to mind. I typically think of, like, a young female, you know, 8th grade, early high school has had no exposure to strength training. Maybe has maybe has decent skill because they've done a lot of travel sports or whatever, but. Um, they just they just lack strength. You know, where do you start with them? Because one of the challenges I think people are up against is like, I need them to move fast, but they're not they don't even have the requisite force capabilities to to put into the ground. What I need to see them do in order to propel their center of mass. anywhere in space. So what, what is it? What's your thought process when working with a young underdeveloped athlete like that?
Jason Feairheller:So a couple of things that I like to do initially is like a push up start. So, and this isn't like from they're pushing up from the ground. They're already kind of in like the top of a pushup position. They bring one foot up and I want to see how close is their shin parallel to the ground. For them to not lose their balance when they try to accelerate. And obviously a stronger athlete is going to be able to be virtually parallel to the ground with that shin. But weaker athletes, they will lift that shin up higher because they will naturally find the angle that they need from that lower position that they can push from and get out your camera, record the video and take a look. Because even if they start with a parallel shin. If they have certain amounts of weakness or a lack of strength, their hips are going to shoot straight up in the air. And once they then have the angle of shin that they're able to push from, they'll push from there. That tells you exactly what you're working with. So it's important to understand. Where you're starting with the athlete. Okay. So now from there, I love a lot of like the band resisted drills. I love doing even like accelerated runs with resistance because I just need them to get used to pushing and pushing. And yes, their ground contact is going to be a little bit longer when they do those drills. But it's almost like a specific form of strength training a little bit along with that. All of the drills that were performed, let's say like broad jumps, lateral bounds, all of those things. I'm not telling them that they need to stick the landing every time. Because for me, they need, yes, they absolutely need stability because you can't produce power without some form of stability. But, if I ever tell athletes that I need them to stick the landing, all of their jump training is going to be sub max. They're, if I want them to push off of one leg, perform a lateral bound, land on the other leg. And they are doing that with the intent of sticking the landing. They end up going maybe like three or four feet. They make it a more vertical push and they come down and focus on sticking the landing where I need outputs So I need them to focus on as much distance as possible and if you're worried about sticking the landing and Them totally collapsing because they have that little bit of lack of strength Then you can put a light band around them where it'll make their landing easier We go take the force away, but the whole goal of that is to create as much push into the ground as possible. So that's the other part. And then along with that, they're obviously doing some form of strength training in order to continue to develop strength over time. And the main thing with that is you just have to be, get them to be consistent. Over long periods of time, and then as they're building strength, you're still trying to get them to push from as deep a shin angle as possible. Because as someone gets stronger, it's almost like they need to coordinate movement patterns a little bit different because they need to understand what their new capabilities are. Of their body in terms of where they can push from. And if you watch all of the fastest athletes, the best athletes, they all get in these low positions and able to create really deep shin angles and push from far outside their center of mass. And ultimately, like that's the goal. And we just kind of, as we're building strength, we're just working towards getting into those positions a little bit more, more of the focus is on that kind of strength side, that more of like a force type of output based jump training, rather than minimizing time on the ground that still is going to be in their program. But the main thing is they are really trying to just. Work on putting more force into the ground.
Ryan Patrick:Absolutely. Yeah, it's like, I tell people, you know, you have to earn the right to have those quick ground contact times because if if you don't have high force, it doesn't matter if the ground contact time is short because you're just. You're not going anywhere. You know, you might, uh, you might scooby doo the run where you've got this rapid turnover, very brief ground context, but no actual force application. So let's take this, this athlete out to the extreme. And I love my football guys, but that culture of just getting stronger, I think is to detriment, uh, of many physical capabilities that they need on the turf. So you've got an athlete, they have a tremendous strength development. And now it's now you're seeing, um, the long ground contact times, the inability to, you know, effectively move side to side. Maybe they've lost some range of motion due to strength training or something like that. How are you? How are you starting to navigate that? Um, in a speed development program.
Jason Feairheller:So number one thing is take advantage of your warmup. So every single warmup should have forms of extensive hopping or jumping. And with bigger athletes and like football players in particular, I'm doing a ton of bilateral. work. Their Achilles cannot handle, and their tendons usually cannot handle, the amount of force that their muscles are capable of. They've spent so much time doing that, that their, the force their muscles can produce greatly outweigh what their tendons can sometimes handle. So we do a ton of bilateral work for at least four months. Where I'm really limiting the unilateral work. Now, if I have an athlete who's pretty springy, they clearly can get off the ground fast, then I'll start to incorporate a little bit more unilateral work into it. But every single day they warm up. They're doing a pogo series, a multi directional pogo series. And I'm even cuing them, when they're doing their pogo jumps, don't let your athletes get lazy, and you see a lot of knee bend with the pogos. No, we want this to be elastic, so even if they're not necessarily getting high off the ground, we are limiting the time on the ground. And I'm cuing them all the time. Minimize time on the ground. Get faster off the ground, alright? Don't be lazy as you're doing this. And then we'll go into the quickness or the priming drills that I was talking about, and they would even match the type of speed work I'm doing that day. So if I'm doing an attacking day, they might be just doing like. Zigzag rapid fire jumps over a line, but they're moving forward as they do it. If it's a retreating day, they're going to be moving backward as they do that. I could do that with a single leg. I could do that, progress that to a single leg, but their rear foot is elevated on a box. So. Their single leg isn't taking all of their weight, but it's taking the majority of it and they're just doing side to side reps over a line. Once I have athletes do that, then we start to be quick off the ground, but cover more distance. So maybe instead of just going over a line, you could have like two pieces of tape on the ground that are about six inches apart. And now you're just covering slightly more distance. So we need times to stay low while our goal is to eventually cover more distance. within our times. And then I might even have them like our plyo drills, and I term them like plyometric, but a lot of times it's more of like a dynamic drill because plyometric technically means like 0. 15 seconds or less. But a lot of the drills, my end goal with training is to be powerful off of a single leg because if we are reacting to another athlete on the field, we are not doing a hockey stop with two feet on the ground. It is one foot plants into the ground while the other leg reposition, the body, wherever it needs to go to stay with that opponent. So what I would term a speed skater, just because I want athletes to think about getting off the ground fast is a push off of one leg, kind of like a lateral bound, but they're punching into the ground and coming back quickly. And I need them to cover as much distance as they can. Where time on the ground does not increase and I need them to find that exact spot every time. So if athletes are quick and they cover just a couple feet with this, great. Go out further, go out further. Let's say they get out like four or five feet. All of a sudden it's slow off the ground in order to come back. That's the limit. Back up just a little bit. So they start to get quicker off the ground. Obviously the further out to the side we go. The further we are punching away from our center mass, which kind of goes back to that model that we kind of talked about in the beginning of like, what are we looking for with change of direction? And then along with that, we need their head to stay in relatively the same position. We don't want to get a lot of vertical movement because if we start to get vertical movement when we are going to the side and then coming back, now we're not accelerating well out of that because we've, we've lost that shin angle. So it is always getting athletes to learn to be quick off the ground and then increasing that distance over time.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, one of my favorite exercises to use with that is, uh, it's exactly like the speed skater, but Lee taff slow box, you know, it's okay. We start we start kind of narrow. It's punchy. It's quick. Let's open it up a little bit. Then it gets, you know, it's a little slower, but still quick. And then athletes will eventually feel feel that that drop off point where it's like. The turnaround now feels like I'm stuck in the mud. It's like I could take a still shot of you and you would be stuck there for a long time. And so we just work right on the boundaries of that. And usually these athletes that we're kind of referencing here who do have tremendous strength and we're trying to build quicker ground contacts. They understand training. They know how to train hard and I'm always communicating with them. Like, like, I don't like, I can watch this and, and, and tell you when it starts to slow off, but I need you for the sake of training longterm, I need you to develop a felt sense of what this good rep feels like and what happens when you go out another six inches in this, this time on the ground really drops off because that's, you know, I don't want to practice being slow. You know, these changes direction, ground contacts are going to be longer on average than. You know, acceleration top end speed, but there's still a fine point where it's just too much time. And now, you know, it's at a detriment of, hey, a guy got by you, or you weren't able to effectively close space on somebody. Yeah, for sure. And so, you know, I want to flip back because you were talking about some of the foot. Um, like the quick twitch drills, which I'm interested in because we don't, we don't use a ton of that, right? We've talked about, um, a lot of people in the industry have bashed ladders and I don't necessarily have anything against the ladder, but there is a certain level of choreography to the ladder where you kind of learn it. You can go through it. It's a pattern. It's something that, you know, in sports tends to be very, very reactive. And so I think a lot of people shy away from these quick twitch things, and I've seen some people take them to the extreme where they're doing, uh, these like little splish splash in the pool, trying to twitch as fast as they can, which I don't know about that. But talk to me about, um, you know, how we're using them. I know you've briefly kind of mentioned it, but just the thought process, the volume, obviously, it's not like a central. Focus point of your program, but it has a role in getting these athletes prime. So just love for you to dive a little bit into that and elaborate on, you know, why you're using these and how they're being implemented
Jason Feairheller:for sure. So usually I will use it like right after the warmup. And like, maybe we do one low level speed drill and then I'll get into it. And it basically just like gets their nervous system primed, fired up where they are ready to move fast. And if you tell an athlete to move really fast and. If they don't, is it part of like, they're not, maybe it just is a way for you to almost like a readiness assessment as well. But the main purpose behind them is the idea of rapidly turning a muscle on and off. Because it is happening so fast that you're not consciously thinking about like put my foot here, put my foot here, go back, go back, it's just way too fast to think about it. So, without that thought, how fast can an athlete rapidly turn their muscles on and off? And if I just use that idea, and I think about any change of direction, That's exactly what it is. They are striking the ground to change a direction. Muscles are turning on. Then they're rapidly turning off or going the other direction. And so that is kind of like just the general basis, but I always go back to athletes have to understand a feeling of moving fast in order to actually get them to move fast. And if they don't even know, like what that is. Then it's hard for me to communicate with them to move faster because they might think like, Oh, I, I am moving fast. But they're actually not so I do like them for that reason and you know You could say like whatever you want about ladders and things like that But I think everything always comes back to like what is the purpose of the drill by no means? Am I saying that this is going to increase an athlete's top speed? over very short distances and this many a lot of ground contacts. I'm not necessarily improving a ton of ankle stiffness or anything like that. But what I am doing is improving just an athlete's ability to learn to move fast. And that's kind of just set the foundation, right?
Ryan Patrick:There's so many.
Jason Feairheller:Yeah. And it's really just one drill within the workout that day. Yeah, and yep, and then we keep going on.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, it's so simple. And I, you know, it's 1 of those things people can, you kind of see the pendulum swing too far either direction, right? Where it's, you know, we're doing, uh, this has become the central focus of this because, you know, somebody read, uh, a finger tap study or Albert pool holes was able to do, like, you know, 40 and 10 seconds or something crazy. And so now they're like. Yeah. Thinking, oh, this is like the key to get the nervous system firing. And I think to your point, it's kind of a representation of we're trying to wake it up, wake up the nervous system. We're trying to get them in a position where they're feeling quick. They're feeling fast because, you know, striking back under your hip first couple steps of acceleration. It requires some zip. That sometimes, you know, if they don't, if they don't have stuff to prep them there, they get lazy and then you get that vertical shin and it kind of kills the acceleration. And I just love how simple this is. Um, but I don't see as many guys utilizing it and that's 1 of the things I really like about your program, but inside of that, there's. you know, the foot contacts and change of direction, the ankle stiffness. And one of the things that I also see you do that not many people talk about, I've seen J. B. Moran talk a little bit more about it recently is, you know, really isolating the foot and strengthening the foot. So I've seen you use the slam boards and some other type of like isometric drill. So could you just. riff on that for a minute and talk about how you're utilizing that
Jason Feairheller:for sure. So foot development is huge. And I've, I mentioned before that you cannot produce power without stability within a system. So that can come through your hip or even sometimes like come through your foot. And if you were to get somebody who runs a curve run, and let's say like a relatively tight curve, And they run it at full speed and you take a still shot and you look at their shin, how far leaned in towards like the curve they are versus the position of your foot. It would literally look like their ankle is broken. And you're like, wow, like I didn't even know my foot could get into that position. But a lot of that comes from just extreme stability off of the different edges and angles of the foot. So if I'm doing a curve run, for example, that day. And I want to do some outer edge work on the side of my foot. I'll put the slant board where the slant is going down, like towards the medial part of my foot. So that's going to be closer to the ground and weight has to be on the outer edge of my foot. And obviously like the steeper, the angle, the more difficult it's going to be just to hold that position. But you can work on holding that position. You can work on then like bring a tennis ball around your body while you hold that position. You just add a little bit more instability into it. But I like instability on hard surfaces. I'm not a fan of doing a lot of like footwork. Eric's pads or things like that. And I understand like in rehab settings, that that might be the right thing to do, but I'm trying to create stability off of a stable surface and I'll use the slant boards for that. And even this is something I picked up just like a couple of years ago. From a Franz Bosch course, but it was even like the strength specifically of the toes where like walking around, let's say you have like a 45 pound bumper plate, you put it up close to the wall and you walk around the edge of the bumper plate, but you literally only keep your toes on it. You don't let any part of the ball of your foot and where the, your toe meets your foot, you don't let that touch. The plate and you walk around it like that and you would not believe like you might have what you think is a strong foot, but you might have weakness within your toes. But if you think about all right, strength through your big toe, that's going to be the last thing that leaves the ground. We want to create stiffness through that position. And those are some of the things you could even do like a calf raise, but instead of like bending at your toes, you try to keep your toes stiff where you go up almost like a ballerina up on your toes. It also creates some more toe stiffness. Um, yeah. And. I'll say like, once I have athletes for a bit, our warm up and all of our pogo series, we do it without our shoes on, just to get them used to feeling the ground with their feet, creating a little bit more stiffness. And as soon as an athlete takes a shoe off, they immediately spend more time on their forefoot, which is what I want. I don't want them to constantly like drive through their heel and land totally flat footed. I want strength through the forefoot because as the foot strikes the ground, and if you watch someone accelerate, this is a good assessment for anybody's like foot stiffness is you have them just starting like a two point stance. They accelerate, they take off when their foot strikes the ground. Does their foot change in shape? Like does their heel drop towards the ground or does it remain stiff where every bit of force they put in is then able to go forward. And it's a good way to see like if their heel drops a ton. Their strength greatly outweighs their stiffness, especially for their first step. All right, we know that that is something that they are leaking power through that first step because they lack stiffness within the foot. You can do a bunch of like isometric type of drills where you are on like a PVC and you're just balancing on a single foot. Where you are not letting your heel drop towards the ground. You're trying to keep the PVC underneath the ball of the foot and almost like curling your toes around. And that'll even help like strengthen your foot a little bit. But all of those things work, the different arches of your foot and the different positions of the, of your foot that you would use whenever you are striking the ground. And we all know sprinters, like they're a hundred meter sprinters, their ground contacts are like 0. 08 seconds, sometimes even a hair faster than that. You cannot do that and have a weak foot. And now sprinting alone is also a great way to build some of that stiffness, particularly once you get up to like max speed training. But these are all additional things that you can easily do if an athlete comes in early to a session. Great. Appreciate it. Let's do some like foot strengthening stuff while you're just waiting to get started here.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. One of the, um, one of the terms that I like is, and I think I can't remember who I stole this from, but it's, it's, you know, when you strike the ground, I want a confident ankle, right? So if you're on the forefoot, I don't want to see the yield. And give way of that. I just, I want to create that stability and, you know, kind of on that note, something that I would like to hear you touch base on, because I feel like anybody who trains multi directional speed indoors runs into this problem. And that's footwear, you know, you've got the Adidas, the Adiboost, which are, have no side to side stability. So I would just like to hear how you contend with some of the, Shitty footwear that's out there.
Jason Feairheller:I, as soon as somebody comes into the gym, I'm all over them about getting the right pair of shoes. And usually I'll tell them you find a turf shoe, you find a basketball shoe and any sort of court shoe. And you're good to go. Luckily, a lot of athletes play on turf now, so they at least have a pair of turfs so they can use that, um, if they need to. But the problem is it will totally change how an athlete moves. There's no question about it. They will move based off of their foot sliding in their shoe. And it totally limits what you can do that day. If an athlete has poor footwear, I will likely change a drill. Yeah. So they can at least perform it kind of well. And I'll either decrease the distance, change the angle, or just give them a totally different drill because it's, it's virtually a waste of time if they can't even plant their foot the right way without sliding totally out of their shoe.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. And I get it. I'm, I'm, I'm a shoe head. I like, I like a good pair of kicks, but you know, some of these kids rolling with air pockets. I'm like, you realize. You know, you are literally never going to find the inside edge of your foot to effectively propel out of a cut with this, with this shoe on, like you have to change footwear.
Jason Feairheller:Yeah. Luckily there's like a Dick's sporting goods warehouse, like five minutes down the street. So I'm like, you could probably find a pair of shoes there for like 40. Like go get a new pair of sneakers.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. Just buy some old basketball shoes. They're, they're on. Every outlet outlet store under armor, they typically got like an extra 50 percent off. I'm like, I don't care if they're ugly or they don't have your colorways. Just put them in your gym bag. Only wear them when you're here. It's totally fine. That's it. All right, man, kind of starting to wrap up, you know, if I were to go to your page and I look at your Instagram, I see a lot of great drills and many of them are working on some of the movement skills that we've talked about. But obviously, when you get what we talk game speed, there's chaos, meaning I don't know where I'm going when I'm going, how I'm going. I'm just reacting to the situation, right? And there's this chess match back and forth between an offensive person and defensive person to either, you know, take space or, or, um, close space. And so I would just like to hear you where in your program or how often or, or what are you doing to implement? reactive or open ended drills, um, to actually look at some of these skills in context with your athletes.
Jason Feairheller:For sure. So going back to what you said, game speed is always going to be the ability to create or take away space on the field. And depending on if you're an offensive player, defensive player, that is going to be your task. And breaking that up further, it can be broken down into the perception part, agility, and the change of direction part. And that's like their physical ability to perform the task as they intend to do it. So we mentioned the parts of change of direction, meaning like minimal ground contact, minimal knee flexion, foot strike, their trunk, the new direction of travel. So we focus on that. Okay. So now an athlete has that now let's go to the perception part. So what exactly is agility? It's going to be their ability to anticipate the movement. Pattern recognition, their actual visual ability. So what actually is their eyesight like, and even their peripheral vision, all of these other things, and then the situational awareness. So now things that we can do in the gym, we can perform pattern recognition drills, we can perform. Uh, like visual ability drills, but as far as anticipation. Maybe we can do some of that, but typically I don't want people just guessing and situational awareness. We virtually can do none of that in the gym because to me, agility is a lot more tasks specific than I think a lot of coaches make it out to be. And if I am performing an agility drill at the gym and I have like six people and I have all of these general rules. And I make up this game. That's really cool. That doesn't necessarily transfer at all, because even like a lacrosse player is going to have a lacrosse stick. That's going to change the distance between the people, a basketball player can move really fast still, because they can still handle a ball. That's going to be closer distances. But a lot of the times, like it, to me, it comes back to agility drills need to be primarily one V one. Um, You need to beat someone or you need to take away that space from someone so they can't beat you. And the drills that I do, and I do love agility drills, would be after the rehearse movements that day. And they're all based off of the type of movement patterns that we perform that day. So example, I did some like curve running and attacking drills last week. I had two lacrosse players. One is committed to play at Notre Dame and the other one will be a junior. Uh, for a division three school. And I just had a circle set up about eight feet in diameter and. It was just a simple chase game. I just want to see when they're not thinking about running a curve, how well can they run a curve? And they both are attacking players. So when we think about like getting close around the net lacrosse, you see a lot of scores happen right around the goal where an athlete is running a tight curve around and they're trying to beat someone doing that. So the way I did it was. I had them both at opposite sides of the circle, both facing away from the circle. On my clap, they both pivoted and turned, and one was the chaser, one was being chased. And they had five seconds to catch the other person. And that was it. And the guy was a division three athlete, faster in acceleration. No question about it. Probably like a 10th faster, but his change or his change of direction, not as good. You could see like his, his trunk is in a poor position. He ends, he tends to sway a lot. And this is when he was being chased. And also when he was, The chaser and the, so that's like a, a good example of, all right, I'm working some, some curve drills. Now I want to see the perception part of it. And then we go back. So based off of that and what I saw, he would, we would need to work on. Tighter angles. He tended to run too far wide. He couldn't hit the same angles as the other kid, even though his strength was a little bit better. And part of that could just be his body almost doesn't even know that he's capable of running those angles a little bit better. And the kid who goes to Notre Dame, he's been with us for like three or four years. Now the division three player, this is his first summer here. So this was like his second week of training. But it's just a very good example of we perform the drills, we practice them, we utilize them in some sort of reactive scenario, you can make the reactive scenario, what, whatever you want it to be. But I just love to stick to any sort of one verse one drill. And now based off of that, now I have a new assessment. All right. I need to see at certain curves. Is he able to stay tighter? Is he able to continue speed? And if not. Now we need to figure out ways to improve his physical capabilities, running that curve, and then we'll see what happens next time we do that again. And I might manipulate the drill a little bit just to make it a little bit more tougher for the other person or something like that. Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:It's, it's some constraints, man. What you're able to accomplish our turf areas is similar to yours, but what you're, what you're able to accomplish with your athletes is nothing, nothing short of impressive, man. You obviously utilize. That's based in a really effective way, and, uh, you know, you've talked about numerous movement patterns today, which, you know, curbs running in general, I feel like it's going to happen at. Some higher velocities in some cases, obviously, if you're circling a net in lacrosse, it's going to be, you know, a little bit lower velocities, tighter curves, but in open fields, you've got some of your soccer players making runs and and things like that. So, the fact that you can navigate this with the time and the space that you have is phenomenal. So, man, this, uh, this interview as a whole was just. Very dense with really solid information, and I appreciate you carving the time to come here. Share your thoughts. I know I picked up a few things and I feel pretty confident about what I'm doing too, because I'm just kind of not in my head the whole way, but, uh, You know, if you could, man, what, what's next for Jason Fairhill?
Jason Feairheller:You know, I'll give one other example first, just to give the listeners another example of what I was working on. So here's another good example. Two more lacrosse players, their brothers, one Torres ACL playing football last year. He plays attack. The other brother is a defensive player. They're both considered like top 50 prospects in the country. So it is awesome that they can go one on one versus each other. But watching the film of the attacking player that won a tour as ACL prior to his injury, he was, cutting well off of both sides, he was moving really well. After his injury, he tended to every time he were to cut to one side, he would stutter step way too much. And whenever someone stutter steps, you slow down. But what you also do is you allow the opposing player to slow down. And when athletes move slower, they have more movement options. Meaning it's easier to change direction at whatever angle you want them to at a slower speed. So his brother was always beating him. The defensive player was always beating him in these one verse one drills. So a lot of his like change of direction work was improving his ability to plant off of that leg without stutter stepping and getting him not used to doing that. And he ended up having a great season. His team went to the state finals, but like, even like talking to his dad, like that was their number one goal with training was to get him back to what he was before, but without having that movement model in mind, like, what does that even mean getting back to what he was before? Like, does that mean stronger? Does that mean faster? He did all the rehab, his leg ended up being stronger than the one that he didn't injure after he was done his rehab. So, that's just an exam another example of like, utilizing change of direction, working it in an agility drill, and then kind of going back to the table and just continuing manipulating those things to try to eliminate what was like a movement deficiency. For that athlete and coming back from an injury. A lot of it really is just like a mental thing where body and the brain have to understand, Oh, I'm capable of moving this way again, and I'm not going to injure myself. So I'm not going to like put on that governor of like protection and limit my speed. You're doing that.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, we work with a lot of kids who, who are coming back from AC. We see that stutter step a lot and it's just, you know, I've always said, it's like, they're, they're, they're trying to minimize the force. They have to contend with on on that leg in the transition, because, like you said earlier, they have to load 1 side while the other is anticipating a reposition and they can't really get there. Early, and I think a lot of the clinicians are just, you know, I think the strength is important. I'm not negating that. But I think sometimes they get too caught up and just chasing the strength or the capacity of that limb. And I'm always like, well, you, you have to use it contextually. Yes. I know they're, you know, within 5 percent or 10 percent asymmetry, but. When you watch them cut like this is where the deficit is. So I think that's just massive and so important for a lot of athletes anyway.
Jason Feairheller:So what is next for me? I am in the process of redoing my course. I put it out a few years ago. I've learned a lot since then still, I mean, I think it's still stand by it and think it's fantastic and coaches can learn a lot from it, but I think there's even more that I can add to it. So, in the process of editing, which takes just a long time to get through, uh, Of doing that. So that is like the next big thing on the list here.
Ryan Patrick:Ah man, I'm excited for that. I still love that course. I, I go back and reference it, uh, fairly often, you know, you get kind of stuck in, in doing certain things and I'm like, I need to. Jog my memory here. It's, uh, it's definitely one I go back to. So that's, that's exciting, man. Like, I'm really pumped for that. And honestly, you have your own podcast.
Jason Feairheller:The Game Speed Podcast. Yep, formerly the Speed and Power Podcast, but as I've transitioned down this road, it really has become about developing game speed, not just general linear speed and power development.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, I like the rebrand. It's very solid. All right, man. Well, um, I will tag you in the socials and make sure that people can find you and find your content. I think it's for any coach who's looking or athlete who's looking to improve speed. Jason is a guy. I. I have learned a lot from, um, and again, man, thanks. Thanks for carving the time. It's huge honor. I appreciate you coming in and doing this. And I just feel like this was an absolute clinic today. All
Jason Feairheller:right. Thank you so much.
Ryan Patrick:All right. Take care.