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
Speed: Lessons from a Legend Ep 45 f/ Henk Kraaijenhof
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In this episode of The Athletic Performance Podcast, Ryan sits down with legendary coach Henk Kraaijenhof. Henk has quietly influenced generations of sprint coaches around the world—not by dictating methods, but by asking better questions and helping others think critically about adaptation and performance.
Henk has coached Olympic champions, broken world records, and even walked away from coaching for several years—only to return with the same curiosity that fueled his early success.
🎯 What you’ll learn in this episode:
- Why one athlete’s breakthrough can be another’s downfall
- How strength training fits (or doesn’t fit) into sprint performance
- The hidden dangers of “grind culture” in athletic development
- Why individualized programming beats cookie-cutter plans every time
- Lessons from decades of coaching at the highest level
If you’ve ever questioned whether you’re doing too much—or not enough—as a coach, this conversation will make you rethink your approach.
Email Henk.
Visit Henk's Website
Look around in the world. And I looked around from Argentina to Australia to China to anywhere. All the spin coaches have, uh, in their toolbox around, uh, 1000, let's say 1000 different drills and exercises. But if you look at the workout of Chinese sprints or Usain Bolt or South African sprints, they all do the same drills. So the secret cannot be in the drill. We all do the same shit.
You just heard from Hank crying off. If you've been around speed training long enough, you've probably come across Hank without even realizing it. He's quietly shaped the way sprint coaches think worldwide, not just by dictating methods. But by asking better questions and challenging us to think deeper about adaptation and performance. He's coached Olympic champions broken world records, and even walked away from the sport for several years only to return with the same curiosity that fueled his early success. This episode is an absolute banger and Hank covers so many important lessons when it comes to speed and athletic development. Now, before we dive in, I do have a quick ask. Hit that subscribe button. It helps me out more than you know. And if you've already subscribed, thank you. But take it one step further for me and drop a five star rating. To be honest, we gotta bump the bump, the ratings on Apple because somebody didn't like one of my guests and left me a terrible review. So it's cool. We got, we gotta play cleanup. Bury that nonsense. I know it's not you if you're listening to this. Uh, if you do know who did it. Tweet out their address, DM it so we can take care of business. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, a lot of good things to cover. Could use the ratings, would really appreciate it. And Hank has got a lot to offer you today. So let's dive into episode 45 of the Athletic Performance Podcast with Hank Koff.
Ryan Patrick:Welcome back to the Athletic Performance Podcast. Today's guest needs no introduction. So for anybody who's spent time digging into the roots of sprint training, and for the younger coaches out there, Hank Koff is one of the OGs in this space. And so I'm very excited to be here with you today. I'm very humbled that you're carving time out of your busy schedule to do this, but, um, I'll give a quick background on you and then let you take it away. But you've worked with some of the fastest humans on earth, uh, including Olympic sprinters, and I feel like you've been quietly influencing a lot of coaches, um, and how we think about speed for decades. So this conversation for, uh, this podcast came about just by, um, a comment you made on, on a post, uh, randomly. I don't know how you found my page or what, but, um, I knew what, I knew there was more to unpack and I I wanted to reach out. So I'm glad we're here to, to talk, to talk one-on-one. So welcome to the show.
Henk Kraaijenhof:You're welcome, Ryan. It's, uh, honor and a pleasure to, to be talking to you and, uh, to our colleagues. As a matter of fact, uh, young coaches. Uh, to start with, uh, the, what you said, I, I hope I have influenced, uh, young coaches, all the coaches as well, in a positive way. Uh, it's not to dictate things. I'm not, uh, the, the, the one who knows everything and did everything right. I just might, uh, differ from, uh, uh, an opinion and, and some topics and hope that my point of view is worth looking at and, and compare, okay, maybe this guy is talking some sense. Maybe we'll try something out. You know, that's, uh, that's not, I'm not the one to tell you what to do. Uh, I don't have the experience. I don't have the athlete, the facilities, the culture that you have. So. You have to stay kind of humble and, and, and, and see where you can, uh, at a fundamental level, at a basic level of thinking, improve the, uh, thinking about training, about adaptation, about sprinting.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. If you could hank, you know, I feel like there's a lot of this field to me, just athletic development in general. I feel like we're still in our infancy. This field is not that old relative to, you know, a lot of the other sciences. And so there are so many coaches who, you know, they're in their twenties or who are, who think velocity based training is, is brand new and maybe don't understand the work of a lot of the, the pioneers in our field. So I guess a good place to start is just share a little bit about your path to becoming a speed coach. And, and I'd really like for you to touch on kind of what brought you back into the coaching fold after that hiatus.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Okay. My story is, uh, rather old since that my age, I started, uh, against, uh, my will. My mother pushed me to do sports. I hated sports. I like to read books and, uh, I don't like, uh, didn't like sports at that time. And you got tired. You got, uh, uh, dirty, uh, get stressed. Uh, I didn't like it, but somehow I managed to get into a track and field. She pushed me to get into track and field for my health and rather thought I'm six foot six, uh, shrink. Shrinking a little bit, uh, in my age, but I started as a high jumper. And, uh, despite my effort, my technical efforts, I was rather successful. But my real heart was in the sprinting hundred meters. And, uh, my coach was a sprinter a hundred meter runner. He had a regional, or say the state record in the, in the meter at 10.6. I said, I wanna sprint. He said, no, you can't sprint. You're too tall. By the time you got outta the blocks, everybody's already at the tape. So I said, well, we'll see. I was 18 at that time and, uh, I started coaching myself and to punish him, I broke his record. I ran 10.5, uh, manual times, but on a cinder track, not on a synthetic track at that time. And then I felt that he is partially right. I was kind of slow out of the block. So I tried my look in the 400 meters. And of course they lied to me. They said, uh, if the first time I was forced to run four meters for the team as a high jumper, my longest run was seven, seven steps to the high jump bar. So running four meters was quite an, uh, adventure myself, but I was so tired. And, um, then they said, well, if you start training, you run faster, it'll get better. Well, it got better the times, but not my fatigue. You get more tired, uh, the faster you run. So they were lying about that as well. But outta frustration, I started kind of trying to find new information, uh, from East Germany, translated from Russian and learned, uh, about Kyki mat, uh, called the classics as a matter of fact. And then I started to do the courses of the federation and I was the youngest coach, uh, calling, flying for national coach. And basically it started from there. Then I became a national coach because they needed some warm body on the track. Uh, and I became national coach. In sprinting and hurling and relay. And then I run into my first athlete who later would become, uh, an international nel coolman, two times world champion in the 60 meter dash and world holder. At the time, at the 60 meters, he was my first, lemme say international level operating, uh, athlete, but I saw her when she was really young, 16 or 17. It's not that I got her when she was already good. She wasn't good at all, as a matter of fact, but I saw something in her, she saw something in me strange enough, and then we got together and I coached her for 12 years and, uh, she was well successful and that's the one that, that started the whole thing basically. Then in 2004 I had went to five Olympic games as an accredited coach and I thought, well. What's next? I coach world record holders, Olympic champions, world champions. So what's next? Well, it can only get worse. It cannot get better. So let me do something else with my life. And then in 2018 or 19, I, I was asked by Nellie's daughter, Nellie's daughter, uh, uh, what I think at that time, 17 or 18. And, uh, Nellie didn't want her to be in track and field and, uh, said, Hank, can you coach my daughter? Well. Let's give it a try and I'm still coaching her, so that worked out well. Very smart, very bright girl, very positive minded girl. And, uh, decently talented. I think she can do good things, but as a sprinter, you shouldn't be too smart. You know, you need the time, you need the time on the track and not time in the books and in the library and then the other universities. So, but I said you should do, you smart enough, do something next to sprinting. It's kind of boring also, especially with me, it's very boring. So they're boring yourself for two hours and then another 10, 22 hours boring yourself. So do something that makes sense to start to study. Exercise physiology of human movement, science, lets say in Amsterdam, which he almost finished now. Wow. So that was the reason, my comeback, no other reason than I had basically nothing better to do with my life. I found out after 14 years, so I kind of made a comeback and now many athletes asked me to coach them, but I'm a little bit older. I have to slow down a little bit. So I stay at one for the moment time here. Oh, yeah. I, I was asked as a coach, uh, I would say 2018 19, a national coach in Kazakhstan. That's something completely different. So I worked with, uh, Olympic Champion, uh, Kova was now present over the Kazakhstan Athletics Federation. Mm-hmm. Jumping 15 meter, 33 medals in your Olympics. And so that's a nice experience as well for the country as the athlete as coaching triple jumpers. Uh, yeah.
Ryan Patrick:Wow. So you went from a, a kid who doesn't like sport to international successfully. Successful coach.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah. Well, well I was into science, so I like to figure things out. I was a curious guy, so I like to figure things out. Not necessarily be on the track or coaching athletes, but there's a lot of things to find out there as well. So it kind of coincided at that moment.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. One of the things you said about Nelly that really stood out is you said at 16 years old, she wasn't really good enough, but she was also young. And being in an America, I feel like 16, if you're not good enough, you're, you're starting to get weeded out. Um, yeah. These kids are like, they're, you know, there's just, they, I don't think they understand how high the ceiling is for physical development, but with us going to, um, post-secondary school.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah. Colle
Ryan Patrick:College around 18. A lot of these guys and girls have to be ready to go. So one thing that, that I'm kind of curious about to, to dig into is how has, um, the coaching landscape maybe changed a little bit compared to when you first started?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Um, not only when you first started, there's already, as you indicated, a ter, a terrific difference between the culture of sports in Europe and especially in Holland because our system is completely different. We don't have a, a university system. Once you get to university or to to college, you're basically screwed because there's no. Interest in, in sports, there's no way to combine those things. You are a full-time athlete or a full-time, uh, student. There's no way to combine it. Uh, time-wise only and, and support of the university or the, or college, there's no support whatsoever. It's not popular. So mainly it's, uh, built by, by clubs. You go to a small club, 100, 200 members at the track. There's a coach there who is working at daytime. There's no professional coaches. There are hardly any professional coaches still. So there, it's all based on part-time athletes and still they start. As you can see, rather late. Mm-hmm. There's no hurry here. We have time to let, uh, the flowers grow instead of trying, putting it from the soil in instead of developing it in the early age. Because you can see the numbers. How many athletes really make it to the very top. I mean, in a huge pyramid with a very, very, very wide base of athletes that will never make it. And even the talented ones, uh, they got injured, uh, at some point. And that's the advantage of the US system. It's survival of the fittest. Mm-hmm. I'm happy with every warm body that enters the tracks. A hang I want to call. You wanna be coached by you in the US every year. Uh, uh, a new box, a new can of athletes, uh, comes in a hundred ones. And if one survives, you did a good job. And that one will be good. And then that one will be really good. That's a luxury we cannot afford. We don't have that genetic talent pool. You don't have the, the massive numbers. So we have to be careful. Yeah. We have to be careful. Look at the individual. We cannot do one size fits all. Uh, that's, that's impossible. That's in luxury you cannot afford.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. That was actually, that segues into my next question, so Well, because, um, it, you know, I've read, I've listened to multiple podcasts with you, I've read a lot of your work and the, the, the fact that one size doesn't fit, fit all really encapsulates a lot of how I think about you as a coach. Mm-hmm. And hopefully I'm interpreting that correctly.
Henk Kraaijenhof:But,
Ryan Patrick:um, I know you've talked about fitting the program to the athlete and not necessarily the athlete to the program.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:So, you know, one thing you said that that really stands out is what can exploit and really help one athlete develop is literally poison and will explode another. And so what I'd like is, um, I think people inherently understand this concept, but do you have some real world examples of athletes you've worked with where maybe you've had to kind of modify your coaching philosophy?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Oh, many, many, many. Uh, thank God. Uh, one thing is I, what can you say? Well, about nutrition, we don't even eat the same food based on, uh, somebody in China eats different food than you and I are, uh, uh, eating. And one person's super food is another person's, uh, poison. Think about peanuts. If you're allergic to peanuts, you might die, but peanuts is excellent food. If you are in an, an inhabited island, uh, and got stuck for some time, then if you have only had peanuts, you are, you are well off with peanuts only. So the same applies to exercise. We have number one first and sprints. Look around in the world. And I looked around from Argentina to Australia to China to anywhere. All the spin coaches have, uh, in their toolbox around, uh, 1000, let's say 1000 different drills and exercises. But if you look at the workout of Chinese sprints or Usain Bolt or South African sprints, they all do the same drills. So the secret cannot be in the drill. We all do the same shit. We do the skips though, a, b, C skips. We do the bounding, we do the lifting. We run with the, with a SL heavy s sld nowadays. So the secret cannot be in there. The secret is the application of those exercises, which one to choose for your athlete. For instance, dependent on muscle fiber type, uh, also anatomy and weak links and strong points, what they need. You have to figure, this takes most of the time figure out what is, makes this athlete good, which exercises are making them. Run faster or exercises after three times of doing them causing an injury, they pain in the back, pain in the tendon, pain in their knee because they do this exercise well for all athletes. This is fantastic. Think about Nelly. Nelly never jumped. She couldn't. She got pain in her knees and pain in her lower back, so she never did the bounding. I love bounding, but all the athletes in my group were like human kangaroos. They could do the bounding over hurdles. Like, like, and they were sprinters. They did it like, like high jumpers or or triple jumpers. They tremendous jumpers and we did a lot and never any injury. Well, for Nel, all the got injured after, after one or two workouts jumping the same applied to Ben Johnson. He couldn't jump. He couldn't jump. So what do you do is you can jump, well, it's very effective but also very risky to do a lot of bounding and jumping Trics is very powerful but also can lead to terrible injuries and I've seen them. What is a good exercise of, uh, a three feet, uh, drop jump for, uh, uh, sorry, 70 kilograms or 75 kilogram high jumper might not be the, the perfect exercise for, uh, 200, uh, 120 kilogram, uh, shot puter. It might tear his, uh, his, uh, uh, patella because he's too heavy. So you have to take those things together for every exercise. There's a, there's a, uh, a benefit risk ratio. So some exercises like plyometrics, very efficient problem is therefore, many people, they have a, uh, a high risk ratio. That's why we figured out vibration training on a vibration platform, because it, that's only benefits. And if well applied, there's not a single risk there. So that's why we, you can put a lot more people on a vibration plate and get an improvement in, uh, explosive strength, much more efficient. Then why? By doing lots of hurdle bounding or drop germs.
Ryan Patrick:Do you think that the modern sports science and this wave of, uh, consum, like much cheaper tech, makes this process harder or easier for a lot of young coaches?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Well, here we go. Complicated, complex matter and modern technology and lots of information makes from good coaches, better coaches. Mm-hmm. They got more information and they know how to apply it well. They know the value of it and apply it in the right way, at the right time for the right ethic. Mediocre coaches follow every trend, every, uh, most of the time marketing or commercial trend apply it and they discard it again after three weeks. Their athletes are not world champion. Did not become world champions. Ah, this doesn't work. You know, they, they have no time. They want to see immediate gratification and immediate results. Most people want nowadays, uh, time seems to be a thing we're missing. We old people have all the time in the world, even if we're older. But young people don't seem to have time. You have more than enough time we take, but most athletes work 10 to 12 years uninterrupted every day, or let say five times a day, five times a week, six times a week for 10 to 12 years. So I have all the time in the world. I don't need, I'm not in a hurry, but your system is different. The pressure is much higher from the outside world, from the parents, from the athlete themselves, and from the culture to perform well. So that's why where the, the, the survival of the fittest, uh, thing comes in. And we don't have a survival of the fittest. Uh, here we take our time.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, I wish it was more like that. We have such a. High volume of competition in America. I mean, a majority of my kids. So, you know, the primary audience that I work with in the private sector in America is gonna be middle school athletes up to high school. Our college kids, um, it depends on where they go to university. A lot of'em will leave town for, you know, nine months. But I would say at, at the level of, you know, junior high to high school.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:So anywhere from 12 to 18 Yeah. Years old. These kids are playing year round. They have, uh, weekend tournaments and training that I feel like they're spending too much time demonstrating their skillset. Yeah. And not enough time developing it. And they just seem so physically underwhelming. Um, and I feel like they're leaving a lot on the table. It's like one of, it's one of the things that is most painful about what I do because. They just, they won't take time away from sport to do Yeah. What they need to do to enhance their athleticism.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah. Well, it has to do with the same thing, lack of time. Because nowadays, and this is the, the, the impact of mobile phones or social media, everybody is whining about at, uh, me Too because, uh, it's a, it's a huge time consumer and it's passive. You're just sitting, you're not doing anything. As a matter of fact, just, uh, scrolling your screens, uh, and if you see how many hours a day that takes, it's time that you could have spent in training and improving yourself with another way. If you're 30 years old, there's 50 years more to, to scroll. So, uh, if you but your after reach, uh, peak between somewhere between 20 and 30, that's precious time right there. And it needs time also, uh, at least here in Europe, uh, physical education is down the drain. So the kids can't catch a ball anymore. They can't kick a ball. They don't spend less and less time playing out in the streets because it's, uh, dangerous for all kinds of reasons. They don't do it anymore. And I like to, uh, here in Holland, uh, I'm the old guy whining that there's a nice track and a, and a and a synthetic, uh, uh, field hockey pitch. And as kids, they want to play soccer or field hockey. But there's a, a fence around the hockey field with a big lock. So you have to climb over the barbed wire and everything. So the, on one hand, the governor one are kids to spend time outside physical themselves, do sports, move, get fit, get healthier, and they don't allow it because the facilities are closed all the time when the kids are. Off. So that's, that's another problem. That's another problem in the us It's, uh, as far as that concerned, a lot easier. There's many places to train. There's a higher level of awareness of being, uh, fit about, uh, proper nutrition.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. I would say that they're not, uh, leveraging that, those advantages because we have a lot of tracks that are closed too, which I tell my kids, just climb the fence. And if somebody comes after you, that'll be good. Speed training when you make a run for it.
Henk Kraaijenhof:If I remember the times I had to run for the caretaker, for the guy taking care of the track to, to run and scream and shout. Of course they know it's me because I'm tall and they know my face. But, but it's ridiculous. So, uh, that's a kind of double thinking of the, of the government. Mm-hmm. To want fit people and not allow them to, to train at the time the track is available or the, the, the, the, the, the student is available or can train. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:It's, it's very organized in America and I think it's financially incentivized. So they want kids in organized stuff so that they can charge tournament fees and fees. Yeah, true, true,
Henk Kraaijenhof:true.
Ryan Patrick:And I, I have a, a question before we kind of move on here. So, you talked about the athletic development process being 10 to 12 years and kids, you know, that the university and higher level athletics are, are kind of mutually exclusive. There's just not a good way to do both Uhhuh. So I'm curious, what is the, the process of talent identification like, because these kids have less physical literacy, so how do you, how do you know who's gonna be a good fit for athletics? Is it just they have to make a decision and see where it goes? Or is there a way that you guys are actually pooling kids towards your athletic development programs?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Well, look, it's part of my book guys. I studied a lot to figure this thing in and I figured it out. The problem is it doesn't work in real life. Once again, I'm happy with every warm body that enter the trick of the talent that of not, I can almost see it and goes like, oh boy, you want to train with me? But it's gonna be a waste of time, uh, because there's so many factors involved. That's number one. That's number one. And most of the time our talent scouting system, no country in the world where tele scout system, an organized, selective, uh, talent scouting system works. The only thing it worked was in, in the former East Germany. And the rest of the country said that it was just push a lot of kids in, test them, do all kinds of measurements, fine. You can be a good, I would be a basketball player or volleyball player, not a gymnast or, or, or a weightlifter. And that's about it. And that's about it because there's so many factors involved. Uh, there's support from the, from the parents. There's, uh, the, the does kids like it or not, don't forget you. You're eight years old and you're only bit on the heavy side, let me say that. So you want to do shot put. You saw these guys, giant guys, uh, uh, throwing this, uh, metal ball. And you go to the track, to the track club and they make you running laps. Because the coach is a middle distance or long distance runner, so a recreational runner. So you don't like it all. So you disappear. Now you are eight years old. You throw this metal ball, you are lucky. You find a coach who likes it too. You throw this metal ball, you walk, come back and do it again, walk back, and in the beginning you make some progress. Is this your fulfillment of life for the next, for the next 20 years, throwing a metal ball and in the end it doesn't get any further. Maybe, uh, 20 meters or something. Or let's say, uh, 66. Uh. Feet. It doesn't get any further than that. And then still you have to spend 1, 2, 3 hours a day in order to try. You have to bring a special personality to, in order to, to do that. It's not fun. Don't forget that speed as a part of track and field is, it's not a fun game. It's not. There's no, we call it, uh, uh, there's no fun part. There's no play part in there. The only thing that counts is the, is the performance, the time or the distance and nothing else. It's not having fun with your friends, uh, throwing ball or kicking a ball or, or playing games. It's not like that. So that's part of the talent, already the mental part to know that for the next 20 years you'll be throwing this iron bullet trying to get further all the time or trying to get faster, and you reach the ceiling in, in speed and you can't go any further what to do. The coach doesn't know what to do, so, yeah. So yeah, there's no, but there's no. As a matter of fact, what helps you is just playing common sense. So I can throw away all those book and still use my common sense. It added very little to the common sense I had. Of course, if you're tall, you're likely to be a high jumper, no guarantee, but it really helps if you're one head taller than the other guy. It really helped the other guys to compensate with technique or explosiveness or something. But that, those are things you can train for. Um, what I do myself, I always, uh, look at, uh, the, the, okay, fast or slow fibers. For me, that's very important in the, in the speed or in the explosive events. Forget about it. If you're 80% loaded, fibers not gonna make it in the explosive events no matter what event. Uh, that might, uh, be the second one. How can you handle stress? You got the warriors and the Warriors. No. Okay. It not say The Warriors are terrible. They're people who like to think before they act and the warriors just go in and do something and they think afterwards. Most of the time it's too late. But then they both need a different approach in order to succeed. They can both succeed. So, uh, I look at weak spots in the body, things that might give up, not, I try to break them and see if they break, if they broke. They're not to tell it, not like that. But I like to see how they move, how they, um, adapt to simple tasks. So that, tell me a lot about the motor system. Is it adaptable? Does it pick up things quickly or like me, are they like more like, uh, say spastics and need a lot of repetitions in order to understand what's going on? Anyway, so that's, that's. Just common sense. Just common sense. It's not difficult at all. It's impossible to predict how people, I remember Nelly as national coach. I went to my chief and he said, look, Nelly is, uh, I'm not gonna want you to invest in her time or money because she's, uh, lazy, crazy, stupid, and uh, too short and too fat. So Joan, and five years later, she broke the world record. Nobody on this planet had ever run faster, so, so far for talent detection. Yeah. Right. And many times I got people who were so called too old or don't waste time in him. Well, I didn't waste time. I found ways to, uh, because if you can't do things right, your old coach as you, uh, can do things right. Maybe he didn't know how to. Do things right with his athletes. If you can play piano, it doesn't mean it's a bad piano. You can maybe you can play it all. So this is a thing for coaches as well, and all the science didn't bring us one step further to, to, uh, to finding more talents or better talent. Still you have those outliers. The people say, oh, that's not a talent, and they become world class. And people say, well, that's a great talent and after two years you see that they're not going, going anywhere. So as long as you have those, the talent system is not, uh, perfect. So make a clear distinction between who's gonna make it.
Ryan Patrick:Mm-hmm.
Henk Kraaijenhof:And you predicted that and the ones, uh, that you predicted not gonna make it. And indeed they're not gonna make it. Fair enough.
Ryan Patrick:When you talk about testing fiber types, is this something pragmatic, like, uh, vertical jump, sprint test versus their distance test just to get, uh, a sense of kind of where they lie on the spectrum?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Well, number one. Yeah, it's, it's, it's so simple and it always works. Ask them in school. What was your best event? The 60 meter, if they're very young, or the a hundred meter or the 800 or the 1500, they said, well, the 1500 is always way ahead, but the 60 man, I was always dead at last. I was so slow. Then you already know the fiber type, I mean, mm-hmm. Again, science seldom beats common sense. And then yes, you can do like, uh, like, uh, uh, doc councilman did a swim coach of Mark Peter at the time. He made them do the vertical jump, just no force platforms or whatever, just vertical jump a piece of chalk and go. And if you jump over a certain, uh, uh, height, then you definitely a sprint swimmer. And if you can be, or if you barely leave the floor, you'd most likely be a slow long distance swimmer. Simple as that. You don't need the technology, as a matter of fact. Uh, and once again, technology is, can be a great tool, but most of the time it's setting us back because we rely on technology and on the, on the, of making things in life. Yeah,
Ryan Patrick:it, it's easier to rely on, rely on the eyeball test, you know?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Um, yeah, of course. When, when, especially when I didn't have anything else in the past, then I got, indeed, I got the jumping mat. Indeed, I got a force platform. Mm-hmm. But it, it was more accurate whether it wasn't more. Uh, uh, there wasn't more certainty in there. It, it, it was no guarantee. Of course, you could measure on the millimeter now, but it's not, the millimeter makes a difference between fast and slow twitch. It's a two inches or three inches. Well, you don't need a force platform to that because you also have lack of, uh, of, uh, budget, lack of, uh, resources. Most the coaches have, they don't have a force platform, electronic timing. So then you use manual timing and if you do it often enough, it becomes more or less stable. But if you can afford it, please do, but don't, uh, don't get, use it Well, like any toy or sorry tool.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Right. We've, I've seen, seen enough all the time. It's the same. It's the same.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. Well, I've seen a, I've seen a number of coaches invest in this technology, and the only information they're getting out of a force plate is jump height. I'm like, this is so, such an underpowered assessment that you're doing with, with this.
Henk Kraaijenhof:You can get a hundred parameters from a single jump. So how many do you really use or really tell you what's going on? Uh, only one the jump high that tells you all that you need to know because that's why you get the metals in the high jump or basically in the sprinting, not in the rate of force development in the, in the, in the eccentric phase. That's, that's, that's, uh, not even secondary. The ary information. It's nice to know, but not need to know.
Ryan Patrick:Right. Okay. So one area I want to dive into next is, um, the over infatuation with strength training for speed. I feel like, I don't know if this is a worldwide thing, if it happens in Europe, but I feel like in America it was since like the nineties, the bigger, faster, stronger mentality has been very pervasive in our athletic development. And I will. Wholly admit, I am a recovering meathead.'cause I love to lift. But you know, I, I have comments on my YouTube channel, you know, asserting that more strength is the key to more speed. And you and I both know this isn't quite factual. So from your perspective, yeah. What are coaches missing in the modern era when it comes to speed development, especially as it pertains to the weight room? Well,
Henk Kraaijenhof:the simple question, how strong
Ryan Patrick:do
Henk Kraaijenhof:you need to be? How strong do you really need to be in order to run a hundred meters under 10 seconds? You think Usain Bolt squatted, uh, 600 pounds or 500 pounds? No way. No way. Our weightlifters and power lifters the strongest athletes out there are the fastest athletes out there. You are the first five meters they can. Keep up with the sprinters, but then it's over because the contact time is too short. Don't forget, you have to, what you do is squat. You go, you're standing, you're going down, going up again, one second and a half, okay? Mm-hmm. That's eccentric. Concentric in one second and a half. That's not the time. What you have, when you're running a hundred meters, it's only 100 milliseconds. So the thing is to develop strength and develop forces in the right direction. Still in that very short period of time, and that's what you don't learn in the weight room. Now, you can be strong because of, or most popular sports, American football, I guess. So it's one of the most popular sports in our world. Well, these guys are huge, and they're fast too. Primarily they were, first they packed on a lot of muscle mass to brace for the impact and to to, but not necessarily to get stronger. They were strong. Mm-hmm. From the beginning, the gifted athletes, they're the best athletes, uh, around the best athletes in the world, as a matter of fact. And probably one of the strongest, a few of them entered the Olympics and one medals, and they didn't barely did any strength, but because they were fast to start with and then they packed on the muscle mass, they weren't born that muscle, I guess. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, so then they got stronger, but not necessarily faster. So there is a relationship but not a linear relationship between the raw strengths and not, the more you squat, the faster you are on the track. If you can have this transfer from maximum strength to explosive strength and really speed or quickness. Absolutely. Right. But this is where one of the secrets is because everybody, every sprint in the world is doing squats. I had Olympic finalists, uh, barely squatting, uh, 200, uh, 200 pounds. They're having problem squatting 20 day World Olympic Ries running 9, 9, 8. I said, boy, I see some, some, some 12-year-old girls doing that. So it is, it's an even stronger. So, but it didn't stop them. Now it's not that if they would have been faster or I would've been stronger or got stronger, that they wouldn't run. But there's no guarantee. As a matter of fact, when you are a little bit older, the injuries come up and, and there's a, there's again that risk benefit from trying to get stronger at your older age. We try, sometimes it works, sometimes it didn't. Mm-hmm. To make older athletes stronger because they were too weak to start with. But then you get them when they're 24. So the problem is, of course, the transfer, it's always about transfer. Number one, you have to look at the demands of competition. Demands of your event. As a matter of fact, what is the biological, biochemical and the mental demand of your, uh, event? Well, that's a damn a hundred milliseconds. And everything else that you do might transfer if you are lucky. It depends on the person. It depends on the person. For some people, uh, getting stronger gets them a long way. Absolutely don't forget if you're getting stronger, you're getting too much stronger. You also pack a muscle weight, a mouth, a hypertrophy, which gets in the way or makes you heavier, which you have to carry around. So you have to, uh, more strength and, uh, as a benefit of the strength that you gain as opposed to the, to the, to the, to the weight gain. You, you, you have. You have to carry it around. If it's muscle not, it doesn't matter. You have to carry it. I prefer muscle to fat, no doubt about it. It has to be fast muscle as well. Mm-hmm. And then when you injure yourself, you injure yourself big time because big muscles take a lot of force to, to tear like a hamstring. I've seen body build tear a hamstring, boy, you could hear it. And they stayed out for a long time because before it tears, you need a lot of force. Big, big hamstrings.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. So one of the, one of the challenges with, uh, transfer to training, especially, you know, for strength or anything is, uh, the delayed effects, right? Mm-hmm. Because this, it's not like I do something one day and all of a sudden it shows up. So,
Henk Kraaijenhof:yeah.
Ryan Patrick:What is the, what is this process? Uh, what are we missing about transfer.
Henk Kraaijenhof:A lot. A lot because the, the complexity, again, the complexity, when you dive deep into it, you grab your head and, and walk away from any sports field because this delayed effect is not the same for everything that you do. So basically we're talking about, about uh, uh, uh, super compensation and this classic super compensation curve, which does not exist. It exists, but it's different for the central nervous system. It's different from autonomic nervous system. It's different from muscle fibers. It's different from 80. The electric anaerobic system. The electric anaerobic system. Anaerobic system. So they, in the end, and it's very hard to do an exercise, which only touches one system. Mm-hmm. So when you spread, you use muscles, you use fuel, you use hormones, you use a central nervous system, you use the autonomic nervous system, and all of them. Go down and get tired, and all of them super compensated, went out of the right time, all at different times. So here's the complexity of it, and when you can read that complexity, when you can tinker with it, you go a long way because then you start to understand and then you start to understand where, why variation is very important. So one day you do strength, okay? Central nervous system and the, and the, the, uh, the muscles are eccentric, muscle damage a little bit, but it will repair. So the next day, if you do strength again, it will go deeper. So what you do, you do something else that touches all, uh, that, that, that, uh, that touches other physiological systems. So. The strength, uh, uh, systems, the central nervous system and the muscle itself, they can recover and they can come back the day after tomorrow, and then you can train them full speed, but not, not doing the same thing or doing strength every day. That doesn't make sense. Maybe it makes a little bit sense when you do upper body on Monday and lower body on Tuesday. Okay? But then still the central nervous system has to work, especially when you go in a maximum or in the power range of, uh, of, uh, intensity. Mm-hmm. So then still the nervous system in the end, you, you go flat, especially when you want to do speed and speed training. You also need your central nervous system. So when it's flat from the two strength of power workouts already, the speed is not athlete feels flat. So this is very important. The, the, the, the, the, what is the effect of every training session, whether we call it the windows of, uh, of, uh, trainability. As a matter of fact, you know, some. People came up with this thing from the omega wave, the windows of, uh, of trainability, is the system recovered and able to, or that system, that specific visual system able to process the next workload? Or is it 90%? Suppose you're running in, uh, or you are driving a Formula One car that's more popular in Europe. I, I guess you got the NASCAR things like this. So, but Formula One, okay, now you start the race with a petrol tank 90% filled up and not a hundred percent. That means you are not going to win that race because you have to top it up again, uh, somehow during the race, while the other guys are passing by. So this is the, this is, uh, one of those, uh, uh, problems also, when the system is not ready to handle the workload and it's high intensity is a higher risk of injury. So you got s. Or maximal training effect and adaptation because the system is not ready to handle the workload and you have a higher risk of injury. So there, the Omega wave as a, as a, as a tool was very, uh, important. Uh, for me personally, it was one of the first, uh, buyers of the system tested, uh, thousands. Thousands of people. The thousands of tests on, on, on people five times a day before the workout, one hour after the workout, four hours, seven hours, and 10 hours after the workout. So you can actually see the super compensation phases of all different systems. So you can see the different super compensation have an idea when they super compensate for this exercise, for this person, for another person might be different and for different exercises or different train load might be different as well. But then you start to understand for the first time what you're doing to an athlete. Great. And most of it's great tinkering with the black box. Uh, put your hands inside. I hope there's not a scorpion inside, but you're just doing something in that black box and hope something good will come out.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. So, uh, follow up question to this, when an athlete is not, uh, fully prepared for training
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:Do you see value in sub maximal work? So what comes to mind is maybe the Charlie Francis approach where he's got these high intensity days and low intensity days. Yeah. So we're doing tempos or maybe more technical work. Do you feel that that has value for enhancing speed long term? Or is it just something we're doing to kind of buy recovery?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Uh, yeah, good question. I hate this, this, uh, definition of recovery training. It's training or recovery because recovery training means something is, uh, something is loaded. It could be an ease load, but something is loaded. Even the fact that you make time to go to the track and do something, takes you away from getting massaged, taking a shower or, or doing some other things to where, and you recover your brain. The brain is nowadays getting more important because it's overloaded in many cases. It's, uh, multitasking, it's social media, it's all the load and all the negative load coming from the media as well about any topic nowadays. Uh, so the brain needs more relaxation and more, uh, uh, recovery than the physical body most of the time, especially when you're well, well-trained when you are undertrained and when I train now, I, I am sore for three days, you know, but when you're fit and, and things are okay, so to come back to your question, yes, what I like to do is, uh, keep in mind the demand of competition. So if you do speed work, it's 99 to a hundred percent. In control. I prefer an athlete running 300 meters in, uh, 36, very much in control, and 35 and, and all over the place so that, that's not going anywhere. Um, so the speed work is, uh, is, uh, a hundred percent. Then the low intensity work sometimes is more instead of a high intensity work, not added to, but instead of high intensity work, so barefoot on the grass for kind of earthing or grounding who you want to call it, and also to train the intrinsic, uh, foot muscles and everything. Mm-hmm. So on the grass, a neglected, uh, way to, it's a very, uh, mild, but I don't edit. I just, uh, it's not on top of saying it replaces a high intensity anyway. See, uh, today high intensity is not going, uh, to work. Right. So, and the sub maximum training, I don't like it. I write like, to run tempos hard, so running hard because again, there's a difference in pollution. Lactic acid at the end of a marathon and put to less asset at 400 meters. It's a speed of, of, of, uh, production of, uh, lactic acid, which is very, uh, specific as a matter of fact. So there is something I like to run temps one fifties or two hundreds, like to random heart. If they can't, we do something else. And if they can't, we do this low intensity, uh, training instead. But most of the time they're able to do it because I disperse my think my week cycle pretty well. And there's always me to make jokes out of things or come up with, uh, some pleasant or unpleasant surprise, a dessert or something, or something like this.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, you, you touched on something that I hear you say a lot, which is train as much as necessary, not as much as possible. Mm-hmm. We have, we absolutely have the grind culture in America. Yeah. Who is out working, who, um, you know, pushing fatigue. We have gyms in our local market where it's almost a contest of who's making kids puke more for conditioning. Yeah. Which,
Henk Kraaijenhof:yeah,
Ryan Patrick:I, I think is crazy. So I guess, you know, the Omega wave is obviously a very powerful tool to help you calibrate load. Yeah. But what are some of the other strategies or, uh, just like about your coaching eye when you're evaluating athletes, how are you finding how to adjust volume?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Uh, yeah. Good question. Good question. Number one, ask. Number two, observe. So sometimes the athlete come to the track, you plan a speed workout, maximum speed super, maximum speed. Okay, now the weather's nice, the track is clean. Nobody there? Fantastic. A nice little tailwind. So you got, and that's the athlete coming to the foot. So what happened? Oh, I was studying for an exam. Have an examiner tomorrow and he dragging himself through the track. Said okay, I'm tired, not ready to do the speed work. We can do it tomorrow. There's no problem. We can flip things around. There's no problem to flip things around so we can do it tomorrow. Ask. How you feel. Any fatigue, any soreness, anything that see a orange light flashing in the back of your head, like, Ooh, my hamstring feels a little bit, then I would be stupid not to listen to that and taking that turn into account of designing this daily workout and change it a little bit. Do a little bit more. Do a little bit less. Do a little bit different. That's a tools that you have of a coach to improvise now. But now we have a program, we wrote it down, drinking cup of coffee, wrote it down. So it has to happen because I wrote it down. And then we do five reps or 10 reps. Why? Because we only reason is we have 10 fingers. There's nothing else. And 10 toes. That's the only reason we do 10 reps or five reps. We never do seven reps or 19 reps or whatever. Why? Because just this, this is how our, our mathematical system is designed. Mm-hmm. So it's not built on anything. It's not said that I write a program due to the best of my knowledge and experience, but it isn't said there isn't a better program for that athlete at that day. I try to find it. I think if you look at my programs and I look at the diary of the athletes, what they, they write down what they did, or I write down what they did. It's only 70, 80% all time is I have to change things around because I see, I prefer to see, and especially a speed work and quality work. Five good reps, no five good reps and five terrible reps. Where they, where they terrible technique in the, in the, uh, injury risk zone. So give me the five good ones. Leave out the five bad ones because they're gonna lead to fatigue the next day. They don't bring anything and they give you the risk of injury. Well, the same to philosophy based training, which was basically when we came up with this in the beginning of the 1990s with, uh, Bosco and Tehani and Jean Agar. Um, which was a, a way to establish the route amount of, uh, of repetition. So I you repetitions 20 reps, but what is really going to help, we found out that, that, that at the optimum, I said the maximum power output in, in expressing awards, uh, sometimes five, six reps and then the power output declines. Here we go, binge press 1, 2, 3, and then the end they go ar. So what happens? Well, the fast switch fibers got tired. They drop out. So you're only recruiting and therefore training the slow switch fibers. Is that what you want? Perfect. Keep doing it. But if you want fast switch fibers to more or less, re recruit it selectively, keep it to those five reps and forget the last five because they train the slow fibers, make'em bigger, make'em hypertrophy. We've seen it from biopsies. They get bigger, not what you need because they slow down the high speed movements. That's what the slow fighters do because they're too slow to contract and relax at high, at very high speed. So this is a very, for me, it was a very simple concept to understand and to apply. And it worked. It still works.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. Yeah. One of my, one of my favorite quotes, it doesn't have anything to do with training, but it's, uh, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. And I just feel with training and the programs we write. I'm always willing to make those adjustments because yeah, you see somebody come in, you see the rep, and I'm like, Ooh, this is, I'm looking at the program, I'm like, well, this is shit today. Like we're just, we're gonna try something else. Yeah.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah. But how many times you never heard heard from Coach? I thought you, before the workout you said, we're going to do this. Yeah, but that's the beauty of being coach. I changed my mind and you can't, I changed my mind. I see. You can't do it. Ah, but then yo, the other competitors are doing this. Yeah. But you'll do it tomorrow in good shape and they'll be out. You'll, you'll watch me. They'll be out And you do it tomorrow. There's no problem. We're not in a hurry. We can flip things around. It'll come, believe me. And also one day, a hard training that they don't like electric training or some training they don't like, uh, okay. Today. No. They're like, ah. So no, we try again tomorrow. Now this shitty training will be done tomorrow. Yeah. So there's no escaping of the, of the demands. This is the, the problem. I want to go back to your, uh, or my statement, uh, train as much as necessary. Not as much as possible. So, what is necessary? Well, simple, necessary to improve if you do minimalist training. So like people say it's minimalist training. Yeah, it's minimum, but you have to have improvement. If you don't improve, it's just wasting your time. It's just, uh, occupational therapy, you know, just to keep engaged, just to keep busy. Recreational, for fun, it's not, I want to see improvement in strength, in speed, in technique and mental aspects. In performance, that's what, basically what you get paid for. So training, training as much as necessary, is necessary to improve. So there's a little bit of misunderstanding there. And most people say, oh, is necessary. What is necessary? Well necessary to improve the simplest death.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. One of the challenges that I encounter is that, uh, athletes associate, uh, necessary as tired. And so tired becomes the goal of the workout. And that starts to interfere because a lot of times they're leaving the session wanting a little bit more. I don't feel tired enough, but they're slowing down. Their technique is breaking down. Yeah. So necessary becomes this, this very gray, like almost moving target.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Well, this idea is of course, uh, insecurity of the athlete. Mm-hmm. And that's sometimes what we all have. Did I do enough? And enough to what? To injure yourself. Absolutely. Uh, and enough to empty your stomach on the floor. Absolutely. But how many shot footers or a hundred meter runners did you see throw up after the a hundred meter if this a demand of competition? No, it is, it is never a demand of competition. And yes, you have APU competition, then you might be a great winner, but it's never to go this way. You're not tired after a hundred meter physically. You are, you are. Uh, there's so much arousal going on. Sometimes you think that people run the curve after the tape. They run the curve faster than they run the a hundred meter themselves. So there is no exhaustion or something. But it's just a, the, the, the, the, the, the good feeling that you did something. Mm-hmm. Coach, we did everything. Yeah. And now, yeah, I'm injured. So you did everything to get injured, right. What a waste of time. What a waste of potential that is. So you can always do more. This is the, the problem, the the, uh, 99% of injuries are over training injury. The under training injury does not exist. Yeah. When I am, my old age starts sprinting full speed, then I might pull a hamstring that's an under training engine, but they're over training engine. You keep that in mind. So that's not what you're looking for. Not you're looking for the optimum, not for the maximum and, and just the fact. Well, when athletes are in the 1990s, they said, Hank, are you sure we doing enough? Have a very nice anecdote about that. But athletes said, are you sure in doing this? This is nothing. Said. Okay, come on. We take a steep hill with lots of sand, shallow sand and make'em string full speed for one minute. And uh, they see paradise. They can almost see paradise. They said, okay. Now you're happy. You trained for one hour and a half. Now you did this one minute and now you're happy. Right. And then they start to understood and they start to understand the, the craziness of their thinking. That it's only good when you are tired. But that's more a mental, it's more a cultural thing than, than anything else. And coaches are the same. Mm-hmm. You don't wanna say, well, you didn't do enough. I don't care if he did enough. I prefer to have a, a gold medalist who didn't do enough than somebody who didn't make it to the finals, who did 10 times more than my athletes. So there's no medals for enough or four year being tired. That's again, not the demand of competition.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, I think there's a lot of gold there because it's, um, you know, as training goes on, it, it's, I call it the siren call of just doing more, just, you know, that insecurity of Oh, just, just a little bit more, just a little bit more. And then yeah. It, it just all creeps into the program until you've got so much
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:That you don't even know what's really working. It's just you're throwing everything at the athlete.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah. For instance, athletes are bounding for distance and, uh mm-hmm. You get three attempts. Okay. And three attempts are, and they're getting better all the time. So, Hank let me try force and No, because the competition only have three attempts. I mean, you went like, shit, you can't do it over again. It's then squeezed out in that one attempt that you have in competition and not, you can do it over if you run a bad hundred meters. Like, oh wait, this wasn't good guys, let's go back and run another one. It's not like this. So you have to set the limits there as well and make'em give the quality in the work that they do not, uh, by just increasing the volume because it's, most of the time it's increasing the volume. Unless you want to do a max out in bench press or squats, then you, uh, then increase some, some weight. But even then you, in the end, I sometimes say, okay, Hank, can I do one more? Okay. Sometimes, yeah, of course. And you want to see, yeah, we want to feel that fear, that failure. Good. Do it. Okay. You wanna have pain in your back tomorrow? Please do it. So, no, the role of a coach is more, is, is, is very important because it's always the, the, the chemistry between your brain and the, and the brain of the athlete. That's in neglected sense. It's not that you can be replaced, you cannot take my athletes, I cannot take your athletes. People have to get used to each other. So if you think it's not, then the trust of an athlete in the coach and what he says, no matter how much it is or how, in my case, how little it is, uh, that's a matter of, uh, of deep, deep trust. I always say, okay, here's my group of athletes. I have good results with them. Now there's a new kid. I gave him the same, I split the group in half. I give him the same program like I will do. So copy you, take, I take my, this group, my part, and you take your part and we go separate. And then after six weeks, we will see the results. His results will be less. Why? Because the people think that based on my, uh, on the results of my athletes and they think wrongly, that I have a magic wand. I can touch them and they will be good. And this guy never seen him before. No experience, no idea. Even if he has the same program and you execute the same program, but extra touches your personality, and, uh, that's what many people forget. Hmm.
Ryan Patrick:There's, uh, before we wrap up here, there's one area I want to, uh, just ask a follow up question too. So I'm kind of flipping back, but before you were talking about, you know, some of your athletes that they couldn't jump
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:Or certain things were not useful to them. When you're coaching your athletes, do you, do you look to enhance their strengths? Or are you looking to bring up their weaknesses? Because somebody could look at the same, same situation and be like, well, you can't, you can't jump and jumping is essential for developing power, so we need to learn how to jump. And so all of this time is spent on jumping. Yeah. Um, and, and obviously to it within a certain degree, we wanna, you know, minimize the downside of things that are gonna injure athletes, but when really trying to enhance their physical capabilities, how do you, how do you approach this add to the strengths, minimize the weaknesses or some combination of both? A combination, of course.
Henk Kraaijenhof:I would feel, I'm always like the kid in the candy store in case of doubt. Choose both.
Ryan Patrick:Mm. Yeah.
Henk Kraaijenhof:So if you look at the extremists as only increase the strong points and leave the weak pencil and the will will haunt you until the rest of your career. If you only strengthen the weak points, then you are also, uh, ignore, ignoring. They have strength. Mm-hmm. A lot of people work on their weak points, work on core stability in anything, and spend many hours doing core stability. And the most fantastic exercise you can see stand on the, on the bow suit ball and one leg and carrying a dumbbell and the rubber bands everywhere. Great. That's all your weak points are getting better. And again, I think this is, uh, coming back to one of the first, uh, segment, it's individual. While some people might be better off working on their strong points and kind of keeping their weak points or the limitations, keep it in check and some pop, uh, it depends also on how weak it really is. Mm-hmm. If it's really weak, it will set you back immediately. If it's something that's not because you can't expect heavy. Aspect of the earth athlete is strength, the speed is technique. We at a hundred percent level, there's always something that's weaker than others. Now, is this weaker? Yes, absolutely. But this is a lot weaker. Do I need to do something on this? Absolutely. Until it is at a certain level. And then it will be, uh, it will be okay. And then they can work again on the strong points. And as a matter of fact, it's a matter of in time working on both, uh, things. Uh, in the, the same time it's a matter of improvement, stabilization, improvement, stabilization, strength, getting stronger and speed as ky you know, the block organization of strength training. Mm-hmm. By John. I work on strength, work on speed, and leave the strength alone for some time. And when you do the strength, leave the speed alone because you feel heavy and you are much stronger, but it doesn't feel too good. So do like this all the time in time. Yeah,
Ryan Patrick:the, I mean, I agree with you because, you know, if, uh, it's like the, the most important thing is whatever the limiting factor is, but that limiting factor changes over time. So, mm-hmm. You know, what's a weakness today may not be after a month or two. And so the focus of training, I think just has to evaluate. But I've seen the dangers of the pendulum swinging too far in either direction as you highlighted, where we're, we're only focusing on weaknesses. Yeah. And so we never really optimize the upside, or we're focusing on strengths. And now I've got, you know, this drag car who just breaks down every time we run it. So,
Henk Kraaijenhof:yeah. Yeah. So what might be a strong, uh, weak point might be a strong point. In other case, I think that being overly strength focused on strength and, and being, uh, heavy looks like a strong point because he can squat 50 pounds more than another athlete, and the end, it might be a weak point because of a sensitivity for injuries, because body weight, because maintaining strength and so on and so on. So take it with the key point in coaching. After 50 years, I finally figured out is just balance. Balance between everything, mental and physical, strength and speed, aerobic and aerobic load and recovery. So it's as simple as that. Damn. I read all those books. I bought all those books. I read all those books to figure that out after 50 years, so, okay. Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. We've seen some guys, uh, you know, we've had football guy, American football guys, you know, train, get insanely strong, but you put'em in cleats and on the turf and you have to time'em with a sundial because it just looks like they got rocks in their shoes.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Yeah, absolutely. We see weightlifters doing shot boot and they had to be careful with their toes because they couldn't get a thing outta the ring almost. So, uh, it's all very specific. It's individual and, and, uh, and, and, and specific those are, or balance individual, specific patients. Those are important. Uh, those are important, uh, say words in my, uh, vocabulary as a coach.
Ryan Patrick:Alright, well Hank, I'd like to wrap up with just a few quick questions. So one of the first ones I think is, it's kind of a challenge, but if you can distill. You know, just some philosophy or something you would share with young coaches down to like Yeah. A text message or, uh, even a billboard. Uh, what would, like, what statement or what would you really, uh, want to impart on some of the younger generation of coaches who are listening to this?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Well, um, be open-minded, but not so open that your brain falls out, you know, because most of of the time the worst enemy of being a very good coach is yourself because you fall in love with your own training system. In the beginning you say, oh shit, never thought, but this works great. And then say, it's the only thing that works, and think this is the only thing that works and everybody else is stupid. This is how far it goes. And young coaches are very sensitive to. Input from social media. I saw a queue a, a very cool exercise on, on Instagram or TikTok. I saw this cool exercise Unbeliev. They do this immediately. Most of the time when I give a presentation, I start with two drills that nobody else has ever seen, said, okay, we got that outta the way because this is basically what you want. You want new drills so you can show it on Monday afternoon in the on the track. So you know, nobody has to spend time on fundamental things on your philosophy. If your philosophy, right, I can train triple jumpers. I can train javelin throwers that trade soccer players that coach with the national volleyball team, hockey team. Why? Because if your foundation is good, it doesn't really matter if you can cook, you can cook Chinese or French or Italian or whatever. It doesn't really matter if you can cook. If you cannot even fry an egg, then well. You stick to a vegetarian diet or something, you can make a maybe nice salad, but that's about it. That's about it. You only eat sell it all day. But if fundamentals are good, and I know it's not nice to work on the fundamentals, everybody wanted the coolest or latest things instead of, uh, kind of wasting time on, on, on boring, fundamental stuff that you think, you know. So it's the illusion of knowledge. And the internet gives you the illusion. I can look it up. I don't want you to look it up. I want you to tell me right now. I mean, somebody gets a heart attack. You have to look it up, what you, what you're gonna do, or you're going to do something right now, otherwise the person dies. So you have to do it right now. Don't look at the internet too much. Just use your brain. Rely on your own, uh, uh, skills on, on, on common sense.
Ryan Patrick:It's easy. Oh, there's quite two, uh, one liners, right? Yeah. No, but that's so good because, uh, with Google at our fingertips, it's, it's not worth remembering everything. And you can just go, like you said, look it up. And, um, one of the things that I, I really try to impress on the coaches that I talk to is every time I've gone to watch some of my mentors, some of the people that I feel like are, are very accomplished, who have a wealth of experience is that I'm almost underwhelmed when I go to watch their programs because they're just doing the fundamentals and basic exercises. But it's, it's the way they execute them. Exactly. It's the, the intention, the focus, the queuing. They get so much more out of it than than I ever have. And so usually I, I come home and I'm curating my exercise list down to, you know, half of what it was.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not the exercise in itself. Like I said, everybody's doing the same exercises. Some people are running 10 flat and order 14 seconds while they're doing the same A, b, and C skips. So the secret is not that you're absolutely right hitting the nail on the head. It's, it's, it's the intention and it's has to be seen in a context. You see this exercise, but what they doing tomorrow? What did they do yesterday that they do was exercise. Why are they doing this? Why only 10 reps in and not seven or 17, right? Yeah.
Ryan Patrick:Alright, Hank. So, so what is next? What is next for you, man?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Uh, good question. I, uh, I'm going tonight. I'm going to do archery. I've started archery. Eight months ago, because with friends I do all the time, something crazy that we never did before. Do a barista course making stained glass, blowing glass, you know, mowing thing. And we made a bow from wood. And now I got this bow and my wife said, Hank, what do you do with this bow? You never shoot. So now when a shooting, I'm shooting with my homemade bow, which is the best, lemme say, do it yourself product I ever did. I can't even nail a, uh, I can't even hammer a nail in the wall. But the bow is my pride. So that's what I do. Uh, what tomorrow there's a competition of my athlete and, uh, and Ellie's daughter. And, uh, next week I'll preparing a podcast with, uh, China. I was lecturing in Shanghai, uh, nine years ago. Somebody said, Hey, I looked at your, uh, your presentations again. So can we have a, a series of four podcasts with, uh, China? So as long as you don't have to speak Chinese, everything's fine. Yeah. You need the interpreter. No,
Ryan Patrick:that's great. I, I I'm with you. It must be something with, uh, a lot of strength coaches.'cause I don't even know which end of the hammer to hold. And I always joke with my wife, I'm like, we really need a husband.
Henk Kraaijenhof:We had, we got better things to do with our lives, isn't it?
Ryan Patrick:We really, we really need a man around the house. Yeah. Okay. So for people who do wanna get in touch with you, um, yeah. What's the best place to connect?
Henk Kraaijenhof:Oh, uh, one thing is, uh, very simple. My, uh, email hank at Tex and Tex is without e hank Atex nl. Or is it.com? I don't know. Even know. I, I seldom mail myself, you know it. Then my, uh, Instagram, which I have, uh, drills. It's Hank Koff. I know it's a very difficult name for other people. Hank Kof five at Instagram and I have my blog. I'm a little bit too busy. I'm in the process writing two new books. Um, my blog is helping the Best to get Better com, helping the best to get better, and there's some technical stuff that you won't find anywhere and sometimes it's some regular bullshit, so it has to be there otherwise you to start. So once in a while you have to come up with bullshit. So help Get Better is a blog. Know Five is uh, Instagram and then you can look my website with no use because it's not sport related. It's Forex. It's my company testing stress and fatigue and people.
Ryan Patrick:Okay, well I'll make sure I link all of that in the show notes. And again, just wanna thank you. I thought this was a, a great conversation, super pragmatic for people and, um, I think there's, there's a lot of, uh, gold nuggets people are gonna pull out of this. So, super appreciate your time. Thanks for working with the time change and everything, Hank.
Henk Kraaijenhof:Okay. Thank you Ryan. Thank you for, uh, for taking the time and setting this up. And, uh, thank you for the opportunity to be an influencer. Okay. Keep in touch.
Ryan Patrick:Will do.