Strength Coach Collective

“Game Speed”: Jason Feairheller on Training That Actually Transfers

• twobrainbusiness@gmail.com • Season 1 • Episode 22

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The fastest athletes aren’t always the best performers on the field—and today’s guest explains why.

In this episode of the “Strength Coach Collective” podcast, multidirectional speed expert Jason Feairheller joins Kenny Markwardt to break down what athletes really need to succeed on game day.

They discuss why sprint times don’t tell the whole story, how to coach change of direction and agility as separate skills, and how to build speed that actually transfers to sport.

Jason shares the origins of his “Game Speed” framework, how he assesses and progresses athletes, and why many traditional speed programs fall short.

He also explains how he incorporates movement variability, cognitive processing and pattern recognition into his training—and how high-volume change-of-direction work can drive better performance and injury resilience.

Tune in to rethink your approach to speed and help your athletes upgrade their real-world performance.

Links

Jason's Instagram

Strength Coach Collective

0:47 - What is game speed?

10:27 - Progression in sports training

17:41 - When training starts & stops

25:36 - Continually refining skills

36:20 - How to learn more

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to the Strength Coach Collective, a podcast brought to you by Two Brain Business. We are here to help advance the strength and conditioning coaching community by bringing you a wide range of experts in the field. Join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com. For today's episode, I'm your host, Kenny Marquardt. Jason, welcome. Kenny,

SPEAKER_00:

thank you.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, man. Glad to have you here. I found you on Instagram. I'm a huge– I love youth sports development. I love athletic performance, and I came across your stuff. game speed, the things you were talking about, and I figured I had to have you on the podcast. So I reached out. Sure, thank you. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

Fire away. Let's do this.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, just tell me what that means. Tell me about game speed. That's a big... I think I can probably extrapolate what that means, but I want to hear from you. Tell me about game speed, and then we're just going to go from there.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, so game speed, if I'm talking about... All right, what exactly is linear speed versus game speed? So we have to first understand... Linear speed, or what I would just say like track speed, how fast can you run straight ahead? That is just one small part of the type of speed that needs to happen on a field or in a competition. So what makes an athlete successful on the field? If you're an offensive player, it's your ability to create space in order to make a play. And you can do that by changing direction more efficiently, creating better precise angles, different things like that. If you're a defensive player, that means that you are trying to either maintain space, whether you're already close to someone, or you're trying to take away that offensive player's space so they don't have the ability to make a play. So it's always this kind of cat and mouse game back and forth of like trying to figure out how to do that. All right, so then it's like, how does that happen on the field? Well, we have two different kind of parts that make up true game speed. It is the agility side or the cognitive component side. So you are reading and reacting to something that's on the field. And that is made up of your visual ability, your pattern recognition. So can you actually recognize, like if someone dips their shoulder down, can you recognize, oh, that typically means they're going to cut back the other direction. If they drop down low, or they stutter step, all right, I can expect them to go through some sort of change of direction or something like that. Anticipation. Which that is more based off of like the score of the game. If somebody is down by a goal or two late in the game, you can anticipate the best player getting the ball or getting the opportunity to try to make a play on their own. And then situational awareness. Where are the other players on the field? So a lot of those things. or help through practice and actual game situations. So in the gym of those parts of agility, what can we work on? We can work on the visual ability. And if we talk about like scanning and convergence and the actual vision of an athlete, and we can work on the pattern recognition side. The other part that I kind of talked about as far as like trying to read and react to someone. Yeah, that's

SPEAKER_02:

like, sorry, that's like the biggest one. I mean, that is all relatively, I don't know, new, I guess, for me. But what you were just describing, I can't believe I'd never really thought about that before. Everybody thinks about speed, power, all the things, but recognizing what another person is doing, how do you train that? Because that seems like most people, we're just doing it live, assuming we're going to figure out how to ride the bike as we send it down the hill. But how are you actually training that for people?

SPEAKER_00:

I'll go into that in a little bit. Okay, sorry. So that is one side then of that's like the agility side. The other part that makes up... that is the change of direction side. So change of direction being speed drills where they are rehearsed in the sense of the athlete knows where they're going to go, when they're going to go, and what type of movement you want them to perform. So I might say, I want you to shuffle five yards and sprint back to where you started. I want you to back pedal 10 yards and then sprint laterally to the side for five yards. So they know what they're supposed to do. And I'm not even doing that on a go call. They're just doing it. doing that. And what makes that change of direction effective are a bunch of different components. And it happens from like a chain reaction from the ground up. So we need a foot plant outside their center of mass because we need to create an angle or a wedge almost in order to decelerate and then also reaccelerate the other direction. So if I plant my foot wide of my center of mass, I have a good angle to stop, but also that shin angle dictates the new direction I'm going. So if it's a positive shin angle and it's lower to the ground, I can accelerate better. Think of like a track athlete going out of the blocks, their shins aren't vertical, they're really low compared to the track. And we kind of want to get into that position.

SPEAKER_01:

We

SPEAKER_00:

want to hit the ground with a little bit of knee flexion. So not a ton, but a little bit. So when we go into deep angles, that means it's slower to get out of. Think about accelerating out of like a quarter squat versus a full squat.

SPEAKER_01:

A

SPEAKER_00:

full squat, it takes a little bit to get it going, and then you can move the bar fast at the top of that range of motion. The same thing applies. If we can hit the ground and we have just a little bit of knee flexion, we can almost bounce out of that change of direction, display a little power, a little elasticity out of it, versus looking like we're getting stuck in the cut if we sink too deep. we need our trunk to rotate the new direction of travel. So the faster I rotate my trunk, and this has to do with like visual ability also, and you kind of rotate your new direction and you pick up the target of where you're going to go, you will go there faster than if your trunk tries to kind of like sways or lags behind a little bit. And then There's other parts of like linear speed. If you just have faster linear speed, you're going to be faster out of a change of direction, but those are the key components. Oh, and also we want to minimize ground contact time, but that happens with a wider foot plant and with decreased knee flexion. So they all, all of those things kind of work hand in hand. So the first step I'm looking at when developing game speed, I take an athlete through a change of direction drill through that rehearse drill. Can they do it well? Yeah. Yeah. I want you to sprint five yards and just do 180 degree cut and sprint right back. So you just sprint out and right back to where you came from. If I see an athlete stutter step a lot, then I know that could be either they aren't used to this type of change of direction where I'm asking them to really just slam on the brakes really fast and come back, or they don't have the strength in order to slam on the brakes with like just planning a single foot into the ground and then coming back the other way. So, All right, let's do it from three yards then. If you can't do it from five yards, great. They did it well at three yards. All right, now let's go back to five yards. If they can do it well, then maybe we know, oh, it was a coordination issue. They just didn't coordinate the steps like they needed to. If they still can't, then we know, all right, it's a strength issue. And we address that through other forms of training, obviously strength training, but also the change of direction drills that we choose. Now, within all of those things... Yeah. Yeah. An offensive player versus a defender at one point. Think of like a wide receiver versus a cornerback in football. In basketball, guys are matched up one-on-one all of the time, and you just see how you can create those space. So I do different games, and it's pretty much just all one-on-one drills where I am changing the rules of the game to not guarantee victory for one person, that they have to go all out at some point. and there's a bunch of different ones like the easiest one you could be is just like a chase drill i have athletes maybe three yards apart the person who one one is going to be behind the other one and the person who is in the back is going to start sprinting and the person who's in the front they're just kind of looking behind them And they're going to go as soon as the person in the back goes. So they're just reading and reacting, and they just have to go out and try not to get tugged. There's other versions of games where it's like I might have athletes 10 yards apart facing each other. One athlete is trying to tag the other one, and they'll do it on my go call. But the... the one athlete will say like the offensive player has a choice. Their goal is to get in between a set of cones to the right or a set of cones on the left. So they might go through like a speed cut once or twice to try to fake the defender out in order to kind of get to the goal.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And all of those things are kind of decided based off of the speed work that I'm going to be doing with them on a particular day.

SPEAKER_01:

Cool.

SPEAKER_00:

I know that that is a, lot to unpack but that is the that is the the biggest general kind of part of it is like you have the agility side you have the change of direction side and you're always working to improve both of those things but depending on the athlete you might need a little bit more of one or the other we have to develop the physical capacity because if they don't have that i cannot expect them to move well in a reactive scenario totally if they're asked to do something

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So how does that look as a progression? I mean, I'm assuming it sounds as though, like it sounds like a series of testing, like normal programs, like test or assess, and then, you know, try and progress. But from what I would imagine the, the games that you're playing are happening at the peak of the pyramid and the base has got to be built off of something else. So like, how are you progressing somebody? Does that make sense? Like, those are my line of questioning makes sense in terms of like, okay, where are you starting from? And then how are you, how often, like, what does this look like? Maybe I'll just ask it in a periodization sense or a training cycle sense. How does that look?

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. So the movements of sport don't change necessarily. So that is something like a lot of people don't necessarily understand right away. So there's going to be a lateral shuffle. We see that in basketball. A baseball player fielding a ground ball, they shuffle to the side. Even in a soccer match, when someone's approaching them slowly, I might be shuffling. And I'm a defender. I might be shuffling backwards a little bit. There's a lateral run where think of like a linebacker in football. I'm looking straight ahead. I'm looking at the quarterback, but I'm running laterally. So like my hips turn to the side, but my shoulders are kind of square forward as I'm like reading and reacting to a play. There's curved running. So rarely is someone actually running in just a straight line. People are usually running along curves, whether it be a wide curve or like a really tight curve, depending on the scenario of the game. We have a backpedal. which is just someone is approaching you straight on. You need a little bit of speed to go backwards so you don't just get burned one side or the other. So you go into a back pedal before you transition to another movement. You have a hip turn, which is, let's say I'm square to you. and you're trying to run past me one side or the other, I will reposition my foot. So if my feet are kind of in a parallel stance next to each other, I would plant one foot into the ground in front of me in order to allow my hips to reposition and go behind me. So I'm basically creating that angle, that shin angle, in order to project myself backwards. And all of those things happen all the time in sport. Now, the different part of it is, Depending on the position you play, not even the sport necessarily, will you be doing more of one thing versus the other? I go back to American football a lot because it's just easy to understand. A cornerback in football that is covering a wide receiver, they're typically retreating or going backwards a lot. So they perform a bunch of hip turns, a bunch of back pedals, a bunch of shuffles where they're retreating, where they're kind of looking straight ahead, but they're like shuffling backwards and they have to transition backwards a lot. But a defensive end in football, even though they're on the defensive side, they're attacking a lot more. They're running towards the quarterback. So they're going to be doing things like trying to get a sidestep or maybe they do some sort of like spin move to get around a defender. So I'm looking if I have an athlete or a very small group, I'm looking at the positions they play in sport and I'm trying to match those movement patterns to that athlete. If I have a large group of people, then I'm just dividing my workouts into, I have change of direction days where I'm attacking. So thinking if I draw a line straight by my side and I'm moving forward in any direction, that would be an attacking type of day. And that could be cuts, that could be curved runs, any of these types of things. I move laterally and then I move forward. I have a side to side day where I'm just now if I'm on that line, I'm literally just going side to side. A lot of people are familiar with those types of drills like a shuffle and then a sprint back, you sprint 180 cut, come back, and then I'll have a retreating day, anything behind me. So transitions to a sprint behind me, a back pedal to even like a lateral sprint to the side, all of those things. Alright, so that is kind of the general idea. If I have an athlete coming in, we'll say anywhere between like four or five days a week, they're going to be getting in at least one of those days every single week. And there's a ton of carryover and crossover between those days because even if I'm doing a side-to-side day and a retreating day, there's a good chance I'm still going to be performing a shuffle each of those days. So one day still carries into the next one. It's not like, oh, we are only doing curved running today. We are only working on a back pedal today. No, there's tons of crossover in between all of those things. And then how am I progressing those? So ways that we progress speed drills, the actual duration of the drill, just about every one of my drills is like two to four seconds long. And it's very short because it allows me to get in a ton of quality reps. If I'm actually trying to improve someone's speed, I need them moving super fast. I can't let it turn into a conditioning workout. I could use this type of stuff as conditioning, but the main goal for me is to improve their top end output or their top end speed. And that can be through change of direction or anything else like that. The number of changes of direction within a drill is also going to dictate the intensity of the drill. So if a drill's four seconds long and includes one change of direction versus four seconds long and two changes of direction, that's a different type of intensity. And if you've done a lot of change of direction work, you know the more changes of direction, the more difficult it's gonna be. It is just a lot more fatiguing to have to quick slam on the brakes and then re-accelerate and then you've gotta slam on the brakes again. It just gets very tiring. the total distance that we cover within the drill is also something I'm looking at. So like a general rule of thumb for me is 150 to 250 total yards per workout, per speed workout. And in general, like if you're doing an acceleration day of just like a linear speed day, acceleration day, That's kind of the target. And 250 is still a good bit if we're looking at quality reps, but that would be kind of later in the off season once athletes have gone through this a good bit. And I just want to kind of extend them out a little bit more. But that's how I'm progressing it. So within each of those things. I am going maybe in the beginning of an off season, 150 total yards. So in general, all the drills are a little bit shorter, either in duration or in distance. And then over the course of time, we are just adding in slightly more changes of direction, slightly more duration per drill, which leads to more distance covered. And that kind of goes into the next thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Cool. So let's you keep using the American football example. When does this type of training start, stop? How does that look on an annual basis?

SPEAKER_00:

Never stops.

SPEAKER_02:

Never stops.

SPEAKER_00:

Never stops. So even if I have somebody coming in two days a week, they're doing this type of stuff, I'll say at least one day per week, but still a little bit on the second day. So I still do a lot of just max speed work where linear speed, They're just maxing out. We're running 30s, 40s, and we're just improving their fly 10, those types of things. That is always going to happen at least once a week. And then I'm layering in all of those other things along with that. Because I've never had an athlete who is perfect at all of these things. And you can always make it more difficult by... increasing the speed into a change of direction so that if someone's change the entrance velocity they have before they need to go into a change of direction if i have them go 10 yards that's still going to be a pretty tough cut if I'm asking them to get out of that pretty quickly. And they're going all out. And then depending on, you can get really complicated as far as like the coordination types of things. And what I mean by that is like, let's say I'm backpedaling and all of a sudden, like I make a lateral cut to one side and then I need to go directly behind me again. Pairing all of those things up is just a new level of coordination, which is difficult. But again, I always think about it this way. If name a sport and it's like the skill of the sport, if you're a basketball player, dribbling, shooting, all of those things, people put a ton of work into that. But the speed or the game speed model, speed is a skill. So you have to work on this skill of developing all of these things and the ability to really link these movement patterns. And if you can become an elite mover, you have more options on the field. So what makes someone better than someone else? It's when they have more movement options. I'll say like a player who's okay– they tend to stick to maybe the same move all the time. I always use basketball for example, where the best players, think of the most creative players. A lot of people use Kyrie Irving as an example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Increasing them at higher speeds and more difficulty, which will then transfer over to what they're actually doing on the field.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, both offensively and defensively, I'm imagining. Like where offensively you have more tricks in the bag and defensively you have more reactivity to the different tricks in the bag, right?

SPEAKER_00:

That's exactly. And particularly offensive players... You can practice a lot of these things because you are dictating the move out there a lot of the time. Yeah. I know I can create separation by doing this particular thing that I've practiced over and over.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And even defensive. I mean, yeah, on both sides of it, where you can kind of like, you're actually leading the dance. They might not even, they might not realize you're leading the dance, but you're leading the dance because of the, because of the sequential tricks you have in your bag that may lead them that direction. I love it. That's awesome. I don't mean to keep leaning into this, but like, I'm trying to reconcile this in my brain, the periodization thing. Like I'm so, and again, I'm not, this is just what I've, you know, been trained to know and learn, but it's like, okay, season post-season, like you start to slow down. You kind of go, you stop moving in the directions you have been to try and, you know, go back to basic movement patterns. And then long story short is you go faster and faster throughout the year up until pre-season where you're trying to go game speed. So yeah, That's been my perspective. I'm hearing something a little bit different from you. Am I right in hearing that differently from you?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. And I'll say like the main difference I have compared to a lot of people is I will do more volume of speed training than a lot of other people. Every athlete's still doing strength training. Like I'm not neglecting that in any way, but. When we think, even if I'm looking at the amounts of people counting plyo contacts and all these other things, particularly sub-max plyo contacts, the amount of changes of direction that happen in a game are a lot. And if I need athletes to be prepared to accelerate out of a change of direction and be able to slam on the brakes in the fourth quarter or late in a game, I need to prepare them to do that. So I am, I'm not just relying on other linear conditioning or like the game or the practice to get them prepared because it really always goes back to the idea that it is a skill and it's a skill that has to be performed all the time. And if you aren't doing that with intent, And what I mean by that is like knowing what you're supposed to do, knowing how you're supposed to move. Yeah. Then the odds that it's going to happen are not high. That's why you still have just like the one or two best people on a team all the time, despite people doing sports year round all the time. And I'll use like hockey as an example. Hockey players, even like youth hockey players. They'll play from like 11, 12 years old. They might play like 40 to 50 games a year. And they do that every year. So why when they're 18 are they absolutely not the elite of the elite? Why are there still some players that just aren't as good? And it comes down to intentful practice. and knowing exactly what you're supposed to do and knowing how to move. And it's the guys that put in the extra skating time and the extra skill work that are better. And it's the idea, like I consider myself almost more of like a skills coach in the sense of I'm teaching the skill of movement. And then the coach can teach the skill of the actual sport or the implement, whether it be with a puck, with a ball, anything like that. So, yeah, you are correct in terms of like I do things a little differently from that perspective.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think it's– no, I love what you said, and that makes more sense to me in that like the movements being a skill, like that sounds so obvious, but it's like that's not what most of us I think are doing in the office. I think most of us kind of go back to the– to the very very basics of you know squat bend push pull like trying to go super gpp

SPEAKER_01:

on it sure sure

SPEAKER_02:

which i think is what i'm hearing from you as well like you're not neglecting the strength part of it but you're continuing to do the skill in the off season so it's not a complete like a race of the whiteboard and starting over when you do move more specific down the line you're still i think what i'm hearing is you're using that as practice time to continue to refine and continue to build the movement patterns in a way that's that's not like maybe full game speed all year round maybe it is but i think you're you're continually refining the skill which which i love and what you're talking about with the volume of games and what i tend to see is where your kids are playing year round it tends to be a lot of garbage time which is i think what you're saying about like the hockey example it's like you're just You're just doing the thing, but there's no intentionality to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. And I see that with soccer is huge here. I'm in North Idaho, so we're going hard into soccer season. These kids will be playing for the next nine months, and I get a little bothered by it because it is a lot of grab ass. They're playing, which is fine. The ball's out there, but the skill development, like you're saying, I'm not sure how productive it is other than the fact that there's a ball in the field. That's the only difference.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and also I went to salt tooth mountains last year, second time I was there. It's like my favorite place on earth. Um, it's awesome. But I'll say too, I think the limiting factor is a lot of coaches. If I were to say, all right, teach me how to squat. They'll give you 20 cues. They know exactly what to look for. But if I say, show me how to lateral shuffle, what are all the cues you need to perform that? We don't have that. So without having that. the model of movement in your head as far as what you're looking for. you're not going to necessarily coach that because you're not going to go out of your comfort zone in that sense. So I would say start to take a deep dive into understanding what does a shuffle look like? All right, it's a push off the outside leg, a pull off the inside leg. The inside leg, the toe is going to point out a little bit. So you can use your hamstrings to pull a little bit more. If I'm looking from the straight on, your head should be level the whole time. There should be no vertical displacement. of that, and we need to cover some distance. It shouldn't look like short, choppy steps. So without knowing all of that, knowing what to look for, it's not as intentful. And then it's like, would time be better spent doing more strength stuff or doing more linear speed stuff? It probably would if they're just going through the motions. But I think it is a missing piece that it's like, take that deep dive and look into all of those things. And then that will help everything else down the line. Because ultimately, if they're not playing their sport better, then can you say you're doing your job? Right. He had like a 39 inch vertical jump. He didn't even make an AFL team because his skill on the field was just not good. So he had all of the physical tools. Yeah. But at the time I didn't, that was all I was training was I need to get him stronger. I needed to jump further, jump higher. And what's his linear speed. I didn't look at any of the actual like change of direction side of it or how could I help him move a little bit better on the field. And part of that probably too is like his ability to read and react to what's going on. But here's another key thing that a lot of people miss. Your perception on the field changes based off of your physical capacity, right? So if I know that, all right, I have someone who I'm defending and I know that if I back up slowly and I allow him to get a little bit closer to me, I can still transition really well behind me and he's not going to beat me versus people that don't have as much confidence. They leave a much bigger buffer zone between them and the person that they would be covering or defending. And once again, that space allows someone to create a play or to make a play. So if I have more confidence in my ability, I'm going to play differently on the field than I would if I'm just kind of doing it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Yeah, so true. On paper performance type thing that you were saying, I love that too, where it's like, okay, fine. All the combine numbers that we see pumped out for NFL games It's like, well, who, like, does that really matter? Like, not really. Like at the end of the day, it's like the performance on the field that's going to dictate their success. But on the other thing you just said, the chess match that's available to somebody with the capacity of all the different movement patterns that they can perform like that. Again, I just see the, the practice of those things. What I, my best example of this is jujitsu, which I did for a dozen years and That's the

SPEAKER_00:

perfect example. Yeah. It's like, you can be the strongest guy and you go in and you're choked out in 10 seconds.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

It's like, what just happened?

SPEAKER_02:

Right. Right. And same with the like complexity and the layers that you're like, when you're, when you're getting going, it's, and the mastery of those things, which is what I've, what I've learned from what you've brought me today is like the mastery of those little nuances, which I did, like, that's a big emphasis in jujitsu is like, I can show you this thing, but you've got to practice it thousands and thousands. The difference between a master black belt practitioner and the new person is it's so subtle, but it's so impactful. that it makes all the difference in the world. And the Bruce

SPEAKER_00:

Lee saying is getting precise with the angles, the leverage, all of those types of things. And it's just that same thing applies to speed development. You're just getting all of those things a little bit more precise and a little bit better based off of the model of what success would be.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Again, I've watched– so my son's 11. We do a lot of youth stuff at our gym. I've been an athlete for, whatever, 30 years. I would say the vast majority of what I'm seeing is not what you're expressing. And I, I'm just thrilled to hear it from you can convey it through my brain of like, you know, we all do the drills. We all did it. You know, we've, we've been doing the same stuff for what I feel like is all that. Have I been an athlete for, you know, karaoke, high needles, all the same stuff with no intentionality to it. It's like, okay, we all know what we're supposed to do. Cause we've been doing this for, but there's no coaching or queuing or, or, or performance review of why we're doing these things and trying to actually master them. It's more, Garbage time filler. Like, oh, I think this is what we're supposed to be doing, so let's just keep doing it. And I really appreciate that perspective of why, what, all the patterns that would be expressed on a playing field in a competitive environment to be explored and mastered, which I think I said a couple times, but I think that's what I'm hearing conveyed.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, just yesterday, I was at the New York Red Bulls Major League Soccer at their academy doing a seminar. And just watching video on YouTube, you can pick clips of any sport. And I just picked a few clips out. It's like, this is why this was successful, because of the shin angle, because of that model of changing direction I talked about, hitting a wide foot plant to create a good shin angle, minimal ground contact time. They turned their trunk, and they were able to create a shot out of essentially nothing.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Versus... Like here's another example of a person doing something similar, but they didn't quite hit those angles and allow the defender to maintain a good position. And all of a sudden they're just holding the ball. They got to pass it off. Yeah. And it's just those little tiny things all the time. But once you become, I'll say even like a student of movement and you, you start watching people move all the time. you can just develop such a good coach's eye. And I'll say the other part too, why I think a lot of people stray away from this, and you can even go more on like the college side, is there isn't as much measurable stuff to it. Because the amount of movement options are essentially infinite, that you cannot say directly like, I improved this jump by this much, so success is going to be that. I get it. A lot of people need measurables to show progress of what they're doing, and it is hard to show measurable progress with change of direction. There's a few different types of things that people have done, but it is still so limited that it always comes back to the model movement and just looking at it versus... Yeah, just kind of seeing what else is there.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, certainly. I totally– I can see that. Again, I am well behind you in this, but I can do that with all the movements that I coach and with the clients that I work with. It's like just– it's there. I just– I don't know. I can't really– I just see it's wrong or it's right or it's whatever, and I can usually boil it down into words.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, even like Olympic lifting is a perfect example. Yep,

SPEAKER_02:

yep.

SPEAKER_00:

Where– The small changes make huge differences. And the more you watch people do it, the more you can just say, ah, you know what? Like, just be a little more patient. Like, get under the bar a little bit. Like, whatever your cue might be, but watching over and over again, you're easy. Like, you don't need to slow-mo it down. You can just kind of see it and be like, this is what could be better. And you watch the bar move faster. Yeah. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

100%. That's a great example that I can relate to. I spent a lot of time on the platform, a lot of time coaching people on the platform, and I did have to, in the beginning, slow things down a lot. I used the heck out of Coach's Eye, and that helped refine that. And now it's like I can't remember the last time I had to do that. And what I appreciate about what you just said is the same thing. It's like just getting the reps in and paying attention to it, slowing it down if you need to, but that will develop your mastery of understanding the movement patterns that you're– were looking to develop with your athletes. Aside from that, where would somebody, as I just said, I'm well behind you in this, where would somebody like me start? How do I kind of explore this other than just getting the reps in? Where do I begin my journey of understanding athletic movement better?

SPEAKER_00:

The easiest thing to do is start doing it yourself. And it doesn't have to be a lot, but the more you do something, even think about when you're lifting, You've done it enough where in a certain rep, you might say, I didn't do this on this rep. And the next rep, you just kind of cue it better. And by doing that, it also helps you coach other people better. Like imagine trying to coach something that you've never, ever done yourself. It's going to be difficult. So the first thing I would say is make it part of your daily warmup. It doesn't have to be much, but five to 10 minutes every day adds up over a long period of time. And once you do that, you develop a better understanding of moving. It'll help you coach people a little bit better. It'll give you more confidence if you're having somebody start performing these drills. But the easiest thing to do is honestly go to my Instagram page and read the captions because I always write this stuff. But Once you start to go back a long time, you can see all of the things, they're constantly there. The principles never, ever change. They always stay the same. What changes might be the movement patterns or how we link different movement skills together. But the principles and the model movement never change. And once you develop that model movement and you can kind of see it like, oh, this is what it's supposed to look like. You start practicing yourself, even record yourself doing it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Watch. All right. This is I could have covered some more distance when I did this shuffle versus like taking a lot of choppy steps or something like that. And what did that feel like? And there's a book called The Inner Game of Tennis where they talk about like the learning and the idea of like, all right, that rep was really great. Try to remember what that felt like and replicate that the next time. So you're not necessarily like telling them what to do. but just the feeling they had. And I'll say too, like the athletes that I've trained a lot and regularly, I almost don't even need to coach them as much anymore just because they've developed such like intuitive awareness of how they move that they're almost like self-correcting at a certain point.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep. Yeah, that makes sense. Same with the, again, back to the Olympic lifting thing. Like it just doesn't, something wasn't right. I know exactly like, okay, that was wrong. Something wasn't right. I can understand it. But the beginner, it's like you got to break it down so much. So, yeah. What's your Instagram? Where can people find that page?

SPEAKER_00:

My first and last name. It's a lot of letters together. Jason, J-A-S-O-N, and then Fairheller, F-E-A-I-R-H-E-L-L-E-R. It's all together.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep. We'll put it in the show. I'm Mark Horton. I get that one butchered all the time. So I feel you there. That's a lot of spelling of my last name, which I'm assuming you're in the same boat. So totally get it. Anything else you want to recommend? You've got some other stuff on your site too. You've got courses.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So I have some programs out. The programs are intended for either coaches to help coach their athletes or they are intended for just athletes themselves that, that want to go through it. And then I do have a course on multi-directional power where I go over the movement patterns. I talk about the importance of linking those movement patterns together and then specific drills that I like to implement in order to create that outcome.

SPEAKER_02:

Cool. That's awesome, man. Uh, anything else you want to leave us with? I think that was a, that's a great, That's a good summation. The master.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And feel free to reach out. Yeah. Message me on Instagram and, and I'll get back to you.

SPEAKER_02:

Cool. Love it. Thanks, Jason. That was great. Selfishly. I can't wait to bring this into my own gym and with our athletes here and hopefully for the rest of everybody that's listening, this is, this has been super cool. So I appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_00:

Awesome. Thank

SPEAKER_02:

you. All right, man. Talk to you soon. All right, coaches. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you're going to put it to practice and I hope you enjoyed this episode. Don't forget, you can join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com.