What's up, guys? Welcome back to the THPStrength podcast. We have a very special guest with us today. It is Mike Young, PhD. This person has mentored me since I was probably 17 years old officially, unofficially much longer because I had read through every single article that he's ever posted on lead track and every single forum post that he was involved in on this website.

So major influence on my coaching, credentials, major influence on my life, major influence on Isaiah even to some extent. You could even say that Isaiah, you're his grandson if I'm if I'm gonna be your son, Mike, which I know that you love those jokes. You may not know this as well. Mike hates anything that is sentimental, so I will be sure to include anything that is sentimental in this, podcast. So a little bit of background as well.

For those that don't know, I would I did my first internship at Athletic Lab. Mike actually allowed me to come ahead of time, probably against his better judgment now looking back on that period of time. And I would essentially, every day after he would finish, his workday and he would do his lift, I would sit down with a pen and paper, and I would just ask him questions. And we would just go through a series of things that I was had on my mind, and then he would give me homework. I'd go home.

If you guys are are you still do you guys still have the internship program. Right?

Yeah. Going strong.

Going strong. So, yeah, it was, massively influential on my development as I previously said. Taught me most of what I know. So, Mike, the first question I have for you, is is there anything, or coaching lineage, actually. I already asked you this this first one.

Is there what was your coaching lineage? How did you get to where you are? I know that Boo played a really big role. I didn't know for sure about Dan, and if Ben and I were talking, who influenced who? If Dan influenced Boo or Boo influenced Dan or they worked together, we were kinda confused on that storyline.

Yeah. So I'd say my primary influence is Boo, but I've been lucky enough to have quite a few. So I, and and I I truly mean lucky because I did, I GA'd. I transferred in as an athlete from Canisius College, small liberal arts school in New York to to Ohio University. I graduated, did a GA shift there, worked as both a track and a strength and conditioning coach, in my GA.

And as a head coach in strength and conditioning, I had a guy named Ethan Reeve who has kind of become known to have created escalating density training and had became the president of USTFCCCA no. Of the the CSCCCA. So the that's probably one of the largest strength coach organizations in the in the world. He was one of the founding members of that. So he was my first strength coach member my first strength coach mentor, then went on to do my PhD.

Kinda long story short there, I worked for a guy named who every single day, I'd go out. And if I had anything at all that I would claim to be similar to you, John, is that I would go out to practice and take notes every day, and I'd come come back home and come back to my office at LSU and write down the and his his little witty jokes and cues and everything else. And, also, while I was there at LSU, had a PhD professor, not really known in our field, but is a biomechanics guy, and he taught me more than I could ever imagine about critical thinking and about how to be both critical minded, but also open minded to exploring new ideas. So and then where Dan fits into the equation is that as a guy who was at LSU, at the time, text Dan was at Texas and subsequently University of Florida. He's he influenced Boo, and I was then connected to Dan via that connection as well as Lauren Seagrave.

So those are two two coaching legends of track and field. Like, if you look at a lot of the influence in track and field, it comes from that era. Boo, Dan, Lauren Seagrave just punching way above their weight, both in terms of the athletes they produce as well as the coaches that they have produced. So Dan, even before I really knew him, started to you know, I I hadn't even really spent any time with a guy, to be honest with you. Crossed some emails and calls, and the guy was super gracious there, but he was almost based off of some of the work I had done for USA Track and Field and and, you know, the recommendations of Boo, opening doors for me left and right, getting me job interviews, connecting me with people.

So Dan was by far more of an external influence, not a day to day kind of guy. Certainly influenced me a lot, both directly and in indirectly through Boo. But I'd say coach Ethan Reeve at Ohio University who later went on to handful of other things, including Wake Forest and Tennessee. And Did he lecture

at one of the ALTs or athletic lab? I I think I met him. Yeah. That's what I thought. I was like, that name sounds really familiar.

And Boo and my my major academic professor, Lee Lee, who taught me how to be critical minded and basically get through the BS.

Sift through the shit. Yeah. Well, my my coaching, what's funny that you say that is my biggest mentor is obviously being you and then Dan going back to you know, for those of you who don't know, I did an internship at Altus, and I had asked Mike. Most of the experience, that I had, I would filter what I was gonna do through Mike as a as a system to figure out what was worth my time and what wasn't. One of those things was to go work with Dan in 2016, the summer, before the Olympic games.

So went over there, got to spend a lot of time with Dan. I know, Ben, you're currently taking the Altus courses, so you're pretty well accustomed to, some of the stuff he teaches and stuff like that, and he's absolutely brilliant. So if you guys are listening to this and you wanna add someone to study on your list that isn't us, then go check out Dan Paff because he's he's one of the GOATs for sure. And then, obviously, you know, being in a roundabout way influenced pretty heavily by Boo because I you're, like, his little clone. And maybe there's another question I had.

Where do you guys differ more or where do you think you differ, in relation to how Boo coaches jumpers? And my, guess, experience with this is when speaking to Eric, because Eric was heavily influenced by Kilgore at Mhmm. Westchester. He said that Boo and Jason would probably do Jason would do the most plows out of the three of you. You would probably do the least, and Boo would fall somewhere in the middle.

And maybe that's changed, but that was probably ten years ago that I asked him that question. So where do you guys differ, you and Boo, now?

I'd say from a training standpoint, it's pretty minimally. I definitely am kind of a Boo version two, I would say. Like, if Boo had the luxury of being born generation or two later and, you know, had access to things like BBT and force platforms and the sports tech and the load management stuff that I do, then I think he he would have used that a little bit more than he does. I tend to like to use sports tech when I can. It's not I it will never replace that for me, but Boo is admittedly a ludite when it comes to sports tech.

You know? He doesn't he doesn't really rely on it or need it, and he's proven you can get the results without it. So in terms of the actual training difference, it's quite little. And it's interesting you say about the plyometric volumes and densities. I'd say my plyometric volumes, especially as you have probably seen, largely differ from Boo's because I'm getting Boo's getting grade a talent in terms of jumping abilities, I think.

And I'm oftentimes getting you know, my my biggest successes, Eric included, are division two, division three castaways. They're not guys who were going to LSU. They're guys who were told to hang it up after, you know, their senior year in college because they weren't even division three all Americans. And this is back at a time when division three all American meant you were way far off division one. Nowadays, it's kinda close.

But back back then, division three was kind of like you were a good high school or a very good level high school, like national class high school person. So, you know, the level of talent that I was getting was was very was lower than than what you'd see in terms of what Boo would get. And even at I coached at West Point for some time, and it was lower still there. Like there, you just have grinders, you know, guys that are just gonna pound away, they and couldn't take the plyometric volume. I actually tried to do some of the plyometric volume and the sprint volume that I was doing at LSU with guys at West Point, and we just couldn't they couldn't manage it.

They just get beat to crap. But those guys, you put them in the weight room, and they were fine squatting two or three times a week really heavy. And for whatever reason, they responded well to that. But if you gave them the the jumping and sprint volume, it was just beat them beat them up, and they couldn't perform. And that was kinda the start of when I started to look at things instead of these nice clean buckets like, here's your sprint volume, and here's your strength volume, and here's your plyo volume.

They're really they're I just kinda view them as the same thing. And you can you can take some out of one bucket and put it into the other if you need to and vice versa. As long as you're kind of have a little bit in every bucket, you're probably okay. And different people are gonna need different ratios to get to reach their genetic potential. If you got a, you know, you got a donkey who can just grind and work, and I don't mean that, like, in any bad way, but it's like a guy that can go to work.

You know? They're a workhorse. They can go to work. How you handle that is gonna be a little different than how you treat it as a racehorse. You know?

You got a racehorse. Now it's you know, you gotta treat it right all the time. You can't hammer away at the slow grinding strength stuff, and maybe the volume doesn't need to be as high. So some of, I think, our differences in terms of the plyo volume or, you know, the sprint volume that you might see between my programs and Lauren's programs would be due to the the level of athletes that I've had. And I've had a lot of success with these d two, d three guys.

We we almost made a career as a track coach turning d two and d three guys into national champions, you know, like, high level, especially in the multi events, some triple jumpers who've won national championships, guys that have gone to compete in the high jump, and even some sprinters that have gone on. And and all of them are my best guys, couple national champions are all d two, d three guys. And, you know, it's the the idea that I'll tell them when they first come in is, hey. Look. You are way far behind your competition.

You think you want you wanna compete at USA's? Well, there's already 30 collegiates that have the national qualifier in your event from division one that are the same age or younger than you. So if you wanna catch up to them or maybe exceed them, you have to be willing to do things that they're not doing because you have to get you have to be the best at getting better. Because if you gotta if you wanna catch up, you can't just improve at the rate that they're improving. You have to be the best at getting better.

And that's the only way you you narrow that gap between you and these guys that are, you know, coming from your LSUs and your UTs and your U University of Florida's and your UCLA's. It's like, these are you know, why do you grade a beef talent? It's like, you

know, guys resources out there? I mean, are you gonna keep making these illustrations?

I mean, it's like really worth it. Would you say with the when looking at a talented athlete versus a not so talented athlete, would you say that for the talented guys, they can't handle as much of the weight room volume, or is it more of, like, a mental thing with them?

I think the guys that are really wired for fast elasticity, that's naturally wired like that, whether whatever you wanna define that as. They're just super elastic. They're super bouncy. They're, you know, maybe don't have great natural qualities in in the weight room, but you they can jump out of the jump through the roof. Those are the guys that I think, you know, are a little bit more neural drive.

They they're gonna benefit from getting strong, but they're probably gonna maybe reach a a limiting return a little bit earlier. And the guys that don't have those qualities improve improve what they're good at, they're not gonna get as beat up from the from the weight room. They'll be able to handle that slow grinding strength. You you put them on a on the track where they've gotta handle these elastic loads, five times body weight loads on sprints, 10 times on jumps. Just can't handle it.

You know, I've seen it many times over. I don't know what the full ideology of it is, but it's like, I see it all the time with guys that especially in your really, really ballistic events, like like sprinting, like the horizontal jumps. Vertical jumps are a little bit different. You know, I mean, you guys, of course, know about that, but you see a you see guys coming at it from both sides in the horizontal jumps and the and hit different jumping strategies there. But, you know, I know you guys do a lot of the more traditional weight room work, and I think that's that's a great great spokesman for that methodology of training.

You know? And I think getting strong never never hurts. It's always seems strikes me as a stupid question of, like, how strong do you need to be or how you know, when be as strong as you can. Of course, you if you're taking away from other aspects of training, not recovering from it or whatever, then sure. Shift your shift your bias, but get extremely important.

Do you think that some of these like, we we see a few guys in our space that have insane verticals. They had never touched a weight room in their entire life. You see it in track sometimes. Guys will run you know, in high school, you'll see these nine ninety guys now or low tens and stuff like that. They've never touched a weight in their entire life.

Right? And then they'll chalk it up as, oh, look at me. I don't I don't need to touch weights, you don't need to touch weights. You know? Or you'll see guys in our space that jump every day when they're kids, and then, you know, they've got naturally good jump technique.

They jump really, really high, especially two foot jumpers. I think they can handle it more because the forces are lower than what you would see in, like, high jump or long jump in terms of peak forces. You know, like, I I was telling Ben the other day, I was like, well, the the big difference in the progressions in track with what, like, Mike or Boo would do is they're they're gonna do a lot more of a buildup for, for example, like long jump takeoffs or something like that. Right? Like, you're gonna go do your your short approach jumps.

You're gonna do your, probably not brick top, but the standing balance series where it's, you know, standing long jump and then standing triple jump, double double, stuff like that. Then you're gonna build into the short approach jumps, then you do approaches, then you do full approach jumps usually in competition. Whereas, like, as dunking athletes or people that only dunk or only turn vertical jump, they're doing three hour sessions, you know, almost every day as a kid, jumping every single day. And I guess my question to you is, what do you think the sorts of changes, you know, maybe from you use the word ideology point of view. Don't know if you would or perspective.

I don't know if you would have the the lens on that per se, but do you think that it's just that they learn those motor patterns so effectively? Do you think someone like Isaiah who did that, you know, he's grooved it so many times and just has, like, better adaptations of the tendon because he's younger? Like, how would you attribute that, their success in jumping as someone who only jumped, you know, to their their progress or progression, I guess?

Right. I mean, you think you can you can see that in to some extent in every sport. It's most interesting when you look at your physical your physical performance oriented sports, your jumping, your sprinting. And I think that if if you stop thinking of it as these sprinting in one bucket and jumping in another bucket and weights in another bucket, and you start just thinking of them as stimulus on a continuum, a neurological continuum, that it's a lit there's a little bit of a sliding scale, and everybody's slightly unique, not completely unique, but slightly unique, and different things will work for different people. Different tendon lengths, different tendon composition, different fiber types, different technique, different, you know, neural drive.

So it's just figuring out what matters for each person. And there's plenty of stories. I I actually talk about this a lot in terms of sprinting, little bit less so in terms of jumping. But, I mean, there there's some classic examples that are really just kind of straw men of when you dive deeper of exactly what you're talking about. You know, you're you're pointing out the one outlier or maybe a maybe a dozen outliers, whatever it is, and they've all they've done is jump.

Or Carl Lewis, the greatest sprinter of all time. If you've ever looked at his weight room program, it's like really shitty light leg extensions, you know, on a Nautilus machine, stuff like that.

Awesome. That's what we need. Guys,

not a cleans. Or, yeah, you look at Usain Bolt. I've got I I have a presentation. I've got Usain Bolt on there cleaning, and he's doing a 135 pounds, 10 reps with what looks like, you know, a a catch. Doesn't even get the elbows around.

It's mostly just lower back extension and you're Football cleans, reverse caterpillar. Yeah. So it's not even it's not good technique. It's not good load. It's not a significant load.

It's a 135 pounds. It's poor prescription at three times 10 on a power clean, something like this. Right? So you're basically missing every every box in terms of what you would expect to see, but then you dive a little bit deeper and you go, oh, well, he sprinted a shitload. What did Carl Lewis do?

He sprinted a shitload, and he did long jump. Right? So there's your you're you're already throwing into the plyometrics. And even the guys who are, like, tempo guys in the sprint world, there are tempo guys, and they say, oh, you don't need to sprint sprint. And guys like, you know, Bobby Kersey is a is a good example.

He has a very comp I don't wanna distill his his successful methodology down, but he does a lot of slower, longer tempo running. You know, I've seen some programs where they're doing, like, really long hill runs for short short hurdlers. And people of my school of thought would go, oh, that doesn't really make a lot of sense. Well, that tempo run at 80% is reasonably close to sprinting. You know, it's the same basic action as sprinting.

And because it's an 80%, you could do a shitload of volume at it. You know, once you get closer to the edge, you're 95%, you're 100%, well, now you can't do nearly as much. So, again, it's I think there's no denying that an all jumps program could work. An all sprint program or even an all tempo program could work to make you faster, especially if we're talking about sprinting to sprint or tempo to sprint or, you know, you saw the guys at Altus were doing a lot of kind of submaximal running. Right?

Even their sprinters would do submaximal running by at least by my definition. And the jump if you're doing a lot of jumping, you it's certainly gonna improve your jumping even if it's, you know, submaximal. You can't beat specificity, I think.

So it's almost like you take it through the lens. And I've said this before. We're working on a a project right now where we're talking a lot about strength, and you can ask Isaiah because he read through what I wrote. And I basically said, strength is, I think the word you always say, it's it's like a con contrive, like, point of view because it's force. It's just force going through the muscle and through the tendon.

And if you've got a lot of force going through the muscle and the tendon and you're doing a lot of times, you're gonna improve that muscle's ability to generate force. It's not like, oh, because I'm doing a squat versus running, there's no force going through. I'm not generating force. I'm not generating tension. And even if you were to look at something like jogging, I think jogging, you still had three times body weight or something like that.

Like, know, if you were to put Yeah. If you were to put, like, three times body weight on the bar and do quarter squats with one leg, it's gonna be pretty fucking hard. But and so, like, if you go out and you do a bunch of jumping, you are like, let's just call strength anytime we're loading the muscle with like, you're if you're on a force plate, you're generating newtons. Right? Or there's newtons on the it's measuring newtons.

Okay. We're gonna see a lot of newtons a lot of times. And so you're doing something that is and and if you're increasing the velocity, we know you need an acceleration due that you need net force. So you have to you have to generate force in all of those activities. It it's like saying, no.

Really, what you're trying to do is say that they went out and did something where there was no force like sitting in a rocking chair. It's like that truly is no force. That's not gonna make you better. But if you go out and you do the jumps and you do the running and you do all these other activities and you do have a progression built in, like, let's say that you're starting with I was when I was, at athletic lab, always say swimming to jumping. Right?

It's like, as long as there's a progression there where you're getting to jumping at some point, you're still following progressive overload. You're still following maybe individuality. You're still you're still getting more specific in some ways. And even if it's these guys are only running tempo and they're competing, they're still gonna get really intense sprint stimuli from just competing. And so I think, yeah, it's a really, really interesting point, and it's kind of, confirms what a little bit of confirmation bias.

You know? Just seeking for the answer that I want. So I think, another we, I have a a whole list of questions here. I think another good one that you alluded to or mentioned that this is kind of heading that direction is what is your favorite current sports tech that you like? If you had to pick one for jumping higher, you'd say this is the one.

It's VBT. It's force plate. It's the new beyond power. What, you know, what is the one piece of sport tech that you think is underutilized and incredibly effective in improving performance?

I it's really tough to name one. I've got a couple favorites off the top of my head. We love our Beyond Power. We we use output pretty extensively for testing and and some force plates from Valve, I'd say, as a as an assessment as an overall assessment metric. In training, it's probably output.

Output is great for training as well as assessments. It's super easy.

The name of the tech. Right?

Yep. What is

I've never even heard of that. What is that?

It's a it's a sensor. You can place it on a barbell. Can place it on your foot. You can place it on a waistband. It's similar to it's a it's an accelerometer with a gyroscope in it.

It's like

push band?

Like push band. But much better. Yes. It's much more accurate, much more reliable. It has more versatility to it as well because you can use it on your body.

You can use it on the bar. It can handle angular movements. It you can you can actually test an RSI. We've done RSI tests with a laser grid, laser contact grid on a force platform with a output device on the foot. And the three of course, the force platform is a gold standard for jump height and contact times, and the three devices are all very much in line with each other for jump height and contact times, which is which is exactly what you'd wanna see.

A lot of companies promise that, but they don't always deliver. So we will oftentimes use the output device interchangeably for some jump metrics. You're obviously not gonna get all of the jump metrics that you want out of a accelerometer based device, but you can get you could certainly get things like RSI and all versions of RSI ten five and max RSI and Scandinavian test, and you can get jump height, and you can do drop drop jumps and rebound tests and everything else. Single you could do a single leg variance. So it's has a lot of benefit, and we use it on bar barbell lifts, specifically, like a squat and some poles.

It's kinda taken the the place of a lot of the VVT stuff that you were doing is now that's the VVT device device that you would prefer to use. Because you used to be able to do that with push as well. It just wasn't as reliable Yeah. Whenever I was there.

Is this device beyond like, is it by Beyond Power? Are they the same thing?

Totally different. So Beyond Power is a is another device, which I love. It's like man, I feel like I've I think I was maybe the first person in The US to get it.

You're also the first person to be interviewed by that one brand that you wear on your wrist that I don't know if I can disclose.

On my wrist.

Yeah. A lot of people use them. They give you HRV. They give you recovery rate.

Company. This is Apple. So, no, they never that would be, I think you're speaking of, Whoop. That was a long time ago.

I know. I was there. I was there for that one.

Yeah. That was

I thought about Whoop. I used to used I it for, like, a couple months.

Yeah. Mike Mike always somehow famangles him himself into a position where he gets on these, like, calls with people, and they'll be like, oh, yeah. We wanna test out this new sports tech. It's really cool, and Mike will sit on the call. I see him.

I can't disclose the full thing, but he'll just be like, he'll look at me and be like, it's fucking horrible. He'll mute himself and be like, oh, fuck. Are they tired? This is so bad. So he always has a really good filter, which is why I wanted to ask you.

This is beyond power, by the way. So I think it is more or less taking the place of force plates because it can give you almost immediate RFD. Correct me if I'm wrong. You and and also potentially ten eighty.

But so it's more similar to a ten eighty device. I use it I use it a I think you have you asked me a question about ISO inertial. You can do ISO inertial in way more with the Beyond Power. So I I really love your nontraditional resistance formats. In particular, our we use eccentric.

Again, I think we were the first in The US to get eccentric. They they saw some of the crazy ass shit that I was doing to get accentuated eccentric overload, they were like We still do that. Looking at it and going like, hey. What the fuck is this guy? He's gonna kill somebody.

And

He still do it. The viral video is John trying to kill me.

Have you seen the videos of Isaiah doing the front squat overloads at the twenty four hour?

They're like, oh, let me they'll send me send me a couple boxes, save a couple lives. So that's how I started working with that centric. And then the that they're not exactly interchangeable. They have different uses. I progressed them a little bit differently, but I love overloaded eccentric a lot.

And both of the devices make it very easy and safe to do, which back 20 ago was not the case. I mean, you could get overloaded eccentrics through some kind of less known things like weight releasers or maybe some specialized equipment or maybe special use cases of two up, one down, strong weak type methodologies, but actual technology and equipment that you could use to implement it was few and far between. I believe Muscle Labs maybe had some things that you could maybe do it, but and ten eighty kind of has has some devices that do it. But be what Beyond Power has done has made it a little bit more approachable in price. Still expensive, of course.

And then same thing with the flywheel devices that are out there with my favorite being the the k box probably being the one we use the most. Great way of getting ISO inertial resistance or accentuated eccentric overload or even doing high speed nonmomentum based momentum less velocity type training like you could do with a Kaiser. You could do things like can't quite mimic pneumatic training, but you could mimic chain using chains, using bands, using reverse chains. You can fully control the eccentric overload, which is something that you can't do with most devices. So there's a lot of u utility in it.

And I think both of them, as well as the output device, all have the benefit of providing instantaneous feedback, which helps to drive intent. And even the best programs in the world will benefit from instantaneous feedback that drives intent. I've always kinda joked around that if I could create an app with an invisible bar sensor, a k a k a invisible, a fake bar sensor, that didn't even provide any data, and the app is just a random number generator that force people to move faster, you see fantastic benefits, you know, because there's so much evidence to suggest that, you know, if an athlete feels like they should push harder or are in competition with somebody or themselves, that you'll see better results. And when people talk about transfer of training, that's one of the ways you get transfer of training is you just drive intent. Mhmm.

The gains are really in the margins of intent. You know, you put 85% on the bar, you could give 85%. But if you give a 100 with 85% on the bar, that's where the gains are. So that what the VBT or the output device or the k meter does is it provides that instantaneous feedback that makes you just push a little bit harder and lets you know, and it lets other people know, and it provides a level of accountability that just isn't there with just traditional mass face lifting until you get up to those max percentages. You know, you get to 95%, the barbell will provide all the accountability that you need.

But if you're if you're 80% smashed. Right. Yeah. If you don't give 9595% on the barbell, you're smashed. But if you don't 80%, now you got a big pretty big margin for error.

You know?

And Yeah.

If you don't if you're training for explosive power, it becomes really important that you're able to lose move those light to moderately heavy loads very fast. And that's actually one of the we've kind of shifted away from using I think, probably, when you were around, John, we were doing, like, maybe our squats up to 95% even during comp competition cycles, and now we've kinda shifted away from that. We do five four three two one in rep scheme using the BBT. The the 80% is at two. The 85% is at one, and then we'll just see what that looks like over time.

So we we might not even be testing over a twelve week period, but we're expecting to see the 80% and expecting to see the 85% move faster. And I've had guys, some of whom you know, Devin was great at this, Devin Cornelius. But a handful of guys, including some great long jumpers that I had recently. Josh Coley, he's a, like, a eight meter long jumper, jumped eight meters last year. He he could move 85%, like, almost point eight meters per second on a barbell.

That average or peak?

That's average. So point eight meters. Crap. Yeah. It wasn't wasn't 20.

Was, like, point point seven five. So incredibly fast. Yeah. So but we did

that for sure. So you had some big weight on the bar.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that the the group that I'm talking about, I had that Josh was a part of was 15 deep, 15 guys. The the strongest guy could squat 3.2 times his body weight.

Is that Greg?

Greg, absolute monster. Then we had a couple guys that the group average, I think, was, like, 2.6. And it was even like, I'm taking the foot off the grass on strength, and we just shifted it more and more. And even since that group, which is largely dissolved now, I've got a much, much smaller group. We've gone even more so towards that 80 much more emphasis on the 85%.

And I got one guy who's still very, very strong. We've gone even less so. So can you move this 75 to 80% loads very, very fast rather than worry about pushing the needle and getting that 95%, you know, a fraction of a meter per second

city.

Snap city. So this is a this is this is a follow-up question because one of the biggest pitfalls I've seen with using BBT is it mega fatigues, guys. We've done the same thing you have actually with Isaiah and a few other guys where, you know, we had a in house little, you know, case study where we put the same loads on the bar for three weeks, and it was power cleans. And we said, okay. What wattages, peak wattages are you gonna hit?

We what peak VLOs are you gonna hit? Are you getting better at the loads that, you previously were bad at? Are you getting worse at those loads? How are those metrics happening? Are you pulling the bar higher?

And, you know, the total displacement's higher, but your peak power is lower. Your peak VLO is lower. Sometimes you can see the peak power go up, but the peak VLO won't be because the displacement is higher on the OVR at least. I think they've changed the equation a little bit now, but used to be able to see that, which was a little bit confusing at the time. And we saw that as we focused on those things, they got better.

So, like, Isaiah, you know, came in. His ground contacts were really long. His reinforced development eccentrically, concentrically was lacking. We said, okay. We know you're really strong.

You just squatted 200 kilos. You've cleaned a 140 kilos, I think. Is that right, Isaiah, in kilos? Yeah.

Just below one fifty. It was three three twenty five.

So, like, super crazy metrics on the far end of the slow concentric side of things. And we said, okay. But we need to focus more on the the faster side of things. So we've we've done those things. But what I'd previously seen using it a lot was that it it fatigued guys massively using the BBT, and it would take away from like you said, like, you're pulling out of one bucket and putting it into another.

And so my question is how long and how do you balance those things? Have you seen the same thing?

Yes. In a different area. So we use it we use VVT pretty sparingly. I've actually moved completely away from using it on Olympic lifts. It does I'll use it on pole variants, but not on Olympic lifts.

And that's something you alluded to is that, you know, a power clean is one of the few lifts that isn't defined by range of motion, really. Right? You could catch a power clean anywhere from legs fully extended. Like, say, you use 60%. You just catch that, you rip it and grip it, that thing's caught with legs fully extended.

Or you could do a power clean max, and you're catching it at 90% or 90 degree knee angle. Both are technically a power clean. But one has a shorter pull, way way shorter pull, and probably a way lower velocity. And the fifty percent one that you're catching with legs fully extended has a much much higher velocity, almost certainly a higher power output. And so we started because of that discrepancy or that variability inherent within the definition of the lift, we stopped using it for the full lift with a catch.

We'll only use it for pull variants, like a a clean clean pull. Not a panda pull, not a high pull. I think you could probably do it to a high pull if you said here's this is the endpoint. Right? You define what the endpoint is, and you don't panda pull it and kinda duck under.

All great lifts. Panda pull's fine. Power clean's fine. We use them, but VVT kind of just gives very misleading understanding of what you're seeing there. We use it almost exclusively.

Multis will use it on a bench press. Multi eventers to athletes, etcetera. We'll use it on squats. We'll use it on poles, and that's about it, to be honest. But where I've seen and even there, it's pretty sparingly.

Probably, like, max of four sets per week. Where I have seen the phenomenon that you're talking about is in sprinting. So there was a a while there that I was trying to auto regulate sprinting, And what we would do would and I still do it a little bit, but I pull out timing gates every day on the on the track. And this is, again, at the height of my group is 14 guys deep. The the context is it's COVID time.

These guys aren't competing. We don't know when our next competition was. They're all, like, high t going at it, men. You know, they're all kind of fighting to make a a national team or something like that. I think with that year, we had three guys make a team USA in the decathlon in Thorpe Cup and one one lady.

And the so we got the timing gates out, and we're just doing fly tens. And and I'm just gonna I'm saying, hey. I'm we're gonna run five to eight of these five ten five flying tens, 40 Yeah. Meter A 40 meter running, and I'm gonna shut it down when I see a decrement of, let's say, 3%. Right?

That's a little bit outside of the variability that you might see sprint to sprint. Two two and a half percent.

Their all time were just based off on the day?

So if so for on the day. So if you Okay. And if they if they improve, then they reset. You know what I mean? It'll cap at eight.

You're never gonna do more than eight. You're never gonna get do less than five, but you and that's kind of a concept somewhat coming from the sport of weightlifting where they talk about daily minimums or daily maximums and in terms of volume. And then when you got so we'd have the people the the athletes go through, and they're basically all turning it into a track meet every single day. And the guys would just get absolutely blistered, so we had to take it out. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's like me

going out and being like, alright, guys. We're gonna do vertical jump today. Vertical jump test.

Guys, we're pulling their attention. The intent was like that we're gonna I'm gonna be able to quantify their neurological fatigue rep for rep and be able to pull them when the fatigue gets too high. How long did

it take?

I mean, it would it would be so that they were just going after it for all the reps. Like, it would just just turning into a race. Everybody was trying to race every single time. And, you know, we were all we were just during that two year stretch of COVID, we were doing a lot of kind of experimental kind of crazy stuff. We were combining that with what the guys would call a slingshot where we pull together a couple bands together and basically just cheat code the full acceleration phase.

So we were getting, like, pretty much a full 20 meter fly at top speed. And what I would even do is it got to be so crazy that I wasn't even using a 10 meter because guys would hone in on it and say, hey. I know I can run a point nine five or a point nine three, and I just wanna beat the point nine three every single time. Or I wanna beat my man's point nine eight. So instead, what I did was I would just throw out the timing gates at arbitrary distance somewhere, but I wouldn't even measure it.

Somewhere between eleven or nine and twelve meters. And then it that it that brought it down a little bit because now you're not competing against your PR. So it's you're just you know that it's Beat the day. Beat the day. That's right.

But even then, it was still it was still too much to use regularly. So now we'll use it, like, once a cycle because the intensity is so high. You know what mean? And you guys How much is the drop like a training group.

Yeah. How much of the drop off would you see? Like, how long did it take before you'd see, like, these guys are like, I mean, you'd have to see at other places. Like, they're squat. They're clean.

You know, they come back on a sprint session. Like, it had to be, like, one or two sessions before these guys are crushed. There's no way they made it through a, like, a three week loading period. Right?

Yeah. It would depend on the guy, but it was almost inevitable that there something was gonna fail, whether it was like a small injury or, you know, the retraining syndrome. I was just

What is wrong with you? This is the shit people look at me and they say, John, you Barry guys. I'm like, I learned from the best. I'm the guy that took the most intense stimulus and said, you're gonna do 10 of these and you're gonna go into your hamstring falls off the fucking bone. Like, yeah.

This is why I don't have a lot of empathy for guys. Now, Isaiah, I hope this creates some perspective of why I'm like, you'll be fine just doing that. I've since changed a little bit. Okay? I've changed my ways.

I've gotten away from it because we would see injuries.

Oh, you've gotten soft. You've gotten soft.

I've gotten soft in my old age. I've gone soft. It's because you laugh about it. You're like, this is funny. I've gotta I've gotta be friends with these people.

You just go home to your wife and kid, and you're good to go. I've gotta deal with the text messages afterwards. They're like,

I pulled my hamstring. I pulled my quad.

I'm like, oh, it was a fun experiment. I got to see what didn't work. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. Okay.

We're gonna pivot here because we're at forty minutes, and I have some other fun questions that I wanted to ask. One actually, before I do that, I I did wanna ask because it's semi related. You work with a lot of NBA guys. First, can you disclose quickly who those are or no? Yes or no question.

Yes or no question.

Not blanketly all of them, but I could mention a couple names. I think right in the league right now, I have three guys, two guys, of which I can probably speak of one. Okay. And I've had maybe I I've not had a ton of them, but I've had 11 guys over the last five years. It's I pick it's really picked up in the past five years.

They're they're all regulars. Not only a couple of them are are bigger names. Caleb Martin, you know, kind of almost one East Coast Eastern Conference MVP a couple years back. TJ Warren, who was a bubble MVP. Jay Huff, who, you know, is kinda now get getting quite a bit of recognition for his reverse dunk skill package.

Right? Is that the tall he's like a tall

Oh, that guy from Indiana?

Yeah. Dunks backwards all the time?

All the time. Basically, unnecessarily all the time. Yeah.

Okay. So

I worked with those guys for, I don't know, four plus years. I've had guys that have floated in and out of the league as well. You know, guys that are still playing, but maybe now they're in China or now they're in Alright.

We get it. You're a big deal. Alright. So alright. The question that we had is, do you have some stories about managing them in season versus off season and the type of things that pop up that you see in season, how much you can train versus off season, how much they can train?

And and for context, the reason this is actually my question, because we ran a poll on the guys we train, and it's, almost half our guys are basketball. The other half are volleyball. But we have a lot of guys signing up, basically, to train whether in season or off season, specifically to jump higher. So I figured it'd be cool to ask you who are training, you know, at the most elite level, these guys, what you've seen from them.

So full disclosure, I barely train them in season. I have them almost exclusively in their off season. I will sometimes work with the their team coach a little bit, and then I will see them on breaks. So, like, all star break, I'll see them for maybe two, three sessions if they wanna come home. But then it's in the NBA, if you are don't make the playoffs or you're eliminated early, you've got a pretty long break.

You know, you've got four, maybe five months break. I don't know. Teams are making you report a little bit earlier and earlier each year. But generally speaking, I have guys for about four months in the off season and then very sporadically and almost like on a consultancy basis in season. So and I don't really have a lot of control over what they do in season.

Most guys most guys of the level that I'm working with, they work with the team staff. You know, if you got a LeBron, he's got his own guy, and his own guy is on staff. Not a lot of guys have that. There are some that do, but not a lot. So that's just full disclosure.

I don't wanna claim to be a expert of in season management for these NBA guys. But off season, I I do have the luxury of training them for extended periods of time. So we can follow a planned progression that probably is pretty similar to what you guys do. In season, I know that a lot of the stuff that we do in the off season just isn't possible. So when I I do write some programs for the guys that are overseas, and maybe they have a little bit more freedom to do what I asked them to do.

And there were removing most of the higher intensity plyometrics

for them. That's what you're doing, or that's what they're

I'm doing that. Okay. Really, what I'm trying to do in season, and this is true for any sport, whether it's basketball or track and field or, you know, soccer, I work a lot in soccer, is that I'm trying to fill the gaps of what is not covered as a stimulus elsewhere in their sport. So the basketball guys, they're they're jumping. They're changing direction.

They're even maybe they're not sprinting. They're but they're running. So what am I doing? Well, they're probably not doing any Squats. Squats.

That's right. They're not doing any heavy loaded strength work, and they're not doing any probably the low intensity extensive plyometric work that is pretty good for has a high reward for recovery in tendon health and low low potential negative effect. Right? So if you do the the high intensity plyometrics has a high risk and a high reward that maybe is not worth it, and you don't have to check that box when they're in season because they're already pretty smashed. But if in the what they're not seeing for sure is heavily loaded, slow grinding work.

So I might per prescribe that a little bit more. We might almost go reverse specificity in terms of

the weight specific everywhere else. Specific elsewhere in general. Yeah. Makes a lot

of And that's the and this is all in season?

That's in season.

In season. Yep.

How does what what do you focus on in the in the off season? And I'm specifically curious too about how much, like, skill work and on court time these guys are getting on top of the off season workouts.

So all my guys and I don't know that this is true for everyone, but all my guys are great professionals. They you know? And that's probably the case with anyone that is actually seeking out a coach. They're they're doing it on their own volition. So I do get a filtered filtered landscape of that, but they're they're also doing skill work on a pretty much daily basis.

In fact, sometimes I'm I'm scheduled before or after their skill work. It's that's a very, very common format for my guys, at least. Again, that's a small sample size. I don't know how true that is around the league. You know, you I've heard the stories.

They show up in the media every now and then. Some I think Anthony Davis two years ago said he didn't even touch basketball, something like that.

Think Ray Allen had, like, a story about that. Like, he didn't touch a ball all off season. That was like, I didn't even lose my, like, nothing happened. Guys. Right.

Right. And there's certainly, for sure, guys that don't step foot in the weight room also. I mean

Probably a lot more of those, I would imagine.

No. That's right. That's right. It it is going away a little bit, but I think that in the off season, I I haven't looked at your full on programming, but I would guess my off season when I have four months probably looks a little similar to what you guys sell as your package deals, where it's a planned progression over time. We're starting with a kind of what in track and field would be your general prep type stuff.

By the end of it, we are getting into some of the more sexy stuff, but we start really, really basic. The stuff that, you know, is just boring as shit, but serves as a foundation, They probably

Write down, Isaiah. Yes.

I literally call it that, the boring stuff.

I have the boring stuff,

and then

I have the fun stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing is the fun stuff isn't even that fun. It's like, oh, we put a pause in with our ankle.

Yeah.

Because I'm like, dude, you gotta power clean, like, a lot. I'm sorry. You gotta do slow squats for your tenants. Like, I don't know what to tell you. You gotta do that stuff.

But so you yeah. That's it's really interesting that that it's not too dissimilar. You know? I kinda was curious about that. I know Isaiah obviously was, and I think it's it's funny you say that because, you know, a lot of the time with these in season guys, I'll say the same thing.

I'll be like, well, you know, Dan calls it checking boxes. I know you have a really good Dan impersonation. I'll try to mimic it. I'll like,

well, you know, you gotta come in here. You gotta you're not doing strike work,

so we gotta we gotta do that. We gotta do that stuff.

And I know that we that's what I tell them. I'm like, look. You're not you're you're on the court for three hours a day. You don't need more on court things. You don't you probably don't even need more plyos.

Like, you're doing enough of it. And even to the extensive plyo point, you know, like, you probably could get away with very low volumes of that, but you're still getting some plyometric contacts, like, on the court. So it's like, well, what are you not doing right now? Well, you haven't touched a squat in four months. Like you know?

And and you see, like, these LeBron memes and stuff like that and his, like, shitty RDL deadlift thing. And sometimes you'll see these, like, in season NFL or NBA guys, and they're doing, like, stability ball, like, banded work. And it's like, yeah. That makes sense because you can't do anything else because you're already so far overloaded that, yes, it makes sense to just mask any real loading in the weight room because you're already crushed. And I guess, have you seen that too where guys are just obliterated all the time from the on court stuff and it's like borderline can't even get any work done?

Oh, yeah. For sure. Just had actually, just had a couple sessions with a guy that came back from the CBA just last week. They were on a little break, and they've condensed it. The CBA is a little bit unlike in many ways, it's the most similar league to the NBA, but in a lot of ways, they have a very variable number of games, variable number of when the season starts for a variety of reasons.

And he said they were playing as many as four games a week. I didn't Holy crap. See if that was an exaggeration or not, but four games a week. Yeah. And so and the the coach wants them to train a little bit as well.

So what do you even do when it's four games a week? In in the sport of soccer, you'll sometimes see games where there's three games in a seven day period. Well, whether regardless of which scenario you're talking about, when the density is that high of maximal intensity work, you're basically just figuring out a way to recover from it. You're not getting you're not getting better from any kind of training stimulus. The only stimulus that maybe is getting you better is the competition stimulus.

Right.

And so you don't have time to you don't have time or recovery capacity to do any of the actual training, the heavy squats, the plyometrics, the sprinting, whatever that looks like for you. But you just need to kind of recover and reset. It's figuring out where that balance is of how much do I want to risk detraining, and what's the recovery benefit or maybe rehabilitative benefits, the therapeutic benefit of doing these lesser intensity kind of glue type things, the things that just hold everything together when you're really going pedal to the metal in those dense competition phases.

Right. Yeah. That's kind of vows you to which makes it tough, you know, in our case where it's like, well, the answer is do less. And it's like, well, you're I'm paying you to make me better. And it's like, that's not a realistic expectation.

Like, you're in season, chief. Okay? You're jumping you're a volleyball player jumping six days a week.

You're paying us to tell you no. You're tell you're

paying us to tell you to not do shit or to do, like, really general work. Like, what I found with some guys, you can do some posterior chain work and that you can get away with that, you know, because a lot of the time, like, your hips are gonna be a little more resistant than, like, your knee would be if you're squatting or something like that. So, yeah, really, really good, really good stuff there. I did wanna ask you about this because I know it's, this person's your pride and joy. They make you happier than anything in the world, and plot twist is not me.

It's, it's an an athlete that you coach that is a performer, that I asked you if I'm allowed to ask about, and it's been under the radar for some time. I don't know if you've talked about this person. So first, can you disclose who this person is? And, hopefully, you know it's not me. Can you disclose who it is?

I well, you gave away the gave away the story when you said my favorite person. Everyone knew it wasn't you, John. It's it's it's J. Cole. I worked with J.

Cole for about six years now. He he is what people think he is. You know, he has he definitely has almost a meme culture surrounding him. He has people call him humble. People call him a great guy.

People call him real. He is all of that. So I'll start off with that. I mean, the dude is just you could you wouldn't believe it. He he is deep.

He's introspective. I would consider him like we've had some of the, you know, most intellectual conversations that that I can recall having worked with him. He's hardworking. You you realize that this the stuff that he does with me is secondary. You know, he's played professional basketball twice now and maybe playing again.

The you realize that people do not generally take side quests from their primary career to be a professional in another elite level career. Right? So it's not quite like Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders. Right? But in some ways, it's actually it's not more impressive athletically, but the two things that he's trying to do are way more divergent than baseball and football.

And I think it's safe to say, regardless of whether you're a a Cole fan or a hater that the guy's at least top 15 all time. And some people would put him as a top five all time.

So he's a goat. Top two. Top two. He's my favorite.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There we have it. Right.

I got it's it's Cole and then Kendrick my number two. So it makes me really happy to hear.

Right. So I'm saying, like, here's a guy who is elite of the elite in his field, and he's still finding time to to train for a sport. I mean, the guy loves basketball, and he's one. This is a this is great from the last point is in the early days of training him, which is, like, the start of COVID shutdown, I used to go to UNC and train him because he I was the only gym that we could go to at the time. We'd meet at UNC.

He'd use their courts, that that kind of thing. And I we'd go in the weight room at UNC. And it was clear the guy hated the weight room. Hated it. I mean, our conversations were kinda awkward.

He didn't like the weight room. His favorite exercise was the leg extension. He loved the leg extension, but that was about it. You asked the guy to do I mean, I'm serious. You asked the guy to do a squat, and he just didn't like it.

So then it's, you know, it's as I as I'll always say is meet the person where they're at. We, for sure, did leg extensions, and he's had some knee injuries. He's had some ankle injuries, that kind of thing. But he went from that to realizing I can't even play if I don't work with Mike. So now he won't even play.

He won't touch the court as much as he loves it unless he's worked with me for, like, two to three weeks continuous. He he might shoot around a little bit, but he knows that he will pay the price if he does more than that. So there's a level of discipline and kind of learning both for me saying, hey. You can't you can't just go from doing nothing to playing, you know, two hours of pickup ball and not pay the price the next day, now he realized I've gotta earn the right to do this thing that I love. So I was telling him for a long time, like, you're I'm I'm telling you not to do this, not to play, basically.

Don't play until you're ready. Because if you if you try, you're gonna do it one time, but then you're not gonna play for two weeks, three weeks. It's gonna flare up that bad. So now he's totally bought in. I don't know that I we don't know that he loves it, but he definitely does it, and and he knows that he has to earn his right to hit the court again.

And

he's he's pretty disciplined in that regard. The guy's 41. We actually share the exact same birthday. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Birthday buddies. And we he he wrote a song about our shared birthday, January 28. And he yeah. He's just he's disciplined.

He's a older guy trying to play professional basketball or trying to play basketball at the highest level that he can. Kind of gave it up in his earlier years to pursue his pursue pursue rapping and his his company Dreamville. So it's rare that you have the opportunity to to work with a guy who's, like, actually a a goat and trying to do something different. Hardworking guy. And then, you know, even, like, fitting in all that, the guy's a great dad, great family guy, down to earth, super private.

Yeah. But six years, a little bit on and off. Like, right now, I haven't seen him for we we chat every now and then, but I haven't seen him for a little while, two, three weeks because of fall off drops.

Stuff up the world. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, this has got some stuff going on right now. I don't know if you're aware.

And, you know, he's got a got a little world tour coming up

Yeah. Something

that I won't see. Won't see him for a couple months.

The world too.

Okay. So here's here's a question I actually do have. Does he have you ever told him, like, yeah. You know, this you ever see this Isaiah kid? He can really he can really dunk the ball.

He says, is that ever coming up in conversation?

Oh. I got Oh,

yeah. Isaiah.

That means he's so happy.

There's there's a couple of things. So he he doesn't really use social media, but I think he lurks on YouTube and Instagram. And he's definitely seen he's seen your videos. He's

That's terrifying. He's asked saw a

good asked about different protocols. You know, he's he's talked about knees over toes, guys. He's talked about does something is does this work or does that work? So he's now kind of probably invested enough into it where these the algorithm is feeding these these things to him. But he's as I said, the guy's a basketball fiend.

For when I first started working with him, he had lost his ability to dunk. He couldn't dunk. And it took about two years to to regain it where he could do it confidently. And some of it is really just pain related and and being healthy healthy enough to do it. Once He's you want

he's still dunking at 41? He can still dunk? Yep. Wow. That's good stuff, Mike.

Can you dunk?

Not with two hands.

Can you dunk with one hand? That was gonna be my follow-up question. I was like, I can't do a windmill. It's like, can you do a one hander? You could.

I think you could. I think you said you dunked you dunked the women's

ball at

one point. Back in the day, I could dunk. I could dunk if you lobbed it. I could dunk if I could dunk a women's ball. I could, yeah, probably permanently jack my SI joint by grabbing the rim with one hand, coming around with the ball in the other hand while this hand slips.

My hand my hand slips. My hips roll through, and I land on a curb. Yeah.

Yeah. That sounds that sounds good. I think I think that would be good. I think we should should test that out. Yeah.

Okay. So we have one last question. I was actually, it was really, really interesting. I know Isaiah is probably gonna leave this. He's gonna be on Cloud9 for probably the rest of the year, having heard that.

So thanks for making his, his year more than I ever could in, one in five minutes. So the the follow-up question, this we'll end on this. What is your favorite story about about me interning or mentoring under you that you can share that's, let's say, below rated r. It can't be above rated r.

Okay. So there's a there's honestly, there's a shitload of stories. Anyone that was around athletic lab at that time was probably witness to many of them. John was a, believe it or not, more intense character than he is now.

Not even I don't even say it's close to where I was then.

So John John shared some of the context of this story in his opening, but I'll just kinda reiterate a little bit. So he he trained with me from fourteen or 15 years old or something like that. He did an internship at 17, I believe, before we even accepted intern at an age when before we even accepted interns. He wanted to do a back to back intern, but I was like, no, John. You should go and do something else, which was, you know, both altruistically was to say, hey, John.

Go explore other methods where where we saw all Altus and had a great opportunity there. Selfishly was so that I could get away from him for a little while. Then then he comes back of all things. He comes back, and he does the second internship. So John is the first guy of at this point, now after seventeen years of having athletic up, John was the first guy.

He was the youngest one to ever complete the internship and the first guy to do it twice. We've now had about four people do it twice. Okay. So that's the back

They're probably your best they're probably your best mentees. That's all I have to say.

So, John, I'm my timeline is maybe imprecise here because I am an old man. But so that's the backdrop for John. John took a shitload of pride in being the greatest intern ever. Okay. That's really great.

Twice. He was the youngest to complete. It is almost like, hey. I'm the I'm the best at being the unpaid intern. And so we had this guy we had this guy, Matt Hunter.

Right?

Oh. Matt Hunter

Matt Hunter had had worked out and interned at Mike Boyle's Performance Center in Boston. That's BC. Really big name place. Right? Boyle you you guys know Boyle.

Right?

Heard of the name of it? Yeah.

Worked out and trained with Eric Cressy. I or or interned there at Eric Cressy's in the Boston area as well. So those are two massive, massive names in the industry. Okay? So he's he has interned at both of those places, and then he comes and interns for us.

And he's running track as well. I think he was something like a division two or three high level I

think he yeah. I think he got second d three or something like that.

So he he's joining the track club. He joins the track club, and I think John is away or at Altus or something like that. And I'm messaging John like, hey, man. We've got this guy.

He's a stud.

He might he's

a stud. He's he's gonna give you a run for your money.

This is

this is maybe the best intern we've ever had. You know? That's right. And I'm just building this up over time, over months. So John returns now, and Matt is now part of this part of the training group.

And John comes in, and they're about to meet for the first time. And I Matt Matt is in on this. Matt is in on this. And so John comes up, and he says, I I introduced them. I think it's at Davis Drive Track where we used to just bogart onto this track.

I introduced them. And John's like, hey, Matt. Nice to meet you. I've heard all Mike talks all Mike talks about you a lot. I've heard good things, but he's still pretty salty.

Behind the scenes, he's kinda pretty salty. And Matt says, on script, he says, what's your name again? I've I've never heard of you. Mike's never mentioned you before. This is like this is like a dagger.

I can't imagine. You you can't imagine the the how disarmed I was.

Heartbreak. Heartbreak. My entire

life, all I wanted to do was was say, you know, John, Mike to say, you know, John, I'm I'm proud of you. You've really done something with your life. Instead, he says, I haven't even talked about you in two years. I don't even fucking know your name. I don't even know who you are.

And I think, you know, one of my favorite, stories as well was the the me passing out in the weightlifting meet. I think that was my second choice.

Yeah. That that was a really good video. I've seen this video. Yeah. So am I.

I pass out. I don't remember shit. I'm sitting down in a chair, and Mike's like, this is first off, Mike tells me to make a jump that I I had no business making. Like, I'd never clean and jerked a 100 kilos in my life. I clean and jerked 100 kilos.

I'm super excited. Run to the back. I'm like, Mike, what should I jump to? He's like, go to one zero five. I'm like, Mike, I've never put 95 kilos over my head.

I just hit a five kilo PR. You think I should go to a 105 kilos? He's like, yeah. That was easy. So I go to a 105 kilo.

To you. That was your one opportunity to make me proud, John.

Yeah. Well Didn't say that. So I get this thing on my shoulders, and I'm just like, oh, I feel real lightheaded. Like, I'm not feeling good. And I just, like, nearly pass out.

I do, like, the wave seizure, dance move. It was, quite the meme in the gym for quite a while amongst all the members. And I sit down, and I look at Mike, and I'm like, did I put it over my head? And he was just like, fuck.

Do you

remember that when I was like, did I get it? Like

he's like, no.

You almost died. I was like, oh, well, that's unfortunate. There's a few other really, really good stories, but this was this was this was a ton of fun. I actually really enjoyed this. Hopefully, you guys learned a lot from Mike, and you you enjoyed getting to hear him speak.

This hopefully won't be the last time. Mike, we have a we have a habit of need a part two. We have a habit of putting people on. What is your where can people find you on Instagram, YouTube? Where do you share content?

At mike young p h d on Instagram. It's about the only place I'm active now. I I have a athletic lab coaching academy where I put together a course, the mentorship course that John actually referred to that he took part in. We turned it into an online course, formalized it, developed a curriculum. Was just speaking to Luigi about it today, who you've met, Luigi Marino, and he was kind of around during that early years of seeing it form and kind of being part of what turned it into what it is today.

Kind of reminiscing and being nostalgia about the the whiteboard wall. You know? I think we'd have these lectures and just come in and I'd stand up and teach at a whiteboard wall and about whatever everybody wanted to talk about. So Athletic Lab Coaching Academy is where I put out a lot of my work as a as a formalized course. Starting at John's behest and following his guidance actually to to put out some YouTube shorts and get a little bit back into content creation during the COVID years when I had actually had time to do it.

I was I put out, honestly, some of my best work, I think, about track and field programming, philosophy, methodology, speed and power related for about a two year block posting almost every day on Instagram. I'm not haven't looked at those,

Go back to 2020 and read the descriptions. You'll see some of the most interesting stuff, on a number of things. Anything from b p t to cluster sets to to so if you and I always tell guys go back through the descriptions.

I would act I would second that. I've actually bought and taken the course. Highly recommend everybody. That was good. And then and then I've gone through all the Instagram post descriptions as well, and you will learn a lot you do those two things.

And if

you wanna take it to the next level, go to elitetrack.com. You can see my training, journal on there. You guys can steal that information. But, yeah, thank you guys for listening. We will catch you guys next time.

Ciao.