Joel Smith is a NCAA Division I Strength Coach working in the PAC12 conference with Cal (UC Berkley). He is also a very accomplished higher jumper, track and field coach, and he hosts an amazing podcast called “Just-Fly-Sports” where he has had the best of the best as guests. Joel has genuine passion for sprinting, jumping, and overall athleticism. Bigger than that, he is a great human being and leads a life of greatness. It is an honor to have him as an interview guest, and I think he really killed it with his answers giving tons of valuable information that will change the way you think about training.
To get more great content from Joel and Just-Fly-Sports, including the podcast:
Website: https://www.just-fly-sports.com
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-fly-performance-podcast/id1121047188
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justfly/?hl=en
And now, on to another fantastic interview…
1. Congrats on the tremendous growth of your podcast, Just Fly Sports (with link). I am sure you have learned a lot as well as helping your listeners from talking to so many great coaches. What are some of the biggest things that have changed in the way you train athletes since starting your podcast?
This is a question I get asked often, and the answer is lots! I have something that's made me think deeply for just about every episode. It might be easiest to work in regards to the most recent learnings. One thing I've changed is doing more unilateral work in terms of being my "base" training and then doing bilateral training the sharper I want the athlete to be. It all comes down to starting with more "degrees of freedom" and then closing down to "less degrees of freedom" over time. This can either be over a long period of time, or even in a single session.
I've also really taken on a lot of natural movement ideas, a combination of thoughts from Tim Anderson and Rafe Kelley. Our warmups (and sometimes even a large part of the workout itself) ends up being a lot of improvised natural movement, so crawls, crouches, climbs, various jumps with a high skill element, and so on. I do proportionally more bodyweight work than barbell work now versus 5 years ago. I try to make the weight room replicate more of sport itself whenever possible since we are training athletes. I also use a lot of extreme isometrics, and a lot of my work has an isometric element to it. In a nutshell, I really work hard to make the weight room more "alive" and ballistic with a dash of heavy barbell training. Athletes who need more size and strength might need more barbells, but at some point, the core of training an athlete has to revolve around sport like principles.
2. Randy Hutchinson, coach of the fastest Asian sprinter of all time, Su Bingtian, was one of my favorite guests of yours so far. He has been in the game a long time and I appreciate his love of Kaiser equipment in that every rep should be powerful. With the recent popularity of isometrics and eccentrics, can you please explain how explosive or maximal intent concentric training, isometrics, and eccentric training create a better athlete?
I agree that maximal intention is important in the weightroom. I think it's a fast way to get some big increases in power, especially when used with the "big lifts". I think there are a few pieces that can be lost in all this, however. One is that doing things only "one way" in terms of maximal concentric is less robust from a motor pattern perspective and can create a lower performance ceiling (in my opinion). This is why it's important to A. give athletes a lot of variety in how they express that maximal intent (Olympic lifts, Keiser, bodyweight work in the Jay Schoeder vein, sprinting, resisted sprints, plyometrics) and B. have various outcomes in some of this work that doesn't always just involve straight up, "max force". As an industry, we seem to think that just "max force" or "max RFD" solves everything, but it does not. Coordination is the answer, and clearly smart people like Frans Bosch are starting to see this. At some point an athlete will be outputting as much as they can, but it's important that the body knows multiple ways to unleash that output! I like work that has a combination of submaximal and maximal elements. You see this in swim workouts. Often times every 4th rep is fast, rather than blasting it every single rep. Often times fast reps are intermixed with skill work, work with gear, fins and paddles. Skill acquisition is a centerpiece of swimming, so you can see how those coaches workouts play into athletes acquiring better skill in the water, and not blowing all fuses by making everything maximal constantly. As long as the nervous system knows what maximal is and isn't taught to down-regulate, you will be fine, just as long as an athlete is fully engaged throughout the workout.
3 You've had some great people like Adarian Barr, Emily Splichal, and Gary Ward talk about the importance of feet. Soccer players are notorious for not only ugly, but dysfunctional feet from cramming them into cleats with a narrow toe box. What are a few things every player should be doing with their feet to optimize their health and performance?
Sure, I'm actually writing a book on this topic, as it's been important to me in my own training life. I suffered from Achilles tendonitis for 10 years before I learned how to make the joints in my foot work properly, and since I've done this, I haven't had a problem a day since. I also used to have insane fascial power through my forefoot and managed to unwire this over a decade of too much lifting and not enough fast and dynamic work, and not enough playing around barefoot. I'll just give a few quick recommendations here.
1. Learn to pronate properly, or in other words, flatten all three arches of the foot. Make sure your calcaneus (heel bone) can move properly. To do this, I'd recommend looking into the work of Gary Ward and his foot wedges. You can also just start with doing vertical jumps barefoot and try to feel your arches flattening as you drop down into the bottom of the jump. If you can already pronate (or perhaps overpronate) then you don't need to worry about this, but rather, the opposite!
2. Do more work barefoot, this is an easy one. Try to experience different surfaces, different angled surfaces, and different textures.
3. Do a lot of low intensity hops on a single leg, and get variety on these. A single leg barefoot line hop is one of the most powerful methods that exists, but it's almost so simple we discount it. Rudiment hops barefoot are also a fantastic movement for developing the tissues of the lower leg.
4. You should be able to do at least 25 strict single leg calf raises for adequate "muscular" calf strength, but beyond this, a lot more strength isn't super helpful, and it gets pretty specific.
Ronaldo must have read Joel’s books and articles on jumping
4. The late, great, Charles Poliquin wrote an article on how soccer players are way behind in terms of strength, power, and speed compared to sports like rugby and American football. I agree that for a change of direction and acceleration dominated sport like soccer, relative strength is very important. However, I have heard you discuss on your podcast the negative effects of the weight room on athleticism. Can you delve into that topic a bit...for example, where do we draw the line between helping and hurting athletes? Are there any indicators to look for in terms of movement patterns?
This is a great question. I feel like there was something going around on social media last year where Chelsea didn't do any barbell training or something like that and people seemed upset. My response is this: guess what... lifting a barbell is not playing a sport. Every step and jump in sport deals with multiple times one's bodyweight, and does so in a triplanar, highly coordinated manner. Training with one's bodyweight alone can yield substantial changes. What if all you did was play, then do pushups, pullups, some core work, skater squat and nordic hamstrings? You probably wouldn't be in a terrible place would you?
In the last few years, I've done more and more extreme isometrics with my men's tennis team and have really downplayed barbell training. Guess what; the last two years have been our most healthy and injury free years of my seven with them so far. In sport the best ability is availability. Would you trade a few % off of your vertical jump if you could gain a few % in terms of not getting hurt? Most elite athletes who get paychecks to be on the field would choose the latter.
The thing is, that barbell training can take the body out of its natural mode through compensation patterns. Common compensation patterns that happen in barbell lifts are things like superficial muscles overtaking small muscles, excessive activation of extremities prior to proximal muscles, lower back firing before the glutes (especially in athletes who think a "squat morning" is a viable lift, greater anterior pelvic tilt and other small adaptations that the body makes to accommodate for a large weight being placed on the spine; something that creates a large moment arm! I'm not saying that lifting is bad in saying this, I'm just saying that when you lift, lift well (keep extremities somewhat relaxed, learn to breath properly, master the isometric positions that come with the lift, and always leave 3-5 reps in the bank on most major movements (don't go to failure).
5 Soccer is a very demanding sport on the knee joint with all of the unexpected cuts, twists, and turns. Although there is less unpredictable torsional force, your background as a higher jumper and coaching jumpers likely exposed you to some interesting knee aches, pains, and injuries. What are some common denominators you have noticed in athletes who get knee issues and some things you have found work to prevent and remedy them?
Athletes who get knee issues may have several problems, but as I believe Ida Rolf said "where it is, it ain't" meaning that if the knee hurts, the problem is not the knee. Some things I've noticed in athletes with knee problems are as follows:
Poor hip internal rotation
Poor pronation
No sense of the "space behind" ones self in the motor map
Generally poor overall coordination and mobility
Poor hip internal rotation makes it hard for the VMO's to fire and activate. If the VMO is weak, it's for a reason. I think all the sissy squats can help here, but to really rid the problem you need to go to the source. This also fits with pronation. If you can't pronate, you won't be able to internally rotate well and the VMO won't really come online well. Basically, the knee needs to travel (legally) into the mid-line of the body to create this effect.
I also see knee issues in those athletes who have a bad sense of the "space behind them", meaning they are disconnected neurologically and from a sensory standpoint from their posterior chain. This causes them to use excessive forward knee bend in most of their movements. Fixing this issue goes deeper than teaching an athlete how to hinge properly, although that isn't a bad start. I like using the RFESS for this, teaching athletes to constantly "pull" themselves apart by hooking the back foot into a pad, and creating tensional balance in the body. This movement is also great for tendon health since it trains the knee tendons in extreme positions.
Finally, athletes who just aren't very coordinated and don't have a big movement literacy tend to do common movements with less "options". This can cause the knee to take on more of the same stresses repeatedly.
Fixing these, in conjunction with the common fixes (heavier lifting, squatting pushing the knees over the toes, Petersen step ups, etc.) is a great strategy.
6. You are a family man, a coach, and a business man who is very driven. We talked before you ever launched Just-Fly Sports and landed the job at Cal. What makes you get up in the morning and work on your craft with the consistency and discipline you do?
This is a good question. The first thing was, and still is just doing it to survive, but I do this happily, and now I don't approach it from a "survival" or fight or flight mentality. Rather I approach this from a perspective that I have placed myself in a situation where I live in a very expensive area of the country and am the sole provider for my family, so therefore more work is necessary to make ends meet and I'm happy to do so. I believe we are a product of our environment and the environment shapes and forms us. I was pretty lazy (with flashes of greatness) until my late 20's until my work environment forced me to start doing all of the thing I had wanted to 5 years prior. I love challenging environments because they can really change our lives for the better.
This was the starting point for me, and perhaps it is for everyone. Beyond this, I now am moving into a place where I want to succeed so I can have the means by which to change sport on a greater level. I'm shifting the gears from survival mode to creation mode. I've realized for a while that life isn't about finding those last 2-3" on your vertical jump (even though this is very rewarding, since I am a firm believer in excellence in whatever you do) but it is about serving people in conjunction with the gifts you've been given. My whole life has been about understanding that I am much more capable and worthy than I had thought imaginable in my early years, and I need to use this potential to serve the sporting community on a greater level. To me, being able to be a driving force in not only the process of building the body, but the entire process that a child, up through adult has in sport and physical activity is where I'm heading. I want to change sports on a greater level, not just in terms of how we compete, but why we do, and to be a proponent of sport as conduit of transformation for thousands of athletes, rather than simply winning. I'm just getting started, but I'm on my way.