Scott Saulwasser's Journey in Strength and Conditioning

Today’s episode features sports performance coach Scott Salwasser.  Scott has been a multiple time guest on this show, talking about speed training in football, force-velocity profiling, and perception/reaction work.  Scott is currently the assistant director of strength and conditioning for football at the University of South Carolina.   Scott has worked as a sports performance coach for nearly 2 decades, and has worked at a number of NCAA DI universities, as well as in the NFL, and in the private training sector. When it comes to training, Scott is one of the most practical and grounded coaches that I know, and has an incredible ability to take complex concepts, and create a simple and effective training solution.  Scott works with a variety of technologies, such as force plates, GPS, 1080 Sprint technology, and more, and is able to break things down to simple terms as to how he is utilizing them, and the tangible results he is seeing with his players. Today’s show covers a number of important topics such as going into Scott’s speed program for lineman, what tendencies they have from a force-velocity perspective, as well as giving more perspective on the nuts and bolts of his perception-action and agility program.  A highly relevant aspect of today’s show is Scott’s experience in helping athletes get back to a high level of performance in a short period of time after a layoff, which is very pertinent to many situations coaches will be finding themselves in, in the near future.  While working at Cal, Scott helped a key player who was down with a virus for the majority of spring training get back to competition shape quickly in the summer, using a variety of feedback tools, and goes in depth on his methodology in today’s episode. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 8:30  Scott’s transition from working with skill players in football to working with lineman 14:30 How the NFL combine, although limited in transfer to the game, does at least provide a level of comparison from year to year 17:30What Scott’s speed program looks like for a lineman 21:30 How Scott’s perception/action work has progressed throughout the year and his movement of closed into progressively more reactive movement scenarios 35:45 How Scott has leveraged GPS, heart-rate and force plates to help an athlete get back and ready to play fall football in a very short period of time in summer after the athlete was sick for a large portion of the spring training season 54:50 How Scott has been using force-velocity profiling, specifically with football lineman  “What I do like about (predictable agility drills) is that they are very high-speed, high-force.  It’s like exposing someone to high speed sprinting in many ways, it’s an overload” “(Perception/Action) isn’t just putting them out there and having them play tag” “Initially, you might work on closed cuts, that’s a predictable response.  Then you start layering on and adjusting the environment, adding a reactive component to that response” “You then start to integrate (agility) into more real life situations, closer to the sport, it might be adding bodies,  it might be manipulating the area, it might be manipulating the rules of the drill” “The need for (perception/action) drills are more or less necessary depending on what the coaching staff is doing.  You want to focus on what the players are not getting” “The better we can understand each other’s specialties (in a high performance system) the better we’ll all be as a whole” “(My special teams coach) was able to start at a more advanced stage in special teams education because I had already done a lot of the introductory drills that he had planned on doing”