Art Meets Science in Fitness Coaching

Today’s podcast features podcaster, and educator, and physical preparation coach, Angus Bradley.  He coaches out of Sydney CBD, and co-hosts the Hyperformance podcast with his brother, Oscar.  Angus has a wide-spanning knowledge base from both in and outside of the strength and conditioning field, with a focus on inter-disciplinary over-arching principles.  He works with a diverse crowd from strongman to surfing and everything in between, has been a 2x previous guest on this podcast, and runs regular mentorships for strength coaches and personal trainers. Part of the fun of running a podcast, and seeking education from a wide variety of coaches is the ability to create links and connections between different fields of thought.  When we can observe multiple training camps saying similar things about the gait cycle, squatting, or breathing, we can level up our total coaching and training perspective. On today’s podcast, Angus talks about learning from fields outside of fitness, to become a better coach and overall student of life.  He also talks about links within the field of fitness, such as the positional and rhythmic relationships between Olympic lifting and sprinting.  A main talking point on today’s episode is Angus’s approach to training “early stance” in a physical development world where so much is devoted to training that ends up focusing more on “late stance” in the gym.  Angus shares his thoughts on how he approaches late stance type training, how he uses more “mid-stance” to train the knee, and also gives his thoughts on how good Crossfit boxes get a lot of trainees stronger than many strength coaches would often like to believe. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and the Elastic Essentials Online Course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com. Find out more about the the online course, Elastic Essentials, by heading to justflysports.thinkific.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 3:20 – The importance of having hobbies outside of training, fitness and S&C 18:53 – The use of creativity and intuition in training vs. pre-planned, systemic stimuli 27:50 – Thoughts on “knees behind toes” type exercises, and their benefit in physical preparation 41:52 – The links between rhythm in weightlifting, and rhythm in sprint acceleration 51:31 – Thoughts on more dynamic versions of training early stance and associated negative shin angles 1:01:59 – Angus thoughts’ on pushing knees forwards into positive angles during training 1:11:33 – Angus’s take on some of the mechanisms by which good Crossfit boxes can elicit such substantial strength gains in their population, as well as the importance of doing larger overall GPP workloads Angus Bradley Quotes “If it’s a true principle, it’s something that applies to things outside of the fitness industry” “A lot of systems sort of have this transition from a scientific underpinning, and once we have useful heuristics, it turns into more of an art form” “That stereotypical prescription of 3x10, 4x8, I’ve been pulling back on, not going full Yessis 1x20, but doing things like 2x8, 2x12, 2x6, just two hard work sets.  One thing we take for granted is just attention span” “Pretty much every sport at some point, you are going to have a big powerful negative shin angle” “Exposing both of those contexts (knees over and behind) toes in a loaded sense (is important)” “Yes, working negative and positive shin angles, I’ve created the perfect system” “It’s a relative negative shin angle, when people can plantarflex themselves into a squatty squat… otherwise it’s just a knee bend (if you dorsiflex yourself into the squat), that’s one of my take-aways from a gait-based approach to squatting”