The Art of Coaching

Today’s podcast features track and speed coach, Chris Korfist.  Chris has been a high school coach in track and football for 3 decades with close to 100 All-State athletes.  He is currently the sprints coach at Homewood Flossmoor high school in Chicago, owns the "Slow Guy Speed School”, and has consulted with professional sports teams all over the world, including the NFL, MLB, NBA, and Rugby League.  Chris has been a favorite podcast guest on this show and is constantly evolving and innovating his methods. Sprinting is a simple, yet complex topic, and one that requires a continual analysis of mechanics, exercises and training models.  There are many ways to train athletes, and with this in mind, it’s important to understand the “first principles” of any training system.  With many first principles taken from the brilliance of the “DB Hammer” training ideals, Chris has steadily evolved his training system, year over year, to the place where it is today. This past season, Homewood Flossmoor won the Illinois state track championship, and won the 4x100m and 4x200m dashes on their way to the title.  Chris’s adjustments to his speed training models worked well, with some athletes chopping off a second or more off of their 200m times from the previous year. On the podcast today, Chris starts by talking about his mental training approach, and some unique mental training elements of this past year’s team.  He then gets into the main changes he utilized this past training year, including reducing the speed endurance component of the work, and replacing it with some potent “AN2” bracket (30-40 second) specialized training for the sprints.  Chris also goes into how he would specialize the exercises for sprinters of different archetypes (stompers vs. slicers) and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by Lost Empire Herbs and Exogen wearable resistance gear. 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. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:40 – How the state track meet went for Chris’s team this year, including a 41.03s 4x100m time and a state championship 7:08 – Updates on mental strategies for racing, and building mental highlight tapes for athletes prior to meets 20:49 – Some main changes that Chris made this year in his programming that proved successful in the team’s state championship performance 30:12 – Using the 1080 sprint for slow-speed iso-kinetic hamstring work to improve the injury resilience factor of the muscle group 33:53 – The specificity of the “AN2” (30-40 second) bracket of work for the special exercises that Chris’s athletes were performing 41:15 – “Stompers” vs. “Slicers” and how to train the weakness of each athlete 47:10 – Water bag training and the role of the trunk/core and arms in sprinting 49:33 – Hip flexor training and strength in speed development, and usage of the hip swing exercise 54:19 – How to use primetimes and flexed leg bounds in speed development 1:01:04 – Training frequency throughout the year, and how this was a lower frequency year for Chris’s athletes 1:06:49 – Final thoughts on working strengths vs. weaknesses, and when to stop trying to bring up weaknesses in a training year Chris Korfist Quotes “(The highlight/motivational videos for the kids) It’s just this constant feedback that you are all of that” “This year, instead of goals, I had them focus on telling their story” “Our self-talk this year became a story: This is where I came from, this is what I did, this is where I’m going; Tying in history and tying in stories to your self talk is really powerful, because as humans we all want a story” “You figure out what motivates that kid, and then you push that button when you need to” “I knew if we showed up to practice and did the exact s...