Zach Dechant " Movement Matters, Building athletes through thoughtful Speed and Power Development"

On Episode 20 I sit down with The assistant director of Strength and Conditioning at TCU baseball Zach Dechant. I was really excited to get someone on from a baseball background to hear some of their rationale behind building effective players and in my opinion Zach is one of the best. Zach has a great book out titled "movement over maxes" and we begin our conversation by discussing why he prizes movement over maximum intensity firstly. Zach Highlights how plyometrics or jumping is a quality that should be prized by all athletic populations. Zach emphasizes that he trains baseball players to be athletes and he really drives home the dangers of prizing specificity especially early on within development. Zach present a really great rationale  speed, power, and an overall base should be emphasized prior to specificity. Zach has a great program out on warmups and we discuss the role of the warmup, Zach discusses the RAMPS protocol with the S equating to skill. Zach discusses how the warmup can be utilized as an effective method to build skill year around be it coordinative or speed and power related. Baseball trainers can be extremely polarizing with their upper body methods of training so I was keen to get Zach's take on upper body training. As we go through the conversation Zach reiterated the idea that there are no or very few bad exercises, it all depends on the athlete. Zach discusses how he utilizes Screening to effectively cater athletic development on an individual basis. We discuss isometrics and how they can facilitate highly prized athletic qualities and allow positional awareness as well as rapid relaxation in their oscillatory form. Baseball is an extremely rotational dependent sport, so naturally we discuss rotational work and med ball throws with Zach and he discusses how he has moved towards stability training rather then rotational work and he presents a really good reasoning for that shift. We end our conversation by discussing how Zach develops speed and the necessary energy systems for the sport of baseball. Zach starts out by present a great fact, baseball is almost completely alactic; therefore, speed is the game. Zach stated " he wants his athletes to be fast, powerful, and explosive with everything that they do, there is rest between every play." Zach states that speed is the highest on their priority list therefore, it is the skill they chase most frequently and firstly in their weekly progression. Based off of GPS data collected by Zach, baseball may involve much more max effort sprinting then one would be led to believe. Zach runs a high/low system, so we discuss what the low days look like and the overall benefits of tempo running and how he specifies tempos to better prepare positional players as they move closer to competition. 

Movement over Maxes text https://www.amazon.com/Movement-Over-Maxes-Developing-Performance/dp/173102424X

Movement over maxes website including 3 d movement prep https://www.movementovermaxes.com/#

Zach Dechant.com https://zachdechant.com/

@ ZachDechant(twitter) https://twitter.com/ZachDechant?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/zachdechant/?hl=en

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