Today’s show is with strength coach, Graeme Morris. Graeme is a performance coach that consults for a variety of team sport and combat athletes including world and Australian champions in Muay Thai. He is also the head strength and conditioning coach for the AFL umpires and has previously worked in rugby league for 6 seasons. Graeme has experience learning from many leading coaches, and has integrated it into a balance that he sees fit for his own training populations.
There are so many topics in the world of sports performance in regards to speed and strength. I often get a lot of questions on how I end up integrating much of it into a practical training session. At the end of the day, seeing the art of how coaches take information, and use it practically with athletes helps tie the content in the many conversations I have together.
On today’s show, Graeme takes us into his own integration of the two most common interests of performance coaches: Game-speed and strength/power development. Graeme speaks on his usage of closed versus open agility work, and lateral speed development, linear speed, and “robust running” ideas for team sport players. He also goes into his strength methods for athletes, how “specific” to get in the weight room, and particularly how he gets into various oscillatory strength methods to help his athletes maximize their power outputs, and finally, some ideas from training combat athletes.
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Timestamps and Main Points
4:15 – Graeme’s mentors and influences on his sports performance philosophy
5:45 – Graeme’s take on closed vs. open agility training for his athlete populations
19:00 – Talking about linear speed drills, “switching”, mini-hurdles, and more in the development of speed for team sport athletes
27:45 – A discussion on working in small vs. open spaces and its impact on how an athlete’s muscle groups and energy systems are impacted
30:45 – How Graeme’s role as a strength coach fits into game speed, in respect to the coach’s technical/tactical plans for the team
35:15 – The story of “never go full Bosch” and Graeme’s approach to more “specific lifts” in the weightroom
40:30 – Where Graeme stands on the 1x20 lifting spectrum
43:00 – Graeme’s experience with oscillating lifting reps for a variety of athlete populations
58:00 – Working with Cal Dietz’s “reflexive trimetric” training method
1:04:00 – Core foot training movements that Graeme utilizes in his programming
“If an athlete doesn’t have multiple tools to begin with; it’s hard to select the right tool… I look at shuffle positions, crossover step, basic backpedaling. We are starting in a closed scenario, maybe resisted to slow it down a little more”
“When you look on social media, you always see the best athletes…. It’s always great to see what people are doing online but they are always putting the most talented athlete; people are afraid to show the least talented”
“When players reach where I am trying to get them to (from a linear speed perspective) then I will sprinkle in robust running methods… I find people will skip that initial step and go right into (robust running)”
“I think you can get a lot of game speed in your technical/tactical drills”
“In defense we are trying to take away space from the competition, in attack, we are trying to create space… you know these guys, you know they are not quick, but they always seem to have time on the field”
“We need to have these drills that are executed at game speed, or above”
“When you are working in a short space, that is going to put more stress on the calf, groin and glute area. When you work in a more open space, that is going to put more stress on the hamstrings, and it’s often more aerobic”
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