Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 2, Epiosde 38

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 38

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This episode dives headfirst into the art of blending audience desires with crucial knowledge, ensuring that even those new to the field walk away with actionable insights. You'll learn how sharing personal stories and mistakes isn't just cathartic but a vital teaching tool, especially in an era where social media influences conference dynamics significantly.

But that's not all—prepare to be inspired by Saquon Barkley's jaw-dropping athletic feats, and discover how such agility can be nurtured across various sports disciplines like AFL and soccer. We explore the effectiveness of different training philosophies, from the repetition of key movement patterns to the liberating flow of game-based learning, offering a comprehensive look at how athletes can hone their natural talents. As we wrap up, expect a humorous take on "grenade planning," with an emphasis on facing the unexpected with gusto and the unbreakable camaraderie that fuels our passion for coaching. Don't miss this lively exchange that promises to leave you both informed and entertained.

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Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. Darren Burgess, ason Webber, here. How are you, mate? You're all dressed up for Melbourne Cup.

Darren Burgess:

We are recording on Melbourne Cup Day For the Victorians listening, they'll be on holiday, but West Australia and South Aussies, I'm in the office.

Jason Weber:

Everybody else is working.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah.

Jason Weber:

I live in the office, my bed's in my office.

Darren Burgess:

Today, players come back in the next sort of week and a half. So we're just getting everything set. And, yeah, we're changing our logo, which will be announced in two days. Wow, I'm sure that was fun.

Jason Weber:

Listen, mate. I see you're back on the speaking circuit again. Back up to the Australian Strength and Conditioning Association. They've got their annual affair on the Gold Coast.

Darren Burgess:

In Brisbane and yeah.

Darren Burgess:

I'm the speaker before the dinner. So Saturday afternoon 4 o'clock time slot, they tell me it's the prime one, but I don't know that it is Jason. But anyway, no, I'm looking forward to it. They wanted me to talk about what have I learned in 20 years in the industry. I did correct them and say 25 years. Wow, in fact it's 27 years and I just penned the three takeaways from that.

Darren Burgess:

So, yeah, it's been interesting to go back and reflect and what examples to put in, what not to. And I'm trying to give people one thing that I can't stand that's creeping into our, you know, to conferences and even Instagram posts and things like that is when people talk about culture and they talk about, you know, be curious and all of those things which are really important, and culture is really important. Please don't get me wrong when you go to a conference, you want to have things to take away from that and you want in my opinion, you want to have tangibles, especially something like an ASCA conference where there's a lot of sort of younger, up-and-coming strength and conditioning coaches who are looking to us for guidance and advice and more about, okay, how to navigate your way in the industry, how to, what has changed. How do we handle athletes now compared to how we used to handle them? So I'm trying to give people more takeaway, take-home messages and objective examples that they can hopefully learn from and I can tell them how I made mistakes and hopefully go from there rather than more general yeah statements with no sort of, with no homework. I think it's really important that the people who attend go.

Darren Burgess:

Okay, this guy like him or don't like him. He's telling me that I should be more educated in holistic human programming. Okay, what does that mean? That means take um care to know what's going on inside your athlete's head. What are they doing? Where are they at? Uh, where's their contract at? Where's their, where's their life at? So that can help your programming. There you go, don't even know, you don't have to attend.

Jason Weber:

Well, you know, it's really interesting. You mentioned social media and I'm a reluctant social media user and not I just don't. It's a pain in the butt, I will say. I will say that, while I'm not a supporter of X, I think Twitter originally and still is to some extent a reasonable vehicle for people to get research out and there's some genuine people putting some good stuff out. But it also makes then the conference a harder thing, because the conference 20 years ago used to be.

Jason Weber:

You're turning up and seeing all these people that you don't hear from, so like and not that you're a prolific poster or anything, but people wouldn't have heard from you before and they get to the conference, go right out, but you get other people who are constantly barraging and then they then they're on the speaking circuit and you see that they go from conference to conference sort of saying the same thing. I'm not bagging any of that, it's just I think people have got to be aware that everyone's telling a story and that's fine, but I think, as you said, there's got to be value in it. What can I give you to take away? And that's the really hard part. That's the really hard part of all of this.

Darren Burgess:

Our industry searches for things for free be honest, exactly, and the attempt then my attempt, rightly or wrongly, and people might tell me whether I've been successful or not is what do I think they want to hear, rather than what do I need to get out and tell people how smart I am, and tell people how evolved I am, and tell people that I'm reading the Art of War by you know, or tell people that I'm reading how to Be a Successful CEO? All of those things, yeah, I've read, or I'm reading, and I'm trying to make myself a better sporting director or director of performance or whatever title you want to be. But in this instance, I'm not trying to show people that side. I'm trying to say right, when you're programming with part-time athletes, full-time athletes, because this is the majority of the audience what kind?

Darren Burgess:

of things do they want to hear rather than you know if I'm speaking to a bunch of CEOs or if I'm at a leadership conference or something like that. It's a different talk.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, yeah, I get you. I think you're absolutely right, mate. But I would also say like, yes, there's what do people want to hear, and then there's what do they need to hear.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, good point Because.

Jason Weber:

I think one of the things I think we both do this relatively well is we share the story. We're happy to say, hey, I screwed this up. I mean, what's the absolute predicate of this podcast? I screwed this up. I'm trying to help other people not screw this up. I mean, what's the absolute predicate of this podcast? I screwed this up. I'm trying to help other people not screw it up.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Weber:

So I think sharing that story and showing the people where not to go, because one of the great persistent themes of our industry, along with wanting everything for free, is that we can reinvent the wheel with the best of them For sure. Right, you can have a 25-year year old come in and tell me the how unbelievable I've got this new thing we're doing kettlebell swings. I'm like right, kettlebell swings like they've only been around for god knows how long, since the greek you know the original greek olympics, who knows?

Jason Weber:

but. But so yeah, I think there's a good blend. But, man, I trust you'll deliver well. You're always a good speaker and you've got plenty to tell people.

Darren Burgess:

I think people by then are going to be pretty fatigued. So I'll be looking to sort of Saturday night they'll be ramping up.

Jason Weber:

There can be. Not that I've attended a lot of them, but I know there's a couple of.

Darren Burgess:

Dan Baker will be on his fourth in-hang.

Jason Weber:

I wasn't going to say his name, but Dr Dan Baker.

Darren Burgess:

No one of the best Strong man.

Jason Weber:

Very good man.

Darren Burgess:

Good man Dan will be leading the charge. Representative of ASCA and he'll be saying come on, wind it up, virgil, come on. Come on Bar. And he'll be saying come on, wind it up, virgil, come on.

Jason Weber:

Come on, bar's open, tad's running, let's go, let's go.

Darren Burgess:

Anyway, let's go Now. Jason, the and I guess, the growth of, so right now we're a week and a half, two weeks away from players returning to AFL teams that weren't good enough to make the finals and, you know, maybe three or four weeks for those who did play finals. So now I've got Alec Budfield in the building and we're trying to work through.

Jason Weber:

Brains.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, how can we best guess at what the players have done so that when they come in day one there's not this massive spike or drop in loads? And some of them we know because some of them send me, you know, their Apple Watches or Whoop or whatever it is that they're wearing Apple Watch for us.

Jason Weber:

Gratuitous placement of products.

Darren Burgess:

Everybody knows Apple don't give anything for free. No, no, no, this is not making it.

Jason Weber:

That's why they're worth a fortune, mate. Anyway, continue. Yeah, so we've got young blokes coming back.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, we've got people coming back and it is a really tricky thing to nail those first Now, particularly in the Premier League, when you've only got five weeks or four weeks. You've got a bit more of a graduated build, but it's pretty hard knowing what they've done, particularly those who have gone and sought some help. So I know this is big in the US and it'd be really hard for them because you're not allowed to speak to the athletes and a lot of times private consultants don't want to tell you what they do because it's their secret sauce and everything you know. I get that Yep, 100%. How have you handled that in the past and what advice have you got for me?

Jason Weber:

Mate, if we go with the theme of, we want to give people takeaways. So for anyone listening who, I think we're up to 15 listeners now. We've got the great Phil Coles on who's 14.

Darren Burgess:

I think we've got someone else.

Jason Weber:

He's dragged someone else in but for anyone who's actually in the industry. So I'm going to talk AFL specific because, well, well, actually I did this in pro rugby as well. But my, my idea is the first session, particularly I should caveat this if you've given them a program and so they have a number of things to do, complete right, and so in your program you've built them up to a point where, in theory, if they turned up, they would be ready to step into the next body of work prepared.

Jason Weber:

So my first session in, I do, the last session that they needed to do in their program sure so that they come in and so we would have everything under the sun, like you got gps, you got heart rates, you're all that hoo-ha to see how they react.

Jason Weber:

Now I have more than once picked up people who have just not survived, that they might push through the session but the next day they can't move and you know they've got calf soreness or they've got this, they've got that and it's like right. So I'm saying to the staff doing, let's say, in the classic and this got asked of me recently the classic AFL, let's do it on the first day. We'll run a 2K time trial. Well, that's okay and that's probably a method to get to it, but it's a maximal test. So you run the risk of people going off the scale and hurting themselves. So, yeah, I would run the last session that I would have expected them to complete and usually I would sort of structure that so that they'll have already done that session twice, let's say on the previous Friday, then the Friday before they come back. Then they do it on the.

Jason Weber:

Monday. So you go, you should be able to do this on your ear. So we're running, we're doing whatever we're doing, rep 150s and we've got a time that we expect. We've got a heart rate, we expect blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's also over the next couple of days we're evaluating how did you pull up? Are you ready to go? And in that way, I think you are. At least you're never going to what you and brains. Brains will probably figure a way out how to figure out what they did, right, but I'm not as smart as him, so hence my nickname, which is not brains.

Jason Weber:

I think you give yourself the best chance of saying, hey, yeah, the high probability is they've done the work and they come in and they're good to go. And that would be because, mate, I was just looking at some notes about a talk that I'm about to do soon. Part of it's the three main conflicts in sport performance, and I'll give you one, and one of them is inference versus fact. How much are we inferring versus how much do we know as fact?

Jason Weber:

And it's always a balance, because we don't know, and people I think people oftentimes are taking inference as fact when in fact that's not. We're making our best guess possible and in this case I think, if the evidence is they can do the session, they've done it well, you're a good chance to say yep, they've got a body of work underneath them.

Darren Burgess:

Yep, I think that makes sense. What about the footballs? Do you get those out from day one? Yeah, yeah, oh, absolutely, so you add that into that session.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, your program, our program, would have had X amount of kicking in it change of direction, the whole thing.

Jason Weber:

So, like if I was to be gory in the detail, I have a particular change of direction series that I would do that they would build up through that period. They would need to come in and complete that in X period and maybe I'll share that on some form of social media at some point. But it means they can come in and I know they've changed direction, they've done X amount of speed, Because I know personally in that first week, yeah, I want the footballs out, I want them kicking, I want to get. My concept is to get to football as soon as possible and then we intersperse it with running and we overload and blah, blah, blah. But footballers want to play football, man, they don't want to come and do a track and field season.

Jason Weber:

And I think if you add to that something we've discussed previously, maybe on this podcast or not, I don't remember something we've discussed previously, maybe on this podcast or not, I don't remember but if you look at the amount of skill involved in, let's say, AFL, it's huge. Like reading the game is incredible. So the sooner you can get to a position where you're experiencing that you're making a decision, no matter how simple it evolves the game and our job, albeit physical preparation. But if you you know HBM, you're overseeing everything. You want to facilitate as much football as possible so that they can develop the skills they need for the game. Sure, so yeah, anyway, that's the broad brush, mate.

Darren Burgess:

Okay, I've got two more for you Hand grenades Unprepared for. Let's go brush mate. Okay, I've got two more for you Hand grenades Unprepared for let's go. Because I can help with this. I don't know if you saw Saquon Barkley yesterday Did you see, yes, I did, yes, I did.

Jason Weber:

Okay, awesome, just explain it in case there are people who didn't see it. But it was everywhere.

Darren Burgess:

Running back. Philadelphia Eagles in my opinion, ridiculously signed away from the New York Giants. Just extraordinary Eagles were allowed to sign them. I like the Eagles, so that's good news. He evaded somebody and then approached a tackle and did a full 360. A hit and spin, like a hit and spin, but was then facing his own goal line. Looked behind and saw that a defender was attempting to tackle him by way of which using the whole body, which is not uncommon in NFL and you see players hurdle players when they know they're just going to come charging at them and use their whole body to tackle. And he hurdled, facing the other way.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah backwards, backwards, hurdled over the top of him and got tackled. So it was an unbelievable sense of agility and movement. So my question to you, jason, and he's, you know, probably one of the top three running backs, which means he's probably one of the top I don't know 10 field sport athletes in the world. Oh, in the world, from you know, an agility point of view, an explosive, yeah, yeah, yeah, the world From an agility point of view, explosive, yeah, let's park that. How do you take a draftee in AFL or a young kid in soccer to that point? Go, good question.

Jason Weber:

You've got four minutes. Okay, afl and soccer, you're not going to get him to that level. He has trained his entire life to avoid to carry the ball and avoid being hit. That's all he ever does. There's no repositioning, there's no defending, there's no nothing. All he does is train to carry the ball. Now, when you look at the moves he made, the hit and spin move he made should be in the dictionary under hit and spin. He actually stepped across the path of the individual, drew him across and then spun off. So the guy never even made contact with him. He was tackling air.

Darren Burgess:

It was unbelievable. Tell me how to do it. Tell me how to get my players to do it. They're coming back in the back of their feet Right.

Jason Weber:

So let's say, one of your young blokes I worked with only a week ago we started doing cornerback training. Ago we started doing cornerback training. Now it becomes, in my opinion, it becomes your opinion about how people change direction, how they move to defend and attack versus transition. Transition is when you just move from one spot to another and you can kind of shuffle sideways. So we worked on getting just hip mobility. Hip mobility, foot and foot coordination was the focus of just what we did. Now, what they do, what your man in your demonstration did, they are incredibly coordinated, number one. They have already practiced these patterns over and over and over again. So I disagree with you. He didn't look over his shoulder. He knew the players were coming. He jumped because he anticipated where that player was going to be. It was brilliant. But my point to all that is Am I getting there through?

Darren Burgess:

If we had Darren Roberts here he of previous school and various physio practices he would say put a whole bunch of shit on the ground and let the players weave their way through it and get used to the random nature of it. If we have-.

Jason Weber:

That would be part of it. That would be part of it, but you can't start. So again, the athlete I worked with of yours last week you can't start by putting random stuff on the ground. He doesn't know how to move.

Darren Burgess:

Okay, right, so let's say-'re going to. Am I putting some red, blue, yellow cones and then calling out the thing where he places?

Jason Weber:

No well, we didn't. So again you start to you're going deep, so we don't make any decisions. Let him learn the pattern. So what I showed him was I showed him the pattern and I said man, I just need you to practice it. It's the same with running fast right.

Jason Weber:

Too often we get coaches fucking chirping all the time. Sometimes you've got to let them practice. You have to educate practice and then evolve that and that becomes a skill acquisition question. So do you put random things on the ground and throw shit at them and all that? Yeah, down the track, when they know how to move, when they've got control of what they're doing. But when you're talking about an AFL kid who's 6'7 or something and really is still learning his body, get the basics down pat. But get the basics down pat in such a way that you can do them at low frequency and they can practice over and over and over and get movement patterns down such that they've got, as Kelvin Giles would say, they've got, a great big library of movement to draw on. That's the key, right. If you've got lots, you're the NFL guy man. He's just got so much experience to draw on, he's had so many.

Darren Burgess:

Brazilian soccer method would say just let them play, and they will be exposed to so many scenarios. So let them play football. Everything's a bit closer to the same. But they'll develop this movement library and their body will tell them that's an efficient way to do it, that's an inefficient way to do it. That works, that doesn't work. So that's a little bit counterintuitive to what you're saying.

Jason Weber:

No, no, no, I think it's a different model. Okay, that's what you would call. Oh, I'm trying to think of the word. It'll come to me in a moment. Alzheimer's has got me for the moment. But you're putting everybody in and saying, right, we're going to play futsal three times a week and get it two games. So we're going to play so much that, yes, we're just going to figure out the strong will survive, the weak will bail out. We're not talking about that. In Australian AFL. You don't have that option. You recruited that kid last year. You must make him work.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I agree.

Jason Weber:

So we can't blame. Now. I don't think the Brazilians have got it wrong, but they've got so many people playing the game that they can afford to just shove them all into a funnel and the best ones will pop out. But we can lose 100,000 of them because it doesn't matter. Australian sport doesn't have that, and I think if you look to the American model, it's the same thing. You have so many people playing that they have. You can get on social media and look at strength training in high school. You can look at the number of kids that are squatting extraordinary weight horribly like, in a disgraceful way. Yet at the same level there are other guys that are just coaching brilliantly. So it becomes that it's a nutritional model. That's the term I was looking for. Just smack them all into that system and away you go.

Darren Burgess:

So our best guess for Saquon Barkley and we know that it's 40% genetic, 60% environment, so he's got the. Let's assume that Mr and Mrs Barkley have given him the greatest genes that enables him to do that you reckon he has learned those patterns over and over again so that he knows when a player comes into his field of vision here. This is the move that's always worked for me. When a player comes into my field, this is and that has been taught, rather than him chucked into an environment or a bit of both.

Jason Weber:

I think it's a bit of both. But I'd say, if you take that another way, I've got a great book back here that looks at soccer players and how that one player can be running to the left and they know where their other players are and they don't look, they can just pass it because they've done. This is what this predictive mechanics they're going. I know where everybody's running, I know he'll run this line. Bang, put the ball there.

Jason Weber:

Saquon Barkley knew all those guys were coming. He'd seen him as he got spun. He goes. I'm the wrong way, but I know this guy's coming up and that was brilliant, mate, I reckon when he was probably 10, 12,. I reckon someone probably taught him a couple of things when he was 13, 14, 15. But now, mate, I would reckon he'd do some drilling, he'd do some static. You see again, you see on social media they'll zip around a couple of static things, but he has learned so much Again, kg Belvin, giles, movement library, he's got so much under his belt. So I think there's a very big difference between a kid Like, let's say again, the NBA and Brazilian soccer is not that dissimilar. What they do when they're kids, when they're 9, 10, probably younger, they just keep doing.

Jason Weber:

Now you know as well as I do our AFL nine, 10, probably younger they just keep doing Now, you know this as well as I do our AFL kids, mate. They're playing basketball, they're playing swimming, surfing, kite surfing, whatever, and they play footy. So they're not. They're all quite divergent things. So I think it's an interesting question, mate, and it's a great example, but I think kids have got to learn first.

Darren Burgess:

I appreciate that lesson and the last lesson you're going to teach.

Jason Weber:

It wasn't a lesson mate, it was just me sharing my stupidity.

Darren Burgess:

You've again got three or four minutes for this before we wrap up. Is there a place for Saquon Barkley and his friends and we all aspire to be or have athletes like that for the proliferation at the moment of movement coaches? So by that I don't mean people who are teaching people where to place their foot to evade opponents. I'm talking about mobility, holding poses, l-doa type poses with the addition of movement. So I'm going to teach you to forward roll correctly. I'm going to teach you know, move laterally, but slowly, uh, and and your whole body in sequence. Does that translate to field stuff?

Jason Weber:

I think there's a place for it. I'm I'm not. I'm certainly brought a perspective within an environment. I would prefer to deliver that type of thing from my staff, like within the team, rather than having a guru come in. But I will tell you, I used to run a thing called gorilla yoga and my gorilla yoga was quite simply deep flexibility components and mobility that were based on just moving. It's getting Now. I think there's a big place for it. I think mobility is underrated.

Jason Weber:

I think some of the stuff we do is inappropriate, Not inappropriate, inefficient. I think we get kids stretching I would use your man that I worked with a couple of weeks ago. You identify there's a limitation in their hip and you go, show me how you stretch and they lie back and pull their knee to their chest and you go not really getting there, Show them a harder position and encourage them to work through that position and all of a sudden we go, hmm, my knee doesn't hurt anymore and hmm, I can do a drill properly and all these things. So I think there is a place. I don't like you know, you give people in this day and age of specialists right. We get the movement specialist that comes in and does it. I think there's a small part for it. But not sell out the whole program to running around barefoot and lifting rocks and all that sort of stuff. That's probably not the go. But anyway, that's my two cents worth. What do you think?

Darren Burgess:

uh, yeah, I think mobility is really important and it probably is undervalued and and mobility might be a combination, might be defined, might be as a combination of flexibility and movement and or flexibility in movement, and I think range of motion in movement is, is important. So I think, if there's a limitation, yes, um, uh, like with you know some afl players who've only grown up in um, we must linear lift and we must linear run um.

Darren Burgess:

I think their hip and pelvic mobility is limited and that would need to work, and that can be manually or it can be position-based, and I think both of them work pretty well, and it depends on your resources. If you've got 45 athletes and you need to make them get from A to B quickly, and often it may well be the. What theory did you have? I called?

Jason Weber:

it guerrilla yoga.

Darren Burgess:

No, no, no, no, the slow ones die off. Oh, the attritional model. Attrition, so it may well be attrition. You're going to deliver a program which is best going to prepare these people for AFL. And you know what, if player A, b and C can't do it because of their lack of mobility, hey, this is the reason Go and fix it yourself, because we don't have time in this program to do that. 100%.

Jason Weber:

But you run a very strong program and you would have those views about certain elements of running.

Jason Weber:

But there's no question that, like I always talk about the Tour de France, I think whether I get this right or not it doesn't matter. But I remember reading somewhere that if they can't push 80 watts per kilogram on their blood, on the power generator on their bike, don't even talk to them. So it doesn't matter who gives a crap what your vo2 max is, who grabs, it doesn't matter. You've got to be able to punch 80 watts per kilogram. So it is that point of hey, this is where the program's at. We've got to bring able to punch 80 watts per kilogram. So it is that point of hey, this is where the program's at. We've got to bring it up to you. Which is again, mate, I have been criticized previously for saying, hey, you're setting standards too high. I'm like, fucking, what, like, what are we aiming for here? Are we? We all want to say we want to win the title, we want to win the afl premiership, but we're not going to win it down low.

Jason Weber:

We're going to have to bring those standards up.

Darren Burgess:

Don't ever apologise for that.

Jason Weber:

No, mate, never. I'd just lose my shit probably.

Darren Burgess:

Speaking of which, I need to get back to proper work, and we are at the end of our normal 30-minute. End of our 10-minute I think we've even extended that a little bit which is asking you questions unannounced, so unprepared.

Jason Weber:

Grenade planning. That's what this is about. We just do it, throw your body on it. Love your work man, love your work and let's get on it again real soon.

Darren Burgess:

No worries, see you soon, man. Love your work and let's get on it again real soon. No worries, you too, mate.