ASCA Podcast #104 - Ross Smith

Leading a multidisciplinary team at the Australian institute of Sport, Ross has over 25 years strength and conditioning experience working across multiple sports and organisations. Since 2004 at the AIS working with development and elite athletes across sports including netball, boxing, taekwondo, judo, athletics, cycling, rowing, basketball, modern pentathlon, water polo, winter sports, gymnastics, artistic swimming, and part of the leadership team in the AIS intensive rehabilitation program. He has also work with the Australian armed forces and lectured ASCA courses in Australia and overseas. Throughout his career coaching Athletics, sprint and agility and S&C the ability to tell a story and build athlete understanding has been an integral part of optimising outcomes. QUOTES “As an S&C coach we are highly time limited and time poor and sometimes our intervention with athletes doesn’t resonate” “So that understanding of what that data means is important and the last piece for is how to apply that data” “If I can make myself redundant on the basics, on the low level stuff, it gives me an opportunity to work on the high level stuff with athletes” “That separation between technical training and the gym is too large alot of the time with how we coach” “Anything high velocity, high speed, I want to do it in as fresh a state as possible and this also applies to the cognitive state, like teaching somebody something new.” SHOWNOTES 1) Ross’ update since the last episode and background 2) Concepts for S&C coaches to understand to maximize interventions with athletes 3) The first things to focus on when setting up strength & conditioning programs for athletes 4) Athletic models of movement and magnification of error learning techniques 5) Themes in warm ups and drills and how to link sessions together 6) Building the cognitive transfer between technical training and strength & conditioning sessions 7) An optimal structure and sequence of strength & conditioning within a head coach’s plan 8) Purposefully making yourself redundant with athletes 9) Do athletes have the capability to apply force and more importantly, the rate of force? 10) Barefoot work and core training with Kosta Tszyu PEOPLE MENTIONED Craig Purdham Kosta Tszyu Johnny Lewis Kelly Penfold