Lacrosse Training for Speed | Creating Better Athletes in LAX

This video is a presentation on speed training for lacrosse athletes. The video discusses a new way to approach training and coaching for LAX that could help revolutionize the way things have been done before.

I have consulted with many lacrosse teams over the past few years, and most have adopted the Feed the Cats speed training and approach with major success. Full length article on lacrosse and speed training below:

Out of My Lane: Lacrosse Training for Speed

What is Feed the Cats? Check out the full introduction video here:

Get certified by the Universal Speed Rating & start building your speed community: https://train.universalspeedrating.com/feedthecats

Twitter: @pntrack
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Amazon affiliate links to recommended books:
– Essentialism: https://amzn.to/3C3b2Nm
– The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: https://amzn.to/43xRdtN
– Atomic Habits: https://amzn.to/4602Rz4
– The Practice of Groundedness: https://amzn.to/43TtP9T

Feed the Cats is a revolutionary way of training, coaching, and teaching that values specificity, essentialism, performance, and love. After gaining a world-wide following in Track & Field, FTC has now gained a foothold in American football, along with other sports.

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you on the next one!

My name is Tony holler and I’m happy to be here talking about feed the cats and speed training and how how that applies to the sport of Lacrosse I’d like to thank Grady Breen for everything he’s done for me um he’s exposed me to the uh

To the world of Lacrosse a world that I did not know anything about until about four years ago and since then I’ve I’ve consulted with probably 10 of the best NCAA programs uh in the nation and uh many of the teams have adopted some of

My ideas if not all of them and so what I’m going to talk to you today about is basically what I would talk to incaa coaches and strength and conditioning coaches um on how they can feed the cats in the cross at the college level After that intro um I go right to uh uh uh the heart of the matter and that is that we need to see tradition as not something we want to cling to but we want to seriously question everything about the tradition of sports in America including the sport of lacrosse

I believe that tradition is the status quo I believe tradition is almost a religion uh we we cling to tradition and the tradition of sports in America this is a track tradition but basically the practice sucks and uh this is an athlete from Purdue University who says that he hates practice on Monday

Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday and then he can’t wait for the meat and loves the meat and then on Sunday his body hurts he hates track and in 24 hours this uh tweet got retweeted 934 time times and had 3,812 likes that means that that athletes all over the nation

Not only thought this was kind of humorous but they could relate to it one of the responders was a former Olympian and a coach and he says I love coaching track and delivering pain this is uh this is kind of like a problem I think and it’s it’s everywhere and and I I

Think people just accept it people loved when Norman Dale in the movie hooer said my practices aren’t designed for your enjoyment practice was just the hell that we had to go through the misery that we went through in order to get to play in the

Games I see uh uh teams put out uh videos like this this is from a nationally ranked High School in Oklahoma uh a football team and they think this is what makes them maybe give gives them the The Winning Edge makes them tougher than other teams this comes from uh Georgia where

They brought in some military guys some Navy SEAL and having them do all kinds of terrible stuff you know this is borderline abusive but you know this is sports in America this is everywhere this is a school in Texas who’s uh highly successful and they they think that things like this is what

Gives them the edge once again sports in America this comes from a u a coach in Miami who uh come on man hurry up man one great pushup go this kid this was his first track practice in the summer and this coach was so proud of this video he put it out

To the World on Twitter here’s a coach in Colorado I mean I don’t go around looking for this stuff this stuff finds me can you imagine what happens if a kid kills himself on these stairs and this one of my favorites we’re going to toughen kids

Up remember this was not done with a secret video this is something that these guys are proud of and I just see it as just Dumber in hell I’ve coached for 43 years my dad coached basketball at the high school and college level for 47 and and I see

Stuff like that and I’m like I I just it’s in defensible but you see as humans all of our surviving ancestors and they all survived all of our ancestors survived long enough to have children or else they wouldn’t be our ancestors they were protected by believing in the group by accepting

Traditions of the group they survived by by joining a clan a tribe um they it protected them the Lone Wolf often times did not live long enough to have children so it’s in our genes that we want to belong and to belong we have to believe what everybody else

Believes I like Mark Twain he said uh when you find yourself on the side of the majority is time to pause and reflect Buck Min Fuller said you never change things by fighting the existing reality to change something build a a new model that makes the existing model

Obsolete that’s kind of what I’ve done I’ve built a new model I built it for myself 25 years ago but now I’m giving it away and a lot of people kind of see the value in the new model up until the age of 40 I coached old

School I coached just just like my dad my dad coached for a long long time he was a great coach but I coached just like him I copied other successful traditional coaches I used to visit Bobby Knight I was a basketball coach in my early days used to visit Bobby Knight the

University of Indiana and and I would hang on every word I was intolerant of losing I was a poor loser and I thought that was a good thing because good losers probably lost a lot and I didn’t want to be a good loser I believe that you had to outwork

The competition and then brag about it always telling your team nobody works harder than us and I use the term we turn boys into men a lot and it’s it’s weird we never hear in the modern days of women’s sports that nobody talks about turning girls into women but

There’s a weird thing in America about turning boys into men and I also bought into the idea that practice is going to suck it’s going to be miserable it’s it’s going to break us down but that somehow it’s all Justified when we win games when did it all change it changed around

1999 and these three words really hit me hard uh my my son Alec said Dad track sucks I was the head track coach at the time my my son could dunk a basketball in the e8th grade and I thought to myself if if an athlete like my son

Doesn’t want to be in my sport maybe it’s time to try a new model I I I I said that I’m gonna copy nobody I’m gonna build something new into hell with tradition I decided I was going to out aete the competition man is this important I don’t know if there’s

Anything in feed the cats is more important than the idea that we are going to attract athletes to our program the team with the best athletes usually wins so we want to attract those athletes we want to attract cats and then we’re going to create athletes it’s kind of like if you’re a

College coach you’re going to recruit great athletes yes and that’s what they do they recruit great athletes they do a great job with that but then so many of them fail in the creating of athletes or the improving of athletes they just lift and run a

Lot and then here’s another key this is an absolute key to feed the cast we’re going to make practice the best part of a kid’s day you know kids get to go through Sports One time I don’t I don’t care I I call College athletes kids too they’re they’re just grown-up kids and

Um what I found is that you know uh all these people are saying like oh kids these days they’re awful they are not awful they’re fantastic because when kids like something they’re good at it and when kids really love something they become obsessed and and they they work

So hard at what they love so we have to make practice lovable that’s weird because it’s a total departure from everything I’ve ever believed in when I by the time I was 40 I mean I was halfway through my life before I finally evolved what that creates is what I call

The feed the cats endless feedback loop where a coach starts to create a happy healthy environment by happy I mean mentally healthy by healthy I mean physically healthy and we then perform in practice and kids leave with a smile on their face and some gas in their tank

And when they do that they start performing well in practice and then then they start saying coach I love this stuff I love this stuff you know what what else can I do to make myself better and then we as coaches start to reflect our athletes enthusiasm uh there’s nothing that’s

More inspirational to a coach than inspirational athletes we will work forever for kids that want to be there and it’s just a new model where we’re going to make practice more like a game we’re going to gamify practice Steve Jobs said if you’re working on something that you really

Love you don’t have to be pushed the vision pulls you what have coaches done traditionally over the last 100 years they’ve pushed athletes they’ve pushed them pushed them pushed them and what I’m saying is this change that let let’s let’s pull our athletes let’s provide a fertile field for them

To grow into the people they need to grow into uh this video kind of sums up the love encouragement Joy success you know kids I let’s just say I’ve never had anything as much fun in practice as The Gauntlet is for us when we’re speed [Applause] training

I started doing that 12 years ago and the first time I did it even though we’d been speed training for two months uh we had 62% of our athletes run the fastest time they’d run in their life 62% since then it’s always between 60 and 65% we do this typically once or

Twice a year but athletes perform better when they like something uh if you’re miserable if you’re mentally depressed if you’re physically broken you don’t run the fastest you’ve ever run now a part of feed the cats is what I call the disciplined pursuit of less I stole this from the book essentialism by

Greg mcken and uh if you haven’t read essentialism please do so it’s an amazing book I believe in hormesis which is a it was really a pharmacological term uh 500 years ago a guy named paracelsus said that everything’s a poison nothing is a poison it all depends on the dosage

I believe that we need to see training as as a drug and that we dose training and when I think of U Paras celsus I think of aspirin where two aspirin is the correct dosage it’s great for a headache it’s a miracle cure for a headache but 100 aspirin will a suicide

So um so aspirin can be both good and bad just like training can be both good and bad schol said for every substance small doses stimulate moderate doses inhibit large doses kill when I think it shows I think more of tequila that maybe after a shot tequila you’re having a

Great time at a party after three or four shots um it’s no longer a stimulant uh it it’s it’s inhibiting you and then of course too many shots will kill you so so we need to see training uh in that way the hormesis curve looks like this

Now my my dad as a coach used to call that hump there the uh point of diminishing returns he loved to say those words the point of diminishing returns that’s why his basketball teams never practice longer than two hours ever because he thought a three-hour practice might be a negative

Day not not just the last hour being negative it might a three-hour practice might cause his team to regress so what we want to do is we want to air on the side of the front of that curve we don’t know where the hump is

For every one of our athletes so we want to air on the side of less my own experience as an athlete I think I was weighed down on the far right of this curve at least in three practices a week uh usually the day before before a football game the day

Before a basketball game day before a track meet our coaches would back off thinking that would magically solve all our broken bodies and uh depressed Minds um and it might have done something like that but but you can’t break kids three days a week and I I think that you want

To accept the fact that we can get a small gain every day without ever ending up in that adverse effect range remember that that hot dog that we see here does not taste better with 10 times more mustard on it I love the metaphor of burning the

Steak if if you air on the side of less if you accept small winds then you’re basically cooking the steak rare or medium rare but you’re never going over that hump because once you burn the steak it’s ruined and I believe the same thing happens to

Athletes we want to get to the line 80% in shape and 100% healthy rather than the other way around sports in America for the last 100 years it’s been the opposite 100% in shape and 80% healthy was acceptable and you don’t perform well when you’re 80% healthy you don’t your

Your team does not perform well when when uh 20% of the guys are broken and unable to play in the game and that stuff happens all the time but yet as coaches man this is deep down in our DNA that somewhere out there someone is working harder than you this

Is what we’ve grown up I was a coach I was a coaches kid I grew up with this kind of stuff my life was like a a cliche a poster and everything was about if I’m going to be a good basketball player well Pete marovich and Larry Bird

Those guys played eight hours a day so I played three hours in the morning three hours in the afternoon and then played games at night and my knees hurt all the time and I never learned to jump the way I should have because I was always tired and

Broken uh Les bellman’s a very good friend of mine and um a business partner and uh he Les is is is such a guy now he in the 2022 NFL draft of the 19 top picks he trained eight of the N of the top 19 picks in the 22 NFL draft this

Guy is a genius and he says if you make a profit every day you’ll never go broke let feed the cats that’s that’s where we want to be in practice um the t-shirt on the right no pain no gain uh is everybody loves the you know that’s another thing it’s

Something about male you know men men love the this pain and you know skulls and things like that uh but Charlie Francis one of the best Sprint coaches ever live said athletes should never be sore from training that’s a crazy statement isn’t it um now I think that

Charlie was hyperbolic like I am Char Charlie really didn’t say I I don’t think he meant that they’re never going to be sore I don’t think athletes should ever be intentionally sore from training it’s like that you know that basically he is refuting the no pain no gain mentality of

Sports coaches everywhere you don’t want to wear a shirt like this like where can I find this shirt this is the uh Navy Seals motto embrace the suck and you know coaches don’t want to buy my shirt uh my my shirt is just different and and you

Know you can call me soft but uh but I think the performance is not soft I don’t think winning is soft so if if if I can teach you how to win more games and have athletes that love their sport by the way you know you know who are

Really tough are people that love something people that love something will fight for it um you know you don’t want to you don’t want to mess with a mom when when she’s protecting her kids that Mom’s tough as nails so so it’s a different type of toughness that I’m preaching

Here now the word grind as a verb means to reduce something to small particles or powder by crushing it so any coaches that say embrace the grind and wake up and grind do they really want to crush their athletes into smaller pieces it’s just a it’s it’s just not a good word

And then if you look up grind the noun dull hard work or hard dull work uh so I don’t think that’s the way practice should be be if you want to be good and have kids want to be on your team if you want to attract athletes and then make

Athletes love the craft so much that they’ll really give you everything they got uh I don’t think you should be embracing hard dull work stop doing [ __ ] that makes you slow I’m sorry for the the uh the word [ __ ] but um but you know I think when you say

Things like this maybe people remember it better so stop doing [ __ ] makes you slow please now this is a really controversial thing but in feed the cats programs and we’ve just had in in the last month we’ve had five football teams high school football teams win state championships with sprint-based football

Which is also known as feed the cats football and one of the things is they don’t condition none they do not do pref fatigue which is like trying to get real tired for the first 40 minutes of practice they don’t do that instead they work on skills and they play fast at the

End of practice they don’t do gassers they they don’t do traditional conditioning at all they let the game prepare them for the game also they don’t do Tempo Tempo is when you run submax and do a lot of it you know we’re talking about things like

20 200s or something uh and and and you try to look kind of perky when you’re doing it not like you’re you’re sloppy and and jogging but we just don’t do Tempo you know all that running stuff that supposedly magically gets us to be good at our sport I just don’t agree

With one of the reason I don’t agree is because when you’re doing endurance type of training um bad mechanics becomes a habit uh I say the sprinters are bouncy there’s no bounce here I say they’re Snappy I love the word snap they’re not Snappy there’s no elastic stuff going on

With these endurance Runners there’s no big split of the thighs when you you have to go real fast you have to you know open up your legs and there’s no power You’re Just landing and putting the next foot forward but there’s lots of hard wirring and what I

Mean by hard wirring is habit building and we just don’t you know this doesn’t this doesn’t look like athletes to me one of my favorite football players or football coaches I’m sorry was how Mummy he was responsible for the Air Raid Offense um uh he he revolutionized football um with his

Offense and the way he practiced and stuff but he did he did it at a small school called Iowa Wesleyan um uh oftentimes revolutionaries are not top down they’re bottom up so he’s at the very bottom of college football and his offensive line coach um was a guy named

Mike Leech and uh of course he became famous as well and uh I love this quote he was 110 at the time coaching for Vasa State he says we don’t stretch we don’t run sprints and we don’t practice on Mondays and Fridays and when we do

Practice we never go longer than an hour and 45 minutes we don’t waste the players time now this is blasphemy to the coaching world what you only practice three days a week you don’t stretch you don’t run sprints but he’s like cut all that crap out let’s let’s focus on performance

Instead endurance will never create speed and you say well speed’s not that important no I think speed’s really important every college coach I talk to I say who do you recruit he goes good lacrosse players they’re athletic sometimes they’ll say I recruit athletes yeah athletic or athletes and if I say

Define that Define athletic or Define being an ath they always say well fast explosive and then I stop them there the first word out of their mouth is always fast well if you’re working on endurance you may feel you know proud of yourself you know running stadium stairs for 60

Minutes but you’re not going to get faster this is the typical look of great athletes doing conditioning eyes closed you know terrible mechanics all you can tell all these guys are great athletes they’re probably fast too genetically fast that’s why they’re on the team but they’re having the cat run

Out of them they are miserable and eventually what happens especially in today’s world is that athletes don’t want to be on this team they just don’t especially if if there’s a feed the cats team somewhere else that that prioritizes performance instead of misery and then you have to address the

Weight room you know there’s way too many snc people that University of Illinois snc guy first name is tank and uh he was born he no not born I’m sorry he probably was born in a weight room but he he married his wife in a weit

Room think about that for a minute he married his wife in a so it’s kind of like the weight room is his church almost and there’s too many people who see the weight room as church and so they chase Infinite Strength and Infinite Strength does not produce

Speed matter of fact guys that look like this are all slow none of them are fast so I’m not anti- strength at all I just think the strength is a small part of of being an athlete remember the out the first three things those coaches say about athletes fast

Explosive usually strong is not even the next word now you say explosive means strong yes it does it means strong um in a highspeed way so so what you need to do is stay General in the weight room and then be real extreme in your speed training and and this really you know

Blows people’s minds my dad used to say we’re going to work so hard in practice that the games are going to be easy and we all shook our head like this guy is so smart you know that’s why we practice so hard but here feed the cats way

I say the opposite it’s counterintuitive if I say allow the games to be the hardest thing we that we do allow the games to be hard what this means is we can we don’t have to work three hours a day because we have a 2our game we can

Work an hour a day and let that two-hour game be hard so what we want to do especially in the offseason but this should be in your mind all the time is the building of Apex ex Predators which this is just a cute way for me to say we want to build

Athletes but see we get confused because a lot of times we think we need to reverse engineer the game uh Curry runs uh 2.71 miles in a typical game for him uh he plays about 34 minutes a game uh the average speed is not even Under 12

Minutes mile Pace um some people might think that he needs to be going on three mile runs that would be reverse engineering the game let’s prepare him for what he has no let the game be hard he needs to train speed explosive he needs to especially as he ages he needs

To become a better and better athlete if you don’t do that he’s going to decline as an older basketball player slows down can jump anymore they’re no good so just get rid of this idea that we need to prepare him for the endurance of a game you know you need to improve

Athleticism another example of this probably one of the best is that I’ve been told by soccer coaches that um hey we you know we have to run over nine miles in a game blah blah blah well reverse engineer that that means you need to be doing like 9 miles of Sprint

Or a 9em run every day every other day some no no no if you look at this picture is this girl does this girl look like a marathon runner Heavens no she wouldn’t be any good in the marathon you don’t want her to be good in the

Marathon no matter how much a soccer coach will tell you that endurance is a key to their sport if you ask them describe your best player describe the player that wins games for you they will always say fast explosive always but then they go out and run them like

They’re a cross country Runner or something don’t run the cat out of your athletes so we want to let lacrosse train lacrosse but away from lacrosse we’re going to train athleticism now when I say train athleticism I think this clip is is pretty important uh my good friend Brian

Kula has trained Christian mcaffrey since he was like 12 uh Christian ran track for him uh he still trains with Brian in the uh in the summer and he does no endurance training at all none zero zip it’s all fast explosive oh and by the way when he has to do a stupid

Conditioning test which I hate um with an NFL team like he had to do with the Carolina Panthers he still wins it because you can still will become aerobically fit without doing aerobically focused work we call it stacking anerobic work if you want to see what stacking anerobic work looks

Like watch this clip but remember this clip is not showing one very important thing it’s not showing rest intervals to do the things that Christian’s going to do in this clip you must recover between your work this is not endurance work remember you’re not seeing the recovery

Times but I guarantee you you don’t do that and then wait two seconds later and do that again it it takes sometimes a couple minutes up to even five minutes if you run a 40 yard Dash it takes you 5 minutes to fully recover we should want all of our

Training in the cross to look just like the things that you see here strong explosive fast eliminate the [ __ ] that makes you slow and focus on the things that win so when I’m talking about apex predators I break it down into Sprint fast of course that’s number one number two is

Lift heavy you saw that with mcaffrey next it’s actually two things but I call it jump high and jump far I think there are two different things and then bounce if you look through the mcaffrey things that we just saw you could categorize each and every one as one or

More of these four things by the way notice that there’s no number five that says um endurance or you know bench press you know I mean you know we do say lift heavy uh but but these are the the traits that win games as an athlete so this what runs fast looks

Like this is my guy [Applause] that guy uh uh was the fastest high school kid in the history of the state of Illinois at the age of 14 when he was a freshman for me he ran 10.40 in the 100 which is the world alltime world record for a

14-year-old um he ran 9.99 at the University of Texas uh last year so so he’s you know he’s an amazing Sprinter but that’s what fast looks like now lift heav is really important um but remember that or maybe I’m telling you something here there’s not a single lift in the

Weight room that directly creates faster Runners and no matter what lift you point at you know I could say well yeah fast guys are usually pretty good at that lift but I’ve seen a lot of slow guys that are good too so there’s nothing thing that I can like pick fast

Guys out by seeing them do things in the weight room jump high these are five of my guys jumping high and by the way you know I said that there’s nothing in the weight room that directly uh indicates speed this does guys that can jump like this are all

Going to be all state track athletes they’re all going to be super fast so if this is how fast guys do things man shouldn’t we be taking our slow guys or our generic guys and have them do things like this jump far totally different thing we’re trying to

Jump over this this uh 9 foot white line here 9 foot’s a pretty good standing long jump and by the way the guys that jump the highest for me or jump the farthest either one are usually my fastest athletes and then bounce bounce you know

You say well this looks like a jump but it’s really a bounce and and I think bounce is very underrated what it is is reactive force and guys that bounce well really change directions well I know that’s really important in the cross but you know I don’t care what

The sport is um if I had golfers I would train them with the same athletic stuff that you’re seeing here now the atomic speed workout something I created Adams are the smallest parts of matter but the Adam has incredible energy locked inside of it so what I did actually for lacrosse athletes through

Jamie Monroe’s organization jm3 shout out to Jamie very good friend of mine um uh a lot of those kids were so busy they went to private schools tons of homework you know they had practice every day and they just couldn’t find time to do like

An hour workout so what I did is I came up with a 15-minute workout I call it the atomic speed workout and I think this is the smallest possible workout that you could do two times a week and get faster hey this is LEL Pon today we are

Going to do the 15minute atomic speed workout in this workout we’re going to do 10 speed drills that will take us about 10 minutes and then we’re going to do two sprints in all it’s only going to take us 15 minutes and LEL is only going to

Do 60 seconds of work but the work that he’s going to do is very high quality high intensity and super fast this is the shortest smallest workout that that I’ve come up with that will actually have a positive impact on speed so what we’re doing here we’re doing 10

Speed drills in 10 minutes that was a fast March that’s an a skip very Snappy obviously your kids won’t look like this because they haven’t done this for three or four years yet that’s the third thing now we’re going to a bouncy thing here’s the fifth drill these are speed bounds

Another bouncy thing Pogo jumps that’s the sixth now we’ve done six in six minutes these are straight-legged short Prime times Everything’s in front of us super fast now we go big Prime Times everything in front of us legs straight now we go bent kneed Prime still

Everything in front but we Bend our knee the last thing we do is we accelerate and work on that and we try to get to top speed because now we’re ready to Sprint here’s our first timed Sprint and we’re doing a 10 yard fly then we have to go five minutes

Recovery now is our second fly he runs a 0.89 which is an amazing amazing 23 miles an hour all in all he did if you counted every second of that video obviously we cut out the rest times but he did 69.4 seconds of work period That’s all

The work he did he did that in a 15minute period so it is it is a lot of bang for the buck just like an atom is small but has a lot of power locked inside so I never really meant I meant this to be just a way to get busy

Lacrosse kids out the door twice a week and get faster or not get slower um but what’s happened is that there’s hundreds of football teams probably 100 in Texas alone that have replaced their warm-up twice a week with my Atomic speed workout they are literally timing Sprints during the week

Of course TCU made it to the NCAA football championship game last year um and they blew people’s minds by saying that they were speed training three times a week in season and it’s interesting ing not only were they doing that to be fast they were doing that to remain

Healthy teams that speed train during the season report back that they’ve had no soft tissue injuries all year I don’t know why except for I guess it accustoms your uh tissues to highspeed Performance game speed type of play but teams just don’t get hurt because they’re getting this low dose of

Speed so in review it’s a 15-minute workout 10 speed drills two sprints 60 seconds of work you do this two or three times a week remember that speed grows like a tree uh the the tree in my front yard I don’t know if it grew or not last summer

But if I would measured it in the spring and measured it in the fall I would have found out it grew I’m pretty sure same same thing with speed it grows like a tree you can’t really see changes so we have to measure speed and we do with a a

Free laap Timing System uh I I can’t imagine coaching any sport without sprinting I can’t imagine coaching any sport without a free lap now what do we do on the days if we want to get fast what do we do on the days where we’re not sprinting so we’re

Going to work on those things that are really important bounce snap power the big split of our thighs and also creating habits so by Snappy this is a Snappy lunge we call it a Snappy lunge we want that like if you think that’s easy to bring that foot through that that

Quickly with that much elasticity like a tight rubber band try that sometime you will not look like this guy because this guy can run 10.71 in the 100 now some things will actually do a lot of different important things like a big split snap bounce and I would even

Add in power for these air lunges bouncy big split Snappy these are the types of exercises we do on xfactor days with a lot of recovery this looks a lot like the mcaffrey stuff we do leg swings now everybody kind of does this as a warmup we don’t warm up with it we

Perform we’re going as high as we can in the front high as we can in the back we’re get hit in a little dirt or a little ground on every swing and we do this until we get tired and then we quit which is usually about six seconds everything is at performance

Level and every there’s if you watch our xfactor workouts it’s mostly stand around because you got to stand around a lot to perform at performance levels but you win games by doing things at performance level you don’t win games by going at 50% uh we do wickets right now they’re

Laying down um you don’t see the whole run in but we Sprint in about 20 yards 25 yards maybe sometimes we put the wickets up 6 inch uh but if you lay them down on the ground six feet apart six feet apart usually about eight of them

Um nobody ever knocks them down and guys will still go over like they’re supposed to we are hardwiring good mechanics when we do that very important and this is the same guy except for a steel frame and this is what a sprinter looks like so he’s stepping over that hurdle like

Like it’s a still a 6in hurdle it’s still a barrier in his brain and so we are getting into I call this the power position of a sprinter and Lacrosse kids really they’ve never done this in their life the cross kids have never sprinted they only run and so

It’s really important to get them to raise that ceiling of speed sometimes we time wickets those are obviously not laying down I’ll show you that again when you time things you change things we do bounces remember bounce is one of the things that we want to get

Better at just a simple way to bounce you say well gee couldn’t you like jump rope and get yes jump rope is a great thing to do on X Factor except for don’t do the ropes for uh endurance do it for bounce which means you you jump rope

Real fast you bounce you bounce uh in a in a very uh performance like way and then when you get a little tired after about 20 seconds you drop the Rope rest do it again maybe uh this is called an extreme isol lunge where we’re just holding this

Position um the front heel is up and you might be able to see the crazy magic that happens in this kid’s body you see the shake going on we call this the Jackhammer effect that’s from co- contractions uh there’s no soreness uh next day from doing isos you

Only get sore from doing Ecentric stuff the elongation of a contracted muscle and since there’s no elongation going on here it’s just a co-contraction but um there’s just a huge returns to doing extreme isol lunges uh big another big split drill just we did a Snappy lunge

Earlier for you this is a long lunge working on that big split we do power stuff love Med balls this a 14lb med ball Ro a strong strong strong kid here full extension of the body finishing with the hips get out of the way so the ball doesn’t kill you on the

Way down uh we we do uh all kinds of medball stuff and it’s just a a great change up from sprinting because we we can’t Sprint six times a week or seven times a week we have to find other things to do sometimes we get the just jump matad

Out and if you’ve ever done this kids will uh um by the way this is our fastest kid that’s why he jumps High um by the way if you get faster you’ll jump higher but the uh but this is important that when you get this mat

Out kids will kids will do it 10 times and I think if you jump as high as you can 10 times that becomes not just testing it becomes training so we say training is testing and testing is training of course if you want to push

Sleds you know X Factor is the time to do it if you want to pull something X factors is the time to do it and I’m not showing I I got like hundreds and hundreds in my head I don’t have it written down anywhere but uh but we do

Tons of things on xfactor days but we never get tired tired is the enemy not the goal well we don’t want to get sore um so most of it standing around if you want to change something measure it here we’re going do a standing broad jump um

Actually it’s a triple broad jump um jump three times see how far we can go I doubt if you’ll have anybody going 316 if if they do they should have they should be winning medals and track and field in the long jump or the triple

Jump but still we want all of our guys to get better at things like that especially the guys that are bad at it the guys that can’t do this hardly at all they need to be doing athletic things talking about athletic things saying guy and he is he’s really good but all

Of our guys do this even the guys that don’t do it well this is a standing triple jump where he goes from two foot lands on left lands on right and then we land on two feet I think the triple jump is one of the most athletic things in

The world that’s why all of our guys do the triple jump and you say well you’re a track team I don’t care if if I was coaching any sport that required movement including golf I would be doing standing triple jump with them the next is Bounce again we’re just

Going to bounce here these are called Pogo jumps I’m sorry it’s not a pogo jump this is a box jump and I couldn’t show you everything um these two courses combined are over two and half hours of information and they happen to be the two bestselling

Videos on Coach Tu now I have videos on a championship Productions as well and the one I produced in 2018 was their number one seller all sports including football lacrosse basketball everything number one seller was feed the cats um I um I no longer promote those videos I

Think they’re old um now my videos are on Coach tube and these two um set Sal records um in their first two years of being sold so if you want to get into more feed the cat stuff this is where you find it okay speed is the tide that

Lifts all boats the most extreme movement of The Human Experience is sprinting Max velocity spiked up in a straight line getting timed we are going to challenge our nervous system our CNS to fight fire faster than it’s ever fired before that’s why speed has such a global

Effect as you improve your speed your CNS becomes improved and the Brain always wins uh my friend Chris corus tells a story of of um kids with thick glasses when they’re young that don’t see well um they’re the slowest kids in the class it’s because their brain will

Not let them run fast because the brain is a protective mother well we want to remove that protective mother part of our brain and the way we do that is by really challenging it and and sprinting when we train the extreme we train the range and like I said speed training is

The most extreme thing we can possibly do I’ll show you that again th this is not Soft Stuff you see that’s the Freel laap Timing System if you’re not timing um I don’t think it’s sprinting uh I I I think people are just running fast uh to

Truly time um when you time something you change the athlete um by the way when you video you change the athlet aete uh and and if you can get to a hard surface a track uh no matter what sport you’re coaching I would encourage track spikes because we want to be as Extreme

As we can be in our speed training this is marcelus I love that sound uh once again this is Extreme people say Well when when you’re so extreme so much don’t guys get hurt and it’s the opposite because we’re extreme we’ve trained the range we don’t get hurt because we Sprint a

Lot our goal is to send lightning bolts in Nan seconds through the wires of our body that’s the CNS control muscles are dumb all they only know one thing they know contract and when they’re told when they’re they’re not told to contract anymore then they relax well we want to

Light up those muscles in a nanal second and get a full contraction and then a full relaxation and that cycle of contract relax is allow allows us to Sprint and allows us to become good in every other type of movement interesting story Brian koua train not one but two this is not the

Person he trained um this a generic picture but two girls um uh one’s uh now Montana University golfing and the other just won the 5A golfer of the Year award in high school out in Colorado anyway they trained two women golfers girls just like mcaffrey strength power speed they trained them like athletes

They didn’t train them like golfers they did not reverse engineer their sport they became 2 m an hour faster as sprinters and for those of you who don’t know if you’re one M hour faster you are a new person I mean one M hour is amazing well they got 2 miles hour

Faster and their Club speed their Club head speed improved 15 miles an hour the high school girl is now out driving her dad who is an excellent golfer so um so is speed the tide that lifts all boats I sure think so the same group Kola Sports Performance trained Highlands Highland

Ranch aquatic swim club and they did not train them as swimmers they trained them as athletes they trained them sprinting explosiveness strength jump high jump far bounce even though swimmers don’t do any of those things they do none of those things but that’s how they were trained they broke 48 Club

Records that Following season after being trained at Kula sports performance speed just not I I’ve heard a coach say one time well speed you know it’s just another bucket no it’s not you know yes I agree ail and acceleration skills sports skills strength and capacity those are all important things really important

But speed’s not another bucket because speed’s the tide that lifes all boats too many people want to go in every direction equally they don’t know how to prioritize even if they wanted to prioritize they don’t know what to prioritize I I know you know I know that

Speed’s the thing we want to prioritize if we’re coaching athletes uh a football coach once once said to my friend Chris corus Chris is probably one of the top three speed gurus in the world today uh football coach said I want you to get my player is bigger faster and stronger you know

Said every football coach ever or every lacrosse coach ever and Chris gfus said in what order that means we got to prioritize something and I think you probably know what order you should prioritize those things in uh because see speed as you get faster your agility

Will get better you will be able to stop start faster um change directions better your acceleration improves I’ve never seen somebody super fast that didn’t accelerate well uh your skills you say how would that improve our skills well the faster you be the faster you get the

Slower the game becomes for you it’s like you start to see the game in slow motion because your CNS is so fast so your skills will actually be accentuated by your improvements and speed uh ask any weight room coach what the best warmup for the the weight room is and

They’ll say a CNS warm-up in other words sprinting and then capacity is your ability to run multiple Sprints if you can run 23 miles an hour you can run 20 miles an hour all day you could run 100 Sprints at 20 miles an hour if you can

Run 23 So the faster you get your capacity to do work improves too I love Mark Ellis uh he was my contact guy at Princeton and of course Princeton fed the cats um actually they fed the Tigers they called it and uh they had great success and uh Mark is

Now at uh Northwestern University just got the job last summer and he’s spectacular he’s only 29 years old uh Mark says for us it’s speed an explosion before anything else some coaches are mainly focused on getting athletes bigger other C coaches prioritize conditioning at Princeton we want speed we don’t want the fastest

MERS we prioritize fast explosive and strong in that order obviously a feed the cat’s disciple uh just an incredible guy and uh I asked him I said now how how did that affect your conditioning at Princeton did when you sto doing conditioning and started focusing on on Sprint everything

Um did that hurt you in the fourth quarter he said coach we ran circles around people in the fourth quarter it’s almost like Fast guys are still the fastest guys late in the game buddy Morris is my hero from the NFL and Buddy’s different because he was

Not like born in a weight room instead uh buddy actually still holds his 100 meter School record from high school so he a speed-based snc guy and he says we train our skilled guys like Olympic sprinters and our big guys like Hammer throwers but everyone is exposed to Max

Velocity everyone you may think well gee offensive tackles they don’t ever Sprint why do they Sprint is because when you sprint you’re a better athlete the faster you are as an offensive tackle the faster you take a first step and a second step the faster you go backwards

The the more balance and coordination you have that’s why the slowest offensive tackles at the NFL combine might not get drafted the fastest offensive tackles 315 pounds 65 but the fastest guys go in the first round and make the most money how do you train a cat you sprint

As fast as possible as often as possible staying as fresh as possible possible we put all of our energy into prioritizing speed and we get faster because of it it doesn’t mean we neglect everything else but our priority our focus is sprinting so when I talk to Lacrosse

People I tell them I said hey I’ll give you an A+ for Speed you guys all love it you you recruit speed you nobody recruits slow look cross players you love speed A+ it’s when they get there that I have to give you bad grades your team slows

Down during the year so when you enter the tournament you’re not as fast as you were on day one that’s unacceptable you must speed train during the season and then none of your guys get faster if if you even know you probably know they get slower as they gain weight and age

And that’s unacceptable as well we should athletes should be getting faster well into their 30s but when they don’t speed train and all you rely on is your genetic speed and you gain weight and you’re overworked and you’re doing too much endurance crap and you’re doing too much

Weightlifting you’re not going to be as fast as you should be speed amplifies power uh it’s it’s not that big of a deal to be 64 238 um but you know if you’re 64 238 and slow you’re not a very good tackler but if you’re 64 238 and R 4.3 940 then

You’re the first pick in the NFL draft because speed amplifies power speed also creates Sprint capacity Sprint capacity does not improve improve speed okay let me explain this if if we can get this guy to run 23 mil hour like I said earlier you can run 20 miles an hour 50

Times but if you’re running submax speeds 20 30 40 times you’re not getting faster doing that capacity does not improve speed and that’s that’s what coaches have always done they’ve run their guys yeah we run run sprints we run like 20 Sprints and then a practice no that’s not a Sprint

That is a fatigued run that does not improve speed probably is even making them slower the biggest mistake I see over and over again is people say oh yeah we’re you know check out our speed development stuff here there’s nothing wrong with this this is from West Point nothing wrong with this at

All um but it’s not it’s not speed training you’re running up a ramp it’s hard work it might be good for you but this is not making anyone faster speed also creates endurance uh this is my guy marcelus I guarantee you the other six guys in this picture all

Worked harder than he did they all did 10 200s 8 400s in practice Marcels never did more than 3 200s in a practice ever because we focus on speed and because he was so much faster than these guys his submax speeds were better than the best they

Had it’s kind of like if you train 100 miles an hour 80 miles an hour feels comfortable but if you train this is traditional if you train at 60 M an hour 80 M an hour will wear your ass out and that’s how so many football teams basketball teams lacrosse teams

Soccer teams they all are sluggish in practice too much practice too long too fatigued there’s never enough recovery and because of that they never go at game speeds in practice and then they expect to go game speed yeah just not good I mentioned feed the Tigers at

Princeton they made the 2022 final four and um when they first started this is right after our initial consult um that I did with uh their snc staff and all their coaches they had three guys at 20 miles hour 10 weeks later they had 17 at

20 by the way 20 miles an hour barely makes my high school Sprint group barely makes it like like the 20 M hour guys on my in my Sprint group are like freshman they are all my good guys run 22 23 so they only had three guys we’re

Talking about division one athletes only three guys that could run 20 well they were a lot better team when they had 17 at 20 and some of the players improved a couple miles an hour you know 18.3 to 20.7 is pretty good I love the guy at

The bottom 22.2 miles hour he was really fast and improved to 23.2 so you know that guy could have been sprinting on on Princeton’s track team you say well explain to me what one M hour looks like okay I’ll do that right now DK metcafe is going to run one mile an hour

Faster than Buddha Baker that’s Buddha here is DK medf he is running actually 1.3 miles hour faster and that’s pretty significant so just imagine if you could improve your team by like 1 Point 3 m hour every single guy in 10 weeks oh my God you would be a different team you

Would go from oh yeah I really like athletes to actually creating athletes so what do you do when you practice uh the old school pyramid is tons of strength and conditioning lots of conditioning basically you lift and then you get tired and then a lot of toughness crap and compliance crap you

Know like you know this is how we’re going to be a good team and then a lot of long hard practice and once again it’s not made for your damn enjoyment and eventually you get to sports skills and strategy and games but man it’s just I think it’s too late it’s too late

Because I believe that winning is more important than hard work call me crazy winning is more important than hard work and I think performance is more important than effort you know coaches are big effort people because they get their team so damn tired they can’t perform all they have left is effort

That’s why coaches focus on effort so my my pyramid has a base of rest recovery and sleep and nutrition and then the next level we’re just becoming better athletes Sprint lift jump bounce now it has to be built on that rest recovery sleep nutrition because you can’t get better at sprinting lifting

Jumping and bouncing unless unless you have a healthy body and then we get to sport specific skills a lot earlier and then in practice we perform in practice we’re not trying to get them tired anymore matter of fact tired is the enemy not the goal never let today ruin

Tomorrow don’t ever burn the steak send them home Happy Gas in their tank take a day off once in a while which allows us to take a healthy team that loves a sport teach them strategy and then win games and the whole thing about toughness I’ve

Mentioned it um I get so sick of of men talking about toughness and you know those Navy Seals on the right they’re really tough guys no question you know you look up tough guys you see that picture um but you know what if you put

Those guys in high heels on on on a tight RPP way up high they they wouldn’t be very tough and I think if you took that girl that that’s walking the tight rope and put her in cold water with a with a automatic rifle um maybe she wouldn’t be

Very tough either so toughness is very task specific so we want to train athletes for their task and stop doing this artificial toughness crap you need to set up your practices with high days and low days like our high days or Sprint days and our low days our xfactor days or off

Days so a weekly plan let’s say you had a Friday game you’d have a performance practice on Monday and Wednesday that means like game speeds now not doesn’t mean real hard because you don’t want performance days to be harder than a game practice should never be harder than a game the the most

Work you should do in a single practice is maybe 50 to 60% of game demands and so you you would take a performance day and then and then a day where you’re backed off a little bit kind of like a pregame day fundamental days are like pregame where you’re

Working on skills if you’re a basketball team you’d be shooting the ball a lot on a Tuesday then you have a performance day a fundamental day so it’s kind of like you have three games in a week by the way if you had a game on Wednesday you

Would still have three games in that week one performance practice and two actual games and then I think you have to take two days off it is I mean just totally off don’t bring them in and run sprints or don’t bring them in and lift them matter of

Fact I I urge coaches to consider four-day weeks I know that’s blasphemous but uh a 4-day week just creates really healthy happy athletes uh inside of per performance practice you cannot be like doing something high and then going to something else that’s high and then you can’t perform perform perform you can’t

Perform consistently over a 90minut practice so it’s kind of like it has to have this wave like thing where you perform and you recover and you perform and you recover and what that allows us to do now the games are going to be harder than practice but at least you’re

Conditioned I hate that word you’re conditioned to go at game speeds Eric corm uh Dr Eric corm very good friend of mine says I think every coach should be uncomfortable with how little they do in the first week I I think the only thing I would argue with

I think you should be uncomfortable the whole season um I love the word uncomfortable because it it it’s it’s pushing the button that we have as coaches where we are only comfortable when we work our kids really hard it’s just in US I mean I have the same

Disease as you guys have um it is uncomfortable to see kids go home with gas in their tank because oh man we could have done a little bit more but I think it’s really important to never let today ruin tomorrow if we get you know a lot of

Coaches even Old School coaches give uh kids a day off after a game but their practices are harder than games and they don’t give him time off during the week so I’m just making the point here that that a day off after a game is a good

Idea I think everybody agrees with that but but if your practices are harder than games how come you’re not recover how come you don’t respect kids’ bodies then so to solve that I just say that your practice should never be more than 50 or 60% of the total volume of a

Game the Devon Will’s story is is really important this gives a great running back from msca high school uh their coach went to a feed the cats approach they stopped practicing on weekends stopped conditioning um practices 90 minutes uh their team had no injuries they won I think they won every game but

One and uh he had a big win and I think the fourth game and he gave me a call and said coach I got to tell you this story he said my guy Devin Wills he was incredible last night he gained 337 yards 337 yards on 33 carries and and

We’re 4-0 and and we’re coach he’s so good and I go was he gassed on that 33rd carry he laughed and said yes he was he said but he still gained 22 yards on his final carry and coach and this is what gives me chills coach there’s nothing we could have done

That would have made him fresh for that 33rd carry I’m like yes yes that’s it nothing would have made him fresh we let the games be hard he said coach and he gets to sleep in every Saturday till noon because we’re not coming in at 7: a.m.

Running like we used to and Coach he hasn’t done any conditioning all year we just practice cool stuff the last thing I want to talk to you about is rpr I’m just going to give you a real quick rundown reflexive performance resets a big deal um Cal

Deets um probably the greatest snc guy you know uh in the country today University of inota uh says the biggest secret in sports and Chris corus is the founder of rpr and he’s my business partner great guy and uh basically what it is it’s it’s breathing this is Julian

Love he plays in the NFL now he’s an NFL player for he was with the Giants I think he’s with the Seahawks now and uh this was when he was in high school and he went to Nazareth High School that was a big rpr school and uh and so basically

It’s a breathing thing where you belly breathe bre in through the nose out through the mouth great big breaths and then you work on your sternum and your bottom rib with your finger you just go real hard on that bottom rib through your sternum and that that gets your

Diaphragm working um even better so you’re actually able to take in more air and as this starts to happen your brain changes you go from like an adrenaline sympathetic state is what it’s called in science it’s a it’s a figh ORF flight State and it gets you parasympathetic figh ORF flight is not

Contrary to some Knuckleheads beliefs fight ORF flight is not a performance State it’s a survival State this gets you into a parasympathetic state which is a state of performance so your belly breathing no magic in that you’re working on your ribs and sternum you belly breathe better and when you belly breathe it

Looks like this notice that Julian’s chest is not moving it’s almost like there’s a big balloon in your belly and then you work on your soaz your soaz initiates um the lifting of your femur and so you go two inches over from your belly button two inches down he’s

Using a activation stick I I just we when we do it as a team we just use our thumb and use our other hand to push our thumb deep into our gut and we do big circles we do it on both sides of the belly button two inches over two inches

Down and then we hit the two glute marks you know if if if breathing breathing is pretty important so the first thing is breathing second thing is lifting your damn leg pretty important to move and then the second thing is put Force into the ground which comes from your glutes

So this is at the very base of your skull in the back and you just once again I don’t use the stick we just use our thumbs and we just rub back and forth for about 15 20 seconds and then the other spot is under the earlobe back of the jaw

Pressing towards the nose and this hurts but you just wse and get get past it you just you just go hard with your thumb for about 10 seconds and and then after each one of these you take like three more belly breaths and that alone that that’s only that’s only like Zone one

There’s hours and hours of rpr certification that you can get uh but rpr is huge um University of Michigan uh their football team does it and I saw uh in their practice indoor practice facility they had these like 80 foot tall posters of the rpr spots I mean

It’s it’s like Central to their program it’s it’s a heck of a if you haven’t heard of rpr um you’re missing out on a something that will give you a competitive advantage and if teams that you’re playing against or doing rpr you’re at a disadvantage so you know

What what I’m thinking is that maybe you should look into it it’s really good stuff I’ve been using it for about 10 years and in review um if I was going to sum things up here uh I’m always trying to come up with more essential life

Um definitions for feed the cats I say feed the cats is a way to cook it’s not a recipe it’s not a system you know people say can you give me the exact no I can’t give it’s a way to cook you know in some ways it’s it’s it’s not doing a

Lot of the things that we used to do traditionally um and then it’s a you prioritize things and then the actual implementation will be based on you and where you are but two words for uh feed the cats and that’s prioritize speed remember speed’s the tide that lifts all

Boats and then if I’m going to do like a 37w uh definition feed the cats I’d say Sprint record Rank and publish I means always write stuff down you know you know you always want to check and see how fast people are we get motivated when uh when when we see progress so

We’re big on record Rank and publish so let me start over Sprint record Rank and publish Sprint before lifting never let today ruin tomorrow accept rest and Recovery to create performance level outputs stop doing [ __ ] that makes you slow and make practice the best part of a kid’s

Day that’s it let feed the cats I always want to encourage people to read books uh my my top six books I think you should read and there’s only one that’s even remotely a coaching book the twin thieves written by uh Steve Jones a really good friend of mine you know just

Love the guy he had he won 92% of his high school football games in the state of Wisconsin once won 70 in a row five consecutive 14 and0 seasons and so he wrote this book called the twin thieves on leadership by by the way the twin thieves

Are fear of judgment and fear of failure so it’s a book about leadership so the other five books are not about coaching at all but I think that um that all six of these should be maybe not only read but maybe read twice uh you know and and then also hand

It down to your athletes um they’re just you know I I just don’t think we read enough and I don’t think we read stuff that really improve us