Shawn is the owner and founder of Movement Mastery: The Art of Optimizing Movement. He's a movement coach for a dozen NFL athletes and continually looks to push the envelop on what makes great athletes - great! To him, and I agree, this means movement - not necessarily strength, or weight room numbers, or power, or motor performance - rather great movement qualities, attuned perception and action coupling, free and creative thinkers/movers, and refined motor learning processes. In this episode we discuss everything from…
What a movement first approach means
How coaches can tweak agility training for better outcomes
What reactive agility really is
How warm-ups could be better structured for the subsequent tasks of sport
Mistakes coaches make during practices in terms of removing messiness, mistakes, and creativity
Where he found his roots in dynamic systems theory, a constraints led approach, and ecological psychology
We talk about the greatest mover of all-time - Barry Sanders
Much More
Favorite Quotes:
"My only goal with athletes is getting them better when and where it counts, which is in the arena of sport"
"Sport is a problem solving activity"
"If the perception is inaccurate or wrong - the action won't be appropriate"
"I don't refer to it as a warm-up, but a movement preparation scheme. Warming-up is general; I'm trying to prepare behaviors"
"A major mistake I see is the training environment is not truly representative that of which happens in the sporting environment"
"An offensive player and a defensive player have much different requirements in sport - so should their warm-up, training, and patterns"
"I try and learn from different fields - I've gone to watch dance instructors, martial arts instructors, teachers - it should come as no surpass that we can learn from various disciplines"
"Often we gets athletes so restricted on reproducing what we deem an ideal movement pattern, that we don't even know if it's ideal or optimal for that respective athlete. Instead we should help guide and be a facilitator rather than an instructor"
In this episode, we have a special roundtable discussion with fellow coaches to discuss the various aspects of S&C coaching in the public and private sectors. In this great podcast we have the following coaches
Steve Brown - UW-Oshkosh
Twitter - @CoachBrown19
Zach Cahill - Northern Illinois University
Twitter - @CoachZCahill
Matt Gifford - NXLevel Performance
Twitter - @GiffUsStrength
Korey Van Wyk - Northwestern College
Twitter - @KoreyVanWyk
Topics Covered
Caliber of Athlete
Freedom Allowed - Freedom of programming, freedom from sport coaches, freedom of the facility, freedom of equipment, freedom of space, freedom of time/hours
Job Stability/Security
Typical Schedule/Hours
Salary/'Compensation
Favorite Quotes
"Much of my day is running around like a chicken with my head cut off, working with athletes of every make and model"
"As a strength coach, I'm support staff, but I've found that the better my relationship with the sport coach - the more freedom and trust they give me in the weight room"
"Much of my job was educating the parents - they often just wanted to see Jimmy and Johnny sweating, but if we're doing pure speed work, the athletes might not be sweating"
"I have many friends, who I know are good, quality coaches who are out of jobs because their team didn't have the wins. The higher the level, the less job security"
"Being a good Strength coach isn't enough anymore - you have to branch out and find 1-2 other areas of speciality like speed & agility, technology, nutrition, rehab, etc"
"Definitely a benefit of most public sector positions is the benefits like health insurance, retirement, life insurance, etc. When I worked in the private sector, my salary was basically the same as it is now, but the benefits I now receive make my current job more worth while"
"A hidden part of being at my University longer and longer is I always seem to be roped into more and more committees - whether it be a hiring committee or leadership committee or coaching committee - these add to additional meetings/hidden hours"
"When I was in college, I didn't know until my senior year, that our Strength coach did summer training for free. His contract didn't include the summer and wasn't paid to be there - I'm now in that situation with maybe a small stipend"
"Do an internship in the college setting, do an internship in the private setting - every situation is different and you won't know what you'll like unless you spend valuable time in each setting"
"You better love it, you better have a why to what you're doing"
"We do such a good job in our own weight rooms of building people up, but we could do a better job building up people in our S&C community"
"How many athletes are totally healthy? In my experience, not very many, so spending time to figure how to work with injured people because it's a huge part of the job"
