Keith Ferrara Episode 15 From the Ground Up Athletic Performance Podcast ""Purposeful assessment for sensible development"

On this episode I sit down with Keith Ferrara of Adelphi University. Keith puts a lot of great content and ideas on social media, so many of the concepts that we covered today came from his twitter. Keith starts by sharing his background and the incredible story that got him into sports science and S&C. We discuss speed development and how he would arrange a week of offseason speed work, he takes us through a 3 day split and talks about all of his considerations along the way. We discuss what a typical acceleration based day looks like and what a typical max velocity day looks like. We discuss the considerations when implementing hill sprints and sled pushes for acceleration based practices. We also talk about bounds and how to progress them for individuals that may struggle with the coordinative nature of speed bounds. We discuss Keith's Philosophies on in season training and how he utilizes French contrast and cluster sets to potentiate and prime movements. We discuss what decision trees are and Keith discusses how he utilizes them within the context of his programming. In order to effectively group players based on their needs Keith utilizes a couple of different measures to assess for needs. The first is training age(under a year=GPP) Over a year(more specialized means), Secondly, Strength level, and lastly the 10 20 M(developed by Dietz) split test to assess needs within the weight room and training. We discuss why he utilizes Olympic lifts within his program and the adaptations that can be derived from including them. We end our conversation by discussing how he takes the nervous system into account within his training system. We also discuss how he utilizes RPR to ignite his athletes and get them properly primed for the days needs. Keith is currently beginning a new training study so we discuss the focus of that and how it will help different prep coaches get a better view of the needs of differing athletic populations. Keith has a great twitter account make sure to give him a follow to keep up with his training content and the training study we discussed.