Daniel Back is a performance coach in Austin Texas and the founder of Jump Science (website: jump.science). You can find him on IG @jump.science

He has been working in the industry since 2012, but has long been a student of athletic performance particularly plyometrics and speed. Some of his YouTube videos on sprint mechanics and physics shattered my entire world when I first saw them and I’ve long been a fan of his approach and his counter-cultural thoughts on training

In the episode today we discuss why strength training exclusively can limit adaptation in youth athletes and how filling in other athletic gaps first can be a better place to start.

Then we dive into the overshoot phenomenon vs super compensation and how to be practical in programming for athletes given what we know about those factors. This leads to a discussion about negative adaptations and fiber types and how we need to consider these when writing training programs.

Then we shift to speed and discuss max velocity for basketball players, what metrics and outputs Daniel tracks in his sprinters and how he thinks sprinting should be at the heart of training for most athletes.

All of that and we didn’t even discuss jump training, which is Daniel’s bread and butter. Since we missed out on that make sure you check out his website jump.science and his IG of the same name and he’ll get your vert right.

Thanks again to Daniel for hopping on for what was a terrific deep dive on some very thought provoking concepts.