This week we welcome Ryan Patrick to the show to talk about training! We get into Ryan’s background, his experience being a part of the Silverback Project, concurrent training, and filling the buckets for high level athletes.
Ryan has been the owner of Peak Fitness and Sports Training in Kentucky for 10 years, serving adult gen pop clients and high level professional athletes alike. Ryan has competed in powerlifting and in recent years has enjoyed training himself like an athlete, having met James through the beta version of The Silverback Project.
We first get into Ryan’s evolution as an athlete and coach. Having started off with a bodybuilding background in highschool and dabbling with training through college and post college, Ryan discovered powerlifting in 2014. While powerlifting helped rekindle his enthusiasm for training, he missed being an athlete and found himself not identifying with the idea that you’re washed up once your highschool playing days are over. Ryan ended up hopping on the very first Silverback Project in 2018 and jumped head first into transforming himself into a hybrid athlete. The concurrent model completely reframed how Ryan thought about training and how he now structures programming for himself and clients.
This leads us into getting into how Ryan is currently programming for some of his higher level pro athletes. Taking a page from Bill Hartman’s model, he starts with looking at the two different movement strategies of compression and expansion and how he can increase their options. With these athletes in particular, they already have exceptional abilities, so making improvements is a matter of filling the buckets and giving them what they need. With a limited amount of time to work with these guys, he is simply trying to find the low hanging fruit to get them ready for camp and avoid injury from a lack of preparation. He has them lifting 3 days a week with 2 days a week of lower intensity conditioning, and even one higher intensity conditioning day on Saturdays to coincide with their specific movement and agility based drills.
We transition to discussing the concept of “kangaroos vs gorillas” and Velocity Based Training when working with different athletes and deciding which qualities they need more of. With Ryan’s objective of making these already force based athletes a little bit faster, he trains them in zones more specific towards the velocity side of the curve so that they can learn to produce that force in as little time as possible. He makes sure to keep other variables such as rest periods consistent so that he’s getting a true reading of how much output the athletes are capable of and how much volume is appropriate.
We then talk about how he cooks in movement variability into a program without spending inordinate amounts of time laying around on the floor and potentially losing buy-in. With the NFL guys he works with, Ryan is looking to drive very specific adaptations so he will often use what could be called “redundant” training to layer on intensity as he’s trying to recapture movement capacity. This way he can still continue to build fitness qualities while getting athletes to recognize the similarities behind what they’re doing and how it will translate to ultimately making them better.
James then brings up the point of using the right exercises to plug the leaky holes so that you can funnel more energy into the things that truly matter. In this instance, when looking at what would be usually considered to be accessory based exercises, both of the guys agree that you want to be far more concerned with the quality of the movement and not necessarily trying to hit big personal records. This keeps “the goal the goal” while still keeping the training very challenging.
Next, Ryan breaks down how implements sprinting into his athlete’s programming. With his young athletes in particular, he believes that there needs to be an element of competition and that you have to “let athletes be athletes”. With a limited amount of time within any given training session, there is always some kind of speed and power work included but he finds that shorter accelerations with appropriate rest but with the right context relative to the athlete provides a big bang for his buck.
Enjoy and be sure to hit that subscribe button if you learned a thing or two!
Episode Highlights
2:50 – Ryan’s Background
8:50 – Ryan’s evolution as a coach and athlete
20:48 – How Ryan structures training for his higher level athletes
33:56 – Filling the buckets and layering in movement variability
44:09 – Appropriate use of accessory exercises
48:30 – Implementation of sprinting
Links and Stuff
Ryan Patrick – @coachryanpatrick
James Cerbie – @jamescerbie
Apex Athlete Training Team
Program Shop
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