Phi - Lacrosse - Ophy Podcast Season 6, Ep. 21 Speed Coach Tony Holler

Welcome to the Filicross-a-feet podcast where host and lacrosse expert Jamie Monroe will do what he does best, talk about lacrosse. Each episode will provide listeners with education, insights, stories and lessons about the lacrosse world. We will discuss current events, coaching, philosophies and college lacrosse recruiting. Now let's get started with your host, Jamie Monroe. How's it going everybody? Welcome back to the Filicross-a-feet podcast and I am incredibly excited to have Tony Holler joining me on the show again. Tony is a track coach out of Chicago, Illinois and has in many ways revolutionized the way people view speed training and how he has in a really intelligent, a really smart... Let me rephrase that and he has in the most practical and smart way revolutionized speed training. Tony, I'm so fired up to have you on the show, so fired up to talk speed with you. How are you doing? Yeah, it's always great talking. So Tony, give us a quick rundown on what you're up to with Feed the Cats and any new stuff you got going on. Well, the thing called sprint-based football has become a movement in this country now and basically what it is is plugging Feed the Cats principles into the coaching of football, which I kind of thought that would be the last place we would ever find these things because as you know football may be the most traditional, most religious, most patriotic, most masculine. All these traits that really make football coaches really hard to accept new ideas and things. It's very dogmatic. It's kind of a closed loop. Every staff is like an echo chamber. It's just the way football is and that's why football has not changed much in the last 50 years in the way they go about their business. But last fall, there were eight teams who won state championships last year at the high school level with sprint-based football and so it's become kind of a movement. Like I say, it's coaches feel that it is a competitive edge. None of my ideas would mean anything if it didn't win. So they found that it did win and was a better way to do things, better for kids, better for coaches. And so last weekend, we were down in Argyle, Texas, which is on that rich side of Dallas, you know, around Trophy Club and South Lake Carroll and North Lake, all those places. And we had like 100 coaches there, Texas football coaches, the most traditional in the world, and it just went great. And I think that it's going to continue to grow because it's just so good for kids and for coaches and it wins. Amazing. Okay, so talk about Feed the Cats principles for any listeners here who want to recap or don't know what it is. Yeah, and so like in a football sense, sprint-based football goes by these principles. And I think one of the cool things is that it's kind of a way to cook. It's not a recipe. We're not going in and telling a lacrosse coach or a soccer coach or a football coach that he needs to do different things in practice. You know, practice should be as specific as possible. And a lot of coaches make a mistake of making practices general, where they just kind of chase fatigue and get tired and all those things. But if you're a Feed the Cats football coach, a sprint-based football football coach or lacrosse or whatever sport, basically you're going to take a leap of faith and say we're going to stop conditioning, traditional conditioning. We're just going to stop that. We're going to stop chasing fatigue. Everything we do in practice is going to be specific to our sport. Anything that we do in practice that does not directly win us more games, we're going to stop doing, which will make practice shorter. And in, I hate to say, but in today's world, a shorter practice will probably attract more athletes to your sport. Kids have a lot of options today. They don't have to go to practice for three hours, like maybe me and you used to have to do, because it was the only show in town. So it's going to be very specific in practice. We are going to have high quality work in practice. Once again, when you reduce the amount of work and you're not chasing fatigue, your quality will automatically get better, automatically. And one of the cool things that we back up pre-season is that S&C people will not have to prepare the athletes that they have for these huge loads, because practice is going to be very specific. It's not going to be, I heard the other day that a football coach has coached the marathon. On the first day, they'd have their team run 26 miles. On the second day, they'd have them run 30. And on the third day, the team would be complaining with sore legs and limping, so we have them run 40 miles. That's kind of the way that old school football coaches and I hate to say it, but many other sports have done things where practice loads in the early season were just double and triple game loads. And that's when everybody got hurt and they blamed it on a lack of conditioning in the summer. So S&C people had to like double and triple their loads and what they stopped doing is creating better athletes. If all you care about is loads and conditioning, you are not caring about sprinting fast and lifting heavy and jumping high, jumping far and balance, I'm sorry. So we are able to create athletes in the off season instead of marathon runners, and we are able to enter the season doing less. I suggest that all coaches do 50 to 60% of a game load in practice tops and that just blows people's minds. I know we need to do like triple game loads. We got to make practice hard so games are easy. It's just a whole different way to think about things. And then the final part of this is that the base of my pyramid, the base of everything we're doing is rest, recovery and sleep. That we want fresh, excited, enthusiastic athletes that love practice. And when we get that, they come and perform in practice. Coaches go home happier. They get better at their sport because they're very specifically working on that sport. And so it all just kind of fits in. And I hate to say it, but it's a real departure from the way things used to be. It's so interesting and it's so counterintuitive. So real quick, what is Feed the Cats? Where did it come from and what are the main tenants? It came from when I was 40 years old, 25 years ago, 1999. I realized that if my track team had every great athlete in my school, on my track team, that nobody would beat us, regardless of our system of training. That every school had a great track team. They just didn't come out for track because track was a dreadful sport. In the spring and in Illinois, it's cold, windy, wet. Cold spring days in Illinois are colder than winter days, it feels like. And so it really was just a bad sport. I call it an orphan sport because parents didn't even come to meets. There would be 18 family members go to a t-ball game on a hot, hot summer night, but nobody goes to a track meet because it's just dreadful. So I had this idea that I was going to sell out and all we were going to do is sprint and jump. We were going to stop running and we are going to time short sprints and we are going to record, rank and publish the times. And it's going to gamify our practice. In other words, we're going to make it into a situation where we're kind of like keeping score. Where people get timed and they get excited and they talk trash to their buddy like, "Hey, I bet you can't beat me." So all this fun stuff starts happening. And so I thought I was selling out training-wise. But what I found by collecting those numbers are that kids got faster. My best kids got a little faster. They were still the guys that won meets for us. Those genetic freaks that could dunk a basketball, score touchdowns and football. They were still the guys that won meets. But the medium tier, I call them my generic athletes, my generic athletes improved vastly, sometimes up to two miles an hour in their speed. And that increase in speed actually made us really good at the longer sprints. Like the 400 meters became, we were just as good in the 4x4 and the 400 after we went to this reduced speed first, speed is the priority type of training. And so with the success we had, it just evolved for the last 25 years. And in the last 10 years, I've talked a lot about it, written a lot about it, been a lot of podcasts, done a lot of presentations. And so it has evolved and maybe my messaging has become better. But that's how it all got started, is that I just wanted to make a better experience for kids. My practices got shorter. I went home happier. I fell in love with being a track coach. My kids fell in love with being track athletes. Parents started coming to meets and, you know, it's like Nirvana. Amazing. And why cats? Because I saw nothing happens in a vacuum, as you know. I went to, this is a sad thought, I went to my first ever track clinic when I was 40 years old. And it happened just about the same time. Of course, I was broke and had four kids and actually in debt, not just broke, but in debt. And so it was hard for me to like travel two hours away, stay in a hotel for two nights and watch track coaches talk about track. But I finally did that. And, and I saw a guy talk and he said, you know, when guys get on a track bus, they're like three different species. They're like the throwers, the big burly guys, you know, like they're big strong, they have their own type of attitude. And then there's the, the family dogs, the distance runners, the guys that are compliant. They, you know, like you tell them to run a lap and they'll go, I'm sure I run another one coach, you know, and like, they're that type of kid. And then the cats get on the bus. And right away, I kind of thought, I know those people, I know those cats. And they're the fast twitch athletes, the guys that could dunk, the guys that could win a race, the guys that, that, that coaches that came from a background of being slow, like most coaches, most coaches were slow athletes. I don't know why that is, I have a, I think I know why. But, but because they were slow, we never liked cats because we thought that they were genetically blessed with stuff that we did not have. And the harder we worked, the slower we got and just didn't seem fair. So we didn't like those guys. Plus we thought they were lazy because they built their performance on recovery, just like cats do. So, so when I heard this, I thought to myself, I'm going to start, you know, like prioritizing cats. I'm going to start, and the word feed pops into my head, like nourish, I'm going to start feeding the cats. And the thing that has evolved is that I no longer think of cats only as the genetically blessed freaks of nature. I see a generic kid needing to develop more cat-like qualities. And that's where it's really changed. If I train dogs, I'd want them to rest more, to do less, to sprint fast, to train their CNS, to fire quickly. And we're going to get that dog into being a sprinter, more cat-like. So that's why we talk about cats. Cats are, as you say, apex predators, they sleep all day and when they have to explode, they can jump, they can run, they'll chase you down for sure. They're not soft. They're going to wear you out when they're chased, they're going to catch you. Yeah, they're not soft either. They are assassins, they are vicious, but you wouldn't know that when you see them sleep. Cats are very peaceful, and that's really the way a lot of really great athletes are. But you know what coaches do with cats is that the old school coaches run the cat right out of them. They run them to death so that they're not cat-like anymore. They have them hustling from drill to drill and, hey, there's no stand on my field and all that stuff, even though in a football game, about three hours of a football game are players standing. But yet in football practice, they got to keep running around because it's like this macho, we work hard type stuff. Training is testing, testing is training. Explain that because I think that's one of the most important tenets that almost nobody does. Everyone's got a speed guy. I'm always like, "How fast are you?" Nobody ever knows. Nobody knows. I ran middle school, high school, and college track. And the only thing we were ever timed at were like laps and slow 200s. Miles, and nobody wrote anything down. Nobody ever recorded, ranked, and published. We didn't keep score, basically. And so we wanted to show the coach we had high effort without killing ourselves. So it was a way of loafing, really, in practice because we weren't there for practice. We wanted to play in the games. So in a feed-the-cat situation, we want to measure whatever is important. Speed, for example, is very important. So we measure things like the 40-yard dash, the 55-meter dash. And then we love to measure flies, which is when we -- a fly is basically when you run a 40, but we're only going to measure the last ten yards. And that's a top speed measurement. And we convert that into miles per hour. And we give wristbands for 20, 21, 22, and 23 miles an hour on my team. And all that is gamifying our approach. But that testing can go further than that. We test how far you can jump because that's important. Now, that may be a standing long jump. It may be a triple broad jump where we start on two feet and we jump three times and we measure how far we can go. And I read one time that if you're playing on wide receiver on TV and in college someday, you better have a standing broad jump of over 30 feet. And I think that's a pretty good measurement because I only have typically two or three guys on my track team who can triple broad jump 30 feet. We sometimes do single-legged bounds and see how -- we'll do five bounds and see how far we can go. We measure it, we record, rank, and publish. We have the just jump map where we'll test vertical. And if you've ever tested a vertical jump, kids will ask to continue to do it. I think if you vertical jump 10 times, that's kind of a workout. So everything we do is now measured. We even measure our lactate workouts, things like three times 200 with four minutes rest. We measure those and we record, rank, and publish. And we have year to year data. We show a senior how slow he was as a sophomore. And by the way, when we start measuring things, we can use that data to motivate athletes. Coaches all want to think that their words motivate athletes. They talk in paragraphs. They give pregame speeches and things like that. But what really motivates athletes is if they believe, if they see that they're progressing. And so if we start timing sprints, we can use that to hook them in. Because as you know, speed grows like a tree and we must commit to a speed program to infinity. It's like the easy thing about speed is that a speed workout is like 60 seconds of work. It's not that hard. You're not doing anything more than five seconds. The hard thing about speed training is it's two times for the rest of your life. Two times a week for the rest of your life. And I mean, as soon as you quit, then you get old. Because as soon as we slow down, we start feeling old. Right. Okay, so you talked about the fly in the miles per hour. Why is miles per hour such an important metric? And do you prefer that metric, you know, for lacrosse athletes, they're not track athletes. And so, you know, they're not going to measure a million different things. But why have you in the past suggested that using the miles per hour metric when people talk about, you know, look, lacrosse is an acceleration sport anyways. And if I'm going to sprint, why don't I just measure the 40? Can you give a little insight into that? Yeah, that's a really good question. Because I think once again, like almost everything I say, you know, I could start by saying that this is counterintuitive. But well, you're right, lacrosse is an acceleration sport. Many teams will just do tens, you know, like, I don't care how fast they are at the end of the 40. I just care about the first 10 or the first 20, because it's just acceleration. But what I've found is this, is that the best metric of an athlete is how fast that athlete can go. Notice I said athlete, I didn't say lacrosse player, I didn't say football player, I didn't say volleyball player. I said athlete. When I have consulted with multiple top 10 in the nation lacrosse teams, I've consulted with really good soccer. I was in France last December, and I talked to them, their soccer stuff there. And when I say, who do you look for? They go, well, we're looking for good players who are good athletes. I said, well, what does that mean to you, athlete? The first word out of their mouth is always fast, always. Even though soccer is a jogging sport, you jog or walk 98% of the time. It's not a fast sport. And lacrosse is just, you know, like a couple of good steps here, a couple of good steps there. Sometimes, you know, like a sub-max run down the field in football, you know, like an offensive lineman. They take two steps backwards. They don't really sprint hardly ever. But what we found is this, that if you want great offensive lineman, lacrosse players, volleyball players, soccer players, you want fast athletes. You want athletic kids. Fast, explosive. And so they need to be trained that way. And probably the best example of why maximal speed, by maximal speed, I mean, spike up, get on a track, time yourself, change the fly into miles per hour. We're not talking about repeat sprints here. We're not talking about running on a soft surface against the wind or something. We're talking about your maximal speed. When you improve your maximal speed, everything else improves with it. All movement improves. This is crazy stuff. But all movement will improve. I call speed as a tide. I say that speed is the tide that lifts all boats. So the best example of this, Brian Kula in Denver took two good girl golfers. They were good. And instead of reverse engineering golf, like swinging heavy clubs or even going miles per hour of club speed and just working that way or bands of rotational strength and things like that, he did not reverse engineer the sport. What he did, he trained these girls like he trains Christian McCaffrey, which he does. And they trained by sprinting, lifting, jumping and bouncing. Those things, golfers don't sprint, but he made them better athletes. By better athletes, that's like across the board. They would have been better in volleyball because of this training. But what happened is amazing because they were not, they had not sprint trained much. They improved by two miles an hour, which is mind blowing. Usually we're, we want in 10 weeks, I think we can change people by one mile an hour, which is a different human. I mean, it's, it's really, really good. But these girls got two miles an hour faster. But the thing is their club speed improved 15 miles an hour. Wow. So now wait a minute. Could it possibly be, now I haven't tested this. Could it possibly be the lacrosse player who improved by one or two miles an hour in his sprint speed? The speed of the ball coming out of the stick might be greater. I think so. I think he's a better athlete. I think the CNS has been wired to fire quicker. And, and we know that, that you can be the strongest human in the world. That doesn't mean you throw a baseball faster or swing a golf club faster. We know that there's something else and that something else is our nervous system. And the best way to train your nervous system is to train it in the most extreme way possible, which is sprinting in a straight line as fast as you can. It's amazing. And for those people, if you want to have an idea of what one mile per hour looks like, if you can remember the DK Metcalf and Buddha Baker interception run down. That was 1.2 miles per hour when DK Metcalf chased down Buddha Baker. And that was an example. You gave me and I always show it to people. I'm like, let's imagine you as Buddha Baker and then you 10 weeks later as DK Metcalf. Because that's 1.2 miles per hour. It's a massive difference. The funny thing is almost nobody trains for speed, not in lacrosse. In track, they do. In football, they're supposed to, they could potentially have the time all summer to train. But in lacrosse, everyone is playing other sports and like playing so much and, and literally never training for speed. And it's, except for, you know, I shouldn't say that because there are definitely speed outfits that do this. But a lot of times I'll be like, so, you know, they'll be like, you know, Jamie, I'm, I'm, I'm, I got this great program. They're timing my 10s. And I was like, that's awesome. What's your time? And they're like 1.6. I'm like, hold on, let me just do that real quick. 12.7 miles per hour. Well, you could run a marathon that fast. And so now you, you are actually probably getting faster when you time your 10 pure 10 mile, you know, just, just zero to 10. And it's, you know, look, timing is good. It's going to make you faster in that 10, but it's not. If what you're saying is you can't improve your speed until you run your absolute fastest, you're not going to approach that absolute speed until you get to around 30 to 40 yards, which is the whole point of having a 30 yard run into your, to your 10 yard fly. And I want to mention, I want to mention why people don't do that. Jamie, a lot of them are afraid of hamstring injuries. They're afraid of running fast. And what they don't realize counterintuitive again, but sprinting fast is the best way to prevent hamstring injuries and soft tissue injuries that, that exactly what they're missing. And then the other thing that I want to interject real quick is that I'm convinced the best way to improve your first 10 is to improve your max speed, that really fast athletes accelerate well. Have you, have you ever timed, have you ever tested that? Not, not in terms of a scientific thing, a very anecdotal. There is, we do a thing, we do a 15 into a 10 because, because we don't want to rush acceleration. So we don't time the first 15, but we, we time the next 10. Now, as you know, 15 is not enough to get you a top speed. So I believe that when we go 15 into a 10, we are working on, on good acceleration mechanics and seeing how, how soon we can get up to top speed. Now, I could probably go back and, and chart, let's say a kid that's a senior from his freshman year sophomore junior senior, he gets obviously faster, faster, faster, faster in his max speed. And then I could also show you his 15 into a 10 faster, faster, faster, faster. I would think, I would think the graph would look exactly the same parallel because, because as we get faster, our CNS controls all movement. So, so that acceleration is governed by the same CNS that governs our max speed and is tested. You know, max speed is like our ceiling. So we want to constantly raise the ceiling, which my mind goes right back to those 325 pound offensive tackles that don't have to sprint. But yet if they're slow, they don't get drafted. I don't care if you're big, tough, mean, they don't get drafted if they're slow. They only, they, they draft in the first round, the fastest offensive tackles. And the reason for that is because the faster you are, the faster your first step. The faster your second step. The faster your ability to run backwards, sideways or forward, because B is the tide that lifts all boats. And then the really cool thing about offensive tackles is they found that guys that are fast at the NFL combine will have careers of 10 to 16 years. Guys that are slow, big and slow, they age terribly fast. Once again, that CNS is really important for everything. It'd be really, really interesting to every now and then just time somebody's first 10. And then come back to it at the end of the season after you didn't practice it at all. And just look at it, you know, a couple months later after you've sort of improved your max speed. Because it would be a good way to kind of prove, prove out this, this point. It is so interesting. And when you say CNS, you mean central nervous system. And, and why is, why, why do you sort of describe speed development more as sort of quote electrical rather than sort of muscular? I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I've worked with, with kids for 43 years and my 43rd year of coaching track. And, and in our weight room, there's a sign that says champions are born in the weight room. And people who work in weight rooms almost have like a religious attachment to, to the room that gave them a lot of gains as an athlete. They, they improve their self worth because they got bigger and stronger and more manly and all those kinds of things. I mean, you can go work out anytime and you see people that have muscles busting out of their shirts and because it makes them feel good. So we have this weight room thing and the weight room definitely changed sports in America to the better. But the weight room is still based on bodybuilding and on powerlifting. It really hurts people's feelings when I say that, but still the grandfathers of lifting came from bodybuilding and power, powerlifting. And those things do not make better athletes. They make you look better in a mirror. So these kids that would come out that were very muscular did not seem to have any advantage over the kids that did not lift. I have found that the major lifters and the kids that didn't lift, the only difference between the two is that the kids that lifted a lot, that really had a lot of high, you know, they got really big, they got hurt more. You know, their muscles were used to long, slow contractions, not, not the nanosecond contract, nanosecond relax. If your muscles don't relax quickly when you're sprinting, you pull a muscle. So that's why muscular guys, so I think people paint me as anti weight room and I'm absolutely not every athlete benefits from lifting and getting stronger. But, but they have to sprint to because there's nothing in the weight room that's going to make you faster. And that really pisses people off. And I say, no, hear me out. There's not a single lift that fast people do well and slow people don't. Not a single lift. No, well, power cleans, I'm like, you and I both know there's slow people that can power clean like crazy. I mean, they couldn't break six in the 40, but yet they can power clean, you know, 415 or something. Yeah, so that that happens. So I see, you know, I have to come up with and I, you know, like, why is it that a thin guy that's not been in the weight room can be super fast and the weight room guy is super slow. And what I see is it's all the nervous system. This is the ability to fire quickly. And I just saw something the other day that sometimes that nervous system is, is determined sometimes before the kids even in high school. And you and I both know that 12 and 13 and 14 year olds, they don't do any sprint at all. And maybe they should. So interesting. Um, so when you're, when you're thinking about, let's switch gears and talk a little bit about mechanics. Because a lot of times people, they hire a sprint coach, you know, speed guy, and they do a ton of mechanics. And I'm sure that there are mechanics that, that are fundamentals of movement. But will mechanics make you faster? Eventually, I see mechanics is very similar to like lifting, you know, like lifting, if you're, if you're a skinny, weak kid, you know, lifting is really going to be important to you. If you have really weird mechanics like T-Rex arms and they're always in front of the body and you have a forward lean and, and you're, and you're like, your legs are really long in the back as you sprint. There are things that we can do that will make you probably immediately faster, just like that 110 pound 15 year old boy. As he starts to squat and bench and things like that, he becomes stronger and can sprint faster. But I think that where we're going with this is that too many people think that the mechanics is the key. And it's not just like lifting is not the key mechanics, not the key, the key is consistency and sprinting fast. I hate to say this because it almost like, you know, like tell people they don't need me. But if you would just go out and time yourself in a couple of sprints every day and, or three times a week and not ever worry at all about mechanics, you would get faster. Now, when people contact me, I think they're contacting me mainly for me to have a quick fix of some, you know, like, yeah, you need to rotate your hip a little bit, you know, and all that stuff is, you know, I basically, with my own team, I say we assemble the plane in flight. You would see some guys that don't run right, but they're a work in progress and they will run better next year and they'll run better the next year. And the key thing is for us to attempt to sprint faster than we've ever sprinted before because that starts raising that ceiling of the CNS. And then I think that form kind of follows function where I know Michael Boyle talked a lot about how the most impactful thing that he's ever done in his career is start timing sprints. And he basically said, we don't, we don't talk a lot about mechanics. We just time sprints and the kids are chasing faster times and they're consistent and they just get faster. So I really see it in kind of a former science teacher, but I'm kind of a folksy track coach where I think the most important thing is that we're getting low doses of sprinting and we're doing it with a fresh body and lots of enthusiasm. And what Mike said, what Michael Boyle said that, that I'd like you to speak on as it relates to, we don't really talk much about mechanics because when we watch film together of his kids doing their flight 10s. He said, look, it's, it's every one of these kids is pretty good. And they self organize when you actually run that fast. Your body self organizes and this comes right back to the podcast he did with Alex Sarama and talking about ecological dynamics and the fact that you can work on your mechanics all day long, but when you go sprint, you can't think about anything. You just got to like literally sprint and if you sprint as fast as you can, your body will self organize and start doing some things the right way. Not to say there isn't things that can be tweaked and improved, but without the full sprint, it doesn't even matter what kind of mechanics you do. Yes. And, and the other thing about mechanics is let's say I was working with a kid just yesterday who was running a good running back in football. And, and he was running, you know how running backs tend to run with a lean because they've been taught to, you know, deliver a blow, you know, like, you know, like, you know, don't run, don't run straight up. Well, so he had this lean. And he ran like 18.6 miles an hour. And if he's going to be a starting running back at the high school level, he needs to get faster. And so even though it may be a little different than the way he's taught to run in football, he needs to get upright and he needs to run with big arms, low shoulders. He needs to be big in the front with his legs short in the back, you know, just some basic things because as he gets that CNS to fire quicker, if we could get him to 21 miles an hour, even if he looks like a track sprinter now, instead of a fullback in football. him running 21 miles an hour will make will make his football better. He can still run like this in football. I mean, he can run his bend over his butt. But as he needs, we have to get him faster. And so, so those things. Now, if I said run straight up and down, is he going to do it? Probably not. I mean, it takes, you know, like small changes in mechanics can't be corrected with a cue. You can't say do this. So we spent a lot of times in our speed drills of trying to revisit review a bit to create habits of the things that good sprinters do. And it's just very repetitious, but we talk about it all the time, and we do it all the time, and you have to warm up anyway. So, so that's when we coach. That's when we warm up. That's when we do our speed drills on. We do them like an 11 on the scale of 10. We're doing them very intensely. So it's not like just to warm up. But that's where we're assembling that plane in flight is that we will gradually get better at things like running tall, running with full arms, getting big in the front, short in the back. Those little things will start to correct themselves. And then as you say, as we get faster, we get faster. I mean, we must be doing something different. Yeah. Now the CNS might be firing faster. That's great. But we might be self organizing, as Michael Boyle talks about. And, and I think that's, that's what we do. Well, all people do in every sport, they self organize, which is why in football, you may have to, you know, you may have this incredible top speed that you learn on the track, but you're not going to run exactly that way in the situation that you're in. But it still gives you more, more acceleration, more speed and more ability to do everything you're doing. I want to talk a little bit about the warm ups and these drills that you're talking about. These are kind of the mechanics, but they're sort of done. In my opinion, they're like constraints. You've got exercises with various constraints like try to run with your knees coming up as high as you can or try to jump as high as you can or bounce in this way. And what these little drills are doing are essentially teaching the mechanics through constraints that you're asking the athletes to do with various movements. And you talk about those a lot in your X factor workouts and with your warm up that it's what can translate into, you know, these, these, you know, it's like differential learning and shooting in different ways. It's like all you just put your body through these different exercises that are all great. But in the end, it comes back to you're going to have to time your sprints in order to be great. And I do believe that there are, I'm thinking about a senior just graduated from me. This kid got to the point where he was as good as anybody on our team with his drills. But for some reason his times didn't improve. So when people say that drills do not make you faster, they are, they are partly right. Now, I do think that if we did not do these drills, that I would have no time to coach because for every drill, there's like about a minute of recovery. And that's when I can talk. That's when I can show things. That's why I can pull somebody out of the crowd and say, show these guys how you do this. And I think that's one of the most important things in coaching is to, to demonstrate and allow imitation to happen. Now, as a 65 year old man, I have a hard time demonstrating, you know, like good bounds and things like that. So I have to grab somebody from my group and I'm not going to grab somebody that sucks at it. I'm going to grab somebody that's the best and, and kids will see this, this guy bounding. And I think that has an imprint. We learn by imitation all the time. If you want your, if you want your kid to be a better lacrosse player, get them around lacrosse players that are good. I mean, just being around excellence, it rubs off on you. I think we learn more from imitation than we do explanation. You know, like coaches want to talk all the time, but man, if coaches could find a way to show athletes the way it looks. Somehow there's that incredible imprint thing that goes on. So, so yeah, I think that all the things that we do, whether it's X factor for us is our exercises we do, which are basically things that, that we have a reasonable hunch, make kids faster, more explosive, more durable. And also an interesting thing is that we like to do things that fast people do well. For example, fast people can usually dunk a basketball. And so would dunking a basketball be a good exercise for athletes? I think it's the best. I wish we could lower our rims to nine feet so that so that all of our guys on our track team could have dunk practice. We'd be dunking volleyball or softballs or whatever. It's an aggressive thing. I tell the story when I went to Franklin, Tennessee to coach back in 2004. I walked through the gym and there's this kid that was about five, nine and went up and dunked the basketball with two hands. I was head going through the gym on the way to teach chemistry. And I called this kid over and he smelled like weed. And I said, I said, what sports do you play? He goes on, nothing coach. And I'm like, you're running track for me this year. He goes, he goes, really? I go, you are a buddy. And you know, the kid was, yeah, he was fast and he could jump long jump 23 feet. Dunking a basketball is is one of those things unlike things in the weight room. Dunking a basketball is a huge indicator of athleticism. So we want to do things that good athletes, fast athletes do well. Okay, so let's talk about a practical way to get faster. And if people want to look this up, you can look at the atomic workout. Feed the cats, Tony Hall or atomic workout, go to YouTube. There's tons of info on there. But how did you come up with the atomic workout and what is it? I came up with it 100% due to my work in your sport, in the sport of the cross. And, you know, I'm proud of the fact that that I've had an impact on the cross and I've never held a stick. You know, which, which, you know, sometimes we learn from people outside of our echo chamber, you know, and so. So I was doing through your organization, JM3 Sports. I was doing some consult type of work with some of your athletes and many of them go to school out East. They have huge academic loads. I mean, we're talking, they have three hours of homework every night. A lot of them had personal trainers. A lot of them played tons of lacrosse. Some of them played a second sport. Some of them played a third sport. And so when I would, when I first started working with your kids, I would say, I would give them like an optimal workout, which might take 45 minutes and say, you need to do this four times a week. And somehow I sense that they weren't going to do it. And it's just too much. So I'd read a book just prior to that stage in my life called Atomic Habits by James Clear, where we are all just an accumulation of our habits, good and bad. And there are strategies to get rid of our bad and there are strategies to create good ones. And the strategy is to start small. For example, two years ago, I said, I'm going to, before I eat every day for the rest of my life, I'm going to do 10 push ups. And I started doing that. And now it's just like brushing my teeth, except for I don't do 10 anymore. I do 30 or 40. So we start small and we grow it. So what I did was how small could I make a speed workout? And we call it the atomic speed workout because atomic habits. So we made it 15 minutes where we do 10 speed drills in 10 minutes. So it's like one per minute. So there's good recovery. And then we do two times sprints with five minutes in between. So roughly that's a, this is the beautiful hook. I haven't made a penny on this, but I wish I could have monetized it because it's everywhere now. So when I, let's pretend like you're a lacrosse athlete. I'm like, do you think you could do two 15 minute workouts per week? And people are like, yeah, easy. Especially if you're only going to do 60 seconds of work in that workout. Wow, that sounds easy. I said, well, it's not easy, but it's a different type of thing. You're going to feel better at the end than you felt before. Matter of fact, it would be a perfect warmup for a sports practice. There's a basketball team in Minnesota, a girls team that actually was doing the atomic speed workout the day of a game because it lit up their CNS. They felt tingly and enthusiastic and bouncy after the workout. So 15 minute workout, 10 speed drills, two time sprints, go home. And the hope is that we can hook them into a habit. It'd be kind of like, you know, like if we want them to develop a smoking habit, we would have them smoke one cigarette in the morning when they woke up every day. Eventually they would, they'd be two packs a day, right? So, so the atomic habit for smoking would be one cigarette, but do it every day. Well, the atomic habit for speed would be two workouts per week, 15 minutes, and, and you're getting really everything. And then you say, is that all there is? Hell no, there's not all there is. You know, we can grow it, but once we have the habit in place, they will eventually come back to me and say, I want more. And that's what we want from all of our athletes. If you want to gain that one mile per hour over the course of 10 weeks, can you get it done with two time sprints twice a week? If you are what I call blank canvas and many of the lacrosse athletes out there have never sprinted in their life. They don't know what max speed feels like. They never worn spikes. They've never been timed. So I think very probable that you could do that. Now, if I take my best freshman sprinter next year, who's already the fastest guy in his class. I don't know if I can get him one hour faster by doing the atomic speed workout twice a week. He probably needs more optimal. So, so if a kid is very untrained, like those two golfers, I was talking about two girl golfers, they improve by two miles an hour sprinting because they were golfers. They never sprinted. So, so somebody out there is probably thinking, well, what would optimal look like. And so what we do for like 12 weeks before our track season is we do a speed workout on Monday and Wednesday. And that's basically the atomic speed workout plus one more sprint. And we vary the lengths of the sprint. Sometimes we go 20 fly. Sometimes we go 40 fly. So we have different things, but no matter what, we're doing three time sprints after our 10 speed drills. And then on Tuesday and Thursday, we do like a 45 minute X factor workout where we're doing the plyometrics, hit mobility stuff, the wickets, the med balls where we're on acceleration with with bands or, you know, we don't push slides, but you could. So we're doing those kind of things the other two days. And then really important, every kid has three days off Friday, Saturday, Sunday. That's when we grow. That's when we heal. That's when we, if you don't ever rest and sleep and recover, then it's like you have a hole in your boat or something. It's just going to sink, no matter how, no, how hard you work, it's still going to sink. And so having those three days off and getting the kids to buy into the idea that that's, that's when we grow. We don't grow when we work, we grow when we rest. So there are three days of rest. So we do that just chasing speed and power for, you know, like three months before our track season starts. So for the record, if you added five minutes to the atomic workout and went from 15 minutes to 20 minutes, you could get that extra sprint in and you're getting pretty close to the optimal workout. I mean, it's actually remarkable. It's also remarkable too that, you know, when you say a lot of people are like, well, why, why doesn't everybody do this, particularly all the, all the speed outfits that are out there. And the reason is, is that they're, they're a business and it would be hard to charge somebody for a 20 minute workout where, where they're literally standing around for 19 of the 20 minutes. And so that's, that's really hard, but people need to wrap their heads around that it's not about how hard you're working and how much you're doing and all this volume and all of these things. It really comes down to, can you go out and have a good warm up and time yourself on two or three sprints a few times a week? You will get faster. And it's the only way to get faster because A, if you don't time yourself, you don't know, like you have no idea. I think I'm getting faster. You don't be people I ask, oh, I got this great speed guy and I'm getting faster. I'm like, really, how do you know? I don't know. I just, everyone tells me I look faster and I feel faster, which, you know, it's probably true. They probably are getting faster if they're actually sprinting, but gosh, why wouldn't you want to know? Yeah. And, and, and what, what, what we see Jamie over and over again is many of the people in this athlete training business own a weight room and, and they don't have the space to sprint. Yeah. So that's why they love 10s. They can run 10s, but they can't sprint. That's why they love sleds. The things that sell, this is really important. The things that sell are not kids standing around and resting. You know, that looks bad. What parents want to see are lots of props, you know, whether it's med balls, sleds, bands. I mean, you can buy a 1080 sprint for $15,000. That's a heck of a prop. But they want to see props. They want to see constant movement. They want to see their kids when they're done sweating and panting. If they don't get that, they have a hard time, you know, paying $100 for that workout. They want good bang for their buck. So if a kid trains with me, I think it's so important, you know, to, to admit that the visual is not good. The visual looks like a lot of, you know, like, God, why don't they sprint more? But that's not what makes you faster. Right. If you go to a track practice, there's a lot of standing around because you have to literally, you have to be fresh to run your fastest. So the criteria for running your absolute fastest would be a, time it. B, you have to be rested, which means you're going to need about five minutes between sprints minimum, right? C, you've got to be fishing off on that day. Like you couldn't have had a tournament over Saturday, Sunday and sprint on Monday and expect to be fast. You got to be fresh on that day from the day before the weekend before you got to, you can't lift and then sprints, right? You actually have to be fresh. Am I missing something on that? No, and I just think one of the things that, that really inspires me and motivates me is I think this message of, you know, the first level, the pyramid is rest, recovery and sleep and nutrition and hydration. And then the next level is build athletes, sprint fast, lift heavy, jump high, jump far bounce. And then the next one is like sport specific movements. That's like agility and, you know, things that a lacrosse athlete needs to learn how to do. And then the next level is team practice. So one of the things I really love is that when you tell an 18 year old kid or a 15 year old kid that you can only do this when you're fresh. You are planting a seed in that kid's head that might be a valuable lesson for the rest of his life because you and I are better when we're fresh. If we, if we could get a good night's sleep every night and wake up feeling like a million bucks and, and, and have a, you know, have a bounce to our step. We are better business people, we're better husbands, fathers, all those things. But that's not what, what traditional sports have taught kids. Like coaches and athletes work themselves into being lesser humans. They killed themselves. Coaches, you would, the family problems of a coach going home to his family after doing too much and being spent. That was almost a badge of honor. Like, well, that's, that's what I felt like I'm going to be like an NFL coach and I'm going to get in there at like 530. In the morning and I'm going to stay late and I could not coach as well when I was tired. Oh, I mean, a long time to realize that. Yeah, I think, I think it's a great lesson in performance. I even say that, like in college, you know, like college programs are some of the, you know, like most abusers of the grind, you know, like super long practices, you know, like triple game volumes in the first day. And I, I swear to God, what people do when they've been just broken in practice, they drink at night. They, they drink more and, and even if they have to wake up at six in the morning the next day and do it again, they have a hard time facing it. So, so they develop bad habits. What we want is we want kids to perform in practice. We want them to perform in the weight room. We want them to perform in speed training. So the only way we get that is by not letting today's workout ruin tomorrow's never burn the steak. We want to be 80% in shape. I know that's blasphemy 80% in shape, but 100% healthy. We, we, we do not want to feel the need to drink more at night to deal with our broken body and our brain being unhealthy. Because the amount of work we're doing and it's just a fundamental change in the way things are done. And when you put performance as the number one thing, I think you win more. Right. And it's hard work to prioritize performance. And I think that's the, you know, we, we've talked about this a couple of different times. The message is it takes a lot of effort to be consistent. It takes a lot of effort to get sleep. It takes a lot of effort to eat right. It takes a lot of effort to just actually take a day off. You know, and there's a lot of people that are such hard workers. It's very, very hard for them because they just are getting better. They want to feel like I'm working. And if I'm not working, what am I doing? And, and, you know, to be able to prioritize rest recovery and sleep and to actually take time off to grow is takes as much discipline honestly is doing it oftentimes. And, and I think I go back to it makes you a better human. You know, I, I've had, I have at least three testimonials from coach's wives that said that feed the cats, save their marriage. Wow. And I totally agree because the old school, especially football coach used to have to drive his team, push his team because his team was beaten and battered from the day before. And so he had to scream and cuss them for effort, you know, because they couldn't perform. All they could do is effort because I mean, if they were tying them, they're like five miles an hour slow that day because of what they did the day before. So if you have like three hours of being just a tyrant, I mean, you're going to go home and like yell at your wife and kick your dog or vice versa. You know, I mean, it's going to be, it's not going to be a good life for you. Whereas if you go to practice and your kids have a bounce, they're enthusiastic, practice the best part of their day. They're not burnt from the next day. They're healthy mentally and physically. And then you ask them to perform and they perform and you get better. You go home after an hour and a half or hour and 45 minutes. You're a happier person and you're going to do better. You're going to be a better dad, better husband, all those things. And I don't know if you're aware of it, but high school coaches are dropping like flies right now. I mean, it's, it's, it's a tough gig to be a high school coach these days. And I think I'm giving coaches a way to make coaching less, less awful. I mean, the games have always been fun, but, but the life of a coach does not have to be miserable. And without question, if you're tired, your athletes are tired, there's just no way you're going to come out of that practice happy. Which means you got to do less, which is again, it's so counterintuitive. Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show. I always love talking about this with you and helping to educate the lacrosse world on Feed the Cats for people that want more. Follow Tony Holler on, on Twitter and on Instagram and go to his YouTube channel. And in the show notes, we'll put some links in there for you. But Tony, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on, man. Thank you, Jamie. Always fun.