E181: Michael Tucker: SPRINTember. Building speed and speed culture

This week, we welcome Coach Michael Tucker to the podcast to dive deep into functional performance. Michael has 7 years of experience working with collegiate athletes at schools across the USA, and he is currently the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for the football team at Villanova University. Mike’s experience has built him to be one of the top strength and conditioning coaches in sports applications.

Today, Dr. Shallow and Coach Tucker travel in and out of the weeds to discuss sprint training and periodization, and how the latter is used to enhance an athlete’s performance on the field. After a brief introduction of Mike’s history, the conversation explores the entry-level sprinter and the common problems among athletes fresh on the collegiate turf. Mike walks us through some of his favourite drills to develop the technique of sprinting and how he thinks critically about developing programming for each athlete’s individual position on the field. From his “High to Low CNS” model and other methods to manipulate athlete constraints and periodization, Mike shows us just how deep the science rabbit hole can go. Not to fear, he does a fantastic job of relating concepts back to sports applications. Focused on building athletes to both perform and feel their best, Mike uses sprint training as a tool to accelerate his athletes’ performance. At the end of the day, we are reminded that context is key for any application and that for any athlete to be successful, it comes down to one main concept - run fast and rest.

Check out Mike’s SPRINTember program at just-sprint.com to learn and develop the fundamentals of your sprint technique!

Mike’s Media: SPRINTember: just-sprint.com IG: @tuckermike43

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