201: Alex Natera on the Origin of Run-Specific Isometrics and Their Integration in Team Sport Play vs. Training Sprinters | Sponsored by SimpliFaster

Today’s episode features Alex Natera, senior athletic performance specialist at the GWS Giants of the AFL.  Alex has over twenty years of experience in high performance sport including time spent as a professional sportsman, a technical coach, a sport science lecturer, a published scientific researcher and his primary role as strength & conditioning coach.  Prior to the Giants, Alex was the senior strength and conditioning coach at Aspire Academy. Alex’s original article on isometric training that was specific to training sprinters “broke the internet” several years ago.   In it, Alex laid out an approach to training sprinters (and speed in general) in the weightroom in a manner that was very novel to anything coaches had seen before, using isometric exercises to hone specific elements of the run cycle.   This was followed up by podcast #86 where Alex took us in the nuts and bolts of the training system for sprinters. Since our last podcast, Alex, has spent a lot of time working with, not sprinters, but team sport athletes.  As much as the specificity of Alex’s isometrics to running still ring true in the scenario of training team sport athletes, working with this population versus sprinters is really a different “beast” than sprinters, who are more or less fresh all of the time and are athletic freaks.  On today’s show, Alex gets into the fine points of how he is incorporating his system into a team sport training regime.  Other topics we will cover will be Alex’s take on hamstring training for team sport athletes vs. sprinters, as well as a fun story regarding how the run-specific isometric protocol originated in the first place. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. More show notes at just-fly-sports.com/podcast-201-alex-natera/