JON: So just a little bit about me, my name's Jon Heck.
I’m currently a strength and conditioning coach for the football team at the University of North Carolina and then I’m also a competitor in strongman and in powerlifting.
I played football. I played at the University of North Carolina.
I graduated in 2016 and then when I got done playing football, I had the opportunity to go to the professional level, and go to the NFL and it just wasn't for me.
I had kind of lost my passion for the sport at least from the player side of things.
I knew I wanted to be a strength coach and training was my absolute passion.
Our off-season training and conditioning was sort of my in-season.
The football itself was sort of my off-season.
It got to the end of my college career and it was coming time to start getting ready for the NFL, start getting ready for the combine and all that, I was kind of like “this really isn't my passion, this isn't what I want to do with my life, I want to be a strength coach. I want to compete in powerlifting, being strongman.”
So right when I graduated, that's what I did.
I graduated with a degree in exercise sports science, started competing in powerlifting, got an internship in strength and conditioning and then things kind of took off from there and since then I’ve done a lot of work on social media.
I’ve started a nutrition and coaching business on the side.
I work with a lot of strongmen, powerlifters, bodybuilders a lot of general population folks as well.
It's a little side gig I have alongside a full-time job with strength and conditioning but over the years as I’ve gotten bigger as I’ve gotten stronger, working with bodybuilding coaches, I’ve really kind of adopted the bodybuilding lifestyle in terms of the nutrition side of things and everything that goes into the bodybuilding style, really applied it to a strong man, to powerlifting, to take my game to the next level there.
I’ve made some amazing progress over the years just in terms of adding muscle, in terms of adding strength but last year, I suffered my first kind of major injury.
I herniated a disc and I kind of lost a lot of muscular control down the posterior musculature of my right leg.
Couldn't really fire my right cash, could barely contract my right glute and that was an issue that persisted for a while.
I rehabbed the injury, regained range of motion, and got back to training and my plan at that point was “okay I’m gonna kind of do a bodybuilding phase.”
I’m gonna try to take a lot of the load off my lower back as I get back into the training here.
So it's doing a lot of body traditional bodybuilding-type training rather than barbell squatting which had always been the foundation of my training.
I was doing things like hack squats and heels elevated, narrow stance smith machine squats, leg presses, things like that really hammering my quads and that was working for a while, I was making a ton of progress but then all of a sudden I just had absolutely crippling patellar tendonitis to the point where I had developed a severe hip and pain in my right hip.
I had been still kind of training with a little bit of compensation because my right leg was still weaker than my left from the disc injury.
So the next thing I knew, I kind of had a host of issues.
I took a break from training, from dieting altogether, and then it was kind of back to the drawing board.
So it's kind of trying to figure out “okay what is my training gonna look like moving forward? Am I done?” like is this the end of things for me?
It's been a few years since I’ve been able to compete in strongman, compete in powerlifting.
So I thought things were looking pretty bleak for me and then one of our coaches on staff at UNC, his name is Miles Brown, had really gotten into a lot of the kneesovertoes type training and he himself got into the ATG system and I’ve heard a little bit about it.
I was familiar with the kneesovertoes guy on Instagram and I had heard of ATG.
Honestly, I just assumed ATG stood for ass to grass because I’d see all the people within the ATG system performing things through a very full range of motion.
So it's like ass to grass. It took a while to learn it stood for Athletic Truth Group but anyway I saw this stuff and finally, it kind of dawned on me “hey this is probably something I should look into for myself.”
I’ve got this terrible knee health right now. I’ve got a bad hip impingement.
I can't really load my spine a ton. I’ve got weak underdeveloped quads.
I’ve always been a posterior chain dominant lifter.
I’ve always been a big deadlifter kind of a good morning squatter and those are things that probably led to the disc injury itself.
So here lately, all of my lower body training has been… I’ve been training ATG and it's made a huge difference for me, my knees have never felt better.
I’ve never felt better in general but one thing I noticed was I just feel so much more athletic.
I feel like I can move and sprint and jump and decelerate and absorb force better than I ever could and this initially for me became “okay let's find something to do to kind of rehab”, get through this so I can get back to my normally programmed training but now that I’ve been doing it for so long and I feel so good and I’ve kind of just gained these abilities that I never had, it's something that I just want to continue and continue to explore and pursue and get better at and get stronger with and more importantly… the reason I kind of wanted to get on this call with you was because it's really opened my eyes to “wow, I think this could be an incredible tool for athletes, for our football guys”.
Because as a player, we had a very kind of old school, traditional style training, you know, squat, bench press heavy and lots of running, we didn't do anything like this and with how it's made me feel and how we've begun to integrate a lot of the over toe work with our guys and just seeing the difference it's made, I think this could be kind of the missing puzzle piece for a lot of programs and could benefit so many athletes.
So I wanted to talk to you and kind of just pick your brain on kind of bridging the gap and integrating ATG within a strength and conditioning program for a football team or a basketball team.
We work with a ton of guys. We've got about a hundred guys on the team.
Obviously different position groups. We've got the linemen who are 300 plus pounds who have different abilities than our wide receivers and defensive backs, who are from 170 pounds to 210 pounds and so we've had to get a little bit creative of how can we program…
Obviously, we can't train these guys individually.
We're having to train groups of 40 at a time, all the different position groups in the room.
We've got five coaches on staff.
We're able to kind of divide the team into separate programs.
We've got a freshman program, we've got a big man program, a skill position program, and an advanced program for the older guys but like I said, I wanted to pick your brain on some ways to integrate this for football strength and conditioning where it's probably not the only thing we could do.
I don't think we could take the team and just put them through 12 weeks of zero and never touch a weight and never do some of the traditional liftings that the head football coaches are going to expect us to do and so I just kind of wanted to pick your brain on that a little bit.
KEEGAN: Yeah, man. I want to say thanks so much for reaching out and sharing your story there and the fact that you didn't give up and you kept looking for solutions and you tried some other stuff and it's just so good to hear that you're back excited about your training and how was it during that time where you kind of weren't really lifting and I know if you have that identity, it was a huge part of who you are and how you see yourself and how other people see you, what was that experience like of not training for a little bit?
JON: I mean it was probably the low point of my life.
I had never I had always been someone who I tried to work hard to train smart.
I’d always go through a thorough movement prep.
I’d always work hard to periodize my training properly and to take deloads as needed to back off when needed.
So I was always someone who prided myself in training smart and keeping myself injury free.
So when I had my first major injury, it kind of made me re-look at things I was doing and maybe question my own programming, and then just when I had to go weeks and weeks and turn into months without touching a barbell, without doing the things I love, like you said, it was kind of that loss of identity and I’m a strength and conditioning coach, this is my entire life.
It's not like it's powerlifting and competing on the side.
My entire life is in that weight room and my players look up to me as a guy who's big and strong and kind of walks the talk and so when I’m kind of shrinking a little bit and getting weaker and I can barely move, I can barely walk properly, it was embarrassing to me.
I wasn't me. I definitely suffered some depression and anxiety from it.
The training has always been my baby, that's always been the one thing that's there for me no matter what, that I can count on, it's my escape, and not only that it's something that's a big part of helping my business.
When I’m fully in training and getting stronger and doing cool things in the weight room, I’m posting it, I’m putting up tons of content and you know business is great and then all of a sudden there when I couldn't do anything, I found myself, I don't want to put myself out there on Instagram.
I don't want people to see me bear on barely able to pick something up off the floor when a few weeks ago I was deadlifting 800 pounds and I was embarrassed of it.
So I kind of went dead on social media for a while, business took a hit.
So it was a dark time in my life for sure but one thing I will say that one positive that I did take away from it was it definitely reignited my hunger for training itself and reignited my hunger for learning.
For a while there I’ve been kind of going four years straight of just pushing things very hard.
I think over the course of four years leading up to the injury, I don't think I had taken a week off, away from the barbell.
Everything was just forward, forward, push, push harder and I think that was my body telling me “hey you need a break”.
So as hard as it was, it was kind of a good mental reset and like I said, it opened my eyes to a lot of things I wasn't doing.
It opened my eyes to a lot of new things. Kind of reignited that hunger to learn more and to just expand my network, expand my knowledge and add more tools to the toolbox.
If you would ask me two years ago, and told me that the basis of my training would be a lot of bodyweight stuff, a lot of single leg work, and things like that, I would have laughed.
I’m heavy deadlifts, heavy squats, and overhead presses, that's me.
So I never thought this would be a huge part of my training but now I’m doing this, I love it, and seeing my mobility progress, seeing my just strength at end range through new ranges of motion progress, it's as rewarding to me now as a PR and deadlift were two years ago.
So that's been a lot of fun.
KEEGAN: I appreciate you being honest and vulnerable with us around that.
I think it's a thing that a lot of strength coaches go through, to experience when training isn't going that well.
It really is tough and I worked in rugby, that's sort of my background in strength and I want to jump into like applying this sort of stuff in a team environment and with kind of heavier athletes but it's something that coaches should be aware of, that if you are going through that phase, reach out and get support and there are other coaches who understand it and they've been far too many coaches that didn't make it through those kinds of phases that you went through there Jon.
I know a bunch of guys who kind of had tough times and just lost track.
So I think this conversation gains another level of significance just with what you've opened with there.
But let's jump into the weight room side because that's where the real change… that's the mechanism for the change but the results go far beyond athleticism when it comes to keeping people excited about life and positive about life.
So as far as here, like applying in the weight room, I ran a camp just a year and a half ago now with like the sort of highest profile rugby player in the world, he just signed the biggest deal ever in rugby league and we did a month-long training camp and we used the ATG system and were very much influenced by, Ben and I basically set it up and then and then I ran it there for a month and we had a bunch of other pro athletes come in and do the program et cetera.
The guys loved it. The guys ran well.
It really depends on whether there's a muscle mass goal.
I think as you say, you still definitely want to have that really heavy stuff in your program and super high force lifting, whether that's with Olympic lifting or plyometrics or whatever it is.
There has to be some stuff that's crazy high force that's gonna pull you apart but when you have ATG underpinning that, you have this new level of security about “if I do go too far with something, I know how to settle things down really quickly, I know how to get things back on track really quickly.”
The way I see it, it's laid out really well in terms of the ATG program with the standards and such, there's a lot there that you can apply directly.
There's probably one big message I’d love to get across for you Jon and anyone who listens who's got the NFL kind of rugby background.
These guys are already heavy and they're already under a lot of joint stress in their sport so you have to consider the joint implications of the movement more so than the muscle implications.
So because guys like rugby players and football players are used to being… “can I lift the weight from a to b?”.
If you apply that mentality, especially the Peterson step-up and even the Poliquin step-up, it can be really risky because the guys will get a heavy weight from a to b but the joint will be loaded more than what the muscle can handle.
There's a potential there to load the joint especially when that's loading on the ACL.
So I think that's the number one thing that I would have you consider is because these guys are heavy, it's already going to be heavy especially when we're looking to load like directly into those, I call them joint dominant movements and it's most relevant to the knee and most relevant to the ACL but I don't know if… does that kind of concept make sense?
JON: Yeah, absolutely.
KEEGAN: But when we get beyond that, I think it's setting up the culture around buy-ins for things and using these movements as a buy-in, setting up your ratios between what are they squatting versus what they can do on the Patrick step up, quantifying the Nordic and really celebrating the Nordic, especially your running backs and wide receivers and these kinds of guys, you want to see them really smashing out those Nordics and they wouldn't have been exposed to them during their high school programs.
More than likely their high school program probably didn't put an emphasis on that.
So I would leverage hard off like the cheetahs.
The cheetah's a superstar in the football world.
Those cheetah reps, make sure every player has seen him doing those cheetah reps like a hundred times and I think you could be able to get that buy-in on culture for that and I think you'll see that carry over into their dash times and speed testing which is something that they're going to care about if they're looking at going into combines and things like that.
Tell me a bit about how it's been so far.
How did the players respond to it attitude-wise? Physically?
JON: So up to this point, we've only really implemented it in our movement prep prior to starting the main lift itself and in our post-work.
So in our warm-up, we'll do front-foot elevated ATG split squats.
We've done some isometrics at the bottom position and range of the front foot elevated ATG split squat kind of just holding some time under tension at that end range.
We've started doing some tibialis work, a lower leg prep in our warm-up.
The wall tibialis raises and calf raises… that's become a big part of our warm-up but other than that it's not a whole lot of it.
We kind of just now starting to integrate a few things here and there and you kind of touched on it in what you were just saying, with these guys coming out of high school, they haven't been exposed to a lot of these things.
So in our program right now, as I kind of touched on earlier, we've got the whole team divided into a few separate programs.
When new freshmen come in, we'll typically have about 20 new incoming freshmen every year and they come from a range of backgrounds.
We'll have some guys who are coming from big prominent high school programs where they had a good strength and conditioning program.
And other guys who come from low-resource rural schools where one of the football coaches leads a few workouts in the weight room has no idea what he's doing… we have some kids who come from high schools that didn't have a lifting program at all.
So we have what we call our foundational program which is essentially teaching a lot of our basic movement patterns to these new kids and just kind of setting the standard in the weight room, teaching our cues and things like that… the back squat is a big part of our program.
So when these guys get in, we'll start them with just doing kettlebell goblet squats on a slow eccentric with a pause at the bottom on a coach's cadence and then we'll progress into eventually a front squat with a barbell.
We'll progress eventually into a barbell back squat to a box and then progress from there to a free barbell back squat.
One of my questions was, where do you see ATG being best implemented into a guy's training in terms of where they are in their career with us?
We've got the incoming freshmen who've got this foundational program.
Okay, we've got to teach them how to squat, we've got to teach them how to breathe and brace, we've got to teach them how to hinge, we've got to teach them our cues and how we train in general.
There's a discipline component.
We've got to condition the guys and then we've got kind of our base team program and then we've got the advanced program.
The advanced program being a lot of our older guys.
A lot of our guys who don't necessarily need to get stronger, who have been their fourth-year, fifth-year guys, whose training is a little more specialized.
So in some of our conversations as a staff we've looked at okay “Is the time to really implement a lot of the ATG stuff with the incoming guys to perfect their ability to move, to perfect their knee health before we start loading them or do we take these young guys, teach them how to squat, teach them how to deadlift, like we've been doing and start implementing a lot of the ATG stuff for the older guys in the advanced program who already have that foundation of strength and their training can be a lot more specialized.
Because we see so much value in it and we've got limited time with the guys, just NCAA rules.
We can only spend so much time in one given training session and up to this point the only thing we've really been able to do with it like I said, was including it in the warm-up, including it in the post-work, including it as an accessory movement but like I said, as I have trained it myself and as I’ve seen what it can do, I think it's more than just a warm-up.
I think it's more than just an accessory movement here or there but like I also said, we can't make it the program.
Do you see it having more value for a young guy versus an older guy?
Do you see what I’m getting at there?
KEEGAN: Yeah, I mean, it's the ATG system.
We kind of think about strength differently, too traditionally like in how I looked at strengths before.
I’m a huge Louis Simmons fan and Poliquin and I’ve also been through like the traditional… stuff like Mike Boyle and athletic development from that perspective.
The way we look at it with ATG is wherever you have the biggest gap is wherever you need the most work.
So for some of the guys, they may have phenomenal calf and tib strength because they haven't had injuries in those areas and they're just really good natural athletes and it's wherever the biggest gap is, is wherever the most impact is going to be made.
So the guys that have the biggest gaps and the biggest deficits are the ones who are going to benefit most from the system.
For me, you want to have an idea… if you could identify the key movements that their biggest deficits are in, even if you're running it within their warm-up or after.
I would just I would change the wording and the mind framing around that just to be that… every movement is important and if you know if someone's biggest gap is with their tibs then that's the most important movement for them.
If they've got a big squat and if other things are good and they're in balance.
I didn't look at it like that when I was getting started and for sure guys have to be big and strong, there are no two ways about that, for rugby and football but identifying where those gaps are will make a huge difference in your program and if you're able to kind of shift the weighting of the program towards those things…
I know it's difficult as far as individualization goes, you could work it on a kind of a rotation to keep the key things in there but I would really like work on that profile of “okay this guy's got super weak hip flexors, and this guy his ATG, the biggest deficit is with his tibs, another guy could be with the rotator cuff”…
If you could just identify like they're one or two movements that are lacking the most, I think that's where you're going to get a huge benefit.
Also identifying the positions and being able to get into all the positions will have a huge benefit as well.
So as you say, it doesn't have to be super draining.
The big lifts in strength training, require huge output from the brain, like from the CNS.
So you can actually get huge significant gains in performance and tissue quality just by getting guys into the position.
So being able to split squat, being able to get into like a deep sort of Jefferson position, the deep RDL position, you can make a big difference to the fluidity of their running and their injury predisposition by those things.
So it is a big change for a strength coach to shift away from being purely about how much force can be produced.
That's still massive and if you had to choose, I would probably still take the players that can produce the most force quickest, that was kind of my motto as a coach but if you can put this in as well and see the balance and the positions equally as important because you can keep your best players on the field more often.
You can have them train at 100 percent more often.
JON: With a lot of our big guys one of the biggest gaps we see is the single-leg strength.
Some of our best players they're 6’6 330 to 350 pounds and they're strong in the weight room, they're strong squatters, they're big strong men but you try to get them to do a body weight in place reverse lunge and they can barely do it without putting their hand on their thigh and that's an issue, we've seen that and none of these big guys could do a Nordic right now.
Do you see the Nordic as something worth investing in not only for our skilled guys, which we have?
Doing Nordics has been a big part of our programming for our speed-based guys, our wide receivers, and defensive backs but something we haven't really touched with our big guys.
For them, we'll do our posterior chain work.
We'll do an RDL. We'll do a back extension or something like that.
Do you see investing in developing their ability to do a Nordic is something worthwhile for those 300-plus-pound guys?
KEEGAN: Definitely, I think the knee flexion, the hamstrings as a knee flexor is a really really important role for running athletes and knee stability.
I would really for sure build that in.
Some programs will use the hamstring curl as a kind of replacement for that and the RDL, the hip dominant variations are really important, and back extension, single link back extension, bosch type, that stuff is great.
JON: We'll do a stability ball leg curl. We'll do some dominant hamstring work as well but…
KEEGAN: That's good, you've got it covered and it's in there.
The thing is how much you value it.
It's probably the best movement for top-speed development now your big guys don't necessarily need that top speed to the same extent but whenever they're operating at a lower percentage of their maximum, they're also decreasing the amount of fatigue they're going to have, the amount of injury risk they're going to have and there is a video of one of the Westside Barbell athletes doing like 10 Nordics pretty good form, huge guy, shorter limb and shorter levers than your 6’6 330 guys but I’ve seen 6’6 basketball players doing these and I was pretty surprised.
There's a guy, Justin Gray, who was training at Ben's gym when I had a month over there with him and seeing a 6’6 basketball player banging out Nordics like a boss I was like “oh wow”.
We just haven't set it as a norm, I think Jon, I think it's just… players know they need to have that bench, they need to be pressing 220 pounds for 20 reps or 30 reps or 40 reps, they know that's what's required, we haven't set that standard around the Nordic and we need to do it for the tibs and those things as well.
It's a real shift in mentality but it has to happen to get the best out of the ATG system.
It is quite a significant paradigm shift but I think if you get into it earlier than other teams, that's where you have a competitive advantage and we saw that with Ben's high school team.
He had the most players drafted out of a high school team into div one college on record out of the team that he's working with down there in Florida.
So there is some precedent for this in football and I know he's trained a bunch of top NFL players.
He hasn't been public about it but it's being done.
He's sent equipment to some of the top NFL clubs so it's happening.
The tip bars are getting sent out and the slant boards are getting sent out to NFL teams so maybe that will help for giving you confidence and for your team and staff.
Those little stories, I know can help a lot for the buy-in.
JON: No doubt and I think we're definitely… I mean guys like you, guys like Ben who have really becoming popular on social media.
I mean if it wasn't for social media, I would have never been exposed to this and I think it's definitely helping make it a little bit more mainstream but I mean just simple things like the wall tibialis raise.
I had no idea how weak my tibs were until I tried to do one set of wall tibialis raises after I saw it on Instagram.
I did 12 reps and I could barely budge my foot off the floor anymore and I’m sure that weakness in my tibs has created tons of issues that I never associated with tibialis weakness.
KEEGAN: Have you tried a tib bar yet? Have you experienced the tib bar?
JON: I’ve got a tib bar and a monkey foot on the way that I just ordered.
Will my size 16 foot have issues sitting in the tib bar?
KEEGAN: It depends on which brand you got but I’d say you'd be okay.
There's a few more American brands coming out now so the original ones are coming from Australia.
I’m not sure which one you got.
JON: I’m also on my own little personal journey to come to an unassisted Nordic, eccentric, and concentric.
Right now I’m using a mini band, I can control it down and do one concentric rep with it but I mean a couple of months ago…
KEEGAN: How tall are you?
JON: 6’7
KEEGAN: You're a tall guy. It's going to be cool man, you setting the time with that, no athlete's going to have an excuse.
I think it's a great way to get the buy-in with it and your own story is so important, you can show him kneesovertoes guy, show him NFL players that he's working with but if they can see you experiencing it and you can tell the story, that that always carries extra weight.
JON: No doubt. I won't keep it much longer.
I know you really hammered the point of identifying the weaknesses, identifying the issues to really kind of determine where we're going to go with programming so not to kind of go against that concept with this question, if you had three ATG movements to just “hey if you don't do anything else, do focus on these three type thing”, what would those be?
KEEGAN: It is a tough one, it is whatever you haven't been doing but to not jerk the question, do you guys do sled work because if you already do a bunch of sled work then there's no point putting that in your three.
JON: We do sled work within our conditioning.
When we get into the summer portion of our year when we're two months away from getting into training camp, the season's starting, with our big guys, we'll do prowler pushes, and then with our skilled guys, we'll do sled resisted sprint work but we don't really do the backward dragging with the sleds.
KEEGAN: What sort of access do you have? Do you have enough sleds in space and all that sort of thing?
JON: Yes, equipment and resources and space we have no shortage of.
KEEGAN: So to sell you a little bit on the sled, when I went to Clearwater, I was as strong or stronger than Ben on most movements, not the Nordic and not the sled but when we did the sleds, he just smoked me by so much and I was like “man there's something to this being key for athleticism” because when you look at it, it is that last part of kind of lockout strength that you're using all the time when you run and especially when you decelerate.
We're not often in that super deep position.
People criticize like “when are you ever in the bottom of a split squat and things like that?” and that's another conversation but that reverse sled drag is so golden.
The sled pushes, and the prowler pushers are amazing also for especially for the Achilles and that's probably the biggest thing for the ankle complex to get that full range into the ankle.
I love the heavy, heavy sled pushes but if you line your guys up and see who can really go backward, so make them hold the same pace as each other for say the first three reps and then the fourth rep they get to go fast and you'll see a correlation.
More than likely, I would guess the guys who run fastest and the guys who are most athletic are going to smoke the other guys even if their squat numbers aren't as good as the others.
It's the thing that correlates most and therefore your strength program should improve whatever the best predictors are.
It's almost a good predictor lift or predictor movement and I know it was the thing at an ATG.
They counted the numbers, every athlete knew, they knew when it was sled day, and they knew their times.
The sled is the new squat. Sled is the thing of if our guys are the best on the sled, we're gonna be really, really good, that would be my case for the sled and it's bulletproofing the whole way along, and when you do that before you go squat or before you go split squat and stuff, guys just feel ready to go, they don't need so many warm-up sets.
So it can be done in like two minutes if you do that accelerating journey.
So that's pretty much how we trained it at ATG and that would be my number one.
So I don't know if you want to comment on that or question that.
JON: I’m glad you said that because the sled, it's already kind of built into the culture of football.
All the guys know the sled, the prowler, the low sled whatever.
Especially for our big guys, I think that's one we get a lot of buy-ins right off the bat.
Now when you're programming the sled work, let's say we're fitting it in, we're doing it in our fieldwork with our guys, would you prefer to program them heavyweight short distances, lighter weight long distances, doing it for time, doing it versus doing it for distance, all of the above?
Are there ways that you prefer programming?
KEEGAN: Biggest preference would be for the heavy and not too many.
It is pretty tough. It doesn't cause muscle soreness, it doesn't cause muscle damage but it's stressful on the hormonal level.
You can get extreme lactic acid production, guys can get nauseous pretty quickly.
So heavy for short distances would definitely be my preference unless with the caveat being if guys need more conditioning work, if they need more fat loss work, then I like it for intervals as well.
We were doing like 40 meters on the minute.
So pretty heavy. Go on the minute for like 20 minutes.
It's a lovely session. If you make them do a couple of push-ups between the pushes and pulls, we would do the prowler down and then reverse back a lot of the time as well.
So like 50 50 but it depends on where the emphasis needs to be.
If guys are more posterior dominant or had more knee issues but it doesn't have to be a lot of time to get a significant difference.
The cool thing is Jon, when it's in your program, one of the reasons sled doesn't catch on is because it's not comparable across the world.
So you can't compare numbers like on bench press and squat but you only need to
compare your guys to your own guys.
So I would love to see you have like a timed thing that's up on the wall.
Treat it with the respect that you would treat squat bench dead or cleans in the traditional kind of system or standing press, better than bench press and I can hear that you're on to that but because you can use the same sleds on the same surfaces, I think you should be able to get some good times out of it and I know that those times were like one of the pillars of Ben's program.
That was a secret to success and I use them a lot with my rugby guys in 2013-14.
We won the equivalent of the NFL in our small-time Australian stuff but we used it a lot there as well and I’m a big fan of it.
So it is good if you can get it in before weights.
I know that logistically that can be a problem.
If you can't get it in before weights then using the slant board pulses and as you're doing with the tibs and calves that's perfect, just don't call it a warm-up anymore.
Make them accountable to the numbers and care about who's strongest on calves and tibs.
Ben was the chicks dig big tibs was his sell to these players of “you're going to get the girls off the back of this” and they will if they get NFL contracts and big div one college contracts, that helps with the girls too.
Ideally, you get it in before the strength but I know logistically that's depending on where your gym is and where your sleds are and stuff, that may not go down so easily.
So that's one, that would be the number one.
I would love to see you guys able to get into the split squat position.
Now before you vomit in your throat, it doesn't have to be that that replaces the squat or anything like that.
It's not a competition for that stuff.
The biggest thing with the split squat is, can you guys get into and out of that position without pain, with the back hip opening up?
It's not necessarily the best way to open up the hip flexor but you're going to see some guys that are just really locked in that back hip flexor and that's going to be part of your ticket to say “hey, let's get this split squat going.”
We know that when your split squat position is strong, you run faster, and your injury risk goes down so let's get this hip flexor opened up, so you can split squat like these other guys who are faster than you or who are smoother than you on this one.
Does that make sense is, the approach to the split squat?
JON: Absolutely.
KEEGAN: How have you experienced the split squat as a 6’7 giant?
JON: I was exposed by it and you just touched it, the back hip flexor mobility was my biggest limiting factor.
I’ve always had very tight hip flexors so that was something I had to hammer to be able to get into a true ATG split squat position.
I’m still working to improve it but when I first started doing them, my positioning was awful, strength was awful, down at the end range of it.
Over the course of two months, I’ve improved drastically with them and just one thing I’ve noticed now and it's not just with the split squat but all the work that's gone into my knees, I feel like I can drop into a split squat and decelerate and pop out of it pain-free and with strength and balance.
Whereas, if I were to drop into any sort of abrupt deep knee bend, I would feel like my patellas were going to explode and I mean being able to decelerate like that in awkward positions, that's huge for the sport.
That was something that really kind of opened my eyes to “wow, our guys should be doing this, this should be a big part of our guys’ training” but I’ve gotten a lot better.
I’ve gotten a lot better still nowhere near your guys’ level.
A lot of the deficiencies I’ve created over the years and being my height with legs as long as I have hasn't helped.
I’ve always been a deep squatter but a lot of the ATG stuff has exposed a lot of my deficiencies both in mobility and strength.
KEEGAN: Instead of running away from that, you've faced it and you're getting the rewards from it and you've realized like “hey I don't have to break the world record in the split squat to get some benefits from this”.
One of Ben's guys, he was working with, wanted a thousand-pound squat and he had like an 875.
I’ve seen his Instagram but I don't know the name off the top of my head but Ben might have told you about him, I’m not sure, but 875 squats, knee pain.
Got rid of the knee pain using split squats, an ATG system, and squatted a thousand pounds.
Now the ATG system didn't make him squat a thousand pounds, it just got rid of the knee pain so he could go and put full force into the lift.
You know what I mean, you can certainly look at it like an assistance to those things but I would change the language around it.
More so to be like prerequisites and foundations.
The ATG app which is going to come out is going to literally show the athlete all the numbers in the different areas and kind of color code things and I think that's going to help a lot with buy-in and it's going to be something that any coach can use with their athletes.
I think that kind of profiling system, to me, that's what's needed.
That's what I needed when I was working with a team so that it would organize this stuff and the athlete could see it like gamified in front of their eyes of just it's like a computer game like this is the zones you haven't conquered yet, fix these and light it all up in balance.
The other big benefit with a split squat is you get that back hip flexor, you get the knee stuff, and being able to close the knee joint.
Every human should be able to close the knee joint, we're all born able to do that, and we should never lose the ability to close the knee joint.
You can debate about how much load is needed for that and how heavy we should go.
I can understand the argument of maybe we shouldn't max it out.
I think we should but not everybody agrees with that.
I can get that but we should be able to do it.
We should be able to close the knee joint to prevent arthritic changes and to have the meniscus and things intact but the other big one is that front Achilles and the front ankle, so you're gonna get mobility gains in the front ankle and you can actually just put a little bit of weight on that front knee.
For guys who need to open up their ankles as well, that's an alternative to the prowler.
Make sure you have that ankle range and have your athletes buy into the range and the positions and think of themselves more like sprinters.
If you look at Usain Bolt, he had phenomenally mobile hips.
If you watch the documentary and stuff, you can see his master working on his hip mobility before every running session, nice and smooth in the hips, and then go out and run.
So yes you need the force but you can increase fluidity and efficiency by loosening up the hips.
So that the split squat, there's so much value there before you even get beyond half body weight, even quarter body weight for big guys like yourself, you can see life-changing shifts.
JON: Yeah, no doubt.
One more question for you, just off-season versus in-season programming for our guys, do you see this as something, obviously, in season our guys are taking a beating from football itself, pounding on their knees, their ankles, their elbows, all of it.
Do you see obviously within the ATG system itself… its high volume like 10 by 10 stuff, the zero, do you see this better as something we kind of do the groundwork in the offseason, we do a lot of the volume in the offseason, we kind of touch on it in season or is it the opposite?
You see “hey this is when we need it the most is in season”, this is when it should really become the primary focus.
How do you go about that?
KEEGAN: It's a great question. I definitely wouldn't be smashing them with 10 by 10 on a split squat or something like that in season.
You're spot on with throwing that out.
I think your players are going to love you for having them do these kinds of workouts where they're doing their tibs and calves and they get in there doing Jefferson curls and ATG split squats, reverse Nordics, and pullovers.
If they're doing that stuff after a game, I think they're just going to love you for letting them get their bodies just feeling amazing again and getting everything working smoothly.
I used to run a session something like that for my rugby guys one or two days after the game and they loved it.
My dosages were super small in season and I don't know what you guys are doing there Jon, you're probably more advanced in some way than what we were doing but I went for crazy low volumes on the squat bench.
I liked cleans and snatches. I got most of my guys to the point where I was happy with the way they were using those movements so we use those movements but super low volumes.
Just trying to get to that top set with kind of the minimum volume.
Now using ATG, I would need even less warm-up sets to be able to get… I think that one of the benefits that you could have in your program with ATG, is that you need a lot less volume on your big lifts to see the numbers go up and I think if you can get the numbers to go up just as much or even faster using more of the ATG movements…
In the same way… I’m not sure if you're a fan of Louis Simmons but his approach is like you bring the movements up by the assistance work and then you express with a tiny amount of volume because obviously, it's suited to powerlifting.
You can't do much volume on that stuff.
It's just physically impossible.
I think that that approach is perfect for athletes and I would still keep the big lifts in my program.
I’d probably still have them cleaning and stuff.
I really think that the impulse of those movements was really valuable.
If you look at the physics, it's not just the acceleration of the bar but it's the impulse of the bar when it's at the hip and then when it's at the shoulder.
I’m a big believer in those things for high-contact athletes.
Those movements want to tear you apart.
We had a bunch of guys with like 330 cleans and that's not common in rugby and we crushed the other teams.
They were asking our players, “what do you guys do that we don't do?” because it's different and I think you're probably going to need those movements.
Someone's going to experiment with using all ATG stuff and no heavy squats or no heavy cleans but I know Ben was still heavy squatting with these guys in the high school one.
I just think it's the underpinning Jon and then you can do whatever you want.
I think it gives coaches the freedom to, whether coaches want to run with weightlifting or whether they want to run with a more west side approach with the bands, whether they want to run with the bosch type stuff, whatever you want to run with, to me it just makes sense to have that underpinning of strength through length and balance at every joint and then go for your life after that.
I think a lot of different approaches can work.
To me, it's like year-round but probably even more so in season to be able to cut the volume on the big lifts.
JON: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, absolutely.
KEEGAN: Last movement I’d give you would be the Jefferson curl.
I don't know what your take is on that one or how you've seen it so far but my experience with the rugby guys is, it was phenomenal for their spines and for their hamstrings.
Now a lot of athletes, their hamstrings are just way too tight.
RDL can be done in different ways, it can be done for length or it can be done for load or it can be done for both.
Ben was able to get to 100-150 of body weight at like drop catch style reps so like letting the weight free fall into his hamstrings under extreme stretch and then popping back up to the top.
I don't know if I’ve seen anyone attack the RDL as aggressively as Ben.
So you could potentially use the RDL instead of Jefferson but I just see so many guys with jammed up, banged up, bothered lowered backs, and crazy tight hamstrings.
The tight hamstrings are causing more hamstring injury risk with tears and the sore back just makes him not want to be in the gym, it makes him not happy to get out of bed.
It's such a big quality-of-life enhancer, getting the hip flexors sorted, that's a huge win for the lower back, and then the Jefferson and the 45-degree back extension, huge tools for getting the back going but I’m a big fan of the Jefferson.
I like it on the slant board. It becomes very neural on the slant board and you can zerch the bar in the crooks of the elbows once you're ready to handle the weight.
I think if you give those guys those three movements, I think you'll win a lot of love and a lot of support and none of those three movements are not gonna wear the guys out too much.
The sleds are crazy safe and then I’m telling you on the split squats, you don't need to max it out and then Jefferson you definitely don't need to max it out, you just use the weight that feels good.
Tell me about your Jefferson experience and what do you think about that suggestion for the third.
JON: I like the Jefferson curl. I only recently started implementing them myself because of my disc injury.
I’ve tried to hold off on a lot of loads of spine and I’ve only recently gotten back into them.
I think it's a fantastic movement. I wasn't completely sure and I think it kind of just answered me there, but ideally, if this was a movement that was intended to be strengthened and adding load over time or if there's purely a just use enough load to be able to go through that huge range of motion and it's all about the stretch?
I was always a big deadlift guy, my instinct is “let's see how heavy I can load this. Let's see if I can do a 500-pound Jefferson curl on a slant board, wrist below foot. Is this something that you see?
This is more for me, we would not load our guys heavy on a Jefferson curl.
Do you see it as something… you said you yourself, like training the ATG split squat to the max.
Does that same sentiment applied to the Jefferson curl?
KEEGAN: Personally, yeah and personally, I love going heavy on it but you do have to really build up to it gradually.
It was Coach Sommer, a gymnastics coach.
He kind of got popularized quite a bit through Tim Ferriss.
A number of years back he said “go up, I think was like two and a half kilos a week”.
So when you're just conservative like that then you're gonna know if you ever get to a weight that's like not the weight for you.
But for big strong guys like with my rugby guys, I’d put them on a box with a 16-kilo kettlebell, 24-kilo kettlebell and I would have zero fear, zero concern and they just loved it.
They just felt good with it. They just didn't feel like old men and you don't want your athletes to feel like old men.
We didn't go beyond like 40 kilos on it but a lot of coaches that I’ve worked with have gone to body weight and a couple of guys have gone a little bit beyond body weight, some guys are doing straight leg Zercher deadlifts off the floor.
There's a kid out there, he's a CrossFitter, Josh Bond, I think his name is.
He's worked with us with Real Movement for a while before ATG for Coaches but he was doing some serious weight, I don't know what it was, like maybe one 150, 180-something kilos.
Elbows in the bar, straight leg off the floor, super… that stuff's tough, and that stuff can tear you and your back, you can damage the fascia in your back.
Anyone listening to this, I would not jump into this unprepared and treat it with respect because the fascia of the back, if you do damage it, it takes weeks and months to feel better and I can tell you that from experience, lifting with some ego and playing around with things but I think that's the role of the coach is to explore the stupidity and then you know “I’m definitely not doing that to someone who's paying me money or someone who I’m being paid to improve the performance of”.
As long as you're progressive with the load, I do think it's good for athletes to get to the point where they can handle… especially a wrestler, I would get them to body weight 100%.
NFL is probably not as wrestly as rugby. Rugby is a bit more like wrestling, like American wrestling and that kind of thing where you jostle the person to the ground rather than just smash your body into them as much as the tackling style and stuff is different.
You have to get them on the ground and they don't want to go on the ground.
In rugby league, it's more like that than rugby union.
In rugby union, they go to ground.
I worked in rugby league where it's like you wrestle them to the ground.
So probably for your guys, you wouldn't have to go that much but for you, I would love to see you do that and I think it would be great for you but from my experience, I’m not your doctor, I’m not your fairy godmother, I’m not your whatever but my guess is that as you gradually progress into that, your back will feel more and more resilient.
If you do go too fast or try to go too fast with it then you may get a warning shot from your body of “hey like slow down there big boy”.
The body tends to tell.
JON: No doubt.
I appreciate all your time.
I’ve had a lot of good takeaways from this and we just played our last game of the season this past Friday where we'll be preparing for our bowl game here over the next few weeks and then heading into our off-season.
KEEGAN: How was the season? Excuse my ignorance.
JON: It was up and down.
To be honest, it wasn't quite the season that we had hoped for.
We had a lot of big wins. We had a lot of heartbreaking losses including this one.
We just played on Friday so we've got one more opportunity to end the season on a good note.
We’ll be playing a bowl game, we are not sure exactly where, we’ll find out on Sunday.
And then we’ll head into next season.
Over the next few weeks, our strength staff, we're gonna be really meeting a ton and putting together the offseason plan and I’m glad I got to talk to you today and get some good tidbits to start incorporating this for the guys.
KEEGAN: I really, really appreciate you reaching out.
I love talking about this stuff and it's cool to speak with someone who's working in the team environment because that's all I did.
I was never really a personal trainer. I only worked with rugby teams and then started to work with coaches, sort of my business.
I love having this conversation so I appreciate the opportunity to do this and for your coaching staff, I would challenge them on some numbers there.
Get them to some standards on stuff and you'll find that it'll be easy for the team because they'll have more like the experience that you've had.
If you can set them some challenges around “hey there's gonna be some incentive here to get a Nordic. We're gonna come back. We're gonna have a competition on the Nordic. We're gonna see what we can do on the tib bar. We can see what we do on the calves. Sleds are gonna be a big thing for us in the next pre-season”.
I’m such a huge believer in the coaches.
I was just speaking two days ago with the coach of the most successful team in Australia.
The team that I worked with have kind of had a dynasty, we won three of the competitions out of the last six or seven but his team, he's been with them since 2007 and they've been the dominant team over that period and he's a big west side guy and he's super strong, he loves his deadlift and he's a coach who really practices what he preaches and he's the most successful guy in rugby in Australia, which is the most strength dominant sport in Australia.
I’m such a big fan of that as a cultural thing for coaches pushing themselves to the next level.
The coaches who I had that interned with me, worked for me, I made them lift and two of the guys are working with pro teams now.
One of them is a national-level weightlifter, and the other guy's crazy and super strong as well.
He's only like 27, 28. He's been running a program in the top competition, the equivalent of the NFL, for a number of years now, for three-four years.
So I would really challenge you to get your staff pumping with that and any coaches that are listening, that's a huge piece of advice that makes the buy-in so much easier within the program.
JON: Absolutely, I agree on all accounts.
KEEGAN: I’m embarrassed now. I’ve actually said “practice what you preach to the biggest, strongest strength coach I’ve ever spoken to but you know what I’m getting at.
It's a bit different with what we talked about in ATG.
JON: Absolutely, being able to do the stuff that we're having our guys do and I mean it's a big part of earning their respect, earning the buy-in, it's no doubt.
When our guys and every member of our staff, we all lift, we all train hard, we all train similarly to the way we program for our guys and our guys see that our guys respect that, our guys follow me on Instagram, see the big lifts, they love it, fires them up.
I 100% agree.
If you're a strength coach, train, and get strong yourself.
Your guys respond to it.
KEEGAN: But we've got to move the goalposts a little bit and I know that's a little bit painful because you work so hard for the lift and your coach works so hard for their power lifts and stuff but it won't take them too long.
They can move the goalposts on that stuff pretty quickly and then it'll have even more reward because the team wins.
Where if you're a good powerlifting team, you don't necessarily win but if you're good on this stuff, I think you'll see.
But Wade wants to say something to you there because he's one of our top coaches, he’s worked with football teams and he works with a lot of junior athletes.
He was a good player himself.
He's over there in Nebraska. He just wants to share a few words there because he's been listening in the whole time.
JON: Sure.
WADE: How are you doing there coach?
I just wanted to say, if you wanted to go a little bit deeper, I’ve programmed this into my football program as a high school coach the last few years and seen some great results.
Keegan hit the nail on the head on a lot of this stuff but if you're willing, I’d like to just go dive a little deeper with you maybe sometime we can work out a call.
Just get some more specifics about what I’ve done specifically since we're both football guys and what I’ve done and what I’ve seen that I think… you got a really good start on here today with this.
There's only so much you can cram into an hour but it's good stuff and congratulations on getting out of a meathead approach which I call it.
I know the industry man. It's a hard battle and you fight a lot of those stereotypes and those pressures to uploading guys’ backs and going down halfway and slapping guys in the face and all the stuff that goes on in the culture of a weight room but I tell you what the more I’ve distanced from the traditional mindset and I’m the same way, I can do things at age 39 that I couldn't do as a college football player because of ATG.
I’ve restored some youth and like you, out of some bad injury stuff just from overuse and the things that we do.
I think it's screwed up, to be honest with you, I think we program it largely in almost completely wrong in some manners but I know you don't have to sacrifice everything that feels so… because it's changed.
It's scary and you don't have to give up those things that kids care about but I think the biggest portion is if you include it regularly in your programming, those things they care about while you're changing the narrative, are going to grow up.
They're going to go too because you're getting into that tender strength and it makes you throw up to see how many these freak athletes are blowing ACLs out on non-contact injuries, you're not training through full range.
There's a bigot, Saquon Barkley should not tear his ACL. He's training very poorly but he's a freak.
This is what ATG comes in and does man, it fills those gaps in and then you can just go confident.
You go into it with so much more but Keegan hit nail on the head.
You've got to make it cool. You got to feed that ego. You got to feed that football ego.
The biggest guys that struggled and even on the high school level, my weight room junkies were the hardest adopters to this stuff because they just want to bench squat clean, they just want to do it all.
It's a tough sell but at the same time, I think anything new is gonna be that way but when they feel better, when they're more fresh, when they can perform, they're not always beat down.
I never felt fresh on game day once in my life.
I was so beat down.
I was chasing numbers and I was always sore and tired…
KEEGAN: We're going to do this again as a round table if Jon will jump on again at some stage but I know there's a bunch of guys that love the football side and it'd be really cool to be able to dive deeper again if you want to make some time available again in the future Jon.
JON: Absolutely, I’d love to do a roundtable sometime and Wade, I don't know if you follow me on Instagram, if you want to shoot me a dm, love to set up a call sometime but I love doing these things, and getting to talk with other like-minded coaches, learn more and debate and anytime you guys want to get on a call, whatever, I’m game.
WADE: It'll be ATG Nebraska, so when you see me.
JON: Got it.
KEEGAN: Good crew.
JON: All right thanks for your time.
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