218: Matt Cooper on Fascial Systems, Proprioception and the Human Performance Engine | Sponsored by SimpliFaster

Today’s episode features performance coach and nutritionist, Matt Cooper. Matt has been a multi-time podcast guest and writer on Just Fly Sports, and trains athletes and individuals out of his gym in Los Angeles, California. Matt is a bright young coach who has encapsulated many of the training concepts from top coaches, nutritionists, and human performance specialists, into his own system which keeps the athlete operating in proper neurological and fascial harmony. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed observing in the work that Matt is doing is his incorporation of the work pioneered by Marv Marinovich and Jay Schroeder, into his own training design. The combination of proprioception, reaction, and neurological emphasis is something that creates explosive and adaptive athletes, with a priority on the function of the body, rather than a priority on lifting a barbell max at all costs (and when you respect the nervous system in training, you tend to get improved lifting numbers without the neurological cost that comes from hammering away at bilateral sagittal plane lifts). Recently, a few arenas of training that Matt has been working through that I found particularly intriguing, were his thoughts on training the fascial system, as well as a recent article of his defending proprioceptive training, when we define its role in the training process correctly. For today’s podcast, Matt talks about the role of the fascial system in human movement, as well as its importance in regards to training in light of exercise selection. Matt also talks about proprioceptive training, its role in light of the greater training process, and practical exercises for training both the proprioceptive and fascial systems. 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. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 6:15 What training the fascial system means to Matt 16:15 Methods to engage the fascial system appropriately in training 24:45 Reasons that barbell squatting can cause neurological irritants to high-performance athletics over time 37:35 Training movements that can improve tensegrity in the body and fascial function 46:15 How Matt programs Olympic lifting and Keiser/Supercat machines, in respect to the feet and fascial dynamics 53:15 The value of proprioceptive and dynamic balance work in training and performance “The fascia being well-wound together is not just an injury prevention concept, but the fascia being well-woven together like a basket, that actually helps store, transfer and release elastic energy effortlessly” “(In a powerlifting squat) the athlete’s fascia has to revolve around the bar path” “If the fascia is adapting around these big compound movements, and they are the centerpiece of our training, then we are sort of adapting athletes neuro-myo-fascially to be sagittal movers, and not everything else” “You can do corrective exercises in a way that get the neuro-myo-fascial segments of the body well-orchestrated” “The main emphasis of our training is one that respects natural biomechanics” “You are setting off a completely different muscle firing pattern by having someone squat off the heel; and the heaviest load is going to happen at the joint angle that is most compromised” “The engine of the car in humans is a lot more horizontal, it’s push-pull; this is the engine that really drives the car, and if you really (axially) stack the body, chances are you are not going to see that turn into more fluid movement” “If I’m doing a little too much sagittal lifting, the movement is too much about the bar and the bar path, and the athlete has to mechanically adapt around that load” “I’ve been having my guys do Olympic lifts, pretty much all off the forefoot” “The bread and butter should not be the pure sagittal linear lifts, that’s kind of my stance” “There is a case to be had that proprioceptive training is, more of a feedback mechanism than anything” “Doing proprioceptive exercises might be a way to get an athlete to feel parts of the body they might not have previously utilized” Show Notes Matt’s addendum to ideas on facial work in compound movements versus machines “In addition to the neuro-myofascial element, the athlete also has to create proprioception and engage stabilizers on some of those big compound movements that maybe would not compliment them for sport. What we should be trying to do as coaches is reinforce stabilizers, proprioception, and fascia in a way that respects the demands of the sport, whereas if you take something like a Keiser squat or a heavily loaded Super-cat squat, you’re not going to have the consequence of creating the wrong code of stabilizers, improper muscle firing patterns, not-necessarily-ideal proprioceptive maps, and unwanted neuro-myofascial connections” Supercat training for a more athletic strength stimulus and fascial adaptation View this post on Instagram A post shared by Matt COOPer (@rewireperformance) on Aug 13, 2019 at 7:21pm PDT Coiling lunges inspired by David Weck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN5LQYHbLE0 About Matt Cooper Matt Cooper (Coop) is a nutrition consultant, strength & conditioning coach, and human performance coach from California. Driven by an obsession to expand human performance, Coop spends his time researching, experimenting, doing nerdy things, and building better humans in general at Stand Out Performance (Fast Twitch LA) in Compton, California. Coop works with athletes and individuals-from developmental to professional levels-remotely and in-person to optimize their health, performance, and fitness. Coop translates research, experience, and human performance technology to design one stop shop services and programs that address relevant areas, including nutrition, health, training, sleep, mind/body integration, the nervous system, recovery, and beyond. Coop’s own personal journey began in athletics and fitness-until poor health and mental states befell him at an early age- this lead to him becoming his own practitioner and fuels his current work, marrying functional medicine and human performance to help others become superhuman. Certified Nutrition Consultant Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) NeuFit Electrotherapist Speed of Sport Affiliate; Certified Sport Performance Specialist Director: Wellness I Performance I Sport Science; Fast Twitch LA Director: Wellness I Performance I Sport Science; Black House MMA Consultant: The Third Wave Chief Scientific Officer, Ketone Score Over 1K Clients Helped (pro/developing athletes, individuals, businesses, addiction/trauma) Co-Author, The Ketogenic Diet: A Metabolic Manifesto For Dieter & Practitioner Communications; SSU Transcripts Joel Smith: Welcome to another episode terms like the fascial system and proprioception, I think have a bit of a mystique to them. Training those entities is probably not as directly measurable as doing a 12 week bicep/ tricep arm training program and measuring how much bigger your arm got, or even doing a 12 week squat program and seeing how much your squat run up, or a plyometric program and seeing how much your vertical jump went up. But nonetheless, these are components that feed into a good training program and addressing these elements will allow athletes to see improved outputs. Particularly if we're talking fascial training and proprioception, seeing it in dynamic output. Sprinting, jumping, athletic movement, explosive athletic movement. And I get asked every now and then, what's a good resource for these things. And I think the fact is that there's not a whole lot of solid, readily available material linking these concepts and entities to training. Joel Smith: And so that brings in our guests for the day, which is performance coach and nutritionist, Matt Cooper. Matt's been a multi-time guest on this podcast. He's written a lot of great articles for Just Fly Sports. And Matt is a coach who every time I talk to, I always come away learning something new. Not just something, but a lot of things. And he is one of the brightest young minds, the most inquisitive, a guy who is just really driven by learning from so many of the best and also most progressive coaching minds in the game. People like Marvin Marinovich, Jay Schroeder to name a few. Matt has a system that is truly driven on just driving neurologically optimal training means and methods to the athlete in the athletes program. So a few things that Matt had been talking about recently with me was ideas on the fascial system as well as the proprioceptive system. Joel Smith: And that was partly coming from an article that I had read that Matt wrote on Simplifaster about kind of redeeming proprioceptive training for athletes. I think we just, if it has to do with standing on a balance ball, we instantly write it off. When in reality body awareness and kinesthetic awareness and, and honing in the proper receptive system, it does offer benefits and can play a role in the training program if we just look for just distinctly what it has to offer. So that being said, Matt's going to get into the role of the fascial system and movement, how the fascial system adapts to different training methods, specifically axely loaded lifts versus more dynamic movements, how to mix that all together in training. And then he's going to get into the role of the proprioceptive system and training how to train it and how to address that is part of the bigger picture. Joel Smith: So this was an awesome talk. Matt is such a bright guy and always enjoyed having chats with him on training.