Sam Wuest on Fascial Dynamics, Martial Arts, and Posture in Elastic Athletic Performance

Today’s show is with Sam Wuest. Sam is the head coach and manager of Intention Athletic Club based out of South Florida. A licensed acupuncturist and former collegiate track & field coach specializing in the jumping events, Sam owes much of his unique perspective to apprenticeships with Ukrainian Olympic Hurdle Coach Olex Ponomarenko and several master acupuncturists as well as his continued education within Daoist Gate’s martial arts and meditation programs. Sam has been a writer of some of the most popular articles on Just Fly Sports, on the importance of rotation in sprinting, jumping and sport jumping movements, such as dunking a basketball. Sam is a holistic, outside the box thinker who has been able to blend several unique worlds of thought into his own process of training integrated athleticism. So much of our modern thought on sports performance comes from “Western thought”, which focuses largely on forces, muscles, and things that can be easily quantified in training. You’ll often hear things like “producing the most force in the least time” or “maximal stiffness” as common pursuits in athlete training. It’s not that these ideas aren’t important, but what we don’t consider is the other “side” of training that involves things that are harder to quantify, such as timing, fluidity, connectedness of the body and mental-emotional factors. On today’s show, Sam gets into the fine points of posture and expanding joint positions, what it means to train an athlete from a “fascial” perspective, and how his influences from the martial arts have made a major impact on how he goes about training athletes. He also closes with a bit on how to balance a training program from a philosophical perspective of “yin and yang”. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:42 - What can martial arts teach us about movement quality? 10:39 - Why we talk about fascia & What “fascia” means from a performance perspective 13:55 - Why focus on postural cues in athletes? 17:34 - The role of contractile elements in the body & The importance of timing in jumping 21:21 - Posture, the long spine, & The Alexander Technique in relation to athletic performance 31:53 - Fascial stretching & coming back from an injury 38:03 - Engaging the anterior of the body & Internal vs. External cueing 42:04 - Martial arts drills, mobility exercises, and mindfulness techniques Sam uses to expand the long spine and the tensegrity system 58:29 - The yin and yang of a training cycle: What a week of training for Sam’s athletes looks like 1:10:02 - Why you should finish your day with a parasympathetic cool-down “All these different movement styles, martial art styles… especially the ones that say they’re internal, you’ll see that they’ll use the body in a different way because they’re not trying to use them in the same way as an external martial art… because you’re using different sections of your body in a particular way and you might be mobilizing different things that I think, in strength and conditioning, we don’t often assume can or should move.” “When we talk about the fascia, it’s adjusting one area of the body to check the tissue length in the other area of the body. So when we talk about tendon strength versus maybe muscle strength, we’re talking about adjusting big muscle strength in the gym, usually if you see a body builder… their biceps are not big all the way through the upper arm.... Whereas someone who has more of a tendon or even elastic structure… you’ll often see that the muscle is almost more spread out because the tendons and the connective tissue at the joint level has also developed.” “A lot of the little postural adjustments are to adjust the tensegrity... they’re to adjust the little bits of the system so instead of just having to contract a muscle more, we could actually sometimes even lengthen, just slightly, something around a joint or spine or on the mid-section of the body and by creating that little bit of length, we add that sort of elastic, and maybe we can say fascial, strength. Sometimes we can actually get stronger not just by contracting harder but by lengthening, just naturally.” “The more lift-dominant programs seem to have more of the folks that started to stack up injuries, even if they weren’t on the spine. I don’t think it’s just the lifting, I think it’s maybe something of the mentality but also I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there aren’t that many ways that people have in their standard coaching/strength and conditioning toolbox to really open that up… Everybody knows how to compress something… but pulling it apart is a little bit more nuanced.” “That’s sometimes what I’ll do, unbeknownst to the person I’m working with, when I’m trying to work somebody back from an injury and I want them to go all out, is I’ll do something in the days before or in the warm up that’s going to take a bit of juice out of the system so they’re going to feel 100% but they’re not actually going to be running as fast as they can.” “There are ways to engage posture without just throwing more tension on the system.” “We talk a lot about internal and external cueing, but I don’t think the distinction is as clear cut as people make it out to be because there’s also imagery that will allow you to almost be thinking about your body parts and your limbs as if they are external, even though they’re on the inside of the body.” “Especially people these days, because everything is so visual, so technological, but we need people to go back into their bodies more and more and more and be able to actually feel where they are in space, feel where their limbs are in relation to each other. If we can do that through movement, that’s wonderful, but sometimes we also need to just affect the way someone’s mind is working and kind of cut off some of those outside distractions. Otherwise, we have no place to go with this stuff.” “You can be the [first lines of defense] for yourself, before you ever get into the other stuff, if you know yourself, if you can go inside a little bit. I think people are realizing that.” “The way you start and end something is the way you remember it.” Show Notes Sam Wuest postural drills inspired by the martial arts View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sam Wuest (@way_of_sam) Tommy John extreme isometric lunge hold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfEdRv7utNA&t=199s About Sam Wuest Sam Wuest, L.Ac., M.Ed., is the head coach and manager of Intention Athletic Club based out of South Florida. A licensed acupuncturist and former collegiate track & field coach specializing in the jumping events, Sam owes much of his unique perspective to apprenticeships with Ukrainian Olympic Hurdle Coach Olex Ponomarenko and several master acupuncturists as well as his continued education within Daoist Gate’s martial arts and meditation programs. Please visit wayofsam.com or IG: @way_of_sam to hear more about his training philosophy.