308: Will Ratelle on Explosive Training Specificity, Olympic Lift Debates, and Avoiding Redundant Exercises

Today’s episode features Will Ratelle. Will is a strength coach, at the University of North Dakota, working with football, basketball, volleyball and tennis athletes. He is also the owner of “W2 Performance”. Prior to working in the performance field, he spent time as a professional football player, spending time with the Atlanta Falcons, Kansas City Chiefs, and Saskatchewan Roughriders (CFL). In the supportive role of physical preparation/S&C, it is very easy to partition the process of weightlifting away from the actual needs and demand of explosive, chaotic sports. It’s also easy to get carried away with excessive auxiliary work, or “atomizing” facets of power work/RFD that don’t end up transferring to actual explosive sport skills. In this sense, it’s helpful to personally spend time in sport, in skill acquisition, and in strength development one’s self, to intuitively understand the balance, and synergy, between athletic components. Will’s athletic background, love for sport and play, and raw “horsepower” is a unique combination. He was a semi-pro athlete, can clean and jerk 198kg, dunks a basketball with ease, and also loves to play a variety of games and sports. Will has an analytical process to his performance programming, and asks important questions that have use really dig into the why of what we are doing in the gym (and beyond). On the show today, Will talks about his athletic, game-play and strength background, and how despite being more than physically capable, did not make the pro level of football. Will then goes into ideas on what we should actually be looking to improve/intensity in the gym setting. He chats on how to avoid training things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of everything an athlete is asked to do. Will finishes with his thoughts on the specificity of potentiation, jump and sprint variability training, and then a great take on the “Olympic lifts vs. loaded jumps” debate. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 3:40 – How many “Bang” energy drinks Will believes the typical strength coach should consume daily 4:51 – Will’s background in athletics, sport, and athletic performance 9:53 – The importance of play in fitness and boosting overall athletic qualities 16:02 – Why Will, despite being athletically physically superior to many other football players, did not make it as a pro-football player and what he has learned from that 21:35 – Will thoughts on things he would choose to intensify in the gym, such as barbell velocity 27:17 – Thoughts on “generalized” power training methods 33:39 – Will’s take on not wasting time in the gym, and how to avoid redundancy in the course of training 47:58 – Will’s thoughts on heavy strongman work, squats and deadlifts and the optimal potentiation for sport skills 55:15 – How Will approaches jump and sprint variability in his warmups for training 1:03:46 – Will’s take on loaded jumps versus Olympic lifting, and the utility of Olympic lifting in sport preparation “It’s really difficult to get people,who are my peers, on a Saturday afternoon, to go play racquetball, or go play pickleball, or something like that…. When you do get a group of people to go play a game like that, they always say, “we should do this more often”” “I think a lot of times (playing) is going to have a better training effect than going in the gym for an hour” “I didn’t have the (tactical) ability that would have been required for me to play at that level… the general perception action abilities were right up there with anybody else, I just didn’t have the specific perception action abilities” “I think it’s a good idea to improve your ability to produce outputs, and once you reach a certain threshold of producing these outputs, we need to improve the context by which you can produce those outputs” “I think a lot of extensive plyos is kind of a waste; it depends on the sport, but take basketball, I don’t think they need to do any extensive plyos because that’s what basketball is; submaximal contacts up and down the court” “I do not like the rationalization of doing loaded jumps to improve “rate of force development”… I like to think of them as “you are improving jumping competency”” “I do not like the comparison of loaded jumps and Olympic lifting…. In Olympic lifting you are interacting with an external body of mass” “I try to teach snatch before clean, for a variety of reasons” “The reflexes are being trained much faster in Olympic lifts, than if you are going to do repeated, loaded jumps” About Will Ratelle Will Ratelle is a NCAA Division I strength and conditioning coach at the University of North Dakota, working with football, basketball, volleyball and tennis athletes. Prior to working in the performance field, he spent time as a professional football player, spending time with the Atlanta Falcons, Kansas City Chiefs, and Saskatchewan Roughriders (CFL). He has a passion for solving problems to issues and questions with his athletes regarding performance issues. He takes a principled approach to his training philosophy while also critically thinking about important topics in the field.