327: Joel Reinhardt on The Fusion of Sport and Strength Training Workloads in American Football

Today’s episode features sports performance coach and sport scientist, Joel Reinhardt. Joel joined Stanford Football’s staff as the assistant sports performance coach and applied sports science coordinator in 2022. Prior to Stanford, has spent time at UMass and Nicholls State working in sports performance and sports science roles. One of the great things about the sports performance/strength & conditioning field is that it is interdisciplinary in nature. Within the field itself, we have the elements of anatomy/physiology, biomechanics, pedagogy, team culture & coaching, training arrangement, and long-term development. We also have the integration of sport science, which quantifies the complex nature of the ways players are loaded in their sport. When the nature of this load is understood; many relationships can be noticed between a football practice week, for example, and the way a track sprints or jumps coach may set up their training week. The more areas we see training loads and adaptive trends, the more we can understand the dynamics of the human organism, and how to facilitate the training environment. On today’s show, Joel Reinhardt goes into his role in helping to build out the work-loads of football players at Stanford through his sports science role. He’ll talk about what specific training weeks look like, how the strength training complements those weekly micro-cycles, and then primary pitfalls that can happen in loading athletes throughout a training week. Without good integration of sport volume, and weight-room volumes, athletes are almost always going to end up doing more total work than what they need, and that’s why conversations like these are so valuable. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. 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: 5:16 – Recent job updates, and Joel’s role at Stanford University as a sports coach and sports science coordinator 8:01 – Joel’s role in building the workloads for sport practice at Stanford 18:01 – How Joel draws out football practice loads, and how it relates to track and field loading patterns 26:53 – Specific weekly microcycle loads Joel helps facilitate for football practice 36:14 – How Joel looks to complement football loading volumes with strength training 49:10 – “Pain points” and practice elements that could lead to a greater incidence of injury 1:00:22 – Thoughts on “conditioning finishers” at the end of a practice period “I wanted to be very intentional about not coming in and being the person who was saying “you need to do less”” “My role as sports science coordination is utilizing the data to help guide our planning on the front end to play as much football as we possibly can while still being healthy for Saturday” “You want to understand what (practice) scenarios relate to the physical outputs that you are wanting to track; and start to influence where those fall within a week, within a day, within a month” “Day 1 is more constrained by the type of drill they are in, and Day 2 is just playing ball, there is a lot of open scenarios, and it ends up being very game like; that second day is the most open” “The third day is most volume, most time on feet” “That second day is where you expect to see the highest intensities” “It’s not black and white; all this happens on this day, all of this happens on the other day” “In camp we lifted once for every 3-day cycle; we lifted on day 2, the highest intensity type day. In season we lift Monday, Wednesday, Friday” “In terms of when they lifted, in the racks, during camp, it was only twice a week, but how often they worked with the sports performance staff, it was every day, just in small doses” “If you get those big rocks in place of the sport practice and how we are managing that load, you can get away with peeling back in other areas and not losing those higher level qualities, because they are not getting drowned out by excessive fatigue” “The level of detail to predict those total volume loads; the only piece of information you really needed was total time on feet; to predict intensity you needed a bit more granular detail” “In camp, if the daily volume was in a normal range, 4 practices in a row created an un-sustainable well that these guys fell into” “Knowing we were not going to practice 4 days in a row, it gave us more wiggle room within those 3 days” “I boil it down to, "Is this going to effect the number of team football reps we are going to be able to execute before our first game'” About Joel Reinhardt Joel Reinhardt joined Stanford Football’s staff as the assistant sports performance coach and applied sports science coordinator in 2022. He will oversee Stanford’s sports science and data tracking for Cullen Carroll’s football sports performance staff. Prior to Stanford, Reinhardt worked at UMass as the assistant sports performance coach since 2019. At UMass, Reinhardt oversaw sports science, practice planning and return to play for football, while also leading all aspects of women’s lacrosse and men’s soccer’s performance training. He previously worked at Nicholls State in Thibodaux, La., where he helped design and implement a comprehensive strength and conditioning program for football. He was also responsible for the implementation of all agility work for the team’s off-season development program. He also worked with women’s track and field, women’s soccer, softball and both tennis programs at Nicholls State, in addition to organizing and analyzing Playertek GPS data. Reinhardt arrived at Nicholls State following an internship with the Minnesota Football program. Reinhardt graduated from Springfield College, where he earned a Master of Science degree in Strength and Conditioning in 2017. While studying at Springfield College, Reinhardt worked as a graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach. He earned his undergraduate degree from St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minn.) in Kinesiology and Exercise Science in 2015. Reinhardt’s strength and conditioning expertise also includes internship tenures with Total Hockey Minnesota (2013), Springfield College Athletics (2015), the UConn Athletic Department (2016) and Western Michigan football (2016).