Rethinking Strength and Conditioning with Cole Hergott

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Welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On today's episode, we have Cole Hergott. He is the head strength and conditioning coach at Trinity Western University, where he leads performance training for over 300 Spartan athletes. With a master's in coaching science and multiple elite certifications, he's recognized for his evidence-based approach practical use of isometric and eccentric training, and innovative recovery methods.

Cole is passionate about building resilient athletes and fostering a strong weight room culture that helps teams thrive on and off the court. Cole, welcome to the show.

Thanks. I'm honored to be on.

You know, the first thing I want to ask you about is over 300 athletes. I think it says, I read online, 1,000 square foot is the weight room department. But how do you share that space and how do you get players, you know, to collaborate in that space and just make it a productive space for all of those 300 athletes?

A lot of trial and error and a lot of mistakes. But one of the things that I've kind of landed on is I'm a fairly general programmer. I believe in general physical preparation and that the sport should kind of take care of the specificity.

And so the way we'll kind of roll is because we do have team sessions, but because of our, you know, we're a smaller university, limited classes that not everybody can make their team time. So our men's basketball time, for example, might only have 3 quarters of their team, but they've got a couple of men's soccer, a couple of women's basketball, and maybe a men's volleyball player in there.

So what I've started to do is have similar movement patterns on similar days. So let's say a day 1 on a Monday, everybody's squatting. You know, basketball might be doing a back squat, volleyball might be doing a front squat, hockey might be doing a split squat.

But at the end of the day, you could share a rack, you could share that space if you needed to, instead of one team doing back squats, one team doing Romanian deadlifts, and one team doing bench press. So while we can't really facilitate all of that, so that's kind of where most of my coaching philosophy has kind of gone as well, is like everybody squats on Monday.

You know, everybody does more upper body stuff on day 2 and everybody does more hinging stuff later because it just allowed us to program more seamlessly and allow those sessions to roll. So that's one of the, one of the tricks that I've learned to, yeah, to fit 300 kids in a 1,000 square foot space.

Yeah, because then, because then if everyone is doing the same thing on every day, you can better manage the whole week and where everybody's training at. You've obviously worked in different places, different internships. A grad assistant at Columbia University before you went to Trinity Western.

How have your experiences shaped your philosophy and your approach now where you are?

All of my previous stops, which isn't a ton of them, but before I got this job here, yeah, I did my master's degree at the University of British Columbia down the road in Vancouver. So I was a grad assistant there. One of the main things I learned there from the staff, especially Joe McCollum, who's the head guy there was just how to control a room because they have at UBC, they have like 750 athletes.

They have a much bigger space than we do, but just taught me the importance of, yeah, like keeping people in line and making sure your programming is sound so that again, things can kind of flow seamlessly. So that was one of the main things I learned there.

I did an internship stop at Simon Fraser University. And one of the things I learned there was, was a lot on programming. So their head strength coach at the time, TJ Seider, Taught me a ton about, you know, the ins and outs of programming and getting the right adaptation.

But I'd say most of my philosophies have just come like they're almost like a mishmash of everybody I've learned from and, you know, took the things that work for me and kind of left the things that don't. And that's something that, you know, I'd encourage all young coaches to do is I might see Alabama football do something that's awesome, but when they have a weight room that's about 500 times the size of ours, And they've got a huge staff.

I can't necessarily do what they do, but maybe we can do it a different way, or I can still use maybe that coaching cue they gave. So I think a lot of times we're quick to dismiss something because it looks silly or, oh, we can't do that.

But I think we need to make sure we're looking at what is the nugget I can take from that video or from that interview and kind of learn from that. So that's kind of the way I've shaped my philosophy is just by learning from everybody and stealing all the good stuff and then throwing away the stuff that doesn't work.

Absolutely. Being a sponge. I want to speak about your isometric and eccentric training. You've got some blogs that you wrote. I was reading one before. It was on sprint, what kind of exercises sprinters should do. I thought it was interesting, but I just want to focus on a little bit on the isometric and eccentric training.

I think isometric is great, but I'm not, you know, I'm a basketball coach. I'm not a strength and conditioning coach, but I always use isometric for activation. in my warmups. So we'll do the warmup, a warmup game, and then we'll get into some, some isometrics, you know, with a basketball or with a partner.

But I want to ask you, like, what exercises or progressions do you rely on the most with those isometric and eccentric training? And also, can you just explain that for the coaches listening as well?

Absolutely. So in any movement, there's 3 phases. There's the lowering phase. So let's say I'm squatting. So when I start to go down, that's the lowering phase. That's called the eccentric phase. In that phase, my muscles are lengthening, so they're stretching. And then on the way up, it's called the concentric phase.

So that's when my muscles are contracting. The in-between phase, so when I'm going down and then I have that, you know, half a second pause before I come back up, that's called the isometric phase. Isometric means your muscles aren't moving, but they're exerting force.

So if you do a wall sit, Or a plank, your muscles are working, but they're not moving, which is what an isometric is. So what we'll do for a lot of our isometrics before practice or even before lift is, yeah, we'll do some, some isometrics for activation.

We'll do them for knee health. We'll do them to kind of, like you said, just prep the body for the training that we're about to do. What we'll actually do in our weight room is we'll heavily load isometrics or eccentrics. Now, a lot of times in training, people focus on the concentric.

Again, the up, like how much can you bench is like how much can you push up? How high can you jump? These are all output metrics. They're all how, how much can you concentrically push? What I've started to focus on in the last year or so is to look at the other portions.

So this was really made popular by a coach named Cal Dietz who works at the University of Minnesota. It's called triphasic training. If If anybody wants to look it up, he's got a ton of stuff on it, but I've really started to dive into it.

So what it does is it looks at each of those phases, the eccentric, the isometric, and the concentric has a different adaptation you want to obtain. So again, if we look at a basketball player who's, you know, driving up to the rim, yes, they need to jump up, you know, in order to get the ball in, to dunk, to make the block, whatever they did.

But before that movement happened, they lowered themselves. They had to eccentrically lower. They had that isometric before they popped up. So what we want to try to do is to develop the eccentric and the isometric areas of the muscles so that they're better able to perform the concentric as well as better able to handle the loads.

Because what goes up must come down. So if I go up for a dunk, I don't just stay up there. I come back down. And so when I'm coming down, what am I doing? I'm eccentrically stopping my muscles or my body from collapsing into the floor.

Or from, you know, loading my ligaments, you know, my ACL, all those kinds of things. So what we've tried to do is the more we can like lower weight. So the slower we can lower a weight or the more we can pause a weight, let's say in the bottom of a squat or the bottom of a bench, that's going to reinforce number one, good movement patterns.

It's going to help us develop really good, strong tendons, ligaments, and muscles, as well as it's going to allow us to perform that concentric movement In the way we want to. So the way I'd like to say, a lot of people say, is it's kind of like driving a car.

If you have a Ferrari but you have really bad brakes, you have Honda Civic brakes, you're not going to hit the gas pedal that hard because you're going to go, I don't know if I can stop this car. So it's the same thing with the human body.

If we develop really strong brakes, a braking system through the eccentric movements and even that isometric movement, then that allows your body to unleash more concentric power because you know that Okay, if I jump 40 inches, I'm going to be able to land from it as opposed to, I don't know.

So I'm only going to jump 33 and we'll hope, you know, I don't blow up when I land. So that's kind of the thought process behind it. And the main exercises we'll do it with is squats. So any kind of squat movement, back squat, front squat, split squats, that's a really good way to, again, load the lower leg musculature for those jumping and sprinting actions.

We'll do it for the upper body as well. So I've done it with Pull-ups and chin-ups. I've done it with like dumbbell bench press, barbell bench press, shoulder press overhead. Basically any main. I mean, you can do with any movement, but I like to do it with our main compound movements because the other benefit is it reinforces again good movement mechanics and good patterns.

Because if I'm gonna, let's say again back squat, and I'm just focusing on you know going down as fast as I can and up as fast as I can, I don't have to worry about my movement or I don't have time to worry about my movement as much because all I'm thinking about is pushing.

200 pounds as fast as possible. But if I'm going really slow, now I have to brace through my core. I have to make sure my knees are tracking over my toes, get a good pause, and then I can explode up from that. So it allows us to, again, focus on that, get a lot more core work, which is something that all athletes need to work on.

And then the last benefit is it sucks. It sucks to move weights really slow. It sucks to pause with it. So then now, for example, where we're, where our season starts in a couple of weeks, We've taken away those pauses so that it makes it easier.

We've got that good movement pattern, and now everybody's just smacking up way more weight because they're not having to do the slow movement or they're not having to do the pause, but they still have that good movement that we ingrained in them. And now we're moving more weight, we're moving it faster and moving it safe.

And when do you use your isometrics specifically? Do you use that before your training starts, in the middle, during? How do you, how do you add the isometrics in?

All over.

So it depends on the goal. We'll do it before training for a lot of our teams that have like knee issues. For example, our volleyball teams and our basketball teams will do some isometrics before. We'll do it during again, like with the main movements like our squats and our bench press, which will happen our lift session, then we'll do it.

And then I've actually started our volleyball team specifically doing some isometrics at the end of training. Now, I'd have to chat with the coach that I got this from, but basically one of the ideas that they gave me was that when you do it before practice, you're kind of prepping the tissue for the demands they're about to go under.

So you're prepping it for the jumping, the sprinting, the cutting, all that stuff. And then you go through that practice and at the end of that practice, you're like, oh, my knees feel like crap. My legs hurt because we basically like, you know, destroyed that tissue.

So now what I'm starting to do and what I've learned is that if you do isometrics at the end of training, the whole goal is that you kind of reset that tissue into the position that you want it. So instead of stretching for a cooldown, we do isometrics for our cooldown to kind of reset that tissue and get those basically signal to the body where we want the collagen fibers to be laid to strengthen the tendons and the ligaments.

So that again, the next day, it's not like, man, my knees feel like crap. It's like, well, I did my prehab at the end of the training. And we just started that this year. And so far I've gotten a lot of really good feedback from our volleyball players on it.

So I'm looking to do it with our basketball players as well. I don't have any specific research to kind of cite that shows that it works. It just anecdotally seems to work. So we're going to kind of keep going with it.

Yeah. So you still do it before practice, but then more importantly, you finish with the isometrics.

Interesting.

All right.

I want to pivot here and talk about recovery. So you are against the icing or, you know, after an injury. Can you speak to why that is and how your athletes have responded to that?

Oh, absolutely. So everybody here knows I'm anti-ice. I think icing is, is the worst. So what icing does is it constricts your blood vessels, which stops blood from flowing to the injured site. So let's say my knees are bugging me and after practice they're inflamed.

So that means there's a lot of blood flow going to the area and that's what causes them to Feel like crap, so I ice them, which constricts my blood vessels, which means less blood goes to that area, which causes less inflammation, which everybody assumes is a good thing.

The issue with that is inflammation is the sign to the body that we need to get stronger in that area. So if I'm not allowing more blood flow to that area, if I'm icing it, yes, my knees will feel better, but they won't get better because my body doesn't think, "Oh, my knees hurt.

I should probably make them stronger." They think. Oh, my knees feel fine, so I'm just not going to do anything about it. So that's one of the main reasons that I'm anti-ice. The other reason is primarily because of that blood flow, and blood flow is what promotes recovery.

That's how your body, you know, transfers nutrients throughout your body. That's how it clears out waste, is through blood. And so if we're basically going from, you know, the Autobahn in Germany and those nutrients can just rip around as fast as possible, to now where, oh, Now we're going into like the highway where it's really congested, then they can't get nutrients as quickly.

And we don't want that. We want to make sure that we're getting nutrients as fast as possible to that injured site, which again, isn't going to feel good, but it's going to make you better. So that's why I'm anti-ice.

And what if, you know, I'm coaching at practice, one of my players sprains an ankle, am I icing then?

Nope. You don't touch ice. Whenever something like that happens, what you want to do is promote blood flow through a safe area. So if you roll an ankle in practice, don't keep just running up and down the court. But what I would do is maybe sit off, do some ankle circles as much as you can.

If you can walk on it, walk on it a little bit. But what we don't want to do is ice it, but we also don't want to just sit around and let that blood pool in that area either. We want to, again, promote the blood flow by trying to move it and use it so that we get the exchange of blood from in and out through that movement, which is going to help it heal faster.

Again, it's not going to feel better in the moment, but as I tell our athletes, like, if you roll your ankle on Monday, I don't care how you feel on Tuesday, Wednesday. I care if you're ready to go on Friday, Saturday. And if you ice it, if you ice it, you're going to feel better probably on Tuesday, Wednesday, but it won't be better and you're going to practice again and then your risk of reinjuring it goes up.

Whereas if you don't practice on Tuesday, you know, maybe do a little bit on Wednesday, you know, again, creating that blood flow, allowing it to heal naturally, then by the time Friday rolls around, we're cooking and we're ready to go. So that's kind of my thought process on it.

Because I think especially with the ankle sprain specifically, you still want to keep that, you want to have the mobility in your ankle. So by moving it, you can ensure that you're still keeping that mobility. And then obviously having more blood flow will ensure it gets— it heals up faster as opposed to bringing the ice and slowing down that blood circulation, if I heard you correctly.

Yep, that's exactly right. Like, as you just mentioned, the other thing is the mobility aspect. If I just sit on the couch with my foot up and an ice bag on it, that's not helping it. It's restricting the mobility it has, whereas I want to try to maintain that mobility as much as I can through movement so that when I come back, I'm ready to go as opposed to, okay, now I'm back, but I haven't really used my ankle in 3 days and now it's hurting and it's achy and all these other things happen.

So yeah, so don't ice.

Yes.

All right.

No ice. But I think we've always been about that as well. It's just interesting when, when someone actually explains the why. And in terms of mobility, just quickly before I move on, how important is that for injury prevention in your opinion?

Depending on your position and depending on your sport, it's huge. Like if you look at a sport like basketball, The more shapes you can get into, the more effective you're going to be on the court. If you don't have great hip mobility, you know, and you're trying to, you know, do defensive slides or you're trying to pivot back to the rim, it becomes a lot more challenging if you don't have the hip mobility to do that.

I like to think of it like the more mobility you have, the more options you have to solve solutions on the court. So basketball, like any sport, is Basically like a, you know, like a problem-solving game. You know, I have a defender in front of me.

How many ways can I try to get past him? Well, if I don't have good enough mobility, you know, I maybe only have 5 or 6 options. Whereas if I have better mobility and better handles too, then I might have 7, 8, 9 ways I can beat him.

And same thing on defense. If I only have, you know, if I can't pivot to my right, well then if somebody tries to go past me on the right, they're going to get by me. Whereas if I have The ability to go to my left and my right, you know, I can, I can turn, I can jump.

The more, again, movement capability I have, the more ways I can solve a problem on the court, which is going to allow me to be way more successful.

That's amazing. And so now moving on, speaking about the constraints-led approach, how do you apply that with your athletes, specifically the basketball athletes? And can you share any specific activities that you're doing in the weight room?

Yeah, so one of my favorite ways to constrain our athletes is to give them a set weight and to have them move it at a certain speed. So one of the things we'll do for our, especially our vertical power productions, like jumping, is we'll get a trap bar.

So like a hex bar and I'll put a set weight on it. And then we have these little devices that can measure how high they can jump. So instead of in the past where what I've done is, okay, we're going to do these called trap bar jumps.

It's like, okay, we're going to do trap bar jumps and like try to move them fast. Everybody's kind of doing a different weight and they're, you know, maybe putting on too much weight, some people putting not enough. What I've done now is I've put constraints on them of, okay, you're only allowed to jump with 100 pounds total or 75 pounds total, and now you need to move that as fast as possible.

So it allows them to compete against each other because it kind of levels the playing field, but it also allows them to try to figure out ways to move that set thing faster because For me, at the end of the day, especially in basketball, like the ball is not going to change weight.

It doesn't change size. So it's not like the stronger you get, like the— you're sorry. It's not that you need to get stronger because the ball gets heavier. It's we need to get stronger because you're going to handle people on defense and offense.

But when you get the ball in your hands, like you need to be able to— you have the constraints of that ball is only so big. So how are you going to change your movement mechanics and your shooting? With your new strength to still get the ball in the hoop.

So same thing with in the weight room. Hey, I'm putting this set weight on, but I need you to jump with it as high as possible. So that's one of the ways we'll do constraints. We do it a lot in our warmups actually.

So I like a lot of tennis ball games for warmups. So we'll have constraints where it's like, hey, you know, you're tossing the ball with your to your partner, but you can only use your non-dominant hand, or you know you have to be backpedaling while you do it, or you have to.

Do one bounce in between each part or 2 bounces. Like it allows them to, the constraints allow them to figure out ways again, to still solve the problem within the ability that they have and within the movement mechanics that they have. So kind of ties those last 2 questions together of just putting constraints on them, whether it's again, with an exercise in the weight room or with some kind of a movement thing in warmup.

It's like, hey, your goal is to still do this as fast as possible and win this relay. But every single pass you have to do with a tennis ball, it has to, you know, do one bounce, or again, it has to be with your non-dominant hand.

But you still have to solve the solution or solve the problem of do it as fast as possible and beat everybody else.

I love that. And you also speak about the Olympic lifts and how you think they're sometimes overrated. Talking about that now, what can coaches do alternatively? So you talked about adding constraints so that players compete against each other and build the power. What else can players and coaches do alternatively to build power for sport-specific development and maybe using constraints as well?

Biggest thing is grab a stopwatch. One of the things we've done over the last couple of years is shifted away from doing Olympic lifts, especially with our basketball teams, for a bunch of different reasons. But what we do now is sprint, jump, and throw.

So we'll go grab a medicine ball and do some kind of a throw. We do some kind of a jump. Again, could be that trap bar jump, could literally be just jump up and touch the rim. Or, and then again, with a sprint, grab a stopwatch, race each other, or, you know, we'll vary up the kind of sprints we do.

We'll vary up the jumps, we'll vary up the throws. But for me, those exercises more mimic the sport basketball than, you know, more than a clean or a snatch anyway. It allows us to again solve the movement problem. So if we want to work on mobility, Not that Olympic lifting doesn't help us with that, but if I'm trying to work on mobility, you know, in my pivot and getting up to the rim, well, why don't I get them to pivot and jump up to the rim and work on that?

And then if I want them to be faster, well, yeah, I could, you know, put weight on the bar and get them to do a snatch, but why don't I just get them to sprint and time it and tell them to do it faster?

So for me, that's kind of the shift I've gone down to is just keeping it simple. Like, what is basketball? Basketball is sprinting, jumping, And throwing, you know, passing, dunking, shooting. So why don't we just work on those in the weight room? So, and the constraints within that is again, like sometimes I'll have them do, I'll time them.

So it might be, hey, you know, we'll have a stair and it's like, do as many quick feet up and down on the stairs, do as many quick steps as you can in 5 seconds. So the constraint is you've only got 5 seconds, but you got to move as fast as possible.

Or sometimes I'll set up some cones and we'll set up like a pattern. that they have to like run and weave through. So again, the constraint is, well, you have to go around the cones, you know, you have to again do it as fast as possible, solve this problem with whatever movement capability you have, but you have to do it as fast as possible.

And then I'm going to time you, I'm going to time your teammates, we're going to put it in a leaderboard, and then we're going to see who did it the best. So that's kind of our shift from Olympic lifts and how we've done that.

I always say, like, with basketball athletes, you can— and I think it goes for any sport, but like You know, in basketball, let's say you're gonna, you're gonna receive a pass and then you're gonna attack the closeout and go to the rim and maybe lay up or dunk the ball.

So why not do that with maybe a heavier ball, right? Or maybe like some kind of resistance on the closeout rip through, right? And that's something that I think how we can work together with, you know, people in your position and the coaches can design like what kind of situations are these athletes going to be in and then You know, what kind of activities can we get them doing in the weight room that's going to mimic these situations, that's going to help them in that situation as well?

So, you know, exactly what you said is what I'm thinking as well. I want to ask about your activation circuits on game days, what that looks like, what it does for the players, and then as well, how do you balance not getting your players too tired for the game by doing too much?

Yeah, so our activation circuits is a new thing we've started this year, specifically with our women's basketball team. We were going to do with our men, but they actually just got back from a trip to China. So they were gone for like 10 days.

So I didn't really get to do anything with them. But what I get our girls to do is they do an isometric split squat, but they do an overcoming isometric. So I didn't explain this earlier with the iso stuff, but with an isometric, there's 2 different kinds.

There's called the yielding isometric and overcoming isometric. A yielding isometric is like a plank or a wall sit where You are trying to stop your body from moving. So I'm— my body wants to fall down. I'm trying to stop it. An overcoming isometric is where I'm trying to move my body, but I'm unable to.

So for example, what we do with our women's team is that I gave them towels and they go in a split squat position and they put that towel underneath their front foot and they go in a split squat position and then they grab the towel with their hands and then they push with that front foot.

But because the towel is tight and they're holding onto it, they're not moving. But they're exerting force. So again, it's an isometric because they're not moving. But what that does is, is it essentially fires up your nervous system in the same way that moving really heavy weight does, but it doesn't have the same fatiguing effects of having to put, you know, 300 pounds on your back and move it.

Right.

So what we'll do is we'll pair an overcoming isometric. So that isometric split squat, and then we do the same thing with their upper body where they actually get in a pushup position on their knees. And a partner like pushes down on their chest while they try to push off the floor.

So same thing, we get that like almost like a really heavy bench press feeling, like you're trying to push as hard as you can for a little bit of time. It's like 3 to 5 seconds max. So you get that like, whoa, I'm ready to go.

And then we pair that with an unloaded movement. So with the split squat, we pair that with just like a one-step approach jump. So like take one step, boom, get up. With the push-up, what I actually get them to do is they just do half-court passes.

So they'll do the pushup on each other. Then one stands at half court, one stands at the baseline, they get a basketball and they just chest pass it as hard as they can. So for me, what I'm trying to do is we'll do this after our morning shootaround.

What I'm trying to do with them is just fire up their nervous system a little bit more because shootarounds are good for, you know, reinforce, you know, you might work on your free throws, you might be doing a walkthrough, but it doesn't really like get you going.

So what I'm trying to do is basically like start the car. Before we put it in drive later in the evening. Whereas instead of, okay, we're getting to the game, you got to start the car, put it in drive, you know, do all your warmup stuff.

Whereas if you're already buzzing, for lack of a better word, from doing that circuit, then it kind of starts that work for us and allows us to start faster. In order for it to work, obviously you have to do it hard. You can't slack off on those isometrics.

Like, you got to push. So I tell them that, like, if you slack off on this, the effects will maybe last 3 to 4 hours, but the game is like 8 hours away. So you actually have to like work really hard to have that activation last that long so that we're able to start the game faster and kind of get rolling.

And how important is that for injury prevention, just having your central nervous system fired? I remember Kobe, Dwyane Wade, Michael Jordan's trainer, I forgot his name now, but he was saying how, you know, before every game they lift and the Chicago Bulls as well, before every game they lifted.

And I'm just wondering, like, how important— because in my eyes, I guess before I kind of started reading about the research, it's like, why would you do 2 exercises on a really intense day where you're playing a full game? Whereas now, you know, I know the importance of like activation, having your central nervous system ready to go.

But how important is it? Can you just explain to us how important that is to make sure that your body's ready and your central nervous system, like you said, is activated?

I think it's huge. I think a lot of it just kind of preps you and keeps you mentally engaged. I mean, your brain governs everything. Like when you run, jump, shoot, like your brain chose to do that. So if you can do something that's going to elevate the way your brain is performing or keep it humming a little bit higher, have it revving a little bit more, you know, theoretically, and we've seen practically that like it allows you to perform at a higher level.

And even from an injury prevention standpoint, like a lot of injuries happen from I don't want to say lack of activation, but when you're landing from a jump, when you're not really paying attention, when you're tired, when your brain's not really in it and you're not thinking about it.

So if we can do something that kind of elevates, you know, your thought process, for lack of a better term, then hopefully we're going into a game feeling better, feeling more awake, feeling more alert. So that allows us to perform our movements sharper, quicker, you know, the way we've practiced them so that we're not running into, you know, knees wobbling all over the place because we're not thinking about it.

That's kind of my thought process behind it and kind of why we do it.

No, I love it. I want to move on as well in terms of the culture. You work with a lot of different athletes in the weight room. So how do you make sure that they respect the space and you just build a positive team culture?

I know I read something or heard something that you write your plans in pencil. What does that mean? And how do you help the other coaches help the athletes as well? How does— how do you tie everything together in the weight room?

Yeah, it's, it's tough. But the, the benefit I think of our weight room is it is small. So you can't hide. You can't hide in our weight room. I can see everybody. Everybody sees everybody else. So that's one of the things that's allowed us to grow a good culture is me being able to coach everybody, creating more of like a family environment.

Because again, if we have that men's basketball lift with a bunch of different athletes, they now have to talk because they got to share a rack or they got to share dumbbells. And And it just creates a family environment. There's a bunch of little kind of like games and challenges we'll do, have like a tip of the week.

I always give everybody, and we do, it's called a PR challenge, which basically every time you hit a personal record in the weight room, your team gets a score. And then the team at the end of the month that has the most PRs per athlete per session, you know, they win.

So there's all these kind of fun ways I've tried to gamify training and make it a fun place to be. Has really helped the culture. And a lot of it too is just holding people accountable. Because if they're not, if they miss a session, I message them right away.

You know, if they're late, I've got punishments for that. Like there's things where I'm trying to hold them accountable so that they elevate themselves, not just as an athlete, but as a human being, as far as again, coming on time, communicating. Those are really big for me.

And then yeah, writing the plans in pencil. Like it's, to give you an example, I always wanted to use our gymnasium, which is across from our weight room to do our warmups and our sprints. But sometimes there's a different group that booked the gym or there's a human kinetics class that's using it.

So we don't get to, so I've got to pivot. And so instead of like, oh no, no, no, no. Like, but this is what we have to do. One of my sayings I like is find a way in, not a way out. So instead of, okay, I guess we're just not going to do that.

What is another way we can put the work in? What is another way we can find a way to do that? So that's where, you know, maybe we can't do 20-meter sprints in our gym, but we can maybe do some extra jumps or we can do some extra med ball slams, or, you know, we can maybe do a 5-meter sprint in the corner.

Or just again, finding ways to teach kids resiliency, to teach kids that we're not just going to give up. You know, there's some work we got to do and this is worth doing. And so it builds that trust that, you know, I have their best interests in mind and I'm willing to go the extra mile to get creative and find ways to get them to do stuff.

But yeah, and then again, just if I just, nope, this is the way we have to do things, like, you know, it's got to be this way, then we wouldn't get anything done. So for me, it's more about Something is better than nothing.

Again, find a way in, not a way out. Let's just get some work in and then keep moving on.

Yeah, and it's like, that's a great constraint that you've leveraged to your benefit. So you don't have the court and you can't do the exercises that maybe you already had planned. That constraint there, how can I use it to get even better and challenge my athletes to be resilient, to think differently, think outside the box, and, and still, you know, push, get better and push the needle forward.

Another thing is I just want to ask you before I ask you our last transformative tip question is what are you most excited about with research or technologies in the strength and conditioning field? And the 2-part question. So what are you most excited about?

And then what advice would you give to coaches seeking to stay current with these advances in technology and this research?

So one of the main things that I'm really liking is simple ways to Individualized training. So we've got all this technology. We've got force plates. We've got velocity-based training units. All these things that can change the training environment in that day. And one of the things that has started to come out a lot more now, and we're actually starting to do this year too, is to individualize training based on the data that we're seeing.

So what we're starting to do is when we get athletes to do their force plate jumps, there's like 100 different metrics that these plates can sense. So we're going to pick a couple of them. One of them is going to be jump height.

One of them is going to be how fast they jump or their time to take off. And then we're going to bucket kids based on how fast they jump versus how high they jump. So if you are somebody who jumps really fast, but you don't jump very high, it means you need to produce more force.

So we want to do extra exercises to produce more force. And vice versa. If I'm somebody that jumps really high, but not very fast, well, if I could jump faster, then theoretically I could also jump higher and improve my performance. So I think that's something with the tech is, is it's just utilizing it better to serve athletes instead of just getting kids to jump and being like, hey, you jumped 30 inches, cool, see you later.

Like, what are we doing with that data? Because athletes aren't going to do all this testing if we're not actually using it. So that's something that we've started to do, and I've started to see a lot of my colleagues as well. And, and a lot of kind of blogs and papers and stuff have come out on the best ways to individualize training that way.

And then the second part of that question is how can, can coaches stay relevant? To me, it's talk to other coaches. It's one thing to read research and it's one thing to know what the science says. But again, I have 300 kids in a 1,000 square foot weight room.

I can't do that exact protocol that they said in the research. But if I talk to another coach at a small school and say, hey, how do you do this? Or what are your thoughts on that? It allows me to hopefully bypass the time where, oh, I made the mistake that Hey, we can't do that, which I've done 1,000 times.

But having conversations with coaches, allowing, you know, even it doesn't even have to be other strength coaches, like talking to, you know, a basketball coach, talking to somebody about like, well, like, how would you do this? And what are your thoughts on, you know, if I gave you this data?

Like, that's how anytime I want to do a new test or I come up with some new protocol, I always run it by our coaches. And it's like, hey, would this be valuable to you? What are your thoughts on this? And more often than not, they'll come back and be like, That's good, but what if we did this?

What about this? And it just gives me more ideas. So it's one thing to be relevant with the research, but I think it's a whole nother thing to be relevant with the applicability and the practicality of that research so that you can actually apply it right away instead of, okay, I read that research paper, but I don't really know what to do with it.

Emil, that's awesome. Cole, I want to thank you for your time, and I have one more question for you, but I just want to thank you, and I'm definitely going to be keeping up with Trinity Western University. Sports, I'll be on Google just to see how they're doing, and hopefully they'll be staying healthy and performing at their best this season.

But once again, I really want to thank you for your time and the fact that you seem so passionate about what you're doing. The transformative tip question, what is one piece of advice that you would give to any coach that they can apply in their practical environments that could instantly enhance performance?

Talk to their kids every single day. That to me is the one thing— relationships. No amount of tech, no amount of knowledge can bypass the trust you build from knowing your kids' names, knowing, you know, where they're from, you know, do they have siblings, what's their favorite genre of music.

Like, for me, one of the things I try to do every single day is say every single kid's name that walks in the weight room and try to ask them a question. Now, that doesn't always happen because there's one of me and there's, you know, sometimes 30 kids.

But my biggest thing is like make one single touchpoint every single day. And that's something that Greg Popovich used to do with his meetings with the Spurs is like, you know, I think it was on Mondays or first practice week, he would just go and talk to them.

And that's where he learned all about them. And that to me is what makes a great coach is how can you learn about your players, your athletes more? Because that's how you know how to push them more and that's how you can drive performance more.

So Talk to your kids every single day. Make one touchpoint with every single kid, and it'll radically change your coaching.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Cole.

Thank you.

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