| An Inside look at Tim’s NSCA Conference Presentation

This weekend I presented the Inside Foot Push & Outside Foot Push model for agility training at the National Strength and Conditioning Association national conference! Athlete, National Champion, Athletic Trainer & Salem State Strength Coach Joshua “Cricket” Markette aided in the sessions.

For this month’s training blog, the editors at Skyd asked me to write up an overview of my presentation. During the presentation, I treated all 200 attendees as athletes, with my job being to empower them to understand how to train for agility. I broke my presentation into multiple pieces.

Piece # 1: Empowerment

Our job as coaches is to empower our athletes. I define empowerment as inspiration plus education. We inspire by being able to perform the movements, being good people, getting out there training and competing. All of my Morrill Performance coaches also compete because putting yourself in the octagon is key to really understanding the effects training has on performance. Too many coaches only coach.

We educate by creating a systematic thought process that makes sense to our athletes. We sprinkle in cues and exercises one by one and build the castle that is our athletic potential one brick at a time.

Piece # 2: Understand Your Athletic Position

This is about optimizing movement in the frontal plane. Therefore, feet shoulder width apart and toes forward, even slightly in, is where we want to be. Get those toes forward! Understand that from this position you must be able to fully express your genetic range of motion in hip abduction and adduction. Therefore we overemphasize our IFP & OFP patterns.

Boston Ironside’s Brandon “Muffin” Malacek works a jab step for Inside Foot Push power.

This weekend, I gave a lesson on each, supplying coaches with a thought process they could immediately apply when they headed back into the weight room.

Piece # 3: IFP Lesson # 1 – Shuffle Progression

Low Shuffle Push