345: Nick DiMarco on Speed, Specificity, and Maximizing What Matters in American Football Preparation

More show notes at https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-345/ Today’s guest is Nick DiMarco.  Nick has been the director of sports performance at Elon University since 2018, and is a leader in the realms of high-performance ideology.  He is both a former professional athlete (NY Jets and Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker in 2014), and has a Ph.D in Health and Human Performance.  In addition to being well versed in the intuitive aspects of athleticism, Nick is skilled at applying logical models to a high-performance training environment.  He has been a guest on multiple episodes of this podcast, speaking on the physical preparation process with a focus on American football. In the preparation of an athlete, all roads must ultimately lead towards the specificity, chaos and decision making of the sport itself.  The days of putting outputs on a pedestal (such as a squat max or “canned” SAQ score), are still with us, but integrative coaches are seeing the higher-links within the total training equation, and the win-loss column.  Ultimately, a good sports performance program never loses sight of the ultimate goal, which is to prepare players towards their sport as well as possible.  If you caught the recent episode with strength coach, turned football coach Michael Zweifel, this message likely hits on an even deeper level. On today’s show, Nick gives an overview on the Elon football team’s performance over the last few years, and the integrative factors that contributed to their recent success and low injury rates.  He gives his evolving take on the important elements to cover in preparing players for the speed and movement demands of the game of football, including acceleration, maximal velocity and agility/change of direction.  In this episode, Nick goes in depth on his weekly speed and strength training format, talks about the metrics he measures, gives his take on deceleration training, and much more.  Nick’s ideas are both cutting-edge, and incredibly pragmatic, useful for any sports performance coach. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro (strengthcoachpro.com) 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