Take Homes from MSPC

by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS

Last Friday I was honored to be able to both attend and speak at the Midwest Sports Performance Conference on the campus of the University of Kansas.  The event is organized and run by Andrea Hudy, the Assistant Athletic Director for Sports Performance, and her strength and conditioning staff at KU.

I had the opportunity to attend this event a few years back and enjoyed my time, so when Coach Hudy asked me to come and speak, I jumped at the chance.  When I last attended, it was a smaller community event of around 100 attendees who were mostly local high school coaches, athletic trainers and personal trainers.  When I arrived this year, I learned that the conference has grown to over 320 attendees with strength coaches, athletic trainers, physical therapists, and performance coaches from not only around the country, but also outside of the US.  This once “community event” is now an “international event”.  I give a huge kudos to Coach Hudy and her staff at KU.

The speakers were all great, so I wanted to take a few minutes to share my take home points from the day long event.  Keep in mind that there are several different tracts going on at the same time, so I know that there were other great topics that were covered that I missed because I was either attending another session or speaking.  I want to be fair to those sessions and acknowledge that I’m not skipping over them.  I just didn’t have the chance to listen to them.

• Tim Schlosser (Personal Development Coach): We essentially are what our thoughts are.  Our thoughts are not necessarily reality and how we understand our thoughts and respond to them will determine our success in life.  Understanding what is positive, negative, constructive and not helpful determines our outcomes.  We should be addressing our own personal thoughts, but also coaching our patients, clients and athletes to do the same.  I love this quote that he cited from Buddha, “We are what we think.  All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.”
• Mitch Hauschildt (Prevention, Rehab and Physical Performance Coordinator – Missouri State University): Our dysfunction lies in the transverse plane.  I know this is self-serving to put up a take home from my presentation, but I am so passionate about the topic that I couldn’t resist.
• Dr Phil Wagner (Founder and CEO – Sparta Performance Science): As coaches, trainers and clinicians, we need to identify where our patients and clients are deficient and place our training attention on those areas to improve resilience and prevent injuries. We use Sparta at Missouri State with our athletes, so I am familiar with their technology, but it was great to hear about it from their main advocate.  Phil is a physician who has basically taken the best parts of medicine and applied it to training.  They are taking the guess work out of health and performance training with their force plate technology.  Even if you don’t have their software, there are a lot of things to be gained from their programming.  The main take home for me from the Sparta presentation is that we need to change our training (mainly exercise selection) to improve the weaknesses for each individual.  If you are a lineman, you squat all day long in your sport, so you probably don’t need to squat that much with your training. If you are a distance runner, you get lots of endurance work, so you need to train strength and power.  This is a different approach from the “sport specific” craze that was really popular a few years ago.
• Andrea Hudy (Assistant Athletic Director for Sports Performance – University of Kansas):  The take home for me here is that despite all of the really cool technology and resources that KU athletics has at it’s disposal, programming should be pretty simple.  Within our training we should have 3 types of workouts – Stimulating, Fatiguing, and Recovery.  Stimulating workouts develop some sort of skill or ability.  At KU, they perform mostly stimulating workouts while in season and they are almost always performed prior to practice sessions instead of after them so you stimulate the nervous system when it is fresh.  Fatiguing workouts are just that.  They are metabolic in nature and work to improve endurance and conditioning. These workouts should be reserved for the offseason.  Recovery workouts are often overlooked and are needed at very specific and strategic times.  I also love that while in their training sessions they perform 2 healthy sets (designed to keep people moving and feeling well) for every performance set. This keeps people developing, but also very healthy.
• Dr Andrew Fry (Director of Health, Sports, & Exercise Science – University of Kansas):  Dr Fry presented a ton of research and a great physics lesson to help us understand tempo training.  He specifically looked at the idea of super slow training for the athletic population and demonstrated both logically (with math) and through peer reviewed research, that in most cases, slower training is worse for athletes than normal tempo or higher speed exercises. It’s amazing how many things get spewed out there into our field that have absolutely no scientific backing.  Super slow training seems to be one of those training methods.  That isn’t to say that you should never change your training tempo.  But, Dr Fry did a great job of showing that slower training reduces force, time under tension, work, and there is no literature to support the notion that slower training recruits more motor units than normal tempo training.

Overall, the day was great. The education was good.  The program was well organized and well run. The networks and connections made are invaluable.  All of the speakers are approachable and accessible.  Next year, I recommend that you attend if you haven’t before.  It is worth your time.