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John Curtis

@john__curtis

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Strength & Conditioning Coach @ ETS
CSCS | PSL1 | TN
Developer of Freak Athletes 📈
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“Life is for service.”

A simple line I walked past almost every day on the way to class in college that has become something I live by.

Yesterday I wrapped training in Minnesota, where I was truly able to live those words.

To all the athletes, coaching y’all was the opportunity of a lifetime. Our time together may have been short, but I will forever value the relationships we built and the trust you placed in me with your development.

I’m just as grateful for the coaches who took me under their wing, poured into me, and welcomed me into the ETS family. To be part of a company that not only lets me live a life of service but also surrounds me with incredible people is like winning the lottery.

Now, I head back to Tennessee to start building new relationships and to begin preparing to open something that is truly special.

Life is for service. by @john__curtis

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20 days ago

I hate the idea of optimal training.

It leaves us with the idea that there is a single right way of doing things, which is rarely (if ever) true. While we have to acknowledge that there are better ways of doing things we also have to recognize that making blanket statements on the efficacy of something can be a little wreckless.

For example, is a feet-up dumbbell press the worlds greatest pressing variation? Definitely not. Does it make sense for where I’m at in my current training cycle? Sure. The added benefit is I enjoy it.

The greater takeaway here is this: you’re never going to have the perfect program. You’ll never do the perfect exercise. The only perfect thing we can do is give our best effort to whatever it is we are doing. by @john__curtis

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6 days ago

Athletes tend to overcomplicate their approach to spine mobility.

The usual fix is seeking out some sort of routine, and abusing said routine until it starts hurting more than helping. The reality of most routine is that they underdose vital strength qualities and overdose simple patterns.

The real fix is blending mobility work into your training. Every single exercise in this carousel can show up in a training session, and better yet enhance that training session. We may do some form of thoracic rotation work on a press day. Maybe we do some hip mobility in between sets on a squat day. There are plenty of rational options.

Anyways, all I’m proposing is being smart about how your approach training mobility. Don’t treat it as a one-off thing you do on the side. Understand that it is just part of the training. by @john__curtis

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13 days ago

As coaches and athletes, we are always trying to further intensify the work we’re doing.

Coaches do it with small tweaks to the training card. Athletes do it by chasing a new program. A lot of that is boredom, or wanting the work we’re do to feel more important/unique.

My argument… one of the greatest intensifiers is time. Change nothing for six weeks. Week one and week six are not even close to being the same session, because you are no longer the same athlete.

So before you start rewriting your plan, see how much progress your patience can afford you. by @john__curtis

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14 days ago

While I’m sure there are way more reasons to use holds than what I’m about to say, here are three reasons they show up in my programming.

1: Low-Risk & High-Specificity

With holds, we pick the joint, the direction, the exact range of motion we want to achieve an intended result. This allows us to target problem areas without further irritating sensitive tissue. We are only doing our holds inside a mostly pain-free ROM.

2: Weak-Link Probing

If you can hold shoulder internal rotation for a minute but struggle to hold external rotation for 10 seconds, it becomes pretty clear what we need to target. To me this is a really cheap diagnostic that can be used in early RTP.

3: They Self-Intensify

I believe this is likely the part most miss with a lot of our overcoming holds. The same 20-30 second movement is drastically different from month 1 to month 3 solely because our athletes are improving at said movement. Deeper ranges + stronger contractions = higher intensities.

Again, there’s plenty of reasons one might use holds. These are just three surface level reasons IMO. by @john__curtis

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16 days ago

All of my friends do drop-catches.

In all seriousness, theme of today’s arm care (still not a huge fan of that term) was some form or fashion of a reflexive eccentric. Lot if ways to accomplish this effect, but the premise is a very fast eccentric phase coupled with a powerful concentric phase.

Too often we get married to very traditional modes of training the shoulder and arm, which can leave quite a bit on the table. I’m personally of the belief a lot of that stems from the difficulty of true upper body plyometric training. It’s very easy to accomplish with the lower body, but we are somewhat limited in upper body options. Especially limited in options that force some sort of reflexive move out of a collision.

This is where methods like reflexive eccentrics and even impulses fill a gap by exposing us to some degree of collision much like a true plyometric would. Anyways, if I had to dumb down this rant I’d say this: train your arm and shoulder the same way you’d train the rest of your body. by @john__curtis

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22 days ago

Figured I’d continue the trend of simple youth movement progressions.

My stance on the squat is similar to that of the hinge. Constrain it and gradually allow the athlete more degrees of freedom as competency in the pattern is built.

This progression goes
1: Counterbalance Squat
2: Goblet Squat
3: Zombie Squat

From there you can add and remove constraints, prescribe tempos, and build a solid squat pattern.

I prefer heels elevated for the majority of youth athletes as it serves as yet another constraint. Just because an athlete has the preq range of motion doesn’t mean the athlete is ready to use that range of motion.

I’ll take that last sentence a step further. One take I have that may not be as well received is that I don’t believe we should be chasing depth for the sake of chasing depth. If we’re squatting to depth but using every compensation in the book to get there, we probably should revisit some more foundational exercises. by @john__curtis

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24 days ago

It’s generally a good idea to measure the qualities you intend to progress.

We do an excellent job of this inside of our sports, on our weight, and in many other areas of life, but when it comes to physical performance a lot of times we seem to prefer guessing.

I’m sure there are times these are educated guesses that drive some level of change, but if we truly want to improve at something we need to understand it in its fullest. Want to drive upper body output? You may want to measure changes in your plyo push-up over time. While this is a very specific test, it is going to give us better insight into what type of adaptions our programming is driving.

Stack a few relevant measures and we end up coming up with a relatively powerful testing battery that can give us a better glimpse into where our athletes are currently, and a better ability to forecast where they’re going in the future.

My only warning is don’t oversaturate yourself with needless tests. Do your best to find metrics that are applicable to the health and performance of YOUR athletes. It does no good if the measure doesn’t show up on the field or court in some capacity. by @john__curtis

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a month ago

Upper body mobility.

Let’s move in a variety of patterns, under a variety of loads, at a variety of tempos. Enough said. by @john__curtis

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a month ago

Let’s talk long-term youth athletic development.

I’m going to talk about using constraints with athletes, but before we get into that, I’m going to admit that I do love allowing younger athletes the opportunity to explore patterns and positions. Throwing in constraints doesn’t discount that perspective, it just adds structure to otherwise random exploration.

I like the idea of starting heavily constrained on core movements such as our hinge, our squat, and our press. From there we can slowly remove constraints until our athletes naturally arrive at our intended outcome. I’d much prefer to use constraints than to try an cue athletes into positions they’re incapable of recognizing.

For a hinge we could go.
1: Plate RDL with knee support. Main cue here is to pull into the plate as our hips shift back over the bench.

2: DB RDL with knee support. Same concept here but now we are going to see if our athlete can maintain a neutral spine on their own.

3: DB RDL. This is the outcome of our constraints. Can our athlete successfully execute a DB RDL without a cue?

Is this a perfect progression? Probably not, those don’t really exist, but I’d argue the framework is what truly matters. by @john__curtis

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a month ago

Want to hear the secret to building the most freakishly athletic upper body you can?

Follow a structured plan.

We often look for the hacks or systems elite athletes use in hopes that we can expedite our own development process. The unfortunate thing is, those athletes did the mundane tasks better than many of us ever could imagine. There’s not a secret exercise, rep count, or system that’s going to make you an elite athlete. Sorry.

In this workout, the focus was time under tension and overall volume. Nearly everything had a tempo prescribed to it whenever it be a hold or an eccentric, and rep counts remained relatively high. I know a lot of coaches prefer strict rep prescriptions but I typically allow for ranges so I can better push intensity when possible.

Most athletes hear the words high volume and time under tension and immediately think it’s body builder training. Really, it’s just a block of training targeting very specific adaptations. Again, we aren’t chasing magic systems, we are (hopefully) chasing specific adaptions relevant to our long-term trajectory as an athlete. by @john__curtis

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a month ago

I enjoy using impulses. Sue me.

Like any modality there is pretty much always a line of reasoning we can use to justify their existence in programming. This is going to be a really brief/simplified look into how I view the modality. There’s a good chance I’m wrong. I actually hope I’m wrong because it means someone smarter than me has taken the time to understand what an impulse is in this sense.

Our definition of impulse as a modality is a repeated, short-duration collision that is typically restricted to more early-phase force organization (i.e. early RFD). Slack is rapidly removed from a rope, force rises abruptly, and since the interaction is so short, you can’t rely on prolonged yielding or gradual force buildup. This is not the same as the physics term “Impulse,” though an understanding of impulse will lead to a deeper understand of impulses.

When impulses are performed correctly, they create repeated high-rate loading events (the short collisions we see). The magnitude of the force may not rival that of a heavy eccentric lift (it’s not mean to), but the rate of force application is high and the duration is short. Structurally, that biases the adaptation of material stiffness. Neurologically, it biases early RFD. From a durability standpoint, it’s going to expose our body to controlled, repeatable collisions.

Massey et al. (2018) demonstrated that explosive contractions characterized by brief, high-rate force application increased patellar tendon stiffness and Young’s modulus without meaningful changes in tendon cross-sectional area. Sustained contractions, unlike their explosive counterpart, produced different structural adaptations. The key takeaway is that connective tissue responds not only to load magnitude, but to strain rate because high rates of loading, even at moderate absolute forces, are sufficient to alter tendon material properties.

Longest write up I’ve really done on here. Key takeaways I’d like you to have: the logic behind why we could use impulses is in place. The actual research on impulses is non-existent. Like I said at the start, I hope I’m wrong. It means someone took the time to really figure out what this modality does. by @john__curtis

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a month ago