I was going to give you a long song and dance about why I think you should stop what you’re doing and immediately purchase Mike Boyle’s Functional Strength Coach 4.0.
I thought to myself,
“Yeah, but he’s not a track guy. It’s not ‘event specific’. Track people might not see the value in it so I better give a laundry list of benefits and tap dance around the room use a bunch of fancy words.”
But, I changed my mind. If you’re an information junkie, a lifelong learner and/or one of those people who knows you can never get enough good ideas for your athletes, keep reading.
If you’re not really into paying for good information, that’s cool, but this email isn’t for you.
I was never much of a Boyle fan until I got Functional Strength Coach 3. But, once I got it I realized it covered a lot more than weight room stuff. And I realized I needed to spend more time studying coaches who weren’t track and field people.
And if you look at my program, you’ll see a clear influence from Boyle’s info, especially in my warmups, my mobility work and my weight room exercise selection.
Strength training is an area of relative weakness for me. And there really isn’t much good information on strength training in the world of track and field, especially if you’re not working at the elite levels.
And I am not.
So here is what I think you may learn from Functional Strength Coach 4.0 based on what I learned. If you already have all this mastered, well then I guess you don’t need it. And don’t let the fact that he’s not a ‘track guy’ affect you. In my opinion, that would be a mistake.
1. You probably don’t have the resources to do an FMS (Functional Movement Screen) with all your athletes, but once you watch FSC4 you’ll see that may not be doing a great job of identifying postural and mechanical deficiencies. Or understanding why athletes can’t do certain things no matter how hard they try. And it’ll be hard for you to go back to practice doing the same drills and exercises for your warm up and mobility work. FSC4 will give you ideas on which exercise progressions and regressions you can use to fix many of the issues your kids show up with because, well, we both know they’re not doing athletic development in their other sports.
2. After you see him talk about foam rolling and see how he works it into his programs, it will be hard for you to start a practice without doing it or hear your athletes complain about being sore and not feel guilty that you’re basically ignoring simple stuff that would help improve muscle function.
3. After you see him talk about ankle mobility (and, while we’re at it, hip mobility), you’ll realize that shin splints are largely a function of poor program design and when your kids complain about them, it’s really your fault. FSC4 will help eliminate that curse.
4. After he goes over the ‘joint by joint approach’, you’ll realize that hamstring issues are more about glutes and less about hamstrings, that quad issues are more about hip flexors and less about quads (rectus femoris, more accurately), that knee pain is probably an ankle or hip mobility issue, not a knee issue, that low back pain isn’t about the lower back, but….you get the idea.
FSC4 will show you what you need to add to your program, individually and globally, to, first and foremost, reduce injury and secondarily improve performance.
5. After you watch the strength programming section you’ll realize that most of your athletes should probably be goblet squatting, not back squatting or even front squatting. That you should be doing more single leg work than you’re doing, but that your single leg progressions are probably too complicated for your athletes’ current level of ability (lunges are not a beginner exercise). That you have an imbalance in the amount of hip dominant vs knee dominant work you’re doing. And that you don’t have enough regressions and progressions for each movement pattern you use. But, FSC4 will definitely fix that.
Within all these areas, Boyle shows exactly what he does, why he does it and how he progresses and regresses everything based on ability.
Bottom line:
You will get better results with your track and field athletes after you implement what you learn in Functional Strength Coach 4.0.
So, if you’re in the market for an upgrade to your biomotor programming system/approach, it is a worthwhile investment.
Check out Functional Strength Coach 4.0.
Of course, if you have questions about whether it is a good fit for you, I’ll be glad to answer them.
Good luck!
-Latif Thomas
P.S. You may be asking, “What’s the difference between Functional Strength Coach 3 and Functional Strength Coach 4?”
Here is what Coach Boyle said:
“The major way FSC4 is different than FSC3 (and 1 and 2) is that it is part of my continued attempt to keep everyone current on what we presently do. The FSC series is really an evolutionary process. I learn and then the viewers learn with me. If you look at my books you see the evolution. You can read one and then the next and not find them repetitive.”
Grab your copy of FSC4 now here -> Mike Boyle’s Functional Strength Coach 4.0.
