Coach Bob King (01:11):
Well, the thing you have to keep in mind is the language you're using is this, is this footwork drill good for what, what did you just say? Footwork? So footwork is footwork. And what I mean by that is there are only so many ways to shuffle run forward, backpedal crossover. And that's pretty much about what you're going to do in sports. Some of those are modified with a shuffling, might be a little choppier in a circumstance, a running strides vary for different circumstances, but they all go from sport to sport. So footwork is footwork. If you see a lot of stuff in the early days, it was done by football players. I don't know if they were pioneering drills or whatnot. They were just kind of left alone because that's football. Well, what we've done over time is learn how sports cross apply.
Coach Bob King (01:56):
Some general examples, court, sports, you know, basketball, volleyball, tennis. They have a lot of similar footwork patterns. So certain drills would be better for them in larger quantities. Everybody learns how to become a sprinter so they can run fast, train fast, then be fast on their field of play. Now, for example, in the current question is we learned when I was with the Cowboys and Mavericks, working with them at the same time, the big men in the backcourt or in the frontcourt of basketball, the seven-foot or six, nine, and over guys, their footwork was very similar to the offensive linemen of a football team, because it was very short space. And we always talk about quickness, his speed and his sprinting, or speed in a short space. So we want everybody to be quick and fast.
Coach Bob King (02:46):
Therefore, if you have a drill that does something to improve your foot speed is good for your short period. That can be any of the devices. We use ladders hurdles, certain cable drills. So the footwork is going to be used in various quantities in a sport back to the offensive lineman is I was told by some of my big offensive linemen in offseason training when we had to do drills that were 10, 15, 20 yards, they wonder why, why do I have to do this? I only have to go three steps. The same thing with the, you know, centers and basketball. They're just working around that lane area. So why do I have to run far? I only have to go three steps. Well, we want you to be fast and explosive in three steps. If steps one and two are good, everything else will be taken care of back to, therefore, if you want to be fashioned your sport, if you want to be quick in your sport, you will cross apply anything that you can get your hands on to help you teach your feet to be quicker and faster.
Coach Bob King (03:47):
And especially in a small space. Sprinting's one thing. Quickness is another. So if you're looking
Coach Bob King (04:20):
That's a great question because we've always run into that. What we want to always do is be weatherproof. So if an outdoor sport has climate issues and doesn't have a specific indoor facility go take it indoors. And to kind of detail this a little bit more, the foot patterns tend to change a little bit. So what that means is a shuffle step is they call it, you know, you'll hear slide and you want to be careful with that because when they, when they say slide athletes, they translate that into just a big, long step or one foot reaches out. And the other foot drags behind. It's never like that. The feet are always quick and light. And with a field sport going indoors, you can actually work a little quicker because the surface is a little more sticky, a little more it's I'm going to say friendly for the abrupt change of direction, so that can help train the nervous system, the muscles to be reacting faster on that type of surface and transfer that onto the field. So it's not a bad transition or a part-time situation at all. Reminds
Coach Bob King (06:16):
And there are several things that go into the application here. And one of them is if you're doing a showcase combine or whatnot you want to get that practice on the surface. You're going to be on, of course. And the turf you're alluding to is that old school turf that had no, it was just really a nylon carpet. And so there was no cushion, I mean, really any cushion or death to it. And so it made a hard transition to the grasp, which has a lot of giving. And if it's even moist is going to just come out from under you, the answer to your point is you have to learn how the mechanics have changed the direction of work, and they will cross apply to all the surfaces. And so briefly stating it, when you stop, we always say squat, when you stop, that means to bend your knees, drop your hips.
Coach Bob King (07:00):
The other part of the equation is to keep your feet apart and kind of picture it where your feet are wide enough, that you're a line from your hip bone down to your knees will be inside the knees. So it's a, it's one long parallel line from both hip bones to the ground inside your knees. So basically your hips are between your knees. And so if you do that, you have a better chance of being stable and more balanced in limiting the S the slipping, anytime your feet, get too close together, you're going down the surfaces a little slick, or is very free, very forgiving. So make sure you squat, when you stop feet apart, hips between your knees and that's the best starting mechanic for a change of direction training. Now, you don't get that situation in sports very often because the game is moving so fast and the reactions are abrupt, but that's how you want to train it. So your body has that in its system in those how to do it correctly, anytime, anywhere, any place.
Coach Bob King (08:41):
You can redefine things, however, you want it. Sport-Specific position-specific. Let's just call this needs specific. What do they need? For example, I do not have wide receivers doing a lot of shuffling drills if they're shuffling something's wrong and they're probably not going to play because they're, they're running and breaking and sprinting. So it's, it's really a sports position need. And so, again, back to the office of alignment, my favorite group, you have a group of guys that need to be fast in a short space and lateral in a short amount of time, just a quick burst of a step. So make sure that you understand what is the position need. And listen, it's not a matter of just grouping them by sport at all. So you know, like say the basketball player, big men in the office and have worked together just fine in our overall summer program in winter program, we took all our athletes and just lined them up because we had such a diverse well, first we had a diverse population of athletes.
Coach Bob King (09:39):
Secondly, we had a very diversified training program where we operated on themes. So we didn't just do one thing every day over and over in, in, but we did it in varying amounts. The ladder was always an extended warmup. I would call it whether it was a full ladder or half a ladder. The number of reps was dependent upon the theme of the day. So the athlete needs to be exposed to a lot of different types of movement for a couple of reasons. Number one, if you're in the younger levels, you do not know how you're going to evolve, grow, change, interest, and go from sports to sports. Especially when we talk high school girls go from volleyball to basketball, to tennis or softball guys go from football to basketball or wrestling to track and field and baseball. So there's a lot of need to have a lot of different foot patterns in your repertoire because you change and go from sport to sport. But since you're going to sprint shuffling backpedal, and most of them you're going to be fine.
Coach Bob King (11:03):
I mean, that's a great question and I'm trying to get a 25 or word list answer, but I don't think I have one because we have taken that and intricately woven it into our program. And I know that sounds pretty grandiose, but let me put it to you like this, the 5, 10, 5 is a great lateral drill for athletes in sports that have lateral movement. That's the end of the story. That's a great drill. And we recognize that. So we use it quite a bit now because it's such a good drill. We've created little gadget drills to help the conditioning aspect. And let me make a parent medical statement change. The direction is hardest on the legs. So when we do change the direction days, we don't have a heavy conditioning period after that, because we're going to get you during the actual workout. So for example, back to the 5, 10, 5, we're looking at what we call the super shuttle, where we have the athletes do the five, five, which is run five, sprint 10, sprint back five.
Coach Bob King (11:57):
And then we have them try to jog to the finish of the 5, 10, 5 perimeters, turn around, walk to the middle and take off again and do five in a row. So basically we're going to have you do a hundred yards in a 10-yard space, and that is a great workout. Not only is it a great workout, but it also works on the principles. We talked about feet apart, hip feet apart, knees bent his between your knees. And we do that five times. So we get a series of change directions on both legs going both directions, and we may do two or three sets of those. So if we can do two to 300 yards in a 10-yard space, you're going to have a good explosive workout, change, a direction, workout, and conditioning workout. And that's just an example of one of, of many of our change of direction drills that we have used to get a two for one. And this is what we talk about all the time, coaches, you know, buyback time you do these drills, you don't have to spend another 10 or 15 minutes. He ended the practice by doing a conditioning period. We're going to get it to you right in, right at prime time during the middle of the workout, you know, we're covering some
Coach Bob King (13:51):
This is a critically important question because the most common error is to stack training elements on top of each other. So I have a 5, 10, 5, I have a giant shuttle ever general metabolic. I have my favorite drill. I have my, well, I have this drill too. And so we start stacking them on top of each other and we're just headed down the road to over-training. The beauty of that is if you will just take time to look at your favorite drill and what does it look like that we have? And if you're, you know, if I'm blessed enough that you will take king sports training and use it, you will be able to look at drills and see compatibility. And there's, it doesn't take much variation to make it different. So for example, we talk all the time about the 5, 10, 5, our athletes were so proficient at it over years that we had to come up with we got to figure this out.
Coach Bob King (14:39):
We got to shake this up a little bit. Well, we went to something called the stagger drill. We call it arhythmic. In other words, 5, 10, 5 is a nice, smooth pattern, but we did the staggered drill. We moved one cone into steps. So we, now we have a 5, 8, 3 pattern. And so it was very rhythmic. It's very abrupt. And so we were able to change that drill. So there's a, there's a variation. It may be, maybe you have something like that, swap those out. That way. Your athletes get a rotation of drills. You don't have to stack everything into one workout, but say, I'm going to do four reps of a 5, 10, 5 today. And the next time I'm going to do the four reps of the Smith special, which is my favorite drill. If that's what you have and you just rotate them through. So you may have a menu of, let's say 12 drills. Each workout has six drills in each workout. So the first week one through six next week, three through eight, and so forth. And so on where the drills are rotating in and out, and the athletes get a lot of work, but they don't get so proficient that it now becomes old and moldy and they're not developing anymore. So just changing variation is good in the right amounts, in the right place.
Aaron King (15:50):
All right. That's a great, great spot to wrap it right there because that'll take us into our next topic for the next episode where we will discuss how many do I do have extra for extra results and that's coming up next time. But if there are any questions you can reach out to us coach Bob king on Instagram. And then we got him rocking on Tik TOK as well for these podcast topics. And then, of course, YouTube. And then you check me out on YouTube and Instagram at DeepSnap, and I'll be rocking on tick tock, tick tock here soon at ShortSnap. But if you have any questions, just let us know and we'll talk to you next time.
