The Joe Kenn Experience

elitefts™ Sunday Edition

NSCA National Conference, Las Vegas (July 2014) — I had an epiphany at the NSCA National Conference. It was the first NSCA that I had attended in over 12 years. The first session I attended was the Joe Kenn pre-conference symposium on the tier strength training system. I bumped into an old buddy of mine and former strength and conditioning coach for the Houston Rockets, Daryl Eto. We hadn't seen each other for 12 years but picked up the threads of a conversation we had had way back then as if it were yesterday. It turns out that he's friends with Coach Kenn, so I was able to meet the man himself.

I know that I'm preaching to the choir, but Kenn's seminar, which seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, was remarkable. They say that if you want to get the best information about how to train speed, talk to a track coach. If you want to know how to get strong, talk to an Olympic lifting coach or a powerlifting coach and then apply it back to your sport. If you want to be the best strength and conditioning coach you can be, go to the NSCA Conference and listen to Joe Kenn speak. He just makes so much sense in his approach that I've applied his ideas to an audit of my own programming and have started to make some changes based on his information.

He talked about going hard in the fourth quarter. It's relatively easy in the first quarter because you're all pumped up and ready to blast away at the line from either side. It parallels what Wayne Bennett, a legend of Rugby League coaching in Australia, says. Bennett wants players to go hard over the last three steps and often won't sign someone who he sees cheating on a test and not finishing those last three steps. The first three are the easy ones—getting off the line and meeting the opposition before they get over the advantage line. It's the last three steps that are the toughest because these are the ones that often end in collisions. This is what Joe Kenn is training by altering the dynamics of programming, including speed-based lifts after strength-based movements, and integrating unilateral movements with multiplanar movements.

After hearing him speak and chatting with him during the trade show over the course of the weekend, I've attempted to trial some of the things he spoke about. I've been amazed at how many of my players couldn't perform a lateral lunge, for example. Because I hadn't programmed much, if any, of this type of training into my own training, it will now become initially a warm-up mobility movement. Then we may attempt loading over time.

So since returning to the Panasonic Rugby team in Japan for our summer training camp, I have had a chance to play around with a few of Joe’s ideas and extend it into not only strength and power but also speed and modified circuit training aspects as well.

The first idea that I had was to move horizontally through Coach Kenn’s template rather than approach it in a vertical fashion. I also analyzed regression and progression from a mean point of the exercise chart that I knew all my players could achieve. Thereby, I challenged all the players to extend past the known and challenge the traditional way that they have been conditioned for so long, which has often been reinforced by people like me who may have become comfortable or, at worst, lazy with the programming dynamics they've been used to.

I like the idea of a horizontal progression for sports where strength isn't the dominant characteristic. In addition, for the player who is metabolically challenged, we still want to target strength gains concurrently with fitness gains. So I took Coach Kenn’s vertical tier system and laid it out as a horizontal circuit moving from left to right with 30- to 45-second rests in between exercises and no more than one minute between sequences. I dropped off exercises if the required number of sets had been achieved.

Here's an example of the total body day:

The idea for this was based on the work that Damian Marsh had done a few years ago. He modified a concept that he had picked up from an article. I then modified his work and came up with the template below, once again moving across but, in this case, adding an exercise to the sequence with each rotation:

My next task was to attempt to align the tier system with another biomotor quality other than strength and power and apply it to speed training. In the speed programs that I often write, there are four major areas that I draw exercises from:

• Acceleration and power
• Footwork and agility
• Maximum velocity
• Plyometrics

As Coach Kenn advises in his books and lectures, start by writing down as many speed related drills and exercises as you can imagine and have available to you and that you're able to teach proficiently. From there, categorize them into one of the four areas mentioned above and then prioritize them into a sequence based around the ordering of the movements from most productive to least productive. I used five major movements in each of the four categories above (see below).

The speed “tiering” is in its initial development. The sets, reps, and distances are all specifically inherent to the phase of training and also to the “art" of the trainer to ensure that there is adequate stimulation based around the complete training integration of strength, power, conditioning, and game training if in-season. This could also be performed using either a straights sets approach (doing all the sets for the first exercise before moving on to the next exercise) or as a circuit approach (doing a set of each of the five exercises in sequences before starting the sequence of exercises again).

The inspiration to adapt the tier system to speed came from talking with Joe Kenn, but it went deeper than that. It was also an attempt to honor a dear friend and former assistant of mine, Luke Thornley, who tragically took his life back in 2010. As I said in my ebook, "Luke, well my friend, we will never know how your story would have turned out. You left us far too early. You would bring extraordinary presence into the gym every day and a generation of the finest rugby players in New Zealand owe you a debt of gratitude for the work you did with them.”

Here's a copy of Kenn's work on speed/neural primers, which I've used very frequently in the training of my players:

I would like to thank Joe Kenn for his permission to publish these ideas around his initial work. If you haven't visited his website, get on it. It will change the way you think.