Our guest today is Bobby Stroupe, founder and president of Athlete Performance Enhancement Center (APEC). Bobby has directed human performance systems for nearly 20 years. His coaching ranges from youth athletes to some of the top names in multiple professional sports, including first round picks, as well as Super Bowl and World Series champions. Bobby is well-known for his work in the physical preparation realm of Patrick Mahomes, quarterback of the recent Superbowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs.
After doing 235 episodes of this podcast, and opening up my eyes to more and more of the performance space, I’m always excited to find those coaches who are spearheading creative and effective training methods in athletic performance transfer. When I recently watched Bobby Stroupe’s presentation at the recent “Track Football Consortium” regarding his methods in working with Patrick Mahomes, I was like a kid in a candy shop, viewing training methods that replicated many time and space requirements of sport play without being mechanical or contrived.
Bobby is not only a holistic and open minded coach, but he is also an incredibly thorough and detailed thinker. There are so many points of carry-over in what Bobby does, I believe that studying his work is essential if we are to reach the point of getting our training to truly transfer to the field of play. Bobby achieves this transfer in a way that still pays homage to traditional principles of force development and human performance, but is able to add in the tri-planar and chaotic nature of what athletes will encounter in sport.
On today’s podcast, Bobby gets into a variety of his “unorthodox” training methods, including locomotion complexes, tri-planar plyometrics and strength training, complex training, long-term development, and athlete autonomy. Again, with the interest of transfer to sport in mind, any aspiring coach should be familiar with the work of Bobby Stroupe and Team APEC.
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Timestamps and Main Points
6:15 What Bobby and I have learned about coaching from being fathers of young children
11:00 Bobby’s take on working with athletes from a young age, and how his team approaches long term athletic development
21:05 Bobby’s thoughts on being able to follow elite athletes for an extended period of time, as many professional athletes have been working at APEC since they were quite young
23:25 How human locomotion is taught using “locomotion complexes”, triplanar and scalar breakdowns of basic motions such as skips, caraocas, and gallops
36:40 Multiplanar jumps and how Bobby will complex these movements in with more static strength training means
46:35 Using different body alignments in strength training movements, as well as Bobby’s work with lunge matrixes using different foot positions
56:26 Bobby’s background with therapeutic education, and how that has impacted his work as a strength/physical preparation coach
1:04:00 Bobby’s take on the efficacy of technology for training athletes
“What we want kids to say is, APEC is so fun we went up there and played for an hour and I wish I could come every day”
“If someone comes up and tells us what we want them to do with their kid, we tell them that generally, it’s not a good fit”
“Typically, middle school, with what we do, the girls are fairly dominant by the time they are in 7th grade”
“We want to educate the individual on what makes them unique, what are their gifts?”
“You will not find more variance than (coaching 40 middle school kids in one session) that in any training situation”
“The number one rule of locomotion is “you do not restrict an athlete in space””
“There’s no better way to (calibrate) than letting the body move through space on its’ own with tension relationships”
“I’ve even incorporated locomotion between heavy strength sets to make sure that the body applies those types of things to movement, which is our priority”
“If you have an athlete who can do the caraoca pattern forwards and backwards (backwards is very difficult) and increase the circumference of the space they are taking up, that is a highly coordinated athlete that is going to do special things in space”
“Anything that you can do with a kid that’s effective, is going to be effective for a professional athlete. But anything you do with a professional athlete is not going to be effective for a kid. So if there’s something you believe in that’s in your core curriculum for youth development, then you have to make sure your professional athletes get some exposure to that, because at your core, you are a human being”
“If I’m going to take the time to do something that’s more human performance based, but not practical in a game, then I’m always going to cross it with something that is more multi-dimension