Our guest today is Patrick Coyne, coach and owner of Black Sheep Performance in Cincinnati, Ohio. Pat started helping clients of all levels reach their fullest potential after his career as a 4-star high school football recruit ended in college due to injury. Pat started Black Sheep Performance in 2018 on the side of a house in Cincinnati, OH. Within 3 years BSP organically outgrew itself, working from renting gym space, to a barn, to a state of the art 11,000 sq. foot training facility.
Pat has mentored under some of the top coaches in the nation, is a progressive thinker, and gets great results with his clients in his fast-growing business. When I moved back to Ohio in July, I connected with Pat shortly thereafter and have gotten several training sessions and conversations in with him since then. Pat has a training style that fuses many of the elements I consider essential: A great environment, room for exploration/creativity, competition and reaction, as well as an integration of modern speed training methods, such as those taught by multi-time podcast guest, Adarian Barr.
As such, it was only a matter of time until Pat and I sat down together and recorded a podcast. Two of the big things that Pat and I are both passionate about are being life-long learners and then looking at (and experiencing) the holistic effects of things like the training environment, athlete autonomy/creativity, and the effects of music, rhythm and reactions on performance. On this podcast, Pat and I go into his background as an athlete and coach, his thoughts on structured vs. unstructured/open training, his progressions on speed training, rhythm, timing, how he challenges athletes on a holistic level, and some deeper discussion on the evolution of the human/sports performance industry.
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Timestamps and Main Points
5:30 Pat’s medieval gear in his gym, as well as his background as a top-ranked high school quarterback, and his transition into strength and conditioning
11:15 What Pat believes held him back from being successful on the college level after being very successful (and physically fit and gifted) in high school, and what he would tell his younger self from his place now as a coach
16:00 How Pat uses games and a holistic approach to connect dots in his training programs/process
27:40 Ideas on how structured versus unstructured training, as well as the importance of being in the moment without expectations, in the training setting
46:50 How Pat’s speed training process has changed over his years as a coach
54:15 A chat on rhythm and timing in coaching speed and athletic movement, as well as using musical beats to time up various training movements
1:04.00 What Pat sees as the evolving purpose of the profession of a strength coach and the deeper purposes of training and coaching in the physical realm
1:14.15 Three things that go into Pat’s mind before each training session that tell him “this is what will make a great session”
“(To my younger self) I would go and spend time doing everything that I didn’t want to do”
“You have these training sessions which are comfortable and build people up, and it’s very ego driven to where you have your athletes feeling to where they crushed the day, and there is truth in that. But.. how uncomfortable did you make your athletes in a healthy way, in a safe environment, to where they could fail, to where you could see how resilient that athlete is becoming”
“I want to see the full human being first, then we can smack the weights”
“I feel like you make the most progress when you are having fun… why does a kid make progress so fast. Why do we throw that out when we are working with a pro athlete?”
“They may have got their asses kicked,