Off-Season Training Secrets with Master Strength Coach Clance Laylor
Jeremy: Welcome to another episode of Dominate Discussions today. Today we’re going to change a little bit because over the course of the last few episodes, you guys have been asking tons of questions about training, about nutrition.
So we’ve gathered all that today. We’re going to have Master Coach Clance answer a lot of these questions.
Ready?
Clance: Ready? Awesome. I was born ready, baby.
Jeremy: So today, we’ve got a lot of questions about off-season training and you know that right now, hockey, volleyball, these, you know, these athletes are coming into off-season training, so they want to know this information.
Clance: Sounds good.
Jeremy: Let’s get right into it. All right. What is the minimum amount of days a week that you should be training in order to get results?
Clance: Based on my experience, a minimum of four days, you should be training intensely. Three days in terms of specificity, in terms of your sport, whatever skill work that you need to do. So to be clear, you should be training seven days a week, but in terms of strength training, speed work, so on and so forth, four days a week.
That’s how you want to structure your training. And for us, we like to structure the seven days a week in athletes, we emphasize for them to work on their weak points, things that they need to level up, you know, hockey guys, it could be, you know, stick-handling, so-and-so forth.
For football guys, you know, so wide receiver, you know, catch the ball, snapper, long snaps. So you get the point, just work on those weak points on your off days, out of the gym. Or you can double up, you know, have two or three sessions a day where you lift in the morning and work on your skill work in the afternoon.
Jeremy: So it’s okay to train like five days, six days a week.
Clance: Every day is okay to train. I liked our athletes to train every day, but in terms of specific lifting, running, relatively intense work, four days a week.
Jeremy: What time of the day is better for training? Morning, afternoon, evening?
Clance: That’s a hard question. The best time to train where your body wakes up, you should be ready to go at about 10 AM, 10 to 11 AM. And that’s when we have most of our elite athletes in pros, etc, to train at 10 AM. That’s when your body, you know, is ready to go. Some people are very, they’re early birds. They like to get in early.
Some people, they don’t work, wake up until noon, but in general, on average, you’re ready to go about 10 AM in the morning. So I find that’s the most optimal time. You know, you get the best out of your sessions.
Jeremy: Someone asked the importance of vertical jump.
Clance: Vertical jump is just an indicator. Okay. Hey, I can express power quickly, you know, so I short my muscles like I can express my power rate of force development very fast. So that is a very indicator for a powerful athlete, but you can be powerful, but you can be weak. So if I have a super powerful athlete, I know I need to work on strength and that will actually help his power because power is one of the hardest attributes for athletes to develop.
So when an athlete is powerful, that’s why a lot of teams check vertical jump because when you can express power, you’re relatively fast. You’re explosive. You’re quick. So you have the qualities or the proudest to be a good athlete.
Jeremy: I mean, the common thing is people think that they need to lift and be super strong in order to express that explosive power. Is that true?
Clance: That is incorrect. You do want a baseline strength. Research has shown double bodyweight back squat will translate to the optimal rate of force development. That’s not always the case, but it’s good to have those measures. We found the, what we’ve trained, get our athletes to double bodyweight back squat, they have a better ability to express better rate of force development, better power. So that is like the holy grail basically in terms of research, based on experiment athletes, but that’s not all case.
So you have some athletes that are not that strong, but they’re very powerful, very quick. And what we call is very efficient, elastic components like tendons and ligaments, right? And now you get them strong. Their rate of force development goes up—power. So to be clear, strength is important. If you overdo strength, you get slow and you don’t want to get slow. So that’s why it’s a very inverse relationship. They always want to pay attention to athletes, get too strong, they tend to get too slow.
Jeremy: One viewer asked, as a football athlete, how do I get off the line faster? What exercise does this?
Clance: Hands down—snatch and clean helps you express power, helps you express rate of force development. That helps you express first step. There’s a very popular saying about this great strength, track coach Bo Schembechler, and he says: You back squat for the start. So back squatting is important. And then you clean for the first 10 and then the rest is sprinting.
Okay. So if you break that down, back squat helps you overcome your body weight. That’s why it’s very important to squat, double your bodyweight. Okay. If you’re 300 pounds, try to squat 600 pounds. That’s 272 kilos. Bottom line.
Jeremy: Full range, of course.
Clance: Full range. All right. Ass-to-grass. Okay. Then you try to clean. Okay. Clean 1.4, 1.5 times that weight. Okay. That is a great formula for amazing rate of force development for power—knockout power. Okay. So getting off that line fast, working out those numbers will help you.
Jeremy: Just to be clear when you say clean 1.5 times, if he was a 300 pound, you’re essentially saying cleaning 450 pounds?
Clance: Yes. Right? So that 450 pounds. So saying that’s a big dude, right. But so when I say 1.5, two 1.5. So you can, you know, hey, you have guys cleaning 400 pounds, fast, quick, amazing, very explosive. So those are the numbers you work up to. 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4, you can see, so don’t get it twisted. There are guys that are actually cleaning that much weight.
Jeremy: So someone asked, what is periodization and how is that applied to training?
Clance: So periodization, the first book I read was by Tudor Bompa was a famous Eastern-European strength coach or sports scientist, and there are different methods of periodization. But the most common periodization is you’re planning a whole cycle, it’s gonna be a six months cycle or annual cycle or a year or a multi-cycle. Be one, two, or three years you’re planning for.
Breaking it down you go block by block, you go by a month block or a three-week block and say, you would have phase one, which is GPP which they call General Physical Preparation. Just get into the bodywork so that the work is not too specific. You basically get into shape so that may last for, depending on the periodization model, could be last for a month, it could last for three weeks. Or then you go into phase two.
Jeremy: What do you prefer? Like a month, three weeks. Is there like-
Clance: It depends on the athlete. It depends. The more advanced the athlete is, you shorten the phases. Like I have athletes that I change their periodization every week. So every week they’re doing something different. I have other athletes in general because of, you know, mental, like boredom and so on and so forth. Within our system, we don’t do the, what we call, the general periodization model. Ours is different, but for the periodization model, you will focus on basically one quality at a time. So that’s the difference between the periodization model and our model.
Our model is something like a conjugate model. We work on all different abilities and qualities within one block. Okay. So, periodization model, we’ll separate those blocks. So first I’ll get back to GPP (General Physical Preparation). Second phase, three to four weeks of hypertrophy. Third phase would be, could be strength. Fourth phase could be power. Right? Then it could be fifth phase, specialization. And then they will come back.
The problem I found with that model is every time you move on to a new phase, you lose the quality. That’s why I like the, what we call the conjugated, the conjugate model where I think it was very, it was popularized in powerlifting by Louie Simmons. But the conjugate model is you work on all the qualities in every block. Okay. Whatever. So power, speed, strength, and you keep bringing those qualities with you in every block. Okay.
Jeremy: So you kind of focus on a little bit more on a certain block, but you still do all the other qualities.
Clance: You still doing all the other qualities. Right? Touch your qualities. So it depends. So for example, for us, we start off with structural balance, which is even though we’re working on structural balance, we’re still working on rate of force development from day one. Okay. We’re working on strength from day one. We’re working on hypertrophy from day one. Right? So even though the weight is low, the load is low. Only thing we don’t work on is speed, normally in day one. Okay. Then the second phase is when we start AAS one where we work on strength, we work on power, work on hypertrophy, and some athletes could be like more hypertrophy than others. So hypertrophy means like getting, you know, putting on some size and so on and so forth, but power. And then we start our sprinting and then we keep those.
So every phase we pretty much work on power, speed, sprinting. And then, you know, for hockey or football, we start on strongman, strongman for six weeks. So even though we went through another phase, we’re still doing more power work, heavier lifting, we’re doing speed. We’re doing contrast training and we’re doing conditioning. You see how all that work is. But the periodization model, the old model wouldn’t allow, that wasn’t part of the and I found with the model that I use in my experience, far better results.
Jeremy: For those that don’t know what AAS means, it actually means Athlete Activation System. And it’s a system that you developed for many, many years. And this is a system that you actually use at the gym.
Clance: A hundred percent. This is a primary system we use for all athletes.
Jeremy: Someone asked, is unilateral work useful and how do I use them in my training?
Clance: Unilateral work is useful and the way we use it is for mobility, flexibility, and obviously, leg strength differences in the, you know, in the different legs. So on the biggest thing, we do tons of split squats, we like that to prevent groin injuries, especially with hockey players, work on mobility, flexibility in the ankle, hips, knee, and get them more flexible and so on and so forth.
So we use that a lot in terms of our structural balance phase and depending on the athlete, if they need more unilateral work, we will continue doing the unilateral work through many different phases. So phase two, phase three.
What I don’t like and drives me crazy is these clowns walk around using all these unilateral work for getting athletes strong, which to me does not make any sense and it does not work. You need to use both legs. Why do you use more weight? Why to activate higher threshold motor units?
The body is very smart. Okay. When you skate, you run, you know, they say, Oh, okay, because I run on one, only one leg hits the ground. I should do one legged pistol squats, and this and that.
And they’re all out of position. The ankle gets tight and it just looks horrible in terms of mobility, flexibility, and getting stronger. Okay. So you actually doing a lot of harm to doing incorrect unilateral work.
So for us, we like step-ups, like Russian step-ups and so on and so forth. But we do a lot of squats, bilateral squats, double leg squats, double leg cleans, and stuff like snatches. But we do not do all of these pistols and, you know, unilateral work in terms of, we love lunges. We do a lot of lunges. Lunges are great. Drop lunges are great and that is more for conditioning, more for flexibility. A little bit of strength, but if you want to get strong, you squat. Bar none. Okay. There’s no replacement.
Jeremy: What is the difference between strength-speed and speed-strength, and why is that important when it comes to training?
Clance: Strength-speed is you can use a higher rate, higher percentage of your max to, you know, so 70% and above is classified strength-speed, or say 60% and above. Speed-strength is like 40%, 50 and below down to like 30, 20%. And it’s just basically rate of force development, high-velocity work.
It’s important to use speed-strength a lot because at the end of the day, you want your athletes to be quicker, and that’s one of the tricks in terms of getting our athletes to have quick feet, be very explosive. From day one, utilizing hip snatch, that’s a way with the bar and you know, athletes will use up to 40 kilos, which is 88 pounds or some more advanced we’ll use 50 kilos, which is, and a hundred and two pounds. And they’ll do hip snatches. And we typically prescribe three sets of two to three sets of six, very fast, very explosive.
If you’ll hear me screaming speed, speed, speed, that is strength-speed, because that is a low percentage of weight, moving that weight very fast. So athlete using the bar, whether it’s a female using a 15-kilo bar, a male using the 20-kilo bar, moving that weight very fast is key for speed strength. Now, as they start going heavier in their snatches and in their cleans and so on and so forth, they start getting into that strength-speed, quality. So marrying the two is key to have an all-around athlete. Right?
You want to because what happens is you have like velocity disciples that just everything they do is a high-velocity, but they’re weak. Right? So they encounter some opposing force that they need to apply some strength and some speed. And they can’t. So they just get blown away. Right? So marrying that two is key in terms of, if you’re thinking contact sport, you’re thinking hockey, you’re thinking football and so on and so forth, and also managing your own body weight. Okay.
So if you really analyze our programming, we use speed-strength every day and strength-speed every day because our athletes get better. They’re normally working anywhere from 62 up to 90% of their max as frequently as possible.
Jeremy: Got it.
Clance: Makes sense?
Jeremy: Makes sense. Makes sense. I mean, right now we’re in the middle of a pandemic, right? And then you talk about using bars and weights and all that kind of stuff. What about the people at home? What can they do?
Clance: Pushups, sit-ups, chin-ups, hills, stairs, jumping jacks, burpees. There’s no excuse to do something like freaking get an old tire, get a piece of rope, order from home Depot and pull it down the street. I was doing sleds in front of my house yesterday. You know what I mean? So I don’t care who’s laughing. There’s always something to do. Okay. I know the parks were cut off. You couldn’t use the parks, but now there’s no excuse.
I have athletes who are doing Hills. I just got a video this morning of one of my football players where the gyms are closed. He’s doing hill work. You run up the hill, do some pushups, sit-ups, run back down the hill, do some sort of some pushups, jump.
Jeremy: How much of that do you need to do in order to, can you replicate that result that you get from training in a facility?
Clance: No. Like, no, but you can be conditioned and there’s no reason to be strong. I’ve been, I’m a pushup. I’ve been doing pushups for years and I just simply do a lot of pushups and one of my coaches and I seen him utilizing what we call these one, two, three, or pause pushups. Basically time under tension pushups. Amazing for getting you strong. Right? It’s just something that just slipped me over years. I use time under tension with weights and so on and so forth, but it’s all kinds of just mastering your bodyweight is what I’m trying to say.
I feel that most people are not doing, I believe it should be a prerequisite mashing your bodyweight before you even start touching weights. You like, you know, you should at least be able to knock out 50 push-ups before you start using dumbbells, you know, or you should at least be able to do 12 chin-ups before you start doing chin-ups.
I’m not joking before you start doing pulls. I’m not joking. Like those are the goals. Like those are, should be the primary objectives. So when I hear that, Oh, I don’t have any weights. I don’t have any. It kind of is just laziness. Just do something, get up and do something, just exercise. And I know, just try to feel good, you know, set for example for pushups, chin-ups, do them, do them every day. For hill work, structure it two or three times a week.
For example, get yourself, you know, start maybe once a week, then you build a twice a week, then maybe three times a week. You’ll be amazed at what kind of condition you get in if you just get out and do it. And change is good.
Jeremy: Alright. Someone wrote, I noticed your athletes do a lot of sprint work. Do you do that before or after working out and why?
Clance: We do our sprint work after we lift jumping then we sprint that’s our structure. Why? Because we’re activating higher threshold motor units. Those threshold motor units are ready. They’re awake, they’re firing, ready to go, and then we do our sprint work. Over the years I found that that delivers the best results. I didn’t invent it. I first learned about it by this famous track coach, his name was Carlos Lopez, who in turn learned it from a famous Italian spring coach back in the day, his name is Victorio something. I can’t remember his last name, but it works. I’ve been using it for many years. It’s tremendous.
Because at the end of the day, most of our athletes, hey, our athletes who come to me to get strong, become more explosive. That’s our specialty. And I found so far nothing beats that even if our track, we’ve had a bobsled guy, he came in national team, put 10 pounds on him, and he was faster. He was very skeptical about doing lifting weights first, but he found that it works. So we lift and then we run. And that’s what we do.
Obviously, if track is your priority, you don’t want to do that. Most of the time, you want to focus on track, but weight training is just a part of the process. We’re a small integral part of the process. So if your priority sport is track, your priority sport is football and so on and so forth, hey, there’s going to be times where you’re just going to run track. Period. And then you lift after. But for us lift first, jump, then sprint. Because it’s a very effective and it’s one of the fastest way to get results immediately.
Jeremy: Especially when, you know-
Clance: We have a limited amount of time. And for me, I’ve been, you know, biggest thing for me is just trying to, everybody wants results now. I want results now. So what are the most effective way to see results as fast as possible? If you follow the system, you’re getting results. Period. The system is a system and anybody we put through it, they get remarkably results.
Jeremy: Someone wrote I’m an older athlete. So I’m going to assume he’s probably like maybe 25, 30 plus maybe 35 plus, right? How do I do strength training? Am I doing the same thing as a younger guys that are up and coming?
Clance: Why not? It’s just different loading, but why not do the same thing? It’s just the volume may be less, it’s just what tolerance can you handle? And you can do the same thing because the same principles are the principles: mobility, flexibility, get stronger, you’ve got to get faster.
It’s just for your age and time, how much work can you handle and, you know, aches and pains and so on and so forth. The problem with older athletes, they have a lot other things going on in life. So stress becomes a factor, you know, paying the bills, mortgage, work, whatever.
Jeremy: Sitting in front of a computer.
Clance: Sitting in front of a computer. So those things that come into factor. So generally we have to cut down the amount of time that they focus on in the gym but, the athletes who don’t have a lot of, the older athletes who, you know, say national team athletes who are a little older and so on and so forth, they’re still in the gym. It’s just normally as the older you get, the volume gets a little lower, but believe it or not, intensity is still higher.
Jeremy: So that leads to the next question is how do you monitor over-training? What is over-training?
Clance: Okay. Over-training is I feel overused, overemphasized. It’s a reality, but what are the biggest things I’ve understood over the years and I was very careful of trying not to overtrain my athletes—I guess the best way to express this is in the story.
I had this athlete, started with me when he was about 14, 13, 14 years old. I was very strict with athletes not doing any type of extra work while they were training, but this athlete would skate before they lift. This athlete would skate after they lift. Obviously, he is a hockey player. Numbers kept going up year after year. You didn’t think I was paying attention, but I was paying attention. I knew what he was doing. And I just seen the numbers don’t lie. And then I started to allow other athletes do the work. So sometimes the textbook doesn’t match the reality. This athlete and many of my athletes have a tremendous work capacity to do work.
Most of the athletes, I train seven days a week. They do something, not in the gym seven days a week, but they’re active seven days a week. Some of the football players, they run hills and so on and so forth. So over-training is something that’s real, but what you have to do is make sure you monitor it because sometimes it, you don’t want to stop training. You come in, you’re extremely tired, start training if you’re training all of a sudden your body just adapts and you’re just hitting some new numbers. You just kind of switching or feeling good, or other days you feel like shit, you just cut the volume, try not to cut the intensity, do as much intensity as you can, and cut the volume.
So my point is you have to fight through that point if you’re tapering for competition. Different. And it’s very difficult. I’m not saying it’s easy to understand like when I’m doing too much. Cause when you’re tired, you don’t want to wake up in the morning, you don’t feel like training. Those are part of the process of actually adaptation.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Clance: So you have to actually overtrain for you get to a new level. If every time you come into the gym and you’re smiling and is everything is hunky-dory and you feel great, dude, you’re not training. Okay. That’s just a fact. And because everybody wants to be, you know, have a great training session all the time, we’re actually having a lot of athletes who are not growing on their training therefore more susceptible to injury, right?
So, it’s not, it, it’s a fine line. It’s not easy. Something that you have to really pay attention to and I know they have all these monitors, all these devices, all these things, and I’ve been paying attention to them. A lot of them they’re wrong because the human body is so complex and the human body can take so much. People don’t understand.
I feel the data and all these technologies has not fully or not even close to understand what the human body can tolerate, adapt, and handle, and that’s what I firmly believe. So to answer your question, sorry, that was a long answer. Over-training is real, but you have to really pay attention to it and really understand it and be careful that you’re not sacrificing progress, sacrificing adaptation, which I feel adaptation is not fully understood and utilized.
Jeremy: So I guess that’s why people, you know, hire a strength coach like yourself to actually see that.
Clance: Yeah. Cause the mind will play tricks on you, man. The mind that says, I don’t want to train or body will play tricks on you. I’m sore, this hurts, and I ache. And the next minute you start lifting, I have a lead athlete soon as they start to de-load or start that’s when their body starts acting up because they’re regressing. Their body’s not used to that. They need that work to actually get him into, you know, they need to keep moving, you know? Cause their body’s functioning. So used to functioning in such a high level. Right. So it’s a very complex thing.
Jeremy: Okay. Well, last question here is a question you always ask all your athletes when you interview them. What does DOMINATE you?
Clance: Dominate means to me, very good question. For me, personally dominate means whatever, like dominate is very personal to me because it’s whatever you want to dominate in life. It could be a good mom, it could be obviously a great athlete and it could be certain things that you want to focus on to dominate.
So for me personally, I have things that I work on, you know, outside the gym and it’s not easy. You go your ups and downs and your ups and downs, and for me is focusing on that thing, whatever that is to you. So for me personally is really mastering a certain craft, like mastering my craft, committing to that mastery, and executing that mastery every day, right? Certain components of my craft every day. And so I focus on things outside of my craft, a minimum of two hours a day, that’s outside of everything.
So a minimum, I focus, everything is locked off on, and I’m in that two hours a day. My goal is to build that to four hours a day obviously when I don’t spend, I’m not spending as much time in the gym and so on and so forth. To me personally, that’s very hard for me. So no distractions, something very hard, that’s mentally challenging. That pushes me cognitively hard for two hours a day.
So that is my, to me when I dominate that and you know, I probably never will, but I will try, so to me, that’s personally fulfilling. A lot of times people think it could be just, you know, you go to the, you want to dominate, don’t get me wrong, I want to dominate competitions. But for me internally, personally is dominating sacrifice, being disciplined, being consistent.
Jeremy: Thank you, you master coach Clance. For you, all you viewers out there, if you got more questions for coach Clance, for future episodes, drop a comment below or DM us on Instagram and we’ll see you next time on Dominate Discussions.
Leave A Comment