324: Jarod Burton on Rethinking Work Capacity, Over-Training, and Adaptation Through the Lens of ...

Today’s episode features Jarod Burton.  Jarod is a human performance specialist, chiropractic student, and health coach.  He got his coaching start working with Brady Volmering of DAC baseball, and has spent recent years coaching, consulting and running educational courses in the private sector.  Jarod focuses on engaging all aspects of an athlete’s being, providing the knowledge for the individual to thrive in their domain.

In the world of coaching and human performance, the road to success is often thought of on the level of do “A”, in “B” amount, so you can accomplish “C”.  The focus on typically on numbers, exercises, and (often) a linear cueing process for those said movements.  We are so quick to judge programs entirely based on numbers and exercises.

What we don’t consider often enough is the complex factors surrounding the volume that is administered.  There are elite athletes who have won gold medals and set world records who do a lot of volume that would “crush” other athletes (think the athletes that survived the Soviet or Bulgarian training systems, or modern-day athletes, such as Karsten Warholm, the 400m hurdle world record holder).  We need to ask ourselves, “what is the difference, or elements, that allowed the athlete to tolerate that?”.  Is it that their musculo-skeletal system was somehow just “better” than the other trainees, or are there other additional elements to consider?  The more elite coaches I’ve had the opportunity to work with, the more I realize that good coaches intuitively key into the mental and emotional state of the athlete, as well as the physiological management.

On today’s podcast, Jarod chats on managing high training volumes, work capacity dynamics, the critical role of boredom/interest in training, athlete self-discovery, and much more.  This is a podcast that causes you to ask questions, and gives us a new and interesting perspective on the dynamics of training.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

4:10 – The nature of Jarod’s training experiment, where he only performed extreme iso holds and dunking (in his quest for a higher vertical jump)

9:45 – Thoughts on the process of assessing athletes, and drawing out physical and emotional weak-points

12:15 – How “obsessive” or “unreasonable” training, such as bounding every day, could actually be a powerful performance tool, and how we actually classify fatigue in training

28:45 – How to manage higher volume training so athletes don’t get injured or decrease their performance

42:30 – The role of self-discovery and creativity in athletic performance training

45:36 – Thoughts on mixing game like activities with specific training outputs (such as a 10m fly or dunking a basketball)

57:28 – Mental associations, boredom/interest, and training principles

1:05:55 – Jarod’s thoughts on the “Easy Strength” mentality on weights and barbell training



“As I was holding the isometrics, I was creating the reality of: “what would it feel like as I dunk””

“How do you meet an athlete where you are at in their current state; how do you expose them, and how do you draw out they creativity within them”

“The more awareness they have, the more ability they have to create.  The goal is for them to be the captain of their own ship”

“The amount of volume that kids or athletes experience in a game is 5 to 10 times the amount of actual stimulus that we even give them in the training aspect; I follow along with the idea that the training must be more intense and strenuous than the actual activity itself”

“The biggest thing, regardless of how you train,