Coach Em Up Podcast

Check out Mike on socials! @GBGHoops @mrdoitmoving

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Coach Mike G (Mike Guevara) joins Tim Riley on the Coach Em Up Podcast to break down 11 years of dues-paying before landing consistent pro athlete clients, what it actually takes to train NBA players, and why your rigid linear program is killing your basketball athletes. GBG Hoops founder and elite basketball performance coach, Mike G covers Victoria Azarenka, Jrue Holiday, Reggie Bush, Fred Vanvleet, the New Orleans Pelicans, Achilles injury prevention, and a whole lot more.

Coach Mike G grew up the son of a 20-year Army veteran, and that military upbringing built the foundation for everything he does on the floor. He played slot receiver, nearly pursued PT, and landed in strength and conditioning the way most great coaches do: by coaching teammates before anyone paid him to do it.

He started as an unpaid intern. Eleven years later, he had a consistent working relationship with professional athletes and a passport full of stamps from traveling the WTA tour with Victoria Azarenka. That first break came because she watched him coach a youth group and liked his energy.

From there: training with Reggie Bush, Jrue Holiday hiring him full-time in North Carolina, and a consulting role with the New Orleans Pelicans working alongside Anthony Davis and Rajon Rondo.

On the training side, Mike G gets into basketball performance training in real depth: why maximal strength testing is not worth the risk with NBA athletes, how he uses toe extension and floating heel isometrics for foot and ankle development, why post-game lifting is severely underrated, and how acute-to-chronic workload spikes and the absence of real top-end sprint work are driving the surge in Achilles tendon ruptures across basketball.

For young coaches, he keeps it simple: test every movement on yourself, never bring a bad day to the floor, and keep learning every single day.

Produced by
Q6 Media
https://q6.media

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:28 - Who Is Mike G?
00:05:46 - Football Career, Jumpsoles, and College Days
00:17:28 - Athlete to Performance Coach
00:20:31 - Paying Dues and Career Longevity
00:26:20 - Training Victoria Azarenka
00:34:41 - Training Reggie Bush
00:37:11 - Breaking Into the NBA with Jrue Holiday
00:46:16 - Ego, Mistakes, and Leadership Evolution
00:52:22 - What Separates NBA Players from Everyone Else
01:00:42 - Achilles Ruptures in Basketball
01:04:34 - Daily Non-Negotiables
01:07:23 - Three Formative Coaching Lessons
01:13:14 - Maximal Strength and Foot/Ankle Training for Hoopers
01:17:24 - KPIs for Movement Quality
01:21:44 - Three Things for Up-and-Coming Coaches
01:25:01 - Rant and Rave
01:29:54 - Alternative Career and Overrated vs. Underrated
01:35:21 - Unsolicited Advice

#CoachEmUpPodcast #CoachMikeG #GBGHoops #BasketballPerformance #NBAStrengthCoach #BasketballTraining #StrengthAndConditioning #AchillesInjuryPrevention #JrueHoliday #Podcast

Check out Les on socials! @LesSpellman @les7spellman

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Speed coach and USR founder LES SPELLMAN joins Tim Riley to break down 40 yard dash mechanics, why concentric-only lifting kills your top end speed, overspeed training controversies, and how he survived a 120 mph car crash to walk onto a D1 track team.

Les Spellman went from a fractured femur, opioid withdrawal, and a wheelchair to coaching NFL Combine athletes and building a global Speed Lab network with over 250 locations. This episode covers all of it, plus the actual coaching methodology that got him there.

On the training side: Les explains why speed training built around heavy concentric lifting produces good accelerators who fall apart in transition and at top end speed. He breaks down how to improve top end speed using overloaded eccentrics, reflexive eccentrics, heavy isometrics, overspeed work, and harder running surfaces. He gives a full mechanical blueprint for how to run a faster 40 yard dash, covering launch angle, hip extension through the first four steps, thigh pull, and relaxing through the finish.

On athlete profiling: Les calls out the overrated practice of labeling athletes when the coaching staff never actually changes the program based on those labels. Data without application is just noise.

On NFL combine speed training and the USR: Les tracked over 1.2 million youth and high school sprint tests to build age-based benchmarks, standardizing speed into miles per hour so coaches could finally compare apples to apples across populations.

On coaching development: Les outlines a three-tier pyramid (general population, youth, pros) and makes a case that group fitness instructors have better cueing and room management skills than most sports performance coaches. He also gets into constraints-led approaches, periodizing your coaching voice, and why giving your knowledge away freely online built his career faster than gatekeeping ever could.

Produced by
Q6 Media
https://q6.media

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:40 - Les's running habits
00:12:45 - Near-fatal car crash that changed Les' life
00:23:40 - Janitorial grind, interning, and learning to coach
00:32:42 - Ego-free coaching and giving away knowledge
00:42:00 - Scaling Speed Labs, USR, and COVID pivots
01:03:09 - The coaching pyramid
01:08:00 - Force vs. strength and eccentric training for speed
01:21:12 - Constraints-led coaching, periodizing your voice, and the Apex Fast 40 blueprint
01:36:00 - Breaking max velocity plateaus, overspeed tools, and elite dose-response tracking
01:44:06 - Three things every coach needs to do
01:51:13 - Rant & Rave
01:57:25 - Athlete profiling and GPP
02:06:06 - Unsolicited urinal advice

#LesSpellman #SpeedTraining #40YardDash #CoachEmUpPodcast #SprintMechanics #NFLCombine #UniversalSpeedRating #OvespeedTraining #StrengthAndConditioning #PerformanceCoaching

Check out Tawna on socials! @TawnaEubanksMcCoy

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Tawna Mccoy joins the Coach Em Up Podcast with host Tim Riley to talk about her experience growing up in a small to town to becoming an IFBB pro bikini bodybuilder and gym owner. She speaks on the subjectivity and toxicity surrounding the sport of bodybuilding, opening multiple gyms with her spouse, advice for aspiring business owners, youth and D1 sports, why GLP-1s are becoming too popular, why fitness classes are a great way to get people into the gym, and much much more! Plus, you can't miss the story about her gym catching on fire...

Subscribe if you enjoyed the episode! It helps us bring on more awesome guests like Tawna, and it keeps the show completely free!

00:00:00 Intro
00:04:35 Who is Tawna Mccoy?
00:05:36 Growing Up In Waco
00:09:50 Escaping The Small Town Life
00:11:36 Performance/Sports Upbringing
00:16:56 Navigating Big Life Changes At School
00:19:41 Meeting Husband after a Bikini Comp
00:24:06 Getting into Bodybuilding
00:26:58 Olympias and Bodybuilding
00:27:57 The Problem with Perfectionism
00:30:25 Navigating the Toxicity of Bodybuilding
00:37:23 Main Subjective Criteria for the Old Bikini Division
00:41:13 Retiring from Bodybuilding
00:43:57 Opening Gyms with Your Spouse
00:48:23 The Gym Catches on Fire
00:50:47 What parts of being an athlete help with being a business owner
00:52:22 Hold on to good people and Nurture them
00:57:15 Advice For Opening Your First Gym
00:58:07 Taking Over Existing Gym Spaces
01:01:53 The Reasons Gyms Fail
01:03:41 Advice for Someone Opening a Gym
01:07:31 More Gym Chat
01:09:24 3 Things to be a High Achiever
01:12:46 GLP-1 rant
01:14:57 Was the Shake Weight Cool?
01:15:32 Fitness Classes are the Gateway
01:17:59 Unsolicited Solicited Advice

Check out Nick on socials! @thefitover40man

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Nick Conaway joins Tim Riley to talk strength training for older adults, how to build muscle after 40, and why most men are overcomplicating everything. Nick went from running nuclear power plants for 20 years to building a men's health platform with hundreds of thousands of followers, and this podcast looks at the road he took to getting there.

Nick Conaway built Fit Over 40 Man for guys aged 40 to late 50s who are drowning in social media noise and paralyzed by conflicting fitness advice. His approach strips it down: sleep, a three-day full body workout split, single-ingredient foods, and consistent daily non-negotiables. No extreme protocols. No peptide stacking. No lone-wolf nonsense.

This conversation covers the full picture: how golden handcuffs kept him stuck in nuclear energy, what Carol Dweck's Mindset and Atomic Habits did for his identity after a career-ending CrossFit injury, why men's health has to include blood work, and why male loneliness midlife is a bigger performance killer than bad programming.

They also get into quitting alcohol for fat loss, fitness and longevity as a long game, and why the best thing you can do for an aging parent is get them lifting weights.

Produced by
Q6 Media
https://q6.media

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:01:11 - First annual client meetup in Dallas
00:03:50 - Who is Nick Conaway
00:05:33 - 20 years in nuclear power and golden handcuffs
00:11:23 - Leaving corporate life and betting on himself
00:17:10 - Childhood roots and the fear of career transitions
00:24:05 - CrossFit obsession, overtraining, and emergency rib surgery
00:32:00 - Shifting from outcome-driven to process-driven identity
00:36:00 - Simplifying nutrition and managing midlife stress
00:42:00 - Male community and midlife isolation
00:46:05 - Showing up daily and navigating grief while building a business
00:52:16 - Social media growth, blood work, and training for older adults
01:05:49 - Peptide overuse vs. the alcohol-free generation
01:11:21 - Alternative career and actionable steps for men over 40
01:15:15 - Unsolicited advice

#FitnessOver40 #NickConaway #StrengthTrainingForOlderAdults #CoachEmUpPodcast #FitOver40Man #MensHealthOver40 #HowToBuildMuscleAfter40 #HealthyHabitsForMen #FitnessAndLongevity #FitnessPodcast

Check out Lance on socials! @LanceBrooks_PhD

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Dr. Lance Brooks breaks down sprint mechanics and biomechanics of sprinting at a level most coaches never reach. Tim Riley sits down with the coach, researcher, and founder of Brooks Performance Methods to dig into first principles of sprinting, sarcomere function, quasi isometric contractions, and why the elastic vs force dominant sprinters debate is built on a false premise.

Lance's path is wild: bodybuilding forums to personal training at 24 Hour Fitness and Gold's Gym, then D1 strength and conditioning internships, a master's under Dr. Ken Clark, a doctorate, and postdoctoral work in a Harvard comparative biology lab implanting crystals into rats and running guinea fowl on treadmills. All of it in service of understanding how muscles actually produce force during locomotion.

The conversation covers acceleration vs max velocity mechanics, impulse momentum sprinting, vertical impulse top speed sprinting, horizontal impulse acceleration sprinting, and what Newton's Second Law actually demands from a coach's programming. Lance also dismantles the lazy "science lags behind practice" talking point and explains why mastering basic first principles of sprinting will always outperform chasing hyper-specific applied studies.

Subscribe to the channel to never miss another podcast!

Produced by
Q6 Media
https://q6.media

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:04:09 - Lance's Background and Career Path
00:15:30 - Early Coaching Lessons and Internship Blunders
00:22:34 - Bridging Research and the Field
00:32:14 - Comparative Biology, Animal Models, and Muscle Testing
01:04:30 - First Principles of Sprinting and Biomechanics
01:21:40 - Quasi-Isometric Muscle Mechanics and the Elastic vs Force Myth
01:36:00 - Sprinting/Research Q&A

#SprintMechanics #Biomechanics #CoachEmUpPodcast #LanceBrooks #SpeedDevelopment #StrengthAndConditioning #ForcePlate,#SprintTraining #ExercisePhysiology #Podcast