PODCAST – Win Your Warm-Up

Welcome to episode #89 of the Hockey Strength Podcast. Today I sit down with the THREE co-creators of Win Your Warm-Up: Jess Goodman-Buckley, Dan Allison, and Mike Stacey.

We talk all about their new product and what coaches can take away from it. To learn more go to winyourwarmup.com 

Jess on Instagram: @coachjb17

Dan on Instagram: @coachdanallison

Mike on Instagram: @mikestaceymentalskills

Full Transcript:

David: Jess, Dan, welcome to the hockey strength podcast thank you so much for being here.

Dan: Thank you for having us, Dave.

Jess: Thanks, David

David: We’re here to talk about today your new product along with Mike Stacey, Win Your Warm-up. And everybody loves a good origin story so why don’t you tell us how Win Your Warm-up came to be.

Dan: Going back a couple of years ago now and our gym, Omnevo Performane here in Michigan, myself, Mike Stacey, and couple of other fitness professionals would get together week to week and just do a bit of continuing ed and work on different stuff together and throw around some business ideas.

And we collectively had this idea of that there’s nothing really out there — at the time anyway — that took a brief, efficient, effective physical warm-up, tied that in with the mental skills that Mike was doing with his athletes, and put it together in a digestible, usable way for athletes and coaches to be to just log in to a website on their smartphone and have access to something simple and effective for the physical and mental side of things. Then it just turned into getting together and doing a bit of work week to week for a couple of years. At first we wanted to do an app and then we wound up doing a website. Then we added Jess onto the team to add more to the physical drills side of things and slowly progressed it to something that could be used by coaches and athletes.

Jess: Yeah, absolutely. I was kind of late to the party, but knew about the project from the beginning. It was always an important topic for me. Throughout my coaching career I’ve stumbled upon this weird population of not high school athletes anymore but athletes that weren’t really progressing to the college level. And a lot of them didn’t really possess the mental skills they needed to take what they got from their sport and carry it over into life. 

So that’s kind of a niche — not really a niche population — it’s a lot of athletes who play high school and maybe play college but don’t play after that. And I just felt like we were getting somewhere with the physical side, but there was a really big gap with the mental side.

Then in my own personal hockey career, my body was trashed by the time I was done playing. Especially as a female in middle school and high school I had no access to strength coaches like kids nowadays. And I still think female athletes don’t have the access male athletes have. So, Mike and Dan’s vision that addresses these two problems that I’m super passionate about at a really affordable, accessible rate for athletes of all kinds, which is definitely something I jumped at the opportunity to be a part of. 

David: Jess I want to follow up and dig in a little bit into noticing that players were getting objectively better on the ice, but were lacking in their mental skills. Could you elaborate specifically on what you saw in elite level athletes that you thought needed attention?

Jess: Well, I don’t think these problems really occur in athletes that are really good what they do. The problems arise when they’re no longer really good, or they hit a barrier. For example, high school athletes could excel at the high school level and maybe they need even make it to the college level or maybe they’re not the superstar they used to be. And so through the population that I was training at the time I came into contact with a lot fo these kids, and they didn’t know how to take the skills that made them really good at their sport and apply them to the rest of their life. So I’m a huge proponent of playing sports, I mean it’s what we all focus on. I just feel like as a coach there was this big hole and we were doing these athletes a disservice. They were mentally not able to succeed or move forward and they were stuck in this mindset that they used to be this superstar athlete, and they couldn’t get out of it. Does that make sense?

David: Yeah that makes perfect sense and it’s something I’ve talked about in previous episodes. Justin Roethingshoefer and I talked quite a bit about — that athletes are not just made to do their sport. They’re human beings with families, desires, and jobs and if you’re neglecting all of those elements you’re not going to be to get as much out of them as an athlete. 

I know you mentioned you played hockey. Did that come from a personal history with the sport?

Jess: Actually not really the mental side of things. Not that I was always confident and sure of myself, but I was kind of a pressure player, so it wasn’t really that aspect of it. But like I said my body was trashed by the time I was finished playing hockey in college. Everything hurt. I had wrist injuries, my hips hurt when I walked and I was just prepared for that to be a thing. Then I met Dan and I started learning and developing my own coaching and then I stumbled into the PRI concepts that I’m know super passionate about when it comes to hockey players and their hips. It just changed my life because I couldn’t walk without being in pain to being able to strength train and everything. And I think every athlete should have access to that starting at an early age.  

David: How do you both think about providing that education to your athletes and athletes in this system?

Dan: Yeah the biggest thing on the physical side of things was — as you know — athletes don’t need a million different exercises make them feel good. They made need some awareness or some education from a therapist or strength on why their body feels like crap. And the access to the drills that are going to make them feel good — it’s hard to pick through all the stuff that’s out there. There’s lots of good stuff on Instagram and YouTube but as an athlete, I mean, how tough is it to sift through all that stuff? So our big mission with this is to give the athletes the physical exercises so you don’t have to feel like crap all the time. You can feel really good if you’re still playing you’re sport, or done playing college hockey and just want to live your right feeling great. 

There are a lot of great athletes doing this stuff but for athletes having it accessible at their fingertips and knowing what to do and when to do it… I think this was something missing out there. 

David: Yeah I just to piggy-back off of the overwhelming flow of information in our field. A couple years ago PRI came on the scene and the RPR and FRC. There are so many different methods for helping athletes stay healthy. And if it’s overwhelming for us as coaches, how do you think athletes feel getting thrown ten different mobility drills.

So Win Your Warm-Up came out of asking “how can we distill the key information that athletes need to stay healthy in their sport?”

Dan: One-hundred percent. We can sit here and we all know what all these alphabet soup abbreviations mean for these companies that are teaching great things. But to the athlete they don’t care. It’s all great stuff, but how do we organize it in a way that’s digestible to the athlete who — before the pandemic anyway — was running around like a chicken with their head cut off with 25 hours of things to do in a 24 hour day. They don’t have two hours to warm up and sift through the information. They just need to know:

What do I do?

How do I it?

When do I do it?

And to be left on your own to sift through, there may be great intent with the athletes looking through Instagram accounts and stuff but it may be the exact opposite of the thing they need.

David: Dan, why don’t you talk about your specific situation. Tell us about your gym and the types of players you coach and how you use these ideas of Win Your Warm-Up with your athletes.

Dan: Absolutely. Much like any other coach, you’re influence by a lot of different certs and con ed over the years. I’ve been a coach in the private sector here in the Detroit area since 2012 and we’ve been training predominantly hockey players in the offseason. Mainly goals. Right now we’ve got about 35 different goalies and handful of forwards and D-men. And a lot of it came from goalies coming in with hip impingement and other things that have been talked about plenty on the show here and I was just trying to think about what would work for each individual. 

So a lot of the Win Your Warm-Up stuff comes from messing things up and trying out these different drills, whether it be breathing and reset stuff from PRI, or whether that’s Dr. Michelle Boland‘s exercise database, con ed from the Resilient PT guys. I tried all the stuff and we’re always trying to learn from everybody. We’ve also got a couple of coaches that have gone way down the FRC certs and they’re taking a lot of our goalies through the FRC end-range stuff. 

In Win Your Warm-Up if we have to whittle away at the stuff that’s worked and the stuff that has — I don’t want to say hasn’t worked, but hasn’t been as effective — has come from a lot of that throughout the years.

Jess: For me, specifically, I had so much personal experience with my own body and what worked and what didn’t work at all. So really just over the last year or two, diving deep into the PRI stuff — and I’d say I first dabbled into the FRC stuff — and really I’d say Win Your Warm-Up is kind of a blend of those two schools of thought. Well a lot of different schools of thought. But I think that no matter what the sport is, athletes are still lacking a few of the same things. At the foundational level we tried to address those specific things.

David: Let’s talk about those specific things. What are the big, important boxes you check off?

Dan: As far as the categorization of it, we were really influenced by Mike Robertson’s R7. Release, reset, readiness, et cetera and just taking those things and leading with them. Soft tissue work, breathing work, resets, and then any of your traditional dynamic stretches, dynamic mobility, muscle activation. So you’re doing stuff to take care of relaxing some tissue on the front end and couple of different to reposition your pelvis and thorax. And then you’re doing some stuff to turn on the muscles — I hate saying that word but — turn on the muscles that you need to hang on to those alignments as an athlete. Now whatever you’re going to do whether it’s a skate, you’re just doing whatever you’d normally do.

Jess: Yeah, I think everybody here is familiar with the idea that extension is speed and strength, and that’s something athletes have a lot of. So first and foremost we want to attack the ability to get out of extension and have a full range of movements options. With the breathing exercises, we go after the parasympathetic nervous system. Obviously athletes are really good at getting into the sympathetic nervous system. We want to teach them how to dial that down. With the release component we want to not only release soft tissue but also provide a mental relaxation. 

In my opinion a lot of what is missing in strength and conditioning on a global scale is knowing how to turn it down, dial it down, instead of just turning it up. So that’s a big component of the physical drills and the mental drills.

David: That’s a good segue to bring Mike back in here. Mike what are the mental skills training components in the training program? And how do you do mental skills training without being able to meat with a mental skills coach regularly?

Mike: One thing that we said would be a build helper to athletes is adding a journal in addition to the check-ins. So each week you go through and learn the mental skills work and you learn how to apply the stuff in your warm-up. And we ask you some questions throughout the course of the week that you have the option of answering. Like: 

“What situations were hard for me to focus in after I warmed up?”

“What was challenging for me to control emotionally?”
“When was I losing my top or blowing my lid?”

And you start doing a bit of diagnostic as you go through Win Your Warm-Up. You check-in, videos, warm-up, team warm-up and it’s a total of 15 minutes of our stuff. Then should you choose you can answer some of those questions and take a deep dive on changing your game and make things different for yourself, or stick to the program as is.

David: In the last podcast we talked about how you can use mental training and mindfulness during the warm-up. So do you combine certain things? Do you have certain keys for the athlete while they’re warming up?

Mike: Yes we absolutely do. So what we built was, all right, I’m going to log in for this week into Win Your Warm-Up, watch the video, do the mental skills exercise, and the move on to Dan and Jess’s exercises. In those, Dan, Jess, and I collaborated and said that these are really tangible, salient cues for athlete to pick up on and say, “okay yes I feel this,” or “okay I can really pay attention to my breathing during this drill,” or “oh, this is what it really feels like to do things right.” 

So we turn a lot of the attention to notching what you’re doing in the moment, to what you’re feeling. And for almost every athlete that’s low-hanging fruit and that’s super easy. So we help you cue and stay mindful the full way through your warm-up with us and then give you cues to stay with that the rest of your training or practice. 

David: Dan and Jess: What have you learned from Mike, who obviously has a psychology background? How has that helped you as a coach?

Dan: Personally, Mike has helped out a lot of my athletes I’ve worked with. Getting on calls with them, having consultations when they’ve been going through some hard times. So that right there has been a huge, huge help. The other side of things is, not really being educated on the mental side — I don’t want to discredit what Mike does — But you think it’s like this crazy thing and these super complex drills you have to put into you training, and Mike kinda shows that it’s real simple stuff. It’s not like these “hacks.” Mindfulness and paying attention to the moment can be done a lot more simply than I would have perceived before meeting Mike.

Everybody who’s good at their job makes things look easy. Mike teaches this stuff so it’s very digestible and shows that there’s a lot of high value to athletes in implementing this stuff. Especially in the last few years now that there’s a lot more awareness with mental health. Mike has shown me that there are simple and effective ways to go about having simple conversations with athletes — some simple check-ins and questions that can really help you as a strength to make sure you’re checking in with the mental side of the athletes. And I think he does a great job of putting that into Win Your Warm-Up so that any athlete who chooses to use Win Your Warm-Up is going to be taking care of their mental health as well, not just being able to win a hockey game.

David: Yeah I think that goes back to what we talked about how it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And Jess how you talked about, once your career is in this limbo area, how you take those skills and apply them to school, job, life, relationships, et cetera. 

I definitely see how this is useful to an individual player who doesn’t go see at trainer or can’t see a trainer right now because we’re all stuck at home. But how could this be helpful for a strength coach who probably knows a lot fo the methods you’re teaching?

Dan: For the strength coach, we’ve taking the workout out of it as far as putting it all together. Now you have a lesson plan to teach this stuff, now you just have to execute. Now that you also have videos and write ups on the Win Your Warm-Up website, now you can not only read it and watch them, but your athletes can as well. So I think it takes that one level up where the coach doesn’t have to come up with everything from scratch. We’ve got it all organized for you.

And then from there, as a strength coach you maybe have an athlete who’s going away for a while, or for the offseason, and, like you said, they don’t have a trainer at home… Well here’s a great way to get your training in remotely, and it could be something they recommend to your athletes. And like Mike said, it doesn’t really take up a ton of time. So maybe you’re kind of on the face about it as a strength coach. Maybe you’ve never implemented  the mental skills stuff with your resets or whatever you’re doing. Well, it’s only ten or fifteen minutes of your time. Maybe you try it out a bit, and worst-case scenario, maybe you keep doing what you’re doing. But maybe it’ll get you a lot more organized, it’ll get your team warmed up faster than before. And from the mental side of things, it check in on athletes and gives them an opportunity to get their mind right and address any mental health issues they may be having.

Mike: That was a huge thing — to piggy back off of that — when I was still a strength coach I remember being super territorial about like, “you don’t mess with my stuff, man.” So we wanted to, when putting all the videos and exercises together, wanted to make it as accessible for strength coaches, just as we did in the Hockey Strength and Conditioning articles on Mindful Cueing, to say, “oh okay got it. I know how to blend mental skills into the warmup drills now.” Because we’ve laid it out in the exercise video and the descriptions because oh by the way, this is how you be mindful in doing it. So it’s an easy, digestible, quick-to-pick-up way to cue like an expert, in terms of the mental game. You already know how to cue like an expert with the physical game, so why not double it. 

David: Jess and Dan, what skills or cue have you added to your toolkit as a coach by learning more about mental skills training?

Dan: I think the biggest one for me was to talk less and listen more. You know, instead of giving every little cue in the book to make the warm-up exercise picture perfect, I learned to just shut up a little more, listen, and let athletes figure stuff out a little bit more. And also to just check-in with them more.

As a coach, I feel like we’ve all got good intuition and we can feel when something’s up with somebody. Whether it’s their personal life, or they’re just tired, or whatever, we can all tell. So think the biggest thing is just checking in on them.

And also, just because I’ve learned a few drills from Mike, I’m not a mental health expert or professional. So, hey you’re having a bad day? Do you want to talk about it? Here’s Mike’s number, set up an appointment to take to him. And then go from there.

So, checking in with the mental stuff but also staying in our lane, I would say.

Jess: Yeah, absolutely I agree with that. In my own persona life Mike has helped me develop more awareness, more mindfulness, not only in how I’m talking to athletes and people I’m coaching, but also how I’m talking to myself. Like Dan said, I’m by no means a mindfulness expert, that’s why I lean on Mike for those kinds of tools. But, the fact that he’s so passionate about giving athletes these tools they need is so important not only for sport but for life. I just think that’s so massively important and it’s something athletes need a lot more access to than they currently have.

David: Dan works with goalies, and we all know goalies are weird. We all know it. 

Dan: They unique, as I tell them.

David: So they probably need a little more mental skills coaching. That might not be a fair assumption, but I’m going to stand by it.

Jess: I think that’s a fair assumption.

Mike: Yeah, Jess and I played on the same beer league together, and.. yeah. Absolutely.. 

Jess: First of all, it was the best. I was his defenseman. When we’d play teams Mike would go say, “yeah I’ve never played before” to them And they’d be like, “oh, okay.” 

What did you say? Like, “Oh I’m a catcher but that’s applicable here, right?”

David: Okay further proof: goalies are weird.  

Jess: Exactly, exactly.

David: Jess, why don’t you talk about your situation and how you’re using the mental skills in Win Your Warm-Up

Jess: I mean I don’t really play hockey anymore, and that started the gap in mental skills that I had as an athlete. So when I finished play, I was like who am I? Everybody was like: oh the hockey player, oh the hockey player. And I was like, no. I’m not a hockey player. I’m doing playing hockey. I don’t want that to be all people know about me. But I realized I didn’t know that much more about me. So that was the period of time where I met Dan and Mike and in my own coaching career and ran into other kids that were like me. Or, I was five years ahead of where they were or what have you. And I would coach these kids and I’d think, what is going to happen to you when you don’t have your sport anymore? And like I said, that not my area of expertise at all, but it’s Mike’s for sure. And that really is an area where this passion for this project stems form. That your identity as a player doesn’t define who you are. And you’re strong because of who you are as a person not because of how good you are at your sport. Are you’re smart because of the intelligence you have, not because of how good you are at your sport.

So in a really weird way, it was the fact that I no longer wanted to be known as this type of athlete. I didn’t want to be known as the women who trains hockey players because she was a hockey player. We don’t know that. I played a sport for a really long time, that doesn’t me anything. 

David: Dan, do you want to jump off that and speak to your experience?

Dan: For me it was football. Being done with football that was all I knew. That and hockey. I remember the car ride home from getting knocked out of players for the last time. And I felt like I had no idea who I was. All I thought of myself was, inside linebacker, crush people. Now that was over, and I had that similar type of thing of like, “what now,” like Dan John says.

David: One thing I’ve been thinking about… I’ve done the podcast for a couple of months now, and almost nobody doesn’t talk about how important — how much more important — the mental, coaching, relationship side of things is compared to the actual programming side. So I’m wondering how are you guys thinking about where you see this field going in the future? How do you see building off of Win Your Warm-Up to fuse the mental and physical components together and make them one thing? I could see ten years from now where we’re not even talking bout them like they’re separate things, where giving a mindfulness cue is just associated with an exercise or whatever. So I’m just wondering if you guys have thought about some of those bigger questions and how we’re coaching going forward.

Mike: Part of the growth plan and vision for Win Your Warm-Up is to build it out a little more. We put together program that’s not cookie cutter — it gives each athlete tools to self assess — and we also built out the mental skills component so that it’s specific to you and your game and provide tools and options to trouble shoot that. And hopefully you can overcome some of those obstacles in the near-term. But if not you have Win Your Warm-Up for the rest of your life or the rest of the season depending on which subscription you choose. So, throughout the course of the season you’re never really left out to drift. You hopefully have something that’s a guiding force with regards to mental training so you can keep working on those larger challenges. Or for the small things, like “oh I can’t focus until I get my first shift or shot,” you have those tools in your toolkit.

But the idea on the mental side is to that out  more top be able to say, “Okay, I’m really struggling with perfectionist thinking, or low self-confidence, or a slump, or low motivation,” and to put together branches of the program so say, “okay if you’re looking for X or Y then this is a good avenue to double-dip and build these things into your warm-up and build them into your pre-game prep routine.”

Outside of the hockey realm, or whether you’re involved with hockey or not, the goal is to put together ways for coaches to say, oh this is the athlete exercise library and this is the coach exercise library. Where I learn how to cue mindfully and build this existing language into my drills. Because you don’t change the drills, you just change how you talk about them, in really small noticeable ways.

So the idea is to build out for coaches, and build out for athletes and their specific needs, and continue trying to service players who don’t have access to great strength or mental skill coach or to help teams integrate it into what they’re already doing. 

But Dan and Jess I know they have a bit of a different vision for how to progress and build it out, so I’ll pitch to them.

Dan: Like Mike was saying, constantly refining it as time goes on so it’s more digestible to the point where coaches and athletes can pick the categories they need to focus on. On the physical side we’re just asking if we can it more efficient with fewer exercises? Do we need more exercises? As strength coaches learn over the next few years with different certifications and continuing education weekends, we can learn better ways to upgrade all that stuff. 

It’s all a lot of the same stuff. We’re going to be trying to turn on abs and hamstrings for years to come. Just how we go about saying it is going to change — to each individual, sport, body-type. How we go about saying it will evolve, and that communication aspect of teaching coaches and athletes how to do the best things fo them as time goes on. 

Jess: Yeah, absolutely. And I was going to elaborate on different sports. What we’re building out now is a basic foundation. What we’re building out now is Win Your Warm-Up hockey, or Win Your Warm-Up softball, and Mike and I have brainstormed about this for hours. 

But for me, my passion is really being a female coach with female athletes. Like I said earlier, I just think there’s a lot of access to strength and conditioning — definitely not good strength and conditioning — for high school level, even college level, female athletes. I had very few resources playing in college so that’s definitely an area I want to help Mike push this product into because I really see it as invaluable. It’s not a secret that coaching females is different than coaching males, and there just aren’t a lot of female strength coaches. There just aren’t a lot of people out there who know and understand how speak to female athletes and maybe where their head’s out and how they approach the situation differently than males do. So from my end of things it’s providing that low-cost but needed and valuable product to younger females is of the utmost importance. 

David: Yeah Jess, thank you so much for sharing that it’s definitely… You know, our field is so — in light of recent protests opening our eyes to so many of the injustices in this country, of course it has to do with race and it has to do with gender. And women are definitely underserved in our industry. So, I guess, you’re talking to three white guys who don’t know, who’ve objectively had things easier, so if you don’t me asking, what are some things male coaches can do to help in any way with this issue?

Jess: I think that as a strength coach Dan is doing it. I think he’s listening more than he’s talking. But, I don’t know about Dan but, I grew up in a generation of coaches that were hard asses — like perform or die; you’re either the best or I don’t actually care about you and whatever it is you’re going through. And I do think that’s changed over the years and I do think there’s more awareness with mental health and athletes. But it really is — in a general sense, females are just harder on themselves than guys. At least form what I’v seen. Not that guys don’t have high standards of themselves but females always think that they’re not good enough, and males tend to think that they’re too good.

So, from a coaching perspective you have to understand that a lot of female athletes struggle with confidence. Whether it’s overt or not. So it can be really hard for male coaches to connect with that. But if the least that they’re doing is listening to their athletes and caring about them, and not just their performance or the product they’re bringing to the table, I think they’re already doing better than some of the coaches of past times.

David: Yeah, once again, thank you for sharing that. And I think it’s a really really important conversation that I want to do more of, with getting more women involved and getting more people of color involved. 

With that I’ll announce it to the audience. If you’re a person of color, or a women in strength and conditioning and/or hockey, then I want to hear from you. I want to give you this opportunity to use our platform to promote all the great work you’re doing. 

On that note, I think this is a great place to wrap up, so the website is winyourwarmup.com 

And with that, what final words do you have for the audience? We’ll start with Mike, he looks like he wants to talk.

Mike: As far as Win Your Warm-Up goes, I hope if nothing else you go explore and check out the platform and see what it’s about. Regardless of your level of interest, if you’re wondering how to build mindfulness into your cueing by all means reach out and contact. And if you want to learn more about the physical exercises then reach out to Dan and Jess. 

Our mission isn’t to pigeonhole somebody into “Look at this man buy now. Look at the economy, you gotta have it.” It’s really out there to help people. Mission, vision, values first. If you need something then we want you to be taken care of. 

Dan: Mike summed it up really well. If anybody has any questions, wants to talk shop, I’m always open to talk through Instagram and all that. We’re here to help and we want to be there for strength coaches and athletes alike to give them a good service that’ll help them and their train more efficiently.

Jess: Yeah, not much more to add. But I’m always available to have a conversation about any of this stuff. And I think I speak for all three of us when I say that our passion for this project is just through the roof. We’d spend hours and hours chatting about it.

David: Thank you guys. So it’s winyourwarmup.com. You can learn more and reach out to any of them. Thank you for joining me, and I really appreciate it. 

Dan: Thanks for having us, David.

Jess: Thanks, David.