Product Review: Dan Baker – High Powered Performance Video

I recently had the pleasure of going through Dan Baker’s High Powered Performance Videos.

This series is a 7 video set of a workshop Dan Baker put on in the UK. For those that don’t know, Dan Baker is a PhD and strength coach, who served as the Director of Strength and Conditioning for the Brisbane Broncos Rugby Club for just under 20 years.

I was excited to check this video set out, as Dan Baker has published a lot of great strength and conditioning research and articles around power training, periodization, and energy system training. I have read much of his work over the years and one of the things I admire the most about Dan is that he is a strength coach who honors a scientific approach. He isn’t a scientist who sits in a lab and pontificates about what people in the field should be doing. He is a doer himself, not only serving as a strength coach at the highest level but also competing as a powerlifter, who takes a scientific approach to developing his programs – always testing, always objectifying, and always trying to understand how to do things better.

The video set is excellent. The first video goes into the long term athletic development approach Dan set up at the Brisbane Broncos. Unlike sports in America, where players get to the highest level by playing through high school and college, with different teams, the athletes in the National Rugby League are part of a club and they work through the ranks of that club. As they develop it is ultimately determined whether or not they will make it to the highest level team. This process allows the strength coach to take a multi-year approach to developing strength and fitness. Dan lays out his plan and explains how they move athletes through the process, the ways they test the athletes, and the strength markers that athletes need to hit in order to transition into the next stage.

Other videos in the collection go into topics such as:

> Periodization

> Power training with bands, chains, and lifting complexes

> Program design

> Energy system development (particularly around Max Aerobic Speed utilization in the training process)

Dan shows a lot of video footage of his athletes and shows their actual training programs from year to year. He talks about what they did, why they did it, what results it produced, what errors he made, and what changes were made each year to ensure that the athletes were constantly improving. Dan shows and discusses data on his athletes dating back to 1995 and talks about how guys developed and the sort of capacities the athletes at the highest level were able to attain.

I recommend the High Powered Performance Video Set to any strength coach in the field as Dan clearly discusses how he blends the science and the practical in order to take an objective approach to establishing a high level strength and conditioning program.

from Optimum Sports Performance LLC http://optimumsportsperformance.com/blog/product-review-dan-baker-high-powered-performance-video/