How Olympic Athletes Actually Train for Speed | Ben Simons | Ep 62

yeah yeah I feel like that just explains, Bob, what kind of athlete you've got to be.

You've got to be strong, powerful, but to run a 10-second, 100-meter, or even 11-second or whatever, it's so fucking fast.

And you're such incredible athletes that are going into that sport.

I don't feel like people... expect that you say that you do bobsleigh and they're like all right okay you just must be really skilled at flying down ice yeah but really like you're this athlete that you'd probably beat most athletes whether it's a nfl whether it's football premier league football whether it should be like you'd be a lot more of an athlete than them guys

There's a lot of freaks in the sport.

And I think one of the reasons is because it's so niche of strength and power, you can train just for that.

So you don't get the interference from other elements that other athletes might be training, like endurance elements, skill elements in field sports.

We do just get to train to be strong, fast, and big, which is cool.

There's not many things that you can do that with.

And then, yeah, for people that...

Most people obviously don't know the sport.

I think they're going to consider it the skill element of actually driving down the ice, but only one person is responsible for that.

And it's a pilot that sits at the front, but he does still have to push as well.

So the pilots are athletes as well as, um, drivers essentially so they've got both skills and i think it's really only in the strength conditioning community when people people are kind of aware of the level of athlete that they need to be i think social media is helping that a little bit now there's a few athletes out there that are showcasing their strength and power feats of athleticism I suppose I was one of them really on Instagram and other socials and people are starting to realize that there's some real freaks in the sport.

Yeah, let's just go through your figures for people who don't know.

So you mentioned before broad jump.

Yeah.

What's your numbers for that?

Yeah, 358 is my best broad jump.

So three meters 58.

Yeah, that's 11 foot something for any Americans listening.

I don't know exactly, but yeah, 358, which is probably one of my best performance

metrics.

What about height?

So vertical, vert is an interesting one, right? Because people will always argue about the way that it's measured.