Richard Graves (00:01.071)
Well, Matt, I am delighted to have you on this week's podcast, especially since as we record this, it's pretty early for you out there in Mississippi. 6am local, I think I'm right in saying. Welcome along to the show.

Matt Gebert (00:12.642)
Morning. Appreciate you having me on.

Richard Graves (00:14.937)
Now it's our pleasure. Before we go any further, let's introduce you to our listeners. Tell us a little bit about your journey to this point with Ole Miss and why strength and conditioning and what was it that sparked your interest in sports science and athletic performance.

Matt Gebert (00:32.062)
So, you know, growing up, like most kids, I played every sport possible and I I really be honest with you, I love basketball growing up. I grew up in New York, grew up a big Knicks fan and you know, I I loved basketball, wanted to be a basketball player, and then I got to high school and guys were like six six and I was like, maybe I should try this football thing out. And then, you know, I was playing football, played football in college, got to college and

You know, the the D linemen were running twenty-one miles an hour and I was like, maybe maybe I should try this coaching thing out. So, you know, I've been working in college football about 13 years now. just got to Ole Miss this past January. super fortunate to be here. working on my PhD right now. So they're they're keeping keeping me busy over here.

Richard Graves (01:18.021)
That's good to hear. And your PhD, know, is focusing on speed development. So tell us a little bit about your current role with Ole Miss and what does a typical week look like during the season for you?

Matt Gebert (01:31.244)
Yeah, so we we have five strength and conditioning coaches on staff here. and and each one of us kind of have has our own own niche a little bit. So Paul Constantine, our head strength coach, he oversees our our entire operation. you know, Zach Witherspoon, he kinda oversees our sports science.

I I run our speed development. Matt Clapp runs a lot of our velocity-based training tools and works with our works with our mids group. Devontae Wilson works with our our big guys, our line. I I take kind of our skill guys. So that's kind of how we break things up. You know, typically throughout the week, you know, from a speed development standpoint, when we come in on Mondays, Mondays is an acceleration day and a change of direction day.

So shorter space, all right, heavier loads, heavier resistances when we're sprinting, right? But it's it's kind of a lead-in day. I would call it like a medium day, shorter space, medium intensity. Tuesday's our top end speed day.

Right. So Tuesday's a day where we're opening up more of a max velocity day where we're gonna wanna see guys touch above ninety five percent of their max velocity and we'll let them open them up there and we'll also play football on those days. right now in the summer, we're actually going four days straight. It's kind of a new model we've adopted. We're really only two weeks in the month of July. So, you know, I I I've been enjoying it so far.

But that third day, which would be our Wednesday, Wednesday, you know, typically is a is a curved linear sprinting day, or we're sprinting at different angles, we're working on deceleration a little bit, and we're also doing sport specific work with football. And and then our last day, Thursday, is is a conditioning day.

Matt Gebert (03:18.655)
High volume, high density. If you asked our players, that's probably their least favorite day, right? But it's super important from a work capacity standpoint, a bioenergetic standpoint. So that that's kind of how we break it up. And obviously throughout the year, we'll we'll move things around throughout the week and manipulate things depending on where we're at in the year.

season a little more general. The closer we get to football, the closer we get to training camp in August, things get more specific to the game. And then in season we kind of pull back in our world, right? Like stress is is finite.

There's only so much stressors and there's only so much the body can handle, right? So in season, guys are practicing five days a week, playing on Saturdays typically. So we pull back and typically are working with the guys about two to three days a week. so that's kind of how we break things up.

Richard Graves (04:17.059)
And obviously as we're here in July now, you'll be ramping up things with the athletes and the team with the new season just around the corner. I want to get into what we mean when we talk about speed in this context, because it would be easy to say, well, it's who can run the 40 yard dash the quickest. But when we talk about football, American football, it's far more nuanced than that, isn't it? So when you sit down with an individual athlete and you talk about developing speed.

What does speed actually mean in that context?

Matt Gebert (04:49.421)
Yeah, it's a it's a good question. So w when I think about speed, I think all right, well why is speed important for sport, right? Well in any sport

When you're on offense, you're trying to create space, create separation. And when you're on defense, you're trying to limit space and limit separation, close space, right? The faster athletes will have an advantage in creating and closing space. Our job as coaches is to equip our athletes with an advantage over who they're playing. Sport is a high speed environment, right? In American football, we'll have guys who run 22, 23 miles an hour.

Right. So training is specific to task. If the game is played at high speeds, we need to prepare them for that environment from a performance standpoint, right? To develop them, to get them better, but also from an injury risk standpoint to prepare them for the volume and intensities they're going to see in the game.

You know, in football, the closer you get to the ball, the more important absolute strength is, right? Our big guys, it's super important that they are very strong. The further away you get from the ball, the more important max velocity is. So we're gonna train accordingly, right? We don't run a cookie-cutter approach, we don't run a one-size-fits-all approach. We're very individualized based on

the demands of the position and the unique demands of that individual based on their force velocity profile, their training age, so on and so forth. So you know, really speed to me, you know, the most important thing we could do is get our athletes faster, right? Especially our skill group.

Matt Gebert (06:34.432)
Okay. You're a skill guy. Strength's important for everybody. But if you can't run, you can't help us. If you can't move at high speeds, you cannot help us. We kind of we kind of think about speed in in one of three components. There's linear speed, right? That's straight line, acceleration, max velocity. There's multi-directional speed, right? Change of direction, agility, deceleration, maneuverability, curve linear sprinting. And then there's what we would call enduring speed.

Or just conditioning, right? The ability to finish plays, finish drives, finish games, and have high work capacity to have those high speed outputs over and over and over again. So all three of those components are super important. They're more important for some position groups than others, they're more important for some athletes than others, and depending on where we're at in the year, we may focus on.

certain qualities more than others, but they're all important and they're all interconnected.

Richard Graves (07:36.269)
In the context of what you're talking about there then, my immediate thought goes to how significant in the context of speed is explosive power, fast twitch qualities because as you say if you're working with big defensive or offensive linemen it's not necessarily about straight speed, it's about being able to react.

Matt Gebert (07:59.171)
Yeah, I think there are specific key performance indicators for every position group, right? There there's KPIs and like we said, some qualities are are more important than others. I I go back to like, well, what makes someone fast? Okay, well, Stu McMillan talks about all the time. To to be fast, you need to produce large amounts of force. You need to produce that force fast, and then you need to orient that force in the right direction, right?

Your linemen, they're very big, they produce a ton of force, but they can't orient that force in the right direction and they can't produce that force fast. But for them, they play in a five by five box, right? So they live in that acceleration world, they live in that power world.

as soon as you snap the ball within a within a half a second someone's getting hit. So, you know, for them, it becomes more about reactive power and acceleration. We kind of live in that world with those guys. You know, for your for your mids group, what we would call like our big skill or our mid group, your linebacker.

your running backs, your tight ends, they have to do a little bit of both, right? They live in the trenches a little bit and they have to be powerful and durable. But they also, the way the game is going, they also split out and they also have to run in space a lot. So acceleration becomes extremely important. Change of direction becomes extremely important. Curve linear sprinting max velocity is important, right? And then out on the outsides your your your wide receivers your your defensive backs accelerate

of max velocity is super important. They need to be able to decelerate at high speeds. They need to be able to have high levels of multi-directional speed. So for those guys, you know, max velocity becomes super key. And for your bigger guys, strength and power and acceleration become super important. And then you know your mids and your big skill, they're kind of a little bit of both.

Richard Graves (09:57.85)
How do you measure this then? What metrics are you using to measure development of the athletes you're working with?

Matt Gebert (10:05.26)
Yeah, so within speed, we kind of look at like there's there's five KPIs for speed, right? Or there's five qualities of of speed development, right? Acceleration, right? So short linear speed, max velocity, okay, that's when we're opening up. Okay, can you what what peak speed can you hit? Change of direction?

Deceleration, okay, how fast can you stop?

Right. And then sprinting on a curve. Okay. So those five qualities we want to test throughout the year to one profile our athletes so we understand, all right, who are the fastest guys on our team? Okay, who's the fastest running back? Who's the best accelerator out of all the offensive linemen? Who who hits the the highest max velocity out of all our defensive backs? And then we could give feedback to our coaching staff to help inform them and make help them make better decisions, but also to understand their strengths and

weaknesses so we can help them. We we want to find rate limiters and then we want to raise those up. We want to improve their weaknesses and keep their strengths their strengths. So from an acceleration standpoint, right, I go back to okay, well what of what do the best accelerators in the world do? They produce the most horizontal force relative to their body weight.

Right? They produce a ton of force and they're very lean. Okay, so okay, well what's important? Well, we gotta get them better at producing horizontal force. And we probably if we improve their body fat, that'll probably help them from an anthropometric standpoint. So from a testing standpoint, an acceleration, we're we're fortunate enough to have a ton of technology at our disposal. So

Matt Gebert (11:50.317)
We have catapult GPS and we have a 1080 sprint. Those are probably our two biggest pieces from a speed tr speed assessment standpoint that we use. So in acceleration, we're testing max acceleration. We're testing F0, so your your peak horizontal force.

We're testing RF max, which is we're looking at how much horizontal force are you producing versus vertical force. And then we'll test things like peak power in a horizontal capacity. We'll test things like you know, a 10-yard split, a five-yard split. 1080 sprint is phenomenal because it'll tell us speed at each step. So we have specific markers that we want to see, specific speeds we want to see at the first step, second step, third step, fourth step throughout.

that sprint, okay. From a max velocity standpoint, it probably gets a little simpler there because we're just looking at max V and peak speed. Like what's the highest output you can get? And then we'll look at things like 20 yard time, 30 yard sprint time, fly 10 time, but it's really about that peak speed. What's that max V? Like our goal for our skill players, our receivers, DBs is to have all of them above 22 miles an hour.

Right, we feel good. If we can get them above 22, they're able to play the game at a really high level. 22-5 would be that upper echelon elite level in college football. You know, our our our mids group, we want to get them above 21 and our bigs, if we could get them around that 20 mile an hour range, we feel pretty good. Right. But max velocity becomes a little simpler from a testing standpoint. Change of direction, our biggest test would be the the the 1005 on the 1080 sprint.

where you're sprinting in, you have a high speed deceleration, and then you need to redirect out of there.

Matt Gebert (13:47.201)
Right. So it it tested our it tested our deceleration. It also tested how do we re-accelerate? How do we break? How do we get out of those cuts? we'll test max deceleration within the same test, and then we'll look at the metrics catapult give us on our max deceleration. And then from a a a curve linear sprinting standpoint, we'll track peak speed in our curve linear testing. So in our curve linear sprints, whether it be 15 yards, 20 yards.

we'll track max velocity through our catapult system and and see who's the fastest on that curve. And you know what's really interesting is, and I don't know if it's nature versus nurture, but like typically your running backs, your linebackers, even your defensive linemen, they're really, really good accelerating in short space because that's what they do in the game, right?

Richard Graves (14:40.717)
It's that explosive nature again, isn't it?

Matt Gebert (14:42.902)
A hundred percent. And then like even what what's been really interesting for us is we have a quarterback who's pretty mobile and moves very well. And when we when we do curve linear sprinting, sprinting on an arc, he's our fastest guy. Right? So, you know, it it kind of goes hand to hand. Well that that's what makes him a really good player, one part of it, right? So it it makes sense once you start looking at the data, it's super interesting.

Richard Graves (15:08.537)
It sounds like you've got pretty much every base covered and you mentioned there you've got a lot of testing that gives you a lot of data. The obvious question then becomes Matt, what is the data that really matters to you and the rest of the coaching team? And what's the noise that you've got to try and avoid as well so you get accurate assessments?

Matt Gebert (15:27.97)
Yeah, that that that that's a great point. I think, you know, a lot of people everyone has sports science tech now, right? There was there was there was a tech boom in the sporting world, probably going back about twenty years. You know, it's interesting.

we always used to say people i in the research world would say that sports science in europe and austria was about 10 years ahead of the states and then from a strength and conditioning standpoint strength power speed we were probably about 10 years ahead now I think those worlds have kind of met right in twenty twenty six where we're at

I think the internet and social media has helped that because we can collaborate more and have conversations like this so we're all more aware. But I think a lot of people out there are doing sport technology. They're not doing sport science. They're testing a lot, they're using the tech a lot, they have the tech at their disposal because they have high budgets, but they're not really doing anything with it.

So when we're evaluating sports science technology, we want to know a couple things. Number one, is it accurate? Is it gonna work? Are we getting good data? Okay. Number two, is it efficient? Okay. Can we use this in our environment? We have about 120 guys on our roster right now. So getting guys through in an efficient and a timely manner is very important.

Okay, we're only allotted eight hours throughout the week from an NCAA compliance standpoint. So to get 120 guys through through testing parameters it becomes a challenge. So can we do that in an efficient and a timely manner? If we can't, we're we're not even gonna we're we're not gonna use the tech, right? And then number three, is it actionable?

Matt Gebert (17:18.006)
All right, what are we doing based off this data? Okay. What interventions are we driving? Now, sometimes data just helps you ask better questions. There are a lot of things where you know I'll look at the data and I don't know what it's telling me for months, and then it'll kind of click and then it'll make sense, right? And then we know where we need to go. So whenever we're evaluating technology, we're we're looking in those three parameters, and then we're trying to figure out.

A, how can it drive performance performance and help us win games? And then B, how can it mitigate injury risk, right? Because I don't care if you have the strongest, fastest, most powerful team in the world, if they're all injured, we're we're they're not gonna be able to help our team and we're doing the athlete a disservice. So number one, we want to increase player availability, and then we want to drive performance. And I think our tech and our sports science world helps in that.

Richard Graves (18:14.583)
It's interesting that you bring this subject up because I mean I notice you have a smart ring on your finger, I wear a smart watch and we have that you know as amateurs we have this data. It doesn't necessarily mean we know how to to use it or interpret it properly so that it benefits us. So I do wonder if there's one metric out there that you think athletes outside of elite sport often overlook.

Matt Gebert (18:39.374)
Sleep. Sleep. I I mean, I I think I you know, I I I don't I I have I have no ties to aura, but I think everyone should have an aura ring. I mean

Richard Graves (18:41.433)
Simple as that, sleep, rest.

Matt Gebert (18:50.466)
The investment is is I tell all our athletes, because in college football, guys are making making considerable money now, are really good players. I tell them, well, get an aura ring. It's yeah, I mean, it's it's worth it. It's not even close. And you know, if you want to use whoop, there's a ton of other great products out there. But to me, if you're not tracking your sleep, you're fooling yourself. If you want to be healthier and perform better and feel better and be in a better mood, right? Like from a mental health standpoint, you you you need to be tracking your sleep, right?

for from a and and then from i if you're just an average joe trying to again look better, feel better, track your steps, right? Like ten thousand steps is it's a pretty good it's a pretty good rule. If you get ten thousand steps every day and you get pretty good sleep, you'll probably be in a pretty good s pretty good spot.

Richard Graves (19:37.948)
Again, I'm interested by this because it comes back to this training load versus recovery balance, isn't it? And it's not often one that's always achieved, shall we say, certainly outside of an elite sport. Performance isn't just about training harder. It's about getting that balance between pushing athletes to their limit on any one day whilst avoiding over-training them. Is that something that you're always conscious of?

Matt Gebert (20:08.93)
That's the number one question is how can we push these guys to their absolute limits and train really, really, really hard, but be smart and and not increase their risk of injury, right? So there's a very fine line between training hard and training dumb, right? And that's one we try to walk every day and try to make sure that we're finding that optimal training load, right?

you know, we we look at a lot, we we talk about external load versus internal load, right? External load is how much work are they doing, how much stress are they under physically, right? Catapult is our biggest help with that, right? Because it gives us an objective view of how much they're doing. What volumes are they hitting, right?

Richard Graves (21:01.563)
So with that in mind then, what indicators tell you as a coach that an athlete needs to spend a little bit more time recovering and a little less time with training load and working harder in the gym,

Matt Gebert (21:15.406)
So we with our internal load tracking, right? Like one simple thing that we do is we have our guys fill out a wellness questionnaire every morning. Okay, so every morning we train, they have a wellness questionnaire on their phone, and it's simple, it takes two minutes, it's just five questions basically. Hey, rank your soreness one through five. How did you sleep last night, one through five? And then they can highlight any specific muscle groups or joints that are bothering them.

Okay, they could flag, hey, knee five, my knee's killing me. All right. That's gonna drive a conversation between me and the athlete. Hey, what what's going on with your knee? Well, you know, yesterday on the last play we ran, I kind of cut a weird way and okay, let's get you in the training room.

Let's drive some interventions that's gonna help that knee get better before we start training. And then I need to start looking at do I need to manipulate this guy's training plan this day, right? And so it just increases our awareness, right? And then it drives a conversation between us and the athlete so that we can do our best to take care of these guys. Cause we got a really good group and they train really, really hard. So we want to make sure we're taking care of them and we're setting them up for success.

Richard Graves (22:26.969)
Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like you guys have got a fantastic program there at Ole Miss as well. Now, your career dates back well over a decade, Matt. So given all the technology we've spoken about in this discussion, the data that's available over the course of your career, have you seen noticeable direct impacts, changes in sports science as to the way athletes work, how much they do and the benefits that they get from

Matt Gebert (22:58.392)
Think as coaches and as athletes now, we are more informed customers. We we we have a better objective view of the stressors our athletes are under and how they are adapting. you know, before tech, listen, you don't need technology to run a high-level program, right? People were getting great, great results a long time ago. But before tech, it was an educated guess, right?

Now we have objective numbers because there there's sometimes we'll I'll I'll I'll write a I'll write a a a speed workout up and then we'll look at the data on the back end and I'll go, you know what? That really didn't get what I wanted to get out of it. Okay, guys actually at 15 yards, guys are only hitting 85% of their max velocity. I was looking for 90%.

Today we need to go out to 20 yards. So okay, let's lengthen that out. So it's a guess and check for us where we didn't have that, right? So, you know, but here's what's super interesting is you would think with all the tech we have and the level of research that's going on now and the money that's being pumped in the high-level sport, injuries would be going down, right?

It's just not the case right now. Right. So that's kind of what gets me out of bed every day because we don't have the answers. With all this tech at our disposal and all the smart people that we get a chance to talk to every day.

We still haven't figured out how to keep guys healthy. We still haven't figured out the best way to put together a practice plan for for sport. We haven't figured out a best way to peek a guy for game day. We we haven't figured out these things. We don't have the answers.

Matt Gebert (24:54.914)
Really I have more questions than I have answers, and and that's that's kind of why I do this. I I'm a really curious person. I like to know why things work the way they work. and that's what I think that's what makes this this industry fun, is there are a lot of really, really interesting problems that we're trying to solve, but tech helps us ask better questions. Sports science helps us ask better questions so that we can drive interventions to try to solve these problems.

Richard Graves (25:25.211)
Is that a source of frustration for you each and every day then or does it serve as an incentive to, as you say, get out of bed and go to work?

Matt Gebert (25:34.828)
Yeah, well my my my aura score is usually pretty poor. So I you know, I guess it's keeping me up at night. I I don't know, but yeah, you could say that.

Richard Graves (25:44.411)
I wonder as well over the course of your career, what are the biggest lessons that you've learned when it comes to strength and conditioning and how you interact and work with different athletes in different areas?

Matt Gebert (25:57.039)
You know, I think earlier in my career, I coached every athlete the same way. From a psychological standpoint and from a performance standpoint. You know, when you first get into strength and conditioning and sports science, you are are are are

you know, the name of our job is strength and conditioning coach. So get them stronger and get them in better shape, right? That was always the thing. So as a young coach, I thought getting guys strong was the answer to everything. And it getting guys strong helps. It does. It's really important, especially early on in an athlete's career, right? But you hit a ceiling where absolute strength doesn't move the needle as much anymore, right? There's a s there is a strong enough

standpoint for where okay we need to work on some other qualities but earlier in my career I thought man if we just get these dudes as strong as possible we're helping them right and that that that might not always be the case and then you know from a from a psychological standpoint I I used to coach every guy the same way and and as an athlete myself

I responded to hard coaching. If a if a coach yelled at me, I responded, it worked well. So I thought that's how I need to coach everyone. And the reality is some guys don't deal well with that. Some guys do better with kind of one-on-one conversations, right? Some guys feel like you're embarrassing them if you yell at them in a big group, even if you're just trying to help them. so I think every athlete's different physically.

And every athlete has a different mentality dependent on their past and where they come from and how they were raised and how they were coached in their family life, right? Like there's a lot of factors. So I think everyone responds differently to different stressors. Everyone responds differently to different coaching. and that's probably the biggest thing I've changed over the years is you know, you you can't have a one size fits all approach. Everyone's unique, everyone's an individual.

Richard Graves (28:00.227)
Yeah, absolutely. Before we wrap this up then, if you could give one piece of advice to a young up and coming athlete out there about becoming faster and more explosive, what would it be? What have you learned?

Matt Gebert (28:14.72)
Number one is train consistently. So a lot of guys, high school kids, middle school kids, early or early age athletes, you know, they'll train really hard for two days. And then they take a month off, or they take two weeks off, or they take a week off. You know, the best athletes, this is an everyday thing. This is a weekly thing, right? So

Richard Graves (28:38.66)
It's a lifestyle, right?

Matt Gebert (28:39.958)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, my advice to young athletes would be, you know, you should be training three to four days a week, right? Train three four four three to four days a week. If you do that 50 weeks out of the year, at the end of the year, you're gonna be pretty good. I'm not saying don't go on vacation once in a while, right? And take some time off, but train three to four days a week, most weeks out of the year, and you'll be in a pretty good spot. And then from a from a speed standpoint.

Get good at accelerating. Every single play in sport starts with an acceleration. We we talk about like I'm a U I'm a UFC fan, an MMA fan. Every single fight starts on the feet. So striking's super important, right?

Every single play in sport starts with an acceleration. So get good at accelerating because most sports are a game of acceleration and deceleration. So if you become a really good accelerator, you're gonna get a leg up on your

Richard Graves (29:39.315)
And that's just one piece of advice for our listeners, which I'm sure will have them wanting more. And if so, where can they find you on social media platforms and follow along and perhaps pick your brain if they want to.

Matt Gebert (29:52.236)
Yeah, I I'm Matt Gebbert won on on all socials and I got a book coming out in December called Speed Science. that you know, I I get a lot of questions on, hey, what where can I learn more about speed development? And I I want, you know, what books do you recommend? There's some really good books out there, don't get me wrong, but there hasn't been a ton put out that's geared toward team sport athletes from a linear standpoint, from a multi-directional standpoint, and from a conditioning standpoint. So

I got that coming out in December. I think it'll be a pretty good resource for guys.

Richard Graves (30:26.273)
We'll keep an eye out for that one for sure and as far as Ole Miss goes and the upcoming season, when does that kick off?

Matt Gebert (30:33.228)
Labor Day weekend, we're playing Louisville. we'll start training camp here in about three weeks. So we're rolling, we're excited.

Richard Graves (30:41.017)
Listen Matt, we wish you the very best of luck. We'll keep a keen eye on Ole Miss and their progress throughout the course of the upcoming season. That's for sure as well. Wish you all the very best.

Matt Gebert (30:50.744)
Thanks, Rich. Appreciate it.