ASCA Podcast #96 - Dr. Chris Gaviglio

ASCA Podcast

Dr. Chris Gaviglio has been involved with elite sport for over 20 years working across multiple Winter and Summer Olympic sports and professional football codes in both the northern (Bath Rugby) and southern hemisphere (Queensland "Maroons" Rugby League team, Wallabies – Australian National Rugby Union team and Gold Coast SUNS AFL). More recently, during the recent 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Chris was the S&C coach for Beach Volleyball Silver medallists (Taliqua Clancy & Mariafe ArtachoDelSolar), Decathlon (Cedric Dubler and Ashley Moloney - Bronze medal), 200m sprinter Riley Day, and double silver Paralympic medallist Isis Holt (100m, 200m T35). Chris also works with Australian Female Skeleton Athlete Jacqui Naracott who won silver at the recent 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games. He also has a passion for applied sports science with interests in passive heat maintenance, blood flow restriction training, warm-up & competition strategies and power and strength development. QUOTES “As I developed my philosophy, I started thinking of what is needed at the level of the muscle? How are we stressing the muscle? And how are we building that each month-to-month or phase?” "At the end of the day, unless you are a weightlifter or powerlifter, a good 1RM that’s pretty cool but can they sprint fast or do their sport activity really well?” “My ultimate is isometric pushing with the use of a tie-down and if you have 2 tie-downs, you can train anywhere in the world” "I think a lot of the upper body isometric work gets missed and I will still actually train upper body isometrics even in sprinters” “If you increase testosterone for example, your behaviors associated with that are increased motivation and determination” “How do you heal the body? You need an anabolic environment” “Really with BFR, it is the first set is the key when you are doing low load continuous BFR and I think we should let go of the 30 reps, but you need to go for this feeling of fullness and maybe 1 rep short of technical fatigue” SHOWNOTES 1) Chris’ updates on what he has been doing since our last episode (#30) including insights into the COVID State of Origin rugby league series 2) A quick introduction to skeleton racing 3) Going from just getting athletes strong to focusing on specific muscular contractions (e.g., eccentric, isometric and concentric) 4) Methods of eccentric and isometric contraction work 5) How to measure the intensity of isometric work and the simplest explanation for yielding/hold and overcoming/push isometrics 6) A case study with Beijing Winter Olympics silver medalist Jacqueline Naracott and the unique combination of isometrics, bands and blood flow restriction 7) How Chris has progressed his Blood Flow Restriction work with athletes, especially in rehab space with another case study featuring Cedric Dubler 8) The use of different rep ranges with blood flow restriction besides just high rep ranges 9) Letting go as strength & conditioning coaches and implementing things from other coaches 10) More resources, including practical implementations, on blood flow restriction PEOPLE MENTIONED Wayne Bennett Cedric Dubler Stephen Bird Jacqueline Naracott Adam Storey Ben Patrick Alex Natera Yuri Verkoshanksy Angus McIntyre