Just Fly Performance Podcast

Sarah Miller is a strength and conditioning coach at Georgia Tech Athletics, blending a background in dance, theater, and stunt performance with collegiate S&C. Her work emphasizes coordination, rhythm, and adaptable movement alongside traditional strength and power development.

In this episode, Sarah Miller shares her unconventional path from dance, theater, and stunt performance into collegiate strength and conditioning, and how those roots shape her coaching philosophy. She explores how movement is deeply tied to psychology, emotion, and rhythm, challenging traditional, overly mechanical approaches to training. The conversation dives into habit, inhibition, and awareness, emphasizing the importance of freeing athletes from rigid patterns and reconnecting them with more natural, adaptable movement strategies.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength and the Vert Trainer

Use code “justfly10” for 10% off the Vert Trainer

Use the code “LILAJUSTFLY10” for 10% off any Lila Exogen wearable resistance gear. For this offer, head to Lilateam.com





View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/)



0:00 – Introduction to Sarah
8:08 – The Art of Falling
9:40 – Movement and Psychology
13:04 – The Role of Rhythm in Performance
19:54 – Exploring Movement Patterns
25:02 – The Interplay of Mind and Body
30:51 – The Trying Self vs. Non-Trying Self
37:03 – Integrating Exploration into Training
42:45 – Movement Archetypes in Dance
51:56 – The Challenge of Bound Movement
1:02:22 – Coaching Individualized Movement
1:15:21 – The Complexity of Movement Quality



Sarah Miller Quotes
"If you don't have complete awareness of your own physicality, of what your body communicates, you don't know what things you're selling and how that's being read."

"Psychology influences movement and what I call affective qualities of movement... even in something as basic and foundational as a squat, your mental state is going to influence your execution."

"We often want to chase automaticity, but you can really become a slave to habit. There's really great freedom in being able to break from what is habitual, especially if you're unaware of what's happening in that habitual action."

"If you believe that the body and mind truly are one, it's not that you just have a body that's controlled by your head or a body that influences your head... there can be an emotional reaction to doing something physical."

"The trying self is just focused on achieving an end goal. Rather than being grounded in the present moment, rather than being grounded in your senses and having an awareness, you're in your head because you're thinking about something in the future. The non-trying self is entirely in the moment, grounded in the senses, aware of what it's taking in from a touch perspective, sound, and what it feels like."

"I don't want you to focus on getting the rep up; I want you to focus on the process of getting there and feeling the right things."

"Ideally, they're not rigid; they're expressions of movement. They give the color to movement. I do find that athletes naturally tend toward one or the other, both in their personalities and then in how they move."



About Sarah Miller
Sarah Miller is a strength and conditioning coach at Georgia Tech Athletics, where she works with collegiate athletes to develop speed, power, and resilient movement. She brings a unique background to coaching, having started in dance and theater before transitioning into stunt performance and strength training. Her path into S&C blends artistic movement, body awareness, and high-performance preparation, shaping an approach that values coordination, rhythm, and adaptability alongside traditional strength work. Miller’s coaching reflects a fusion of creative movement roots with applied sports performance in the collegiate setting.

Richard Burnett is a sports performance coach with experience working across high-level athletic environments, including NFL Combine preparation, where he specializes in speed and power assessment, plyometric development, and preparing athletes for elite testing and competition.

In this episode, Rich Burnett digs into reactive strength testing, jump feedback, and what really matters when evaluating plyometric ability in athletes. Rich explains the differences between tools like the Just Jump mat, force plates, and Plyomat, emphasizing that context and consistency matter more than chasing perfect numbers. The conversation then moves into single-leg RSI, asymmetries, NFL Combine prep, and how reactivity profiles can reveal sprint deficiencies. Rich also shares how he uses isometrics, band-assisted jumps, and single-leg testing to build faster, more explosive athletes with greater confidence and movement efficiency.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength.

Use the code “LILAJUSTFLY10” for 10% off any Lila Exogen wearable resistance gear. For this offer, head to Lilateam.com

Use code “justfly10” for 10% off the Vert Trainer





View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/)



Timestamps
0:00 – Introduction to Jump Testing
4:55 – Context in Performance Metrics
8:11 – The Psychology of Feedback
11:59 – Transition to Combine Training
16:10 – The Importance of Single Leg Testing
20:06 – Analyzing Reactive Strength Index (RSI)
32:02 – Asymmetry in Athletic Performance
36:24 – Gamifying the Test
44:59 – Band-Assisted Techniques
55:30 – The Power of Isometrics
1:01:51 – Single Leg Reactivity Insights
1:07:08 – Exploring the Plyomat



Richard Burnett Quotes
"As long as you're using a piece of tech consistently and coaching well and all the things are the same, that's really what it's all about. That's why Mike Boyle still uses the same deal from 15 years ago and will continue to use the same one because he knows what it's telling him."

"The more information you start to uncover the more context you need. Whether it's inflated or not, I know like a 40-inch standing vert on the Just Jump mat is legit. And I also know a 36-inch is good. It still provided us with some key context to allow us to track improvement."

"I love RSI as a teaching tool. It's fantastic because a lot of kids don't understand. It's still gluing us in to what's going on with the athlete, how their strategies are. It's helping them understand plyometrics to begin with."

"It's also from a symmetry thing, really enlightening to see the difference between a left leg and a right leg when you're testing them independently. You're like, 'wow, that is a massive difference.' And let's remember the fact that this athlete has had two ACLs on this side."

"Single leg ground contact time and why you do some of these single leg reactivity drills in the first place because you're dealing with mass in your whole body on one leg. Contact time being rewarded in that sense is not necessarily a bad thing at all. And we're just seeing this clear separation of some of our athletes because of their ability to be more reactive on one leg."

"DRI factors in automatically what your initial jump height is. I love it because they want to self-select that. As opposed to stepping off of a box that you just maybe don't feel as confident in, self-selecting that initial jump and then rebounding just feels more confident, feels more engaging and fun for kids."

"What I had seen is a really high correlation with single leg max RSI and sprint ability in athletes. Higher than force plate jumps, higher than pretty much anything else."

"The step further is now the cyclical five hop where I'm having to really tolerate all of this landing force from my own jump height that I'm creating on the single leg five hop RSI. That's the one that I'm wanting to really flesh out even more to know who's lacking reactivity."

"The sprinting is enough for them to get that midfoot forefoot work but there's no real need to specify some sort of plyo around that when they're sprinting already and we sprint so much."



About Richard Burnett
Richard Burnett is a sports performance coach and the creator of Plyomat, an innovative training system designed to enhance plyometric development, coordination, and reactive strength across a wide range of athletes.

With a coaching approach rooted in movement quality and progressive overload, Burnett has built a reputation for blending traditional jump training principles with creative, constraint-based environments that challenge timing, rhythm, and elastic output. His work emphasizes not just how high or far an athlete can jump, but how efficiently they can organize force, absorb impact, and transition between movements.

Through Plyomat, Burnett has introduced a practical framework for integrating plyometrics into both high-performance and general athletic settings, offering coaches a scalable system that supports everything from foundational movement literacy to advanced explosive training.

His ideas and methods have been adopted by coaches working in team sports, track and field, and youth development, particularly those looking to bridge the gap between structured strength training and dynamic, game-relevant movement.

In this solo episode, Joel Smith explores the principles of programming for speed and power training. Drawing from his own evolution as an athlete and coach, he discusses early influences like high-volume jump programs, Soviet-inspired plyometrics, and classic periodization models. Joel outlines five key programming systems: high-low structure, potentiation sequencing, weekly changeovers, factorization, and autoregulation, while highlighting common mistakes such as excessive volume, overemphasis on one training variable, and over-programming. He emphasizes balancing speed, strength, and capacity, keeping systems simple, and using tools like AI as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for coaching intuition.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength.

Use the code “LILAJUSTFLY10” for 10% off any Lila Exogen wearable resistance training, including the popular Exogen Calf Sleeves. For this offer, head to Lilateam.com

Use code “justfly10” for 10% off the Vert Trainer



View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/)



Timestamps
3:30 – Early Training Influences
18:50 – The Big Three: Speed, Strength, Capacity
22:25 – System 1: The High-Low System
31:14 – System 2: Potentiation-Based Training
33:38 – System 3: Australian Jumps & Factorization
38:53 – System 4: Bondarchuk’s Pyramid of Abilities
43:24 – System 5: Triphasic & Wave Loading
49:00 – Programming Mistakes
57:25 – Principles that Work
1:06:31 – Using AI as a Programming Sparring Partner



Joel Smith Quotes
"We have to zoom out and look at that more slow-cooked, patient, or planned process to get the big picture of things."

"Training is not just going out and doing skills; it is doing a set structure over a set of time."

"We should understand what it's like to have that high-end training day and how long it takes to recover from it because a lot of training setups don't really account for that."

"How do you know which of those stakeholders is really, if we look to the 80-20 principle, 20% of the program being 80% of the neural stimulus? How do we know how that thing is contributing?"

"To maximally simplify any training process, we want to achieve a polarization."

"Doing those easy days really well is one of the pieces of the art of coaching that's not talked about so much."

"The system of an athlete is an amazing thing; it can adapt to the simplest thing. That's actually what makes humans and training and adaptability pretty cool, we don't need that much complexity to adapt."

"Do simple better. It's an important place to start and remind ourselves."

"With aggressive programs, use them strategically, not permanently."

"Don't live inside one system. I think it's valuable to have a few tools in the toolkit with the systems you're familiar with, so you know when and how to use them."

"Make [AI] a sparring partner, challenge your thinking. If you can use it as play and challenge, don't let it do your thinking for you."



About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, one of the leading podcasts in strength and conditioning and track and field coaching. A former collegiate strength and track coach, Joel has spent over a decade studying speed, power, and human movement. He is the author of multiple books and online courses on sprinting, jumping, and elastic training, and works with athletes and coaches around the world to develop more powerful and creative approaches to training.

Tyler Franklin is a strength and conditioning coach and physical education instructor based in Murray, Kentucky. He works with athletes to develop strength, speed, and resilient movement through practical training methods. Tyler is also the founder of Feed the Dogs, a platform dedicated to sharing ideas on athletic development and performance.

On today’s episode, Tyler discusses building speed, intent, and athleticism through creative training environments. He shares how chase games, partner drills, and simple tools can drive higher effort and engagement than traditional drills alone. The conversation also explores balancing “fun and boring” training elements, teaching discipline through conditioning, and the philosophy behind Tyler’s Feed the Dogs approach; training athletes to be both fast and well-prepared for life beyond sport.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength.

Use the code “LILAJUSTFLY10” for 10% off any Lila Exogen wearable resistance training, including the popular Exogen Calf Sleeves. For this offer, head to Lilateam.com

Use code “justfly10” for 10% off the Vert Trainer





View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/)



Timestamps
0:28 – Journey in Physical Education
3:29 – The Music Connection
10:28 – The Art of Intent
14:12 – The Spectrum of Training
21:27 – Competitive Spirits in Class
26:36 – Embracing Fatigue as a Teacher
48:08 – The Art of Boring Workouts
50:20 – Feed the Dogs Philosophy
58:17 – Mixing Conditioning with Fun



Tyler Franklin Quotes
"Don't be a molded strawberry... let's meet the standard, let's infect others with good vibes, and don't bring someone down to your level."

"I finally had come to terms with I am a physical education teacher and I need to start incorporating some of this stuff because kids love it."

"The warmups for our sprints, it doesn't have to be so rigid and it's a perfect time to explore with some of the stuff we're doing."

"We still time all that stuff to just reinforce that what we're doing is working. You've gained weight. You're running the same speed, but you've gained 20 pounds. Those are all PRs in my mind."

"Don't ever stop doing athletic things. Don't stop sprinting, jumping. Because if you do, it's going to be a bugaboo to get back."

"I'm all about doing hard things... you're going to do it and you're going to compete and it's going to be fun and then you'll realize it wasn't that bad."

"Once you put the work in, I think that's a big factor of it is you got to kind of disassociate and just go out there and perform... The amount of hours that those guys put in, I think that's a huge thing is just go perform. Don't be the gold medal guy, just go do it."



About Tyler Franklin
Tyler Franklin is a strength and conditioning coach and physical education instructor based in Murray, Kentucky. Through his work with athletes and students, he focuses on building strength, speed, work capacity and resilient movement patterns that support long-term athletic development. Tyler blends foundational strength training with athletic skill work, emphasizing quality movement and practical methods that translate directly to sport. He is also the founder of Feed the Dogs, working a balance of important qualities in athletes.

Today’s guest is Vern Gambetta. Vern is a world-renowned sports performance coach with over 50 years of experience across Olympic, professional, and collegiate sport. A pioneer in modern athletic development, he’s known for blending movement skill, strength, and long-term athlete development into a practical, coach-driven system.

The more coaching and training leans into data points, KPI’s, rigid standards and an overly specialized model, the more true athleticism, movement and skill development gets choked out. By understanding all aspects of the athletic movement equation, we can give athletes a better total experience in their sport and movement practices.

In this episode, Vern leans into his wisdom for a wide-ranging conversation on movement, skill, and the art of coaching. With over 50 years of experience across Olympic and professional sport, Vern shares insights on functional training, sport specificity, plyometrics, rhythm, and why skill expression, not rigid technical models, drives true performance. From jump rope to the dot drill to developing movement “signatures,” this episode is a masterclass in coaching the athlete in front of you.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength and the Just Fly Sports Online Courses

Use code “justfly10” for 10% off the Vert Trainer

Use code “justfly20” for 20% off of LILA Exogen Wearable resistance gear at www.lilateam.com



View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/)



Timestamps
3:00 – The Birth of Functional Training
10:39 – The Nature of Fascia
15:33 – Training Spectrum
28:16 – General vs. Specific Movements
38:00 – The Art of Movement
49:31 – Rhythm and Movement
55:15 – Plyometric Training Perspectives
59:50 – The Role of Technology
1:13:16 – Sketching Athletic Sequences



About Vern Gambetta
Vern Gambetta is a pioneering sports performance coach, educator, and author widely recognized as one of the foundational voices in modern athletic development. With more than five decades of coaching experience, Gambetta has worked across track & field, baseball, swimming, cricket, soccer, basketball, and rugby at youth, collegiate, professional, and Olympic levels.

A former track and field coach and longtime advocate for holistic athlete development, Gambetta helped popularize the concept of “functional training” in the 1980s, while consistently emphasizing that training must serve the demands of sport, not marketing trends. His work integrates biomechanics, skill acquisition, rhythm and movement literacy, strength training, and long-term athletic development into a unified system.

Gambetta has coached at the Olympic level, worked in Major League Baseball, and served as a consultant to professional teams worldwide. He is the author of multiple books, including Athletic Development and Building the Complete Athlete, and is a sought-after international speaker known for blending science, experience, and practical coaching wisdom.

Above all, Gambetta advocates coaching the athlete in front of you, prioritizing movement quality, adaptability, and lifelong development over rigid systems or trends.