PODCAST - Gain, Go, Grow with Anthony Donskov

Anthony Donskov and David Rosales - June 30, 2020

On episode #87 of the Hockey Strength Podcast, Anthony Donskov joins us to talk about his new book, Physical Preparation for Ice Hockey II: The Gain, Go Grow Manual.

We discuss his writing, his training philosophies, the Gain, Go, Grow system..

Finally, though, we talk about The Paul Donskov Legacy Scholarship, which Anthony and his family started in honor of their late father, Paul Donskov, who passed away in April 2020 after a long battle with cancer.

LEARN MORE AND DONATE to the Paul Donskov Legacy Scholarship.

Follow Anthony on Instagram: @anthonydonskov

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @anthonydonskov

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The Full Podcast Transcript:

David: Anthony, welcome back to the Hockey Strength Podcast. How are you?

Anthony: Great thanks, I really appreciate you having me and all the fine things you're doing with the website these days.

David: Absolutely. I want to start with something off-topic. Poetry. Why don't you tell me how you got interested in poetry.

Anthony: Yeah you know, I've found as I've aged that it's really important to have hobbies, passions away from the weight room, away from the job. And for whatever reason I found as a young coach that writing was a way for me to relieve, a way for me to express myself. I think at times isolation is a gift. And for me it was a way to communicate.. and you know sometimes I've found as I've aged that I can communicate better with my pen than my mouth. So, it's something that continued to evolve and still do it to this day.

I actually make time to do it. I read a little book a little while ago called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. And the first page is still highlighted and a picture of it is in my cell phone and it says.. There's a secret writers know that non-writers don't: The hard part is not writing. The hard part is sitting down to write.

And what prevents us from doing that is resistance. And I think that whether you're writing a book, or a dissertation for a class, or poetry, it takes a lot of delayed gratification, patience, and time. And those things in this day and age are sometimes lacking because we all want quick fixes for things.

So for me, poetry has always an escape. Writing has always been a mistake. And it just gives me an outlet away from the strength and conditioning facilities.

David: How do you think writing poetry has strengthened your communication skills. Maybe your written communication skills as prose, or as a coach?

Anthony: That's another great question. I think it has. I think age also does that to you. When you're involved in the profession for many many years — this is going on 17 for me — I think if you were to ask me on this podcast 10-15 years ago and you said “Anthony why do people come to your facility” and I say “your facility,” “our facility,” because we have several coaches I'd say to you, “Oh, you know Dave, we've got the best programming in the world. We've got this, this, and this.”

Do I believe our programming separates us, of course I do. But really, I think why people come to our facility is for the people. It's communication, it's care, it's concern, it's passion, it's purpose. I think poetry has helped with that, and I think age has too.

As you can probably tell, we're less than ten minutes into our communication and another quote that I'm going to give you and I read this in, I think it was The Talent Code, I could be wrong, and they were talking about creating environments. And they were using gardening as an analogy. I'm going to use coaching in place of gardeners. They said, “Coaches are a lot like gardeners. Gardeners don't grow flowers, they create an environment for flowers to grow.” So I believe, as I've aged, I don't like the term soft science with communication. I believe in being able to have emotional intelligence, to talk to people, to knowing when to cue, when not to cue. To know when to allow a cooperative process within the programming environment and more of a dictatorial, directive process is an art and a science.

And I think that helps build trust and love. When you have trust and love in a program… you can have a great program and if an athlete doesn't believe in it you get mediocre results, but if you have an average program with trust and love — whether it's placebo or not — you get great results. So, communication is extremely important. Long winded answer: I think poetry has helped scaffold that but I think age has laid the bricks on it.

David: I also am a big fan of Pressfield's work. Even if you're not a writer, I would recommend the War of Art. It's a short little book you can read it in, maybe, 45 minutes.

Anthony: This is another thing I would tell a young coach: I would say in the past two-three years I don't know if I've a strength and conditioning book in terms of programming. But every book I've read has something to do with strength and conditioning. Whether it's philosophy, art, communication, leadership, those books can all be applied to our craft if we look deep enough.

David: One other thing I want to ask before we move on to your new book: Something I really admire about you as a coach is your framework for solving problems and your processes for getting outcomes with your athletes. I'm going to quote your book. “Our programs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.” Could you elaborate on that?

Anthony: The whole goal in science is not defend anything, it's to refute. And that' built on failure. The moment you prove yourself wrong, you sooner you can find a better theory and a solution to your problems. As a young coach I wanted the opposite. I wanted to defend what I knew, you know, “this is the results.” This is this, this is that. And the reality is I didn't even have an error eliminator to know what's working and what's not.

They are educated guesses at best. What is a theory? It's a theory. It's an opinion with incomplete information. The game of science is never-ending. There is no finish line. Again, the goal is to do your best, to poke holes in your own ideas, to evolve your programming accordingly. I think that if we as a cradle can embrace that, we'll evolve as a practice. And that again is all hinged upon failure as opposed to success.

David: That reminds me.. It's a very similar idea to what, going back to a non strength and conditioning book that has to do with strength and conditioning, Principles by Ray Dalio and he calls this “radical open-mindedness” where you're never stuck in your beliefs. How do you deliberately challenge what you believe? Is it talking with other coaches? It is reading books? Is this something you consciously do are does it just happen?

Anthony: Another great question. How do I challenge what I believe? I think you can do that several ways. I use the term”error-eliminators” for me those are KPI's. What are the key performance indicators of your sport? As it relates to hockey, believe it or not, not many off-ice motor abilities correlate to hockey. Jumping and sprinting are probably top, and they're moderate at best. Sometimes we find they're low correlates. Something they're moderate. Hockey is played on the ice. It's a frictionless environment. Skating and running are very different abilities.

Having said that, we look at what the literature says to see what correlates strongest with those abilities, and we measure and manage those. So that's a way to find failure in your program. Talking with your athletes certainly is. I can tell you, a wise coach once tald me a long time ago that working with professional athletes is very different than working with 12-year old Tommy. One is a more directive approach, and one is a more cooperative approach. Coaching is a lot like parenting.

So for our pro players, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm asking them, “How do you feel?”

“How do you feel about that about that being in your program?”

“Hey, do you have any feedback for me?”

“How has this worked for you in the past?”

“If I revised this how would that make you feel?”

Again, this cooperative approach breeds understanding and trust. Like I said before, I don't care if you call it placebo or not. Many times I've found through trial and error is that the perception of the program may be more important than the program itself. So that's another way to error eliminate.

Talking to colleagues. Look, I'll say, when you have communication within your environment that's less hierarchical and more heteroarchical, and people feel comfortable speaking their minds, and challenge it in a fruitful way, that's growth right there. The growth of knowledge comes from the modification of previous knowledge. So you have to have communication within your coaches. A group I try to rob and do from is ALTIS. Look at their pool side chats. Look at the communication they have among coaches. People challenge people constructively, they offer solutions, they offer better explanations, and no one too proud to say “wow that's a good point. I might have to change that.” I might have to tinker with it, experiment with it, measure it and see if that creates a better outcome.

So there are a lot of different ways to error eliminate. Subjective. Objective. I think putting those together will certainly evolve not only your programming but whatever it is you're seeking to get better at.

David: Yeah this is one of those concepts, approaches to thinking, that will improve literally everything you do from conversation to loved ones, friends, everything.

Anthony: Absolutely

David: Let's transition to your new book, I have it right here. Physical Preparation for Ice Hockey II: The Gain, Go, Grow Manuel subtitle Programming for High Performing Hockey Players. Tell me the moment you knew you had to write this book.

Anthony: I was asked — I believe it was two years ago — to speed at the NSCA hockey clinic. It was awesome. It was great to spend a weekend and share some ideas and see some friends. I remember being asked to speak and thinking, okay what do I want to speak about? And I thought, well you know, there are differences in how we how we train, what I consider, our high performance hockey players and how we would train our youth hockey players.. Maybe I can expand a little bit and get into the philosophy, the differences. I had the opportunity to give that lecture and then I still kept receiving over the years questions about it. And I thought maybe an hour wasn't really enough time to dig deep into the whys behind why we do things for our higher performance hockey players, players with higher training ages. And I thought this book would be a platform to better expand it.

You know the book itself, really the last chapter is the Gain, Go, Grow method. The majority of the book is really the philosophy behind that behind. How to think critically, how to be a scientist, how to be a better coach. [the book talks about] obviously the differences, the nuances, between high performers and sheer beginners, and then how we program accordingly.

David: Yeah, let's dive in. I want to ask a specific question about one of those latter chapters. Could you elaborate on the need, or the lack thereof, for variability in training elite hockey players?

Anthony: Variability obviously is something that we can manipulate as coaches. We have acute programming variables. I think I stated in the book.. I can give you my experience with variability. Our variability for our professional athletes: we have fewer exercises, consistent loading, and our micromanages dictates our macro. I view programming really as a scientific experiment. We have independent variables and we have dependent variables. Independent variables are our acute programming variables. And our dependent variable is the adaptation we're trying to solicit from the athlete. If we have too many independent variables, then we don't know what works and what doesn't. We don't know what got us our results.

Our variability for professional athletes may come in some minor changes. It might be a stance, it might be bar thickness, it might be the velocity that we're using on the lift, it might be the tempo that we're using.

So the trap bar deadlift — I'll use this as an example — may be in a program the lion's share of the summer. But the variability within that lift might be stance, it might be tempo, it might be grip, et cetera. So variability is a little bit different than young Tommy might need a hinge — a totally different exercise. He might need to be exposed to repetition, different stressors, progressive overload, et cetera.

Our advanced level athletes have that variation, it just comes in smaller pieces, and smaller bite sized pieces, if that makes sense.

David: Yeah, and like you said that kind of goes off of what you built on — this is a hypothesis, this is an experiment. And if we change too much at once, then how are we going to know what we're experimenting with?

Anthony: Absolutely. And again in the book I quoted this because it was one of those moments that kind of changed me. I remember listening to Buddy Morris on a podcast — I just like to hear Buddy Morris speak — and he said, “a basic program works for a beginner athlete and an advanced athlete but for very different reasons.” The beginner athlete, they need progressive overload, variability, time under tension, and they need that consistently. For the advanced athlete, how they get better at their sport is by playing their sport.

If you want to be an elite guitar player, you have to play the guitar. No one takes the stance, that we're going to take the entire summer off and we're going to strengthen your index finger and your pinky finger — I don't want you playing the guitar. And then when the summer ends, let's go back to your big musical symposium. No. You gotta play the guitar. So a simple program is great for the advanced level athlete, because it shouldn't compete, it should complement what they do on the ice. In order for them to get better, their sport is number one.

David: I love this because it kind of goes against what we normally think of — well, okay what I think, I'll speak to my own experience. When I think of NHL players or top level players training, I'm thinking they must have tons of technology hooked up to them, they must be basically robots, and what you're saying is that, well maybe it's not as complex as it needs to be.

Anything: Again I think you have to almost look at it as a big swimming pool. That's your adaptation reserve. And look, our professional hockey players, it's not like they're on the ice all Sumer long getting skated and conditioned. But, in order for them to refine their skills, they do have touch points on the ice for skill work. That comes at a physiological cost. That takes money out of the pool. For me, when I look at it from a coaching standpoint, that right there is the most important in getting them better.

So, as a strength and conditioning coach, how can I use that and how can I plan a program around that? For me, I look at that and say, okay, they're going to be on the ice. That's going to affect the frequency at which we train. Also all of these guys have high training ages; they've been exposed to progressive overload for six plus years. For us to really stimulate so form of adaptation, they need more intensity. Okay, if they need more intensity, they need more rest. Okay, I like the idea of three times per week for our frequency. We must have at least one or two or three days of low-end work to allow them to recover from the stress that we're imposing on them. But again, when I look at it I think, sport first, stress from sport first. If they're gonna get better on the ice, how can I complement that?

Even though it's the offseason, I want them to focus on their skills that got them to the big dance, and that should be their number one priority. The weight training training is still very important. I'm not downplaying the importance of strength and conditioning by any means, but I've found as I've aged as a coach, I may not be as important as I think I am.

David: I'll give some more recommended reading there, Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday,

Anthony: Yeah, I read that book. Great book.

David: What's the experiment of — if we're talking about experiments and hypothesis — what is the Gain, Go, Grow experiment?

Anthony: Yeah, it's a great question. It's really tempting to create a microcycle that's sustainable to professional hockey players where the micro dictates the micro — so we keep things very simple. Things are highly complemented, meaning that our jump training and our energy system training and our “theme of the day” are very similar in nature, and I can expand on that. And then — I always say this — I think one of the cornerstones of the program — and I had the opportunity to read a lot of John Kiely's work and it really changed the way I thought. Specifically, his article, “21st century periodization.” I thought it was an unbelievable article. Long story short, it's a one divided by n heuristic. Which simply states that if I were to give you a million dollars and you were to put it in the stock market, more than likely you wouldn't buy just one stock, because if you made a mistake is your investment you're going to lose big. Well that investment to us as strength and conditioning coaches is our proposed adaptation — what we're trying to go after.

The reality is clouds and clocks. One is very complicated one is very complex. We can take a clock a part, we can put it back together. That's complicated. A cloud, every one of them is very different. It's very complex. Well, so is adaptation. You and I might be on the exact same strength and conditioning program and we might get very different results. And Kiely very eloquently stated that and they used a lot of their research and his references to facilitate his point. So back to the point of this “one divided by n” and this investment-type heuristic. Well, if we're going to make a big mistake as coaches, I'd like to balance my mistake. I'd like to diversify my portfolio. So, if I do make a mistake, it's not a huge one, and it's not a big mistake. So, there goes the “strength block” the “hypertrophy block” the “power block.” Do you see where I'm going at?

What we're doing with this blocks — and again, this all works for linear periodization. This all works for young athletes. I'm not suggesting it doesn't. But what we're trying to do with advanced level athletes is we're trying to balance a portfolio. So if we do make a mistake, it's not a big mistake. So our gain day, back to our programming, is really a max-type effort day. And I say max-effort.. I better watch how I use that. Certainly NOT Westside Barbell max effort method. But our rep counts — the goal is to move heavy weight slowly. Our acceleration is done on that day, and our high-impulse plyos are done on that day. The next day of the week would be a Wednesday. And that would be our Go day. And our Go day, we start with our ALTIS series rudiment warm-up. It's a really “pop,” short, quick warm-up off the ground to really facilitate the tissues and prepare them for sprinting, and build stiffness within the system. We have our true stretch-shortening plyometrics that day. We hook up our GymAware's and look at bar speed that day, and prior to the lift we're doing our timed sprints that day. So you see how everything complements itself. It's like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as opposed to peanut butter and pickles. Everything's trying to be highly complemented. And then on the last day of the workweek, for four specific reasons we have our work capacity day. And typically, that's lifting sub maximal weight for time. It's a really tough day. It's coupled with more lateral-type bounding or higher impulse work where there's longer contact from a jump or plyometric standpoint. And we would be either working change of direction or as the season progresses and we're getting close to training camp it might be more of a repeat sprint day where there's slight acidosis. So the goal is increased work-capacity. And it's done that day because the athletes' have 48-72 hours to recover. The Tuesday-Wednesday of that program are both low days. So that can be tempos, it can be circuits, and the goal there is to recover from the previous days' stressors. So there are three days of frequency but there are really two days of recovery.

That's the engineering of the Gain, Go, Grow model. With the exception of our tissue remodeling block in the first few weeks of the summer, that model carries us through the entire summer until our athletes go back to training camp.

David: What differences have you seen using The Gain, Go, Grow model as opposed to the more typical linear periodization?

Anthony: I think we're getting — I don't think, we're measuring — better at marginal gains. With high-caliber athletes, I don't want them focusing on anything too laser-focused. The moment the measure becomes the target it fails to become a good measure. We're looking at our KPIs. Every athlete that trains at our facility goes through the KPIs every microcycle. And we're looking for marginal gains. We're looking for improvements. And we've seen those with this method. We've talked to our athletes from as subjective standpoint, they have more energy to focus on what they do on the ice, which you and I have spoken about previously. Which, is certainly the most important because that's where they're going to make their money, for lack of a better word.

It's a combination of our KPIs and the subjective feedback we get from our athletes. I'm fond of saying, it's not rocket science but it is exercsie science. Those are the objective and subjectives measurements we use.

David: So the book everybody is Physical Preparation for Ice Hockey II: The Gain, Go, Grow Manual. Subtitle: Programming for High Performance Hockey Players. So you can get that on Amazon or Author House. So if you don't have that book by now then definitely check that out.

Anthony, in April your father Paul Donskov passed away after a long battle with cancer and you and your family have decided to start the Paul Donskov Legacy Scholarship. So, I wanted to give you this opportunity to talk about what that scholarship means to you.

Anthony: Yeah I appreciate it. It has been a really difficult time for our family. We have a really close family and our dad was our leader, our fearless leader. Yes, unfortunately April 15, 2020 my dad succumbed to lung cancer. We started as a family the Paul Donskov Legacy Scholarship to honor my father's name. The Blue Jackets foundation has teamed up with us and the goal of this scholarship is to provide youth athletes incentives and monetary incentives to reach their goals to education after they're done with their hockey careers.

My dad was a huge, huge proponent of development. He put the fun in fundamentals. He was an amazing hockey person. I'm obviously biased because he was my father and my hero but he was a pioneer, instrumental in growing hockey in Columbus. He was also passionate about education, about giving back. He was passionate about providing unique experiences, life-changing experiences to youth players that came with the Columbus hockey organization. So this scholarship in his name will provide funds to high school student looking to gain education once they graduate.

David: First I just want to send my condolences to you and your family. And, where can people learn more about the scholarship, and how can they donate?

Anthony: This link will provide you right to the Blue Jackets page where you can make a donation. If you're able to that would be a fantastic thing. I know our family and my father would be very honored.

David: Anthony, I think this is the perfect place to wrap up. I know gyms are starting to reopen and you're getting busier by the day, by the hour. So thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Do you have any closing thoughts for our audience?

Anthony: No just thank you for the opportunity. You know, this is an unbelievable profession, we've got great people it in. And again, thank you for what you're doing for the sport of hockey and I wish you guys continued success.

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