Neurological Training #1: Matt Cooper
Matt Cooper
Matt Cooper (Coop) is a nutrition consultant, strength & conditioning coach, and human performance coach from California. Driven by an obsession to expand human performance, Coop spends his time researching, experimenting, doing nerdy things, and building better humans in general at Stand Out Performance (Fast Twitch LA) in Compton, California.
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Coop works with athletes and individuals-from developmental to professional levels-remotely and in-person to optimize their health, performance, and fitness.
Coop translates research, experience, and human performance technology to design one stop shop services and programs that address relevant areas, including nutrition, health, training, sleep, mind/body integration, the nervous system, recovery, and beyond.
Coop’s own personal journey began in athletics and fitness-until poor health and mental states befell him at an early age-this lead to him becoming his own practitioner and fuels his current work, marrying functional medicine and human performance to help others become superhuman.
- Certified Nutrition Consultant
- Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS)
- NeuFit Electrotherapist
- Speed of Sport Affiliate; Certified Sport Performance Specialist
- Director: Wellness I Performance I Sport Science; Fast Twitch LA
- Director: Wellness I Performance I Sport Science; Black House MMA
- Consultant: The Third Wave
- Chief Scientific Officer, Ketone Score
- Over 1K Clients Helped (pro/developing athletes, individuals, businesses, addiction/trauma)
- Co-Author, The Ketogenic Diet: A Metabolic Manifesto For Dieter & Practitioner
- B.A., Communications; SSU
Matt is a coach I worked with directly for some time and learned a lot. His ideas behind nutrition, stress, and recovery greatly influenced many things I talk about. He opened my eyes to many nuances that are overlooked in the world of pro sports but are very important.
“When you go too far down that maximal strength pipeline, you often will create governors and limiters on your brain, where for survival’s sake, to protect your joints the brain will rewire the way you contract the muscle”
“(Marinovich) would look at training more in terms of a tendon adaptation; you need to make sure you are training the tendon to store and release kinetic energy, and that’s something you can only train at the speed of sport”
“The deep squat position is one of the positions that is going to produce the most co-contractions and limiters on the body from a survival perspective”
“Someone can eat to express their nervous system”
“With the (Marv Marinovich) ball work, you are training your body to activate muscles in synergy”
“The ball work is more in the pre-hab and warmup, and some oscillation of it is going to be in the beginning of most workouts”
Psychedelics for increased skill acquisition and cognitive performance
An extrapolation of this is to critically look at your weightlifting methods and identify which exercises place the athlete’s brain in a mode of bracing and survival (“protect,” e.g., heavy barbell back squat) vs. performing (e.g., sprinting). I think it’s fair that strength coaches should keep this in mind when performing a needs analysis. I suggest evenly splitting your exercises between ones that target loading benefits, such as metabolic and hormonal distress for muscle hyperplasia, and ones that target performance benefits for primarily neural adaptations.
“The fascia being well-wound together is not just an injury prevention concept, but the fascia being well-woven together like a basket, that actually helps store, transfer and release elastic energy effortlessly”
“(In a powerlifting squat) the athlete’s fascia has to revolve around the bar path”
“If the fascia is adapting around these big compound movements, and they are the centerpiece of our training, then we are sort of adapting athletes neuro-myo-fascially to be sagittal movers, and not everything else”
“You can do corrective exercises in a way that get the neuro-myo-fascial segments of the body well-orchestrated”
“The main emphasis of our training is one that respects natural biomechanics”
“You are setting off a completely different muscle firing pattern by having someone squat off the heel; and the heaviest load is going to happen at the joint angle that is most compromised”
******“The engine of the car in humans is a lot more horizontal, it’s push-pull; this is the engine that really drives the car, and if you really (axially) stack the body, chances are you are not going to see that turn into more fluid movement”
“If I’m doing a little too much sagittal lifting, the movement is too much about the bar and the bar path, and the athlete has to mechanically adapt around that load”
“I’ve been having my guys do Olympic lifts, pretty much all off the forefoot”
“The bread and butter should not be the pure sagittal linear lifts, that’s kind of my stance”
“There is a case to be had that proprioceptive training is, more of a feedback mechanism than anything”
“Doing proprioceptive exercises might be a way to get an athlete to feel parts of the body they might not have previously utilized”
"I've seen people be weight room strong, but not necessarily sports strong...My best athletes in the weight room were not my best athletes on the field"
Further Listening
Matt Cooper: Psychedelic Performance - 103 - The Bledsoe Show
Health and the Nervous System for Performance with Matt Cooper and Adam Menner