Phoenix Suns’ head strength coach (NBA)

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Cory Schlesinger is currently the head strength and conditioning coach at the Phoenix Suns.  He has over a decade of experience as a strength and conditioning coach, having spent the previous three seasons at Stanford University.  Cory also has experience working at UAB, and Santa Clara University.  Schlesinger also has experience as a coach at the Olympic Training Center and as a sports nutritionist for Major League Soccer’s San Jose Earthquakes.

‍Cory has worked with NBA and NFL players as well as Olympic Games athletes. Schlesinger served an undergraduate internship at Wake Forest in 2007 and at North Carolina during the 2008 and 2009 seasons, while Haase was an assistant coach with the Tar Heels. (Source)

Here are my notes from what I learned over a few podcasts and investigation into his work. He obviously is a strength-minded coach with a heavy focus on weights, but I learned some helpful tips early on in my process of unplugging from the gym world.

Notes:

• Athletes need to learn basic movement like falling
• Squeeze everything out of the existing frame (calisthenics)
• Bodyweight exercises like dips and chinups are best way to hypertrophy without CNS fatigue
• Exit strategy
• Cartwheeling, front roll, someone pushing you over, "how do you fall"
• Microdosing: 4x4 compound lift and nothing else almost every day
• Regress olympic lifts with trap bar to achieve same results without the risks, clean with trap bar
• Kettlebell partner tossing
• Athletes need to learn to tumble and self-organize as they fall.
• “At the end of the day, it’s about the athletes, if they got the gold, it doesn’t matter what training program they are on, they got the gold”
• “If you are talking about building better athletes, make them better humans first, and then they’ll be better athletes because they’ll be able to express”
• “Bracing does not help fluidity…. whatsoever”
• “You genetically gifted athletes who don’t need a lot of bar(bell) work, to be honest”
• “When I saw squat numbers go up, when I saw force plate numbers go up… I did not see wins go up!”

Cory Schlesinger Q&A on Autonomy-Driven Sports Performance, Isometric Training, and the Sport-Skill Continuum - Just Fly Sports Performance

Cory Schlesinger on Athlete-Driven Strength and Conditioning: Just Fly Performance Podcast #138 - Just Fly Sports Performance

I hope you enjoyed these notes and research! Let me know if any of this was helpful.