There’s a kind of desperation you often get among inexperienced coaches. You hear it in the way they talk – using words like dorsiflex, externally rotate, posterior chain. It’s the sound of someone trying to be taken seriously. 

Judd Lienhard doesn’t need that. With over 30,000 hours of coaching behind him, he’s heard it all and seen what works. You don’t teach athleticism by dropping anatomy terms mid-sprint. You don’t build performance by clinging to dogma about “heels down” or perfectly even foot pressure. You get athletes to move better by speaking their language. 

“Run over tall grass.” 
“Don’t kick mud behind you.” 
“Pretend you’re getting punched in the stomach.” 

These are the kinds of cues that actually change movement. In this conversation, Lienhard lays out the common coaching mistakes he sees, from forcing straight-line mechanics to chasing symmetry, and makes a compelling case for what real coaching should be.

And when you do that, when you throw out the need to sound clever and start treating movement as something to be explored, sequenced, and adapted – something surprising happens. People get better. They move like athletes again. 

One of the things you do really well is coaching. Could you give advice on how to coach the right movement patterns? 

You know, we’ve got to ask ourselves as coaches: what is my purpose? And if you say anything other than “to get this athlete to excel at whatever they want to do — safely and responsibly” — then you’re wrong. 

As coaches, we probably have an extensive educational background. We know a lot of terminology. We know the science — or at least I’d hope so, right? So there’s an urge — especially for young coaches — to use big, fancy scientific words, to show what you know. 

But it has to be result-driven training. We need to get a result out of this athlete. We need them to perform something. 

Telling an athlete to dorsiflex, or internally rotate… you might drop those terms later, just so they know what it is — to educate them. But they don’t know what that means. And they don’t need to, necessarily. 

I’m sure there are plenty of people in the NFL who wouldn’t have a clue what that means — and yet they can do it. 

Exactly. And if someone’s sprinting and you try to tell them, “Hey, you need to dorsiflex your ankle 45 degrees, you need to hit 87 degrees of hip flexion, 115 degrees of hip extension…” 

They’re going to look at you like, what?! There’s a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic cueing. 

If you give someone a task to accomplish — and you know that to achieve that task, they’ll have to move in a certain way — their brain will figure out how to do it. It’s their brain teaching them. Not you. You’re just putting them on the path where their brain can learn.So we’ve got to get that through our heads as coaches. 

If that means saying, “Run over tall grass,” or “Step out of the sticky mud,” or “Don’t kick mud behind you,” or “Pretend you’re getting punched in the stomach” — then say that. You don’t have to sound smart. I think we always want to sound smart — there’s always this…There’s an inferiority complex with trainers. People think it’s not a real science — or you’re not a real professional — so we have to drop big words. 

But no — you’re a servant, man. Be a servant. Serve your athlete. Get performance out of them. 

Are there any other big mistakes you see people making when they first start to implement the flow stuff?

Starting from the ground up — they’re afraid to unanchor their heels. They’ve been conditioned that their heels always need to be in contact with the ground, and that their foot should always be evenly weighted. 

But there are times — I call it knife-edging — when one side of the foot has to take priority over the other to create angles. That heel being anchored — that torque, that grip — when you’re trying to rotate a joint, it gets transferred up the limb. And it’s absorbed by the knee and the hip. Whereas you can just simply pivot on the ball of your foot and create better force. 

So the biggest thing is: get it out of your head that your heels always need to be on the ground. As an athlete — most of the time, you don’t. There are only a few exercises I can think of where your heels should definitely be grounded. 

Most of the time, you could probably lift your heel — if the load was appropriate for you. It’s better for your feet. Better for your ankle health. If you train under load progressively with an unanchored heel, it builds foot strength, Achilles strength. It teaches you balance and how to stay stacked over your centre of mass. 

So as often as you can — as safely as you can — get your heels off the ground. 

Now — I’m not saying come up into plantar flexion like a ballerina, right? I hope you know what I mean by that. But another thing is: they don’t sequence. They try to move everything at once. 

Athletes don’t move joints. Look at any pitcher, hitter, quarterback, hockey player, golfer — they sequence their limbs. One limb moves — and that creates torque and flow into the next.Very rarely do all your limbs move at once. 

So — they keep their heels anchored. They don’t sequence. And the last thing: they don’t stay stacked. They don’t create straight lines. 

Any other big mistakes? 

We’re not a linear creature — we rotate around our centre of mass — but there have to be straight lines involved for optimal force transfer. 

If you’re going to push on something, your elbow should be behind your hand. You should finish with your shoulder stacked in line with your hip, which is in line with your knee, which is in line with your foot. 

Optimal force and safety. Straight lines help — because force transfer is linear. There are no angles where things can break. If I’m pushing on something and my elbow’s down here — that force gets transferred, but it’s taken up by the elbow joint. Then it’s a UCL factor. Or my wrist takes the brunt. 

We know this stuff, right? We should be stacked — and then rotate off of a stacked joint. So I think those are the three biggest things — as far as flows go and athletic movements in general. 

And then — you know — everything is the hips. You know this. It’s the hips, man. 

We’re always so head and chest and arm dominant. Boxers don’t punch with their arms. Big arms don’t help a boxer — that’s a liability for a boxer. 

If big arms helped throwing, quarterbacks would have gigantic biceps — and they don’t. They’ve got skinny little arms. But they can flip their hip, and they’ve got great range of motion in their shoulder. 

The amount of time you can apply force to a football — that’s what produces ball velocity. Pitchers don’t look like bodybuilders for a reason. Tim Tebow could bench 500 pounds. And Tom Brady could throw a football faster than him — because Tom Brady had better external rotation in his shoulder. So bench pressing didn’t help Tim Tebow throw a football. 

How would you avoid making these mistakes if we don’t have you standing there with us — what’s the best way? 

You could film yourself. A mirror usually works just fine. 

But really — just going slow is your biggest friend. Go very slow. Feel how it feels. I’d say — rather than try to “work a muscle” during an exercise — pretend like it’s a task that you have to accomplish. 

And just do it — like you’re accomplishing that task naturally. Like yard work. When people work around the yard — if they’re athletes at all — they generally do things in a very efficient way, especially once they’re practiced at it. 

So don’t treat it as an exercise. Treat it as a movement. Explore the most efficient way to do that movement. Use sub-maximal weights. Sub-maximal speed. Start to move the weight and see what movement moves that weight the easiest. 

Your brain will figure it out. You don’t need some guru to tell you how to move. Just play around with it. And say: “I’m not here to get a pump or build my muscles. I’m here to figure out how to move better.” 

Just start to move weights — and see what feels the best.  

And that will facilitate all the other stuff, eventually — right down the line. But you have to get that movement in first? 

There is no dangerous exercise. There’s none. There are only people doing exercises in a way they’re not ready for. If most people did the things you see gymnasts do on the rings, they would snap every ligament in their elbow, every tendon in their shoulder, tear muscles in their biceps. Gymnastic ring events are not safe for 99.99% of people out there. They’re safe for gymnasts because they’ve prepared for them. 

So — there is no dangerous exercise. Get that out of your mind. Now, if you have movement limitations — yes, there are certain exercises you shouldn’t do. But when people say, “This is dangerous, they’re going to tear a hip flexor…” Well, you can progress into it slowly and never tear a hip flexor. 

You have to stress the system to make the system robust. You have to do things that would be dangerous if done faster, or with more weight — right? There’s always a point where, if I squat with too much weight and go too fast, I’ll hurt myself. But that’s not the nature of the movement — it’s how you’re employing that movement.