The Dandora Initiative

I want to share 4 lessons from one of the most meaningful projects I've ever been a part of.

6 Months ago, I connected with Coach Richard Omondi in the Dandora region of Nairobi, Kenya.

We've been working together since to create what we call The Dandora Initiative.

The initiative supports over 100 young athletes in Dandora through soccer training, meals, education, mentorship, and soon opportunities with music.

And through it, I've applied my S&C knowledge in a lot of unique ways.

So today, let's discuss:

1️⃣ How your CSCS knowledge can solve complex problems for athletes

2️⃣ How to train Beginners

3️⃣ The structure of an S&C session

4️⃣ Hybrid Training

Let’s get into it.

1. Using CSCS Knowledge for Real World Problems

The Dandora Initiative initially began when Coach Richard Omondi contacted me about the issues his athletes were facing with dehydration.

Some of the players were training in the heat without adequate food, water or electrolytes.

A few had even completely missed training or become dizzy and even collapsed during training.

Now in my area the solution might be to purchase sports drinks and make them available often to the athletes.

But I learned from coach Richard that resources are limited in the area and that is not an option for these athletes.

Fortunately though, electrolytes are not inherently complicated or expensive.

They are minerals such as sodium, potassium, and chloride.

Salt provides sodium and chloride, and other basic foods and ingratiates can provide potassium and carbohydrates.

If you understand fluid balance and osmolality for example from page 216-218 in the 5th edition CSCS book you can determine the amount of salt and sugar to add to water to create your own sports drinks.

Interestingly, this became a sort of full circle moment for me because "Creating your own Gatorade" is the topic that I made my very first YouTube video about around 15 years ago.

And in case you're curious what those CSCS fluid intake and hydration guidelines are:

"Adults should consume a sports drink containing 20-30 MEq of sodium (460-690 mg with chloride as the anion) per liter, 2 to 5 mEq of potassium (78-195 mg) per liter and carbohydrate with a concentration of 5-10%."

In practical terms, one liter of fluid would contain approximately ¼ teaspoon of table salt, 50–100 grams of carbohydrate for example through sugar.

And fruits like bananas, mangos, or papaya would help with Potassium.

I think this is a good reminder that the information we're learning isn't just for an exam.

That knowledge can help you solve real world problems for athletes years from now, which is why I'm so passionate about sharing knowledge.

2. Strength and Conditioning for Beginners

Many of the athletes in Dandora have developed impressive soccer skills despite having never been in the gym before.

I could only imagine how far they could get with months of consistent nutrition support and gym training.

So 3 months ago I reached out to Adam the founder of OVR Performance and he sponsored a full month of nutrition and training for all 100 athletes in the program.

He also sent them one of each OVR device to train with! (Those will be arriving soon since shipping to the area is complex and takes about 90 days)

The funds for gym access, nutrition, and the access to technology allowed Coach Richard and I to think about what type of training would be best for these players.

We realized that they need to learn basic movement patterns like how to squat, hinge, push, pull, brace, land, redirect force, and control their body.

We are starting with basic strength training 2-3 sessions per week simply progressively loading the main movement patterns.

Once we have established a base of strength and have access to Velocity Based Training with the OVR Velocity, we can gradually introduce some power based work coaching faster bar speeds and teaching athletes how to maximize intent each repetition.

We have already had 8 athletes move on from our program earning contracts in the 2nd tier of Kenyan football, where they will face faster opponents and more intense competition.

We're doing everything we can with our program to give them the skills they need to excel at the next level.

And it's important to remember that many of these athletes were struggling with food insecurity and often working in hard labor before we stepped in to provide funding to support their training and continued education.

And all the credit for that goes to you for your support of The Movement System, which has given me the means to create this program.

3. How to Structure an S&C Session

Interestingly, the structure of an S&C Session can stay basically the same whether you're a beginner doing your first session or an advanced athlete at the highest level.

That's because it's based on basic principles of physiology.

Plyometrics go early in the session once the body is warmed up and while the nervous system is most fresh.

That's because the neuromuscular based speed and plyometric adaptations require near maximal outputs.

For improving jump height, speed, or power output (ex: throws) once outputs drop by ~5% the recommendation is typically to end the set.

Now the emphasis placed on different areas of the session may change over time.

For beginners, a few basic plyometrics for bone mineral density may be enough with the majority of the session focused on resistance training.

For advanced athletes with excellent strength already, the focus may be the opposite with the majority of work being speed, plyometric, and power based.

Conditioning is placed toward the end of the session because it's similarly effective whether fresh or somewhat fatigued.

When I'm just adding a basic level of conditioning into an S&C program, I'll typically program something like:

30 sec on 90 sec rest bike sprints

8 or 10 lengths of the basketball court in 60 seconds on 2-3 minutes of rest

Tempo runs 100-150m at ~65-85% effort

Small sided games

Sleds, Stair climber, Ski Erg, etc.

The specific volume and intensity you prescribe depends on a lot of factors, some of which we'll get into in the next section on hybrid training.

4.   All Athletes are Doing "Hybrid Training"

All athletes are in one way or another doing a form of "Hybrid Training"

If we define hybrid training as working toward multiple performance goals at the same time... pretty much all athletes are doing that to some extent.

The degree to which they are chasing one vs. multiple adaptations depends on the specificity of the sport, the season, and their own physical development.

I think that understanding the minimum and maximal dose of different training stimuli informs your decisions around hybrid training.

For example:

Plyometrics:

Training can range from as low as around 10 jumps 3x per week for a positive stimulus for femoral neck bone mineral density in young women. (Umemura et al. 1997)

Training recommendations can be as high as around 120-150 jumps per session 2-4x per week for advanced track and field athletes.

Speed:

~6-10 max velocity sprints per week seems to be the sweet spot of reducing risk of hamstring strains for some field sport athletes (Malone et al 2017)

Though sprinters will require higher volume to maximize sprint adaptations for performance.

Ex: 8-16 maximal accelerations 10-40m, 3-8 flying sprints with a 10-30m fly zone, and potentially 2-6 speed endurance repetitions 60-150m.

Hypertrophy:

There seems to be a lot of debate around this but I'll share the recommendation from a large meta analysis which compiles data from many smaller studies to create a wider recommendation.

"According to the results of this review, a range of 12-20 weekly sets per muscle group may be an optimum standard recommendation for increasing muscle hypertrophy in young, trained men." PMID: 35291645

Endurance:

Very low volumes of endurance training such as one 4 minute interval at approximately 90% max heart rate performed 3x per week improved VO2 max in previously inactive adults. (Tjonna et al. 2013)

The general recommendation, however for cardiovascular health is to accumulate 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise per week.

However, elite endurance athletes may complete 10-13 sessions and 10-20+ hours of endurance training per week.

Approximately 80% of this training is typically performed at relatively low intensity, allowing them to accumulate large volume without creating unsustainable fatigue. (Seiler 2010)

Hybrid athletes will typically find themselves somewhere in the middle of each of these recommendations depending on their specific goals at any given time.

When I wrote the macrocycle for our hybrid athlete program for example, these were basically the upper and lower bounds which I programmed between for different goals throughout the year.

To loop this back to the Dandora Initiative, once we got a foundation of adequate nutrition for each athlete our options for training opened up significantly.

We can now do BMI testing to move especially our 7-12 year old athletes from an underweight to healthy range.

And we can do strength, plyometric, and conditioning testing to ensure that we're preparing the athletes as best we can for the different demands of higher level soccer that we hope they can reach.

Alright, I hope that was an interesting example of how to apply S&C principles to solve real world problems for athletes.

And I hope in some way our newsletter and content helps you do that for your own athletes.

If you support The Movement System in any way, you're already contributing to the Dandora Initiative and making it possible. Thank you.

After 6 months of fully funding the program ourselves, we are finally seeking additional donations to help expand the program to include a music program as well so we can help more kids in the Dandora region.

If you'd like to learn more about the project or contribute here.