Ep 59 - Jonas Tawiah-Dodoo Strategies - "Forces in the right direction are everything."

In this episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined by Jonas Dodoo, a speed specialist whose work sits at the point where multi-directional speed, deceleration and change of direction stop being a collection of drills and start being a set of principles you can actually coach from.

Jonas works from four core principles, and the first does most of the heavy lifting: forces in the right direction. Not more force, not harder force, force applied where the task in front of the athlete actually needs it. A lot of what gets diagnosed as a speed problem turns out to be an orientation problem, and once you see it that way the session you write looks different.

From there we get into what has to hold for any of that to transfer. Pelvic and trunk control comes up repeatedly, less as a stability buzzword than as the thing that decides whether force reaches the ground in a useful shape or leaks out sideways. Then load management and pre-tension, how you prepare tissue to accept force rather than absorb it by accident, which is where the injury conversation and the performance conversation stop being separate topics.

The part I keep coming back to is his framework for diagnosis: is this a physical limitation or a co-ordinative one? Can the athlete not produce the force, or can they not organise it? Get that wrong and you spend a block in the gym on a problem that was never in the gym. Jonas is clear that most common coaching mistakes trace back to skipping that question, and he's blunt about the misconceptions that keep circulating in the deceleration and change-of-direction space.

We finish on the long game, how coaching relationships and mentorship compound over years, and why the practitioners who develop fastest tend to be the ones who stayed somewhere long enough to see the consequences of their own decisions.

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