Julio Tous on Game Changing Strength Methods – 20 Years of Innovation

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Show Transcripts

The Evolution of Flywheel Training: An Interview with Julio Tous

Introduction

Today we have the privilege of speaking with Julio Tous, the pioneering strength and power coach who has revolutionized flywheel training methodology. Having worked with prestigious clubs including FC Barcelona, Juventus, Chelsea, and the Italian national team, Tous now coaches remotely from his bases in Gerona and Mallorca, Spain. In this exclusive interview, he shares insights into his innovative training approaches and the evolution of his coaching philosophy.

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Martin Buchheit: Julio, how are you today? I’m super excited to have you on the podcast because there aren’t many people who have managed to bring you into these kinds of discussions. You often work on your side, a little bit in the shade. Could you start by telling us a little bit about who you are, your history, and all the clubs you’ve worked for?

Julio Tous: Fine, good morning. Thanks first of all for your kind invitation. I would consider myself as a strength and power coach. I used to be a basketball coach – this is maybe where my soul is, about being a basketball coach – but at the end it was impossible to continue both jobs, and then suddenly I found that I had an opportunity to work as a strength and power coach for the first time on a full-time basis at FC Barcelona in 2003. Maybe that was the first time in Spain that a professional on a full-time basis started to work for a pro team, mainly at that kind of level.

Martin Buchheit: Can you tell the listeners where you coach from as well? That’s quite interesting.

Julio Tous: I’m coaching from Gerona, this is my hometown. Most of the time during the last two years, I’m in Tenerife during the winter – this is paradise because I can also train outdoors, and sometimes for the players it’s quite nice to see you outdoors working with equipment or whatever. Then I move to Mallorca, that is my second paradise because my father is from there and I also train from there. So I’m all the time moving between both places. Sometimes I go to the home places of the players and train there, sometimes once a month or whatever – it depends on the time and schedule of mine and them.

Martin Buchheit: You showed me some video where you’re connected to your GoPros, your webcam in the garden with all the mini gym you have in your house – that’s incredible. I wanted to bring you here to really go into more details about your training philosophy, but before that, just one global question: You have such an incredible CV going from Barcelona, Juventus, national team, Chelsea, Inter… I don’t know anyone else that has been through the clubs you have and now working from your home, having a walk on the beach in the morning. Do you think you could have done what you’re doing right now if you hadn’t gotten through those clubs, having the legitimacy and learnings that come from that level?

Julio Tous: Well, I don’t know, that’s a good question. But I have partners or friends from my group who are doing maybe not the same but quite similar. It’s about your commitment with the player and how you’re able to evolve in some way to solve all the problems that could happen when you’re working online.

For sure, COVID has been in some way the reason for all these because even for them it was quite difficult to move from their homes during a lot of parts of mainly the last season. I had the opportunity also during that period when even one of the players was infected by COVID, so he was not able to go out of home during two weeks. In that way, for that particular player it was perfect – he’s got his gym at home, some of the equipment is mine because I had spare at home, so I said “okay, I’m gonna send it to you so you don’t need to buy it during our relationship, you’re gonna have that for free.”

Martin Buchheit: We always talk about the importance of knowing the context of the player – there are things that you need to be with him, you know, sometimes just the way he comes in the room in the morning, his attitude, his mood. How do you get the feel of that online?

Julio Tous: Yeah, you learn about that every time you train. You realize from the posture or from everything he’s talking to you, what you are able to do that day or what you are not able to do. For sure, first we always have a briefing, you know, like when you’re going to an airplane – if you work with a group they have a small briefing to talk about how’s everything going, how do you feel, are you tired, any pain, whatever. It’s about the experience you have – you learn suddenly in just two seconds what you’re able to do, and if you need to change something you thought before and you realize you are not able to do, you have to adapt.

Martin Buchheit: On the fly, I guess?

Julio Tous: On the fly, yeah, sure. And then for sure it depends on the time of the week. If you’re working after a match, for sure you’re gonna need to recover – what we call compensation training to realign all the structures that are in some way out of place, and that’s gonna help him to recover faster. Then you have maybe the middle of the week when you could overload a little bit, and then the preparation for the game. That’s the three kind of different approaches you could have during the week, and usually we work between three or four times a week, sometimes more if you need it – depends on the time of the season and the needs of the player.

Martin Buchheit: That’s a perfect segue to dive deeper into your overall approach. The first time I heard from you was from some of my Spanish colleagues, namely Alberto Mendez, who always kept mentioning your work. The words associated with it were “flywheel,” “eccentric,” “Versapulley,” “variability” – those kind of things. Even now, everyone, especially in Spain, you are the first person that is always associated with this training approach. Can you give us more context and the history – what is it about actually?

Julio Tous: Okay, first of all, I’m coming from what we call the Barcelona school. The Barcelona school – the first guy to introduce the concept was the former conditioning coach, the legendary conditioning coach from FC Barcelona, first in handball where they won almost everything, I don’t know how many European cups, and then he moved to football at the late stage of Johan Cruyff, and you know, Frank Rijkaard, Guardiola – for sure it was a long period of 20 years. He was my teacher at the INEFC, which is the sports science school in Barcelona.

Then we built a group of different knowledge in the sense of the topic. So I was mainly involved with strength and power, then we have other persons like Alberto Mendez who was more involved in flexibility and how you combine flexibility with strength – that at that time was completely separated. Then we have people like Javier Jorge with speed, but speed close to strength, and other professionals who started to build that concept together.

I had the opportunity to start there to work and introduce for the first time maybe – you know, it was by chance because at that time, I remember 2003, some people from California close to L.A. in Costa Mesa brought the first Versapulley to Spain. They contacted me because I was maybe the only guy in Barcelona who was a member of the NSCA at that time. Then, you know, NSCA grew huge and became an international association – before it was just American and no one went to the congress. I used to go to the congress during the 90s and started to have relationships with people from the U.S. at that time.

So they contacted me, they brought the first Versapulley, which is a flywheel but with the opportunity of building 3D movements, so very complex movements. At the same time, I was also lucky to meet Professor Per Tesch from Karolinska Institute, who was living in Barcelona or who was during the year living in Barcelona, who brought also the other flywheel who had more research background – that is the legendary YoYo machines which were designed for NASA.

At that time also, Carl Askling, who wrote maybe the first paper about injury prevention using flywheel with professional teams in the Swedish league, also came to Barcelona and he brought me his paper that took maybe two years to publish at that time in the Scandinavian Sports Science journal. We started that relationship.

So in some way I was lucky to combine the Barcelona school creativity with the science from Scandinavia with experience from the United States, and I started to build the proposal. Then everything exploded in some way with the opportunity to work with different football teams.

Interviewer: Let’s go back to the mechanisms – why would you choose YoYo versus a squat or a deadlift if it’s vertical? And then the stuff with the Versapulley, all the videos you showed me integrating the ball, the movement variability – what’s the theory behind in comparison to the more traditional way of lifting?

Julio Tous: Okay, first of all, the flywheel was the training method that we had more scientific background from Sweden, mainly from Per Tesch’s group. I moved there around 2004 to start my postdoc – I was invited to join them for a grant they had with the European Space Agency. We moved from Barcelona to Stockholm to Aberdeen to perform a study comparing exactly what you are asking – what is the difference between squatting heavy versus squatting with a flywheel.

So we moved there with all the equipment and we did the MRIs and EMG to compare this. What we found was that at least it was something similar and in some way superior to the classical conventional way of training because we were able to involve to a greater extent very important muscles like, for example, biceps femoris.

What we had done was to compare something similar to a squat but in a more horizontal position – that is the so-called multi-hip flywheel machine. In that way you were able to extend your hip and biceps femoris was much more involved. Biceps femoris, everybody knows, is a very important muscle for elite athletes, not only individual athletes but also in football because of the kicking and the high-speed running. Maybe with squatting and other exercises you’re not able to increase the work on that particular muscle because you are not able to use your hip properly.

Interviewer: There’s a point – if you want to do some heavy strength, there’s no way you can ask a football player to put weight on his back, and that was probably the entry point. I remember a few young players, 18-19 years old, they were not playing much, they were training with the first team but not playing much, so we had the opportunity to load them, but no way we could have loaded them with a squat bar. So in this case, the YoYo was incredibly useful – using it as an entry for easy loading rather than looking at adaptation, for example.

Julio Tous: Yeah, sure, that’s a good point because that was actually where our success started from. At the Barcelona team, no one of the players from the first team at that particular time had experience doing heavy squats, so I’m not able to introduce all this period of adaptation to learn technique or whatever with them. I don’t have time – they are asking me for results.

The reason I started to work for them was because they were looking for an injury prevention training program. We designed something appropriate for them, saying that with this particular kind of training we were sure that we were able to reduce the injury rate, at least if we count the availability of the players for playing matches – that was the way we counted injury prevention, how many days they are available instead of the number of injuries. We found a huge reduction in this particular parameter.

In football, in most of the countries I’ve been working, it’s quite difficult to find players who are able to do heavy squats or heavy load training. Then you think that what translates into the injury side of things and the prevention comes from the fact that you manage to load them through this approach rather than without this approach – they would not be able to load.

Interviewer: But is it just because you find a way to work, or is there also some specific adaptation to this type of work? Because we know from the initial readings that there’s a bigger emphasis on the eccentric side of things with these machines.

Julio Tous: Yeah, sure. Then for sure you have some adaptations that right now we know for sure. At first it was – we had some doubts because no one had performed any study using flywheel to see the muscle architecture adaptation. Then we have those studies from Australia who found the real changes in the fascicles of the biceps femoris after doing flywheel movement.

To pursue that kind of stimuli, you need to enrich the stimuli and not just do this kind of movement with one exercise – you need to increase the variability of the exercise to adapt the whole structure from a pretty complex muscle like the hamstrings, or even the quad, or the biceps femoris that is in some way quite unique because it’s quite long, etc.

So we have that part – you really are able to modify the architecture of the muscle so they become less prone to injuries because they’re longer and more able to absorb energy when you have the overstretching part of the movement when you are doing high-speed braking or high-speed running or whatever.

But then you have the functional part that is as much important because you have, for example, all the increase in the feed-forward mechanisms that we could understand as increasing activity before any foot is placed on the ground. So if you’re able to anticipate any footstep every time you touch the ground with proper posture and proper activation, and you increase the activity before doing that movement, for sure you are going to reduce also the forces that all the joints and muscles are suffering.

Interviewer: One thing I’ve seen with especially the Versapulley – you change, sometimes you work on the hip, you open the knee, you change the flexion angles, and I guess that’s why you mentioned the variability – you’re touching wider ranges of force expression, right?

Julio Tous: Yeah, it’s a concept that the Russians used to talk a lot about in all these old books – dynamic correspondence to the real movement. This is – in some way I’m not saying the conventional is wrong per se, this is something you could use in some particular stages if you need it, but then what we are missing is what happens in the middle – what is the transfer between all this strength or power you build with those, as you say, closed-chain movement patterns, to reach the real movement in competition.

That is maybe what we need to add to all the strength and conditioning coaches because you don’t find many papers, many investigations about that part. All the transfer – people talk about transfer, everybody understands the concept, but we need those different levels of approach to the real movement and we are missing that. We are working most of the time what we call the zero or one level, and competition for us is the fifth level because we use that kind of approach – between zero or zero close to one to five. So it’s about seven different levels of proximity of approach to the real movement.

You need to work all of them and you need to combine during the season and even during the week all these approaches. Everything is valid if you know when and where to introduce every approach.

Interviewer: That makes total sense. What about the time efficiency? When I see what you guys prescribe in terms of volume and series, it tends to be way less than what is prescribed in terms of repetitions with traditional training. Can you comment on that?

Julio Tous: We’ve been suffering also with some particular players because they were expecting much more load in what we call congestion and the feeling of a lot of blood flow in the muscles – you know, like feeling like a bodybuilding process. What we have done is to avoid all the multi-set approach, so we just work on a one-set basis.

Then what we do – instead of doing three sets or four sets of a particular exercise, we do four different exercises, each exercise focusing on different parts of the movement or with different approaches to develop a particular movement or a particular part of that muscle.

If we introduce, for example, rotation to a hamstring movement, it’s a completely different approach than if you just work on flexion of the knee or extension of the hip. If we introduce rotation, it’s a completely different way because also this particular muscle has this ability to rotate, and most coaches neglect that very important part of the function of the hamstring.

So as I said before, for us it’s so important to increase the variability just using that particular approach instead of three or four sets – just change the exercise and look for another way of developing that muscle or that particular movement.

Interviewer: That makes total sense. Every single exercise or movement pattern will touch different muscle fibers, different angles. The next question related to that is how do you choose the appropriate load? Because you won’t be doing a one-rep max and then work at the percentage of that one-rep max.

Julio Tous: Okay, so if you want to follow the approach, right now every year it’s easier to do that because when I started to work with this kind of devices, it was quite difficult to have any assessment and it was quite embarrassing to do the assessment because we were using equipment that at that time was the unit we had to measure. So we used a strain gauge, a force sensor with an encoder, and it was a mess because we had all the cables around and the player was just worrying about what happens with the cables, so it was quite difficult.

Then later we developed, mainly with Marco Pezzo who is an engineer who worked with me in Sweden at KI with Per Tesch’s group, a sensor to collect the power from the revolutions per second of the wheel of the flywheel that spins at high speed, and you’re able to collect the number of revolutions per second. Then you have formulas with the angular velocity and the radius of the wheel or whatever, or even the inertias you introduce in the formula, and you get the power. We validated that and started to work in that particular way.

Now we have finally the force sensors with Bluetooth communication, so we have a very small unit like 100 grams that attaches to the handle or the harness or whatever, and you collect and you have on your iPad or iPhone in real time the power, the speed, or whatever you want. From that you are able to make proper decision-making of the loading – for example, how many reps, what is the rest period between sets, what is the optimal load if you want to increase the power or the eccentric overload. Maybe you need more inertias, more weights on the flywheel, or less, or whatever.

We also use something that in other fields is very common – the entropy, approximately the entropy, to measure the chaos or how variable is the signal of that particular exercise. From Bruno Fernandez-Valdes’ thesis, we learned that this is a parameter that is evolving with the mastery of the movement. So when you are learning a movement and you dominate that movement and you’re moving better, the entropy reduces, so you are able to control the movement. This is maybe the right time to change the exercise because you are controlling something that maybe is not producing excellent adaptations for your performance in such a complex world like team sports, particularly in football.

Interviewer: That’s a very nice point – looking for variability within the movements, and as you said, once it’s done properly without more variability, you just move on. Now I’d like to understand a bit more about the actual application within your different contexts. How have you applied that throughout different environments and getting buy-in?

Julio Tous: Okay, that’s a good point. I must say the boom of all this became when Roberto Sassi asked me to join him, not only at Sampdoria – that was the first time I was more a consultant, I did the whole process and then I moved there every six weeks, mainly on the international breaks, because they didn’t have maybe one international player or whatever, or two, so most of the players were at the training center.

But when we were able to really test and optimize that for a pro team was at Juventus. Roberto was there and he asked me to join him, and it was a huge opportunity because they decided from the top management to acquire that kind of approach as the club approach – the whole club from 14 years old to the first team, everyone must do this kind of approach. That was so brilliant because I had a lot of partners who are now in the first team at Juventus, like Guccio Ferrari, on a permanent basis.

Imagine you have not only the first team but also the second team, the Primavera that is U-19 in Italy, and also the youth teams – it was I don’t know, 150 players doing the same thing during three consecutive seasons, and also with great success on the field. So it was like a boom because everything started to work and the feedback was perfect because we didn’t have many injuries, the team performed on the field, and that was the big push to the approach.

Then we were lucky to move to the Italian national team, and I would say more than fifty percent of the players had worked with me in the past, not only at Juventus but also at Sampdoria, and even at Barcelona I remember Thiago Motta – I worked with him at Barcelona and then we were at the national team, so he already knew that kind of approach. So I was quite lucky to have it with the national team – it was five consecutive years working with the core of the Juventus players like Chiellini, Bonucci, Verratti, all these legendary players. Pirlo was five consecutive years, so at the end they were mastering the approach, and for me it was quite difficult to evolve because they were so good doing everything.

Interviewer: What about at Chelsea? How was the adaptation there?

Julio Tous: Then we moved to Chelsea. At the beginning it was difficult to convince a team that was not used to doing strength training on a mandatory basis because it was voluntary – so you go to the gym if you want, every time you want, but you don’t have any specific session during the season. They were surprised because they thought that was only during the preseason, and we kept going because at that particular season they were not able to play in European competition because they had a bad season the year before, so we had a clean microcycle. It was perfect because every week we were able to work at least one training session, one specific training session for all the players.

For the warm-ups we changed and introduced small parts of training, mainly outdoors, so we used other concepts like elastic bands, but this is very important – the good ones, the ones that allow you to work on the elastic recoil part of the movement. Because most of the elastic bands you find on the market, they don’t have this elastic component and are not useful for the purpose of working or reaching eccentric overload levels. You need quite good quality elastics to find this kind of effect.

Interviewer: Can you explain a bit more about how you were using the elastic bands on the pitch?

Julio Tous: Mainly they were using the elastic bands with partners most of the time. It could be also doing some specific moves for activating the glutes or the hamstrings or whatever, but they were using sometimes with a harness or belts or whatever, and they were using the same band and doing 3D movements on the pitch.

When you overstretch this kind of elastic bands with a lot of elastic component, you realize that it’s quite difficult to control that movement and you have a lot of loading. The big ones, depends on the brand, usually are blue or navy blue – I’ve been recording some forces that reach 100 kilos, it depends on the speed you move.

When you’re working in partners and you stretch from both sides of the band, then the elastic band, when it comes to the initial part of the movement, is loading you at high speed, and then you have, with specific technique on the braking part, a really big eccentric overload. So you could in some way simulate what you’re doing in the gym with pretty cheap equipment on the pitch and also using both as a stimulus.

Interviewer: That’s obviously better in terms of interpersonal coordination when you try to mimic coordinated movements, right?

Julio Tous: It’s not only something important because of the equipment – sometimes you don’t have enough equipment, it’s incredible to say that in pro teams sometimes you don’t have equipment for all of them, so that is a good point to working in couples because they share one band.

But it’s much better, for example, if they work at the same time, so they overstretch from one side of the band and they go in different directions. So when the band comes to the initial part of the movement, there is this elastic component that reaches the players together and they move in another direction, so they are overstretching the band like an accordion all the time and doing it in different ways. That is the most powerful stimuli because both players are overstretching the band on one side.

And as you say, that is the way we develop the interpersonal coordination because in some way they’re doing different things or they are opposing a force to your partner, but they need to coordinate because otherwise, if they don’t work as a team – we’ve been working also with four at the same time, so we have more vectors in different ways, and they pass the ball. Imagine you have a band, they get inside the band, four people, and they overstretch the band and they start to pass the ball.

What is the problem? When you have that high force from the bands, when you raise your foot, you lose the stability from the contact force, so it’s so difficult to do, and you realize when you need to pass to a partner a ball and you have the overloading of the band on your back and on your waist because you lose the stability. That is something we introduce also for warm-ups instead of doing passes that you don’t get anything from – you in some way simulate what is happening when someone puts you on your hip and you lose the stability and the ball goes to the public, because that’s a small change in the stability of the hip that creates a completely wrong kicking movement.

Interviewer: Can you give us some overall orientation of those three typical sessions – the recovery, the development, and the game prep?

Julio Tous: For sure, when you work with an individual player, you need to coordinate with the staff or the team he’s working with after they have done the training sessions. With the general approach, you have the option to increase the recovery if you know how to manage not only the loading but also the particular stimuli.

For example, now we’ve been trying to cover or bridge the gap between physical therapies and training, and we introduce the concept of myofascial training to try to realign all the structures that have been torn or are out of place after a match. You know that after a match you usually have heavy or moderate DOMS and you have pain everywhere, and you’re not in the mood for training. But if you compensate all that loading from the match with some particular stimuli that mainly is related to what we call dynamic rotational stability – all these movements with rotations in a very controlled way, using also elastic bands to increase this pattern of rotation to follow all these myofascial chains, mainly on the back side that is the most prone to be out of place, all the posterior chain.

Interviewer: What would be in terms of just one or two key exercises and reps for this compensation session?

Julio Tous: Usually it’s a shorter session, usually between 20 minutes to half an hour, and for example, we look at – if we talk about hamstrings, they do exercises in a rotational manner with, for example, an elastic band. You have it on your shoulder and you pull over your foot and you do like twisting the leg and extending the leg. That helps you to realign all those muscles, and you really feel better when you do that because instead of having a stressed structure, you really feel you’re losing the tension in the structure.

So one of the keys of the myofascial approach is to do this kind of twisting to put the fascia, let’s say, realign it in a proper place so the muscle works much better inside this connective tissue. Also for the back, we do with the evolution of the TRX that is the Arrow Sling – you need just a pulley and you do twisting with your arms and making also turnings with your trunk also to put in place again all those muscles from the posterior chain of your body.

Again, here it is about different exercises instead of doing sets and repetitions – you will do between 8 and up to 15 with each side of the body. It depends also on the feeling – sometimes it could be something that remains at the same posture, maybe with very slight movements to put everything in place.

Interviewer: Based on 20 years of development, what are the things that you think have changed really in your practice or things that you have stopped doing or really changed over time?

Julio Tous: Maybe I understood better the needs of a football player and also to adapt to different contexts. For example, in the UK, you have four competitions, that was really difficult to manage, and so you need to adapt to that. I understand that sometimes it’s more important to recover and to compensate all the loading than to train, and you need to understand this.

For some part of the team, the others who do not play or play less, maybe you could load, but imagine also the goalkeepers – maybe you have three goalkeepers that they don’t play ever, so it’s a completely different approach and they need training also.

And then I was able every time to go more outside the gym and develop some tools to work outside, on the beach, with specific movements and even have the option of taking outside all the flywheels to do with the football boots or in a real context movement with the grass or whatever. That is because everybody could understand that contact time on grass is completely different and how the foot contact, everything, the dynamics or the unstable environment of the field.

So that was maybe the revolution – to reach that level of specificity. And also I think the players accept better because they realize, “Okay, we are working or we are simulating what we are doing all the time on the field” instead of just because it’s quite heavy or whatever. They realize that this is good for them instead of something that you are overloading just because “this is your job and you need to overload.”

Interviewer: I have last two questions for you. The first one is about what are you reading at the moment? I know every time we discuss, you’re a philosopher, and I can tell you are one of a kind and probably a bit different than the people we tend to interact with in our world. I always see you having some time outside, reflecting a little bit on yourself. So what are you reading at the moment?

Julio Tous: This is an evolution, so you know, like 25 years ago maybe I had a seat by my own at the library in the sports school in Barcelona. I was quite good friends with the librarians and they told me “you have your seat with your name there,” so I spent there I don’t know, 10 hours a day. At that time, the 90s, it was quite easy to manage all the info. Right now, you know, it’s no way possible to be updated and to even know what is being published – thousands of journals related to our field. Before we had I don’t know, just 20 journals, you read maybe 10 of them, so it was quite easy to be updated.

So in some way I suffer from – I don’t know if saying burnout or whatever – but got bored of the same kind of readings, and you don’t find many papers that are providing new things and stimulating reading. So right now, for sure I read and I pass over very fast and say “okay, okay,” and sometimes you find a jewel, a paper that “okay, this is the one,” so maybe one out of a thousand, and you read the paper very carefully and you enjoy it. But most of the time I spend on reading other fields – it could be as you say, philosophy, could be psychology, could be business administration, or could be other things, even medicine, whatever.

Right now, I’m gonna tell you the last book I bought because I suffered from COVID during this Christmas, I read a lot of books. Maybe this is “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” by Adam Grant, a psychology professor from Wharton, one of the best schools in business. This is his last book, and this is something I was explaining or thinking in another way – that is what he’s also referring to as deep learning, the learning that is “okay, forget about what you thought was true and reconsider everything you know.”

So it’s a pretty good reading because it’s the power of knowing what you don’t know. This is very important because if you realize how little you know, and how big is the thing you don’t know, first, for your humility, it’s perfect, and then it is helping you to keep your curiosity. Curiosity for me is the most important skill you must have as a professional because if you lose curiosity and eagerness to know new things, you’re dead. Life has a lot of stress and a lot of bad things that are happening, but if you keep that, your inner passion, your inner strength to know new things and enjoy reconsidering – there is a very important philosopher in Spain who passed away a few months ago who used to say this very nice sentence: “Learning is about enjoying, enjoying about reconsidering your opinion.” So to change your opinion, you change your opinion because you realize that there’s something better there, and you enjoy that instead of being pissed off or angry because “okay, I was wrong.” No, good, you were wrong, so enjoy.

Interviewer: Excellent. That’s perfect. I think we can leave it here. Thanks for joining us, Julio.

Julio Tous: Okay, thank you for your time.

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Conclusion

This interview with Julio Tous provides invaluable insights into the evolution of flywheel training methodology and its practical applications at the highest levels of professional football. From his pioneering work at FC Barcelona to his current remote coaching practice, Tous continues to push the boundaries of strength and conditioning through innovation, scientific rigor, and a deep understanding of the specific demands of elite sport.

His emphasis on movement variability, contextual training, and the integration of technology with traditional coaching wisdom offers a blueprint for the future of athletic performance enhancement. As Tous continues to evolve his methods while maintaining his philosophical approach to continuous learning, his contributions to the field extend far beyond any single training modality – they represent a fundamental shift in how we approach human performance optimization.