"Cal, is the GOAT Drill just a fancy warm-up?"

I get this one a lot. And I always say no — but it takes about a minute to explain why.

The Part Coaches Keep Missing

Watch your athletes in warm-ups. You're looking at their feet, their hips, their arm swing. Makes sense.

..But Cal says there's something happening before any of that — and most coaches never see it.

When we were deep in the Olympics prep discussions that shaped TP2, Cal said something I keep coming back to: "All I did was make their movement patterns better."

Simple line and what he meant was neurological. The patterns weren't mechanical problems. They were brain processing problems.

Your Eyes Are Running the Show

The brain uses four distinct eye movement systems during sport:

• Saccadic — rapid repositioning jumps between targets (tracking a defender cutting).
• Smooth Pursuit — following a moving object continuously (the ball, a runner).
• Vergence — adjusting depth as objects move toward or away (catching, pass tracking).
• Vestibulo-ocular — stabilizing vision when your head is moving (cutting, collisions, contact).

Most athletes have never deliberately trained any of those much less specifically under competition stress when all four need to fire in coordination with the body's movement patterns.

When they don't — their movements degrade as their brain is getting too many "errors."

What the GOAT Drill Actually Does

The GOAT Drill forces your athlete to move, load, and stabilize while their visual system is doing what it doesn't naturally do under chaos.

You're exposing the nervous system to that demand deliberately, in a controlled context, before they ever get on the field.

It doesn't take 20 minutes. It fits in warm-up for a few rounds and what it does to the relationship between visual processing and movement is significant. That's not a claim you could make about a regular foam rolling circuit.

Coaches keep treating it like a ball skill drill.

It isn't. It's a neurological integration tool to raise your athlete's overall ceiling of performance.

If your athletes are technically sound but fall apart when the environment gets chaotic, this might be the missing piece.

The problem isn't always what they're doing with their bodies. Sometimes it's what their brains are doing with their eyes.

The complete GOAT Drill protocol — the four eye movement types, how to set it up, and how to program it in your warm-up — is laid out step by step in TP2.

Here is a simple video to start and it gets much more complex from here.

​

Side note: I (Dr MIke T here) program this on all of my clients now from my high end athletes to gen pop clients. It is amazing .

​https://triphasic2.com << order here

Keep going,
Mike and Cal

PS - Here is what TMC had to say:

"Game changer!!! If you want to learn from the best or if you want tips and tactics and the knowledge and drills (GOAT Drill) to set yourself apart, do yourself a favor and purchase this book and dive in!"​
-- TMC

​https://triphasic2.com << order here

Coach Cal Dietz, U of MN
Dr Mike T Nelson
Triphasic Training II: 14 High-Performance Methods to Unlock Elite Athletic Development - out NOW

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