The foundational text on youth athletic development and sensitive periods. Drabik’s synthesis of German and Russian research on motor development — including the coordination windows, speed development timelines, and training principles — is the academic grounding for the developmental framework used at Jungle Athletics. The research on coordination peaking at ages 8–9 and 11–12, the sequencing argument (coordination before strength), and the definition of speed that includes deceleration all come from this book. Greg has been working from this research since before Jungle existed.

Canada’s national sport development framework, built on the same sensitive period research as Drabik. The LTAD model informs the age-appropriate training structure at Jungle Athletics and provides the Canadian sport-specific context for the developmental windows. Where LTAD offers broad guidelines, the Jungle system applies them to individual athletes in real time — verifying, as Drabik himself recommends, with the actual population in front of us.

Sprint mechanics, movement quality, and the training principles behind world-class speed development. Dan Pfaff and Stu McMillan work with Olympic and professional athletes across multiple sports. The Violent Grace framework — the idea that elite movement expresses force and freedom simultaneously — originated from observation at Altis. Stu McMillan’s articulation of what elite movement actually looks like, and why it is so rarely taught, shaped how Jungle Athletics evaluates and coaches movement quality at every level.

Four years embedded inside one of the most successful Olympic programs ever built. This is where the research became visible. Athletes who arrived with larger movement libraries learned faster, adapted more quickly, and stayed on the team longer. Athletes who had specialized early hit technical ceilings that could not be raised. The sensitive period framework Drabik describes in research, Greg watched play out in real time across four Olympic cycles. The observations from this period — including the relationship between multi-sport development and Olympic performance — form the experiential foundation of everything at Jungle Athletics. The research and the lived experience point to the same conclusion.

The training environment that shaped Greg’s foundational coaching education. Working under Dr. Matthew Jordan (strength science), Jason Poole (luge), and Scott Maw (sport science) at the Olympic Oval established the standard: every training decision requires a reason, and that reason has to be better than “it’s always been done this way.” The question — if you could give an athlete one biomotor quality for life, which would it be? — was asked in a meeting here. The answer changed the direction of everything that followed.