Catching Up

I have been
traveling so much lately I am trying to catch up with myself. The trip to England was quite good. The First
two days I was at Loughborough University presenting a seminar for The FA to Fitness
coaches of professional teams, there were sixty coaches in attendance. Presenting
in that environment is never easy because people often do not want to hear the
theory and the why, they want to get to the what. Therefore the theme of the
two days was “Stuff.” My basic point is that everyone does stuff, in the past
six weeks I have literally seen training stuff all over the world. There are
the same ladders and hurdles, with the same drills mindlessly reproduced. My
thesis is that “stuff” without the why, what, how and when is just that “stuff.”
That is not good enough. I hope that I got my point across. The next day I put
on a different hat and traveled to Manchester to do a demonstration of a product
in development for a company I am consulting with. It was very interesting
monitoring the practice and visiting with the fitness coaching staff there.
Friday and Saturday I was able to combine business with pleasure and visit my
good friend Dean Benton and his lovely wife in Leicester. Dean is now the head
strength and conditioning coach for the Leicester Tigers England. I was able to
observe two training sessions and individual session with a player. (See
pictures) Dean does an excellent job, he has had to
work hard to change the
culture of training from an overemphasis on strength training to a more
balanced program. While I was there Dean was offered an opportunity to return
to his old team in Australia, the Brisbane
Broncos, as Performance Director. He
has accepted and will be returning to Australia. I am looking forward to
visiting him
there

 Saturday
Dean facilitated a meeting with Michael Snelling, English Rugby Team Senior
Team Physiotherapist. We spent about four hours discussing hamstring injuries,
prevention and rehabilitation. Michael had done a brilliant presentation at the
conference a couple of weeks previous so we used his notes from that as a starting
point. He is a real sharp dude, who really stimulated me to think. He also gave
a ride to Heathrow so I was able to pick his brain further.

I always
come away from weeks like this excited and over stimulated. Getting back to
reality after weeks like this is always hard, especially when the first morning you wake up and the blog is gone. Reality check! Got back and got one session
with my Venice girls last week. They are AWESOME – all of you should have the opportunity
to work with a group like this. They followed every workout to the letter. This
is a special group of young ladies. Yesterday was testing and now we start a
plyo block. I can’t wait for the workout this afternoon.