Athletic Development – Defining the Field
GAIN 2020 – Join US
GAIN 2020 will be held June 16 to 20 at Rice University in Houston Texas. This is the thirteenth year of GAIN; it started 2007 with twelve attendees and four instructors and has grown to ninety attend...
What Really Matters
In life and in coaching it is important to focus on what really matters. What matters most is relationships – people – the human element. In today’s world of instant information and big data it is eas...
Load Management – Walking on Egg Shells
The whole concept of load management as it is being interpreted and implemented is beyond me. Frankly, it makes no sense. Call me old school, but isn’t good planning and training design that prepares ...
Good or Great – Your Choice
It is always interesting to see how great teams and great athletes always find a way to prevail. They can be banged up, tired and off their game and yet they still perform at a high level. To me that ...
Trapped
Developing weight room strength for the sake of developing strength is a trap. Too often there is no thought to transfer and application. Numbers go up in the weight room without any commensurate impr...
It’s a Big Dance
Every sport skill has a basic technical model that a beginner can master in a relatively short time. What is the difference then from that and the master – the Roger Federer in tennis, Usain Bolt in s...
Experience
Experience(s) are important. I emphasize the plural. In my professional career that spans fifty years I have had too many people who claim thirty or forty years of experience when in reality they have...
Big Picture
Never ever lose sight of the big picture. It is easy to get bogged down in small meaningless details and minutiae and lose sight of the ultimate objective. This is particularly the case in this age of...
Step by Step
Adaptation to various training stimuli take time. You can’t force adaptation to happen faster than the athlete’s current level of trainability and physical capacity. You must be willing to go step by ...