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Gravity - A Movement Constant

Vern Gambetta
Sunday, 07 February 2010
gravityGravity will kick your ass

Gravity wins every time

So does gravity suck? No way!

Gravity can be your friend

Gravity instructs if you are willing to learn from it

Gravity can be chanced and enhanced

Learn to cheat it and use it to your advantage and you will be great!

Run Fast, Jump High and Throw Far!
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Rating: 5.0/5 (2 votes cast)

Discipline – Outdated Concept or Necessary?

Vern Gambetta
Sunday, 07 February 2010
disciplineI spend a lot of time with friends who are coaches. Invariably the topic turns to today’s athletes, and to one question: “Are they different?

They certainly are different in many ways from the athletes of 1969, when I started coaching. But the biggest differences are not in the athletes themselves, but in the society we live in.

One of those differences has been a breakdown in discipline. Discipline is the foundation for excellence, and self-discipline is the highest form of discipline.

Of course, for youngsters to learn self-discipline they must have guidance: what is right, and what is not right? That guidance takes the form of rules.

Coaches today have become reluctant to set rules, because then they must enforce them. That could be uncomfortable. What if a parent challenges them? Will they receive backing from the administration, from the school board, the principal, the vice-principal, and the athletic director? That’s certainly a legitimate concern, when anything ...Keep Reading
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Rating: 5.0/5 (4 votes cast)

Overhead Training for Overhead Athletes

Vern Gambetta
Friday, 05 February 2010
If you are an overhead athlete, a thrower, tennis player, swimmer, volleyball player etc. you need to use strengthening exercises that involve overhead movements. This is another myth that seems to pervade the exercise community and has definitely sprinted in to the athletic development community. You need to pay close attention to how you get overhead. You must get hip to the shoulder. Cheat and use the legs and tilt the trunk to get the arm overhead. I stay away from seated overhead pressing because you cannot get proper trunk tilt and you cannot use the legs to help connect the shoulder to the hip. In season I tend to stay away from straight bar benching, because the bar locks the hand in one position. Instead I use dumbbell bench and it various permutations, with dumbbells you can accommodate and adjust hand position to alleviate any stress on the shoulder. I do also avoid behind the neck pull downs, use front pull downs instead. A key here is to avoid adding stress to stress ...Keep Reading
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Rating: 4.8/5 (5 votes cast)

Ghosts of GPP

Matt Gardner
Wednesday, 03 February 2010
It's the time of year where folks who are doing meaningful indoor seasons have a significant idea of where they are. Certain improvements are maturing and becoming more evident in training and competitive environments. Certain insufficiencies and limiting qualities are also very apparent.

Often things that aren't there lack the basic supports to be there. Once you're into the competitive season, the focus and perhaps more importantly the schedule, limit the possibilities to address certain issues. While you can train through meets, you still have to compete and you need to be prepared to do so. For some athletes, how they compete even indoors looms large for there futures. You do the best you can, but you are limited in your ability to go back. Thorough and healthy GPPs support great possibilities and what you missed, were unable to address, or should have done better often start to haunt you here. Simple solid training executing/learning quality base skills, ...Keep Reading
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Rating: 4.3/5 (15 votes cast)

On Being Average

Vern Gambetta
Wednesday, 03 February 2010
I am reading Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin (Really thought provoking so far), he got me thinking of how hard people work at being average. It caused me to reflect on people and situations I have seen throughout my career. He is absolutely correct; people that are average, into job preservation really do work at it. They avoid risk and conflict for fear that someone will notice them. They talk more about being excellent than any of the champions I have been around and do more to avoid being the best. People told me you could not win at Cal and we did, we set out with a plan and executed it. Meanwhile the other coaches were sitting around talking about how hard it was going to be to win and we were doing it. It was not easy and it made a lot of people uncomfortable. The same with baseball, I was told in 1987 that I could not do the things that I was proposing to do. We did it and got the players healthy and better. There are still people in baseball trying to figure it out, ...Keep Reading
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Rating: 3.3/5 (4 votes cast)

Technique and Performance

Vern Gambetta
Wednesday, 03 February 2010
"Strength and conditioning will get you lengths and lengths. Technique will get you inches." Karl Adam, German Rowing Coach. I would add my comment to Coach Adams statement, the two must be developed concurrently, not separately. The more they are combined and blended the higher the level of possible performance. They go together like hand in glove as the old saying goes. If you don't have the lengths the inches are for naught. All that being said beware of strength and conditioning as a trap. There is always the feeling that you need more, not always the case. Seek the optimum level that allows to express technique that is most efficient and fits you the individual. Yin and Yang, a fine balance that is ever changing as the athletes travels the path toward high performance.
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Rating: 2.5/5 (6 votes cast)

Power Up

Matt Gardner
Tuesday, 02 February 2010
Many current gurus provide sample speed/power plans that recommend volumes of speed/power elements that I find paltry for the majority of situations. I think a lot of this bias can be traced back to incomplete backgrounds heavily centered toward the force end of the force/velocity curve (weightroom centric strength and conditioning backgrounds, heavily powerlifting based backgrounds, etc..) If you're used to nothing at all these volumes may be sufficient to induce some positive adaptations, but for well prepared speed/power athletes I find the volume of speed/power elements to be a very underrated quality.

The oft-repeated maxim of quality over quantity has validity, but you can only increase quality so much. Once you're doing speed there's not much faster you can go. Similar things can be said with plyos, olys etc.. Don't get me wrong, a depth jump is generally more intense than a stiffness hop, but between the same or very similar elements small intensity manipulations, ...Keep Reading
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Rating: 4.3/5 (15 votes cast)

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