As an Athletic Development coach you should beware of overdoing specificity; it can be a trap, a one-way dead end street. You may be just adding stress to stress by too closely trying to overload the actual movements of the sport. You can get too specific and lose sight of what you are doing. My role as an Athletic Development coach is to prepare the athlete for the stress of their sport; I can do [...]

Many coaches are wondering if some experts have a god complex. Think about it. It's no longer interesting or ego serving just to get people bigger-faster-stronger when you can bring back their careers back to life as well. While I will listen to Doctors share what is going on with an MRI to learn, it's a collaborative effort. I will not drop my track pants for chinos unless it's appropriate bec [...]

Aaron Schwenzfeier's blog is a wake up call to what I am observing with D1 Strength and Conditioning coaches. Like the November elections, change will occur, and incumbents are on the hot seat. When Mike Nelson requested why the terms Performance and Fundamental are so strongly segregated, the "we can't put performance on dysfunction", since anything different prescription wise than a screen' [...]

"I see a strange filter in blogs with information that is being shared, with everyone agreeing or linking what they have in agreement. Recently the Anatomy Trains talking points have left me wondering if some sort of darkside exists with the information that people wish not be shared, as it may contradict their beliefs or product list. Did you skip out of any information in your review on the med [...]

Over the course of my career I have used various forms of assessment to determine the athletes readiness to train and compete. Sometimes they looked more like something you would see in physical therapy clinic and other times it was just pure end range jumping, throwing and running tests. I kept searching for an assessment tool that would give then information I was looking for. A few years ago s [...]

Functional training is training. All training is functional, it is just that some training rates higher on a continuum of function than others. If you are not sure how to make your training more functional here are a few tips that should guide you. This not rocket science, I think you will see when you analyze successful long term athletic development programs that all these elements appear in som [...]

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 [...]

I have been pretty hard on what I have called the lost generation of strength coaches. It is time to reveal the method to my madness. I wanted to call them out. Wake them up so to speak, maybe a little tough love. I am not sure they are lost as much as they are misguided. When most of these coaches came of age and into the field of S&C, it was at the time there was a proliferation of information a [...]

This is a list of books that are in my library that I suggest everyone interested in Athletic Development should read.Historical WorksBunn, John. (1955) Scientific Principles of Coaching. New York, New York: Prentice Hall, Inc.Dintiman, George B. What Research Tells The Coach About Sprinting. AAHPER, Washington, D.C. 1974Doherty, Ken. Track & Field Omnibook (Fourth Edition). Los Altos, CA. Tafnews [...]

The focus in the Athletic Development approach is not on the exercise. The selection of the actual exercise is the last step in a multi-step process. In the strength coaching approach it is all about the exercise. Apparently the latest go to exercise is the RFESS (rear foot elevated split squat), an exercise introduced twenty years by Angel Spasov in his tour of the US. I call it the Bulgarian sin [...]