Last year I read Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Outliers. In it he talks about success and some of our (mis) conceptions. At one point he talks about IQ and says, "Over the years, an enormous amount of research has been done in an attempt to demonstrate how a performance on an IQ test... translates to real life success." He then goes on to explain some scoring ranges (e.g., people below 70 a [...]

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 [...]

A while back I remember discussing injury and a fellow coach insisting for the move from injury to opportunity. At the time he meant the opportunity to do great rehab, overcome, and set personal records. While covering the proper bases to rehabilitate the injury is priority number one, injury provides some other opportunities that wouldn’t exist in the course of a normal season or training. D [...]

Well it's been about 3 months since my last blog entry and probably not too much shorter since my last meaningful forum post. I was caught up in a whirlwind of 70+ hour work weeks and lots of business related travel. Thankfully being busy is a good thing for a business owner on a new venture. But now that I've tied up a couple projects I think I should have at least a little reprieve for the nex [...]

With all of the great responses from the Poetry in Motion blog I will throw out this common issue with training. How much feedback is necessary, and what style matches what athlete. I don't have the answer but my guess as little as needed. That is hard. No epic sagas but couplets and haikus. How to do it? Well that's why 20-30 years will bring more answers than questions. Currently in year 12 my [...]

My roots are as a coach are deep in Athletics (Track & Field) so the opportunity to spend three days in Puerto Rico totally immersed in Athletics was a rich and fulfilling experience. In Athletics, I believe because of its very subjective nature, how fast, how high, high far, there is no BS. You need to do basic things very well and be able to repeat them consistently to have even moderate success [...]

Training stress is a fine art. Not enough intensity or volume and you have an athlete who is weak, unfit, and unskilled. Too much of volume and intensity and you have something similar, someone injured, overtrained, and not improving. A buffer zone in training is defined as the margin for error in one's program and is highly influenced by how aggressive one is training to improve the biomotor abi [...]

It is so easy to verbalize that more is not better, but when it comes right down to it seems our comfort zone is to revert to more. To quote my good friend Gary Winckler: “Volume is not a biomotor quality.” Regardless of the event or sport eventually it is quality and intensity of effort that is rewarded in competition. It is easy to do more, difficult to train with intensity. You are walking [...]

Jonathan Hewitt wrote the following 2 responses to yesterday's post ( My response is in bold): Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I often am) but I think I heard you say one time that you have your volleyball players and throwers throw with their non-dominant hand. Why is this? Perhaps I heard this somewhere else, Not Sure. Throwing with non-dominant arm has nothing to do with symmetry, I do th [...]

Sometimes sprinting has a paradox or phenomenon that needs some investigating, and that's when Pierre-Jean Vazel is a invaluable resource. One can argue he is the best in the world at sharing the context of performance in the sprint events. Below is a quote from member Evan (Davan) and I will elaborate on this in a few paragraphs.Since pretty much everyone does starts or some kind of acceleratio [...]