For those of you that have been following the progress of Nick's long jump training, you know that his primary issue last year was fouling. He had quite a few jumps over 7.65m but they were all fouls. So this year, one of the main foci of training was improving accuracy at the board. Last year, we had used some practice variability but I think it was incorporated too inconsistently for the gains [...]

Today's video on the "Christmas Video Spree" is a 6 minute clip from Dr. Will Wu, a great friend and business associate of mine. Motor learning is one of the most neglected sport sciences and this is unfortunate because ultimately it doesn't matter how much a coach knows about biomechanics and optimal techniques if they are unable to convey feedback or organize practice structure in such a way [...]

Some of the recent posts on the the forum have examined skill acquisition, movement accuracy and other motor learning concepts. With this in mind, I thought I'd take the liberty to make the leap to this insane video of some insane skill levels in some otherwise ridiculous and meaningless tasks. Check it out. You'll be amazed. [...]

My latest project is working with a High School hurdler that is a junior here in Massachusetts. One can use low dose cuing with a shaping and piecing approach to allow for Self-Organization. My choice is to separate the mechanics of hurdles in to what are influenced by the stretch reflex of joints and what are truly conscious actions of the athlete. Another view is to see what is motor skill and w [...]

Inspired by biological development, computational development is seen as a potential solution to such problems. This paper reports on a small subset of experimental results summarised from a doctoral thesis. The work addresses the problem of understanding the self-organising mechanisms and principles of development. The application chosen was that of constructing primitive 3D, geometric shapes, wh [...]

Training information is easy to find, go anywhere on the internet and you will all kinds of information, some valuable, some trivial and some downright useless and misleading. How can you separate the wheat from the chaff? Maybe it just reflects my age, education and the era when I grew up. A good sound base of knowledge is so much more important than information. I think to be able to sort throug [...]

First you learn to play, and then you forget what you learned and just play! This is paraphrase of what I heard a jazz musician say in an interview on NPR this morning. When I heard it I could not help but think of this in the context of athletic skills, learn it, then drill it and then don’t think let it happen! Let the instincts and the sub cortical responses take over. It was Charlie Park [...]

I 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 discipli [...]

There is a saying that “You don’t need to see different things, but rather to see things differently.” Sometimes we overlook the obvious. In the incessant search to improve performance we have gotten away from the essence of it all, the foundation of athleticism. It can be developed through a systematic approach to athlete development. It is imperative to look for every opportuni [...]

To drill or not to drill, that is the question? During my coaching career I have seen the pendulum swing several times on this issue. I have seen periods where the trend was to break everything down into its smallest parts and then drill those parts, and hope that the drills would positively affect the whole action. I have also seen times where the emphasis was on the whole action with a minimum o [...]