Many times we are proud as coaches of what we do and use youtube as a way to share with the world our accomplishments. Still, let's focus on every athlete that may not be the star. One of my own coaches made an effort that the slowest person on the team still be a model on how to do things the right way...just a little bit slower. Lesson learned for today is don't post a youtube video of athlete [...]

In some ways it would be so easy if it was just about teaching the Olympic lifts and centering training on those two lifts and derivative movements. So simple, yet oh so boring, but beyond boring it would be flat out wrong, it is a narrow perspective on training in general and strength training in particular. Olympic lifting movements are part of a bigger picture, but what we have going is a sheep [...]

Carl,Thanks for replying. I agree about your comments on olympic lifting and even pull ups being smooth flowing or not. Can you please explain what olympic lifts you use for your track athletes and why? The Thinker aka James Smith says he will use clean variations sometimes but never does any of the overhead lifts (jerk or snatch). I see his point. Something I realized, no one is ever made from ol [...]

The still shots of the video are prime examples of why glutes need activation outside conventional training. I have no idea what stage of development the technique is here but the bar path is clearly away from some of the athletes in this lifting group. I am not saying that I could get an entire team to olympic lift within a few sessions but the purpose of lifting is to enhance the recruitment pat [...]

Dennis wrote the following: Can you please share your thoughts on why you don't like the straight leg marches and the 1-leg rdl's?I believe the straight leg marches cause hamstring problems. They are too ballistic in warm-up. As far as one leg RDL or the RDL for that matter, if you are doing them to strengthen hamstrings, there are better more functional alternatives - the multidirectional lunge [...]

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 [...]

When one looks from the side of olympic lifts we can see how close the bar is to the body. Coaches watch the bar path, roughly called trajectory, in order to keep the lift effective. One example of problems with transfer are assuming the numbers are transferring to performance. The prime case study is a record board with better numbers on the bar but the results are still the same. I observed one [...]

OK. We're about half way through the Olympics now and the track portion of the games is well underway. Despite the miserable track coverage, I've been enjoying watching as much as I can both on NBC and their online site. Here are some more random observations since my previous post. It was interesting to see the small lighter weights placed outside of the collar in Olympic weightlifting. I can' [...]

Do we really need strength and conditioning? Over the past several weeks I have seen and heard different situations that make me question the viability of the concept of strength and conditioning and underscore the need for athletic development. I am a firm believer that words create images and images create action. Strength and conditioning creates two images, heavy lifting all the time and runni [...]

During my seminar this past weekend one of the physical therapists asked me if I looked the workout of the day posted by a popular workout group. I said I did not and I went on to explain that it is more than a workout or an exercise. One workout cannot make an athlete but one workout can break an athlete. Once again it is about context. What is the goal of the workout? Whom is the workout intende [...]