After the 2 day video hiatus, here's another one from yours truly. Like a couple of the others, this one's from the HPC ELITETRACK Gold Medal Clinic. In this lecture I look at the concept of peaking and talk about ways to lengthen the stretch of time an athlete remains in a state of competition preparedness. [...]

I spent New Year ’s Eve working with the Kenyon swim team, what a party! Talk about an uplifting way to end the old and start the new. These kids are great. Focused and motivated. They come to Sarasota every winter break for ten days to train. It has been really neat to see their progress since September. They have made significant strength gains and some huge body composition changes. It w [...]

Happy New Year - 2009 begins my 40th year of coaching. Sometimes it seems like yesterday that I started and sometimes it feels like a century ago. The other day when I was swimming I was reflecting on the way things were in 1969 versus how they are now, it was certainly a different and simpler world in many respects. Please do not take this as an old man reflecting on the good old days. Everything [...]

2009 is almost upon us. 2008 was good. The emergence of Usain Bolt, Beijing Olympics, no major drug busts, and WRs in quite a handful events helped to overcome the black eye that Marion and Trevor continue to be. As we prepare to ring in the New Year, I thought it would be interesting to look at the top forum and blog postings of the last year. Most Active Forum Topics of 2008: HPC ELITE Nick N [...]

This a story on Don Wakamatsu, the new manager of the Seattle Mariners. I had the pleasure of working with Don when he was a player with the White Sox. He came to us as a released player with limited future because of recurrent shoulder problems. He worked his butt off to regain the ability to throw and actually made to the big leagues for a short time in 1991. Don was a player that the other play [...]

Building on the excellent post of Dave's presentation on eccentric strength I decided to focus on the evolution of the taller athletes in regard to shuffling. The video above is a side view of Dayron of his run at Paris last year and it illustrates his specific joint angles with shuffling. Shuffling is a skill that is necessary for athletes that are taller and faster at the elite level, and it al [...]

OK. Here's my last video (at least until I return home from a family visit in NY). This one's a 5 minute clip from the DVD titled, Penultimate and Takeoff Mechanics in the Long Jump. The video was shot at the HPC ELITETRACK Gold Medal Clinic held at the 2008 Olympic Trials. In this video, legendary coach, Tom Tellez, teaches the mechanics that made Carl Lewis and many others to elite status in t [...]

Next in line of this video bonanza is an 8 minute clip from none other than the mighty, shiny-domed Dave Kerin. Although Dave has been made immortally famous and achieved rockstar status for his witty but semi-cryptic rants on ET; he is also well known for being one of the first to really point out the importance of eccentric strength development in the training of speed-power athletes. Dave is hi [...]

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 [...]

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. To help fight off post-Christmas depression, here's my last Pfaff lecture snippet from the USATF National Podium Project. (at least until I get back from visiting my family in NY that is). As with the other lectures, you'll find that although this one was given to throwers much of the talk actually remains the same and is generalizable to a wide range of ev [...]