We've got a couple new features at ET that I wanted to point out. I've added a couple things over the last couple months and wanted to point them out so they can be better used by the community. First is a chat room. We had one a long time ago and actually had organized weekly chats for a while but that disappeared around 2 years ago. Now the chat room is back and hopefully we can start having s [...]

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 [...]

There seems to be a wide range of opinion on the ability to change running mechanics. I am off the opinion that you change running mechanics. This was reinforced to me yesterday when I was watching the baseball team that I work with do some running. Because of Christmas vacation I had not seen them in awhile, the head coach was doing the running so I was able to stand a little further back and obs [...]

A recent news release quoted Usain Bolt's coach, Glen Mills, as saying that the otherworldly sprint god is going to focus on improving his start for the 2009 season. Here's the exact quote from the article:We have identified three major things with his starting that we feel we can correct this coming season. I feel that within the next two seasons he is going to become one of the fastest starter [...]

Those are harsh words so when I was channel surfing last week and heard those words I stopped surfing and listened. One of the ESPN pundits, a former pro football player (so of course he must know everything about football and even more about strength training) was expounding on the recent failure and perceived deficiencies of a pro football team. He identified the fact that even though there had [...]

Due to the requests on the forum, here's the entire lecture of the snippet I posted earlier from Dan Pfaff's horizontal jumps talk in Las Vegas. Special thanks to Tom Kaberna for sending me a non High-Def version of this video that was small enough that I could actually upload the entire thing for viewing. [...]

This is an article from yesterday's New York Times sports page. As soon as I read it I ran the gamut of emotions starting with astonishment and ending with anger. What are we trying to do here? Isn’t this just exploiting kids? Why don’t we just let them be kids? I have a long time interest in Long Term Athlete Development, youth sports and physical education, this concept and many o [...]

Here's another video from Coach Pfaff. This one's another from the HPC ELITETRACK Gold Medal Track Clinic. It's about training elite pole vaulters. Although Dan is known more for his sprint coaching pupils, he has also coached plenty of elite pole vaulters, most recently coaching Brad Walker to an American Record last year. One of the things that sets Dan apart from some of his fellow pole vaul [...]

In training to gauge progress we need to have landmarks, either tests or workouts that allow us to measure progress or lack of progress toward the training and competition goals. In my experience these measures are often arbitrary because they do not relate to the individual athlete or team that is doing the training. I know this is something I have experienced in the training process with program [...]

The title is stated with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek but a recent award to Bolt does resurrect this topic.Shortly after the Beijing Olympics we had some interesting discussions on the forum comparing the amazing feats of Uber-Men Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. The biased (this is a track site!) general consensus around these parts was that Bolt's 3 Beijing Gold Medal performance was superior [...]