Throwholics continues to post some great year-end training interviews, including one with Kibwe and Martin. Click here to view to view more from more than 50 athletes about what they are doing this offseason. Below is a short Q&A with Jason Young originally published last week on Throwholics. Read more
This year marked the first full of HMMR Media and several new authors joining our site. We have doubled our readership and hope to keep promoting a good discussion of training methods. But most importantly we have also improved our content. As a coach or athlete, you have to constantly analyze what you are doing and either verify what you are doing or be ready to change. Nick Garcia summed up this philosophy overt he summer by saying only the paranoid survive.
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In my career as an athlete, coach and trainer I have been challenged many times by other athletes, weekend warriors, and lay folk to do or try random things in training. There is a problem that social and mainstream media are creating. The problem is that the world is starting to confuse “working out” with training.
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In the first two installments of Throwing and Health, I touched on joint health and internal health for throwers. Today I would like to talk a bit about mental health in throwers.
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In Throwing and Health Part 1: Joint Injuries, I examined the influence of training as a thrower and some of the implications that would have on joint health. Today I want to talk a little more about health from the internal perspective
On my first day of college I weighed in at 228 pounds (103kg), after the first year I had increased my strength and weight to a great degree. At the end of my freshman year, I weighed in at near 256 pounds (116kg). My diet was simple, better known as the “seafood diet” by those of us on the team . . . “YOU SEE FOOD, YOU EAT IT” was the methodology! Along with all of the food, I consumed extra protein, carbohydrates, creatine monohydrate and glutamine daily. I was on a very similar plan nutritionally as most of the football players at our university. Bigger-Faster-Stronger was also a known motto for what we wanted from training. The late Stefan Fernholm was a legend in throwing and specifically for his speed-power training feats at such a large body weight.
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Obrigado! After a season that started well with 64.26m early on and a lack of competition thereafter, I decided to hang up the shoes for the season and rest. Never have I been is such good shape and competed so little. The USA national championships made only my sixth meet of the year! It was my fourth if you don’t include the competitions that only had five or so throwers (thanks Tim Miller and Jerrod Cook) , which were gracefully put together to give a few of us a chance to compete in May and June. Actually since April 12th, USATF nationals would be my third “real” meet with competitors in other events with exception to my final competition in April while boasting a hefty sinus infection. Along with the lack of competition, I was largely focused on the possibility starting a career in a new field. 2014 was the weirdest and most spread out season of my career, but from it I still learned a lot.
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The start of the 2010 season was huge for me. A personal best of just over two meters in some great wind conditions led me to many competitions over 65m. I still feel that my all time best performance thus far was at the Prefontaine Classic (Eugene Diamond League), where I threw 66.95m and was third just behind the likes of Zoltan Kovago and Piotr Malachowski. This allowed me some Diamond League points but for some reason immediately exiled me from two other Diamond League meetings to come? I had passed on the opportunity to compete in Monaco, as my wife and I where dead set on getting pregnant that summer. After being snubbed from 2 contests which I had already been invited, I competed after a 6 week layoff at the Zurich Diamond League Final, and in addition my season best of 69.90m qualified me for the Continental Cup (World Cup) in Split, Croatia.
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The coaching roundtable on Olympic weightlifting started last week off by discussing lifting variations and lifting technique with some top Olympic lifting coaches. For this final part I thought it would be best to hear from throwing coaches and see how they actually implement Olympic lifting in their training plans. I was able to talk to two of the top coaches in America, Don Babbitt and Dan Lange, to get their input on the topic.
Don Babbitt has been the throws coach at the University of Georgia for eighteen years in which his athletes captured 12 NCAA titles, and 68 All-American honors. Chris Hill (javelin) and Jenny Dahlgren (hammer) also set NCAA records under his guidance. In addition, he has worked with athletes like Olympic champion Adam Nelson (shot put), Reese Hoffa (shot put), Breaux Greer (javelin), Jason Tunks (discus), Brad Snyder (shot put), Andras Haklits (hammer) and many other international champions.
Dan Lange has the honor of being the only living American to have coached an Olympic hammer throw champion. In 24 years as throws coach for the University of Southern California, Lange’s athletes have won 8 NCAA championships and 58 All-American honors. His most successful athletes have been Balazs Kiss, 1996 Olympic champion and NCAA record holder, and Adam Setliff, who he worked with post-collegiatelly as he qualified for two Olympic finals in the discus. Lange also worked with Kevin McMahon for a season.
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Olympic weightlifting is an essential part of training for all throwing events. But as with any component of training, getting the most out of it requires knowing how to implement it properly in training. This week we have put together a coaching roundtable on Olympic weightlifting. In Part 1 we heard from weightlifting coaches Greg Everett, Matt Foreman, and Wil Fleming about what variations of the Olympic lifts are best for throwers. In part 2, the three coaches provide their input on weightlifting technique. The series will conclude later this week with some thoughts from throws coaches about how them implement Olympic weightlifting in training.
After actually throwing, most coaches regard Olympic weightlifting as the most important training exercises for throwers. The clean, jerk, and snatch provide a great method for developing explosive strength that can often transfer into better throwing results. With many variations of the lifts, there are many exercises to choose from ways to implement them into training.
Over the next week we will ask many top coaches about the use of Olympic weightlifting for throwers. In the first two parts we will ask for the input from weightlifting coaches on technique, variations of the lifts, and other comments. Then in the final part we will also ask a few top throws coaches about how they implement Olympic weightlifting into training.
Greg Everett is the owner of Catalyst Athletics, head coach of the national-medalist Catalyst Athletics weightlifting team, publisher of The Performance Menu, author of the books Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches and Olympic Weightlifting for Sports, and director/writer/producer/editor/everything of the documentary American Weightlifting. I subscribe to the Performance Menu and can highly recommend both that and the Catalyst Athletics blogs as great resources for Olympic weightlifting.
Matt Foreman is the football and throws coach at Mountain View High School in Phoenix. A competitive weightlifter for twenty years, Foreman is a four-time National Championship bronze medalist, two-time American Open silver medalist, three-time American Open bronze medalist, two-time National Collegiate Champion, 2004 US Olympic Trials competitor, 2000 World University Championship Team USA competitor, and Arizona and Washington state record-holder. He currently writes regularly for The Performance Menu and the Catalyst Athletics webpage. I read and highly recommended his book Bones of Iron two years ago.
Wil Fleming is the co-owner of Force Fitness and Performance and Athletic Revolution Bloomington, in Bloomington, Indiana. He recently released the DVD Complete Olympic Lifting. Prior to working as a coach Wil was an all-American hammer thrower, school record holder, and Olympic Trials participant at Indiana University as a hammer thrower. As a junior athlete, he was an Olympic weightlifting resident athlete at the Olympic Training Center after winning a junior national championship. He also blogs about weightlifting at WilFleming.com.
