When the lockdown began 15 weeks ago I started filming physical education videos for the local Willand Primary School. What initially started out as a short, 3-week project to help the teachers provide content for pupils to do at home eventually turned into a large archive of lesson plans. As our local schools just closed for summer break, it is a good time to reflect on the project. Read more
This month’s site theme is training the legs. We’ve posted a lot of content, and have more to come. Our focus over the last week is on a lot of the methods many of the authors have learned from Vern Gambetta. Read more
HMMR Media was officially founded in 2013, but its roots trace back to the personal blog I started in 2007. During the past decade we’ve grown from one contributor (me) to 27 authors. We’ve posted thousands of articles, podcasts, and videos. And we’ve learned a lot about training throughout the whole process. Below are some highlights from the past decade on HMMR Media. Read more
Some coaches like to do things by feel. I’m not that type of coach. I’m a system guy. I like order and organization. In the weight room that means having a plan. And when I’m teaching technique it means having progressions. To me using progressions is like having a system. Read more
Plyometric training is not a particularly new training method. Even though it has recently received much attention it has been a part of the training of athletes in a variety of sports for years. It just was not called plyometrics. The word plyometrics didn’t appear in the training literature until the late 1960s and since then scientific research has given us a fundamental understanding of the elastic properties of muscle and its trainability.
» Related content: Members can watch Vern’s DVD on proprioceptive plyometrics to see what this looks like in practice. Read more
As John Pryor mentioned on this week’s GAINcast, hip lock is one movement attractor emphasized by Frans Bosch that he immediately grabbed on to and saw results from. Look at people experimenting with Bosch’s methods on social media and you’ll likely see a variety of exercises aiming to improve hip lock. The problem is, much of what is going around lacks context and a full understanding of both the function and intent of these exercises. Read more
On last week’s GAINcast, Lachlan Penfold took us on a journey through his career working. Penfold is a master of setting up a performance environment, and his results in a variety of different sports is proof of that. One stop on that journey was with the Sydney Roosters, a professional rugby league competing in Australia’s National Rugby League. He worked as head of performance and science for three seasons that culminated in the 2013 premiership title. Since then has worked for Australian 7s rugby, the Golden State Warriors, and currently with the Melbourne Storm, who he has also helped win a premiership title in the National Rugby League. Read more
Listening to GAINcast 111 at the start of the month got me thinking. On that episode Vern Gambetta and Martin Bingisser talked about how you can creatively use your training environment when you lack equipment. I realized that, as an athletics coach, there are numerous hidden training tools around me every day at the track: hurdles, steps, partners, nets, mats, and more. Listening to the episode gave me inspiration to share some of the possibilities I’ve found at the track in the video below. Read more
Last month on the podcast, Martin and I discussed some of the various training methods we use to target leg strength. As this month’s HMMR Media site theme is “beyond the barbell” it made sense for us to dig a little deeper into the methods we use outside the weight room and what options are available to coaches in this regard. Read more
As we announced earlier this month, we were taking a deep dive into the basics in October. With one month in the books, it is time to give you an overview of all the content we produced last month on the topic. Read more
