Martin Bingisser

HMMR Podcast Episode 294: The overhead athlete (with Dan Noble)

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Training the overhead athlete is a topic that is shrouded in myths and misconceptions. On the week’s episode coach Dan Noble joins us to discuss how his training methods for overhead athletes have spanned the whole spectrum and how he came to his current approach. In addition we talk about the nuances of sports-specific preparation, the bench press, preparing athletes for training camp, and more.

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Dan Noble is the head of performance at Noble Sport Performance near Toronto. After more than a decade developing a program from scratch at the Hill Academy, Noble has now established himself as one of the top private coaches in the world for hockey, lacrosse, and many other sports.

Related resources

  • This episode is brought to you by HMMR Plus. Become a member for full access to our videos, articles, and podcast archives.
  • You can follow Noble on Instagram (@coachnoble45) and learn more about Noble Sport Performance on their webpage.
  • Noble was previously a guest on Episode 111, Episode 165 on circuit training, and Episode 253 on individualization. He was also a panelist on Episode 178 where we provided consulting for ice hockey preparation.

Key quotes and topics

  • 0:00 – Introduction
  • 2:00 – Current role and activities
  • 4:00 – Rethinking the approach to training the shoulder and throwing athletes: “I think it’s great to be constantly putting the shoulder in a comfortable position when you’re training, but you’re never preparing for what it is actually going to have to do.” “It’s not necessarily the movement that creates the problem, it’s usually the load and how they’re moving the weight within that.”
  • 8:00 – Volume considerations and throwing: “I think that, everybody’s battling for real estate in an athlete’s body right now.” “If you’re throwing overhead, you’re gonna need to train a bit overhead.”
  • 13:00 – Evaluating the bench press.
  • 16:00 – Examples of sport-specificity for overhead athletes: “Bosch talks about drivers and identifying these are the things that have to stay the same. Understand what you can’t play with, what you shouldn’t be overloading, what you shouldn’t be putting stress on.”
  • 21:00 – Working together with experienced athletes to define needs
  • 25:00 – Individualizing athlete training to their team: “I want my athletes to be able to be the types of movers that can step into any program and find some sort of optimal level to be able to contribute.”
  • 30:00 – Fear of work: “I think sometimes volume gets demonized to a point, and I don’t mean all high intensity volume, but I think good quality investments on a daily basis and being pushed, pushing your maximum thresholds, right?”
  • 33:00 – Final thoughts

Complete transcript

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