Entries by Nick Garcia

The silent crisis in US throwing events

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From the outside, the American throwing scene is on top of the world. We are in the process of preparing to do our regular HMMR Podcast world championships preview episode and the US looks as strong as ever in the throws after two great major championships in a row. Just look at the world lists for 2025 as well: world leads in 3 of the 8 throwing events (women’s shot put, discus, and hammer), second position in 2 more (men’s hammer and shot put), and top 5 in another 2 events (men’s javelin and discus).

4 lessons on structuring your training sessions

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I‘m responsible for more than a dozen teams at Notre Dame High School. A lot of universities would be jealous with the facility we have, but no matter how large the space or fancy the equipment, the biggest constraint in session design is time. We typically get a group of 30+ athletes for just 45 minutes. The biggest question for us is: how can we accomplish the most in this time? It all comes down to organization.

Balance first, individualization second

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As a high school athletic development coach one of the first questions I always get when talking to a parent is if I individualize the program or do sport specific programs. It is also one of the most irritating questions. Just like the terms “activation” or “posterior chain” the terms “sport specific” or “individualization” have become buzz words the last number of years. I am not sure of the reason why. Maybe because the person I am talking to wants to sound smart on the subject or maybe it’s just because they heard others refer to the style of training they are doing. Regardless, I do not think individualization should be the first thing on an athlete’s mind when it comes to start a new training plan or working with a new coach. 

Using microdosing to teach the Olympic lifts

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Recently I wrote an article on substitutions and alternatives for the Olympic lifts. Those of you who have not read the article may be asking why would you want any substitutes for Olympic Lifting? Why not just do the Olympic lifts? For some coaches the reason is that they take too much time to teach. For those coaches I have another option for you: microdosing. Teaching the Olympic lifts in small doses means that you don’t take time away from other forms of strength training to learn the basic lifts.

Three effective alternatives to Olympic lifting

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Throughout my coaching career I have come to understand that the majority of coaches who work in athletic development can be divided into two categories. On the one side there are those who feel the Olympic lifts are the end-all-be-all to training. They often think that in order to be successful you must do the Olympic […]

The balancing act of planning

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Quite often on the HMMR Podcast and this blog I write about the various elements of athletic development: strength training, sprinting, jumping, multi-jumps, multi-throws, and more. Sometimes the hardest part is not understanding each element, but in figuring out how to combine everything into a plan. To help readers get an idea of how I do it, I just posted the first eight weeks of our high school thrower sprogram in the HMMR Classroom.

Mastering bodyweight circuits like a Jedi

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Last week I wrote about programming in the time of coronavirus, with a focus on athletes that had access to at least limited equipment. This week on Instagram I have been posting videos of the general strength circuits I have given athletes that have no training equipment. The objective of each circuit is to cover the lower body, upper body, core, as well as all three planes of movement (sagittal, frontal, and transverse). I learned these from my college coach Glenn McAtee and find them just as useful nearly two decades later.

Training in the time of coronavirus

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As Jocko Willink says “all excuses are lies.” Therefore, health issues aside, someone not being able to train because of the coronavirus is not only an excuse, but also a lie. When the current pandemic presented itself I knew right away that school and training had a high probability of being postponed or canceled. So the final eight weeks of our season would go down the drain if we were unable to find a way to keep the routine going by some means. So I put together a three-pronged approach to supporting my athletes. Below are examples of a typical workout (option 1), a substitute workout (option 2), and a workout with no tools (option 3).

Training progressions for core strength

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When freshman athletes arrive at Notre Dame high school we use the same approach to introduce them to using and training their core. Ideally athletes arrive having played a lot as kids, putting their bodies through a variety of challenges. Unfortunately that is less and less the case. Most kids just arrive having done Abercrombie abdominal workouts that are not specific to athletics. Therefore we take a step back and try to start at the beginning.