As the year starts coming to a close and the indoor season is ready to begin, the year-end awards are also starting to be announced. Over the past week Track and Field News has released their annual high school All-America teams,. including 3 boys and 3 girls in the hammer throw.
For many strength coaches, the warmup is the best weapon they have. It’s a dedicated time each day to work with athletes, whether they make it in the weight room or not. But to really get the most out of it, you have to have a plan to allow you to use the time effectively, build athlete buy in, and gain the confidence of the coaching staff. On this week’s episode Rett Larson joins us to share his plan and philosophy of warming up based on his experience in the Olympic volleyball world.
A recent interview on HMMR Media shared some of the weight room numbers of the hammer throw world champion. After hearing them, everyone asked: how can a champion be so weak? Strength is complex. Strength is contextual. On this week’s podcast we share some ideas about the role of strength in athletic performance, transfer of strength, training strength, and much more.
We’re starting a new series here on HMMR Media focusing in detail on throwing technique. There are a lot of sites and YouTube channels that break down the technique of elite throwers. With this series we aim to do things differently: break down technique in the words of the athletes and coaches.
Hugh McCutcheon has won medals coaching both the men’s and women’s US Olympic volleyball teams, as well dominant teams at the University of Minnesota. More recently though he’s focus on helping develop coaches and is the author of Championship Behaviors: A Model for Competitive Excellence in Sports.
Diamond League discus champion Matthew Denny is one of the best all-around throwers in the world, having won Commonwealth medals in both the discus and the hammer throw. He’s also on of the best big time performers, having thrown personal bests at the Olympics, World Championships, Commonwealth Games, and Diamond League finals in recent years. He credits both his all-around success and peaking ability to his ability to feel the throw, a skill he developed over countless reps of trial and error. On this week’s episode he talks about how to develop feeling, what he feels in his throw, his current technical focus, and some surprising parallels between the discus and the hammer.
Championship results require championship behaviors from both athletes and coaches. Having guided multiple men’s and women’s teams at the highest levels, volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon knows a thing or two about what championships behaviors are. On this week’s GAINcast he joins us to share his input on finding intention, putting skill acquisition into practice, coaching, and more.
Can you be weak and throw a hammer 80 meters? Of course not. You need an engine capable of producing immense power. That’s both common sense and science. But then along comes along an example like newly crowned world champion Ethan Katzberg. Someone like Katzberg makes you question how the world works and all the assumptions you’ve made about throwing.
When Ethan Katzberg won the world championship title in the hammer throw last month, he surprised a lot of people. But for his coach Dylan Armstrong, it was what they had been training four years for. On this week’s podcast Armstrong breaks down how they used those years to develop Katzberg from a multi-sport high school athlete into the youngest world champion in the event’s history.
The track and field world championships in August offered lots of big throws and interesting storylines on the individual level. We’ve recapped all the events here and here, as well as on last week’s podcast. But beyond the individual stories, there are some interesting stories at the country and continental level as well. Below as some of the most interesting trends we have identified after crunching the numbers.
