Anatoliy Bondarchuk’s success record as a coach can match any coach from any sport. The former hammer throw world record holder and Olympic champion has coached dozens of Olympic medalists over five decades. What is the key to his success? On this week’s podcast six of his former athletes get back together to discuss their first impressions of the coach, what made him so successful, and the role of language in coaching.
The site theme in March was speed. This isn’t the first time we looked in depth on speed, with site themes from 2019 and 2018 also focusing on the topic. This time we tried to learn more from the world of sprinting with 6 new articles, 3 podcasts, and 2 new videos that looked at topics ranging from sprint mechanics to technical progressions to training methodology. Below we have links to all our new and archived content on speed.
We’ve been exploring speed training this month on both the GAIN Master Class and HMMR Media site. On this week’s GAINcast we share our own thoughts on sprinting, including some recurring themes that have come up this month around mechanics, resisted sprint training, planning, and more.
In the first big outdoor meet of the season, throwers from more than 10 states took part in the NSAF Meet of Champions in South Carolina. Collin Burkhart (Nazareth, PA) and Sidney Lake (Timber Creek, Orlando, FL) were the big winners, both setting personals bests to claim victory.
If you want to know about something, the best place to find answers is from those that coach the best. So when it comes to speed, there is a lot we can learn from those that coach the world’s fastest individuals: sprint coaches.
Look back at history and there are a lot of debates about strategies from sprint planning. PJ Vazel has meticulously researched centuries of training journals and joins this week’s podcast to look at one historic debate in particular: should sprinters train long-to-short or short-to-long? From history we can learn some important nuances that can help us optimize our training strategies across many sport.
Speed has many different components. While they are all related in some way, they also have their unique properties. Perhaps one of the most unique is acceleration. You can’t even think about top speed unless you can get there in the first place. How athletes overcome inertia and perform over those first few steps is critical in nearly every sport.
Recently, it seems everyone has discovered the value of sleep. While we all know intuitively how important sleep can be, the science of sleep in sport has been slow to follow. Pat Byrne was a pioneer of developing sleep and fatigue programs in sports. On this week’s GAINcast he discusses what we know about sleep, and busts a few myths about sleep as well.
Ohio’s top throwers threw at the OATCCC indoor championships over the weekend. The competition unfolded across a variety of divisions, but the breakthrough performance came from Tomas Rimac (Brundwick, OH). His winning throw in Division 1 landed well over 70 feet, making him the first thrower from Ohio to cross that barrier this year. The top girl’s mark came from Elizabeth Metz (Beachwood, OH) who broke the 50 foot barrier for the first time to win Division 2/3.
Develop competent, confident, and effective coaches, and then competent, confident, and effective athletes will follow. As a director of coaching education at USA Weightlifting, Michael Conroy’s mandate didn’t just need to teach coaches about technique, he needed them to learn how to program creatively. On this week’s episode he walks us through the scaffolding of programming and the key elements all good programs in any sport should contain.
