It’s been a while since our last episode, but the podcast is still alive and kicking. With the season over we take time to look back our the training successs and failures. Plus we throw in a few classic rants and life lessons along the way.
Read more
If you don’t try learn from your mistakes, you’ll never improve as acoach. Nick and I often reflect on our coaching to see what went well, what didn’t, and what we want to try going forward. No time is better to do this than the start of the year. On this week’s episode we look back on 2025 and also look forward to what we’ll be trying differently in 2026.
Read more
Last week the National Post in Canada published an article on how Canada became a hammer-throwing superpower. Canada won both the men’s and women’s world titles in 2023, plus a number of other elite throwers. To be more precise, all that hammer production is coming out of just a small corner of the massvie country. The article itself is a detailed oral history one person who was a catalyst behind the recent dominance: Anatoliy Bondarchuk.
Read more
We started a series on HMMR Media at the end of last year that looks at the technique of top throwers through their own eyes. We started with a breakdown of Matty Denny’s discus technique. Up next is the shot put technique of 2008 Olympic medalist Dylan Armstong.
Read 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.
Read more
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.
Read more
At various points in my career I’ve experimented with different forms of minimalist training. Both as an elite athlete, and more recently as a middle aged coach I have found many benefits of short focused training sessions. As our February site theme is microdosing, I wanted to share some of my own experiences with this type of training.
Read more
A hot topic in training is that of microdosing: how can we provide very small doses of stress to provide meaningful adaptations within a training session or program? That’s the theme on HMMR Media this month. But what if, instead of thinking of microdosing through the prism of training, we think about microdosing athlete testing? Would it be better to embed small tests into training regularly rather than doing a large slate of test every month or two?
Read more
Strict lockdowns might be over in much of the world, but coaches continue to be challenged daily by the difficulties of planning during a pandemic. On last week’s HMMR Podcast we hosted a roundtable of NCAA coaches. Most athletes have now been allowed to return to campus and train in person, but that only means one set of problems has been exchanged for another. Read more
Every few years the periodization debate heats up. Periodization is an essential component to success in any sport, but traditional approaches need to be adapted to keep up with modern science and the changing demands of modern sport. On this episode of the GAINcast, we look at our own evolution when it comes to periodization, including both criticisms and solutions to the problem of planning. Read more
