As coaches we like to think of the training process as predictable and controllable, but the reality isn’t that straightfoward. As guest Dan Cleather explains on this week’s GAINcast, we don’t dictate training outcomes, we simply guide a conversation with the body. In the interview he looks at how to best guide that process, the role of overload, and rethinking recent trends in athlete profiling.
Read more
Vern is a prodigious reader. On this week’s GAINcast he discusses what makes his top 10 books of 2025 stand out, as well as some additional reading recommendations.
Read more
In 2025 I read a total of 117 books. I never set out to read a certain number, I am just never without a book in my hand. I love reading. My reading is very eclectic, certainly not confined to sport and sport science.
Read more
Last week Alex Hutchinson’s new book The Explorer’s Gene was released. Huthcinson is well known in the sports world as a sports science writer and columnist, even coming on GAINcast 118 as a guest to look at the role of the mind and effort in endurance performance. His latest work goes in a new direct to look at exploration: why humans explore, how much we should explore, and methods of exploration. Even though the subject is no longer sports, his book is just as relevant to coaches as his prior work as coaches are confronted daily with the question of exploration, whether we realize it or not.
Read more
2024 was the first time in years that I have not read at least 100 books. I never have tried to read a certain number of books each year. I log each book I read and then count them up at the end of the year.
Read more
At the end of every year, I do a quick look back on the books I read over the preceding 12 months. This year is no different and my favorite books of 2022 are listed below. However one thing has changed over time: the older I get, the less time (or less energy) I dedicate to reading, Therefore I’ve become much more likely to give up on a book that isn’t holding my attention or interest. Author Ryan Holiday has a simple rule of thumb; if a book hasn’t drawn you in by the page number of 100 minus your age (in my case, page 74), then you should stop. Great readers, he adds, learn to quit books that aren’t very good. Taking this rule to heart, this year, I read 44 books. This is less than in other years, but a couple were month-long reads that took up a lot of time.
Read more
By his own admission, Brad Gilbert was not the most talented tennis player. And yet, across the span of his sporting career, he accumulated $5.5 million in prize money, and achieved a career high world ranking of #4, along with twenty singles titles and an Olympic bronze medal. By almost anyone’s account, that is a successful career—so how did Gilbert, who on paper, should have been a middle of the pack player, achieve so much success? As he points out in his book, Winning Ugly, it’s because tennis matches aren’t played on paper, they’re played on a court, between real people—and people can be gamed. Read more
As the athletics season in the Northern Hemisphere comes to an end, many coaches will be evaluating how their athletes performed in the previous season, and then use this information to inform their training program for the coming, and future, seasons. This is similar to what businesses do frequently, particularly when it comes to developing a strategy to drive what they do on a daily basis towards a long-term, overall aim. Read more
These are the books I am currently reading, rereading, and reviewing. I usually read about six books at a time, sometimes more, seldom less. I love to read. My reading interests are broad and varied. I am finding myself going back and rereading many works that I have read over the past few years. I seem to get more out of them on the second read. Read more
Frans Bosch’s upcoming book Anatomy of Agility: Movement Analysis in Sport is the most comprehensive text I have seen on human movement and the underlying biological systems that regulate it. It expands on Bosch’s previous book Strength Training and Coordination: An Integrative Approach and goes into a huge amount of detail to explain how complex dynamical systems theory applies to the regulation of change of direction in field sports. Below I hope to explain the key takeaways in the book, where I struggled, and how it will impact my own approach as a strength and conditioning coach. Read more
