Finding the right time for reflective coaching is critical, as I wrote about last week. But reflecting will not bring your coaching forward if you do not have the right information. In order to properly reflect, you need the right information. Read more
Many coaches lament the decline of physical education and physical literacy. Rather than just complain about it, Darren Ritchie has been at the forefront of doing something about it. As head of coach development at Scottish Athletics, he sought to arm coaches with new tools to battle the problem. On this week’s GAINcast Ritchie joins us to discuss how he helped define and build physical competence in Scotland. Read more
Plan, do, and review. That’s the basic outline of the coaching process. Most coaches love the doing part, some are good at planning, but what about the review? In my experience this is the poor, neglected child of coaching; an afterthought that might be brought up once a year in a formal evaluation setting. It is a bit like a cool down in the training environment, everyone knows it is important, but most are too busy or too tired to do it properly. Read more
After every season, Nick and I informally look back on how training has gone, what went went well, and what didn’t. In this year’s debrief we look at changes to our warm ups, integrating specific strength, better implementing the Bondarchuk system, lessons on remote coaching, and more. Read more
A key component of a successful high performance program is the ability to identify obstacles that are limiting performance and then implementing solutions to overcome (or avoid) those obstacles. Regardless if you are an operator (an athlete or coach for example), director or in management, all are searching for processes to improve performance in an ethical and measurable manner. When such obstacles are clear and the resulting payoff of overcoming those obstacles in substantial, targeting such “low hanging fruit” should be an immediate goal. Read more
Last month, I wrote about how the coach may act as a placebo, potentially exerting performance enhancing effects through a variety of means. The research discussed in that article was just s small part of recent efforts to better understand the influence of placebo effects on sporting performance. An upcoming special issue of European Journal of Sports Science aims to dig even more into the area, including another paper on the potential to further enhance our understanding of how placebo can affect performance. Read more
12 simple rules for training: Read more
Everybody trains and everybody trains hard. So what separates the good from the great? How they use their time and energy in training. The best coaches and athletes have a relentless focus on learning and getting better. On this week’s GAINcast we dive into some thoughts on getting better, including some practical examples of how to put learning processes into practice. Read more
To celebrate our 200th episode of the HMMR Podcast, we’ve gone back and selected some top quotes from our past episodes. On Friday we posted the first 100. Below we continue the project with quotes from our second 100 episodes. Read more
Back in April 2015 Nick Garcia and I started the HMMR Podcast. Last week, after more than four years of work, we published our 200th episode. During that time we’ve had on Olympic champions, world record holders, hall of famers. We’ve had on experts from a variety of backgrounds including coaching, strength training, sports science, nutrition, physical therapy, and more. Most importantly, we’ve learned a lot on the way and hope our listeners have too. Read more
