Strength is one of the most important qualities in athletic performance. Athletes need to be able to express force in the context of their sport. But much of what goes on in strength training starts to substantially deviate from this maxim. On this week’s GAINcast our friend Chris Webb joins Vern for a discussion on what strength is, moving beyond numbers, the role of the strength coach, transfer, injuries, and much more.
Read more
Testing is a crucial part of the training and coaching process. On this episode of the GAINcast Vern walks through his approach to testing and shares his best practices, including a walk through of how he set up and implemented the testing program at the Chicago White Sox in the 1990s.
Read more
Looking back on successful people, coaches, training programs, and processes, one thing keeps showing up over and over: simplicity. Dr. Michael Joyner has wide-ranging experience at the forefront of medicine, research, public health, elite performance, and coaching. Across these domains he keeps seeing the reductionists move ahead. On this week’s GAINcast he shares examples of how simple approaches can be effective when it comes to planning, data collection, performance models, load management, and much more.
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
Technology is a good thing, right? When we evaluate technology we tend to focus on the benefits: what it can add. But the paradox of technology is that it often has hidden costs we do not see up front. Determining whether technology is good or not can be harder than it looks. Read more
As anyone who witnessed the UK government’s recent presentation on COVID-19 data will know, data is only useful if it can be read and understood clearly. For those who missed the broadcast, the presentation consisted of many slides of data with the BBC banner on the screen blocking out the titles! The audience of millions was left looking at lines and bar charts that had no context or explanation. Unfortunately such examples can easily be found in the world of sport too. Read more
American football is a bastion of tradition. In some areas, such as strength and conditioning, that can hold the sport back. Many coaches, however, are working to change the traditions and they start out by asking simple questions all over again like how do we make our players better? On this week’s GAINcast, Matt Rhea explains how the forward-thinking setup he installed at Indiana University helped turn their program around using a practical data-driven approach. Read more
The HMMR site theme in February was the future of training. I’m a little late to the party, but wanted to add a few points about the future of coaching. After listening to the thoughts of other coaches, many people gave insight into the future of training, but the future of the profession is just as important. Read more
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 to search out the best information. Read more
Over the last decade or so, there has been a Big Data revolution. This is true of our general lives; a good example is how Cambridge Analytica collected, both legally and potentially illegally, data of Facebook users for the targeting of campaign advertisements, but also within sport, where, in part thanks to the increase in technology, there is a vast amount of data available to sporting teams. Read more
