John Larralde has spoken at GAIN on preparing his milers to win California State high School championships. In his words: “Sometimes in the peaking process is not what you do it is what you don’t do.” Below are some thoughts on peaking and tapering, with some special considerations for how it applies to swimming.
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Every month we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. In this month’s edition we look at how elite sprinters warm up, the data on whether periodization works in the real world, tactical behaviors in middle distance running, performance intelligence, and more.
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Ask me 10 years ago about the key to successful coaching and it was all about individualization. Ask me now, and I think most coaches individualize too much. Maybe I’m just getting set in my ways, but the longer I coach the more I see individualization as simply the icing on the cake. It’s nice to have and can make all the difference, but the true substance is the program underneath it.
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The site theme in May was medicine ball training. As one of the most versatile training tools available, there is a lot you can do with a medicine ball. Throughout the month we shared some practical examples of how top coaches are using medicine ball training, as well as programming tips. Below we have links to all our new and archived content on the topic, including 5 new articles, 2 new videos, and 2 new podcasts from 8 contributors.
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Believe it or not, as an athlete I hated 95% of the medicine ball training we did. To me it seemed somehow stupid just throwing a ball 200 times around just to do it. The other 5% have been fun and I loved it. This 5% was the most challenging stuff. I loved it because it had concrete purpose. It might have been as simple heaving the ball up to the ceiling, but that wasn’t easy so it presented a challenge and a purpose. When I finally succeeded, it earned me a drink from our physio or coach and the feeling of having thrown intensely.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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? Learn about what the nuances of history tell us, as well as some parallels in throws planning.
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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.
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