Hundreds of athletes, dozens of sports, and just one coach. Nick Garcia is a master of building an efficient and effective athletic development program. He joins us again on this week’s GAINcast to walk us through his setup at Notre Dame High School, how he started the program, its critical success factors, and all the nitty gritty logistics of coaching.
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Canada gets a lot of headlines for their recent dominance in the hammer throw, but there are aren’t the only ones making their mark internationaly. Over the last decade, coach Richard Parkinson has been building several world class shot putters out of his group in Toronto. This isn’t just by chance; it’s by plan. Planning is key to Parkinson. It seems so simple, but is often overlooked. On this episode Parkinson discusses his planning philosophy, as well as technical training.
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According to coach Dale Stevenson, technique is overrated. Technique is a tool, just like strength is a tool. We need tools, but we can’t forget that tools are there to help us accomplish a task. On this week’s podcast Stevenson joins us to look at his approach to technique in training, how that translates into session design, and much more.
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What are the demands of modern high school coaching? John Larralde calculated that he has just 43 training days to prepare his track athletes this year. Add to that a small student population, multi-event athletes, a young coaching staff, and little connection to the daily campus life. Some might see these as problems, but for Larralde that’s no big deal as he describes himself as a problem solver. On this episode of the GAINcast Larralde talks about how he approaches high school track coaching.
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Sport specific training is not a myth, it is a must. Each sport has unique demands that must be addressed in training. Lest we forget training is not just preparing the athlete for the demands of competition but also for the demands of the actual practice. Here is the step-by-step process for developing a comprehensive athletic development for your sport and athlete.
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When I present coaching seminars about planning and periodization, one key concept I talk about is opportunity cost. For those that do not know me, coaching is my hobby, not my job. During the day I work as a finance attorney at an asset manager. I used to think these two worlds were in different universes, but the longer I work in both the more I see how their orbits intersect.
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The training camp is an integral part of the training process in many sports. But how can you get the most out of it? On this week’s GAINcast we share ideas around planning training camps to get the most out of them with swim coach Chris Webb. In addition, we look at optimal planning of multiple short training sessions, strategies to increase training quality, how much warmup is needed, and more.
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The year is coming to end, which means it is time for our annual combined episode of the GAINcast and HMMR Podcast to discuss the state of training for sports. We share highlights from our favorite episodes of the year, discuss training trends like isometrics, microdosing vs. split training, and what we’ll be trying out in 2023.
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Throughout October and November we looked at periodization and planning. Periodization is a topic we come back to over and over on this site, as the long term planning is one thing all sport coaches have to do, but one also stuck in traditions. We recently put together new articles and podcasts all around the topic of periodization and planning. You can find links to all new and archived resources on the topic below.
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As the year comes to close, we look back to share some quick tips from what we learned this year, new things we are trying out, lessons from the John Smith interviews, and how to successfully blend different training methods.
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