Competition season is starting up again in many sports. We start this week’s GAINcast off by looking at how to best structure training in the days before a competition and how to learn what works best for your individual athletes. In addition we also talk about pre-meet workouts, psychological preparation, GPS data, single-factor models, and much more.
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The SMU Locomotor Performance Lab is at the cutting edge of researching practical questions on sprinting and jumping. On this week’s GAINcast Emily McClelland joins us to discuss her latest research on vertical jumping and sex differences in short sprints.
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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.
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The California State Championships are perhaps the hardest competition in high school sports. This year Nick sent 6 throwers to the meet and walked away with 7 podium finishes. On this week’s podcast we take a look at the meet, how to prepare for it, and the unique path each athlete took to achieve their success this season.
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We often think of explosiveness as just one quality, but the fastest sprinter isn’t always the best bobsledder or long jumper. Explosiveness can be expressed in different ways. Olympic bobsledder Ben Simons is well known on social media for his jumping exploits. On this week’s episode he talks about optimizing your plyometric training, the demands of bobsled training, and much more.
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Jumping is one of the cornerstones of athleticism and plays a central role in the athletic development for early every sport. On this week’s episode we look at introducing jump training to athletes, our progressions, how to make jump training sport-specific, and testing protocols.
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With the spring season nearing an end, many coaches are looking toward summer training. With summer training comes testing as well. Several of the football and rugby players that I coach will be subjected to a battery of fitness tests that include various jumps: depth jump, countermovement jump, squat jump, and single leg jumps.
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Over the last several decades Professor Warren Young has been at the forefront of redefining how coaches test jumping ability, reactive strength, and agility. The tools he developed, such as the reactive strength index, have helped coaches better measure and train the physical abilities needed in their sport. He joins us on this week’s podcast to discuss his career, best practices for assessment, and how to bridge the gap from testing to training design.
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Coach Kelvin Giles once said “If your coach:athlete ratio is 1:25 then you are managing a crowd, not coaching.” It’s not ideal, but it’s reality for many coaches. As I’ve worked more with field sports I’m often tasked with working with up to 50 athletes at one time. In such a setting, you have to make concessions as you transition from theory to practice. But with the right adjustments it can still look like coaching rather than crowd management.
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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?
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