For decades, coaches have trained female athletes the same way they train male athletes — or worse, held them back entirely out of myth and misunderstanding. In this episode of the GAINcast, Vern Gambetta sits down with Morgan Smith, senior performance coach for US Soccer’s women’s youth national teams and former Stanford post-doctoral researcher, to tackle what we actually know about training the female athlete.
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Last week the National Post in Canada published an article on how Canada became a hammer-throwing superpower. Canada won both the men’s and women’s world titles in 2023, plus a number of other elite throwers. To be more precise, all that hammer production is coming out of just a small corner of the massvie country. The article itself is a detailed oral history one person who was a catalyst behind the recent dominance: Anatoliy Bondarchuk.
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Clay Erro is the former football coach at Enterprise High School in Redding, California and one of the winningest football coaches in Northern Californian history. More important than his success was his ability to teach young men to be responsible adults and citizens. His approach was unconventional with a premium on relationships and teaching.
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To kick of 2024 we’re putting together a spectacular roundtable featuring guests Dr. Michael Joyner, Grace Golden, and Randy Ballard. We take a look back at trends from 2023, as well as what we see ahead in 2024. In addition we dive into the value of tribes, rethinking monitoring, soft skills, and much more to kick off the year.
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Hugh McCutcheon has won medals coaching both the men’s and women’s US Olympic volleyball teams, as well dominant teams at the University of Minnesota. More recently though he’s focus on helping develop coaches and is the author of Championship Behaviors: A Model for Competitive Excellence in Sports.
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We often talk about training methods and culture with coaches, but the athlete’s perspective is just as important. World class swimmers Kira Toussaint and Drew Kibler join this week’s GAINcast to share their point of view. Both athletes utilize the GAIN dryland program and share their input on what they need to reach the podium and what drives the training environment in their own training group.
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The lost art of journaling is a great practice for any sportsperson, of any age. Coach and consultant Paul Kilgannon draws on his teaching background to help athletes develop good journaling habits to improve their performance. On this week’s podcast he shares some tips to journal better, as well as his CARVER coaching framework.
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Every month we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. Continuing on from this site’s analysis of the Tokyo Olympics, our first research summary looks at sprint pacing strategies and distribution of effort across the rounds of championship. We then continue to look at new research on creating a high performance environment, mental health in elite coaches, the effectiveness of mentors, and much more.
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The best teams in the world aren’t just teams, they are systems. A system lends order and structure to enable the coach and athlete to focus on the process. It provides a framework to build on. On this week’s GAINcast we look at the power of systems, what makes a good system, and how systems fall apart. Read more
Every month we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. In the August edition we start off looking at some lessons we can learn from a recent editorial giving an elite athlete’s perspective on training and load management. We also look at the modern consensus on hamstring injury risk, coaching resilience, how the athlete biological passport has impacted performance, team comedians, and more. Read more
