Athletes all over the world are feeling the effects of COVID-19 with compromised training and competition schedules. We are no different at Edinburgh Rugby, we are currently unaware when the league season will resume, if it will resume, and what kind of preparation we will have. It’s the same story for athletes all over the world: our job is to be ready whenever it kicks off. Read more
Start talking about special strength or specific strength and one of the first things that often comes up is Yuri Verkhoshansky and the principle of dynamic correspondence. In our latest video lesson, I sat down with German national discus coach René Sack to discuss his framework for specific strength and how he applies it to discus throwers. What stood out to me the most is how big of a gap there is between the theory of special strength and how it is put into practice by top coaches. Dynamic correspondence might look good on paper, but top coaches like René are finding different ways to make specific strength effective in training. Read more
Finding transfer can be a difficult task in field sports, where “performance” is a difficult concept to quantify. But just because it may be difficult to find doesn’t mean the search is fruitless. Mark Bennett joins English Rugby this summer as the head of sports science. He joins the podcast this week to discuss where his search for transfer has taken him over the course of his career as a player, coach, and sports scientist. Read more
I’ve been coaching professionally for nine years and, like any young coach, I started out by reading anything and everything I could get my hands on, attending conferences and talking with other coaches. Scientists and coaches usually present research and theory behind training methodologies, combine them with practical experience and present positive results to support their work. Many of the basic principles of training I first learned about back then I still use today and have never let me down. Read more
Look at the two sporting superpowers of post war era, Germany and the Soviet Union/post-Soviet states, and you find two very different approaches to training. Both have produced amazing results, but interestingly ideas like periodization, the concept of transfer of training, block training, complex training, special strength, etc. came just from one of the two powerhouses. Try to think of the most influential names in training methods and you’ll have to scroll well past luminaries like Leo Matveyev, Yuri Verkhoshansky, Vladimir Issurin, Vladimir Zatsiorsky and of course my coach Anatoliy Bondarchuk before you find many Germans. How come so many revolutionary ideas came from just one of these countries? Read more
One of the core concepts at the heart of Bondarchuk’s training methods is his exercise classification scheme. Bondarchuk has written about dozens of different periodization models that can be used for a variety of sports, but all of them make use of his four-category system of classifying exercises from general to specific. The concept is straightforward, but not one that I have spent a lot of time on here talking about.
In my latest article for Juggernaut Training Systems I take a look at how both Bondarchuk and Yuri Verkhoshansky use their own systems to define special strength exercises. By looking at two leaders in the field of special strength, we start to see what common elements special strength exercises need. I also explain my own five tips for selecting a special strength exercise:
Read more
