June 2012 Blog Posts (16)

Think about and focus on possibilities – what you can do, not what you can’t do. Use obstacles as opportunities. Take changes, risk, get out of your comfort zone, fail forward. Without risk there is no reward. If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always got. Refuse to take no for an answer – test the limits, if you stumble get up and try again. What did not work last year may well be this year’s…

You must change to stay the same. Change is a constant. You can control change by carefully manipulating the variables and being the change you want to be. Embrace change; lead it because coaches are agents of change. Make change purposeful and directed toward a logical goal.

It is always interesting to watch coaches and athletes in an Olympic year. To see what they do and what they don’t do. I first became aware of this in 1968 and have seen it in each subsequent Olympic year. Training in the Olympic year should be the culmination of…

Each year we pick a theme for GAIN, this year’s theme was Coaching that Matters. Regardless of everyone’s job we all coaching the people we work with to get better, in order to do that we must focus on what matters most. My biggest take message from GAIN V was to focus on what you can do, not what you can't do and go out and get after it and get it done. No obstacle is too big and adversity is…

I am not sure where to start. For me it was one of the best educational experiences of my career, bar none. I am not saying that because I organized it, but because for first time I was able to sit back, enjoy it and absorb it. Words cannot do justice to the experience at…

Guys,

What are your thoughts on this Olympic lifting equipment?

Resisted Sprint Training (RST) is the addition of some form of external resistance during performance of a sprint workout. RST can take on many forms. Running into the wind, uphill running, and towing (sleds or parachutes) are the most common methods. While each of these methods brings something a little different to the table and each athlete/coach probably has developed a favorite, there are certain commonalities that must be considered whenever programming this type of…

In my travels and I get the opportunity to observe a lot of different things. Here are some random thoughts based on things that I have seen over the past few months.

Rethink the use and role of strength coaches – Ultimately the responsibility lies with the sport coach for the athlete’s performance. The strength coach does not have that…

One of the key aspects of a good training or rehab programs is the ability to make connections. Recognizing that the body is a kinetic chain we need to always be aware of how we are making connections between all the links in the chain. Are we in fact connecting or are we disconnecting? Remember that the core is the relay center; it is the center of the action, but not the originator of the action. We need to understand…

Yesterday when I was going through some files in preparation for GAIN and I found this article from the New York Times science section in 2008. The article was “Weather History” by Anthony DePalma. http://tinyurl.com/7xjrlzz There is a field of science called Phenology, the study of the timing of…

I had the honor and privilege to consult with Patrick McHugh, (http://raiderathletics.blogspot.com/) Track & Field Coach and Athletic Director at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois to help him prepare his athlete Peter Callahan to run a fast mile his senior year. He did run fast – 4:05 off of an average of off 25 miles a week. By the way the school…

Dear Strength Coach and Personal Trainer,…

Change and transformation are major themes in my coaching and hopefully yours. I want to emphasize that that big changes will occur if we start small. As Gandhi said:  ‘We must become the change we want to see.” So to change in our lives, our teams, in our schools, the community and the world we must first change ourselves. Sometimes this is the most difficult change we will have to make. We must get out of our comfort…

As you surely know by now I think the big picture is very important, so important that you should never lose sight of it. First to be able to think of the big picture you need a plan. The more detailed the plan the better.  What is the big picture? It is an overview of the whole process and the objectives to be able to get to the big picture. What does it do? It lends perspective and context to what we are doing. It…

In coaching there are three management functions

1) Training Session Management

2) Competition Management…

This was inspired by the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.

There were two buses, both going to the same destination. One bus was a rickety old yellow school…