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News and Notes

News and Notes…

First off, if you are in the Phoenix area on June 8th (that is a Sunday), I will be speaking at the USA Volleyball AZ state coaches seminar, which will be held at South Mountain Community College. I am presenting on movement preparation techniques. This is going to be broken down into two parts. The first part is a lecture and the second part will be hands on where we are going to go through some of the exercises and teach coaches how to cue them. I will also be talking about assessment and some common movement faults we see with young athletes. If you are in the area, please drop by and say hello!

Second, over the next few entries, I have some recent research on plyometrics that I will post about that I found interesting and hope you all like.

Finally, I was talking with Andrew Fitzgerald today. Andrew is a good friend and I had the pleasure of working with him back in NYC when I lived there. Andrew also happens to be the owner of E3 sports (http://e3sports.com/). E3 sports is an up and coming sports performance company in the tri state area, working with athletes of all ages (youth, college, amateur and professional).

We were talking about sports performance training and about how a lot of strength coaches seems to only prioritize STRENGTH. Now, I am not saying that strength is not important; because it is. It is very important. The more strength you have, the greater potential to display power you have. Also, most kids need more strength. However, the key is to not prioritize strength and forget about the importance of other qualities. We have to remember that we are preparing athletes. Not powerlifters and not Olympic lifters. It is almost like a paradigm shift. About 20 years ago (maybe even less) coaches seemed to focus primarily on aerobic conditioning in order to prepare their athletes for the competitive season. Now, we have the total opposite, and coaches are focusing on the other end of the spectrum. I guess, as with most things in life, the true answer can be found somewhere in the middle. If you focus on strength, don’t forget about the conditioning (and vice versa).

The other thing we spoke about was the importance of really having good progressions in your training programs and making sure that you are correcting faulty movement patterns that your athletes are producing (this comes back to having a comprehensive assessment). This can be very difficult when it comes to working with teams and groups of athletes. You need to be really creative in terms of understanding what each person in the group needs and be flexible with your program in order to incorporate those needs. A lot of times, this can be accomplished by not wasting time in between sets and exercises, by having the athlete perform a mobility drill or corrective exercise to help refine the movement pattern they are working on for the day. Also, the warm up time is a great time to address these needs, as is the cool down. Being proactive about trying to correct your athletes’ movement faults will really help set you apart from other coaches.

Patrick

Need more YouTube. Tape it and post it :)

I don't have a digital camera!

I'll see what I can do though.

Patrick

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