Posts by stevemagness
The High School to College transition:
Our sport is one of transitions. We have to transition from HS to college and then, if we are fortunate enough, often from college to pro. Often times our success depends on mastering these transitions and making sure they go as smoothly as possible. Way back in the day, I had to make this transition,…
Read MoreThe Placebo Response- belief, expectations, and why it matters in the world of sport
The Placebo Response. Just say the words and you generally get a negative response. People think of a placebo as some no good trick used by devious people to deceive some unsuspecting innocent person. It’s accepted in the medicine and research world as a way to test true effects of a substance or intervention versus…
Read MoreInflammation- To stop or not to stop? What the current research says.
One of the recent themes of this blog has been rethinking the concept of damage being a bad thing. The traditional view has been that we need to avoid damage, whether it is muscle, tendon, or some biochemical change at the microscopic level. Recently, the paradigm has started to shift towards looking at damage not…
Read MoreState of the sport- Rescuing running from life support.
State of the sport- What our sport needs: While this is primarily a science and coaching blog, every once in a while it’s worth it to delve into the greater issues in the sport. After all, if there is no sport of track and field, then there is no room for coaches. Already in many…
Read MoreHow do you get to World Class? A glimpse using 5k data
In another life, I could see myself as a sabermetrics junkie. Some of you may be asking what in the heck that is. It’s essentially the use of statistics in sports, or in simpler terms think Moneyball. When I was younger and baseball was my sport of choice, I’d spend hours pouring through the stats…
Read MoreOutside the Comfort Zone: What I learned from hanging out with a bunch of Aussies
At the world championships in Moscow, I got a unique opportunity to spend a couple weeks understanding the Australian system of training and development. As a coach, it was an incredible learning experience, not only because I was learning different ways of attacking the same problem, but instead because it offered a different viewpoint. It…
Read MoreTraining to Failure: Good idea or bad?
One of the reasons I recommend grad school, is not for the classes, but for the informal theorizing sessions you have with classmates and professors. Even several years after being out of school, I still look back to some of those informal after class sessions and realize how those talks were when we would get…
Read MoreDrugs in Sport- Is Track Screwed and how to clean it up
Today was drug Sunday. If you haven’t been living under a rock, the first big name to fall was American record holder Tyson Gay. The man who was supposed to challenge Bolt tested positive for an unknown substance. Following that up, 5 Jamaican athletes including former WR holder Asafa Powell will miss the world championships…
Read MoreA Peek Inside- Training log of Ciaran O’Lionaird in build up to 3:54 mile
In speaking at a couple coaching clinics this summer, one of the things that struck me was how many people came up to me and would talk about the HS training logs I posted on here. They’d talk about how after reading my training philosophies and then seeing the logs, it helped conceptualize things quite…
Read MoreBlind Feedback Workouts- Why feedback matters and how to ignore it
Times, splits, seconds, minutes. They are so ingrained in our head as runners, sometime cruelly, that we cannot escape them. We become slaves to watch and knowing exactly where we are during every workout and every race. But what happens if we take it all away? The role of feedback in performance is an intriguing…
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