Posts Tagged ‘training’
How Constraints Make You a Better Coach
Coaching is easy when everything is on a roll. You just get in a groove and click it off. It’s magical and easy. However, when things are going well, we always fall trap to what I call default mode thinking. We do what we have always done and continue to do so. In our minds…
Read MoreA Message to Speed/Power/Conditioning Coaches about Endurance Development
This is likely to be a long rambling and disjointed rant. For this I apologize. How and when you learn something matters It seems like information should be information, after all facts are facts. It shouldn’t matter when we learn facts and theories, as it’s generally assumed they are independent, but this assumption is often…
Read MoreThe Dangers of Doing too Little- Why backing off can increase stress.
Too much stress, not enough recovery and our body is primed for a state of injury, illness, or worse, burnout. It’s a simple, but largely true, way to look at the world of training. We know there’s this sweet spot where we can push our athletes hard enough to where they adapt to the training,…
Read MoreThe Myth of losing speed
The Myth of losing speed The 800m is perhaps the most interesting distance to coach. It’s always intrigued me from a coaching standpoint because, unlike the 10k for example, the ways in which an athlete can train to cover the same distance in about the same time varies tremendously. There are successful 800m runners who…
Read MoreThe Process of Endurance Training
One of my favorite conferences to attend and present at every year is Vern Gambetta’s GAIN symposium. The reason I love it so much is simple. It challenges you. You don’t just go to GAIN to nod along and get a pat on the back to reaffirm what you are doing. Instead, you go there…
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 MoreAttacking Adaption from Multiple Directions
The Multiple directions approach: One particular thing I notice from athletes or coaches, and a trap I fell into early in my coaching career, is you start to pigeonhole workouts to develop particular qualities. For instance, if high-end aerobic endurance (or in science speak lactate threshold) needs to be developed, the answer was always going…
Read MoreStimulus and Adaptation- A complex and simple look at the training process
I’m going to be a bit ambitious here and try and break down the process that is training. If you read my last post on stress, hopefully you realized the myriad of factors that might affect training and adaptation. What I want to try and potentially accomplish is to break that process down and look at…
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