(March 26, 2018) After a few years of working with elite, well-trained athletes, it started dawning on me that we all seemed to be caught up in some kind of bizarre ‘arms race’ of strength and conditioning. All around me it was more, more, more. In the rugby world, coaches wanted players to be bigger, […]
Measuring what for what? I’ve just been working on a chapter from our book (longest title ever – Understanding Strength and Conditioning as Sport Coaching: Bridging the Biophysical, Pedagogical and Sociocultural Foundations of Practice) and I touched on Functional Movement Screens. In my research I came across an old post titled “I HATE the Functional […]
For the past five years, I’ve pulled a nasty trick on students taking my college Exercise Prescription courses. I’d explain that the assessment for the course included a couple assignments and practicals and a final examination accounted for the other 50% of their final grade. Over the past few years, I’d noted some complacency and […]
(February 11, 2018) One of the things that really bothers me about the Physical Activity and Health movement has been their tendency to catastrophise inactivity. ‘Catastrophising’ is a term that seems to have come from psychotherapy, where it was used to describe a tendency to exaggerate the seriousness of a situation and to forecast an […]
Performance enhancing drugs (December 18, 2017) The recent ‘shocking’ (mock shocked face) revelation in the press that up to 80 Kiwi athletes have been caught up in a PED (performance enhancing drugs) bust is all a little bit disingenuous and very much ‘non-shocking’ – really, this should be no surprise! Just because we are perched […]
Exercise adoption, Exercise prescription (December 12, 2017) I don’t believe there are any magic exercises or quick fix solutions with exercise – I certainly haven’t discovered them yet! But….. there is one fundamental principle that I think is vital for successful exercise – that principle is PERSISTENCE. I don’t think it matters what you do, how hard […]
(December 12, 2017) Physical activity and exercise are popular these days. Well, they’re trendy to talk and read about but seems that they are not so popular to actually do. Becoming and staying active can be hard and a real challenge for some people. Exercise adoption is traditionally seen by exercise professionals as a 2-phase […]
(December 7, 2017) When it comes to physical activity and exercise it seems that so many people are never really that satisfied with what they get, or are getting, out of exercise – in fact the statistics would show that most people tend to give up in disgust after a short trial. We’ve all tried […]
(December 3, 2017) Ahhh the power of media!! I suspect that it’s made most professionals’ work a lot more challenging. As a 60’s child I grew up in a time when the various professionals had pretty much sole and protected access to the information relevant to their profession. If I wanted to know what was […]