Strength and Power Notes July 2010

So far the month has been pretty busy. Still training Kasi, an 18-year old volleyball player about to start her college career. I hope to post some features on her lifting progress over the past few months.

Robert Brown (www.RBrownSports.com) has some new ideas for youth strength training for volleyball in the Dallas area and I look forward to partnering with him. Bob Takano (www.TakanoAthletics.com) is also moving forward with some volleyball S&C programs that hold real promise.

Ken Kontor of Performance Conditioning (www.PerformamceCondition.com) has asked me to author a series of jump training pieces for his cycling publication, Performance Cycling Conditioning. If you’ve not seen Ken’s new electronic version of his newsletters for cycling, volleyball, soccer, and baseball/softball, I encourage you to check these out.

As noted in the headlines section on my homepage, I enjoyed the NSCA national conference experience in Orlando this month. It was a great chance to see friends throughout the profession and plan for new projects in the near and distant future.

Speaking of the homepage, watch for a new feature including Dartfish video analysis. This is scheduled to appear within the next few weeks. Every few weeks I’ll put up a different lift, along with my frame-by-frame analysis of the finer points of weightlifting technique.

Next month I head to Colorado Springs for the USA Weightlifting workshop featuring the German national coaching staff. Several colleagues and I plan to spend the time working on details of future projects, along with taking in whatever advice the guest coaches have to offer. With the usual translation hitches in such a workshop, the actual amount of meaningful information exchanged is up for grabs, but there will be some gems (all of which I’ll share here).

I look forward to seeing long-time friend Zygmunt Smalcerz, two-time Olympic Champion from Poland, who begins his job as national residence coach about the same time. Zygmunt and I had numerous conversations in the late 1980s, when USAW wanted to hire a national coach and I considered him to be one of the best available.

On August 14th Doug Lane and I will conduct a Performance Keys workshop in Decatur, GA. This is one of the most meaningful 1-day programs available. We go over the basics of strength training, along with a solid introduction and in-depth analysis of Olympic-style weightlifting.

The following week, August 21-22, I conduct a USA Weightlifting Level I Sports Performance Coach course at Fort Bragg, NC, home of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne.