Three of Brazil’s key attacking players. The same injury. Different careers, different bodies — but the same underlying problem.

Brazil aren't alone. In the same tournament, Reece James — England's first-choice right-back — went off with a hamstring injury; his replacement Jarell Quansah then picked up an ankle injury covering for him, and England go into tomorrow's knockout game having burned through both right-backs before the group stage ended.

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Hamstring strain injuries account for 24% of all injuries in men’s professional football, and the rate has been climbing by 4% every year. If that trajectory holds, expect more of the same at every tournament. So why hasn’t the sport fixed this?

Part of the answer is that most prevention programmes don’t address the actual mechanism of injury.

My son on the ball. He runs at top speed every week at our athletics sessions.

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Why the weight room isn’t enough

When a player reaches maximum speed, the long head of the biceps femoris — the most commonly injured hamstring muscle — is activated in a way that no gym exercise can replicate. Research shows that as a player moves from 80% to 100% of their maximal sprinting speed, biceps femoris activity increases by 67%. That’s not a marginal difference. And that specific stimulus — high load, high speed, specific timing — cannot be replicated with a Nordic curl or a Romanian deadlift.

Those exercises matter. We need high-quality hinge work to strengthen the hamstrings across both the knee and hip joints. You can see my full hip hinge progression — from unloaded wall hinges to single-leg loading — in Three ways to reduce hamstring injuries. But the gym work is the foundation, not the vaccine itself.

The vaccine is sprinting.

Getting the dose right

Like any vaccine, the dose matters. The relationship between sprint volume and injury risk is U-shaped: too little exposure leaves the muscle unprepared; too much creates fatigue that increases risk. The research points to what we might call the 85/95 Rule across a weekly microcycle:

• 35–40% of your weekly sprint volume should exceed 85% of maximal sprinting speed

• 15–20% must exceed 95%

That second number is the one most training programmes miss. Games rarely provide sufficient exposure at >95% speed — match play is interrupted, tempo varies, and players self-regulate. If you’re leaving it to the game to provide the stimulus, your players aren’t getting the vaccine.

In Tenets of Speed Development, I’ve written about the technical requirements for this work — specifically how pelvic position determines whether the hamstrings can do their job properly. Sound technique matters here as much as volume.

What it looks like in practice

Below is a clip of Dan Hayfield, a footballer I worked with, doing exactly this kind of max velocity work, after doing hinge variations in the gym. This is what the sprint vaccine looks like in a real training session.

Three things to do this week

1. Stop relying on match play. Games don’t reliably deliver >95% sprint exposure. You have to programme it deliberately — it won’t happen by accident.

2. Use 40m+ distances. To reach true max velocity, you need a build-up. A 15m acceleration phase followed by 25m at full throttle is a practical starting point. Shorter distances won’t get you there.

3. Use the MD-2 window. In tactical periodisation, Match Day Minus 2 is the optimal point in the week for high-intensity speed work — providing enough recovery time before the game while still delivering enough stimulus to count.

The consistency problem

New research is clear on this: the protective effect of any injury prevention programme is concentrated in high-adherence implementations. Doing your sprint work every week at a moderate volume beats doing a large block once a month. The players who avoid hamstring injuries aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated gym programmes — they’re the ones who sprint fast, regularly, and systematically.

Some of our young athletes working on 40 metre sprints from the fire hydrant start.

Raphinha will probably return before this tournament ends. The medical teams at the World Cup level are excellent, and the recovery protocols are first-rate. But the injury didn’t have to happen. For the players you work with, that’s the conversation worth having now — not after someone pulls up in a game.

Before putting this into practice, make sure you have the foundational 98% in place. If your players aren’t hydrated and in energy balance, the nervous system isn’t ready for max velocity work. Read Mastering the 98%: Essential Performance Basics for Pre-Season Heat first if that’s a gap.

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Here’s what the research actually says about keeping them safe and performing (football-based, but it applies to other sports too).

With pre-season training coinciding with extreme heat across the UK, players are currently facing a double-edged sword: the highest physical training loads of the year and environment-induced (heat) stress. While it is tempting to look for the “elite 2%” of performance—the complex supplements and advanced recovery tech—the reality is that most players leave 98% of their performance on the table by neglecting the basics.

Based on the Portuguese Football Federation consensus and recent research, here is your blueprint for mastering the heat this week.

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1. The Hydration Logic: Beyond Thirst

In temperatures reaching 37°C, sweat rates in professional players can soar to 1.46 litres per hour. Relying on thirst is a dangerous strategy because the sensation of thirst often lags significantly behind actual fluid needs.

The Science: Dehydration doesn’t just slow you down physically; it compromises mental concentration and skill performance after only 45 minutes of play. Furthermore, rehydrating with plain water alone can take three times longer to restore your plasma volume than using a sodium-rich beverage.

The Player Protocol (using 70kg as an average weight):

· Pre-Hydration: Drink 350–490 mL (one standard sports bottle) of a drink containing at least 600mg of sodium per litre roughly 2–3 hours before training.

· The Recovery Rule: For every 1kg of weight lost during the session, you must consume 1.5L of fluid within the next 2–4 hours to restore balance.

2. The Fueling Blueprint: Real Food Examples

To sustain high-intensity blocks in the heat, your energy baseline is approximately 3566 kcal per day. If you don’t start with “full tanks,” you are essentially training on empty.

The Loading Phase (24–48 hours before high-intensity blocks): You need 6–8 g/kg of carbohydrates daily. For a 70kg player, that is 420–560g of carbs.

· Practical Food Targets:

· Breakfast: Large bowl of porridge, one large banana, and a glass of orange juice (~90g carbs).

· Lunch: 2 cups of white pasta with tomato sauce and 2 slices of white bread (~110g carbs).

· Snack: A fruit smoothie with 2 kiwis and oats (~70g carbs).

· Dinner: 2 cups of white rice with lean chicken (~120g carbs).

The Pre-Match “Protein Ceiling”: To avoid gastrointestinal discomfort and a “heavy” stomach in the heat, keep protein to less than 0.4 g/kg in your final meal.

· Target: Maximum 28g of protein.

· Practical Example: One small, palm-sized chicken breast (90–100g) or one medium fish fillet. Avoid large steaks or high-protein shakes (>30g) in this window.

Here’s a healthy, easy-to-make, protein cheescake recipe:

3. Bridging the Recovery Gap

Sleep is your most potent recovery tool, yet research shows a massive 1.3-hour “sleep gap” in football. While players report needing 8.3 hours of sleep to feel rested, they average only 7.0 hours, particularly after night sessions where adrenaline and cognitive arousal are high.

The Heat Strategy:

· The Cool-Down Cue: Take a warm shower before bed to trigger the body’s natural cooling response, which cues the brain for sleep onset.

· The Melatonin Meal: Include high-glycemic index (GI) carbohydrates (like white rice or sweet potato) in your evening meal. These facilitate quicker sleep onset by promoting the synthesis of serotonin and melatonin.

Summary: The “Heatwave” Checklist

1st Sodium is Non-Negotiable: Use drinks with >600mg/L of sodium; water alone isn’t enough in 30°C+ heat.

2nd Hit the Carb Targets: 420g+ for a 70kg player to prevent glycogen depletion.

3rd Respect the Protein Limit: Keep the pre-match meal under 28g of protein to ensure fast gastric emptying.

4th Cool the Environment: Maintain a room temperature of ~17°C to fight the heat-induced sleep deficit.

Next Week in the World Cup Series: The Sprint Vaccine: Why running at >95% max speed is your best defence against hamstring injuries.

If this was useful, please forward it to your coaching staff.

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These three are not like that.

I wrote *Get Stronger*, *Run Faster*, and *Jump Higher* to be read by coaches who have jobs, teams, and not enough time. Each is short, practical, and built around sessions you can run on a pitch, in a hall, or anywhere with a bit of flat ground. None of them assumes a gym, a force plate, or a sports science department.

They are based on 30 years of coaching young athletes — including athletes who went on to compete at two Olympic Games, represent their country in several different sports, and win British championships. They are filtered down to what actually matters when you are standing in front of a group of 13-year-olds with one hour to train.

**Get Stronger** — A 12-week strength programme for young athletes. Two-week preparation, three-week adaptation, two-week application. [Amazon link]

**Run Faster** — The speed training book I wish every team sport coach had when I was starting out. Pelvis control, pre-tension, and stride mechanics — the things that actually make athletes faster. [Amazon link]

**Jump Higher** — The shortest of the three. Landings first, then plyometrics, then sport application. [Amazon link]

Or read all three in the **Youth Athlete Trilogy** bundle — roughly 30,000 words of programming and coaching guidance for about the price of a coffee each: Bundle link

I’ve built a “Seminars for Coaches and Teachers” playlist on my YouTube channel.

It contains some long-form thought pieces on coaching philosophy, athletic development, antifragility, master’s weightlifting research, and what 'world-class actually looks like.

They are built for the substance-over-highlights audience. Pair with a notebook!

While I was at it, I tidied up the rest of the channel too. Playlists are sharper, descriptions are more accurate, and the older content is organised around what coaches and teachers actually search for.
There are no shortcuts in teaching and coaching, but I hope to have saved you some time in searching for quality content.

If you want to go deeper, my next online seminar — *Speed & Strength for Youth Athletes* — is on Wednesday, 17 June at 19:00 UK time. We have six spaces left.

Buy tickets – Speed and Strength for Youth Athletes: A Practical Framework – Zoom

— James

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Coach education isn’t about ‘getting a badge’ and then repeating the same things for twenty years. A coach who stops learning starts coasting on what they already know. The athletes change, the science moves, the rules tighten — and the coach gets older. Continual learning is how you stay useful to the next group of kids walking through the door, not the last one.

Three forms of learning I leaned on this month

1. Being coached

I always think in order to coach, you have to be coached. You get used to receiving feedback (not just giving it), having someone else hold the plan, and the discipline of not arguing with your coach mid-session. It resets your empathy with the athletes you coach. In the picture above, Keith is emphasising the need to pull hard on the snatch. He also gave me tips on my jerk. My lifts got better as the competition went on, much better than in my training build up.

Takeaway: find someone whose judgment you trust and put yourself under it for a season.

2. Refreshing the basics (safeguarding)

This is the nitty-gritty of coach education that many of the ‘gurus’ dismiss: because they don’t have skin in the game. Without these basic courses covered, we simply cannot coach.

It’s easy to treat safeguarding and first aid training as a box-tick exercise, but I always pay attention and enjoy the refreshers. The standards shift, and new legislation often comes into force. It’s a chance to ask questions to tutors about the ‘grey areas’ in coaching. Mine was: ‘What happens when a 17-year-old coach who messages their peer group on Instagram turns 18. Are they allowed to still message the 17-year-olds now that she is an adult?’

Takeaway: The answer was ‘not in a coaching capacity.’ I know one weightlifting club had to evict a coach for messaging juniors, and a young local football coach keeps messaging under-18s for private sessions, despite my friendly warnings.

3. Adding a new credential (Level 3 Technical Official)

I’ve been officiating at weightlifting competitions for several years. I did it initially to help out local clubs and to improve my understanding of the rules. I’ve now officiated at seven national competitions and was offered the chance to take the Level 3 exam by British Weightlifting. This meant rushing from the competition platform to the weigh-in room to check the next group of male lifters.

I had a chance to shower, get changed into my T.O. uniform and then referee the men’s 79kg category, while Eddie Halstead sat behind me assessing my decisions: more pressure. Or, as Olympian Emily Muskett told me beforehand, ‘It’s a weekend of opportunity.’

Once Eddie had assessed 78 of my decisions (!), I had a chance to referee another great session, before being the technical controller for the last men’s session of the day. This meant I was overseeing the warm-up area, ensuring the lifters and coaches complied with the rules, and getting a close-up view of different coaching styles. This was excellent, and I learned a lot.

Takeaway: Every few years, do something in your sport that isn’t coaching. It helps the sport, and it helps you.

Empathy

Going through the same nerves, weight cut, warm-up logistics, and risk of bombing out as our club weightlifters face keeps my advice honest. I give a debrief in the following week to our club members and they ask me questions. It all feeds back into making our club better. The medal is the headline; the lived experience is the lesson.

Daisy, me, Keith and our club mascot, Stanley Bear, after the dust has settled.

A challenge for readers (especially p.e. teachers).

Pick one for the next 12 months:

• Get coached by someone in your discipline.

• Take a course outside your usual comfort zone.

• Compete or perform in your own sport again.

Then write back and tell me which one — I’ll share the best replies in a future issue.

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Her coach (me) didn’t tell her to attempt those weights. She decided in the moment. A friend — Georgie, 36 caps for England rugby, now a head coach in her own right — said afterwards she couldn’t get her head around it. ‘How do you train someone to attempt a lift they’ve never done before in front of an audience?’

You don’t, really. You prepare them, and then on the day, the body raises to meet the stress. That’s not motivational hand-waving — it’s antifragility, in the sense Nassim Taleb means it. A system that doesn’t just survive disorder but improves through it.

The whole approach to youth athletic development I’ve been refining for years sits on that idea: not “shield them from stress” or even “build resistance to stress” — but to prepare them in a way that lets the body itself say yes on the day.

(If you want to hear me think out loud about Taleb's ideas applied to coaching, the long-form conversation with Chris DeSantis on his Swim Brief podcast is here)

The second thing.

The Get Stronger / Run Faster / Jump Higher trilogy is now back in its rebuilt form on Amazon, and each book has a companion video library on the website. Every drill in the books links to a single page that mirrors the book’s chapter structure. I did this to fix the dead-link problem that crept in over the years as YouTube changed how it embedded videos. It’s also now easier for parents and coaches to find. If you’ve got the books already, the video pages are free; you don’t need to buy anything new.

• Get Stronger

• Run Faster:

• Jump Higher

The third thing.

The same principles run through Speed & Strength for Youth Athletes — the live online seminar on Wednesday 17 June, 7–8:30 pm BST.

It’s the practical version of all of the above: how to build sessions where young athletes turn up, work hard, and come away faster and stronger without breaking. Recording available for anyone who can’t make the live session; written CPD summary for coaches who need something for the file.

Early-bird closes tomorrow (Friday 14 May) at 0900. Book here.

Thanks for reading.

— James

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No matter what the label on the player’s tracksuit says, successful rehabilitation requires patience, commitment and a progressive plan. This article shows how I helped a Devon centre-back return to play ‘up top’, thanks to his newfound speed.

Before the case study — a reminder that my online Speed & Strength for Youth Athletes seminar runs on Wednesday, 17 June. Full post below; tickets at the end.

Four key principles I follow in ACL rehabilitation

1. Coach the person, not the injury. An ACL injury means the player has lost the opportunity to play the sport they love for 9-12 months. The road to recovery is daunting, and they need support, encouragement, rewards and signs of progress along the way. Giving the player a sheet of paper with some exercises and telling them to ‘come back in a month,’ is unlikely to keep them motivated.

e.g. early stages of rehab, giving movement puzzles for Dylan to solve.

2. Train the whole body, not just the knee. It is easy to focus on just strengthening the quads in isolation, but the quads don’t work in isolation on the pitch. The injury may have occurred due to weaknesses elsewhere and/or poor movement patterns. Utilising my background of coaching gymnastics, athletics and weightlifting, I use many different methods to work on the whole body movements alongside strengthening both legs. This also helps with part 1.

e.g. combining jumping, rolling, and sprinting in one sequence.

3. Load where you can. While the knee is recovering from the surgery and getting stronger, we have to be patient. The rest of the body can be pushed and challenged. This helps the player regain fitness and (again) helps with part one. I coach them as an athlete, not an invalid. It takes their mind off the injury and what they can’t do and focuses on what they CAN do.

e.g. strength training with coordination.

4. Put it together. I am not trying to rehabilitate a knee that is strong enough for normal life; it has to be able to withstand the rigours of 90 minutes of football. Dylan has to be able to start, turn, jump, compete, stop and use the ball effectively. I put aspects of that into the training plan each week and then combined them as we approached his return to football.

e.g. competitive 1v1 in a limited space.

Conclusion:

So far, Dylan has been coming off the bench in a progressive return to play: 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, then a half. He’s done everything that has been asked of him, and more, and it’s paid off. His team has moved him from centre-back to ‘up-top’ thanks to his new speed. He came off the bench at the weekend and had two ‘assists’.

N.B. any players interested in rehabilitating with me, see pricing and packages here.

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Going deeper — the 17 June seminar

Return to play after ACL needs exactly the speed and strength work I cover on 17 June. £59 early-bird closes Thursday 14 May — Book your place: here.

19:00–20:30 UK time. Ninety minutes of practical coaching content and Q&A for anyone working with athletes aged 10–22 — sports coaches, PE teachers, and physios included. Early bird £59 until Thursday 14 May; £75 after that.

It happens every year, and yet the p.e. teachers are caught with their pants down: they haven’t started ‘teaching’ athletics yet. They select pupils based on last year’s results, with no concern for growth spurts. Results are dependent on two things:

1. Early maturation (often mistakenly called ‘talent’).

2. The pupil is a member of an athletics club and has gained a skill set and confidence there.

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At our club, we receive an influx of potential athletes whose parents are fed up with their children being entered into competitions without prior coaching.

Here’s what we do to help them develop their sprinting (the same principles apply to jumps and throws, but with different techniques).

The Pre-Competitive Foundation: A Five-Point Plan for Developing Youth Athletics

The Strategic Shift: From Formal Coaching to Purposeful Play

The athletics fixture list (like many other sports) assumes that children can already run, jump and throw. This isn’t the case.

Historically, the “1985 child” (me, without being a member of any sports clubs) benefited from an average of 30 hours of weekly free play. By 2021, that figure had plummeted to a mere five hours (according to data from the Netherlands).

This represents a staggering loss of 12,250 hours of movement over a ten-year childhood. These hours were once the laboratory where children implicitly learned balance, coordination, and reaction (and had fun without adults).

The “Environment vs. Genetics” dichotomy is often misunderstood. While genetics dictates the absolute ceiling of performance, the environment provides the raw material coaches actually work with. Without those thousands of hours of implicit learning, the technical “ceiling” is irrelevant because the “floor”—the structural integrity and the variety of movements experienced—is missing.

We see the consequences in the “Fortnite-style” movement pattern—children running with their arms stretched out behind their backs, if they are running at all. Imposing rigid, adult-derived coaching models from the 1980s on these children is a strategic error; they lack the physical foundations to cope with complex systems.

To succeed, we must transition from being competition managers and/or ‘measurers’ to architects of environments that prioritise discovery and “Games with Purpose.”

Summary: Technical systems imposed too early fail because the athlete’s body is not yet receptive to the work. By adopting a “Games with Purpose” philosophy, we ensure that children develop the necessary physical literacy through high-energy bursts of activity. This approach ensures long-term retention and development; if the “raw material” is moulded correctly, technical coaching has a solid foundation to build upon.

With this overarching philosophy established, we can begin building the athlete from the ground up, starting with the integrity of the foot and ankle.

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Point 1: Reactive Mechanics—Developing the “Skimming Stone” Foot Strike

Many young athletes exhibit the “Sunday morning shuffle”—a laboured, heel-toe slogging action beloved by the middle-aged joggers, where muscles take the entire load because the tendons are not engaged.

To improve running economy, we must minimise ground contact time, transitioning the athlete from a heavy-footed gait to a reactive “springing” action. This requires developing the stiffness of the foot and ankle tendons to ensure the runner is not “fighting the run itself".

We utilise a specific progression of “Foot Taps” (Ankling) and rope skipping. The goal is strength without the unnecessary muscular bulk that slows a limb down.

A vital coaching tool is the metaphor of “skimming like a stone across the water.” The child should visualise their foot hitting the surface and immediately springing off. This mental image transforms a landing into a propulsion mechanism, “whipping” the floor rather than slogging over it.

Summary: Developing foot mechanics before competition prevents inefficient patterns that lead to early fatigue. By turning the foot into a spring, we improve running economy—allowing the athlete to travel further with less effort—and prepare the lower limbs for the high forces of sprinting.

Once the feet are reactive, we must look upward to the pelvis and hips to ensure this energy is directed efficiently.

Here is a 56-year-old coach demonstrating some of these exercises:

Younger (and better) athletes should be springier. They might find the coordination difficult. P.E. teachers should be able to demonstrate assistance drills like these.

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Point 2: Postural Integrity—The “Hip Lock” and Vertical Frame

The pelvis is the engine of running. To maximise speed, the athlete must maintain control of their pelvis, with the ‘free’ hip higher than the supporting hip. If the support hip drops during landing, the leg muscles absorb the load, losing the “free” energy return of the tendons. A stable, vertical frame is hard to develop, but it can be done.

Developing the Vertical Frame

We utilise specific drills to help children find and hold this posture:

1. The Hip Heist (Push to the Sky):

   • Stand with your back against a wall, arms outstretched.

   • Lift one heel as high as possible under the buttock, foot parallel to the floor.

   • Reach as high as possible with the opposite fingertips, as if reaching for a £20 note on a high shelf (£50 note if you live in Chelsea).

   • Pause to ensure the free hip is level with or higher than the support hip. This can later be progressed to a walking drill, placing the foot 5-10cm in front.

2. The Stick Above Head Drill:

   • Hold a stick overhead while running to force the trunk muscles to work harder to counter the rotation caused by leg drive.

   • The primary goal is to keep the shoulders stacked directly above the hips, avoiding excessive rotation or leaning.

When posture collapses, the athlete cannot use their abdominals effectively. A collapse in any part of the system means the whole system is weakened. Stiffness, bracing and tension are all words we use, with appropriate exercises, to help the athletes get stronger.

Summary: By mastering the hip lock and maintaining a vertical frame, the athlete’s trunk can transmit power from the legs efficiently and project their centre of mass forward, resulting in greater distance covered per stride.

With a vertical frame established, the athlete is ready to master the explosive transitions of acceleration.

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Point 3: Explosive Projection—Mastering Starts and Multi-Planar Mobility

In most sports, the “first two steps” are more critical than running 100 metres. Yet, without the background of playground games, many children cannot move fast from the start.

Agile athletes are able to project their hips explosively from various positions. This requires not just power, but multi-planar mobility in the hips and the thoracic spine, as well as great postural control.

We start with lunging in multiple directions, incorporating arm movements in all three planes (down/up, left/right, side-to-side), then add bracing exercises against a wall or a partner to teach the positions and stiffness required. Small jumps and hops help teach the ‘spring.’

The “Fire Hydrant Start” is a premier tool for teaching hip projection from a kneeling position. The focus must remain on the first two steps—driving the hips forward and striking the ground hard to “rip” into the sprint.

Summary: Developing the structural integrity and thoracic mobility of young athletes is needed to counteract sedentary lifestyles before they can maintain the posture required at speed.

True athletic development, however, requires a diversification of power skills beyond just running.

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Point 4: All-Round Skill Diversification—The Mechanics of Throwing and Jumping

To prevent early specialisation and burnout, young athletes must be exposed to many different movements. Parents don’t ‘play’ catch with their kids in the garden now, and some school teachers ban children from throwing balls in the playground.

We ensure that all our athletes throw and jump (to some extent) as well as sprint. Jumping and throwing rely on the same principle as sprinting: generating torque and force from the ground up through kinetic linking.

We start with two-handed football throws: overhead, sideways, underhand, behind, to get the youngsters aware of ‘long arms’ and ‘trunk rotation,’ without explicitly telling them.

We then progress to tennis ball throws and some loaded throws with medicine balls and sandbags: the heavier implements ‘teach’ the children how to use more of their body.

We may then do some specific throwing with either discus, shot or javelin. Even then, we keep things simple.

Javelin Foundations for Beginners

We focus on two primary grips:

• The American Grip: Thumb and index finger on top of the cord.

• The Finnish Grip: The most popular method; the middle finger and thumb grip the cord, with the index finger resting along the side.

The key technical focus is the “C-position.” This is a “big stretch” travelling from the legs, through the hips, and into the core—an arch similar to a gymnastic arch. The primary principle is “Body First, Arm Late.” The athlete must generate torque through the legs and torso before the arm releases the implement.

Summary: Diversifying implements and movements builds a resilient, coordinated athlete. By learning to link the body from the ground up in a throw, the athlete understands how to use their body better, creating a versatile “raw material” receptive to specialised coaching later.

The final step is organising these points into a session structure that mimics natural behaviour.

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Point 5: The “Games with Purpose” Framework—Structuring the Training Session

Children do not naturally move in long blocks (Park runs) or stand in queues; they move in brief, intermittent bursts. A successful session must mimic this. We utilise a 60-minute template designed for engagement.

The 60-Minute Training Template

1. Warm-Up (10 mins): “Shaking off the school shackles” through tag or parkour-style play.

2. Fundamentals (10 mins): Directional skipping, foot taps, and hip locks.

3. Theme of the Day (20 mins): Specific speed work (starts, acceleration) using Handicapped Competition.

4. Jumping & Throwing (10-15 mins): Skill diversification to build all-around power.

5. Game (5-10 mins): Speed expression through relays or handicapped sprints/ ‘there and back again’ races.

The use of “Handicapped Competition” is a strategic pillar. Matching pairs or giving head starts ensures every child races at their limit. This serves a psychological purpose: fast children need to learn how to lose, and slower children need to feel what it is like to win.

Summary: The ultimate goal is consistency of training. If they keep returning, they get faster. This structure ensures children enjoy the process, which is the only way to achieve long-term speed development.

Note for p.e. teachers and sports coaches.

Spring Workshop: “Speed & Strength for Youth Athletes: A Practical Framework”

Thursday 19th June, online via Zoom 1900-2030 UK time, £75. Early bird tickets available now £59 : Buy Ticket—limited places.

Conclusion

As educators, we must not be in a rush to list rules and regulations and overwhelm with technical points. Nor must we stand there with a clipboard, stopwatch and tape measure and pretend we are ‘teaching.’

Our role is to be patient and draw upon that expertise only when the child’s body has shown it is structurally ready, warm, and receptive.

By building the foundation through purposeful play and structural integrity, we ensure that when the time for specialised competition training arrives, the athlete is prepared.

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Our weightlifting academy girls.

Many people don’t choose to compete in weightlifting; they take up the sport for different reasons. The i9 sports survey, “Shaping the Future of Sports for Girls”, 1500 parents and girls about their attitudes to sport.

You can see the results below:

We would be foolish to emphasise medals at the expense of having fun and building confidence, and yet, guess what NGBs focus on?

Yep, which is why we don’t receive funding from the top. Luckily, we did receive some funding from Devon County Council to run our weightlifting academy. Here’s an overview of our club philosophy and processes.

(N.b. there are flaws in here, but this is our real-world club environment. Before you criticise, ask yourself, ‘What have I done lately to help a real human person?’ It’s easy to criticise from the safety of your keyboard.

1. The Philosophy: Movement Before Loading

Athletic longevity is not built on the weight of the barbell, but on the integrity of the movement. At Excelsior, we adhere to a non-negotiable rule: movement before loading.

Many novices arrive with a “full cup”—preconceptions from social media or experience with the “C-word” (CrossFit). They often want to jump into “bad power cleans” just to move weight. True mastery requires emptying that cup.

We prioritise “movement over muscles”; our gym has no benches because we aren’t interested in lying down to push things. We are interested in picking heavy weights up—defining “heavy” as anything challenging, but looking to lift weights exceeding your body weight eventually. Squatting body weight is a milestone, then cleaning it, then jerking it, then snatching it.

The core values of our club guide this journey:

• Patience: Weightlifting is a late-development sport; we are in no rush to load a stiff frame.

• Empathy: We meet you where you are, acknowledging that every athlete’s coordination fluctuates (and that young people often arrive physically illiterate).

• Technical Mastery: Focusing on the “how” creates a higher ceiling for the “how much.”

4 women at our club: all very different people.

2. The Architecture of a Session: Technique and Mobility

A specific warm-up is a strategic tool, not a time-filler. We follow a "general to Specific” progression, starting with movements such as skipping and then bodyweight exercises such as multi-directional lunges to get the mind and body working.

The first time we touch the barbell, we often perform a specific sequence: the Hinge, Press, and Overhead Squat. This establishes balance before any speed is added. For beginners, we use wooden sticks, med balls and aqua bags to provide variety within the same movement.

We use 10kg bars and wooden disks (0.75kg) to practise pulling from the floor without excessive load. We prioritise the “Snatch-First” methodology because the snatch is the most complex lift; it requires a fresh mind and peak speed.

Building the movement and confidence with an appropriate load.

While the clean is vital, it is often “caveman stuff” in relative terms—simpler to load for strength—whereas the snatch and jerk require deep technical precision.

3. Taking Care of Business: Preparing for Competition

The bridge to the competition platform begins with our “P.B. nights", where we encourage our members to ‘go heavy’ in front of their peers. This causes some pressure, but in a supportive environment.

We then encourage entry to our club competition so that they get used to weighing in, having three attempts at each lift, and knowing what a total is!

The transition to an official competition and a new venue is "frenetic". There is a lot to take in. We use checklists to help the lifters (and parents) get organised.

While the lifters have been preparing for weeks and months, the parents are often caught unawares as to the importance of things like food, transport and organisation to give their child the best opportunity to succeed. I made this video to help them:

All the preparation in the world doesn’t help with the experience of the back room for the first time! We use the TCB (Taking Care of Business) mantra to “Control the Controllables.” During the event, the coaches act as the “thinkers”—managing the clock and the board—so our lifters can simply be the “lifter.”

Helping two of our lifters warm up at a recent competition.

Summary of the Journey

Weightlifting rewards those with the patience to build a broad base of coordination. We aren’t looking for quick fixes; our goal is to develop happy, healthy movers who are competent and confident.

If they do choose to compete, then we encourage the lifters to trust the framework, embrace the process of learning, and enjoy their first time under the lights.

The primary goal of their first competition is simple: have a positive experience and a bit of fun. Medals are a bonus.

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Further reading:

• Weightlifting for Juniors

It reminded me not to take what is out of our sight as a given (sleep is the other major factor affecting athletes’ performance, which is out of our control). So, I’ve been working on helping educate both the athletes and their parents.

Before we start, it’s World Book Day, so why not buy one of my books?

Reviews and links to buy are on my author website here: James Marshall author books Thank you.

Back to Nutrition:

There is no point in complicating things so people get paralysed with fear of doing the wrong thing. I focus on keeping things:

• Affordable

• Realistic

• Tasty

  For example this:

  

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1. The “Why” Behind the Fuel: Understanding Energy Balance

Parents need to know that the energy demands of a young, growing, healthy athlete are different from those of a sedentary adult. Applying (insert celebrity diet fad here) to a young person risks them being undernourished.

For a young athlete, energy balance is far more complex than a simple “calories in vs. calories out” equation. It is the dynamic relationship between total energy intake and the energy required for exercise, growth, and fundamental physiological survival.

In a developing body, “balance” is achieved only when sufficient fuel remains after training to support the synthesis of cellular components, cellular transport, and the formation of new tissues.

In short, they need to eat to recover, repair, and grow.

2. The Hidden Risks: Low Energy Availability and RED-S

Consistently under-fuelling leads to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). This is a systemic physiological failure where the body’s “operating system” begins to glitch. For a teenager, the “so what?” factor is significant: RED-S can result in permanent bone loss and long-term metabolic damage.

4 Critical Health Impacts of Low Energy Availability:

• Skeletal Health Failure: A lack of energy impairs bone remodelling, significantly increasing the risk of stress fractures and decreased bone mineral density.

• Cardiovascular Impairment: The heart is a muscle; LEA can lead to a lower heart rate, reduced blood flow, and impaired cardiovascular function.

• Gastrointestinal Distress: LEA slows gut motility, leading to gastroparesis, bloating, and nutrient malabsorption.

• Endocrine Disruption: The body increases cortisol (stress hormone) while lowering metabolic rate, leading to chronic fatigue and stalled growth.

It can also disrupt the menstrual cycle of girls (but this warrants a separate post).

To avoid these risks, the teenager must adopt practical ways to ensure they maintain an adequate energy balance. Parents need to help them, rather than hinder them.

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3. Practical Fueling Strategies for Busy Schedules

Fuelling is a skill that must be practised. To keep the engine running, follow the Three-Step Method:

1. Selection of Fresh Produce: Prioritise a huge variety of colourful salads and vegetables to ensure micronutrient density.

2. Variety of Carbohydrates: Use a mix of fast-releasing and slow-releasing carbs (oats, rice, wholemeal toast, wholemeal pancakes).

3. Diversified Protein Sources: Rotate through eggs, lean meats, and oily fish (mackerel, sardines, or tuna), which are highly affordable, high-quality protein sources.

   Lack of time isn’t an excuse: it’s usually a lack of planning. Here’s a recipe I shared with our athletes last night.

The Speed-Fueling Menu

Note that while solid food is the foundation, what you drink and specific “boosters” also play a role in keeping the engine running:

Bananas, nuts, whole-grain bagel peanut butter sandwiches (cut into halves or quarters), and homemade flapjacks are good on the go (and at competitions). Eggs or baked beans on toast are good for between school and evening training sessions.

Crisps, breadsticks and sweets are inadequate sources of nutrition, and yet parents seem to give them to their children regularly as fuel!

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4. Hydration underpins everything

My son wakes up on Saturday mornings and only drinks one glass of water before leaving for his football match. I’m trying to explain how he has dehydrated overnight and needs to top up his fluids.

I wonder how many teenagers are chronically dehydrated at kick-off time?

My next project for the athletes is to get them to weigh themselves at bedtime and after peeing first thing in the morning. They can then track the difference and realise how much fluid needs to be replaced (not all in one go) and pace their drinking accordingly.

Hydration education is wasted when the athletes can’t even remember their water bottle.

Summary

Telling young athletes to look after their nutrition often falls on deaf ears: they either don’t know where to start, or are relying on parents to be organised and knowledgeable.

1. Educate, encourage, and give examples that the teenagers can follow.

2. Start simple: bring a water bottle, eat breakfast. Build from there.

3. Set an example as a coach/ parent.

Have you had any success with modifying the behaviours of your athletes? Please share in the comments:

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Four hours!

This means schools look to outsource teaching and waste thousands of pounds of parents’ money (tax) on quick-fix schemes such as the ‘Daily Mile’, not because they work (they don’t), but because they're convenient.

As a parent, do you want your child’s physical health to be sidelined in the name of convenience?

My gymnastics after-school class set up at the local primary school: do you think children would prefer this, or be told to run/walk in a circle?

Me neither. My experience in coaching at our club over the last 11 years is seeing a continual decline in the physical literacy of children: skipping, crawling, rolling, jumping, throwing, and leaping are all alien concepts to the children who join. Let alone sprinting, squatting or combining movements.

It’s a travesty. Worse still, the remedy is simple if there is the will and knowledge; your child could be taught the joy of movement through a rich and varied curriculum that is inexpensive and doesn’t need ‘world-class’ facilities.

But, before you can challenge the school, you need to be informed, so please read on.

An overview of a sound physical education programme in primary schools and the decline of physical education over the decades.

1. The “Games” We Play

In a “sports-specialist” school in Plymouth, a fourteen-year-old girl is hailed as a “Sports Leader.” She wears the official hoodie, attends the requisite seminars, and visits primary schools to lecture younger children on the importance of exercise. Yet, this “ambassador” cannot perform a single press-up, nor can she run 400 metres without stopping. This is the “madness” of our current era—a system that mistakes talking about movement for the ability to move.

We are currently suffering from a profound “cultural amnesia.” We have forgotten that physical education was once about physical culture—the systematic development of human function—and have replaced it with “sports,” a series of adult-led fixtures bound by rigid rules and unchangeable end-products. While we obsess over whether a child understands the offside rule, we ignore the fact that they cannot crawl, skip, or roll with basic competence. We have traded the “vigour of the athlete” for a “semantic swamp” of marketing and administrative box-ticking.

Let’s get physical: some of our club members working together.

2. The Great Divorce: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body

This “cognitive-somatic dichotomy” (mind-body) is a historical inheritance. We have the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes to thank for the “Great Divorce,” the division of the universe into the mental and the material. This split has birthed a “brain-heavy” curriculum that treats the body as a mere vessel to be parked in a chair for six hours a day.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered the necessary corrective, arguing that intelligence is not hindered by physical strength but cultivated by it. He understood that a child’s first teachers are their feet, hands, and eyes. He famously wrote:

“A feeble body makes a feeble mind. ... The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. ... Make a man of him in strength, and he will soon be a man of reason.”

When we force children into “compulsory knowledge” while keeping their bodies stagnant, we ignore Plato’s warning:

“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

To lead a child to the “self-examination” required for true wisdom, we must first allow them to move. A curriculum that ignores the body does not just produce unathletic children; it produces intellectually stunted ones.

An example of a child being led through different progressions. Compare this to a ‘top-down’ one-dimensional approach to movement (like the daily mile).

3. The “Olympic Smokescreen” and the Myth of Legacy

We are frequently told that elite sporting success “inspires a generation,” despite there being minimal evidence to support this (and sometimes there’s even a fall in physical activity).

This is an “Olympic smokescreen” designed to hide the underlying decay of national health. The UK’s obsession with the medals table has diverted millions from grassroots movement into a tiny, elite minority. Consider the “12 people” statistic: of the 96 gold medals won by Team GB between 1996 and 2016, a staggering 49 were won or contributed to by just 12 individuals.

While we boast of our medals standing, we are primarily “winning medals sitting down and going backwards”—dominating technology-heavy, expensive sports like rowing, cycling, and sailing.

Meanwhile, basketball—the second most popular sport among UK teenagers—received zero funding between 2017 and 2020 because it offered a lower “return” on medals.

The “cesspit of mediocrity” in our schools is the direct result of a performance-obsessed culture that treats children as data points on a spreadsheet rather than human beings in need of movement.

4. Stop Teaching “Algebra” to 6-Year-Olds (The Developmental Trap)

In modern P.E., teachers often use an “error model”: they show a child an advanced movement, like a baseball pitch or a javelin throw, and then grade them on how many “errors” they make compared to an elite athlete. As educator Greg Thompson argues, this is, “as logical as teaching algebra to a child who cannot yet count.”

Thompson recalls a school principal who, after observing a developmental throwing rubric, realised: “I think I am a level 2 [thrower].” While she was a “level 4 principal,” she was physically at a “level 2” stage—proving that many adults are still stuck in childhood movement patterns because they were never taught the intermediate steps.

Instead of verbal over-instruction, we should utilise a “dynamic systems approach” based on Esther Thelen’s research. Consider the West Indian cricket fielder who launches a ball from the boundary. The key is the “lag time” between trunk rotation and the arm movement.

To teach this to a five-year-old, don’t talk about biomechanics. Simply have them straddle a line and throw a ball forcefully at a wall. The task constraint “squirts trunk rotation out” naturally. We must stop teaching the “end product” and start respecting the developmental process.

Greg Thompson showing how throwing progressions can be taught.

5. The “Traditional Sport” Lie: Why Parkour is Older Than Rugby

We are told that team games like rugby and cricket are “traditional,” while parkour or gymnastics are “new-age.” This is a historical fallacy born of the nineteenth-century novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The fictionalised account of Rugby School hijacked our perception of physical education, prioritising “character-building” games over functional competence.

In reality, gymnastics, wrestling, and weightlifting are the true traditional pillars of the human experience. Modern gymnastics began when “Father Jahn” took German boys into the woods to leap over obstacles to prepare for Napoleon’s invasion—a practice far older than the codified rules of rugby.

Our decline is quantifiable: the 1948 Iowa high school fitness manual stated that an “A” grade required a student to perform 44 pull-ups. Today, most “Sports Leaders” would struggle to perform four. We have replaced “harmonious development” with a narrow, games-based syllabus that serves the scoreboard rather than the student.

6. Play as the “True Secret” of Discipline

We often mistake a quiet, controlled classroom for a disciplined one. However, the educator Johann Herbart distinguished between Regierung (external teacher control) and Zucht (character training and self-discipline). Regierung serves the needs of the teacher; Zucht serves the needs of the pupil. A “well-disciplined” school can be the worst environment for character development if it removes all opportunity for self-discovery.

Organised chaos: or children allowed to explore and develop?

John Locke identified the “true secret of education” as the ability to:

“...keep up a child’s spirit easy, active and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him from many things he has a mind to.”

When the environment is arranged so that a child’s activity spontaneously discovers the “road to the useful,” discipline becomes an internal drive. Play is not purposeless; it is the “characteristic work of childhood” through which a child learns to navigate the world.

7. The Laban Framework: A New Language for Movement

To escape the “semantic swamp” of sport-specific skills, we need a shared framework for movement literacy. Rudolf Laban’s four aspects of movement provide a language that allows a teacher to move from the general to the specific:

• Body: What is the body doing? (e.g., stretching, curling, twisting, symmetrical vs. asymmetrical shapes).

• Effort: How is the body moving? (The dynamics of time—sudden vs. sustained; weight—light touch vs. firm; space—direct vs. indirect; and flow—stoppable vs. free-flowing).

• Space: Where is the body moving? (Levels—low, medium, high; and pathways—curved, zig-zag, or linear).

• Relationships: How the body interacts with itself and the environment (Over/under, behind/alongside, and collaboration vs. competition).

By teaching these, we give children an “inner feeling” for movement. A child doesn’t just learn a “basketball throw”; they learn how to “launch an implement” using contralateral patterns that apply to a dozen different activities.

8. Conclusion: Beyond the Scoreboard

We stand at a crossroads. We can continue to “flounder” with adult-led competitive fixtures that leave the majority of children disengaged, or we can embrace a renaissance of physical culture.

The three cornerstones of this renaissance are Progression, Variety, and Precision. We must return to a gym culture where you go to learn, not just to train.

The goal of a true Movement Manifesto is not a handful of technology-subsidised gold medals. The goal is a nation of happy, active, and confident children who possess the physical literacy to navigate their lives with grace and strength.

If we taught children to move with the same rigour and expectation that we expect them to read, what would our world look like? It is time to bridge the “Great Divorce” and realise that the children need strong and agile bodies as well as curious and learned brains.

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If you would like your children to thrive in their physical education, feel free to contact me.

I shall share a summary below, with some graphics.

While the article is new and the research cited is recent, the premise isn’t. I was told about the benefits of late specialisation and general sampling by Paula Jardine when I worked with the Sport England-funded “South West Talent Programme” from 2009-2011.

David Epstein covers much of the same ground in his 2019 book, Range.

Unfortunately, most of the Governing Bodies, p.e. teachers and local sports clubs persist in encouraging early specialisation, despite all evidence to the contrary. Hopefully, this summary may enlighten a few minds, or at least educate parents and make them wary of false promises!

The Acquisition of World-Class Performance: Developmental Patterns and Predictors

Executive Summary

Recent synthesis of developmental data from over 34,000 international top performers—including Nobel laureates, Olympic champions, world-class musicians, and chess grandmasters—reveals a fundamental disconnect between early exceptional performance and adult world-class achievement. Contrary to traditional expertise research focusing on young and sub-elite populations, the path to the highest echelons of human capability is characterised by three primary findings:

1. Discrete Populations: Early exceptional performers (e.g., world-ranked juniors) and later world-class adults are largely separate populations, with nearly a 90% turnover rate between these stages across various domains.

2. Negative Correlation with Early Success: At the highest levels of adult achievement, peak performance is negatively associated with early performance. World-class achievers typically demonstrate lower performance and more gradual progress in their early years compared to peers who perform just below that level.

3. The Multidisciplinary Advantage: While early success is predicted by intense, discipline-specific specialisation, ultimate world-class performance is associated with early multidisciplinary practice (”sampling”), a later start in the primary discipline, and reduced amounts of early specialised training.

These findings suggest that the current policies of many elite training programmes, which select for top-performing children and mandate early specialisation, may inadvertently favour short-term success at the expense of long-term world-class potential.

One of our club members working on rope climbing at a young age: we had no idea what sport (s) he would like to pursue when he got older.*

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The Divergence of Early and Adult Achievement

A critical discovery in recent research on expertise is that the individuals who dominate youth categories are rarely the ones who reach the absolute top of their fields as adults. This suggests that the populations of “successful juniors” and “successful seniors” are largely discrete.

Population Discrepancy Data

The following table illustrates the percentage of individuals who are different across developmental stages (the degree of discreteness):

The “Late Bloomer” Rule

Retrospective analyses of eminent adults show that many world-class performers were not child prodigies. While examples like Mozart exist, they are statistically the exception. More common are performers like Beethoven, Michael Jordan, and Charles Darwin, who appeared less remarkable in their early years. Data show that 72% of international-level senior athletes did not previously achieve international junior-level status.

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Performance Trajectories and Predictors

The developmental trajectories of world-class performers differ significantly from those of “national-class” or “sub-elite” performers.

Comparative Trajectories

World-class performers typically follow a “slower start, higher finish” trajectory. Compared to peers performing just below the highest level:

• Athletes: World-class performers show lower championship rankings at age 14 but surpass national-class peers around age 19.

• Scientists: Nobel laureates often have slower early progress in publication impact (citation ranking) than Nobel nominees who do not win. They are also less likely to receive early scholarships and take longer to reach their first professorship.

• Chess Players: Future world top-3 players often score lower on Elo ratings at age 14 (averaging 62 points lower) than those who eventually rank 4th–10th.

Opposing Predictors of Success

The factors that predict early success are often the exact opposite of the factors that predict ultimate world-class achievement.

In athletics, for example, senior world-class athletes engaged in an average of two other sports for nine years during childhood and adolescence. Similarly, Nobel laureates were found to engage in significantly more multidisciplinary activities (arts, music, and additional scientific disciplines) than national-level awardees.

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My book contains many essays explaining the benefits of sampling and long-term athletic development. Buy your copy here.

Explanatory Hypotheses for the Sampling Advantage

Three primary hypotheses have been proposed to explain why multidisciplinary practice and gradual starts facilitate world-class performance.

1. Search-and-Match Hypothesis

Derived from labour market economics, this suggests that experiences across various disciplines increase the likelihood that a performer will find the specific field that optimally matches their innate talents and personal preferences. Performers in an “optimal match” are more likely to sustain the long-term effort required for peak achievement.

2. Enhanced-Learning-Capital Hypothesis

Varied learning tasks in different disciplines may expand a performer’s “learning capital” in three ways:

• Flexible Thinking: Facilitates the ability to recognise problem patterns and integrate diverse insights to solve complex problems.

• Adaptability: The performer becomes an “adaptable learner,” capable of exploiting new information and methodologies more effectively.

• Understanding Learning Principles: Exposure to different teaching styles helps the learner understand which methods work best for them personally.

3. Limited-Risks Hypothesis

Multidisciplinary practice limits the factors that can end a career prematurely. By avoiding early, intensive specialisation, performers reduce the risk of:

• Physical Overuse: Lower rates of injury in psychomotor disciplines like sports and music.

• Psychological Burnout: Reduced risk of “wear-down” or loss of enjoyment.

• Opportunity Costs: Performers are less likely to feel “stuck” in a discipline they no longer enjoy because they have explored other interests.

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Implications for Policy and Practice

I made this video several years ago, which explains why I set up Excelsior Athletic Development Club.

Much of what is said is confirmed in Gullich’s recent article: the current evidence necessitates a reassessment of how elite institutions identify and nurture talent.

Talent Identification Fallacies

Using early top performance as a selection criterion for elite academies or scholarships is often counterproductive.

• Exclusionary Gap: Because the majority of future world-class adults were not top-ranked juniors, selecting only for early success excludes the majority of the future “world-class” pool.

• Dysfunctional “Radiating” Effect: Early selection creates an incentive for parents and teachers to enforce premature specialisation to win scholarships or academy spots, which the data suggests actually hinders long-term development.

Recommended Shifts in Training

To foster the highest levels of achievement, programme managers and policymakers should consider the following evidence-based practices:

• Delayed Specialisation: Encourage young people to engage in “dedicated practice” in around two additional disciplines before focusing on a single field.

• Resource Allocation: Instead of maximising weekly sessions in one discipline, allow time for multidisciplinary engagement (e.g., a youth soccer coach encouraging two sessions of basketball or gymnastics per week).

• Sustainability Metrics: Evaluate teachers and elite programs based on the long-term success of participants (at peak performance age) rather than short-term junior trophies.

• New Selection Indicators: Shift from “top early performance” to indicators such as “above-average early performance combined with multidisciplinary engagement.”

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  *The young boy in the video is now 16.

  

  His favourite sport is football (pictured in green above), then athletics in the summer (Triple Jump and Long Jump), with recreational badminton a solid third choice. All of these are his choices and evolved from his sampling many different activities.

A Beginner’s Guide to Foundational Exercises: Building a Stronger You

Introduction: Why a Solid Foundation Matters

As an athletic development coach, I often use an analogy from architecture to explain the importance of foundational training. Imagine building a structure with bricks. If you rush to build it as high as possible without ensuring the base is solid, the structure will eventually fail. However, if you take the time to build a stable and solid foundation, you create something strong that can be built upon safely.

Your body is no different. This guide is designed to introduce you to key exercises that build a strong, stable foundation for any physical activity. Mastering these movements will not only help you improve your performance but will also be your best defence against common injuries. Let’s get started on building a stronger you.

Infographic showing the main concepts of Structural Integrity.

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1. Protecting Your Knees: The Power of Control

The knee is what’s known as a “hinge joint,” just like an elbow or a door hinge. It’s designed to bend efficiently in one primary direction (forward and back). When the knee is forced to rotate or move sideways under pressure, especially during sports, the risk of injury increases significantly. The following exercises are designed to train the muscles around the knee to maintain proper alignment and control.

1.1. The Hop and Hold

The primary purpose of the Hop and Hold is to improve knee control by strengthening the muscles that support and stabilise the joint. To get the most out of this drill, focus on these critical technique points:

1. Target Knee Angle: The goal is to land with a knee angle between 30 and 45 degrees. This specific range is the training zone where the muscles around the knee are most challenged, forcing them to work to build control. Landing too high doesn’t provide the same benefit.

2. Knee and Toe Alignment: It is crucial that your knee stays directly in line with your toe upon landing. You must actively prevent the knee from collapsing inwards (a common issue known as knee valgus).

3. Control is Key: This principle of controlled landing applies whether you are hopping forward, sideways, or as part of a turn. The focus is always on a stable, aligned landing.

1.2. The Lateral (Sideways) Lunge

This is an essential exercise for anyone playing multi-directional sports like football, rugby, basketball, or tennis, where changing direction quickly is a key skill. A major focus of the lateral lunge is learning to change direction efficiently and safely. Here’s the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy movement pattern:

Pushing: Initiate the movement by forcefully pushing the foot into the ground to accelerate (healthy).

Dragging: Plant the foot and then drag the rest of the body, which is unhealthy for the knee (unhealthy).

To perform this move correctly, keep these coaching points in mind:

• Initiate with a “Push”: The movement should always start with a powerful push of the foot into the ground.

• Keep Feet Parallel: Keeping your feet parallel throughout the movement helps train the adductor (groin) muscles. More importantly, it keeps you in a ready position. If you turn your foot out, the only way you can go is in that direction, making you predictable. Parallel feet give you options.

• Maintain Knee Control: The leg you push off from is for acceleration, while the bent leg is working on braking your momentum under control. The knee of this braking leg must face the same direction as your toe and never collapse inwards.

Progressions for this exercise, such as adding a resistance band around your knees, directly target your hip muscles. This provides a perfect link to our next topic, because strong and mobile hips are crucial for providing the support your knees need.

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2. Building Your Base: Hip Strength and Mobility

Controlling the hips is one of the most critical factors in preventing lower limb injuries. When the muscles around the hip are weak, the hip can shift or drop when you plant your foot. This instability causes the knee to rotate inward, creating a powerful “shearing force on your knee.” These exercises are designed to build that essential hip control.

2.1. The Hip Series (Part 1)

This series of drills strengthens the muscles around the hip girdle, training them to prevent the hip from shifting when you run, jump, or land. Perform the following sequence of leg movements on one side before switching to the other, aiming for a controlled pause at the top of each lift.

1. Lift leg forward (aiming for parallel to the floor) and pause.

2. Lift leg to the side and pause.

3. Lift leg behind and pause.

The single most important coaching point for this series is: “Don’t swing.” It’s better to do it lower with a controlled pause than to swing the leg high without any control.

2.2. Happier Hips Sequence (Thanks to Steve Myrland for showing me this).

This sequence is designed to develop both hip and hamstring mobility, helping them become both “strong and long.”

• Stance: Begin with your feet wider than shoulder-width apart, with both feet facing forward.

• No Collapsing: Never let the knee of the supporting leg collapse inward. This is the same principle of knee alignment we discussed in the first section—it starts at the hips and is essential for protecting the joint. Keep that leg “strong and long.”

• Tension in Feet: Press your feet firmly into the ground, “almost like they’re gripping,” to maintain tension and stability.

The core exercise involves shifting your hips from side to side while reaching down towards the ground. As your mobility improves, you can progress from simply touching the ground to reaching behind your heels.

Once you’ve built this foundational hip control, you can begin to challenge your body with more complex movements that integrate both the upper and lower body.

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3. Full-Body Coordination and Strength

After establishing control at the knee and hip, the next step is to challenge your body with more varied movements. The following exercises require coordination between your upper and lower body, which is essential for athletic performance.

3.1. The Squat Matrix (thanks to Kelvin Giles for showing me this).

The Squat Matrix is a dynamic way to practice the squat in the many different foot positions that can occur during sports. Frankly, it’s a bit more interesting than just doing 40 standard squats in a row. The sequence involves performing squats in eight different stances:

1. Normal Squat

2. Feet Together

3. Feet Wider than Hips

4. Feet Super Wide

5. Staggered Squat (Right Foot Forward)

6. Staggered Squat (Left Foot Forward)

7. Cross-Legged (Right over Left)

8. Cross-Legged (Left over Right)

To make the matrix more challenging, you can add “funky arms”—making different symmetrical or asymmetrical shapes with your arms to purposely get yourself off balance and challenge your stability. For an even greater challenge, try performing the sequence with your eyes shut.

3.2. Walking Medicine Ball Series (thanks to Vern Gambetta for showing me this).

This series trains an athlete’s ability to separate the movements of their upper and lower body. This skill is critical in sports like rugby, netball, or soccer, where you might need to pass a ball or push off a defender while your lower body is moving. The series uses three main rotational patterns with a medicine ball:

• Loop: A circular motion with the ball, like a loop.

• Side-to-Side: A tight rotation with the ball close to the body or a long rotation at full arm’s length.

• Figure of Eight: A “kayaking” action that moves the ball above the head and then below the knees.

It is very important that an athlete can lunge forwards and backwards safely and with good control before adding the complexity of the medicine ball movements.

These exercises build general athletic capacity. Now, let’s address a specific problem created by our modern lifestyles.

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4. Counteracting Modern Life: The Three Uncommon Postures (thanks to Dr Ed Thomas for showing me this).

Most of our daily lives are spent in just a few positions: upright, flexed (like sitting on a sofa or at a desk), or lying down. This is also true for sports like cycling or rowing, where you are flexed a lot. Our bodies become accustomed to these limited postures. By intentionally training “uncommon postures,” we can counteract these effects and help keep our spines healthy and mobile.

Extension:

Bending backwards, the opposite of a flexed or slouched position.

Brachiation:

Hanging from the arms or feet (using boots).

Inversion:

Being upside down.

Here are simple, beginner-friendly ways to incorporate these postures into your routine.

4.1. Extension Exercises

• Watching TV while lying on your stomach.

• The Scorpion exercise (lying on your stomach and rotating one leg over your body to combine back extension and rotation).

4.2. Brachiation (Hanging) Exercises

• Simply hanging from a pull-up bar with straight arms.

• Hanging with your feet on the floor as an anchor and rotating your body left and right.

4.3. Inversion (Upside Down) Exercises

• Placing your feet on a Swiss ball and walking your hands back and forth.

• Doing a handstand against a solid wall for support.

By building a strong foundation and exploring a wide range of movements, you prepare your body for anything life throws its way.

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Conclusion: Your Journey to a Healthier, Happier Lifestyle

The core message of athletic development is that building a broad foundation of movement skills, strength, and control gives you options. This foundation allows you to sample different activities and prepares your body for the long run.

Whether you choose to become a dedicated sports person or simply want the tools for a healthy and happy lifestyle, mastering these fundamentals is the surest path to getting there. Keep practising, stay consistent, and enjoy the journey.

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I used Notebook LM to curate my content and produce the infographic and video. Thanks to for his wonderful newsletter that showed me the way. This was a good use of AI: saving me the time and effort of the donkey work. All the information was mine, so I knew it was accurate and trustworthy.

Robin was funny, challenging, inquisitive, and inspirational, sometimes all in the same session. There was never a dull moment in our sessions together, and we often laughed at the ridiculousness of ‘elite’ sport and posturing from those in charge.

While many people knew Robin because of his footballing (he played 106 times for Great Britain and scored 30 goals), I appreciated his intelligence. He obtained a PhD in Statistics and wrote a guest post for me about interpreting data.

I’m re-publishing it here as a tribute to his memory. Robin once told me that his disability didn’t prevent him from doing anything, ‘it just makes everything a little bit more difficult.’

Robin died tragically too young. The world is a lesser place without him.

Juking the Stats: Why not all “research” is valid

The latest craze in competitive sport appears to be the use of data to aid understanding of, and improvement in, sporting performance. This has resulted in a glut of material, each item claiming to have established some new result which may have useful implications in the development and performance of human athletes.

There are often studies conducted with non-athletes as well, and the line between what could be considered medical research as opposed to what is known as sports science is not clearly defined.

I should stress that my knowledge of the field of sports science is limited, the purpose of this article is to question the structure and findings of some typical articles.

A typical paper in this field might take the following form:

1) Design a study with a hypothesis of interest
2) Collect data from subjects (fitness testing)
3) Analyse the data to check for consistency with the hypothesis
4) Draw conclusions.

A good statistician should be able to perform multiple roles.

In my opinion, some of the most important are:

1. To decide on the real questions at the heart of a problem of interest, not to just churn out results for the sake of it.

2. To decide if a hypothesis is necessary, and if so to construct one which is of real actual interest. Sometimes it is best to approach a problem with an open mind, in the knowledge that there are likely to be interesting results, but unsure of what they will be.

3. To employ appropriate methods (typically statistical models) to analyse the collected data (we don’t need to get too technical here).

4. To explain the underlying reasons behind any results, studies in which results are simply quoted as gospel are of limited interest to me.

5. To critically review the work, pointing out potential shortcomings and areas for future research.

The final point is perhaps the most interesting. It is often the role of a statistician to dampen (or, in some case,s pour cold water) on enthusiasm about some exciting results.

Sports Science Statistics must be taken in context.

Conclusions drawn from a study of, say, a weightlifter’s improved performance due to a certain type of training programme should not be used as an automatic basis for a different strength-based sport, such as rowing.

I work in the field of weather forecasting. A modern-day weather forecast involves running a computer model forward in time to produce a single forecast of the atmosphere. Statistics of this forecast (such as the average forecast error) can be calculated at different locations. It is well-known that such statistics vary by location – it is more difficult to predict the weather in Shetland than in the Sahara Desert. We could not, therefore, use statistics derived from one location to predict the average forecast error in another.

In short, statistics is about describing what might have happened in a given context, but didn’t. We can use these findings to issue probabilities of what might happen in the future, on the basis that the context is consistent.

Forget the weather: what about sports science?

The few articles I have read in the sports science field (in all honest,y I couldn’t face reading too many!) seem to fall short on many of the above points.

For example, Owen et al. (J Strength Cond Res, 2011) conducted a study of heart rate responses of soccer players when playing in three-sided and nine-sided games. They conclude that the HR of players in three-sided games is consistently higher than for nine-sided games. They also note that three-sided games provide more shooting chances, and encourage players to run more with the ball, whilst the nine-sided games produced more tackles, passes and interceptions.

They draw the conclusions that three-sided games are preferable for fitness training, and suggest that strikers should participate in three-sided games, whilst defenders should concentrate on nine-sided games.

I have two main problems with this work from both a scientific and a practical viewpoint.

1. The statistics quoted in themselves should be treated with caution, given the small sample size of fifteen players who participated in only a few games of each type. Without conducting a formal test, I cannot be more precise, but these measurements are undoubtedly subject to substantial variation.

2. What insight does the study really offer us? Aren’t the findings, on which the entire article is based, merely confirmation of the obvious? It is useful here to consider the so-called `pyramid of outcomes’.

This study gives only surrogate measures (the base of the pyramid), but assumes in the conclusion that such surrogates automatically extend into true performance measures (essentially, whether they can be used to increase the probability of winning football matches).

This assumption seems completely without foundation when one considers the practical implications of the study. For example, suppose that on the basis of the study, strikers train in three-sided games whilst defenders train in nine-sided games, in order to provide more shooting opportunities for strikers and more defending opportunities for defenders. Is there really any point in this? Wouldn’t three-sided games just result in strikers shooting from anywhere, and playing (by definition) against less able defensive opposition? Surely the way to improve as a striker is to learn how to play against good defenders?

Frankly, this work smacks of conducting a study for the sake of it, and drawing conclusions based on a few surrogate measurements without paying any attention to the sport of interest.

How to conduct a more informative study.

1) Collect a larger sample of players from a variety of clubs, preferably from different countries.
2) Train different groups of players in different environments, as suggested by the study.
3) Collect surrogate measurements from the different training sessions.
4) Examine if the surrogates had an effect on actual game results (i.e. construct a proper statistical model rather than merely reporting surrogate values).
5) Examine whether a return to previous training routines results in a reversion to previous performance.

A statistical model is essentially the use of surrogate measurements to aid in predicting the value of, and assessing the uncertainty in, measurements at the top of the pyramid. The article mentioned here simply assumes that larger surrogate values immediately imply improved results, an assertion which is without foundation.

Such a study would admittedly be hard to carry out both practically and from a theoretical statistical viewpoint. However, we are dealing with complicated situations - we are essentially trying to model outcomes from the human body, an immensely complicated organism.

This is my overriding point: studies which simply churn out results for the sake of publishing papers are of little practical use. I would go further and suggest that they are actually dangerous in the wrong hands – a statistical model is no good in the hands of an incapable operator.

Conclusion

From my brief consultation of the literature, I have seen many examples of a mis-use of statistics which would not be permitted in a statistics journal.

The typical methods used are likely to underestimate the complexity of the situation at hand. I suspect, therefore, that the true value of statistics such as the p-value is somewhat larger than reported.

I feel confident in ascerting that the conclusions of the articles I have read are based on extremely shaky ground in a theoretical sense, let alone their practical shortcomings.

Robin Williams Phd, England Blind Footballer, (1987-2025).

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More importantly, I used my experiences as an athlete and coach to make it athlete-friendly. I also leaned heavily on advice given to me by other coaches, many of whom I met at GAIN.

Here are the why, how and what I did. Some of it may be transferable to your situation.

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1. The trial was also a taster. We started from scratch: there was no cultural background for girls (or boys) to participate in weightlifting in schools. It’s not on TV, and most people have never seen the sport. I had to ‘sell’ the sport to teachers, parents and, most importantly, the girls. Unlike NGBs, I’m not in a position of power where I can get away with commands and demands (nor do I want to), and parents trip over themselves to comply. I wanted to give the girls a decent experience and make them feel they wanted to come back if invited.

2. Role models are important. I was lucky in that an athlete I coached for many years, Jenny Rackham, now teaches at a local school. She promoted the trial with her tutor group and other year 7 and 8 girls. I also asked two of our most experienced members to help at the trial: they are in years 9 and 10.

   Newbies should see people who look like them doing the exercises, rather than an old codger like me.

3. Teach before the test. I know that children are not taught proper movement techniques in schools. I wanted to give the girls something they could take away, even if they never came back to our club. We spent fifteen minutes warming up and then teaching a specific sequence with wooden sticks:

   

   All of this was new to the girls.

4. “Training is testing and testing is training,” Vern Gambetta. This was in my mind when I planned the session. The exercises we chose as ‘tests’ were ones that the girls could do when they left the club: Broad jump (leg power), hanging for time (grip strength and posture), and side-lying leg lifts (structural integrity, taken from Thomas Cureton). All were simple to measure, required minimal skill, and could be done at home (or in the local park: we’ve got loads of bars in the parks in Willand).

5. Give them some autonomy. We know that athletes will come back to sessions if three things are present: learning, connecting with others, and some sense of choice or autonomy. Although the session was planned by me, I still gave the girls some choices: how many times they wanted to try and hang; what weight dumbbell to use, and whether to do a third set of the circuit at the end.

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   ---

   Some feedback from the girls and/or their parents:

• “Thank you so much for giving R the opportunity today; she really enjoyed herself and came home very happy.”

• “F had a good time and enjoyed the session.”

• “S enjoyed Saturday and would like to do the course.”

• “I was so sore, I had to use my mum’s stairlift!” S, with a smile on her face, last night at training.

• “A really enjoyed last Saturday.”

Sixty per cent of the girls who came to the trial have signed up to train with the academy. The other 40% enjoyed the trial, but have other commitments at the training times (I did put all the information on the trial leaflets that parents were sent!)

This was the first trial I have ever run for our club, rather than for an NGB, private school, or professional team. I’m happy with the result: the collaborative effort and smiles on the girls’ faces were worth it.

The successful girls will now train every Tuesday and Thursday for up to 12 weeks, for free. I aim to encourage and support them so they get into good habits. Any weightlifting ‘performance’ will be a bonus.

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This is my last post of 2025, so I wish all my subscribers a Happy Yuletide and a Healthy New Year.

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I’m very pleased to announce that Excelsior Athletic Development Club has been awarded funding to run a weightlifting academy for year 7 and year 8 girls in Mid-Devon. Devon County Council liked my application bid because it ‘broke stereotypes’ and ‘focused on the community.’

Me, two of our club lifters, and our mascot: Stanley Bear.

The funding will allow the girls to train twice a week for 12 weeks, free of charge. I am working with the two local secondary schools to promote this. We shall start with a trial/taster session on Saturday, 13th December, in Willand.

I asked for the funding because I wanted to give girls from all backgrounds the chance to learn a new sport for free. Cost is a major barrier to participation in all sports: transport, fees, equipment and membership.

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We are giving the girls the chance to train, and if they feel like competing, we will pay for their British Weightlifting membership fee and entry to their first competition.

If they don’t feel like competing, they will all have benefited from 24 supervised exercise sessions: enough to make physical and behavioural changes.

I grew up in a low-income, single-parent household and never had the chance to do anything outside of school. I was lucky in that we had excellent p.e. programmes in my schools with plenty of opportunities to participate in several sports.

Unfortunately, this is not the case nowadays: children are sometimes labelled as either “sporty” or “non-sporty” by teachers when they start secondary school. The non-sporty children are consigned to the dustbin, while the ‘sporty’ children are selected for many events.

I aim to rectify this, in part, by teaching whoever comes to the trials. I am not selecting on ability. If the girls are keen to learn and try their best, I am happy to help them.

We have to overcome many misconceptions, with even p.e. teachers not knowing what ‘weightlifting’ is (it was dropped from the GCSE p.e. syllabus several years ago but may be reinstated after the current review, so they’d best learn!). Plus, negative comments about strength training for girls still exist (sigh!) amongst all levels of society.

It’s an uphill battle, but thankfully Devon County Council and a few committed teachers are helping me.

I made this flyer to help promote the cause locally. Please read and share if you are in our area.

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• Individual Coaching for Sports People

• Small Group coaching in weightlifting and athletics

• Sports Injury Rehabilitation

• Coach/Teacher education.

I am fortunate to be working in all areas at the moment, with some great people of all ages and from different countries.

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While most young coaches focus on the techniques or theories, I strongly believe that connections with people are more important. So many young people were abandoned by policymakers during COVID that they are still struggling to interact with others or engage in new situations.

When so much in the world seems out of our control, I always try to focus on what I can do, rather than what I can’t do. Here are three things that seem to help my day go well:

If I think of times when I have been the best version of myself, it is when I have been able to use these qualities in great environments: London Welsh RFC, British Fencing Camps with the late James Williams, Adult Gymnastics at Orchard Gym, Weightlifting at Crystal Palace (more recently Oxford Power Sports), the GAIN conferences.

According to James Clear, these three qualities “have nothing to do with talent or intelligence (luckily for me) but can make a dramatic impact on your results.”

• Cheerful. You are pleasant to work with and generally raise the level of energy in the room.

• Accountable. You feel personally responsible for what you want to accomplish. It is not someone else’s job. It’s your job.

• Adaptable. You can find alternate paths to success. You don’t need things to be a certain way to be happy.”

Of course, this is difficult to do in some environments. I have been in some environments which were inherently bad and most people (including the children) were miserable, such as…(clue: very expensive).

In other environments, with many good people, it has only taken one or two empire-building, toxic individuals to ruin a good thing.

At the time, these situations were extremely distressing for me and sometimes affected my health. No matter how prestigious the job title or flashy the tracksuit, it simply wasn’t worth it.

Now, I focus on either spending time with great people (who happen to be very good at what they do) or trying to create a similar environment where local people can be the best versions of themselves.

What key attribute do you think is most important in life?

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Three people were on their phones within seconds. With the physio looking after the boy, and emergency services being called, my recently refreshed first-aid certificate was redundant. However, there are several key lessons to be learnt from what happened next that may prove useful if you should ever be so unfortunate as to witness trauma like that.

1. Look after the other players: Two teams of 15-year-old boys witnessed the horrific accident and could hear the boy’s pain. Adults need to get the players away from the scene and back to their dugouts/changing rooms: this can be delegated to parents. Next time, I would ask the linemen to help. Everyone was visibly shaken up, and many people reported being unable to sleep that night (myself included). The NHS has a guide for help and support after a traumatic event.

2. Emergency Vehicle Access: Don’t be the person who parks their car in the ambulance bay or blocks the access to the pitch. One parent went to the club entrance to direct the ambulance in. I stood by the pitch entrance and guided the ambulance there. A car owner had to move their car first. More delay occurred because my daughter didn’t know the postcode of the club we were at. Note: have two people allocated to contact the ambulance, one to call and one to search/ask others for information.

3. Know what’s in your first aid kit and how to use it: The only thing the physio used was the emergency blanket to keep the boy warm. This was also to cover up the leg (which was bent below the knee) so the boy and his parents couldn’t see it. It might seem like a paperwork chore to ensure your first aid kit is replenished, but you don’t want to be the coach scrambling around your bag looking for scissors or a face mask.

Are you prepared for the worst? The accident should never have happened in the first place: it was a blatant foul. Referees need to stamp out all bad tackles so more players don’t get injured. Luckily, the accident happened in Plymouth, where there is an excellent trauma hospital. Some matches are played on a field in the depths of rural Devon. (Update to this post: a 33-year-old player suffered a similar injury, but with an open fracture, 6 days later in North Molton! The air ambulance was called out).

The weather was dry, and the physio happened to be watching and could take charge. The boy was operated on the next day and was home the day after that. He will miss the next few months of the season, but hopefully, he will make a full recovery.

Everyone in the club rallied around and was supportive of each other, but I still know what I would do differently next time. What is your plan for major trauma? Have you other lessons you can share in the comments below?

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On a more optimistic note, you may have noticed the Excelsior website has been updated. It better reflects the work I am currently doing and what I am available to do with other organisations and players. For example:

“I’ve had the privilege of working with James Marshall, and I can confidently say he is an exceptional resource. James is incredibly knowledgeable, clear in his communication, and refreshingly direct—qualities that make him invaluable when navigating complex challenges.

What sets James apart is his willingness to think through problems collaboratively. He doesn’t just provide surface-level answers; he takes the time to understand the nuances of a situation and works toward thoughtful, practical solutions. Whether you’re facing strategic decisions or operational hurdles, James brings both expertise and a problem-solving mindset to the table.

I highly recommend James Marshall to anyone seeking guidance, support, or a trusted partner in their work.”

Chris Plumb
CEO/Head Coach, Carmel Swim Club

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If you are a football manager who wants your key players back as soon as possible (and for them not to get re-injured), then here are three simple things you should know.

1. Prevention is better than cure: None of the three players I am helping did any injury prevention work. They simply played football. Simple strength exercises can be included in your warm-ups or as active recovery between technical/tactical drills. Also, someone has to manage the amount of playing/training time young players have: no matter how fit someone is, if they are doing the load of a first-team player and an academy player, they will get injured. It will not be down to bad luck, but down to bad planning.

2. Start the rehab immediately: Don’t wait for the surgery. As long as the player is pain-free, then the rehab should start before surgery. There are three main reasons for this.

• The outcomes from surgery are related to how strong the player is going into surgery. Strengthening the quadriceps and hips is essential.

• The non-injured leg needs to work too! If you stop training until after surgery, both legs will get weaker. This is one reason why many players injury their ‘good’ leg after ACL surgery on the other.

• Morale: it keeps the player focused and gives them an idea of what to expect post-surgery.

3. Post-surgery training must be progressive and challenging: if you give an injured player a photocopied sheet of exercises and tell them to come back in a month, don’t be surprised if they haven’t progressed! Footballers are athletes: they need to be given appropriate challenges, encouraged and supported through their rehabilitation. The end goal is to get them back playing fast and furious rather than simply walking.

Remembering these three tips will help your players feel part of the team and, hopefully, return to play in better condition than before they got injured. I never rush the process; instead, I make sure we are making the most of the time we have.

Can you afford not to make some simple changes to keep your players healthy?

Here’s what a healthy footballer looks like in training:

Contact me if you want further advice: excelsiorathletic@gmail.com

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It turns out the solution to both problems is similar but at different intensities. I have previously discussed resistance training for health; this article focuses on performance.

(N.B. This isn’t a Jeff Bezos-like post about being in denial about ageing, so skip it if you want to freeze yourself cryogenically or harvest cells from infants.)

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Old or inactive?

It’s hard to separate what is ‘natural’ ageing and what is a lack of activity. Still, if you go to a family barbecue one weekend and then go to a Masters weightlifting competition the next, you might become an immediate advocate for exercise (unless your family are all masters lifters).

Both groups of people might be grunting and wheezing, but the former do it when they get up from a low chair and stagger across the lawn to pick up their burger, while the latter do it when lifting more than their body weight above their head.

At some point, we move from occasionally falling over to ‘having a fall.’ I dislike the latter phrase immensely: it’s changing the act of falling to a passive, receptive state. The two main reasons for falling are:

• Weakness

• Poor balance

The causes for weakness and poor balance are many (including the number of medications you are on: 5 types of medications increases your risk significantly (1)), but inactivity is a factor. Prolonged sitting at work and at leisure, avoiding manual tasks at home, such as gardening, housework and walking the dog, and stopping participation in ‘team’ sports all lead to a decline in fitness.

Unfortunately, the spiral of decline can be triggered by a disease and/or accident. A forced rest means that fitness is lost. Once easy-to-manage tasks become difficult, and so they may be avoided. This results in less movement, less fitness, and so on.

Once recovered, the important thing is to resume training as soon as possible.

Tip 1: If falling is prevalent in the aged, then working on strength and balance to reduce the risk seems like a good idea.

What is causing the performance decline?

But if you are committed to remaining active and have avoided serious illness or injury, why is your performance declining? What is it about ageing that is slowing you down?

A review of anaerobic performance in Masters Athletes found that there was a linear decline in performance from 35-70 years old, followed by a steeper decline from then on (2).

Women experience a steeper decline than men after the age of 40 due to ‘hormonal changes’. While this two-word phrase is succinct in a research article, the menopause is massively impactful for many women. Unfortunately, it is under-researched in female athletes at present. More is needed.

One of the major reasons for the decline in both sexes was the loss of muscle mass. A decline in muscle mass is ‘normal’ in untrained individuals. Although your weight may stay the same between 24 and 50, your body composition is likely to change: for the worse!

Once you get past 50, things (and body parts) go downhill rapidly.

If you are competing in any sport (not just weightlifting), the loss of muscle mass will impact your performance. The type II muscle fibres appear to atrophy the most, which results in a decrease in the speed of muscle contraction, slower enzyme activity and an increase in lactate production.

If you are playing a sport without additional training, then you will struggle to keep up with the younger ones running rings around you (I found this out the hard way and gave up MMA at the age of 41: it wasn’t much fun getting my head pummelled into the ground by a 19-year-old who was 20 kg heavier than me).

The good news: training works!

Hooray!

A review of Masters Athletes found that:

“Despite advancing age…chronic exercise training preserves physical function, muscular strength and body fat levels similar to that of young, healthy individuals in an exercise mode-specific manner.” (3).

The declines in these performance markers: strength, explosive jump performance, rate of force development, stride length, and 10-meter and 60-meter sprints, can be slowed with the correct training.

The best way to do this? Strength training, working towards heavier loads, was key to maintaining muscle mass. This included machine weights and free-weight exercises such as squats, pulls, deadlifts, and presses.

Short sprints (not jogs) and jumping training helped maintain power and the rate of force development. Jumps can include: broad jumps, hops, bounding and combinations of movements.

Weightlifting exercises, and their derivatives, require both speed and strength and improve the rate of force development. This includes: snatch, cleans and jerks. These require technical proficiency and a level of mobility not required for machine weights. If you wish to start these, find a good coach.

Two of the major risk factors for injuries in master weightlifting athletes were:

1. writing their own program (especially men).

2. Either prior or current experience with CrossFit. (4).

Tip 2: Combining high-intensity sprints with strength and power training helps you maintain muscle mass and significantly slows the age-related decline in performance.

Remember, we are not in denial about ageing, but we want to do our best to stay healthy for as long as possible. Much of what is seen as ‘age’ is simply a lack of use.

Activities such as weightlifting and short sprints can help increase your health span.

Sample programme for a Masters’ Weightlifter (in their 50s).

I work on a 5-week strength build-up followed by a 3-week conversion and then a 2-week taper/sharpening block before each competition. As I did 6 competitions last year and have done 3 already this year, it doesn’t leave much spare time!

If I do get time, then I do an easy unload week and then a ‘ramp-up’ week before I start the next block. I use these times to work on circuits, agility, some speed and hypertrophy. Basically, everything without a barbell.

I only do 3 weightlifting sessions a week. I’ve tried four, but I can’t manage it: I’m tired after the first two sessions. I don’t know many lifters in their 50s who are training four times a week. This also fits into my life, rather than my life fitting around weightlifting (despite what my wife says…).

Strength Block.

Session 1: Warm -Up (Movement, plus structural integrity exercise). Then barbell exercises.

• Snatch: Mid-thigh x3, Hang x3, Floor x3 x5. (All exercises are reps/sets).

• Clean Pulls: 5x3

• Jerk from Rack: 3x5

• Front squats: 5x5 (weeks 1-3) 3x5 (weeks 4-5).

Session 2: Warm -Up (Movement, plus structural integrity exercise).

• (1 power snatch +3 snatch balance + 5 sotts press), 3 sets, increasing the weight.

• Snatch: mid-thigh x3x4.

• Power cleans: 3x5

• Push Press: 5x5.

• Back squats: 5x5 (weeks 1-3) 3x5 (weeks 4-5).

  120kg back squats (1.5x bodyweight).

Session 3 (lighter): Warm-up (movement, plus structural integrity exercise).

• Snatch: Mid-thigh x3, Hang x3, Blocks x3x2, 2x3.

• Snatch Pulls: 5x5.

• Push Press: 5x4.

I’m tired and ready to move on to the conversion phase at the end of this block! The next five weeks look like…

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References

1. Being Mortal: Atul Gawande (a good book about ageing and caring for the elderly).

2. Anaerobic Performance in Masters Athletes. Eur Rev Aging Phys Act (2009) 6:39–53.

3. Muscle Performance and Morphology in Masters Athletes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses. Ageing Research Reviews 45 (2018) 62–82.

4. Health challenges and acute sports injuries restrict weightlifting training of

   older athletes. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 2022;8 p1-8.

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The lessons and ideas shared below apply to most sports.

The course was held at the Carmel Swim Club, located on the grounds of Carmel High School. The club has an impressive track (pool?) record of winning championships and developing Olympians. The head coach, Chris Plumb, was part of the U.S.A. team of coaches at the Paris Olympics.

They have two fifty-metre pools in the school. That’s not a typo! The facilities are unbelievable. This is a school of 5,000 pupils and is a public school (state school for us British people).

I was walking around with my mouth open, like a country yokel (which, in some respects, I am).

However, I was there to help coaches, not gawp at the facilities. Here are some of the things I talked about.

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Why Physical Education is the bedrock of Athletic Development

I was asked to explain the importance of good physical education and how that links to athletic development. I gave an overview of what p.e. should look like (but rarely does).

I kept referring back to this over the weekend. Joy was a constant theme. The swim coaches were hesitant to start, but soon couldn’t stop talking and laughing in the sessions.

I aimed to show them that children need to be children and that ‘fun’ is not synonymous with ‘mucking around.’

In a culture where words like ‘grind’ and ‘burn’ are prevalent, joy seems to have been forgotten. I reintroduced it. By the end of the weekend, the coaches were tired and stiff but were still smiling.

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Locomotion and variation

I taught outside on the grass in the shade of some trees on Saturday morning. The cicadas were providing background music for our workshop. I was working with Andy Stone, whom I have known since my first attendance at GAIN in 2011.

Andy is a creative genius at developing bodyweight exercises and variations along a theme (you may remember his p.e. videos from the COVID lockdowns). We split the session into four modules: locomotion for 10 minutes (me), exercise variations for 10 minutes (Andy), and a discussion and chat while sat down for 5 minutes. This gave the coaches time to rest, reflect and absorb.

Then we moved to the next module. It was a Socratic method of teaching. The 90 minutes flew by. It was one of the best sessions I’ve delivered, thanks to the environment and the coaches involved. The coaches were hesitant and stiff at the beginning, but they loosened up, became braver and were eager to experiment by the end.

You can see the type of thing I was teaching here:

In the afternoon, Andy and I taught a session in the wrestling room (Andy’s home turf). I taught some basic rocking and rolling, and then Andy taught transitions from standing to the floor and back.

Once again, the coaches threw themselves into the session (sometimes literally) and laughed a lot.

The Coach’s Eye

My second presentation was designed to dig into coaching methodology: not about techniques, but about basic coaching practices. Chris Webb had said that swim coaches are often hesitant to coach ‘dryland’ training because they don’t want to get it wrong.

I didn’t know if coaches, when conducting their dryland sessions:

• Can’t see errors.

• Can see errors, but don’t know how to correct them.

• Can see errors, know how to correct them, but can’t be arsed to do anything.

I gave an overview of some basic principles and then delved into helping them understand what to look for and how. Understanding the principles is essential when coaching; otherwise you are just copying a blueprint someone else has created. This means you are unable to adapt when things don’t work.

I used the knee valgus in squatting as an example. If nothing else, we wanted the coaches to leave the clinic understanding how to coach the basic squat, add variations and help their swimmers improve.

I showed slides of some athletes with squat errors and some with excellent squats. This seemed to go down well as the coaches got to know what to look for. I explained a basic premise of coaching:

If something is going well, coaches don’t have to intervene: they can simply say, ‘Well done.’

We finished this with a Q&A, which I could step back from as the coaches were contributing a lot. If they are contributing, I know they are listening and learning.

Swimming shapes and minibands

On Sunday morning, I trained in the High School gym alongside Chris Plumb. I spent the next hour chatting with Chris as he asked me what I thought of the dryland programme.

I asked him questions about why he did certain exercises, and he explained the shapes he wanted his swimmers to get into and why. I thought, then came up with some ideas that I might use. I didn’t know Chris that well before this clinic, but I knew he wanted to improve (despite his hugely successful record) because he’d sent me an article about 400m running and wanted my opinion on it.

This to-and-froing with a coach is something I love doing. I’ve had the privilege of working with great coaches in different sports (Martin Jones and Nigel Redman in rugby, James Williams (R.I.P.) at British Fencing, John Jacobs at England Golf, and Denise Austin at England Volleyball).

The one thing they all have in common: they want to get better, and they ask questions. None of them is interested in weight-room numbers; they just want to improve the performance of their athletes.

Chris asked me about mini-bands (swim coaches LOVE the mini-band), and I said I didn’t use them that much. He then asked if I’d use them if I worked at Carmel!

“I don’t know,” was my answer.

But, if I did use them, I would make sure everyone understood why they were using them and how to use them, and then coach the heck out of it. I spent 15 minutes later in the morning going over some basic principles with the coaches, linking it back to the overhead squat.

This was ‘off the cuff’, but I felt under pressure to back up my coaching theory with a practical solution for Chris!

Summary

This is a brief overview of what I did in Carmel. I haven’t listed all the sidebar conversations and suggestions. Thanks to Chris Webb and Chris Plumb for inviting me to present.

It’s a pleasure to be part of GAINswim: there are so many swim teams in the USA taking part and being successful. It’s a shame that more people in the UK and Europe don’t do the same: it would save me from travelling so far.

The principles I shared apply to most other sports as well, but for them to succeed, the coaches must also want to improve.

It would be remiss of me not to post a breakfast pancake picture (always my favourite thing when visiting the USA).

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