Three things to share before tomorrow
On Taleb, on the trilogy, on tomorrow’s deadline
In February, one of the girls at our club went to the England age-group weightlifting championships and came home with three personal bests — snatch, clean & jerk, and total. She missed another two personal best attempts. The first lift in each was a weight she’d done in training. The second and third were lifts she had never attempted in her life.
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.
• Run Faster:
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