Music time, it’s Monday!

I often try to squeeze in some Nina Simone on the stereo in the gym. Some of these Emo kids need their horizons broadened.
I just spent the weekend at my Strength and Conditioning coach’s seminar, and I was shocked and appalled to discover that there are about twenty 19 year olds in that gym who are stronger than me.

Other than that horror, I had a great weekend listening to Will talk, and talk, and talk. In fact he only stopped talking once, to bite his sandwich, and even after that he spoke with his mouth full. I’ll have to take some time to digest all the info he was giving out but I got an awful lot out of it on Saturday including how Will designs my programmes. After finding that out I felt a little cheated.

I try to go and watch as many coaches as I can do their thing. Last year I spent some time with an athletics coach to see how he did his thing, my sojourns into GAA coaching are well known at this stage and I have trained with a lot of martial arts coaches as you might expect. I have no problem giving people the respect that they deserve and how they’ve influenced the way I coach and teach. Everyone is just a product of their experiences, both positive and negative so why not embrace that instead of pretending you came up with it all by yourself. Here’s a short list of the people who’ve influenced my coaching methods in the last ten years. Have a look and see what you think. I’ve taken some things from each of them and I’ve seen some things in each of their classes that I knew I definitely didn’t want to do either, but I’ll accentuate the positives for this post. I’ll go chronologically:

James F- (Have to mention him cos he’s my mate) enthusiasm infects classes, so be enthusiastic.
John D- Authority effects those who can’t do enthusiasm.
JohnK – Method is as important as material
Andy – You can make people do almost anything as long as it’s fun
Martin- helped form my opinions on how to strength train kids
Will- if you’re not assessing you’re guessing.
Sarah- Let them play the game!
Bill- People come and go, relax.

There are lots of others I’ve worked with/known of that I would list and beside them I could put all the things I shouldn’t do. Indeed some of the people on that list would have a lot of negatives beside their names as well and those have been as helpful as the positives.