HOLISTIC TRAINING APPROACH

Each year I'll read somewhere between 5 - 10 training/coaching articles/blogs that resonate far more with me than the 1000 other one's I read throughout the year.

Besides my good self and a few other private sector coaches, there's not a lot of Aussie Rules specific information being made available to the public so these major A-Ha moments for me come from reading about coaches in other sports.

When this happens it's because of the quality of the content is so high that as you're reading it, idea's start to flood your brain well before you even finish it.

Above all it's is the information that I needed, or could fully utilise RIGHT NOW, like all my reading up until now was all leading to this.

If I had read this same article I would not have had the tools/background reading/knowledge to have this flood of thoughts I had the other day.

The article is from a website I've frequented for years now called HMMR Media which doesn't sound like a training website at all but it is run by a World Class Throws Coach Martin Bingisser.

The article was titled Holistic Training Approach and it's actually Martin talking about another throws coach and a video of one his athletes from years ago.

Here are my notes from it and later in the week I'll post something specific to footy that I've built off this information.

- If you go back to all my Game Changer notes from late last year and early this year, you'll often come across how all coaching, teaching and training needs to address the 4 co-actives being physical, technical, tactical and psychological

 - In the video of the specific shot put exercise, technique is being trained by destabilising the athletes technique forcing him to build up the most important attractors of his sport specific action (shot put) by altering the training environment - having him stand on a balance beam

- This requires the athlete to self organise and find the correct movement solution, balance and rhythm to execute the throw without losing his balance

- Physically the destabilisation of the training environment requires even more specific strength to be recruited to maintain balance on the beam, strength that would otherwise go untapped on flat ground and repetition without repetition has been achieved

- Mentally the new challenge introduced to the exercise (balance) means that the athlete must fully visualise and concentrate on every aspect of the movement to execute it successfully where he'll need to recruit more focus than normal

- This mental focus can than be overloaded for further improvements by adding a target on the wall for him to throw to

- Emotionally the purpose is more about developing competition skills and seeing how you respond to pressure so design exercise games that you can only win or lose with zero grey area

- The coach and athlete can gamble on the results as in how many times can he throw the ball to the wall on the full without losing balance and progressing to how many times can he hit the target

- The athlete is allowed to make some errors and you'll never resolve all their problems but with this type of skill acquisition training, you'll have far less problems

What have you picked up from this blog and how do you think you can work it into footy training?