Another month, another handful of random thoughts that are going through my head. Enjoy!

1. As a coach, you need to constantly seek out ways to connect with your athletes.
2. “The first rep of the session should look exactly the same as the last rep of the session.” Lorne Goldenberg —— Quality over quantity.
3. The information has been out there for years – the job of the core is to prevent motion, not create motion – yet the coaches that train the core with that in mind still seem to be in the minority.
4. Always be open minded and look to see what you can do better with your teams and your training program. As a coach you’ll benefit from having a little humility.
5. As coaches we get tunnel vision trying to make athletes more explosive and powerful, which is great. But don’t forget about the other end of the spectrum, being able to throw on the brakes. Its hard to argue that athletes that can absorb force will be less injury prone.
6. Though I do understand and generally agree the ‘your sport isn’t different, you just think it is’ quote, I don’t completely agree. All sports need to push and pull things. All sports need to perform knee dominant and hip dominant movements. All sports should carry things and perform stability based core work. But on the other hand, I think you need to understand the sport you are working with. What are the injury concerns associated with that sport? For example, I work with volleyball and hockey – two vastly different sports when it comes to injury concerns. Be proactive in fixing those issues before they arise by programming movements within those previously mentioned patterns that agree with the population that you are working with.
7. All successful strength coaches have a plan. All successful strength coaches aren’t afraid to abandon that plan based on what their eyes and intuition is telling them on a specific day.
8. I absolutely love the hockey strength and conditioning field – its getting more and more advanced on a daily basis and doesn’t look like its going to slow down anytime soon. A lot of cutting edge coaches working in hockey.
9. We use the Functional Movement Screen to assess athletes movement capabilities, which seems to strike a nerve with a lot of people. The screen itself doesn’t change injury rates – it never claimed to. But what you learn from the screen should change the way you train certain athletes or movement patterns – which can potentially change injury rates. The screen doesn’t tell us what to do, it tells us what not to do.
10. For some reason I’ve had the opportunity to see more summer conditioning programs this year then in previous years…and its scary.