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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

More Thoughts on Training the Olympic Weightlifter

As I was thinking about my previous blog post, some more ideas came to me about the development of a weightlifter or any athlete for that matter.
I find it awful curious that when weightlifting coaches talk about there weightlifting programs they never mention the word "DEVELOPMENT."  This applies to all other sports coaches as well.  We only talk about percentages we use, what defense we run, whether we won or lost.  Never any talk of how to develop the athlete.
To me, developing the athlete is of utmost importance.  I can take an "athlete" and teach him the skills of any game.  I think most anyone would agree with that.  The question is, what is an athlete?  I really like Margaret Whitehead's definition of what she calls "Physical Literacy."  In her paper to the Pre-Olympic Congress in Thessaloniki, Greece, 2004, she writes:

"An individual who is physically literate moves with poise, economy and confidence in a wide variety of physically challenging situations. Furthermore the individual is perceptive in reading all aspects of the physical environment, anticipating movement needs or possibilities and responding appropriately to these, with intelligence and imagination.
In working on this provisional definition I looked in more detail both at embodied capacities and at environmental issues.
With respect to embodied capacities I began to tease out the initial concepts of poise, economy and confidence. I elaborated on these by citing further motile capacities such as balance, co-ordination, flexibility, agility, control, precision, strength, power, endurance and the ability to move at different speeds that is explosively, right through to sustaining a movement over a long period of time. I might add to this list core stability, perceptual-motor acuity e.g. hand/foot-eye co-ordination and spatial awareness and also rhythm. These capacities would enable the individual to interact with a wide variety of environmental situations."


That sounds like a pretty good athlete to me. 


Another way to look at Athlete Development is to consider how we develop kids in school.  If we want them to be lawyers, we don't just start in 1st grade and teach them law things.  No.  We give them fundamentals such as reading, writing and arithmetic.  Then they get science, history, geography and such things.  Along the way, they do learn things about the law, but it isn't until their 13 or 14 year of school that they really get into more specific law courses.  Finally, in about the 15th or 16th year of school they are ready to set for the lawyer exam so they can actually begin their law career.  Training for sport should be no different.


Take your time developing ALL athletic qualities in your athletes.  Along with this you can also integrate skills of many specific sports.  Then when it comes where competition outcome is important, your athlete will be much better prepared.      

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