“Young Coach of the Year” Lectures This Week’s Staff Training Session
This week, our ’staff training’ guest speaker was national “Young Coach of the Year” and regional “Coach of the Year”, Sam Buck.
Sam, a successful Diving coach and ex- international Gymnast, talked to our staff about a variety of technical aspects of the sport of Diving and the conditioning approaches adopted by coaches to train athletes for these requirements….
Every week, our staff take part in our ’staff training’ programme, which is designed to ensure that we’re all currently learning from the latest research and coaching & therapy methods (as well as each other). I’ve posted photos of a few of the sessions here before, Bob Challis’s Long Term Athlete Development and Greg Reid’s Football Injuries.
This week, Sam Buck, presented to us on the technical requirements of his sport (Diving) and the conditioning methods used by coaches.
Sam was a gymnast for 15 years, becoming U18 British Champion and competing on the Junior European circuit and a variety of Senior International tournaments. A few years back, Sam became a Diving Coach (there’s a great deal of carry over from Gymnastics to Diving) and has been extremely successful – becoming Lead Coach for London/East last year and having 5 of his Divers accepted onto the England Talent programme. He was awarded last year the prestigious Sports Coach UK “Young Coach of the Year” and regional “Coach of the Year” titles.
Sam’s talk covered a variety of topics related to Diving, including the technical aspects of take-off, and the corresponding requirements from an S&C perspective, as well as bodyweight conditioning methods and the progressions that coaches would make. It’s worth noting that, because Diving is a sport for very young athletes (as young as 3!), the coaching methodology has to be adapted to make it fun just as much as it develops their physicality.
It may surprise a few of you to find out that Divers tend to be trained in a very “Gymnast-like” – that is to say that they don’t tend to do free weights coaching per se. That said, only recently, a few of the sport’s top performance people have concluded that modified Olympic lifts should be part of an elite Diver’s training regime, and that this should be rolled out forthwith.
It makes sense to us, after all – the higher they can jump, the longer they have in the air and so the more time they have to do all that ‘pretty falling’ that they do competitively.
“It was an absolute pleasure to present to your guys,” said Sam, “There’s no question that the work that you guys do to instil movement patterns and really carry that form over into their sport gives your athletes and clients excellent benefits.” “I’m looking forward to putting your recommendations into place with our squad over the next few weeks and hopefully a few of these bodyweight drills will be useful for your clients too!”
