For this week’s staff training, we de-camped into the labs to learn more about EMG (electromyography) – a way of recording and displaying the electrical activity in muscles. Our guide along the journey was Dan Gordon, a Paralympic World Record holding athlete who has also been a consultant physiologist for the UK Athletics Paralympic Squad (amongst others).

[warning - photos contain a disturbing depiction of male physicality :( ]

If you’ve been reading the blog for a short while, you’ll have seen that each week we ’shut up shop’ to get together for staff training – and that we regularly have guest speakers to deliver on areas of their expertise.

This week our guest speaker was Dan Gordon, world record holding Paralympic athlete and exercise physiologist.

Dan has competed as a GB athlete in three sports (swimming, track & field and cycling) and still holds a world record in track cycling. He has worked as a consultant physiologist to athletes from a diverse range of disciplines including GB Paralympic endurance runners, GB Lightweight rowers, GB cyclists, ECB/MCC academy cricketers, ultra-marathon runners and ultra-rowers. He has also been a team manager for GB VI track & field at a European level and his latest book “Coaching Science. (Active learning in sport)” was released in March 2009.

Our staff training session saw us decamp into Dan’s labs to learn about ‘EMG’ (electromyography) in more detail. If you’re not familiar with what EMG is, then it’s basically this – by carefully placing electrodes on the skin around a muscle, and by using a boat-load of computer-powered signal analysis, you can display various characteristics about the electrical activity of the muscle you’re observing.

This is all very exciting, because you can record the activity synchronised with video and categorically prove which muscles are (and aren’t) working at any given point in time during a movement.

If you were eating your food at the same time as you opened the photo of Andy flexing his enormous gun then I apologise – but what’s interesting about that photo is that during the session we wired up both of Andy’s biceps and you could visibly see on the computer screen traces that his right arm was fatigued (compared to the left) from all the showboating. Clever stuff eh?!

We’ve got some interesting plans to use this technology in some groundbreaking ways so watch this space!

PS: CAPTION COMPETITION – If you’ve got any humerous suggestions as to what you think Dan’s thinking in the last photo, then I’d be delighted to hear them (best submission wins a core cambridge t-shirt :)

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!”

For this week’s Therapist staff training, our guest speaker was Greg Reid, Lead Physiotherapist at Cambridge United Football Club.

Greg has been the club Physio since the early mezazoic era and whilst management and players come and go, Greg is always there to patch players up and get them back on the pitch.

We asked Greg to present on the topic of screening players for disfunction, and also a little about common injuries in football.

One of the best things about working in a tight-knit multi-disiplinary team is that you get to learn from the experience of the other team members – as do they from you. Because of this, every week we set aside time to get together and cover a wide variety of topics to make sure that we’re all learning and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

This week, Bob Challis, a level 5 (that’s really quite good, if you didn’t know!) Judo coach kindly popped in to talk to our coaches about Long Term Athlete Development or ‘LTAD’.

LTAD is an all-encompassing term that is commonly used to describe all of the factors that play a part in developing a healthy high-performance athlete from youth (aged 6-ish) to adult.

Bob regularly lectures in LTAD, has presented research at various conferences around the world, and is probably (at least) runner-up for ‘busiest man in the world’, so we’re extremely grateful that he gave us this opportunity to learn a little about his topic.

During the session, Bob covered the fundamental principles of LTAD, the various stages of development and provided an overview of the pros and cons of the different models developed around the world and how they can be applied in the UK.

…and we didn’t even ask for him to turn up wearing the t-shirt :)