Unleash the Monkey Army

I have been asked, and I know of other trainers who have been told by their clients that they I aren't pushing them hard enough. To be honest, for my part it was a fair call. I wasn't pushing. I'd grown tired of the yard-stealing, corner-cutting, half-arsedness and wanted to test a theory. So, I set up the opportunities to work or to coast. I won't be with you every time you train or every time you go to crack open a beer and a pizza. I am not your drill instructor. There are times when I will be, and that is fine. But we don't have the relationship where I can break you down to your component parts and build you back up. We could have, but you don't really want that! In what we have, if you choose to take the easy path every time you'll a) not get fitter and b) do the same when the chips are down and then you'll leave your teammates in the brown smelly stuff because you can't or won't do the hard yakka when it is there to be done. There are ...

The first flush of the new year is out of the way and many resolutions have already been cast aside, dismissed like a credit card bill pending a better set of circumstances in which to respond to the call. Now is probably a good time to visit the perennial January question - goals. Picture from Reuters.com Now, we "know" that the setting of goals is a good thing. I mean, those of us who have the double-edged blessing of working for pretty-much any sized organisation will have had it drummed into us that that it is vitally important. It also stands to reason that achievement is more likely when the objective is set. But what doesn't often get mentioned is that this is not merely a matter of temporal inevitability like night follows day; rather, it is a likely but no guaranteed sequence like Summer following Spring in the UK (you know it should happen but quite often it seems to go from Spring to Autumn/Winter with barely a pause for breath in between). Go...

Before I really became a student of this training stuff, I used to just dive in. I hated warming-up. All the stretching and holding didn't sit comfortably and the just running was dull. I wanted to get stuck in. Some of my fondest playing memories are from matches where, for one reason or another, we just got on with it. Obviously these images will have been enhanced with preservation in my mind but why is it they worked for me? I think the practice of what I do now before sessions and what I have my trainees do has echoes in these roots, albeit coloured by the training and research since. First question (and this is a pretty standard opening for me): what are you warming up for? More exactly at this stage, what is the point of the warm-up? Well, to borrow from Verkoshanksy, it's more about "pre-activity preparation" than it is about warming-up per se. You are getting yourself ready for what's ahead physically and mentally. Some of the reasons those examples I all...