Melbourne athletic development Blog

On many occasions we have discussed sprinting and hamstring injuries in this blog. I know its definitely an interest area of ours, so I hope you will indulge us in discussing further studies that are opening up ideas in the area. These include factors that may be...

In our previous article we discussed the approach of using safe to fail experiments to implement interventions in novel situations and with complex systems. The approach highlighted that understanding the emergent behaviour allows for the implementation of...

Given our discussions on understanding systems, the characteristics of said systems and the gaps for improvement, the question that everyone invariably asks is how do we close that gap? Is there a better way to approach this kind of problem solving in novel...

Find The Gap. It may seem like a simple process but clearly defining the current capability and the desired capability is something that is often not done well. There are a multitude of reasons for this which we will briefly discuss, but they tend to fall into a few...

Understand the rules of the system In the last blog we discussed determining the type of system that you are dealing with when approaching a decision, problem or situation. If you understand the type of system that you are dealing with you can readily apply some rules...

In a team meeting yesterday we got onto the topic of decision making. And in particular making decisions when in a novel situation. The thing that is obvious is that as decision makers, humans look for previous examples to go from to guide us. It seems like it would...

I spoke in our last blog about the restrictions requiring me as a coach to be more creative and having to adapt the way we have approached training at a high level under restrictions. So I thought I would dive into this topic and elaborate on this more.  There...

With Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra in extended lockdowns, I thought I would put together some lessons that we have picked up over the last 18 months on attempting to maintain a high level of training with restrictions in place. The first and most important thing to...

In the last article I discussed what I saw were the drivers to success at the highest levels of sport. I did so at the individual level, discussing the traits and behaviours that were obvious to me. In this discussion I will try to identify what I have observed to...

As discussed in the last few blogs I was in the fortunate position to be able to stay in Tokyo for the entirety of the athletics program. Further to this I was in Narita, about 75 minutes out of Tokyo prior to the games with Australian athletes who came into Japan...