Melbourne athletic development Blog

I know that this article is going to be the hardest to write. It is the sobering article that comes after some reflection on the performances of my athletes and my own coaching behaviours. High performance sport is just that, about achieving performance. The reality...

Sitting in quarantine, I am slowly getting back to some normalcy outside of the Olympic bubble. This has meant the process of reaching out to friends and colleagues to return messages of support and reflect on the journey. One of the most common questions you have...

No matter what anyone says the Olympics and the World Cup are the two biggest events on the global calendar. Nothing even comes close. They bring nations and the world together in a way that nothing else can. So in the lead up to these games, with Covid looming over...

As I sit here on the wet and humid last day of the Tokyo Olympics, there is a sense of melancholy. I have heard it described before but was not sure what people were talking about when they mentioned the significant feeling of despair that comes over you when you...

It is reasonably well understood that diet and the associated nutritional content of our diets has a significant influence on health outcomes. Eating healthy has been associated with improvements in cardiovascular health, immune function, metabolic disease (such as...

The data continues to get worse for the manual therapy denialists. Look its a small study from a Japanese team, and I am definitely extrapolating a lot here, but it appears that basic myofascial release (treatment to the muscular and connective tissue elements)...

In our recent blog on sleep and performance we outlined the benefits and detriments of sleep and the lack thereof. We spoke about the definition of sleep loss, that is two successive nights of <7 hours sleep, and how many athletes in particular do not get enough...

How long is a piece of string? The question of how long an injury will take to heal is a lazy question. Both for the practitioner and the patient. Not only is it difficult to determine how long something will take for an individual (complex system discussion, that we...

Patella tendon pain is the bane of existence for jumping athletes. In fact the condition is commonly referred to as Jumpers Knee.  The symptoms can be debilitation for athletes that perform a significant amount of jumping or high force end range or compressional...

Keith Baar is extremely well known in the world of tendon research. For those following at home, you may remember his name from one of the short education videos presented by MAD’s Jack Williams. Keith has been researching the properties of tendon, how they respond to...