Lessons from the Perform Better Training Summit

  This past weekend I went to the Perform Better Training Summit in Providence and it was, as usual, one of the highlights of the year.
  I would say Chris Porier and his crew outdid themselves in terms of the breadth and depth of the topics covered and the quality of the presenters.
  Here are just a few of the highlights:

• Mike Boyle: this Yoda of coaches is always learning and willing to admit when he was wrong. In this case, it involves breathing exercises which Boyle used to think were bunk but now finds ways to incorporate them and teach them so that it enhances client's "core function" and safety. 
• Dr. Greg Rose: this guy never ceases to impress and inform and you always come away going, "Wow", that was awesome. He talked about training rotational athletes and the information was eye opening in the sense that everyone can be trained to be powerful but what is done during certain key developmental "windows" is what determines whether someone has rocket fuel or diesel fuel in their proverbial tank. Once those windows close it is virtually impossible to make "silk out of a sow's ear." In fact, training someone who has diesel fuel too hard and explosively will almost invariably end up in injury.
• Bill Knowles: this guy is a world class post injury athletic rehab specialist with a clinic in Vermont. He client lists includes Tiger Woods, Lindsey Vonn and a ton of other world class athletes. His perspective and demonstration on the importance of training deceleration strength and ability was unique and "functional."
• Nick Winkelman: he is the director of education at Athlete's Performance and his hands on was devoted to some very creative reactive agility drills based on either verbal and/or visual cueing. Cool stuff and a great training session.
• Charlie Weingroff: he's a rare combination of brilliance, eccentricity and hard core athlete. His talk centered on debunking some of the myths of stretching and presented a strategy on how best to look at and improve mobility and flexibility in clients with the understanding that sometimes you have to refer out to people like manual therapists to resolve certain issues that won't be fixed by mobility drills.
• Dick Vermeil was the keynote speaker and his topic was on leadership. He reinforced key concepts like you must care for someone before you can lead them or they will follow you, leading by example (walk the walk), and making people understand that losing or falling short is only a temporary state (power of positive thinking).

  These are just a few of the highlights and we have already started to implement some of the concepts in our training of athletes/clients.

Train hard and train smart!

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