Entries by dazdrake

Middlesex Student Conference 2019

It’s a little bit later than planned but just wanted to do a review of the 10th Annual Strength and Conditioning Student Conference, at Middlesex University London, Saturday 9th March 2019. Thanks to Dr Anthony Turner who has done a terrific job in organising it over the last 10 years and will be handing on […]

Daz Drake on Maximal Strength Training

I have Duncan French to thank for putting me on to a journal article in his 2018 UKSCA UFC presentation- when he was going through his needs analysis for MMA.  He actually didn’t even say much about it but as soon as I saw that slide a light bulb went off in my head and […]

Are you a good Story Teller?

A few weeks back I received an email from a parent who felt the session her son was doing with one of my APA coaches was not individually tailored to her son’s needs.  Individualisation is one of the key principles of training- as you can see in the graphic below it is also a key […]

Is Your Training Sport Specific?

There are two comments or requests that parents regularly make to me.  The first one is about lifting weights- some parents are against their child doing anything more than bodyweight until after puberty so want to check that I won’t be doing that.  That conversation usually happens before we start working together.  I think I’ll […]

5 reasons to do General training

In the last blog we looked at Transfer of Training in Sports and focused on two key aspects- Improved Sports Performance and Achievement of Physical Normalisation.  You can also think of this in terms of: motor skills (cognitive) and physical skills (physiological).   I’ve written several blogs on topics related to early specialisation, sports specific training, […]

Transfer of Training in Sports- from the gym to the court

I’ve not been posting so much in recent months- very much a case of being in the business rather than working on the business I’m afraid.  But I’ve still spent plenty of time reflecting about my training philosophy since my visits to PaceLab and Portugal.   Yesterday I was invited to attend a Pixolar inspired […]

Get Fit to Play Sport- Don’t Play Sport to Get Fit

In this blog article I am going to talk about some of my reflections since returning from my week in Portugal, where I was attending the ‘‘International Meeting for High Performance in Training” October 15th-20th.     This was a conference unlike no other I have been to.  I wanted to go for several reasons.  […]

Fitness Testing for Tennis with Tennisbrothers

For the last two weeks I have been testing Felix Mischker of Tennisbrothers social media fame as part of our new collaboration to get him in peak physical condition and share his fitness journey with our communities. Check out our first two videos below   Video 1 Video 2   Where I am next presenting? […]

My visit to PaceLab

This blog is the final instalment in my three part series.  In Part 1 we reviewed the principles of Motor Learning and the concepts of Variation as a form of Overload.  We also looked at the concept of Isometric muscle actions forming the basis of strength training for skill transfer of complex movements that take […]

Does Periodisation even work?

Part 2- The Bondarchuk principles of Periodisation   Does Periodisation even work? It’s a surprisingly valid question to ask.   As we saw in the last blog Frans Bosch challenges a coaches’ tendency to view adaptations in a predictable linear fashion.  The body’s response to training is unpredictable.  All we have established so far is that […]