James Tatham is a senior strength & conditioning coach at the Australian Institute of Sport, where he helps prepare Australia’s very best, young basketball prospects with Basketball Australia’s Centre of Excellence and Gymnastics Australia’s Male Artistic Gymnastics National Training Centre (MAG NTC) athletes. James has also worked for Tennis Australia, Volleyball Australia, NSW Warratahs and Canberra Institute of Technology. James has completed a Bachelors Degree with Honours in Exercise Science and is an accredited Elite Level 3 Strength and Conditioning Coach.

QUOTES

"The narrative I push is that the weight room is for supplementary training to help unlock new higher difficulty scores to make gymnastics feel easy and to lengthen the career window"

"I think as coaches we're nurturing an environment to unfold a challenging future that's very uncertain"

"Training happens around high days being high, low days being low all based on gymnastics apparatus bias"

"A lot of incline press that correlates really well to a lot of what gymnasts do on the parallel bars and the pommel"

"I think there's some other things we can learn from gymnastics as well, the way they have difficulty scores and execution scores, I think we can gamify training that way to build … junior development with a novel scoring system that the athletes buy into"

SHOWNOTES

1) From small town NSW to the Australian Institute of Sport

2) What does strength & conditioning for elite gymnastics look like?

3) Unlocking the physical qualities that drive gymnastic skill development

4) How context, relationships and content influence coaching philosophy

5) Challenges in the Australian gymnastics’ environment

6) A typical training week for elite gymnasts and “building the armour”

7) Using gymnastics to gamify training and the normalization of risk with gymnastics

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Stephen Bird

Haydn Masters

Tom Tombleson

Simon Cron

Julian Jones

Stephen Smith

Ben Serpell

Stephen Larkham

Christian Bosse

John Mitchell