Dana Agar-Newman is the Lead of Strength and Conditioning for the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific. As a former athletics coach, Dana got pulled into the field of strength and conditioning working with a variety of programs including: the Canadian Men’s Rugby team, swimming and the Canadian Sport Schools and before the Rio 2016 Olympic, primarily focused on the preparation of the Canadian Women’s Sevens team.

QUOTES

“Individualization at the basic level shouldn’t be that complex”

“For screening, you should start with the sport and then work your down to the limiting factors”

“With a force-velocity profile, we start at bodyweight and work up to load an athlete can’t jump higher than 10cm with”

“So we have an athlete’s response to training which is really variable and if we vary our training, this response will have even more variance in it, so why don’t we keep one of them consistent”

“There are other things besides the numbers, like psychology, that should be included in how we make decisions about training”

“The programming specific to strength should change dependent on what level the athlete is at”

“I will keep an athlete on beginner programs until they stop getting better”

“There is a different problem with training beginners versus training advanced athletes – you will get the biggest gains in performance with beginners from improving their fitness; however you will get the biggest gains in performance with advanced athletes from improving their readiness and manipulating how fresh they are”

“You can write the best program but if you can’t execute it in your facility it is worthless”

SHOWNOTES

1) Dana’s journey from a pole vault coach to a S&C and the benefits of having to coach hundreds of athletes when you first start

2) Individualizing training for athletes and what level of individualization is needed

3) Using technology to assess athletes and the value of slow motion video

4) Coordination indexes, F-v velocity profiles and the EUR

5) Frequency of assessing athletes

6) The Bondarchuk approach and tracking exercises in training

7) Asymmetries from force plates and what to do about it

8) Beginner athletes versus advanced

9) Upper body assessments and when to use

10) Eye-openers and their impact on a S&C career

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Tyler Goodale

Matt Barr

Mike Stone

Tim Suchomel

JB Morin

Pierre Samozino

Derek Everly

Matt Rhea

Matt Jordan

Thomas Kurz

Scott Livingston

Dan Pfaff

Urban Meyer

Corey Kennedy

Ashley Jones

Al Vermeil