I've been busy - Winter Olympian Jacqui Naracott, podcasting, a quick revisit to PHM and product update.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been busy lately with lots of different things going on.

In particular I've been working to get our podcast, (Snippit Sports Science Podcast) up and running hence I haven’t put out a specific topical blog in the last few weeks. If you haven’t listened to our podcast I’d love you to give it a try (please click on this link). They are only about 10minutes in length, which is a perfect time filler. Our latest podcast discusses the use of Passive Heat Maintenance and different warm-up routines to improve competition performance in swimmers.

Our latest podcast is a nice reminder of one of my previous blogs on Passive Heat Maintenance. I wrote this during the recent Pyeong Cheng Winter Olympics as one of 3 performance enhancement concepts, which I believe to be easy to implement and can provide a potential “performance win” for athletes.

This brings me to the next point where I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big congratulations to one of Australia’s recent 2018 Winter Olympian, Jacqui Naracott (@JackieNarracott). I have the pleasure of providing her strength programming and support since 2015. I started working with Jacqui in 2015 (Qld Academy of Sport) and as you could imagine, training in the heat of Queensland provided its challenges to an athlete training for a winter sports. We tried some different exercise progressions to try and provide transfer to her sliding. During 2016 she moved to Bath in the United Kingdom to live and train. I still provide her strength training support along with her speed coach, Rob Ellchuk (@MANIathletics) (Interestingly this is where I lived 2004-2010 where I worked for Bath Rugby as an S&C coach.) Jacqui finished 16^th at the 2018 Olympics. I admire any athlete at all levels, but the drive that Jacqui posseses to succeed in a sport that is not well funded and is not a “normal” thing for an Aussie athlete to compete in is a testament to her success and performance at the Olympics.

Jacqui is very open minded about her training which is great when wanting to introduce concepts that may provide a training and competition advantage. As mentioned in my 3^rd blog, despite the plethora of information about such concepts, athletes and coaches seem hesitant in adopting these practices. Irrespective, Jacqui has bought well into Passive Heat Maintenance and Ischemic Preconditioning (passive potentiation with BFR cuffs). I met up with Jacqui on her recent holiday in Australia and in general conversation she showed me a great picture (main blog pic) using one of the original PHM blankets that I made for her. I was pretty chuffed to see her using it. Such a simple concept used by one of the best athletes in the world.

The thing she is throwing away prior to starting (silver lining) is the PHM blanket that I got made for her.

As I close, I have been thinking about a potential future blog highlighting some of the different things that I have incorporated with Jacqui’s strength training. Being a sport that incorporates a lot of horizontal sprinting I wonder if anyone would be interested in seeing some of the exercises (progressions and modifications) that she does? If you are interested please let me know in the comments below.

 Also, good luck to all competitors for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. In
particular, good luck to those athletes that I work with on a weekly basis:

• Benn Harradine (@bennharradine) - Discus
• Cedric Dubler (@CedricDubler) – Decathlon      
• Riley Day (_rileyday) – 200m, 4x100m
• Brianna Coop – T35 100m
• Caitlin Sargeant-Jones – 4x400m

Also, my new SRT boxes are finally here. After quite a long time I am proud to finally being about to supply you all with these with your purchase. Also in the next month or so I will be releasing an addition to the SRT family. I will unveil it once it arrives and I’ve tested it thoroughly so please stay tuned. If you previously purchased SRT units and would like a box please email me.

Remember if you would like to see a blog on the strength training that we that we did for Jacqui Narracott's Skeleton Olympic preparation please leave comments below.

Thank you.