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Coach's Gold
Started by Cole Dano, September 10, 2013 · 16 Replies · 128 Views
FB Reply to inquiry on Coach's credentials:
"The better question is what haven't I done in the world of GST. I am a looong time National Team Coach for the US Mens Gymnastics Team. Over the years I have spent more time with Olympic coaches and athletes from the US and around the world than I have with anyone else besides my family. Over the last decade I have spent so much time at the US Olympic Training Center that it came to feel like a second home. I have personally developed several National Champions and over the course of my career have trained hundreds and hundreds of state, regional and national level medalists. I currently have one athlete who has a very good chance of making the US 2016 Olympic Team and two students who perform for Cirque du Soleil. Not to mention the thousands of fitness enthusiasts around the world who are my students and have made their best GST progress ever following the GymnasticBodies.com courses."
Bipocni, on 11 Dec 2013 - 5:48 PM, said:
Bipocni said:Anyone think it's possible to work up to bodyweight with dislocates?
No.
Nor do I think it is necessary. So far 20kg has provided all of the benefits and more that we were looking for.
This is a little bit similar to the history of HS wall runs. I originally started my athletes with a single set of 10 minutes. When that was so productive I then expanded the time to 15 minutes and then expanded again up to 20 minutes. However the minimal ROI (return on investment) gained from moving up to 15 and then 20 minutes did not justify the additional expenditure in time and energy, so I dropped the time back to 10 minutes and it has remained there every since.
The lesson is that there is no inherent advantage in always striving to train more. 'More' must always pay dividends, otherwise more may actually be 'less'. The trick is figuring out just where that sweet spot is.
Weighted Lunge vs Single Leg Squat
This whole thread is full of gold!
Coach, on a personal note, I'm grateful to see you posting more of this great stuff again. It's what brought me here in the first place. 
It is certainly more fun.
However it will need to be done only occasionally as the forum members primary focus needs to remain on completing their Foundation work.
I'm sure you have plenty of gold to keep us focused on the Foundation work as well.
The blind leading the blind.
Kipping pullups are an advanced plyometric strength element and should be avoided by beginners. Period.
Why?
As they lack any meaningful degree of muscular strength, kipping pullups prematurely force beginners to initiate lift by bouncing off the connective tissue of the shoulder girdle at the bottom of the movement.
We are dealing with multiples of bodyweight here due to the plyometric nature of the repulsion out of the bottom. So beginners who are not strong enough to handle their own bodyweight are now exposed to multiples of bodyweight? 
Also as the shoulder girdle is not strong enough to handle the load, the shoulder girdle is also stretched past its current safe max ROM.
To recap:
Beginners. Weak. Multiples of bodyweight. Excessive ROM. Bouncing off connective tissue. High Reps. High Volume.
It is only since the widespread adoption of kipping pullups as an introductory 'strength' element that we have seen a rash of slap tears in adult fitness enthusiasts.
David's recommendation of 3 dead hang is too conservative. A 5 rep minimum is more suitable.
Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer
https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/topic/14468-why-im-not-following-foundation/?p=141446
If someone is of at least average physical ability and they are not making progress; there is usually one culprit responsible. They are not working hard enough. Plain and simple.
What I noticed during this past seminar in London.
- Good people with good potential.
- Bright, disciplined and talented.
- However some had been stuck for far too long on some of the easier elements.
Why?
Primarily there was a huge discrepancy between their idea of hard work/intensity and mine. They thought they were working hard, however in reality they were working well within their comfort zone.
Other than technical details, much of the weekend was spent teaching/showing/demonstrating to them that they were capable of far more physical effort than they had previously thought. 
Experiencing discomfort is not a good indicator that you are working at your capacity. I am personally not concerned with your comfort. Nor should you be. If your body is physically capable of continuing to perform without an adverse affect on form or tempo; you need to keep on cranking.
Your body is a tool. Use it.
Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer
p.s. Yes, it is important to be able to distinguish between the pain of fatigue and the pain of injury (a completely separate discussion); however for most people this is not the issue. They have simply never worked hard enough previously to be inured to the momentary discomforts that accompany serious physical training.
People decide at their own level of success. If they're serious they're gonna find a way to make it happen, they're gonna find the time, the intensity, the resources. If they're not serious then there's no amount of hand holding in the world its gonna make it happen
Practical genius.
As a group, US National Team Coaches are 100% focused on achieving tangible results; helping our athletes make the US National Team and then moving onward to World and Olympic Teams. Old methods that are no longer adequate for the current training demands must be ruthlessly and swiftly set aside; regardless of how cherished or productive these methodologies may have been in the past.
Our minds prowl; endlessly seeking the answer to an unending quandry - how do we make that which is already nearly perfect - better? Continued progress is only possible by exploring, parsing and then synthesizing from new avenues of information; searching for those rare new nuggets of hard won knowledge. Coaching at a world class level is an unusual blend of determination, wide ranging experience and intuition. There can be no blind adherence to dogma. Only an ever unceasing committment to excellence.
We are patiently impatient. A year or two means nothing to us; we habitually think in 5 and 10 year windows of training. We instinctively respect the human body's inherent physiological time frame for adaptation. We have been slapped down by reality far too many times to fail to respect this aspect of training.
We have the luxury (?) of literally spending thousands upon thousands of hours in our laboratory (I personally have over 16,000+ hours invested in Allan's training over the course of 12 years) working with the finest athletes on the planet, focused on one thing and one thing only; the pursuit of perfection. And expanding the boundaries of what was previously thought of as the limits of human movement.
Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer
Hardy Evans, on 01 Sept 2014 - 6:52 PM, said:
Hardy Evans said:No, no, not quite there yet. Still have an SE to master in F4. RC is just very far ahead of any other element; in fact I put both SL and SPL work on the back-burner b/c forearm splints, so I know that I will finish RC well before I'm done with all of F4. Just looking ahead
Getting forearm splints from these lower level skills is indicative that you are not yet strong enough to be worrying about increasing maximal strength. Bent arm pulling strength is only a part of the physical preparation needed to be successful at ring strength training.
Go back, slow down and do things right. In the long run, it results in much faster progress later if you are slow and meticulous establishing your foundation in the beginning.
There are no shortcuts.
Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer
- SSC is a methodology that I primarily used with some of my advanced athletes' warmup elements. You will also see that Jon Douglas here on the F1 private forum has had a lot of success implementing this protocol into his own warmups. Remember also that Jon is a L1.5 Certified GB athlete.
- At your guys level, you need to take care of first things first and that means getting Foundation mastered and out of the way. The primary point that I want you to take away from the podcast SSC discussion is that it is essential to give the connective tissue time to adapt. And that is what the Foundation programming is designed to do for you.
Facebook:
It is not to 'trivialize' per se, but rather to open the students' eyes that there are MANY MANY other far more advanced GST exercises that they should be progressing on to, but aren't because they have been mistakenly taught that a MU is a big deal and are content to stop their training there. To my mind, this is similar to someone who has learned to count to ten and feels no need to go further and learn addition/subtraction.
P.S. Not to worry, the gymnast would fare just fine. Way back when during my military time, I did the requisite weighted twenty milers and had no issues whatsoever. In fact the big guys who were struggling around me were looking at this little guy (me) with this WTF look on their faces. Of course my teasing them to pick up the pace probably didn't help their moods.
It would bring them even more happiness if they would progress onward to more advanced GST exercises. Why stop your progress near the beginning? Why not proceed onward to galimores, reverse muscle ups, planches and iron crosses?
Great discussion, gentlemen. With good points on all sides. I have been especially pleased with the civil tone and the way that everyone has comported themselves.
I would like to point out that the accumulation of my knowledge was not free for myself; it required 40 years, tens upon tens of thousands of hours in the gym developing and working with world/olympic class athletes and countless sacrifices on my own part. I would also like to point out that I am not simply a coach, but a world class coach. A trainer of national champions and some of the finest athletes to have ever walked the planet. In addition to the athletes which I have personally developed, I have also had the opportunity work with more Olympic athletes, Olympic Champions and Olympic Coaches than I can count.
(As a small aside, my family was once with me as I coached at a US winter national championship and observed me visiting with two of my friends. As I strolled back over to say something to my wife, one of my daughters was then old enough to recognize the two friends/colleagues I had been visiting with. "Dad, Dad ... do you know who you were talking to? You were just visiting with two World and Olympic champions!!!" I said, "I know, sweetie. Just what is it that you think Daddy does for a living and who I work with?" 
).
I always find it a little naive when some people feel that my knowledge and services should be available for free. Other high level professionals are paid for their service (doctors, attorneys, engineers etc). How is having access to the knowledge and skills of world class gymnastics coach any different?
My athletes each paid over $400 per month for access to me and my knowledge; often times for 10+ years. The math of their total accumulated tuition per athlete comes to nearly $50,000 in a ten year period.
The few hundred dollars required to purchase the first two courses to get started in GST seems like an incredible bargain to me and one to which I would have had access to as a young coach!
Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer