Stuart McMillan
ALTIS CEO
Embracing the Unknown: The Island of Knowledge and Coaching
Recently, I reread Marcelo Gleiser's great book, ‘The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning,’ and — as always with almost every book I read — reflected upon its implications in sport performance and coaching. One of the primary themes in the book is that of ‘embracing ignorance’. Gleiser argues that the acquisition of knowledge...
Meet the neighbors
How often do you speak to your neighbors? Do you even know them? Research shows that most Americans don’t trust their neighbors. Why not? And what has this to do with speed, you ask? Today we will discuss the relevance of an increasingly isolated world, and how that might affect your understanding of lots of things as they relate to...
Struggling with skill
I alluded to this a few weeks back, and promised I was going to get back to it — which is what I’ll do today: talk about speed, why we should treat it with the respect it deserves, and how — through understanding one simple rule — you can better teach it. So first, the rule: speed is both a...
alligator boogaloo
I wrote the following short piece well over a decade ago -- back when I first started sharing my thoughts publicly. I started a blog called 500words (this was prior to the old mcmillanspeed site), where every post had to be 500 words right on the nose. This was my 2nd or 3rd one -- and I share it here...
Stop Trying to ’Fix’ Athletes!
I’ve never been comfortable with the term ”corrective exercise”. In this short post, I’ll tell you why. When we stand back and look at the big picture, the challenge to improving the health and performance of athletes may seem overwhelming. How can we help athletes improve the quality of their movement with all the complexity and subjectivity that it entails? ...
Let’s Connect
Introducing our new Membership — ALTIS Connect We are re-imagining The ALTIS Membership. You might be familiar with ALTIS 360 — our on-line portal consisting of 100s of hours of amazing video content — ranging from presentations from our own staff and many of our expert friends from around the world, to behind the scenes training footage, to exclusive access...
Sprint Science Categorization
This short post is meant to accompany a two-part article I wrote for SportSmith HQ - where I updated my thoughts on my push-pull categorization. In sport, we use categories all the time: through placing things into categories (‘categorization’), we are better able to recognize, differentiate, and understand the complex systems we interact with. A number of categorization systems already...
Introducing an incredible Mentorship Faculty!
If you’ve read my last couple of emails, you will know that we are soon launching a new Mentorship Program. Thus far, through the ALTIS education platform, we have written almost all of the Courses ourselves. With the exception of a few of the track & field Courses, the expertise required to write these Courses has existed within our own...
What’s wrong with coaching education?
A quick word on coaching education: The sport performance industry has traditionally valued what has been termed ‘technical skills’ (knowledge of anatomy, biomechanics, physiology, etc.), and thus has developed accreditation processes based upon Courses that teach these skills. More and more, however, employers are prioritizing the character of their employees, and are less-interested in the typical technical course certification processes. ...
In coaching, “how” is more important than “what”
Over the last few weeks, I have been talking to a few of my friends in leadership positions in sport around the world, as well as sharing a post on my Twitter account, about what type of things they value in new coaches. My goal in this - besides simply interest - was to better understand what the types of...