Stuart McMillan
ALTIS CEO
Stop Dragging Your Toes: Part VI
Welcome back to the final part of this series on the ‘toe-drag phenomenon’. Thanks for sticking with me here! What was supposed to be just a short post on this somewhat controversial topic, has ended up being a six-parter - which honestly, could go on forever! I tried writing this succinctly, but the reality is that much of what I...
Stop Dragging Your Toes: Part V
In part IV, I discussed the general framework by which we go about designing our input (in this specific case, the ‘technical’ input of block clearance and early acceleration). In part V, I’d like to take it a step further, and discuss how we do this in practice - i.e. what are the next steps in determining how each athlete...
Stop Dragging your Toes: Part IV
Thanks for sticking with me. What started as a short post on the toe-drag silliness, has somehow taken on a life of its own, and is now going on 10,000 words. Apologies - but I really think the context is required here; to unpack this properly, we need to peel back a few layers. And don’t worry - we are...
Stop Dragging Your Toes: part III
At the end of part II, I asked the question: “Is the goal for the athlete to drag her toe, or is it for her to have an effective and efficient block clearance and initial acceleration”? Hopefully, we can all agree that the goal is to be effective and efficient. So that said, before moving forward to describing the process...
Stop Dragging your Toes: part II
Thanks for coming back. In part I, I offered my thoughts on why the ‘toe-drag’ is not the be-all / end-all it is often made out to be, and in fact, a practice I would discourage in almost all instances. To promote ‘low heel recovery’ is often offered as the reason why coaches instruct athletes to drag their toes -...
Stop Dragging Your Toes!
Over the last 15 years or so, there has been a debate in the track and field world around the recovery height of the heels during early acceleration in sprinting. We actually don’t obsess over ‘low recovery of heel’ in the initial steps, but we understand why many do. Many of the world’s top sprinters’ heel recovery is so low...
Working from Home
We are certain that you - like all of us - are effected by the coronavirus. Many of you are now working from home, or worse - may have potentially been let go from your job. Indeed, our own staff are now working off-site, unless we are directly interacting with the athlete group. It is a challenging time for us all, and...
I’m an idiot
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Francis Bacon I’ve got a confession to make. In my best of 2019 Book List, I included my good friend Dr. John Berardi’s book Change Maker. And I probably should not have. Here’s why. If you have read a few of my ‘best-of’...
Coach Stuart McMillan’s Best Books of 2019
I’m not a book critic, so I’m not going to give a critique, as I have occasionally done in the past. Rather, I will simply share a list of what were important books for me in 2019. Many of them have appeared on many other lists, and will no doubt be familiar to you. If this is the case - if many...
“Coach to the athlete’s solutions; not yours”
This is a saying that I probably repeat weekly in some way or another. It essentially means that each athlete has their own unique way of moving; that our jobs as performance professionals (in this case, coaches, therapists, and sport scientists) is to appreciate and understand athletes’ ‘movement signatures’, and train them in a way that best aligns to this....
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