The Latest From ALTIS
Elevator Philosophy
As coaches, we are faced with multiple questions every day, and having a framework to guide us in answering these questions is essential. It is an obvious statement - but one that is surprisingly often overlooked. Rather than writing programs based upon educated personal beliefs (or a 'training philosophy'), many of us mindlessly prescribe what was given to us when...
Sport Science – what is the point?
This is a guest-post by Canadian Strength Coach and Sport Scientist, Dr. Matt Jordan. Back in 2014, while we were coaching our respective athletes at the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, we sat down and discussed quite a few topics in depth. This post was the result of one of these discussions - and was based on a question I had...
Celebrating International Women’s Day
ALTIS have teamed up with The Female Coaching Network (FCN) for this year's International Women's Day (IWD), to celebrate the community of female Track & Field coaches around the globe. Female coaches in Track & Field are under-represented, particularly at the elite end of the sport. During the World Athletics Championships in 2019, less than 2% of all competing athletes had...
Just a Dumb Coach
Jodie Williams is smarter than me. As hard as it is for me to admit that, it is true. Anaso Jobodwana is also smarter than me. So is Lolo Jones. And Kaillie Humphries. And Ameer Webb. Andre De Grasse. Steve Mesler. Christian Malcolm. Glenn Smith. And a few hundred other folk who have had the (dis?)pleasure of my...
Inaugural Women in Coaching Mentorship kicks off
We care deeply about supporting female coaches, and have been disappointed by the pace of change in the support being made available to women in coaching. Yes, there have been some monumental improvements in the last 30-40 years - but they are far and few between. A recent study ‘Achieving Gender Equity in High Performance Athletics Coaching in the U.K’ shared...
THE DRUNK, THE POLICEMAN, AND THE PRIEST
None of us learn something new, and hold it entirely independent of what we already know. We incorporate it into the history of personal knowledge we have been creating our entire lives. This is how knowledge works, and it often throws up challenges in how we appreciate the things that are not happening outside of our brains, our worlds, our existences. It is so easy to...
ALTIS Foundation Scholarship Award
Phoenix, AZ, February 5, 2021 – ALTIS, and the ALTIS Foundation, are proud to announce the inaugural recipient of the ALTIS Foundation Scholarship Award - The Track and Field Program at Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU), located in Charlotte, North Carolina. In keeping with the Foundation’s terms, the $50,000 grant will be distributed in four annual installments of $12,500, through...
Unique Abilities
An athlete’s unique abilities are those factors that co-exist and interact to form the athlete’s ‘authentic movement solution’. There are both internal and external factors that make coaching each athlete unique. Their structure, their force-producing abilities, their coordination, and their current technical understanding of the task at hand means that movement solutions are individual. Their relative levels of neuromuscular and cardiovascular...
#EmbraceTheSuck
Over the last week, I have been sharing my thoughts on ‘leaning into discomfort’ as a way to reduce ‘limbic friction’, and how we can seek out such opportunities. Starting February 1st, myself - as well as a few friends and colleagues from around the world (won’t you join us?) will be ‘embracing the suck’, by doing something sucky...
Try a Little Suckiness
As I previously wrote, the embrace the suck concept first resonated with me a few years back. To bring a little suckiness into my life, I resolved to do something that sucked every day. I generally stuck to physical things - but this also included more psychologically challenging things as well (such as reading articles, books, etc. that went against...