This morning I get to work with the women’s table tennis team… the Gold Medal team, I might add. I am really looking forward to working with these young girls. I had trained them the time before when I was in China and saw some really quick athletes. Their skill level and reaction time is incredible. They have a good dynamic warm-up (one that I brought home and incorporated into our program). I wanted them to do my workout from start to finish, so we started with my ballistic warm-up. These girls are fun to work with, they laugh and have so much fun. I think it’s their attitude that makes this bunch of athletes so good. I guess when you are the best in the world (table tennis) at what you do, you’re entitled to enjoy your training sessions, and I sure did. I had both sets of table tennis girls, the current Olympic team and the futures, or the team in waiting. I had about forty girls to train. The coaches pushed all the tables to the side and made room for me to have one whole side for training.
Breaking this team into four groups was a little different because the girls all wanted to stay in the group with their buddies. I did the best I could do and had four stations set up. The first station was the reaction coach with the swing harness in a sandwich configuration. The second station was shackles and punch belt. The third station was the breakaway belts and the forth was up-back station. These girls trained extremely hard and made no complaints about how intense the workout was. We trained for two hours and they were drenched but loving it.
We were invited to have lunch with the Deputy Director of The Training Center. The meal was a banquet as today is his birthday so the chefs made cakes and pastries which were pretty good I must say. He told us that he has gotten great feedback from the coaches, doctors and athletes. He gave us our schedule for the remaining part of the year and told us he wants us back six to eight times next year. We finished lunch by singing happy birthday in Chinese.
This afternoon I trained the women’s Gold Medalist in weightlifting that I had trained earlier in the week. We worked on the same things that we had previously worked on. She is such a joy to work with.
Everyday, our US team meets to discuss the athletes and teams from that day. We also have to put together a powerpoint presentation to present to the Olympic committee at the end of our training cycle. This presentation consists of video and bullet points of what we see, how we fixed the problem, and what our course of action is for the teams we have worked with. It’s a pretty labor-intensive task and anybody that knows me, knows how much I hate to write. I was asked by the weightlifting team coaches to write a program to supplement their current training program.
Back to the hotel where I will try and catch up on all my emails and send my wife an update from today. I don’t care how much you travel, there is no place like home!
No comments:
Post a Comment