This Article originally appeared on spiked-online April 30th 2010

My Manifesto Club Think Piece on the decline of competitive sport provoked a large number of responses from sports coaches and trainers who share my concerns. For this reason and for a desire to see things change, I have produced a manifesto for the reintroduction of competition in schools.
Continue reading →

 Reclaiming Childhood by Dr Helene Guldberg tackles head on ‘the stark consequences on child development of both our low expectations of fellow human beings and our safety obsessed culture‘.  Alongside a relentless society wide trend to ‘protect’ children from everyone and everything, a new phenomena has quietly made an appearance,  a mounting unease with the increasing amount of restrictions on children’s activity. This unease has been expressed in a number of ways in the media in the last eighteen months.
Continue reading →

With its new ‘Respect’ agenda, the Football Association is demonising a key figure in youth sport: demanding dads.

 Rhys Hanger is tennis performance director at the Brighton Esporta. I wanted to speak to Rhys because he has been training tennis players to international level for over 15 years and has witnessed significant changes in the way tennis is taught in that time.  I initially wanted to know what where the cultural challenges facing someone who wanted to raise the level of tennis in the UK.  In establishing what was holding us back I wanted to know what progress has been made to meet these challenges.

Drugs are useless in interactive sports like tennis, but they may help to extend athletes’ careers. So let’s un-ban them.

Volunteers are the mainstay of children’s tennis, football and rugby teams. These are informal associations, rooted in their communities and run out of people’s front rooms.

The last three days was pulled together by Lorenzo Beltrame with the ‘importance of rituals’ session that started on court this morning. Looking at the ‘between points’ situation that makes up for around 90 per cent of a match, Lorenzo and colleague at the Human Peformance institute Jessica. The development of rituals between points is seen as a process that has for components. The intergartion of the routine into the match is taken very seriously by the HPI and is seen as crucial in developing the Ideal Performance State. The between points ritual has to be rehersed regularly if it is to become habitual.
Continue reading →

The second day with the coaching elite of Spain saw Dr Loehr and his assistant J establish the need to identify the main barriers that your students have in reaching IPS (Ideal Persformance State). It was discussed at length what the IPS might be and consist in. In summary, IPS sees the individual able to establish the ammount of energy they have at their disposal prior to engaging in competition or training. This is done largely assessing the quantitive and qualitive nature of nutrition, sleep, hydration and exercise the individual has partaken in. This having been established the building blocks of an IPS are in place.
Continue reading →

Dr Jim Loehr introduced the concept of IPS (Ideal Peformance State) to an international group of coaches and players. Dr Loehr claims his system will help augment an already dominant Spanish position in world tennis.