Birmingham, England Apr. 30th – May 1st, 2010

It’s multi-sport, but has very strong gymnastics representation.

“This is unique opportunity for coaches working with young performers”, said Hardy Fink, Canada, Director of Education and Academy Programme of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG).

Prof Keith Russell (CAN), Prof Adam Baxter Jones (CAN), Prof Joachim Mester (GER), Prof Joan Duda (USA), Prof Nicola Maffulli (GBR), Prof Neil Armstrong (GBR), and David Hemery CBE.

Chairs: Professor Craig Sharp, Professor Colin Boreham, Professor Fred Yeadon, Professor Lew Hardy, Dr. John Atkinson, Mr. John Aldridge and Professor Greg Whyte.

Kelly's wedding with best man Kyle Shewfelt

Kelly Manjak (CAN) will be presenting on Coaching Issues.

Manjak coached Kyle Shewfelt to the Olympic gold medal … in Athens as well as a fourth place finish on the vault. Manjak and Shewfelt worked together for 16 years …

Coaching Association of Canada

British Gymnastics – Congress home page

I spent many afternoons looking through hundreds of video clips. This site has a TON of content. Amazing.

One of my favourite clips is this progression for forward whip on Floor. Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

One more. A great drill to improve sole circle low to high. The clip shows what happens when the girl misses.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Instead of using elite demonstrators, the performances are realistic to the level of the girls appropriate to each drill. (The clips are not so intimidating when you bring your laptop into the gym and show a drill to your kids.)

Bottom line: GymDrills.com is an excellent new resource for WAG coaches. A good investment for club owners:

• Free per 7 Days (Trial)
• 3.99 USD per 1 Month (Monthly Membership)
• 35.00 USD per 1 Year (Year Membership)

You can now add your own videos to their database.

If members upload 2 approved drills a month or 20 for the year they can get a free membership.

Congratulations to Will Vaughn for putting this together. I’m a fan.

GymDrills.com

Either in the Gatineau / Ottawa region or Montreal. This is a tremendous opportunity to complete both Level 2 and 3 Technical in a very concentrated period of time!

Confirmed instructors are Dr. Keith Russell and Guy Lavoie so instruction will be of the highest level.

contact – jthomson AT gymcan.org

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

This is a video of the 2007 Jr MAG Tirrenia training camp, hosted by the European Union of Gymnastics held in Italy every year. This DVD was produced specifically for the Swiss Gymnatics Federation, and thus has only partial translation in English. Majority of DVD is in German and some French, with very limited english translations. However a lot of the concepts and ideas are understandable even without a translation. …

DVD CONTENT
PHYSICAL PREPARATION – (3min)
POMMEL HORSE- presented by Valeri Belenki (GER)(Former Olympic and World Champion and member of the German coaching staff) (8min)

PARALLEL BARS – Valeri Belenki (GER) (16min)

HIGH BAR – presented by Rudolph Bouché (FRA) (professor of sport and technical framework at the Training Center of Antibes) (12min)

45min total – DVD costs $25

details – The Gym Press – “How to beat China” 2007 Tirrenia Training Camp

If you haven’t checked it lately, there’s a ton of great stuff in The Gym Press Article Archive and Video Archive.

Thanks Valentin Uzunov, editor, one of the most serious students of our game.

Here’s there biggest sellers from the past year. (In case you didn’t get the ones you wanted for Christmas.)

SETS
Mas Watanabe’s Tumbling Set
Tony Gehman’s Advance Tumbling Set
Mas Watanabe’s Bar Set
Mas Watanabe’s Vaulting Series
Beth Gardner’s Preschool and Rec Gym 1-3

SINGLE DVDs:
Tammy Biggs – Leaps and Jumps
Tammy Biggs – Beam Complexes
Mary Lee Tracy – Core Strength
Mary Lee Tracy – Circuit Training
Tammy Biggs – Flexibility
Tony Retrosi – 5 Bar Skills
Tammy Biggs – Round-off
Tammy Biggs- Flipping Drills
Tammy Biggs – Aerials

GymSmarts is Tom & Reiko Beach. Click through to their home page if you want more information. Most DVDs are $30.

GymSmarts.com

He sells his gymnastics coaching Clinics on DVD for $25 each.

There are some free “teaser” clips on his Videos page. One sample.

Looks great.

There are more free Bar training tutorials on his YouTube Channel. (If you’re a Bar coach, you need to see those. Awesome.)

SUBSCRIBE to Enrique’s channel if you want him to post more video.

(via Coaching Gymnastics in the New Millenium)

I like it.

I wish more coaches would document their favourite drills on video and make them available to the world.

The quality of the drills is high. The quality of the video, average. Some demonstrators show minor form and technical errors.

I was pleased to find some drills I’d never seen before.

The biggest problem with the site, as with (to a lesser extent) the similar American Gymnast Gymnastics on Demand is the navigation. It’s not perfect on either site … but GymDrills has one killer feature. Fill in the SEARCH box with “Pak” and only those videos tagged with that word appear on the resulting list.

The 5 star rating system on each video will be useful when enough users rate them.

I do have a few quibbles with GymDrills.com.

I’m not a fan of the Microsoft .WMV video format. But they do play on a Mac if you get the free Flip4Mac plugin.

The database has great potential for growth too, I think. Seems GymDrills can continue to add new clips into the future. At some point registered users may be able to upload clips.

I like that videos from other sources (even GymnasticsCoaching) have been included. They are free to watch, even if you are not a paid member.

Cost of access to this site is inexpensive:

• Free per 7 Days (Trial)
• 3.99 USD per 1 Month (Monthly Membership)
• 35.00 USD per 1 Year (Year Membership)

If cost is a big barrier to you, sign up for the free week and watch every video during those 7 days.

I’d love to see GymDrills offer, as another option, a Freemium business model in future.

… offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features …

A good sampling of videos could be free. Other videos and services (e.g. chat room) should be available for paid members.

Certainly as of today Gymnastics on Demand is a better service … but it costs $9.95 per month as compared with $3.99 per month for GymDrills.

I think both sites are great!

Both are highly recommended.

Check out GymDrills.com for yourself.

I posted some photos from my 9 day coaching course in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

As you see, my camera is very bad in low light. Actually the gym has some nice indirect natural light … but my camera still did not work in that facility.

See the rest of my pics from this course.

I’ll be posting a report and details on the excellent course soon.

Bangladesh is looking for international coaches who would like to volunteer at this gym for a minimum of 3 months.

The other day I was watching the workout of our level 5 and 7 teams during my break.

The level 5’s were working on vault and they were doing the front handspring drill. The drill was to develop good blocking action by using the under arm swing when they punch the board. I was impressed because the entire group was doing the same under arm swing and all the girls were reaching their hands to the table very quickly. Most of the girls were getting a quick turn over of the body from the board and getting a fairly good blocking action.

Of course their handspring vaults weren’t even close to perfect, but the consistent emphasis of good technique was very evident.

Then I looked over to the bars, there were level 7 girls doing back giants, but some of them were still working on their three-quarter giant.

Here too, I was very pleased to see that all the girls were trying to use a proper tap swing to make the giant. Some of their body positions were not good yet, but the tapping action was there. Also, the girls who were struggling with the three-quarter giant were also using the tapping action to kick stronger and lift the swing higher.

I could tell that they will eventually learn a good back giant if they continuously try that way.

Educating all the staff so they teach the specific technique on key skills is not so easy. Many of the younger coaches do not have much coaching experience. …

read the rest – In-house Staff Education

Mas coaches at the excellent Byers Gymnastics Clubs in California.

How is the Staff training at your gym?

Level 4 Canadian beam clinic 2007