David Gil has become a frequent conversational partner of mine going back to the Coaching Conversations original series. I had him talk with members of the Medaille women’s team about preparing for preseason. He was on with a strength coach from Florida State to talk about building athlete work capacity. And it started with him joining the head coach of James Madison to talk about using performance data in coaching.

The foundation of this conversation is the subject of warm-ups, whether pre-match or pre-practice. Because David had recently been looking at (and talking about) some concussion data, that ended up being a thread of our talk as well.

In the episode David refers to the work of Dr. Kerry MacDonald – Director of Sports Science & Sports Medicine for Volleyball Canada – with regards to the concussion topic. Although it’s not on that subject, here’s a conversation David and Kerry had on training periodization challenges.

And there’s that old blog post that stimulated the “controversy” that motivated David to email me: Are your warm-ups wasting valuable time?

David also joked about some conversations we’ve had before about using the mile run as a fitness test, which i something I’ve also blogged about in The mile run for volleyball players.

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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

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John Forman
John Forman

John is currently the Talent Strategy Manager (oversees the national teams) and Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England, as well as Global Director for Volleyball for Nation Academy. His volleyball coaching experience includes all three NCAA divisions, plus Junior College, in the US; university and club teams in the UK; professional coaching in Sweden; and both coaching and club management at the Juniors level. He's also been a visiting coach at national team, professional club, and juniors programs in several countries. Learn more on his bio page.

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