If you missed USA Weightlifting Director of Sports Performance and Coaching Education Mike Gattone’s recent webinar, you can now view it on Youtube.
Titled “Teaching the full Olympic lifts: How to do it and why you should,” this webinar features Mike making the case for going beyond just using power clean and power snatch for your athletes and teaching them the full movements.
Mike talks about how the Olympic lifts can be used to help athletes increase their power output, and how the full version of the lifts can accentuate those gains.
He also provides a simple progression for advancing your athletes beyond power cleans and snatches towards the full lifts.
This webinar is loaded with insights drawn from the decades Mike has spent training athletes from a great variety of sports. Any coach interested in helping their athletes build explosive power will find it useful.
On Thursday, April 16th at 7:00pm CST, USA Weightlifting Director of Sports Performance and Coaching Education will be the featured presenter at a free webinar on “Teaching Athletes the Full Olympic Lifts.”
Mike has extensive experience in the field of sports performance. A hammer thrower in college, he has trained athletes from many different sports, including professional basketball players during a stint working under Al Vermeil with the Chicago Bulls.
In his current role at USAW, Mike has played a big part in transforming the US into a budding powerhouse in the sport of Olympic weightlifting.
His presentation is meant for any coach trying to help athletes maximize their explosive power. Mike will argue that the full Olympic lifts (as opposed to partial movements such as power cleans or power snatches) offer the best chance for an athlete to enhance their explosivenss.
During this presentation, attendees will be allowed to submit questions through the Q & A function, so this is a rare opportunity to pick the brain of one of the world’s best lifting coaches.
The Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association is offering .75 CEUs for this event.
Last night, Iowa throws coach Eric Werskey broke down the NCAA Championship discus technique of Laulauga Tausaga in a live Mcthows.com webinar. That presentation is now on Youtube.
If you coach the discus, you’ll want to check it out, as Eric provided some very interesting insights on technique, training, and the art of coaching.
Also, check out the @iowa_throws instagram page, as after the webinar Eric posted some additional vids of Lagi’s throws.
Also, check out this post in which Coach Werskey breaks down Lagi’s technique in written form.
Also, if for some strange reason you seem to have a lot of extra time on your hands, check out the vids of these previous webinars:
“Teaching Olympic Lifts to Throwers: Helpful Hints for Throws Coaches who Double as Strength Coaches” by Mary Theisen-Lappen the throws coach at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and a world class Olympic lifter herself.
“Discus Technique” by still another fine throws coach from suburban Chicago, Roger Einbecker.
“Rotational Shot Put Technique” with Jeff Rebholz, who gave this presentation when he was coaching at Towson, but has recently built an outstanding throws program at Illinois State University.
We also have a course on Coachtube called “Youth Discus Training in the German Athletics Federation” by German men’s national discus coach Torsten Lönnfors.
Mike Gattone is one of the best weightlifting coaches in the world. He trained gold medalist Tara Nott, studied the art of sports performance under the auspices of the great Al Vermeil, and in 2017 teamed with all-time great lifter Pyrros Dimas (that’s them in the photo) to lead an American renaissance in the sport of Olympic lifting.
More importantly, he threw the hammer in college.
This combination of experiences has made him uniquely qualified to weigh in on some of life’s great questions. Should throwers rack their cleans? Should they snatch? Should they do full, Olympic-style cleans and snatches?
Mike has some strong, evidence-based opinions on these matters that he will share in a free webinar on Thursday, April 16th at 7:00pm CST. It will be titled “Teaching the full Olympic lifts–how to do it and why you should.”
Attendees will be able to submit questions throughout. Don’t miss this chance to learn from a fantastic coach.
As a thrower, Eric Werskey trained under the auspices of two of America’s greatest coaches–Jerry Clayton and Art Venegas. As a coach, he has followed in their footsteps by mentoring outstanding throwers, first at Cal State Northridge then at the University of Iowa where he guided Laulauga Tausaga to the 2019 NCAA title in the discus.
In this webinar, Coach Werskey will break down Laulauga’s winning throw, and in the process reveal his approach to building championship caliber discus technique.
This presentation is free, and attendees will be able to submit questions throughout. It will take place on Thursday, April 9th at 7:00pm CST.
In this webinar, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh throws coach and world class Olympic lifter Mary Theisen-Lappen details her system for teaching the Olympic lifts to her throwers. She has developed a step-by-step approach that can be applied by coaches of any sport who would like to include these lifts in their athletes’ program.
Mary is a fantastic lifter and coach. If you are interested in improving your approach to coaching the platform lifts, this vid is definitely worth a look.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and nothing says “desperation” quite like a man of my advanced age spinning around on his driveway with a broom or a medicine ball.
I know what you’re thinking. “This guy will stop at nothing to entertain his neighbors.” But no, I actually started posting these drills last week as a way of helping my throwers work on their technique.
I decided to share them with anyone out there who would also like to encourage their throwers to drill fundamentals but would rather not risk gaining a reputation as “that idiot next door” by filming their own.
The first one is here. There are more queued up on my youtube page, and more to come.
Thanks much to Kip Gasper and Cody Foerch of Deerfield (IL) High School for presenting their favorite discus drills in yesterday’s webinar! If you missed it, or if you’d like to review some of those drills, the webinar has now been posted to Youtube and can be found here.
We hope that spending an hour focused on the sport we love was therapeutic to everyone who joined us, and we will do our best to get some more webinars lined up to try to help fill the void.
Follow us on Twitter (@McthrowsDotcom), Instagram (@djmcquaid) and Facebook (Mcthrows.com) for info on upcoming presentations.
If you coach the throws, something tells me you have some time on your hands right now. What better way to fill the void than to log on to a free webinar where you can pick up some tips on teaching discus technique and maybe commiserate a bit with other folks in your shoes?
Kip Gasper and Cody Foerch of Deerfield (IL) High School will be the presenters. You may remember those gents from last year’s “Rotational Shot Putting the Deerfield High School Way.” They’ve built a fantastic throws program at Deerfield and are ready to share some of their favorite discus drills this time around.
Participants will be able to submit questions throughout the presentation, which will begin at 12:00 CST. Register here to join us.
