There are people who would love to have your bad day.

Sam Gardner joined us for The 2019 Seminar to educate our attendees on Para Sport, and what training these amazing athlete’s entails. Sam starts out the talk with a little “myth busters” trying to dispel some of the misnomers around Para Sport. He then shares with us a history, or not just Para Sport, but his history, the development of the program here in The USA as well. Sam then discusses the differences coaches will encounter and need to consider when working with athletes with different limitations.

Sam then shares with us how they have started to build sport and athlete profiles. This started for Sam with sport cycling, a sport he never worked with, let alone worked with Para Sport athletes in. He shares with us how the medical research along communication with coaches has driven this for each individual sport. He then shows us an example of where all of that work lead to a world championship, and everything went wrong in the beginning.

Sam then brings us into the weight room and shares with us some assessments they run with their athletes, and how they impact programming. This includes how their assessments are involved in his return to play programming, and how they’ve altered the set-up of some of these evaluations so they can incorporate these tests more efficiently. He touches upon programming, how we (as coaches) look at training for the most part, and gives multiple examples of how different athletes in the same sport require unique modifications based on their impairments.