Best of Complementary Training in 2014

2014… This has been the greatest year for me so far – I’ve got married to the best girl in the world and we got our first child. What could one possible ask for more?

Sometimes we forget to appreciate the things we already have while seeking things we don’t (and we don’t usually need). I am guilty of this as anyone else. I only wish I start realizing and appreciating more how lucky MF I actually am.

I have been away from my family for three months due my recent relocation to Doha/Qatar to start working for Aspire Academy. This made me think of all those things I take for granted, and I cannot wait to get back to Serbia for a week in the January. This has been the first New Year’s Eve that I overslept alone and hopefully the last I will spend without my family.

Let me quote William Irvine from A Guide to Good Life, a book I probably need to re-read many times and try to practice much more:

“One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get. And because we have probably failed to take such steps in the past, there are doubtless many things in our life to which we have adapted, things that we once dreamed of having but that we now take for granted, including, perhaps, our spouse, our children, our house, our car, and our job.”

I tend to say that this “hedonic adaptation” keeps us as a species on a collective level always moving forward and always striving for more, but leaves us as an individuals miserable, unless we learn how to deal with this “grass is always greener somewhere else” mindset which seems to be in our genes.

Anyway, other great things happened in 2014, like the new startup of Complementary Training as a website and community rather than just a blog. One person helped me tremendously in this makeover: Mihailo Tomić who is my Webmaster and partner in crime. We are both working on making this much better experience, along with me working on a new state of the art Athlete Management System on top of the Smartabase platform, which should be available very soon.

I also become much more versed in R, machine learning/data mining and statistics in general, along with getting very familiar with Microsoft PowerBI tools: PowerPivot, PowerQuery and PowerMap that I use almost daily to solve common issues most sport organizations have (I always say that coaches and sport scientist should read more business books – no need to reinvent the wheel especially when business people are using certain tools and ideas for decades).

Complementary Training achieved very good success in 2014, something we hoped for, but never expected. There were some good articles posted in 2014, that got good amount of hits and interest, and which I would like to share again with you here in the case you missed them.

I wish happy and healthy New 2015 to everyone and hope that Complementary Training brings much more quality material and food for thought along with expanding to real community of active members that share and contribute to the overall experience. And let us not forget and practice the ancient art of Stoicism. All the best!

Set and Rep Schemes in Strength Training

This is the article I originally wrote for EliteFTS website that besides describing very useful Load/Exertion table, clears up terminology and provide conceptual framework for designing a strength training program (or any other program for that matter), along with providing the overview of the most common sets and rep schemes at the workout, week and training block time frame. Continue reading »

Planning the In-Season Microcycle in Soccer

I started this article series with the aim to motivate readers to share on their problems and solutions of microcycle design during the in-season. Mark Williams, Mick McDermott and Paraskevas Polychronopoulos share their case studies. This article series has seven parts and covers much intricate of the in-season programming, including the strength training program we run in Sweden that also got published at EliteFTS. Continue reading »

What Do You Need to Know as Sport Scientist Besides Sport Science

In this article I provide my rationale why it is important to have other supporting skills and also provide great list of where to acquire them. Continue reading »

How to Create Individualized Exercise Profile in Strength Training

This was basically a result of a small pilot study that I did on myself and my gym goers utilizing VBT – Velocity Based Training. Some of the insights in this series are very novel and not yet recognized nor studied by the community. It explains how to create and utilize exercise profile for lifters. Want to be on top of you game with VBT? Continue reading »

Individualization of Training – Are You Doing It Right?

This is the screen cast I made for HIT Conditioning guide in which I also cover some of the (mental) models we use in individualizing training, that might not cover the volatile nature of the training. If you want to find out more on this topic make sure to also check the webinar I did for Evolution of Athlete Conference. Continue reading »

Making Sense of the GPS Data

We all collect a bunch of metrics and the next step is to make sense of it. In this article I presented simple visualization tricks using outlier detection (LOF algorithm) and clustering. Continue reading »

Idealism vs Pragmatism

An article that goes into irrational nature of coaching, the dangers of feedback and much more. Continue reading »

Sport Specific of Culture Specific

I might say that this might be the most important article I wrote in 2014. It goes into discussions of similarities and differences of physical preparation in different sports.
Continue reading »