Meanwhile, it was another busy week in Lee Valley, with a couple of Team GB World Champions (Philips Idowu & Dai Green) heading down to train at the centre in a change from their normal places of sweat & toil.  As you can see from my photograph, I however, did manage take a day of annual leave to go to the filming of this weekend's Top Gear show & for those of you that saw it, you will no doubt the staggeringly handsome chap stood next to the Merc C63 Black...er & then saw me standing next to him, during the studio shots.

Another visitor to the Pleasure Dome was Carlo Buzzichelli, a strength & conditioning coach from the Tudor Bompa Institute in Tuscany, Italy.  Carlo was over watching some of the training sessions & to chat with Dan Pfaff but we got chance to have a chat about some of his training philosophies & approaches to conditioning.  Carlo has worked in track & field as well as with power lifting, football & other elite performance athletes & is a well respected authority in his field.

Carlo is very passionate about individualising training programmes using as much data from force plates & heart rate monitors to establish appropriate loading quantities, evaluate responses to training & quality of recovery.  With respect to Olympic lifting to achieve strength gains, he advocates less work done in the 85% 1RM zones, whilst instead concentrating on developing a smooth technique with explosive conduction to ensure intermuscular co-ordination, neuromuscular efficiency & adaptations without suffering the fatigue effects of training more heavily on a frequent basis, particularly in beginners.  He argues that this approach of training a perfect technique with no "sticking point", followed by just a short period of lifting in the 90% zones, has been shown in Soviet literature & in practice with Eastern European power lifters to give the highest transfer for 1 RM loads improvement.

In May last year, Carlo did a fascinating interview with Bret Contreras, for Bret's blog &  I really recommend taking the time to read it by clicking on the link below:

I certainly learnt a lot from the time spent talking & the new found knowledge will definitely influence my programming.  So thank you, Carlo, for taking the time to discuss your thoughts & I hope to see you in Italy next time!

In the meantime, I am now in Manchester making sure my very good friend, Nick More, sees out his penultimate weekend as a single man in true stag style!!!