ALTIS

What if the warm-up is the most underused coaching tool in sport?

In this clip, Stu McMillan challenges a habit that exists across almost every level of coaching.

If today's session is acceleration, why does the first 20 minutes look nothing like acceleration?

Why explain the objective, then send athletes off to jog laps, stretch, and complete a series of disconnected activities before the real work begins?

Stu's argument is simple:

The session starts with the first rep.

The warm-up should reinforce the theme of the day, focus the athlete's attention, and give coaches an opportunity to observe movement, ask questions, and solve problems in real time.

A few ideas worth considering:

• Match the warm-up to the objective of the session
• Introduce key concepts while athletes are moving
• Focus on the one or two things that matter most today
• Observe before you coach
• Use the warm-up to build your coaching eye
• Create more opportunities to rehearse the skills you're trying to improve

As Stu points out:

"We do more warm-ups than anything else."

Hundreds of sessions each year. Hundreds of opportunities to coach.

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🔎 Movement leaves clues.

Your job as a coach is to learn how to read them.

We’ve prepared a free guide: Coaching Eye 101, to help you build the foundations of seeing movement with clarity.

Inside you’ll learn directly from Coach Pfaff:

• where your eyes should go first
• how to organise what you see
• the early movement clues that matter
• simple frames to help you understand any athlete’s stride

🔗 Get your free guide, including ebook and accompanying webinar recording: https://loom.ly/uXtc61A

Last week, our Team Speed Coach Certification cohort came together for our Team Speed Live Call #5, held the evening before many of us gathered in San Diego for the ALTIS Speed Summit.

With coaches joining from around the world, the conversation featured current projects, case studies, and coaching questions that our cohort are actively working through.

One topic that generated a lot of discussion was deceleration, and CoD.

As Les explained, deceleration & CoD feature some of the most demanding actions in sport.

Involving:

• Rapid triple flexion
• High eccentric braking forces
• Significant tendon and joint stress
• Very short time frames to absorb and redirect force

The demands increase based on:

• Entry speed
• Available stopping distance
• Change of direction angle
• The reactive nature of the task

A high-speed 180-degree cut with limited space to slow down places very different demands on the athlete than a gradual directional change with room to brake.

For team sport coaches, this raises an important question:

How much time do we spend teaching athletes how to slow down compared to how much time we spend teaching them how to speed up?

A thoughtful discussion and one of many coaching conversations that carried through into the Speed Summit weekend.

Every planning model began with a coach trying to solve a problem. 🔍

That’s the thread Stu McMillan pulls on in this new eBook - Periodization: A Historical Story.

If you don’t know Stu: he’s our CEO at ALTIS, a coach of multiple Olympic and World Championship medalists, and someone who has spent decades studying how athletes adapt and how training ideas evolve.

In this eBook, he tells the story of periodization through the problems each era faced:

🐂 Milo lifting a calf that grew heavier every day
🏭 Taylor breaking work into pieces to make industry more efficient
🧪 Selye searching for a biological explanation for stress and adaptation
📅 Matveev organising thousands of athletes across a national system
🏋️‍♂️ Verkhoshansky responding to the realities of explosive event training
🎯 Bondarchuk following what actually transferred to performance instead of what theory predicted

Piece by piece, you see how ideas shifted long before they became “models.”

This ebook will help you understand why these concepts emerged and why the load–response relationship still sits at the centre of effective coaching.

Any coach wanting a clearer sense of how planning really took shape, and how this can inform their decision-making will find this a valuable read.

🔗 Download free: https://loom.ly/szcdejU

Before you commit to a master's degree, ask a simple question:

Who is teaching you?

At ALTIS Higher Education, you'll learn from coaches, practitioners, and performance leaders whose experience spans Olympic sport, professional sport, national programs, military performance, and coach education.

The curriculum is applied. The discussions are grounded in practice. The goal is to help you become a better coach.

Everything else follows from there.

Applications for the ALTIS MSc in Strength, Conditioning & Coaching, September 2026 cohort are now open.

⏬ Comment MSC below and we'll DM you more info.

Before you commit to a master's degree, ask a simple question:

Who is teaching you?

At ALTIS Higher Education, you'll learn from coaches, practitioners, and performance leaders whose experience spans Olympic sport, professional sport, national programs, military performance, and coach education.

The curriculum is applied. The discussions are grounded in practice. The goal is to help you become a better coach.

Everything else follows from there.

Applications for the ALTIS MSc in Strength, Conditioning & Coaching, September 2026 cohort are now open.

🔗 Learn more: https://loom.ly/NngVqOo

Day 2 is in the books.

Today we explored some of the biggest questions facing coaches and performance practitioners: monitoring, specificity and transfer, return to play, and the standards of evidence we use to guide our decisions. We also heard keynote presentations from John Griffin, Maggie Bryant, and Cam Josse, before finishing the day with open practice and deeper conversations across the Summit floor.

Tomorrow, we bring those ideas onto the field.

Our final day includes practical sessions with Les Spellman, Stuart McMillan, Javier Miller-Estrada, Victor Hall, Danny Foley, Chris Guarin, and CiCi Murray, covering acceleration, game speed, warm-up design, movement preparation, and strength development in live coaching environments.

One more day.

Questions Over Answers.

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June 12–14 📅

➡️ Register your interest for the digital package here and be the first to hear more: https://loom.ly/F0rHdTg

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