Helping Athletes With Acute Injuries: Key Rehab Strategies with Dan Pope

I want to start with something I don’t say often enough.

The overwhelming majority of gyms I work with are full of people doing this beautifully.

I have coaches who text me at 9pm on a Tuesday to ask whether a kid can start rope climbs yet. Gym owners who rearrange an entire rotation so an athlete in a boot still has somewhere to belong. Parents who drive four h...

Here’s the thing most coaches miss about overhead flexibility: you can stretch the shoulder every single day and still watch a handstand line not improve.

That’s because full overhead motion is a kinetic chain, with many possible issues, and the first link isn’t the shoulder joint. When we understand the anatomy and stop yanking on the wrong tissue, we...

Let me say the quiet part out loud: without culture, everything else falls apart.

You can have the best drills, the best equipment, and the best skill progressions in the region — pair them with a bad culture and the result is still a loss. Culture is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and gymnastics is finally changing fast in this area. Thankfully.<...

Let me start with a mistake I made for years: long running workouts and panel-mat plyo lines as “off-season cardio.”

It felt like hard work, so it felt productive. But there’s a principle underneath this — the SAID principle (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands). Adaptations are specific to the exact demand you train. A gymnast grinding out laps is ...