I figured I would start here because it is probably the most important…because without the ‘who’ then why would anyone be bothered with the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ or even the ‘why’.
So from a young age 12-13 I was a competitive athlete…cross country and orienteering….competitive to the point that I competed nationally and internationally. This was back in the day prior to the interwebs and where in order to get better you actually had to listen to your coaches….and do as you were told…and if you were lucky and smart you would find a good coach and apply yourself and you’d get better. I say lucky and smart because you’d need to be lucky enough to have a coach nearby and smart enough to be able to see their body of work i.e athletes and pick a good one with a good track record.
What you also did back then was talk to other athletes…good ones and bad ones to see what the good ones did that worked and do more of that…and what the bad ones were doing so you could avoid that. I was particularly unsuited to the sport of my choosing…genetically I mean. So I was really pushing shit up hill and spent most of my athletic career training harder and smarter than everyone else in an effort to be almost as good. I read everything I could about training and spoke to everyone I could about training and I think I managed to connect enough dots to enjoy my athletic endeavours and compete at a high level.
I will move the story along because there is still a lot of ground to cover and we are still back in my teens and now I am closer to 50 than 40. So essentially I have been involved in sport and training since I was 12 and have been coaching since my teens. I have studied all over the world….from human biology, sport science, health science and lots of others things in between….including massage and nutrition. I have always studied and always read and have always coached. Through the nineties and noughties probably the smallest number of athletes I coached would have been 50 and at the most it was more than 250 and less than 350…somewhere in that realm…and these athletes ranges from professionals in lots of different sports, Olympians in lots of different sports, high level elite international and national level athletes in lots of different sports…I coached seniors and juniors….recreational athletes through to full time…anyway…it was lots of peeps and I say that not to impress you with numbers…just to say that what I have to tell you has been filtered through lots of people…I had to destroy lots of people to get good at what I did.
So I competed, I studied, I travelled country to country, worked in lots of different sports, stole heaps and heaps of coaches intellectual property and passed it off as my own, studied some more, gave lots of seminars, stole more coaching stuff and passed it off as my own and then burnt out towards the end of the last decade.
That brings us up to now….I still coach online…I still have a lot of contact with coaches and trainers in the industry as they are the people I know and still talk coaching and training at almost every opportunity.
So here we are….I am a former strength and conditioning coach who has been pretty much out of the game for a while but has regained some interest in giving a little back.
This past decade has seen me involved in a similar but different field professionally but instructing, coaching and training people still makes up a large portion of my work time teaching people how to defend themselves with or without the tools of our trade.
Now to the important bit….if there is stuff that you want to know…then ask….also…I am going to come back and edit this section as time passes so don’t be surprised if stuff here changes.
Will Heffernan 