South East Coaching Workshop 2022 - Joey Doherty (Lead S&C Coach, Waterford GAA)

Joey Doherty is the lead Strength & Conditioning Coach with the Waterford GAA Talemt Academies and we were delighted to have present for the coaches who attended the South East Coaching Workshop 2022 in the WIT Arena, Carriganore.

He has coached, played and studied around the world, across a range of sports for almost a decade. His aim is to combine his experience of competitive sports and coaching, with his S&C knowledge to give aspiring athletes the best foundation for their sporting careers. Joey gave an excellent presentation that will be massively helpful for coaches who are looking for info on team prep, injury prevention and warmups.

Coaching Notes:
• Training is a process. It does not produce instant results. Training to be a professional in any walk of life takes time, similar to training to become an elite athlete, it will take time.

• Speed and strength are skills. While some athletes will have more natural abilities due to the environment they are raised in, both skills are learnable.

• The trend in sport is to run athletes into the ground so they leave training and feel tired for 2 days. This is NOT beneficial to your athletes. Killing lads is not our aim. High quality work will produce high quality results. There is no need to flog a dead horse!

• Train smart not hard

Speed Notes:
• You will never get faster running slowly

• Recovery time is not wasted time. It is essential to perform at the required level.

• The intensity must be high enough to produce results. If an athlete is tired, they cannot reach 100% effort and therefore will never become faster.

• The rest time needs to be long enough so that the athlete can perform at 100% again

• Once we see fatigue, our window of improving speed is gone

• High quality and high quantity, until the athlete becomes tired

• Speed kills! There is no substitute for speed in field sports

Agility Notes:
• Generally, the faster people run circles, the faster they are for field sports

• Track footballs and sliotars with our head and eyes while our body moves and reacts beneath us

• Field sports generally require movement in all different directions. Forwards, backwards left and right.