Dan Cleather > Quotes

“Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.  After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick.  Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.  The height of cultivation is really nothing special.  ...  It is the halfway cultivation that leads to ornamentation.”
Bruce Lee”
― Dan Cleather, The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom: How to train to improve at any sport

“The justification for progressive overload can easily be derived from a consideration of the GAS.  We overload an organism by asking it to perform a demanding task – that is, we apply a stress to the organism, and the organism adapts in a way that accommodates the demands of that stress.  In particular, there is an increase in the performance capability associated with the task.”
― Dan Cleather, The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom: How to train to improve at any sport

“The process of becoming an excellent coach therefore also involves the retraining of our intuition such that we see the sporting world through Newton’s eyes.”
― Dan Cleather, Force: The biomechanics of training

“Ultimately, very often one of the key factors in sports performance is the ability of the athlete to change their velocity or the velocity of an external object. Running, acceleration, jumping, throwing, lifting, striking and changing direction all involve a change in velocity, for instance: How high we jump is entirely dependent on our velocity at the point we leave the ground; How far we throw is largely dependent on the velocity of the implement at the point of release; Change of direction (e.g. cutting) requires the athlete to decelerate their motion in the direction of travel, and then re-accelerate in a new direction.”
― Dan Cleather, Force: The biomechanics of training