Mid Ulster Strength and Conditioning

14/12/2024

Only 3 days left to enter to win a free Athletic Development workshop for your club at the start of 2025 💪🏻

06/12/2024

Safe to say I have been off the grid for a while quietly sharpening my craft in the background and as a consequence allowed the MUSC online presence to slip. Been a crazy few years professionally working at inter county level as Head of AD and now in my new role at Ulster rugby that I feel now is the right time to get back to promoting the brand and providing coaches/athletes with training snapshots and educational content that can be useful to them.

To mark the revival of Mid Ulster Strength and Conditioning I am planning to offer a FREE 2 hour Educational Athletic Development Workshop to a sports club (GAA,Rugby,Football,Hockey) in Ulster at the start of 2025. This workshop should cater for all coaches in your club and provide some upskilling and knowledge on a specific area of their choice within Athletic development (AD), some examples can include:

*Speed and Agility.
*Programming for certain age groups (u10-18)
*Designing AD within warm ups.
*Integrating AD within pitch based sessions.
*LTAD club pathway structuring (Athletic development focus).

To be in with a chance to win the FREE workshop for your club at the start of 2025 and kickstart the season for your coaches simply TAG your club team to the post in which youth officer/club coaches can follow up and email their workshop suggestions. *Only emails sent with club name,workshop suggestions will be put forward for selection* [email protected]

Winning club will be selected Monday 16th December. Good luck!

08/01/2021

Booklet COMING SOON!!!

30/12/2020

Review of MUSC in 2020. A challenging year but filled with mini personal successes along the way. Excited to see what 2021 has in store.

28/12/2020

23/12/2020

Exciting projects in store for 2021.. looking forward to launch our first product in January.. stay tuned.

22/12/2020

Interested in Strength Development for Female athletes? Check out the blog post I created on the impact of menstrual cycle and hormonal prevention on strength adaptations in females.

Resistance training has been a well-known popular training method in developing strength and power qualities in the athletic population. For female athletes, resistance training would be included i…

25/08/2020

BREATHING: One topic that never really gets talked about and is misunderstood by many gym goers is our breathing pattern during resistance training exercises. Will try to keep this short and sweet and make it easy. You might be tempted to hold your breath while lifting weight..please don't. Many beginners whilst lifting external resistance (Kettlebells,dumbbells, barbells) stop breathing during repetitive,low intensity lifts,either because they think it will make them stronger or because they forget. The way to breathe during resistance training will ultimately depend on your own work capacity with lifting. Ask around and you'll get all kinds of answers from trainers and coaches: Exhale when lifting; inhale while lowering; hold it hard during the lift; breathe out with effort.

When you are performing an exercise with a light weight, the breathing pattern does not really matter. Your body is not under a lot of stress and you can afford to breathe in any way that’s comfortable for you. As the weight gets heavier, it becomes increasingly important to raise your intra-abdominal pressure by using a forced exhale or using the valsava maneuver. This will not only increase your strength, it will also protect your spine.

Research backs up the safety and effectiveness of the situational Valsalva. A study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2010 found, that for subjects lifting at their one-rep maxes, this technique produced only minor and transient rises in blood pressure.It's worth emphasizing that the Valsalva maneuver is only for SHORT-duration, high-exertion efforts.An EXTENDED Valsalva maneuver like this can cause a dangerous spike in blood pressure, bursting blood vessels in your eyes and forehead, causing headaches and temporary vision disturbances.It could also cause you to faint on the spot, which has its own set of risks, no matter how good of a spotter you have.

Take home message: For those of you lifting with sub-maximal loads and lighter weights breathe naturally folks, for those guys and girls that are lifting huge breathe into your stomach and hold it whilst performing your lift,with a forced exhale as you come towards the end of your movement (make sure its for a short duration though).

25/07/2020

Delivered a webinar for Ulster GAA titled Managing Recovery during competition. With a condensed training and game schedule,the ability to adapt and recover efficiently are crucial..You can watch the webinar on this YouTube link

Ulster GAA coach and S&C specialist Mattie Brady will discuss strategies for training loads & reducing injuries during this shortened GAA season.

15/07/2020

🎊OUR WEBSITE IS NOW LIVE🎊

Been working quietly at this project for the last number of months in lockdown so it’s good to now finally make it viewable to the public.

I have written four blog posts and added infographics that I feel may be useful to those working with females, youth athletes and team sports.

Will hope to add more content over the coming months.

Have a read and let me know what you think

Using evidence and coaching based practice when directing our programming, Mid Ulster Strength and Conditioning was established in 2015 to help provide guidance and expertise to teams and individual athletes who want to be ambitious and driven to succeed within sport. Mid Ulster Strength and Conditi...

05/06/2020

With a potential restart of GAA activities on the horizon, here’s a selection of sample session plans that players can perform now that will expose them to speed/COD and aerobic focused conditioning.