By Fg Off Charlie Todd

The first coaching weekend of the season was hosted at DCAE Cosford and was a resounding success. With a small but select group of around 10 athletes it was all about quality not quantity!

Paul Wilson, an experienced coach with International athletes among his group, very generously agreed to donate some of his time and travel down from York to provide some coaching on the Saturday. His knowledge, enthusiasm and unique motivational skills were happily received by all with valuable lessons about conditioning being learnt at a critical time of the season. Sessions included: weights, core exercises, drills and throws skills training, which saw everyone trying and learning something new that perhaps wouldn’t have been an automatic choice. This will hopefully allow people the option to compete in alternative events in the upcoming season as well as strengthening themselves for their own individual events.

We are extremely grateful to Paul for coming along and giving us such a great day of training along with a vast array of ideas to go away with. Paul has also very kindly offered to provide and tailor schedules for individual athletes, if you are interested, please send me a Query.

All work and no play…… Of course we managed to go out to the local pub for a meal on Saturday night where a massive feast was needed to replenish our aching bodies! It was lovely to be able to get to know some newcomers, to talk through our goals for the season, and vitally, discuss our X Factor predictions!

Sunday saw some very tired arms/legs/cores- you name a muscle and yes, it hurt…

However, being tough and proud RAF athletes, we pushed on! Our Men’s Team Manager, Flt lt Ben Trapnell, took a great track session - again one of Paul’s new ideas: 1x400m, 2x300m, 3x200m, 4x100m. It was hard, but beneficial for all athletes at this early stage of conditioning. We all felt a sense of achievement at the end, and now have the confidence to be able to put ourselves through similar sessions on return to our home Units. To finish off the weekend, we did some basic Pilates work, which will compliment every aspect of training, particularly the all important core exercises.

All in all, the weekend produced some hard and excellent training in a very light-hearted environment. Pain made bearable!

My thanks to everyone who attended and put so much effort into the weekend. If you would like to attend the next weekend being held at DCAE Cosford on the 5-6 December, send me a Query or check the information on the main coaching page.