Last weekend in Athlone IT, there was a huge turnout of coaches and athletes from Ireland National Jumps Squad to attend the Long and Triple Jump Masterclass with John Shepherd (UK). John is a former international Long Jumper and now coach. He is a regular contributor to ‘Athletics Weekly’ and has produced a large number of technical videos on his You Tube channel.

Athletes and coaches were taken through a huge number of progressions in relation to improving warm up, developing specific movement patterns for jumps, understanding the different phases of the jumps and overall preparation and training. Noticeable developments were seen in athletes that were able to attend the two days and many coaches commented on the changes that they would introduce into their training programs.

Athletics Ireland Field Event Coordinator Dave Sweeney said that he was delighted to be able to bring in quality coaches like John Shepherd, Fuzz Caan (High Jump) and Sergej Litvinov (Hammer) in the last couple of months and put this down to the current AAI High Performance team focus on Coach mentoring and development. He hopes to be able to continue with different programs in the 2020.