Jeremy Hall

Despite a seemingly endless supply of training programs promising enhanced athletic performance, the same questions inevitably plague strength and conditioning coaches. How do you initiate an athlete's strength program and progress it over the course of not just a season, but a career? How will you know when it is time to progress, and how can you avoid the consequences of overtraining? How can you develop an athlete's work capacity while increasing strength, power, and speed without completely sacrificing one quality for another? The answer to all of those questions lies in the systematic approach to program design outlined in The System. Hall of Fame strength coaches Johnny Parker, Al Miller, and Rob Panariello have spent their entire careers studying, testing, and refining the best practices and methods of Soviet-era sports science into a modern, practical approach to strength and conditioning for long-term athletic development. Their system of scientific programming and coaching produced not only powerful and resilient athletes, but also dominant championship teams spanning over three decades. Their distilled lessons and experiences will teach you: A structured approach to advance a novice athlete to a stronger and more powerful performerWhy simplicity in exercise selection is one key to athletic developmentThe critical training variables that can make or break progressHow planned-not random-variations in training will yield progressive and sustained physical gainsHow to integrate lifting, running, and jumping together to build explosive athletesThis book provides more than just a system of principles for optimal strength and conditioning program design. Rather, it provides an education in both the science and the art of coaching and will help you develop what the authors call the "Eye of the Coach" to ensure continued success for both you and your athletes.

Jeremy Hall's childhood in the white-ruled apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and '60s was ostensibly idyllic: growing up in the farming areas of Natal, he had free rein to pander to his keen exploratory mind, yet niggling away was entrenched racism and interracial hatred. Closeted in the hallowed halls of an English-speaking high school, the revelation of the real world that followed - a world of township unrest, Afrikaner politicians issuing dire warnings of the red and black hordes massing on the borders - exploded into Hall's psyche with his national-service call-up into the South African Defence Force (SADF), where he encountered the institutionalized hatred of the Afrikaner hierarchy for the English-speaking recruits, the rowe, or 'scabs'. Disillusioned and unsettled, following his SADF conscription, Hall found himself in 1976 signing on for three years with 2 Commando The Rhodesian Light Infantry as the bush war in that country erupted from a simmering, lowkey insurgency into full-blown war. As a paratrooper with this crack airborne unit, he was to see continual combat on Fireforce operations and cross-border raids into Zambia and Mozambique, such as Operation Dingo, the 1977 Rhodesian attack on ZANLA's Chimoio base.

We all need God, Sister Jeremy says in her first sentence, and readers of all sorts will find here a warm and practical address to that need. The monastic way is not forsaking the world, but for the sake of the world, and Sister Jeremy's Benedictine wisdom is fundamental human wisdom. Her book is the fruit of decades of practice, and the spiritual journey she recounts is nobody's but hers 'which makes it, paradoxically, something from which everyone can learn. I did is much more effective teaching than one might or you should. There is nothing musty, cobwebbed, or nostalgic in these pages. Sister Jeremy, in her late 80s, is totally alert to the world around her and within us. She is allergic to sentimentality. Because she has spent so much time in silence 'she lived as a hermit for 20 years ' she is especially attentive to words and how like a chameleon they can be. Her antennae are sensitive to anything phony. Every sentence glows with her graceful and witty and hospitable spirit. She is an inspired teacher, a trustworthy guide, one of God's great ones. She shows how a monastic is not on a pedestal or behind a wall, but right in the thick of things with all of us. Jeremy Hal, OSB, is a member of Saint Benedict's Monastery, St. Joseph, Minnesota. She holds a doctorate in theology from Marquette University. Currently retired, Sister Jeremy taught theology at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University and School of Theology 'seminary, and at Creighton University. She is the author of numerous articles as well as The Full Stature of Christ (Liturgical Press). Sister Jeremy lived as a hermit for twenty years. During that time she gained renown as a wellspring of wisdom and gifted retreat leader.