The High Performance Programme has just completed a very successful training camp in Italy as part of the pre-Beijing ISSF World Cup preparations which featured the attendance of top international sports psychologist and high performance support staff member Professor Peter Terry. In overall control of the training programme was High Performance Director Kevin Kilty.
The camp took place over a 12 day period and was a key milestone marking the start of preparations proper for the run up to the Olympic Games in August.
With the approach of the World Cup in Beijing in less than 3 weeks it was an ideal opportunity to embark upon a series of evaluations and tasks designed to measure the current levels of performance within the team.
Professor Terry brought in a Phd student from Italy, Alessandria Mecozzi to assist in the evaluations.
This evaluation work was combined with an ongoing training plan which has been devised by the High Performance director to bring about a controlled increase in performance designed to culminate at the Olympic Games in August.
During this process several events are marked out to measure the effectiveness of the programme and to afford an opportunity to make changes as and if necessary.
Quite a high volume of shooting training was undertaken and several days were marked out for “overload training” where the athletes are pushed further than normal.
Following these sessions a recovery period was introduced to allow the benefits of the overload training to take effect before a return to normal training.
A major feature of this camp was that a number of competitions would be taking place locally at the various clubs over the Easter period and the Team took the opportunity to spread its time around several different grounds to maximise their competitive exposure.
Further preparation work for the squad is now underway and more progress has to be made ahead of the ISSF World Cups in Beijing and the USA.
In the coming months Italy will be used on an increasing basis as a training centre for advanced shooting and competition preparation as part of the High Performance Programme and we can only hope that these sessions are as productive as the one just passed.
