Making athletes robust
ro·bust
(r
-b
st
, r
b
st
)
adj.
1. Full of health and strength; vigorous.
2. Powerfully built; sturdy.
3. Requiring or suited to physical strength or endurance: robust labour.
4. Rough or crude; boisterous: a robust tale.
5. Marked by richness and fullness; full-bodied: a robust wine.
[Latin r
bustus, from r
bur, r
bus, oak, strength; see reudh- in Indo-European roots.]
bustus, from r
bur, r
bus, oak, strength; see reudh- in Indo-European roots.]ro·bust
ly adv.
ly adv.ro·bust
ness n.
ness n.Robust is a word I use a lot in working with young athletes– giving an idea of a goal to work towards in the short term before we develop them further. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t know what it means!
Naseem Taleb in his book antifragile discounts robust and resilient because they just maintain the status quo. Instead “antifragile” means you actually develop and improve as a result of stress.

England Hockey talk about “robustness training” but then send their players on endless jogs around the pitch, then having them endure 6 hours of low level “busy work” on camps.
I work on an integrated approach, developing young players progressively, starting with a movement asessment, then into fundamental work, and finally into the full training programme.

[…] as we saw last week, we are looking to make you more robust. This will allow you to do those movements Faster, Further or with […]