ASDC Northwest | Alberta Sport Development Centre

Hello, this is Pierce Hnatiuk.

I’m the High Performance Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Alberta Sport Development Centre Northwest. This is the first entry in what will hopefully be an ongoing and descriptive account of what it takes to train like a high performance athlete. Now as you may or may not know, I have been involved in pretty close to all levels of sport in a wide variety of sports, everything from Swimming, to Volleyball, to Rugby, to Team Handball, and more. I’ve played in tournaments across the country and the world, and performed in front of crowds in the tens of thousands. I’ve experienced the joys of a great victory, the disappointment of a bad loss, the pain of a potential career ending injury, and the self accomplishment of a huge comeback. When I say I have experience training at high level sports, it may be an understatement. However even with all of this experience and work, I don’t consider myself done yet, not by a long shot. After all of my education that I’ve got on the subject, I thought, “if I had applied half of this to my own training, I could have been 10 times the athlete I was”. Which as stated I was already a pretty good athlete, but I think it’s never too late and would like to see how good I can still be.

So back to the purpose of this blog, I am going to take the next step with my training and formally begin an athlete training program for myself. I played Team Handball at the provincial level and had to quit a few years back due to a knee injury that I needed surgery for. The knee is better now, but I’m horribly out of practice, and my aerobic system isn’t anywhere near where it was when I had to stop. I would also like to increase my overall strength, power and fitness to make me a better player and athlete. As well I think that there is an interest in the community to play some Team Handball and maybe start a couple teams here and that can work to benefit my training. Although I’m going to try to centre my training on Team Handball, I’m sure there will be elements of training that I may talk about related more to other sports. I think however Handball is a sport that not many people know a lot about, but is actually a very relatable sport for most athletes. It incorporates the anaerobic burst of power like in Hockey, the jumping and overhead arm action of Volleyball, the team movement and dribbling of Basketball, court usage and tactics of Soccer, etc. It obviously lends more to team sports than individual ones, but some of the training will be the same.

 I want this to be fairly organic and want to write about what people are going to be interested in. I will hopefully start with some test data on myself, and some current stats, and then updates what I’m doing to train certain aspects of myself. I also hope to educate people who read this a little on proper training techniques, and various methods that will prove beneficial to those involved in athletic performance. I encourage any feedback and questions about this or how my training is going, so feel free to ask away. Also if anyone is interested in playing team handball, once I have enough interest I hope to get some gym space somewhere and have a practice and scrimmage. Just drop me a line.