Seven junior athletes joined Diamond Valley’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Jess Perkins for term four’s Performance Enhancing Program.  Over ten weeks, Jess took them through intensive work outs that focused on developing and improving their speed, agility, strength, stamina and flexibility.  The sessions featured technique development for injury prevention, body weight exercises and explosive movements to improve overall strength, power and reaction time, and core exercises to build a stable foundation for all movement on and off the court. Jess implemented various training techniques to increase the anaerobic and aerobic capacity of the athletes and incorporated mobility and flexibility exercises into each session.

Each participant undertook testing in the first and last sessions, each seeing vast improvements to their speed, upper and lower body strength, core strength and endurance. Improvements seen by athletes included:

• Forty-nine second increase for timed plank
• Three minute increase for timed wall-sit
• Double the amount of sit ups in one minute
• Push-ups progressed from knees to toes
• 50cm increase in horizontal jump
• 38 second improvement in endurance activity
• 3.5 second improvement for hill sprint

Well done to each of the athletes who took part in the Performance Enhancing Program. You have proved that hard work and dedication does pay off.