Feature Athlete of the Week: Georgia Hollis Lawrence

Feature Athlete of the Week:

Georgia Hollis Lawrence 

1. What event do you compete in?
I compete in 60m Hurdles (indoor) and 100m hurdles (outdoor).

2. When and how did you get into athletics? 
I joined an athletics club at about 7 years old doing different events.  When I was about 12, a few people suggested I should try sprint hurdles which I did. I spent some time competing in the 300m hurdles before coming back to shorter distance hurdling. 

3. Who do you compete for and when?
As well as competing for Hallam, I compete for City of Sheffield AC and will be competing for them in the outdoor season which starts next month.


4. What is your greatest achievement as a athlete?
I think my greatest achievement is probably when I ran my indoor personal best in the England Championships Final this year. 

5. What is your current training schedule?
I do two strength and conditioning sessions per week, and about 3 track sessions which is either hurdling or running. 

6. How do you feel S&C has helped you develop as an athlete?
I think S&C has helped me improve on a lot of my weaknesses in the gym like technique, which has made a difference to my running as it’s helped me to prevent a lot of the injuries I used to have. I have gained strength and power which has in turn helped me to become faster.

Andrew Langford, Head of S&C says: 

Georgia has been really great to work with this year. It is sometimes common in athletics for people to only want to train in a ‘functional’ or ‘specific’ way. It has been refreshing with Georgia because she has been willing to learn new techniques and spend time developing her foundational strength and movement qualities. This has now given us a solid base to start developing her speed qualities.

The session shown is from one of her early programmes. The session started with an exercise encouraging her to develop force as quickly as possible. The exercise also requires a controlled eccentric landing which can have great benefits for soft tissue development. We then used some compound lifts to develop key areas and build strength qualities. We are now progressing onto more reactive and plyometric type exercises, helping with her expression of force at higher speeds.