News
National Development Programme - December Session (NDP)
11/12/2025 00:00, In Blog /
Last weekend brought together athletes and their coaches for another session, part of the National Development Programme (NDP), which are held throughout the year. The day gave everyone a fresh chance to reconnect and dive into a mix of theoretical and practical education workshops.
The main theme of the day revolved around Performance Interventions. To kick things off, nutritionist Lucy Marland delivered an engaging session on pre, during, and post training/competition nutrition and it clearly struck a chord with those in the room, with athletes being engaged in the session.
Following this, Cardiff Met Biomechanics team followed up on October’s monitoring session, with another performance monitoring session. This gave athletes and coaches a better sense of how key metrics are tracking as the season progresses. All of the insights from this monitoring work can be accessed through each athlete’s Athlete Management System.
The last of the days session saw the event groups split off into their event-specific sessions. The throws event group took part in a recovery-focused workshop led by Dave Rowe, the sprinters got stuck into a relay-specific session with coaches Lisa Waddon and Jon Cuff, and the jumps event group worked with former commonwealth decathlon medallist and coach Ashley Bryant.
Reflecting on the day, Pathway Lead Rhys Williams said:
This session has hopefully consolidated a lot of the learning from the previous NDP sessions for the relevant event groups today. With the increased contact time, we’re now getting much greater insight into our athletes on the programme. This is undoubtedly supporting their long-term development across the technical, tactical, and behavioural areas of their events. A massive thank you must also go out to all the staff involved in delivery the days sessions.
More event-specific NDP sessions will be taking place over the coming months, with the next all-event-group day for athletes and coaches scheduled for 14th March 2026.
The programme sits at the first tier of the Welsh Athletics Performance Pathway, and further details can be found Performance Pathway.