For years the major difference in technical styles at the elite level could be boiled down to whether or not a thrower 'reversed' at the end of the throw. Cadée's style plays with the orbit and adds another quarter turn of rotation at the start of the throw. After seeing him train and throw in Turkey last year and talking with his coach about the technique, I figured it was time to ask him a few questions directly.

The style itself is so unique that it doesn't even have a name yet. Feel free to share your thoughts on the technique and a potential name in the comments after the article. My suggestions are either '540' (for the number of degrees you rotate to get to the power position) or 'Neu' (after a German who used a variation of the technique in the seventies; the word also has the relevant meaning of 'new' in German).

At first glance it might seem that grip strength is important to the hammer throw. When I was just out of high school I heard legendary Brooks Johnson explain how grip strength was the key element that took Carl Brown from national-class discus thrower to a world championship finalist. I don't remember the study he cited (if you do, let me know), but he made a convincing case at the time. And while he is best known as a sprints coach, his resume also includes coaching Al Gore in the discus at St. Albans School. If grip is that important in the discus, I thought, then it is probably more important in the hammer where world class throws produce forces in excess of 300kg (660 pounds) and often hold on to the hammer with just three fingers. Yet despite this I don't think I've heard an elite thrower complain about grip in the eight years since.

The cues I use in training mostly relate to the start of my throw. The majority of my problems, and the majority of most throwers' problems, start at the beginning of the throw. I have some cues I always come back to, but what works for me may not work for you. The more interesting question for me is how someone can find a good cue. Cues are the language of coaching and just as finding the right word separates good from bad writers, finding the right cue separates good from bad coaches.

The first step in finding a cue is to understand the different between what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to accomplish it. This is the difference between effects and causes. "Get a longer orbit on the left side" is not a good cue since this is the result you are aiming for. Instead you have to get to the root of the cause. This is a problem I am frequently working on and I often will use cues like "keep a longer double support on the entry" in order to get that result.

For the past 18 months I have been regularly trading emails and ideas with another coach, Mike Morley of England. He is also a student of Bondarchuk and this has led to some fun exchanges. Last summer he sent me a draft of an article that had me thinking about the coaching process. In the article, he proposes that we should teach beginners to throw with a toe turn, rather than a heel turn. His point: typically we teach a thrower to start with a heel turn, only to change it after a few years. Why waste that time learning a entry that will not be used in the future?

If anything, you would think this change would mean that my morning training sessions would get worse in comparison. But the opposite has happened. Now my morning training session is, without fail, my best of the day. This summer some of my best results were as early as 7 o'clock. And my afternoon sessions were continuously unimpressive.