Jaco Engelbrecht Training Blog January 8th

My name is Jaco Engelbrecht and I live in Johannesburg South Africa. I weigh 140kg (315lb) and 198cm (6’5”) tall and I am 28 years old. I have been doing shot put for 19 years and it is quite a big passion in my life.

One of my biggest achievements was competing at the world champs in Beijing in 2015, even though it didn’t go too well I was still happy to see myself competing at that level. So far my best achievements were at the All Africa Games where I got silver in 2011 and bronze in 2015 and at the African Championship is received a silver in 2014 too.

As for my 2015 season it was good in a sense that I competed at a big stage, but the distances I got was really disappointing at worlds (19.04) so I really want to better my distances at international level in 2016.

For the 1st time in 3 years my training is going really well, I feel as if I am ahead of where I want to be and to me that’s a good thing……most of the time. My coach doesn’t really believe in throwing with heavier weights so I train with the 7.26kg shot all the time and we just focus on getting the timing right and looking at where we need to improve technically.

For the next few weeks we are still focusing on the technique and maybe getting a bit more speed and explosiveness in the circle, because we have a early season in South Africa it can be quite a drag to try and perform from January right up to the Olympics so we are not trying to rush things this year. I want to see if I can be lucky enough to qualify quite soon for the Olympics just to take some pressure off and then build on that to make sure I hit Rio in top form when August arrives.