I love training stuff. In fact I have boxes of videos of
training stuff that I have collected over the years. I have shelves of books
full of training stuff. Some of it is really cool looking stuff and some of it
real dumb and ugly stuff. Fortunately or unfortunately I have tried much of
this stuff, some worked and some failed. I used to have to work real hard to
find stuff. No longer, I can log onto You Tube or any one of thousands of
exercise guru sites and find any kind of stuff that I want to see. But does
this really put you or me ahead of the game? It is still just stuff. Is my
stuff better than your stuff? How can we know?
I have given this much thought. I know the stuff that I have
used has worked predictably well for the time that I have used it. Why do I
know it works? Very simply because 41 years ago when I started coaching I
realized that to get an edge as a coach and as an athlete I had to have a
system. So I started working on putting my stuff into a context, a system. I
tried to find why the stuff worked and why some stuff did not work. To do that
I relied on scientific research and what we today call best practice. It was a
constant prototyping process, trying stuff, fine tuning it, and trying it again.
This is an ongoing process that I continue today. I am constantly working to
upgrade the stuff, but always within the context of the sport and athletes I am
working with. So what’s the point of this stuff about stuff? In order to make
the stuff you do meaningful get beyond the what stuff, know and understand the
why, make sure you know the how and when. Then and only then will your stuff
become meaningful and lead to positive training adaptations over time.