Author: Vernon Gambetta
The Answer
"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer — they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." Ken Kesey
Being the Best – Take Action Now
Here are some thoughts I put together for a team I was working with. In bold are the qualities with an explanation, but those are just qualities. Underneath each item you see the word action. I asked each team member to write out the action they were going to take to achieve the desired end result. Over the years I have learned it is too easy to set goals or to talk about being the best, unless those goals are followed up by specific actions it just is a very temporary feel good process. Each individual needs to take control and decide on the they action they will take. They must establish ownership. Do not recommend or assign an action for them. Be Smart – Work on something specific each day. Have a plan! Train with a purpose. Improvement is incremental. Does not have to be big. Small steps lead to big steps. ACTION: Pressure is what you make it! Embrace it. Put yourself in pressure situations to learn. Use the pressure to make you better, internalize it and use it as a positive influence. ACTION: Belief – If you don’t believe in yourself who will? Think you are the best and you are on your way. Confidence, believe in yourself, your preparation and in your support system. ACTION: Routine – Great athletes do the same thing, the same way, at the same time each day. Regularity. You can set a clock by the routines of the great ones. ACTION: Work– Everyone works. The great ones work smarter with a sense of purpose. Analyze your strengths and weaknesses objectively. Then work to minimize your weaknesses and optimize your strengths. Bring your weaknesses up to the level of your strengths. ACTION: Choices – It is always about choices. Make the conscious choice to be the best. Life is constantly about choices. Action: Without ACTION these are all just words.Take ACTION now!
Dulling the Knife
Here is the scenario. The competition season has just ended. Your athletes are fast, explosive and technically proficient. They are fully tapered. All their capacities are sharpened to a razors edge. So now what? Most of the time we go do what I call dulling the knife. We take a couple of weeks of rest, then some active rest and then we start piling on the volume with a general prep phase. The exact opposite of where we just ended. We deaden them; take away all those hard earned explosive and speed qualities that we have so carefully accumulated over the previous training year. Anyone can do that, it takes no imagination and creativity to slog and make people slow. Frankly this is a vestige of the old model of classical Periodization that lingers on today; it is Russian revenge for not having prevailed in the cold war. Instead of dulling the knife you want to take advantage of those sharpened qualities and start the next year up a step from the previous training year. Don’t be afraid to keep intensity up on key training components. Instead of piling on the volume and dulling the knife alternate intensity microcycles and volume microcyles. Jut don't let yourself get too far away from where you want to be when you compete. Sometimes we forget that training is cumulative from day to day, week to week, month to month and above all from year to year. Take advantage of their sharpness and start training at a higher level, keep that knife sharp, but not to a razors edge.That comes later when you need to.
Innovations in Training
Where will training innovations come from? Will training in the future resemble training in the past or will it look significantly different? Is innovation in training even necessary? If innovation and change in training do occur what will those changes be? What will they look like? I have no answers to these questions, that’s for sure, I broke my crystal ball years ago and the Ouija board is not working. In doing research for a project I am working on the past few weeks I have been struck by how similar what we do today is to what was done thirty, forty, even fifty years ago. Certainly we have progressed, but how far? We know more in terms of sport science, facilities are better, performances appear to be better so how can we get better? Will science lead the way or will it be the practitioner? Will it be technology driven or human factors driven? What will training look like in 2050?
Train Fast, Play Fast – Oregon Football
I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon, but watching University of Oregon football play is amazing. A major contributor is head strength and conditioning coach Jimmy Radcliffe. I don’t have many heroes, but Jimmy is one my heroes. I continue to be amazed at his dedication, intensity and his insatiable appetite for learning. He is a coach’s coach. He has paid his dues teaching and coaching high school. He has coached football, basketball and track at the high school level. Experience he rates as invaluable. He works with other sports besides football. He is actively involved coaching the Oregon Elite track group. He loves to coach and lives to coach. He is going to be mad at me for writing this. he shuns the limelight, preferring to put the spotlight on the athlete. I must say this is a rarity and so refreshing in this world of giant egos and self promoters. What you see on the field is a direct link to what they do in training. Jimmy has been on the Faculty of the GAIN Apprentorship the last two years where he presented on the Oregon program. Everyone was blown away by the thoroughness and attention to detail. No secrets, just attention to detail and coaching. He commands the respect of his athletes and they bust their ass for him. He does not have eight assistants and an army of grad assistants. He has a small staff that has been together for years. They get it done. He trains the players for the game they play. He trains for speed, he trains them position specific, and he demands technical proficiency in the weight room and on the field. He is a stickler for details on movement mechanics and it shows up on the field. His players get better and they get faster. I wish them the best of luck in their drive to the national championship. I know for sure that they are physically prepared to play their game. On of my favorite quotes from Jim is from a conversation this summer. We were talking about some crazy things we had seen a coach present, Jim said "sometimes you just have to get them strong." Jim, keep up the great work!
How do you know what to do?
I read this quote from Alex Ferguson, Manager of Manchester United. He was talking about his young forward, Javier Hernandez. “He’s getting a lot of strength work in the gymnasium because he needs that.” It got me thinking, throughout my career I have heard this a lot. A sport coach will tell me to get someone stronger, faster or fitter. I have always struggled with this. How do they know what to do? When I was young and naïve’ I just assumed they knew their game, but as I gained experience I realized that their opinions were very biased. What they thought they were seeing and what was actually happening did not match up. How was it determined that Hernandez needed to get stronger? Was it through testing, observation, or was it just a random idea? I know that as an athletic development coach I want to have a complete profile of each player that I work with. Starting with a complete physical competency assessment, performance tests that look at key athletic qualities in the sport and last but not least game/match analysis data so I know how the player plays their game. Then and only then can I determine what the athlete needs to do from a physical preparation standpoint to improve their performance in the game. So now lets assume Javier Fernandez gets stronger in the gym, will that transfer to the pitch? What is stronger? Is it weight room strong or soccer strong? Are those two similar or the same? Without the whole process it is an exercise in futility, merely smoke and mirrors, how do you know?
What are you doing?
Ask yourself some simple questions as you plan your workout today. Are you making them better or are you just making them tired? Are you being productive or are you just keeping them busy? Is what you are doing focused on need to do activities that reflect the demands of the sport and the needs of the individual athletes? How does today’s training session relate to yesterdays training and how does it lead to tomorrow?
Learning to Coach
What is the best way to learn to coach? The answer is quite simple, get out and coach. There is no substitute for being on the firing line. Not only to write the workout but to coach the actual workout. To make it happen, to make adjustments, change exercises; manipulate rest intervals, to discipline an athlete, whatever it takes. No textbook, no online tutorial can prepare you. Certifications will not prepare you. Internships at palatial training facilities will not prepare you. You must get out in the real world. What do you do if you don’t have a weight room, or a track? What can you do? The best teacher is experience. If you want to be a coach, then start to think like a coach, act like a coach. I knew I wanted to be a coach by my senior year in high school, so I started watching how coaches coached, how they organized practices, how they communicated with their athletes and I coached. During the summers I helped my high school basketball coach. I had coaching classes in school where we had to coach. Gather experiences, put yourself in situations where you must innovate, must organize, must lead. You can never know too much, you must keep learning. Learn from your successes and failures. Above all remember coaching is so much more than the X’s and O’s, those X’s and O’s are people, they have feelings, they have lives. Coaching is about helping to make people better, not just better athletes but better people. I learned very early on that coaching is not something that you do it is something that you are.