Author: Vernon Gambetta
Training or Coaching?
Are you training your athletes or coaching your athletes? There is a clear distinction. Unfortunately today I see much more training than coaching. In another post I plan to address the reasons, meanwhile here are some distinctions between coaching and training as I see them: Training – focused on the result. Just get it done. Coaching – Focused on the process, how it is done, making sure it is repeatable. Training – Self centered, all about the trainer, the athlete can’t do it without the trainer. Coaching – All about empowering and teaching the athlete. Creating self-sufficiency rather than dependence. Trainer – Has all the answers. Coaching – Always gathering data from the training, fine-tuning and learning. Training – Lots of screaming and yelling, ”motivating.” Coaching – Purposeful, meaningful feedback and cue’s, communicating and teaching. Training – Focused on equipment, needs machines and apparatus to train. Coaching- Focused on the athlete and the sport they are preparing for and coach accordingly. Use what is needed and necessary, not bells and whistles. Training – Scattered, all over the place. Coaching – Focused on the task at hand. No cell phone! Training – Follows the latest fads, listens to gurus. Coaching – Knows best practice and follows it. Stands on the shoulders of giants. Has a mentor. I think this gives you the idea. Which are you? Look at yourself and look at your colleagues, if you are a trainer, become a coach. Coaching is much more satisfying and rewarding.
Some Thoughts on Coaching and Training
Training contains a fair amount of redundancy. Use that to your advantage as a consistent means to compare and track progress. I know for years I have used a consistent pattern of warm-up that provides me with instant feedback on the athletes training readiness for that day. The same for certain drills and workouts that I place at the same time in a training cycle. As the athlete gains training age this information becomes increasingly more valuable. The best basis for future planning is careful contextual analysis of the prior training. Therefore it is very important to keep detailed training records and logs. Don’t always look for cause & effect, look for connections. Train the connections. Use Foster’s RPE rating – Wait 30 minutes after the training session, have the athlete rate the session on a 1 to 10 scale. Multiply that score by the minutes in the workout. Talk less, listen more. Speak with meaning. The power in verbal communications often is not the words; it is the space between the words. The rhythm & pacing, how you say what you say goes a long way to determine how and if the message is received. “Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” Martha Graham
Role of Sports Science & Sport Medicine
Sports science is important in advancing our knowledge of training. I am a huge supporter of sport science, during my career I have had the opportunity to work with some of the best, but today we have a problem. The but is that sport science and the sport scientist do not captain the ship, the coach does. The same with sport medicine; under that term I put the pysio (ATC in US), physical therapist, chiropractor and doctor, they are important, but they should not captain the ship. The captain of the ship should be the coach. The coach is the ultimate authority on what needs to be done to get his individual or team into the performance arena in optimum condition to perform. This means the coach must be a great a communicator and organizer. The coach must be knowledgeable enough in sports science and sports medicine to be able to direct, detect and ask the correct questions. I have seen first hand what happens when sport science or sport medicine runs amok and it is not pretty. The athlete suffers and the coach loses games and matches, the athletes underperform and no one is willing or able to take responsibility. The performance team is the team behind the team, they should be invisible, there are no super star sport scientists, sports medicine practitioners, there are only star athletes and great teams. The spotlight should be on the athlete, not the support team. Lets just make sure that we have the horse before the cart and the coach is driving the cart.
Bob Williams Pace Calculator
Bob Williams is a coaching colleague and a very good friend. I worked with Bob five years ago when we both working on the Oregon Project. Bob ran the steeplechase at Oregon for Bill Bowerman. He is a disciple of Bowerman and understands the Bowerman method better than anyone I know. Over the years the Bob has developed some great runners, his latest product is Elijah Greer who ran in the 1:47’s in high school and is now a freshman at Oregon. Bob developed his adaptation of the pace calculator. I will let Bob tell the story: The first pace calculator was The Oregon Pace Rule, developed by Jack Berg, Ph.D., Bill Bowerman’s Track Assistant back in the early Sixties. Jack was a four star athlete from Roseburg, Oregon, and came to school to compete. Jack had vaulted for Bill in the mid to late 50’s and I believe he was the Northern Division Champion at 13 feet 6”. Jack was a Chemistry professor at the University and very bright. He designed the Oregon Pace Rule from his own desire to help Bill figure out track paces quickly. As a distance runner for Bill I was an early recipient of The Oregon Pace Rule. I bought a few of the pace calculators from Jack in the early 70’s while I was in Eugene going to graduate school. By about 1982 the pace calculators had worn so badly that I needed to get a new one from Jack. Unfortunately Jack had passed away a few years earlier from cancer and I was unable to locate his widow to buy them. So in 1983 I started to research the process for developing a new pace calculator. New tracks were being built in meters so it seemed reasonable to have the new pace calculator to meet the needs of those school coaches with metric tracks. I added all of the road distances from 10 Kilometers to the Marathon so recreational and serious runners could figure out mile splits and it could double as a track coach’s tool, too. This process took close to eight months before I got my first prototype. The pace calculator has been through three changes since 1984 with the additions of the 150 and 500 meters as requested by coaches, change in plastic cover to paperboard like the original Oregon Pace Rule for environmental and cost reasons. This is a valuable and very practical coaching. I bought the early “yards” version in the 70’s. To purchase the Bob Williams Pace Calculator go to www.coachbobwilliams.com
Happy Mothers Day
Happy mothers day to all. Thanks mom for all you did for all of us. Your were really a special person. Even though it has been 19 years since you passed, a day does not go by when I do not think about you and the lessons you taught me. You are always in our thoughts and prayers. You would be proud of the kids. Kristen uses your recipes and tries to be the cook you were. Curt is an architect and shares you love of beauty and art. The other Mother in my life, my wife Melisa is trying to out do you in helping other people. She is a super mom and wife. This is a special day because of moms like you and Melissa.
Creativity & Coaching
This interesting and stimulating article in today’s NY Times Arts section on creativity. It got me thinking about coaching as a creative processhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/books/08creative.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th It would be interesting to see these scientists study coaching as a creative process. In a trite manner we talk about the art and science of coaching, and then lean toward the science. I love the science of coaching, but I absolutely embrace the art. That is where the passion is, the fire in the belly, that joy of enhancing the dance of athletic movement. Too much science and we begin to view movement too mechanistically. We lock ourselves into artificial methods, numbers, modes of exercise and prescriptions unrelated to the big dance – the game, the match, the race. The creative coach will look at the same movement and see it with different eyes. I will never forget presenting a movement analysis of the javelin in one of my graduate classes at Stanford. I presented the analysis in a very segmented mechanistic manner, broken into parts, a detailed analysis of each segment. I analyzed the film frame by frame, no connection of one frame to the next. That is how I coached, frame by frame. When I finished, the dance masters students in the class asked me to play the film loop again without stopping. I did. They asked me to play it again and then another time. On the forth time I played it they started clapping the rhythm. They saw the throw as a dance. What an aha moment! I honestly have to say a whole new world opened up for me that day. Movement is a dance; a jazz riff and coaches are creative artists. It changed the way I looked at movement, it changed the way I coached.
Opening the Door
56 years ago yesterday Roger Bannister broke the four minute barrier in the mile. Bannister happens to be one of my sporting heroes. I think it is amazing that he did this while he was a full time medical student. Because of his studies he could only train one hour a day. I read his book in 1969, The Four Minute Mile, when I first started coaching, that was the time that everyone was espousing super high mileage, 150 miles a week plus. Bannister and his coach/advisor Franz Stampfl (Read his book Franz Stampfl on Running – A coaching classic) had a program that nailed it. They trained for the race. I think there many lessons we can learn from Bannister. Lesson One: Have a life – If you just train it is easy to take every little setback and blow it out proportion. I saw this with the Oregon project athletes five years ago when I worked there. Lesson Two: Train for your race – Not only the race, but your race. Learn how you need to run or swim the distance based on your physical qualities. Lesson Three: Stress quality – Any stumble bum can run miles or swim yardage. It is what you put into the miles that count, be efficient, do not waste steps. Lesson Four: There are no barriers, just bigger targets to aim for. Four minutes proved to be a mental not a physical barrier. Lesson Five: Forget facilities and ideal training environment, get out there and go for it. Train where you can, create your own environment of excellence. The track where Bannister trained and set the record was far from an ideal training venue. Lesson Six: Believe in yourself and know yourself. Have a coach/ adviser and a support group you trust. Lesson Seven: Don’t listen to naysayers. Follow the path you choose and do not let anyone discourage you
Identifying Talent
This post http://thetalentcode.com/2010/05/05/identifying-talent-what-really-matters/ from the Talent Code Blog is nothing short of awesome. Every coach, parent teacher and reader should read this and think twice before they anoint someone as the next great ___________, you fill in the blanks. This paragraph from the post speaks volumes. All of this is a roundabout way of making a simple point: we fail at talent identification because we’re looking in the wrong place. We instinctively look at performance (which is visual, measurable) instead of mindset and identity, which are what really matter, because they create the energy that fuels the engine of skill acquisition. They are the nuclear power-plant for the 10,000 hours of deep practice. They are the ghosts in the machine. Bottom line – look for that growth mindset, the little scrawny kid who refuses to give up, who keeps coming back for more. I know when I was recruiting for track I was always more interested in the kid who was fifth in the California State meet who had to scratch and claw to get there. They were the ones who went on to excel in college. They were the ones who were fun to coach.