Author: Vernon Gambetta
We do that!
Great if you do that then why do you have hamstring injuries and ACL tears. Why do your teams run out of gas in the fourth quarter or last part of the season? It’s not the exercise. It’s how you are coaching the exercises that make the exercises meaningful for the athlete. Just doing it is not good enough. It must be done better with intention, direction and purpose.
Is your work working?
Is your work working? How do you know? Look closely at what you are doing? Look even more closely at what you are not doing? Eliminate the fluff, the stuff that makes you tired but does not make you better. Set your priorities based on the need to do, the areas that will provide results. Follow the words of Francis of Assisi “Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Dinosaur or Cockroach – Adapted or Adaptable?
Do not look for adversity, look for opportunity. Ask yourself what I can do each day to make the athletes that I work with better. Carefully study the movements of the sports – understand the forces and how they are produced and reduced and train accordingly. Get away from artificial limiting beliefs about what the body cannot do – focus on the infinite possibilities that the body presents to solve movement problems. Train movements to enhance coordination and efficiency of movement. The body is completely adaptable. It has an amazing ability to compensate and solve movement problems. Yes, I said compensate, great athletes are great compensators and it is OK! Artificial sterile environments or strict “correct” movements do not expand the body’s ability to adapt to the demands of the sport. Sterile and artificial training environments and scenarios result in adapted bodies that cannot change and adjust to the random and chaotic demands of the sport. Open challenging movement enriched environments create adaptable athletes who are able to adjust and modify movements on demand. These adaptable athletes, given a level of talent, are high performers and stay injury free. Which would you prefer if you were to choose an athlete for competition? Do you want a dinosaur type who is completely adapted and on their way to extinction or a cockroach type athlete who is thriving and highly adaptable? I know who I want – I want the cockroach who can adapt to any environment or under any circumstances. Ask yourself – Are you training your athletes to be dinosaurs or cockroaches? I want adaptable athletes who can solve any movement problem presented to them?
Twenty-Four Hour Athlete
I will hold to my belief that the concept of the 24-Hour Athlete is a valid concept that we should not comprise on. Conceptually and in reality, we need to get our athletes to lead lives that are conducive to athletic excellence. You can’t be excellent two hours during training, or just twelve hours during the day and do things that are counterproductive to excellence the rest of the time. We must raise the bar, not lower it. I agree that the young athlete of today has more going on in their life – so what. They need to be taught to focus and commit. They expect the same rewards, don’t they? We as coaches must set the example and get athletes to commit to an approach to excellence that involves all hours of the day. I know I am getting old and these ideas seem old fashioned, but I know they work; I have lived it as an athlete and a coach. When I first started coaching I was training for the decathlon, coaching track at two schools, also coached basketball that year, taught a full teaching load, was married and had a bit of life. We must teach the young coaches and athletes that it takes total commitment; excellence is not a passing fancy. You must strive to win each workout before you can ever bear the fruits of victory. If we give into this generation then it will only get worse going forward. Is it work, you bet it is. Does it take energy, it sure does, but we must do it.
Some Thoughts to Stimulate Thought
Respect is earned not bought Knowledge and wisdom eventually win out over hype and promotion Coaching is special because of the impact you can have lives and the daily lesson you learn I coached 23 years before I produced my first video – it took me that long to learn something that I could share I am an idealist. I dream of the way things should be and try to make it happen. Knowledge without passion is wasted; people do their best when they are passionlessly engaged There is no set formula for training; there are principles that are highly adaptive and adaptable Understanding context is essential There are few new ideas, they are just old ideas repackaged Specialize in being a generalist Research and science are wonderful, but they must be tempered with practice and common sense Coaching is talking, listening, seeing, and doing. It is totally multidimensional. It is not about me, it is about we and us. Friendship is special, cherish your friends
Training Speed In
Let not overcomplicate this. You coach speed into the athlete by training speed at the appropriate time in the workout, using an appropriate method and dosage for the time of the training year. You train speed out by doing all sorts of general nonspecific work and slow “base building” type of work, in short emphasizing volume. Remember you are what you train to be! To be fast you must train fast. When I hear a coach say I have not started speed work yet, I just smile, and I hope we can compete against those teams or individuals often. You train speed from the first day of training until the last. Remember the stimulus for speed is high quality intense work. It does not take much to dull speed.
The Good Old Days – Looking Back to Learn & Move Ahead
As I reflect over the past 49 years of coaches there were some things that were cornerstones of a productive system sport that do not exist today. I hope you all realize that I am not living in the past, but we MUST learn from the past, not repeat it. Here are some areas that I think we could certainly look at and learn from: Sport was centered in the schools – Therefore teachers were the coaches. Whether they were knowledgeable in the particular sport they had a foundation in pedagogy. Today anyone can coach. Elementary schools had after school sports – Kids stayed at their neighborhood schools and played. Sometimes it was organized and other times it was supervised. Today you pass an elementary school after school is out and it is a ghost town. Liability was not an issue – Climbing Ropes, Tramps, Peg Boards were everywhere. All of this has been taken away for “safety” and liability reasons. We are not challenging the kids. Coaches were the experts – The high school coach was the expert in his or her sport, no special QB schools, you got coaches by your high school coach. Can this be a shortcoming if the coach is not knowledgeable, absolutely, but somehow, we overcame this. Daily Physical Education was mandatory K through 12 – Need I say more. These PE teachers were also the coaches. They knew how to teach skill and organize, because they did it all day! Off season Football was track – if you were a football player and did not play baseball you were out for track. You became a better athlete and you learned how to compete. You played multiple sports – This was the rule not the exception. Seasons were defined so it was easy to do. No Travel Teams & All Star Select Teams – This is killing school sports A few ideas from an “OLD” coach; interested in your comments on how we could get some of this back if you think it is important.
Muscle Firing – Where’s the Switch?
"A lot of things weren't firing — his glutes, his hips, thighs," (Training Guru to the star players – name deleted to protect the guilty) told the newspaper. "I wouldn't say his condition was the most severe, I wouldn't say it was the best. … But if I were to classify it on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the most extreme, I'd say he was definitely in the seven, eight category." This is definitely one of my pet peeves. If those muscles were not firing how did this player walk? Let’s get logical rather scientific. If there is an injury the body is very intelligent much smarter than the coaches and therapists who try to intervene by turning muscles on or off. The body will guard and call in substitute, as in most teams the substitutes are not as good as the starters, what we need to need to do is figure how to get the first string back into the game and playing as a team. We don’t do that lying on a training table trying to get individual muscles to fire and then hope we can get them back into sequence. We need to figure out what muscle synergies we can use to coordinate all those muscles to work together as a team. Otherwise it would be so simple, just find the master switch, program the body, turn it on and just like flipping a light switch beautiful motion. Hate to break to the gurus, but there is no switch. We need to understand planes of motion and muscle actions and be able to figure out how to manipulate those variables along with the ground to get the first team players back on the floor playing together. Just remember if they ain’t firing you ain’t moving. It is not about firing it is about coordination and teamwork. Join the team and skip down the functional path to movement bliss. (This is a post I wrote over ten years ago, if anything this thinking is more pervasive now than it was then.)