Author: Vernon Gambetta
Drills & Skills – Finding a Balance
I posted this yesterday on twitter “Simple choice with complex implications: You can do drills or you can train skills. If you want to get better at your sport train skills. Don't forget drills do not equal skills.” This needs a bit of elaboration; it is not an either or proposition, there is a place for drills if they are used properly. To often I see practices and training sessions that are essentially a drill-a-rama, an endless collection of drills with no progression and no connection to the actual sport skill. It is incumbent on each coach to develop a system that works in his or her sport. Meaningful drills that transfer to the sport are part of a good system of training. Care must be taken that the drill does not become an end unto itself. The drills must have a clear context and connection the desired sport skill. The same is true for technical and tactical drills; they must connect to a bigger whole. Criteria for effective drills: The drill should have a clear purpose and goal. The drill should be precise and exact. Drills should be individually prescribed to address a specific technical problem for that individual or a tactical issue for a team. In selecting a drill the focus on the absolute need to do not on the nice to do.
Deceleration
Separating out deceleration as a separate training component is a fantasy. You have to accelerate to decelerate. It is essential a closed loop as illustrated by the performance paradigm. Certainly deceleration is where most injuries and performance errors occur but to try to isolate it just creates another step that will just confuse the body. Keep it simple, design progressions that incorporate all elements of the performance paradigm and repeat the movements frequently preferably as part of warm-up daily. Use as many joints as possible to produce force and use as many joints as possible to reduce force. Honor and respect the wisdom of the body.
Influences – Father Alexander Manville, O.F.M.
Father Alexander was one of the biggest influences in my life. I received word last week that Father Alexander passed away. He was a Franciscan priest who was the principle of Bishop Garcia Diego High School when I attended, but more importantly to my intellectual, personal and spiritual development he was an English teacher. Father Alexander AKA Big A was a towering presence. He was a tall man; bald headed his height accentuated by the brown Franciscan robes. I must admit that as a 13-year old ninth grader I was thoroughly intimidated by him. If I saw him coming I tried to go the other way. As I observed him and his interactions with students during my freshman and sophomore year and his talks at school assemblies I realized that he had much more to offer than just being an authority figure. My junior year he was my English teacher and he was good. He made it interesting and relevant even the boring punctuation and sentence structure diagrams. What made him special was he was human and you could tell he cared about us people. The biggest thing I remember about that year was that we could get extra credit for reading books, any books. All we had to do was turn in the titles and author. No book reports, occasionally he would ask about the book, but he wanted us to read and broaden our horizons. Being the rebel I decided to read Catcher in the Rye that at the time was banned by the Catholic Church. I guess subliminally I wanted to test him. I turned the name and title in and his comment to me was “interesting book.” I could not help but think at the time that he got it, unlike the Jesuit priest who kicked me out of class during a discussion on evolution for citing Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher. The best was yet to come. I had him again for senior English and the second semester the theme was a Philosophy of Life. What a class, still one of the best I had in my years of formal education. I can’t tell you over the succeeding 51 years how many times I have come back to lessons we learned in that class. We read everything from Aristotle to T.S. Elliot. It was challenging to say the least. Over my first few years out of high during college and after when I still lived in Santa Barbara I would see him occasionally and exchange pleasantries. At our twenty-firth reunion he came and sat at out table and he met my wife. She told him how I always talked about the Philosophy of Life class, he commented on how much he enjoyed teaching it. At the time I was working for the White Sox and I found out he was a big LA Dodger fan and a baseball fan in general. Over the years I have thought about him often and the lessons he taught and the intellectual fires he ignited in me. Father Alexander my you rest peace; I hope I can catch up with down the road and share some more reading.
Trade-offs
An effective training program demands constant trade-offs. Every component of training cannot receive equal emphases. If one component is emphasized then another must be de-emphasized. Good training is often compared to a mosaic but in my mind that is much too static, it is more like a kaleidoscope, ever changing in a state of dynamic equilibrium. It is so much more than balancing volume, intensity and density as it is often portrayed. It is actually careful consideration of the interaction of all training components while minding that all components of training should be trained at all times in different proportions. The trade-offs, the mix if you will, changes as the athlete accumulates training day to day, week to week to week, month to month and year to year and must be adjusted accordingly to insure continued adaptation. Carefully consider the trade-offs. Weigh the cost benefit analysis relative to each trade off and relative to the short and long term goals of the training program. There is a firm foundation for all this in scientific training principles but ultimately it requires a heavy dose of coach’s intuition and knowledge of the athlete. No formula or algorithm, just constant adjustment and fine tuning.
GAIN Odds & Ends
Check out the first GAIN Whitepaper on Athletic Development – Defining the Field. This is my attempt at defining the field and moving away from the restrictive nature of the name and concept of strength & conditioning. Go to www.thegainnetwork.com and scroll down to GAIN White Paper. Download the PDF, share it, reprint it use it as you see fit. There will be more to come from the GAIN community. Also another resource from GAIN and HMMR Media http://www.hmmrmedia.com/ are the GAINcasts. Listen to the GAINcasts for insights into athletic development and coaching. Listen to the latest episode for my thoughts and ideas on what is strong and how much strength is enough http://www.hmmrmedia.com/2016/04/gaincast-episode-10-what-is-strong/ GAIN IX – 2016 will held June 14 to 18 at Rice University in Houston Texas. There are a few spots still open for the right professional – Apply now at http://www.thegainnetwork.com/
What Matters
Just coach! Be the best coach you can be – no excuses! Coaching is special treat it as such. Coach the athletes you have and work to make them better. Approach coaching with passion and instill that passion in your athletes. Show them you care about them as people and they will grow as athletes. None of them may be Olympians, National or Sate Champions but they deserve to be coached like they are. Set high expectations for you and your athletes. Never lose sight of the fact your level of expectation ultimately will determine your level of achievement.
Numbers – The Search for Meaning
In the rush toward big data and gathering numbers I see the real challenge as making the numbers meaningful. Certainly technology enables us to gather numbers on almost any parameter we want to measure. We are now able to measure and quantify parameters that I dreamed about measuring 46 years when I started coaching. Certainly this affords great potential to enhance performance. The downside is when we can get so caught up the numbers that we look at them in isolation and not see the forest for the trees. Numbers are one-dimensional and performance is three-dimensional. That is one aspect, the other is that it is too easy to look at a number that represents an isolated variable like HRV and not relate it other measures or put it in context of life in general. In a recent post Seth Godin put it quite succinctly: “We need to spend more time figuring out what to keep track of, and less time actually obsessing over the numbers that we are already measuring.” So take a step back and look at not just what is measurable but what is meaningful to you and the athletes you coach.
Learning – Continuous Personal & Professional Development
Not long ago someone asked me what I do to for professional development and to keep learning. I thought I would share what I do, that is not to suggest that is the way to do it rather to share a process that has worked for me over the years. Even though I call it a process for someone like me who is full of questions and inherently curious it is more semi-organized chaos. Those of you that followed this blog over the years know that I love to read, so for me reading actual books (I like the tactile sense of having a book in my hands, although I do use Kindle when I travel) is the cornerstone of learning for me. I read on the average of two books a week. I also subscribe to several sport science journals, numerous coaching journals, The New Yorker, Atlantic Magazine and Fast Company Magazine. I try to devote an hour a day to professional reading and research and probably another hour to recreational reading, usually at night. These are the books I have finished in the past several weeks; this picture does not include novels, biographies and history (About six more) I keep a notebook where I record my ideas, notes from Conferences and notes from my reading. Below are the notebooks for the past seven years and a page from my current notebook. Much of what is in these notebooks probably would not make sense to anyone but me, but it helps me organize my thoughts. I also keep of log of all the books I read. In addition I keep a Log of my training, something I started doing when I was in high school (I wish I could find those old logs, I know they are buried somewhere in a box). I try to talk to professional colleagues as often as possible and speak to my mentors as often as I can. I can't emphasize enough the role that my mentors have played in my learning both in terms of guidance and inspiration. I probably don’t go to as many conferences as I used to, I have just become more selective. Often I will go to a conference more to interact with those attaining than to hear the speakers. I am not as good at listening to Podcasts yet, which is a new area of learning for me that I am going to exploit further. Each day that I coach is a learning experience. I learn from the athletes I work with and the coaches I work with. More of my coaching today is of the mentoring coaching nature but I still do some coaching daily, you can’t learn if you don’t have skin in the game. I love to watch coach’s coach. In February I was able to spend time with Harry Marra and watch a training session with Ashton Eaton and his wife. The next morning I watched Jim Radcliffe coach an Oregon football off-season session and that afternoon watched him work with Mark Rowland’s Oregon Elite group of middle distance runners. Watching those sessions, interacting with the coaches and athletes are priceless learning opportunities. For that matter I learn by watching anyone who is good at his or her craft. Excellence transcends sport, watching a chef at work an artist paint or draw or a musician play is great learning. I feel you have go outside your field and specialization to broaden and deepen learning. Everything is connected. I love to learn, the excitement and joy of learning new things and challenging myself daily sustains me. I am constantly trying to look at the world with new eyes and discover new ideas and approaches. I hope this helps give you some ideas to guide your learning.