Author: Vernon Gambetta
Trampled in the Rush
I get the very distinct feeling that in the rush to embrace analytics and all its permutations that coaches are being trampled in the rush. Does anyone else think we need to stop for a minute and take a deep breath and ask where we are going here? Analytics are very seductive, but we need to ask some hard questions. What exactly are we learning? What is real in the numbers and what is manufactured? Is the data valid and reliable? Who is asking the questions that are driving the analysis? What is their bias and experience? How much input do the coaches, athletic development coaches and sports medicine staff have in the formulation and subsequent interpretation of the data? Is the information actionable or just curious? Although I was not at the recent Sloan Analytics Conference I was told by several colleagues that I highly respect that there was an undertone of coach bashing, putting down coaches for not being willing or able to use the data. Any good system is athlete centered and coach driven, maybe instead of bashing coach's the analysts need to educate the coaches on one hand and listen more to the coaches on the other. Ultimately it is the coach’s job to produce, to put the athlete or the team in the competitive arena with the best chance to compete to win. No coach in his or her right mind will turn down an opportunity to make his or her athletes better. So it behooves everyone to get on the same page. There is an important place for an educated and experienced coaches’ intuition and experience in the process. Generating numbers is easy, numbers are one-dimensional but performance is multidimensional performed by real living breathing human beings, not programmable robots. Algorithms are interesting and can point us in the right direction but I hesitate to let algorithms drive my coaching. It is all a process with the analyst a part of a performance team. All members of the team should have input, but ultimately it is up to the coach using all information possible to make the athlete better. Maybe it is a little bit like looking for a black cat in a dark room with black painted walls – did anyone think to turn on the light? Who is going to turn on the light?
Common Sense of Training
Yesterday I highlighted the nonsense I have been seeing in training. Today lets talk about some common sense in training. Any effective training program is based on sound fundamental principles. There must be a clear progression. No workout can or should stand-alone. No component of training should be trained in isolation. All components of training should be trained at all times in different proportions based on developmental level of athlete, phase of the training, and training emphasis. Training should always be in context. Adapt the training to the athlete and make it sport appropriate. It is pretty simple and straightforward; no sensational or extraordinary methods just consistent well planned directed work. Training accumulates and takes time; there are no quick fixes.
Free Your Minds – Training Sense & Nonsense
Yesterday in three different situations I saw the nonsense of training. Randomly putting together a series of exercises with no connection to each other and inappropriate for the athlete and calling it functional training is nonsense. Stupidly trying to imitate sport movements, in this case swimming, outside the realm of the sport is nonsense. By trying to do that you are not preparing for the stress of the sport you are adding to the stress increasing possibility of injury. That is why you train for the sport. Making everyone do Olympic lifts with the bar is nonsense. Use the Olympic lifting movements and find an appropriate mode (dumbbell, kettlebell, sandbag) that fit the athletes. It is discouraging to continue to see this kind of nonsense when we should know better. Sometimes I think it is just laziness on the part of the people implementing these things, I hesitate to call them coaches, to think and analyze, to take the time to get to know the athletes and the sport to train appropriately. Wise words from Bob Marley’s Redemption Song are particularly appropriate: Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy, 'Cause none of them can stop the time. How long shall they kill our prophets, While we stand aside and look? Ooh! Some say it's just a part of it: We've got to fulfil de book. Just because everyone does it does make it correct. Free your mind, break out, dare to think differently and above keep learning!
Bridging the Gap
We have been talking about bridging the gap between science and practice in sport for thirty plus years. You have to ask yourself with all we know today why is there still a gap? In fact in many ways with the drive toward more “sport science” the gap has widened with coaches and coaching being marginalized. Why? Ask yourself who is driving the bus? Who is ultimately held accountable for the athlete's performance? When a team loses or an athlete does not perform it is not the sport scientists that are fired. Maybe just maybe we need to take a step back and look again at the whole process and get rid of all the various silos and individual empires that have been created and get back to an athlete centered, coach driven process that is sport science supported, not sport science driven. No need then for a bridge, all for one and one for all with one purpose to make the athlete better.
Crucial Questions
These are basic questions every coach should ask on an ongoing basis as a check to make sure training is on target. What are you doing? Who are you doing it with? Is what you are doing appropriate for who you are doing it with? Why are you doing it? Is it need to do or nice to do? How are you doing it? Is there a better way or a better mode? When are you doing it? Is it appropriate for the time of the training years and even the stage of the athlete’s career? Basic? Yes Simple? Yes Important? Yes
Practice Based Evidence & Coaching Significance
In the move to evidence based practice are we shooting ourselves in the foot once again? So much “evidence based practice” is questionable, inaccurate, fraudulent or flat out wrong. I put my stock in practice-based evidence that I can support with good science where I can. In 45 years of coaching I have found that where it is necessary to produce results coaching (clinical) significance trumps statistical significance. I have yet to see a doctor or a scientist innovate a training method or a technical modification. So much of the time the scientists tell us what can’t be done Talk about barriers and limits) and then coaches and athletes go out and exceed the limits and break though the barriers and records are broken! Here are some resources that will make you rethink or at least look at evidence based practice in a different light: How to lie in sports medicine using statistics by Rod Whiteley mhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMZTc-99xQc Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis PLoS Med. 2005 Aug; 2(8): e124. Published online 2005 Aug 30. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 PMCID: PMC1182327 If you don’t want to read the above then read this article on Ioannidis: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/ If you want to dig deeper into this and stop following the flock I suggest you read these two books. Above all think critically and don’t be afraid to slay the scared cows of conventional wisdom that stifle innovation and hold us back!
Free The Children
We are effectively working hard to destroy a generation of children by what we are doing and not doing to them in the name of education. The headline in our local paper last Sunday was: Mandatory Cramming – Students and Schools are anxiously bracing for this years vast array of tests. Is there any relief in sight? Here is what is going on (Not just in Sarasota/Manatee Florida, but nationally). School day is lengthened. Recess has been eliminated or cut back to almost nothing. Kids are made to sit in ill-fitting furniture that exaggerates poor posture. They are asked to stare at computer screens for extended periods of time. There is limited physical education (60 minutes a week) or none, the same for art, music and theater arts. Not to mention the diet that they eat that is heavy on refined sugar and carbohydrates. All of this to train them for a non-stop blizzard of standardized tests in order to meet state and national mandates to raise our children’s standard of education! It is so bad that even kindergarten students will take as many as five “final” exams. Overall it was reported that the students would take on average 12 standardized tests this year. I feel sorry for the children and the teachers. What are they really learning? The teachers are trapped, their evaluations are now partially based on results form the standardized tests. We are creating a generation of physically illiterate sedentary dolts who are force fed a non stop stream of disconnected facts necessary to score well on standardized tests. These kids can’t think, they are unhealthy and we sit back and watch. Folks this is our future. Forget developing athletes, we need to wake up and do something about developing healthy people who can read and write and think critically. It can be done. Rafe Esquith who teaches in Los Angeles in a very poor area has been getting it done for years. He refuses to teach to the tests. He sets high expectations for his students. He teaches PE everyday! His class puts on full a Shakespeare play each year. It can be done, but it takes initiative, passion and dedication and a big streak of reberebelliousness like Mr. Esquith has shown. I suggest you read Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hairs on Fire and There are No Shortcuts to be inspired along with the Teenage Brain by Frances Jensen. Folks this is not about politics of the left or right, this is about our future. If we don’t do something now we will have a lost generation that will severely compromise the future of our society. Start by getting recess back and full lunch hour, re-institute mandatory daily physical education, teach cursive writing again (a fine motor skill that helps with brain body connection) and eliminate standardized testing. There is so much more but those are simple things that will make a profound difference. Save our children – get out and do something now!
LTAD – Let Them Be Kids First!
It is one thing to say that young athletes are not miniature adults and then to turn around and treat them as miniature adults by imposing adult training, competition and practice schedules on them. They are young and still developing and need to be treated as such. We need to get away from emphasizing where they will be, their future potential, there is time for that later, put the focus on where they are now and build upon that. Develop them so they have mastery of fundamental movements and fundamental sport skills acquired through play. De-emphasize the competition every weekend that starts an early trend toward peaking for Saturday, which then becomes a habit at latter stages of development and results in stifling long term development. We must allow for play that is free and unsupervised by adults. Play that allows the kids to be kids where they learn to explore the all dimensions of movement. The benefits are many and proven over time but simply do not fit into many of the contemporary models that seek to identify the athlete young and get them to specialize as early as possible to accumulate the necessary ten thousand hours to be a superstar. Combine that with the youth sport “Industry” and we have a huge problem in developing athletes. The athlete becomes a client in a business model not a child to be nurtured and encouraged. This has happened because we have deviated form a strong philosophical foundation of athlete development based on physical education, free play, principles of growth and development and emotional maturation.