Functional Path Training

Athletic Intelligence

What is it? It is the athlete knowing their body in respect to their sport. Knowing how to push the envelope in order to get better. Are you born with it? Some are innately better than others but we know from research and best practice that everyone can get significantly better. Tough to measure drive and determination, the athlete with supposed limited physical abilities who can just a find a way to get it done. Look around you and read the sports pages, you will see examples of this all the time. It is definitely not genetic; it is also the environment, if you don’t believe me read Talent Code. The athlete with an insatiable desire to succeed coupled with guidance in the form of good coaching and teaching will prevail. You can significantly raise you athletic intelligence through specific directed practice. It is not easy but the path has been traveled before, you must learn to read the road signs along the way. Gaining athletic intelligence and expertise is not mindless; it is a very mindful process. Everything must be connected to the desired end result. It is not a robotic process; it is a process of tuning into the wisdom of the body, respecting the body and all its self-organizing capabilities. It is not focusing on what we cannot do; it is optimizing what we can do by a focus on the process. It all comes down to the three R’s: Routine, Repetition, and Refinement.

Good, Better, Best

If you want to get in the ballpark, buy a ticket.

If you want to get into the game, make a commitment.

If you want to win, make it a passion.

Connections

To me coaching is all about connections. In training my goal is always to facilitate connections of the various parts of the body. Connecting the foot to the knee, the knee to the hip, the hip to the shoulder the shoulder to the elbow and the wrist. Help the athlete to make these connections consciously at first and subconsciously as skills are automated. These connections are there, they need to be exploited. In assessment and evaluation look for connections, identify them and in remedial exercise facilitate the connections. Connect exercises and drills in training with the competition. Without connections it is just work, mindless movement without purpose. Movement is connecting, teaching and coaching is connecting and reconnecting.

Why is Coaching Education Important?

As I write this, my thoughts are centered on Track & Field, but coaching education is important in every sport. I was fortunate  to be the first graduate of the UCSB Coaching Minor program in 1969. The professors who developed that program put together a curriculum that has been my model for the ensuing 41 years. They recognized and taught us that the coach was the foundation of the sport system. We learned that you need to have a good foundation in applied sport science, pedagogical principles and methods and above all practical field experience of hands on coaching under experienced mentor coaches. That experience certainly molded my thinking.

Over the years as I have had the opportunity to travel to many countries and work with various sports it is very easy to see who have developed coaching education programs. The coaches speak a common language, they have a foundation in good methodology and they know how to learn. Coaching education is only the beginning; it must inspire the coach to keep learning and improving. In this country swimming has a good program, soccer both through US Soccer Licensing program and a separate program provided by the National Soccer Coaches Association do a good job. They could be better but they get the job done. There are other programs in our country that are developing coaches.

It just seems that in our culture the coach does not have the same value as in other countries. I am not sure why that is, but I do know that without coaching education it would impossible to compete on the international and produce consistent results. Look at Great Britain in the late 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s in Track & Filed. Their chief national coach at the time, Frank Dick, made coaching education the basis of the whole system. During that period Britain rose to be one of the powers in the world in events they had been never been strong in before. It was because of coaching!

Look at it a slightly different way. The career of an athlete at the international level is very short, on average three to four years with a few notable exceptions. Someone had to guide them to that level. That someone was the coach. The coach’s career is long, chances are that coach will continue to produce athletes at a high level for years to come. In other words for every dollar invested in coaching and coaching education the return on investment accrues over the years. Some countries will not fund athletes unless they are in a formal coaching program; they understand that without coaching the athlete has less chance of success. Coaching is the key, it is not very sexy and glamorous, but it is the foundation for athletic excellence.

All coaches should be concerned about the recent events in the USA T&F Coaching Education program. I view the recent events as a devaluation of coaching, essentially an attack on the integrity and importance of coaching. If you are coach you are special. You lead, you teach, you inspire. Coaching education keeps challenging us and making us better teachers and leaders.

Thought Provoking

"The truth is more important than the facts." - Frank Lloyd Wright

You can spin the facts, but it is harder to hide the truth.

A Sad Time for US Track & Field

Around the world successful sports and sporting nations know that that the following paradigm must be in place and fine-tuned. That paradigm is simple: 1) A system must Athlete Centered – they are the ones who perform in the competitive arena. 2) Coach Driven – they prepare the athlete, provide stability and continuity, they are the cornerstones. 3) Administratively Supported – This is pretty self explanatory, get out of the way and support the athlete and the coach. For years USAT&F and it’s predecessor TAC has had it backwards. For them it is administratively centered, athlete driven and oh by the way, as an after thought, we have somebody out there called coaches, lets crap all over them.

The events of the past several days in regard to the Coaching Education only serve to underscore this. I was fortunate, along with Dr. Joe Vigil and Gary Winckler to be one of the three founders of the program. I also served as the first director for the formative years. It was a program designed by coaches to raise the standard of coaching through education and to empower the coach through knowledge. There were no political agendas, but immediately there was very powerful and vocal; opposition form the old guard left over from the AAU days. They saw it as a threat to their little fiefdom, but thanks to Berny Wagner who pushed it from the inside we got it off the ground. And it really took off, much to the oppositions chagrin. I was not involved for a period of time, although I followed it quite closely. I got back into it in 2001 as a teacher at some of the schools. It was apparent that the program was a great success; in many ways it was the most successful program in USAT&F. It raised the standard of coaching, it trained coaches whose athlete's won medals in international competition. Despite the success I knew that the opposition was still there from1983, they were just waiting until they could get at the program and compromise its structure and integrity. Well it took until this year with the reorganization and the committee to study USAT&F to finally begin to undue all that had been done. There is no question that the new regime has a very strong political agenda that is resistant to change and innovation. Their agenda is to feather their nests and protect their constituencies, make it administratively centered and keep coaches in the dark.

This demands a strong call to action. All of us who are concerned about the great sport of Track & Filed and coaching must stand up and do something. Flood the national office with emails and letters, even phone calls, coaches must be heard, the coaching education program must go on in the vision of all those who labored so hard to build it to where it is today. If you have a blog write about it. If you are on Twitter, Tweet about it. I am not a politician, but I am pissed, this is an insult to coaches and coaching. EVRYONE WHO HAS GONE THROUGH THE PROGRAM GET INVOLVED AND SAVE THE INTERGRITY OF COACHING EDUCATION.

Help them be remarkable

"To help young people become remarkable, we need to challenge them with lessons they will use for the rest of their lives"  Rafe Esquith in Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire. Reading this last night caused me to reflect on the teachers and coaches who challenged me with those kind of lessons. Thanks Mr Keuhl and Father Aleander, you gave me a chance. I hope each day I can give a lesson or a workout to the young people I work with that will help make them remarkable in sport and life.

No Pain, No Gain?

No pain, no gain was a very prevalent attitude when I began coaching in the late Sixties, surprisingly it continues to persist today in certain circles. I have never been able to figure out the appeal of this approach. Proper training in the weight room or on the field demands that the athlete be pushed to test their limits at various times in training. Some workouts are very difficult and other workouts will almost seem easy. This ebb and flow of hard efforts interspersed with easier efforts is essential allow for proper adaptation. The no pain, no gain approach is a direct outgrowth of the fact that historically Strength & Conditioning was a field driven by football. It was the football strength & conditioning coach who set the tempo for the programs because they were often the head strength coach. The mastodon mentality that pervaded football in the fifties and the sixties served to reinforce the no pain, no gain approach. In those days players were not allowed to take their helmets off during practice and not allowed to drink during practice. The more it hurt, the more pain the better. The whole goal was to make the players tough, so without pain there was no gain! So they thought.

I know this approach does not work; it makes you tired but not better. It is totally Darwinian only the strong survive, and no one thrives. I do not know about you, but I want my players ready on game day. That should be the goal of training.To achieve that, the training load and intensity must vary.  A thoroughly conditioned athlete who is supremely confident in his or her physical preparation will be mentally and physically tough. Physically and psychologically an athlete can only go to the well so many times before it will begin to deplete their reserves both physically and psychologically. There is no doubt in my mind that a good sport coach or a strength and conditioning coach can get athletes to train and perform beyond levels that the athletes ever thought possible. To achieve this does not mean you have to inflict pain. Pushing the envelope is uncomfortable. Athletes in training learn over time to get comfortable with a certain level of discomfort through gradual adaptation to stress. Train your athletes to thrive in the competitive arena by training intelligently.

Reading

I love to read. I think it is becoming a lost skill. Too boring I keep hearing. In another post I will talk above how I acquired my passionate love of reading. Before that I want to share with you a couple of paragraphs from an amazing book I am reading. A colleague recommended it. The book is Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire – Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 by Rafe Esquith. I sure wish I would have had this book 41 years ago when I started teaching and coaching. It is a must read for teachers, coaches, and parents. I am thinking about buying some copies for our local school board. I wonder if Arne Duncan has read this?

"Teaching our children to read well and helping them develop a love of reading should be our top priorities. People seem to understand this. Millions are spent on books and other reading material, celebrities make public service announcements, and thousands of hours are spent training teachers. The spin-doctors at various publishing companies tell us that our students are doing better, but honest people know this is simply not the case. Concerned teachers have learned not to bother raising their voices, because powerful textbook companies have carefully prepared answers to anyone who points that the emperor has no clothes. Young teachers are afraid of being crushed by bureaucrats whose only real mission is to keep selling their product. As testing services compete to rake in millions of dollars, nervous school districts anxiously await the latest results. And year after year, most children do not become passionate lifelong learners."

"It’s complicated. There is a lot of finger pointing. But to borrow a phrase from another big fat book that won a Pulitzer Prize, our children are victims of a sort of “confederacy of dunces.” Powerful forces of mediocrity have combined to prevent perfectly competent children from learning to love reading, these forces include television, video games, poor teaching, poverty, the breakup of the family, and a general lack of adult guidance."

Gravity - A Movement Constant

Gravity will kick your ass

Gravity wins every time

So does gravity suck? No way!

Gravity can be your friend

Gravity instructs if you are willing to learn from it

Gravity can be chanced and enhanced

Learn to cheat it and use it to your advantage and you will be great!

Run Fast, Jump High and Throw Far!