Functional Path Training

Change & Changing

Change is a constant, trite but true! Ultimately you success or failure as a coach will depend on how well you manage change. Change by its very nature is uncomfortable. I maintain that those who are best at managing and leading change are comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. If you can accept that then change is something that you do rather than something that happens to you. Successful coaches initiate change; they lead change as part of the process of continuous improvement. It is being proactive rather reactive. Be a change agent, lead don’t follow. Heed these lines from Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changing.”

The line it is drawn the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a' changin'!

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.