Functional Path Training

So, You Want a Coaching Job?

In the course of my fifty years of coaching I have been fortunate to have had great mentors, influences and role models. I learned very early that I was not entitled to anything I had to pay my dues and earn the right to move forward. I constantly had to prove my competence and continue to improve.

In today’s world with increasing specialization and fast tracking I worry about the up and coming generation of coaches. This is an attempt to help guide this generation as to what matters in coaching. Start here with this as a self-evaluation exercise. Use this to create a profile of yourself beyond your resume’

Statement of Philosophy of Training and Coaching (Two Paragraphs Maximum)

Specific Short Term and Long-Term Goals

Education and relevant course work

All Coaching Experience – In any sport at any level

         Specifically, whom did you coach

         What were your actual coaching responsibilities?

Teaching Experience – Formal and informal (Sunday School counts)

Areas of Coaching Expertise – Be Specific & include examples

What are your Strengths? What makes you special and stand out from your peers?

What are your Weaknesses? Where do you need to improve? How do you plan to address your weaknesses?

Appearance – Do you look the part? Are you fit, and do you present yourself well?

Skill Proficiency – Do you have the ability to demonstrate what you are teaching?

Work Ethic – Are you willing to go the extra mile and work until the job is done? Give examples of how and when you have done this.

Certifications & Accreditations – List all in any field

List three books on Training or Athletic Enhancement that you have read in the past three months

List three books not related to sport or training that you have read in the last three months?

List three refereed journal articles that you have read in the last three months

What are you doing on a regular basis to improve your knowledge and ability as a coach? What is you action plan to improve your skills going forward?

What will you do that will be special?

The Athlete’s Growth Process – Making the Champions Choice

The athlete’s growth process is by no means linear or clearly defined. In my experience there are three steps of indeterminate length:

First Step: Your start out on the journey. Basically, you physically show up. You do what you are supposed to do and for a little while you get better. Not significantly better but enough to keep you coming back. That is the “doing the workout” stage.

The Next Step: Now you not only show up physically, but you are all there in body and in mind. You listen, you absorb what is going on. You process why. You leave the workout thinking about what you have done well and what you can do better. I call that “Training the Workout.”

The Third step or leap is quite different: Now you think about what you are going to do before the workout, you set objectives and measurable goals for yourself. You are fully engaged and aware. When the workout is over, you review the workout, you reset goals if necessary. You put each workout in the context of the big picture. I call this “Winning the Workout.” When the athlete gets to this level they have a realistic chance of being consistently competitive in the competition.

It is a process. Some athletes spend little or no time in in step one or two, they go straight to three and never look back. For others it takes time, maturity, and understanding. Many are called, and few chose to make the champions choice of being at step three. That demands being comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. As coaches we guide the way to help the athlete make the champions choice. We lead by words and action. If we don’t make the champions choice how can we expect our athletes to?

 

Who Am I?

I am possibly going through an old age identity crisis, but I have been thinking a lot lately about how people define themselves or let other define them. It got me thinking about how I define myself, so at the risk of coming across as vain and self-centered I thought I would share how I define myself. This is partially as a result of spending too many years letting others define me. I have learned to have a chance to make an impact and lead a purposeful life you must define yourself and stay true to that definition. Here goes:

I am a coach who specializes in being a generalist. I do this by being a synthesizer, connecting the dots in seemingly disparate areas looking for similarities, differences and patterns that may not be readily apparent. I am a connector of people, believing in the powers of networks. I am also a simplifier, there is no need to make things more complicated. Performance is by its very nature chaotic so to most profoundly affect performance staying simple focused on the basics works for me. Last but not least I am an informed skeptic thoroughly schooled in the school of hard knocks through success and failure.

How do you define yourself?

Read this Book! The Playmakers Advantage

For the past fifteen years I have been focused on what to do to get better at getting better. I have explored cognitive neuroscience, recognizing that the brain and how we train the brain is the key to getting better at getting better. In that pursuit I have read numerous books, devoured research literature, attended seminars and talked to as many experts as possible. The deeper I got into the process I knew I was on the right path. This is why I am encouraging you to read The Playmakers Advantage – How to Raise Your Mental Game to The Next Level. Len Zaichkowsky AKA Dr. Z and Dan Peterson have done a masterful job of compiling the research and their extensive experience into a comprehensive informative guide to the latest information on training the brain to improve sports performance.

This is a terrific resource for coaches. They go into detail as to the what, the how and very importantly the why of training the brain. The material in Playmakers Advantage represents what we have to do as coaches to optimize what we are doing. It is not a simplistic self-help motivational work, there are too many of those and they are ineffective in changing behavior. This has breadth and depth reflecting the latest research and best practice. It is one of the most valuable books I have read in a long time. How often as coaches have we said it is all in your head. Playmakers Advantage shows how to use what’s in our head to our competitive advantage.

Fit for the Test or Fit to Play for the Game

Do you want your athletes fit for the test or fit to play for the game? There is a real and distinct difference on one hand and some real lessons to be learned on the other. It all depends how the “fitness” tests are used and how they are framed in the overall context of the annual and career plan. The goal is accurate feedback in a competitive environment of the physical qualities that could determine success in the game. Selection and timing of tests sends a message. Therefore, decide what message you want to send. If you are going to use a two or three mile run test upon reporting for practice, then you are sending a message to the team that it is an endurance sport and they need to get ready for that. The game could be the opposite, but if their place on the team depends on it they will train for the test!

 

Clearing the Path or Preparing the Athlete for the Path

This post reporting Tony Strudwick’s comments is what prompted me to write this post. http://trainingground.guru/articles/tony-strudwick-why-sport-science-has-lost-its-way

Let’s stop putting inordinate amount of time in clearing a smooth and direct path for the athlete. All it does is set up unrealistic expectations. No journey toward athletic excellence is straight and narrow toward the destination without any bumps in the road, detours or breakdowns. Instead let’s shift the emphasis back to where it should be: preparing a robust adaptable athlete to negotiate any path put in front of them. To quote my colleague Bill Knowles what we have today is a "Medicalization of sport (sports medicine/sports rehabilitation): The process by which sports specific conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment."

This has resulted in reducing practice time by spending an inordinate amount of time on nonfunctional injury prevention programs, all of which detracts from what needs to be done to make the athlete better and less fragile. All this work preparing the perfect path is weakening the athlete and detracting from the ability to tolerate an adequate workload to get better. You don’t prepare the athlete for heat stress by training indoors in a controlled low humidity seventy-two degrees temperature-controlled environment or training is a weight room with temperature set at sixty-eight degrees. To get a training adaptation it is necessary to impose a training load that is age appropriate, meaningful and challenging in preparation for the chaotic uncontrolled environment of competition.

I am in no way proposing that we go back 50 years to my college football experience which did nothing but break us down. I believe there is a happy medium. We have gone overboard with our concern for athlete welfare to the point that we are placing them at risk by putting them in the competitive environment without being ready for the demands of competition.  We are being overprotective. Training load must be high, in fact it must at times be an overload to prepare for competition. We need to do a better job of using all the measuring and monitoring tools at our disposal to be prescriptive, not restrictive. We also need to measure what is meaningful and actionable. Just because it can be measured does not make it meaningful. It is time to shift the emphasis back to preparing a robust athlete capable of travel on any road.

Special thanks to Kelvin Giles, Dean Benton, Nick Garcia, Martin Bingisser, John Pryor, Steve Myrland, Bill Knowles and Patrick McHugh for their input on this post.