Functional Path Training

GAIN 2016 Reflections

In the past years I have written my reflections a day or two after GAIN ends. For various reason I have waited for almost two weeks. GAIN IX was the by far the best ever. I looked back on my reflections from past GAIN”s and I always say that the most recent was the best ever. No I am not given to hyperbole. This GAIN was the best; it was a giant leap forward in all respects. The content was great as expected, but it was more than that, everything clicked I think we really struck at the essence of GAIN which is the interaction, the sharing and the learning. If you are interested you can watch my opening GAIN talk at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWoVevqPSEA

GAIN is not a conference nor was it ever intended to be a conference. The presentations are meant to facilitate, provoke and stimulate thought, even to get people thinking differently. What makes GAIN special is the people from diverse backgrounds, sporting cultures and areas of expertise.

The 2016 GAIN Faculty

Here are some of the things that made GAIN 2016 special for me:

Steve Magness sharing his “mistakes” from this past year and lessons learned.

Jim Radcliffe and Bill Knowles sitting in the front row of every session, taking notes and asking questions.

It was the morning “wake-up” sessions at the track that woke up the brain and the body with the high quality teaching and information presented in an environment where you could feel it and experience it.

The meals where you had a basketball coach from Bulgaria talking to a cricket conditioning coach from Trinidad, where you had NFL and NBA coaches sitting with high school coaches.

It was Dean Benton and Grant Duthie showing they use Tactical Periodization and GPS data for prescription not restriction of training.

Wade Gilbert underscoring the importance of culture and of reflective coaching.

Bill Knowles sharing his work with the Philadelphia Union Academy and his athletic development model of reconditioning and return to play.

Randy Ballard sharing his solutions for transitioning the “broken and bent” incoming athletes into effective Division One athletes.

Ken Clark showing how he is turning his research on speed into practice.

It was Brain McCormick talking about the realities of LAD and making Dynamic System theory as it applies to skill acquisition understandable.

I could go on forever. I leave GAIN every year very tired and overwhelmed by the quality and volume of information. Now that I have had two weeks to decompress, review and recuperate I can’t wait for GAIN 2017, which will be our tenth GAIN. The challenge is to make it better. To make it better demands better people. If you are interested in becoming part of the GAIN experience applications will open in January of 2017. Slots for new attendees will be limited and each year it gets more selective.

We are staring GAIN events throughout the year. The first event will be GAIN swimming September 15 to 18 in Carmel Indiana. Check the website in a couple of weeks for more details.

Last Week in Oregon – Observations & Lessons

Oregon City Swim Team - Matt Crum head coach of Oregon City swim team spoke the phrase of the week to his team: “Embrace Chaos” when he was introducing a new training set in the water to his swimmers. This really resonated with me. Essentially training is preparing to race and no race goes perfectly according to plan. OCST does not have perfect facilities and unlimited pool time, in fact their facilities are limited which leads to some chaos but Matt has turned that into a positive. Learn from the chaos by embracing it. This is a good lesson for us all.

Breakfast meeting with Jon Marcus – Jon is a young coach who gets it. It was great to visit with him and share ideas and talk coaching. Jon coaches a group of elite middle distance runners in Portland but he is far from being a specialist. He coaches all aspects of their training, not just the running. One factor that gives him this skill set is that he has coached other sports and other events in track & field, definitely old school in this day of uber specialization.

Training Session with Ashton & Brianna Eaton - Their coach Harry Marra, has done a masterful job preparing and progressing them. I met with Harry before the workout and he showed me a training summary that Ashton gives him at the conclusion of each month. It was well beyond a training diary, it was his feedback and reflections on what they worked on each day. It was full of terrific insights in to the whole process. It was obvious watching the session that this is a real coaching partnership. I love watching great coaching/teaching sessions like this. Mind you these are the best of the best and they are still learning and growing. Harry started the session with a two-minute lesson on the concepts he wanted to reinforce in the high jump and the shot put. The amount of time Harry puts into preparation is amazing. He gets there and sets up for the session no less than one hour before. In planning the session he reviews video and is constantly looking for cues and things to fine tune. His key is communication; he knows his athletes and coaches them as people. Watching Ashton and Briana was special, they approach training with a laser like focus. They are on task and know what they need to do. No training session is excessively long nor do they do double sessions everyday. They live by the mantra that less is more. Just putting in time is not training.

Oregon football morning training session – I have been privileged to watch several Oregon football practices over the past few years This morning training session conducted by good friend and colleague Jimmy Radcliffe was amazing! It started in the dark and cold with Jimmy leading an extensive warm-up that reinforced the movement concepts that would be the focus of the session. They then broke into position groups for various athletic development activities, linemen where throwing logs, skill positions were doing plyo’s etc. What followed was one of the most impressive team speed sessions I have seen in all my years of coaching. Speed is the Oregon game and this was FAST! They broke into position groups and did what Jimmy calls position sprints (Nothing unique here) which consist of various patterns and angle runs imitating the movements that occur at their positions in the game. The speed and precision of execution was what was impressive – faster than game speed with perfect effort all led by a player in each group. You play the way you train – train fast to play fast!

Sierra/Cascade Symposium – This is a biannual event organized and hosted by Jimmy Radcliffe. It is open by invitation only. It was a great experience to exchange ideas about coaching with this group even though I do not work with football. Coaching is about people so it was easy to connect. What impressed me is that all the coaches coached another sport, mainly track and field, definitely not the norm today.

Competition – The Essence of Sport

Records are not the essence of sport, competition is. A bold and broad statement so let me explain. The more emphasis on an incessant search for world records only encourages athletes to dope. The financial incentives are great and we are forcing athletes to push the envelope every outing, which is physically impossible. Let’s shift the emphasis back to competition. Great close competitions are as exciting as a paced world record that no one outside the sport understands.

Changing the Game

The only way you change the change the game is to change how you prepare for the game. Now we are in NBA preseason and on the NBA channel they are traveling to the various training camps and interviewing coaches and players. It was the same in NFL preseason. What do see in the background – The same old time worn drills, players standing around in lines, coaches talking, players not listening much less learning. You see the same thing in Major League baseball with all supposed advancement in analytics and technology they still prepare the same – batting practice – hitting against balls thrown at 65 mile per hour with millions of dollars of players standing around in the outfield. I repeat the only way you change the game is to change how you prepare and practice for the game. In practice don’t try to replicate the game distort it, practice faster. Strive for high quality perfect effort and game performance will change. To accomplish this takes a sound foundation in pedagogy and a willingness to learn, adapt and change.

Youth Sports – A Position Statement

In developing young athletes it is one thing to say that children are not miniature adults and then to turn around and treat them as miniature adults by imposing adult competition and practice schedules on children. They are children and need to be treated as such. We need to get away from the emphasis on where they will be, their future potential, there is time for that later, put 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. Deemphasize the competition every weekend that starts an early trend toward peaking for Saturday, which then becomes a habit at latter stages of development that results in stifling long-term development and injuries. 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 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 and principles of growth and development as well as emotional maturation. The time for change is now before we lose a another generation!

It’s not the bat!

This is from the feature story in last weeks Sports Illustrated “Exit Stage Center” about Derek Jeter by Tom Verducci. If you want some great insights into sustained excellence, competitive greatness and leadership read this article. This story in the article about the bat really resonated with me.

“The day Jeter reported to the Gulf Coast League Yankees in Tampa in 1992 he found himself standing over a bin filled with wood bats. Jeter the Yankee’s first-round draft choice and sixth overall, had only used a metal bat at Central High School in Kalamazoo, Mich. He picked through the wood bats until he found one in size and shape that most resembled what he’d swung in high school. It was a Louisville Slugger P72, a model first crafted in 1954 for a minor leaguer named Les Pinkham. This one was 34 inches and weighed 32 ounces.

From that first day in pro ball to what will be his last covering more than 15,000 turns at bat, Jeter never used another model. “maybe I’d pick up another one in batting practice if I broke one,” he says. “But I’ve never had an at bat in a game with another one.”

In my career in professional baseball I saw players change bats weekly and sometimes daily, as if their performance depended on the bat. It’s not the bat; it’s never the bat it was Jeter’s consistent daily preparation that never varied no matter if he was on a hitting streak on in a slump, if it was the first game of the season or the seventh game of the World Series. It is about consistency and routine. That is what makes the great ones great! Jeter epitomizes the 3R’s – Routine, Repetition & Refinement.

What do you expect?

What we are seeing today in big time professional and collegiate sports is no surprise to me. It is the result of a broken sports system and a society that has comprised basic standards of behavior. As coaches and sports administrators we are responsible for what we are seeing. Sport does not exist isolated or separate from society. As coaches we often proudly point out that sport is a microcosm of life, if that is the case should we be surprised by the aberrant behavior we are seeing in top athletes? We have created several generations of athletes with a distorted sense of their importance, not to mention never having to account to any semblance of reality in regard to their behavior. We begin the process young by entitling the stars, allowing them to miss class, miss practice and violate teams rules as long as they deliver performance in the game. It gets worse in the recruiting process where immature youngsters are wined and dined and pumped full of inflated opinions about their self-worth. This all coupled with the decline of the family makes what we are seeing very explainable. This does not make it right or acceptable. As coaches and athletic administrators we need to put development of the person above winning. We must stop accepting this deviant behavior as normal. We need to hold the athletes to a higher standard. A standard of behavior that is expected of a good citizen in the normal world not the distorted world of big time sport.

Gaelic Athletics True Sport

On Sunday July 12 we got to see an amazing athletic event the Munster Hurling final between Cork and Limerick. What a sport – it completely captured me. Curling along with Gaelic Football is part of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The GAA has pitches all over the country even in the smallest communities. The Grand Final is held at Croke Park in Dublin with 80,000 fans in attendance. This is in a country of only five million people. The GAA is all community based and completely amateur; all the athletes compete for the love of the game. The community pride and spirit is off the charts (think Cal v Stanford or Alabama v Auburn) and you get the idea, but these rivalries sometimes go back a couple of hundred years. Tickets to the matches are only available through the clubs. The pregame ceremony consisted of a march of the two teams around the field led by a marching band. The singing of the Irish national anthem in Gaelic was very special, everyone sang with a real patriotic spirit and pride – a lesson we Americans could learn.

In Hurling the pitch is 130 – 145 meters in length & 80 to 90 meters wide and no stopping except for injury, there are no timeouts. Women play a version of the game called Camogie. The range of athletic demands is second to none. You must be as fit as an 800-meter runner. Be fast, quick and extremely agile. Possess both strength and power and be able to endure non-stop action for 70 minutes with a 15-minute halftime break. But that’s not all; the high level of skill is what is most impressive. It was nothing to see shots on goal made from 50 meters. It just blew me away to see a player run while balancing the ball on his Hurley while running at top speed for 20 or 30 meters, then stop on a dime toss the ball up and rip off a shot!

On the Tuesday following the match I got to do a training session with the Rebel Og Youth development squad (Both Hurling & Gaelic Football players) at the Mardyke Arena, my hosts for the week. These boys were a fine group of young athletes. The GAA has quite an extensive development system to bring players up to the senior level.

My exposure was to GAA was very positive with everyone participating for the intrinsic value of the sport. Words are not adequate to do justice to this game; you have to see it played at this level to get a feel for it and appreciate it. This is true sport. No one including the coaches is paid. The players all have day jobs. They  are playing for the love of sport; in fact three of the players on the Cork team also played in the Gaelic football match the Sunday before. It reminded of the “good old days” before sport was completely corrupted by money.

Pursuing Marginal Gains

Pursing marginal seems to be the ongoing mantra in sport today. I can understand it when I see someone on the brink of a world record or a championship pursuing marginal gains in a legal and ethical manner. What I don’t understand is when I see teams and athletes pursuing marginal gains and ignoring the basics and fundamentals of sound training. There is no sense pursuing the last 2% until you have taken care of the first 98%. Know the basics, practice the basics, master the basics and never stray far from the basics. Instead of aggregation of marginal gains think aggregation of basics by paying attention to detail on a day-to-day and session-by-session basis and you will see bigger than marginal gains as training accumulates over time. Commit 100% to excellence 24 hours a day and the marginal gains will come, it is a process that takes time, nothing happens overnight. No secrets and no magic!

Rush to Sport Science

Just saw where another NFL team named a Director of Sport Science. I have been looking at this whole area while preparing for my presentation this Friday to EXB 179 Frontiers in Exercise Biology class at University California Davis as part of a series on The Role of Science in Sports sponsored by Dept of Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior. I will be speaking on "The past & future of science in training athletes" (It is free & open to public – join us.) Certainly throughout my career I have used science to the fullest extent I have been capable given the resources available, time and budget. I find it interesting that all of sudden over the past few years I keep seeing the term “sport science” tossed around like it is some mysterious cure all and a magic pill to improve sport performance.

I think all this attention warrants some very basic questions. I ask these questions not to be sarcastic but out of genuine curiosity to see what this is all about. What really is sport science? Do these teams and organizations really know what they are getting when they hire a sports science person? Is it just monkey see, monkey do – just hiring one because everyone else has one? What exactly will they do? Will they just be window dressing? How will they interface with the sport coaches, S&C coaches and the medical staff? Who really knows how to use and apply sport science? Is this really all that innovative?

I know over twenty years ago with the Chicago White Sox we did biomechanics analysis of our minor league pitchers, we had an extensive sport psych program. We did research on running and movement mechanics. I thought it was just part of what needed to be done to develop the athlete. Did it make a difference? Unequivocally yes. Why - because it was a coordinated program that was integrated into the fiber of the player development program. I saw the same thing the last few years under the direction of Dean Benton with the Brumbies in Super Rugby. An unbelievably integrated program with everyone onboard and it showed up in results on the field. Was it sport science? Yes the sport sciences were part of it, but it was a unified effort of the whole performance team. Time will tell where all this will go.