Functional Path Training

Finding the Edge

It is so tempting to just do what you are good at in training and to neglect the other things that you need to do to make significant improvement. It is so easy to rationalize away and then have it come back to haunt you when you need those other things the most. If you spend all your time on what you are good at then how do you get better? Somewhere you have to find that edge, a sweet spot where you can balance strengths and weaknesses in order to make incremental progress toward a goal. It is pushing the envelope to get out of your comfort zone. It has become fashionable to advise the athlete to get comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. That is fine as far as it will take you. For me that smells too much like grit and mental strength, two terms that I am not enamored with. It requires intent and purpose for each session, it is more than that just doing it. You have a well-articulated plan that is grounded in fundamentals. Execute the plan, constantly evaluate and revise the plan as necessary. Recognize that progress is not linear and sometimes there will be setbacks, but with a clear plan, a setback will be a marker to gauge where you are. The key is to push yourself continually to find the edge that will make a difference.

Get Beyond the Numbers

In today’s world of high performance sport we have the potential to bury ourselves in numbers. There is not much we can’t analyze, measure or monitor. In many ways this is a positive step forward & some ways it can be negative. The key is keeping the numbers in context. If you are letting the numbers dictate everything you do then it is time to reconsider. We coach people who do the sport not machines, there is a huge about of individual variability to the same training and competition stress not to mention the emotional and psychological factors that weigh in. Talk to your athletes; closely observe their body language. Find out about the rest of their lives, remember they are athletes only 2 to 4 hours a day the other hours of the day can a more of an impact than the training time – 24 hour athlete. Sharpen your observation and communication skills. It will add a dimension to the numbers, sometimes it will validate the numbers and other times it will dictate throwing out the numbers and following your coaching instincts. I cannot help but think how we did it before we had the ability to gather the numbers we have today. After all in high performance sport the only number that counts at the end of the competition are those numbers on the scoreboard.

If You Think You Have It Figured Out

Maybe you have just completed a successful season and won a championship. The temptation is to rest on your laurels. To do the same training again. In order to stay the same, you must change. Rethink what and how you did it. What must be reemphasized? What must be changed? How can I build on this year’s success? What is necessary to avoid stagnation and continue to achieve adaptation? The athletes will quickly accommodate to the stimulus. If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got. Terrible English but an important point to consider in order to get optimum return from training. So how do you progress? It is also necessary to recognize that there are certain training periods where you just need to put your nose to the grindstone and get after it. Sometimes you don’t really need to change the training the stimulus, just change the sequence of where it is placed in a program. Change is always uncomfortable, especially after achieving success. Sustained excellence demands continual change.

Three Books to Kickoff 2021

These three books are among the best I have read in the past several years. Out of Thin Air is terrific reinforcement of what you must do to compete successfully in an endurance sport. Great insights into training. Huge reinforcement of Seiler’s training polarization concept. The Art of Possible is not another formulaic motivational text. It really is a peak performance primer. Chock full of a practical step by step things you can do to achieve flow. Kotler really nails it. It certainly, got refocused. Think Again will getting rethinking and thinking again. Adam Grant is a rock star in my universe. So much great information here to get you thinking deeper.

Volume

Anyone can do more. Can you do more better? Is doing more really necessary? It is very easy to default to volume, in fact it is seductive to see the miles, tons or reps climb. At early stages of development doing more usually yields commensurate results, the more you do the better you get, but then what? The point of diminishing returns kicks in. Do you push through it or do you adjust?

My experience in having gone the more volume approach in several sports is the take a giant step back and rethink what you are doing. Volume is not a biomotor quality. So trite to say but so true, in so many instances less is more. Defaulting solely to higher intensity is not the answer either. The answer is to find that sweet spot for each athlete where volume, intensity and the often-overlooked factor of density are manipulated. In my experience the answer the volume conundrum is density which I define as the frequency of the training stimulus. It can be summed up in one simple axiom – a little bit more often. This is now being called micro dosing. It is easier to manage and monitor and takes full advantage of the cumulative training effect to achieve the desired adaptation.

Set-Up Concept

Nothing we do in training occurs in isolation. Everything we do is related. Training is cumulative. No one workout can make an athlete, but one workout can break an athlete. Therefore, keeping those two axioms in mind no training session should stand alone. Each workout should be linked to the workout that preceded it and to the session that follows. There may not be research to substantiate this, but I have a large body of practice to underscore the validity of the concept in my system. What I have found is that I can effectively use workout A to setup workout B and so forth. It takes detailed planning and record keeping. It demands coordination with the sport coach if you are an athletic development coach. Using the set-up concept separates the nice to do from the need to do. In the realm of physical preparation, the training session are more in concert with what is happening in the sport practice, therefore insuring a better degree of transfer. Play with the concept, I think you will see a benefit.

Systematic Sport Development

Sport systems have always fascinated me, even before I started coaching. When I was in college, we played the great San Diego State Football teams coached by Don Coryell. It was obvious they had a system and played to that system and recruited players for that system. My junior year in college we had a clinic at Fresno State and the defensive line coach at San Diego State, John Madden, was the featured speaker. He gave insights into the system, how he selected players for the positions and what he did to develop them. Needless to say, that confirmed what I had seen on film and on the field, it left a deep impression on me of the need to have a system if you wanted to have sustained excellence.

At the same time, I watched Bud Winter’s great San Jose State track teams. The knock on them was they had talent, so it didn’t matter what they did. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bud Winter took that talent and refined it and developed it through a well-defined system. The lesson here to me as a young coach once again that even if you have talent it is only through a system can you maximize that talent.

My next exposure to a systematic approach to athlete development was the Bowerman system at University of Oregon. I would say that this had the biggest influence on my subsequent coaching regardless of the sport.

In 1969 when I stared coaching, I was interested in developing my own system that was eclectic or if you will a hybrid of the systems that I could study and that I had seen firsthand. The more I studied and observed I could see that consistent performance was a product of some kind of a system. Sometimes very rigid and clearly defined and other times less structured. The proof was always in the pudding. Systems beat chaos. Systems with talent produced repeatable sustained excellence.

52 years later I am still enamored by systems. I have developed and refined my system over the years. It has been a process. A system lends order and structure to enable the coach and athlete to focus on the process. A viable system is not rigid and confining, instead it is organic and liberating. It provides a framework to build on. They system was always designed to fit the athlete, not the other way around. The system revolves around a well-articulated philosophy and clear core beliefs that everyone lives by. If those core beliefs are not well articulated and practiced, you have no system

I urge you to take a look at your system and other systems. What can you learn from others? What are you doing well? What can you do better?

Brave Enough by Jesse Diggins

I have always been an an avid reader of coaches and athletes’ biographies. Each biography gave me insights into what that athlete tick. How they approached training. How they got into their sport. How they were coached. There is so much to learn  from the experiences of others on the journey to achieve the pinnacle of sport performance. Brave Enough by Jesse Diggins in one of the best I have read in a long time. Her candor is refreshing. She shares her battle with bulimia which makes the book invaluable in itself. Great insights into training and team dynamics with female athletes. Regardless of what sport you coach this is a must read.

What Can You Do?

Instead of looking at ways to predict injury and search for hidden dysfunctions why not spend the time looking at possibilities to determine the athlete’s level of trainability. Each athlete is a case study of one. Focus on what the athlete CAN DO and use that as a starting point. In most cases the athlete has made it to a certain level because of what they can do. My job is to enhance those abilities and minimize the weaknesses while addressing them in a progressive manner to enable them to progress further athletically. Recognize the wisdom of the body and its ability to figure it out by devising training programs that fit the athlete instead of fitting the athlete to the program. Start with what they can do and dial up the program as they progress and adapt. Ultimately the goal is to reconcile what they can do with what they must do to be ready to thrive as adaptable athletes in the competitive environment.

House of Cards

Always build and rebuild your athletes from the ground up. Emphasize training movements that connect and coordinate. Start with fundamental movements and add complexity as the athlete’s gain mastery of the fundamentals. Don’t worry too much about being sport specific; instead emphasize movements that are sport appropriate to prepare the athlete for the sport demands. Take your time, adaptation takes time it will not happen overnight. If you don’t do this, you are building a fragile athlete much like a house of cards that will blow over in the slightest breeze.