Functional Path Training

Getting There – Being The Best

The process of getting to be the best is not a straightforward linear path, it is a process and it takes time. In my forty-four years of coaching I have seen that many are called to walk the path but few actually choose. Yes you read that correctly. Many are called but few choose. The opportunity is there for many but few will make the choice because it is a difficult path that requires moving out of their Comfort Zone.

At each step of development there are clear-cut choices that must be made. Some of the choices are conscious, like doing something different in training and others are subtle almost unconscious like pushing through a pain barrier or finishing a workout that seems too hard. You must be guided by clear SMART goals that help to guide you to your destination. SMART goals are goals that are:

S = Specific

M = Measurable

A = Attainable

R = Realistic

T = Time

The goal is where you want to go, where you want to end up, it is the beacon of light that guides you. Most athletes start in the Comfort Zone and stay there. They are good at their sport and satisfied with where they are. They make easy choices; they never go the extra mile. They do only what is expected, never more. Athletes in this zone take no risks; there are no champions here. If you aspire to be a peak performer then you will quickly have to move out of your comfort zone to the Performance Zone or you will never achieve your goals.

Athletes in the Performance Zone have a greater commitment. They take some risks and they will go the extra mile when necessary. They occasionally are uncomfortable. They usually win as much as they lose.

From the Performance Zone the next step is the High Performance Zone. As the athlete chooses to do what is necessary to move up from one zone to the next there will be less people in of the higher zones.  The athletes in this zone are willing to risk and get very uncomfortable. In fact they are uncomfortable more than they are comfortable and they win more than they lose. They will always go the extra mile.

The pinnacle, the Peak Performance Zone is where the champions live, train and play. This is a special place. It is as far from the comfort zone as you could imagine. Athletes here are the best of the best and they are comfortable with being uncomfortable because they know what it takes to be the best. In fact they are uncomfortable all the time and they make others uncomfortable with their intensity and drive. The path is clear you must do the work daily with ICE - Intensity, Concentration and Effort. You must win the workouts if you expect to win the competition.

Make the choice to be the best. Set your goals and start acting on those goals now. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time.

Olympic Gold Medal Coaching

I have been fortunate in the time since the Olympic games to spend time with seven coaches of Gold medal winners in Athletics (Track & Field) from the London games. In two instances I got to watch workouts and spend significant time with the coach and athlete. These are the commonalities that all shared:

Passion – In most cases they wore their passion on their sleeves.

Technical Knowledge – They knew the basics and didn’t stray far from them. None of them made what they did overly complicated.

Emotional Intelligence – They know their athletes and themselves. They listened to the athlete.

Systematic – Nothing by chance, thorough plans, but still built flexibility into the system

Humility – Not overly impressed with themselves, willing to credit others and seek help. Did not go it alone.

Paid their dues – All except one has been coaching for quite some time; they were not always coaching gold medal winners.

Interestingly enough these are the characteristics I see in great coaches at any level. These characteristics are what it takes to be an effective coach.

Exercises, Drills & Stuff

Yesterday afternoon I was in Hasely Crawford Stadium in Port of Spain Trinidad watching over three hundred track & field athletes of all ages train but I could have just as well been in London, Brisbane or back home in Sarasota. What I saw was a bunch of drills and exercises; it was obvious in most cases the drills were just imitations of what someone had seen on YouTube or learned at a workshop. Drills and exercises without purpose and context are nothing more than busy work, just stuff. If you use drills know the purpose of the drill. Know why you are using the drill or exercise at this time with these athletes. Just doing work and getting tired is not training. There must be a purpose and direction to everything you do to prepare the athlete for the demands of competition. Drills often get the athlete better at the drill and do not transfer to the actual event. I have learned over the years that less is more. Fewer drills and exercises done with a specific purpose that the athlete clearly understands are more effective that a bunch of stuff wishing and hoping they will work.  Training with direction, intent and purpose will produce results.

Going Through The Motion

Just getting in hours will not do it. Anyone can go through the motions, huff and puff and look like they are working. Just doing work is not good enough; you must train with ICE – Intensity, Concentration, Effort. If you consistently achieve a high ice score eight to ten on a ten-point scale. A score of ten being frigid, ice cold then you will the workout. If you can consistently win workouts then you give yourself a chance to perform in competition, remember there are no guarantees. Champions are champions everyday, when there are no crowds, no coaches, and no teammates, just you against the clock or the weight. It is all about the will to prepare.

Coaching Out of Your Comfort Zone

We talk a lot about having our athletes get out of their comfort zones to move forward and progress. How about us? As coaches we all have our comfort zones. Some of us are good in certain areas. Some of us can prepare an athlete for a league or a district meet and then are out of our element when we have to prepare for a state of national competition. In short we all have our comfort zones. Step back and do an honest evaluation of where you are as a coach. What are you comfortable with? Where are you uncomfortable? Is where you are comfortable holding you and most importantly your athletes back? I know I am pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone in certain areas. After 44 years of coaching it is tougher to do but I know it must be done. It may mean little things, but a succession of little things could make a big difference. What are you going to do today to get out of your comfort zone to help make your athletes better?

The Training Puzzle

Start with a clear picture of the finished puzzle, the picture on the cover of the box. What do want the athlete to look like physically and performance wise at the end of the training program? Keep this picture in mind all the time. This is the ultimate goal of the training puzzle. Build from the corners and the edges in to the middle. Take of advantage of the straight edges the easy things to achieve those will provide the structure to fill in all the pieces. Once you have done this the pieces will begin to fit logically into place.

Performance Paradigm

Movement is quite simple and from that wonderful simplicity comes the complexity of sports skill and performance. Twenty-five years ago in an attempt to better explain movement and how we should effectively train movement I came up with this simple diagram I call the Performance Paradigm. It was somewhat like what Albert Szent-Gyorgi, once said, “Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.” Essentially it is the stretch shortening cycle of muscle with a more global interpretation and proprioception brought into consideration. It is the basis for what some people call the Gambetta Method; to me it is common sense. I use this to evaluate movement efficiency or deficiency and then to guide training and if necessary rehab.

Essentially all movement is interplay between force reduction and force production. The quality of the movement is dictated by our proprioceptive system. We begin movement by loading the muscles – this is the force reduction phase. Basically this is the eccentric loading phase as a well as instantaneous isometric action that lends stiffness to the muscle. This is the most important component of the performance paradigm, but probably the most overlooked as well as the most misunderstood. There are several reasons for this; the most notable being that it is less measurable. Because it is more difficult to quantify we have tended to emphasize the more measurable component, force production. It is during the force reduction phase that most injuries occur. Think landing on one leg and tearing an ACL or planting to cut and spraining an ankle.  It is during this phase that gravity has its greatest impact; it is literally trying to slam the body into the ground.

Once force has been reduced the subsequent result is force production. Force production is easy to see and easy to measure. Consequently it gets an inordinate amount of attention in the training process. We see it because it is the outcome. It is how high or far we jump. It is how much we lift. But just because it is easy to see and measure does not mean it should receive the inordinate emphasis, in training that it does. It must be stressed that it is the component of the performance paradigm that is highly dependent on the other phases.

The third component of the Performance Paradigm is proprioception. Ultimately it is the glue that binds a whole functional program together is proprioception. Proprioception is the awareness of joint position and force derived from the sense receptors in the joints, ligaments, muscles, and tendons. It is that component that gives quality to the movement. “The quality of movement, in part, is dependent upon neurologic information fed back from proprioceptors within muscles and joints to the higher brain centers. The information returning to the central nervous system from the periphery includes “data” concerning tension of muscle fibers, joint angles, and position of the body being moved.” Logan and McKinney (Page 62) It is the feedback mechanism that positions the limbs to be able to achieve optimum efficiency. It is a component of movement that has been all but ignored in most traditional training programs until recently. It is highly trainable, especially if it is incorporated as part of a whole program.

It is almost too simple. Perhaps to appreciate proprioception we should look at the extreme case of a stroke victim that is able to return to normal movement patterns. Why can’t an athlete who has all their capacities enhance the quality of their movement by focusing on the same things that the stroke victim has to focus on to get back to function? The key to that is proprioception. We must strive to constantly change proprioceptive demand throughout the training program in order to enhance the quality of movement.

The performance paradigm will serve as a guide to determine how we train all components. It can also serve as a very useful guide to help us to evaluate movement from a slightly different context. It should serve as a guide to be more functional in our approach by emphasizing the timing and sequence of all three components of the paradigm. The synergistic interplay between them will produce the highest quality of movement.

It is very easy to get caught in the trap of measurable strength. How much you can lift or how many foot-pounds of force you can express on a dynamometer are meaningless numbers. Functional training does not depend on measurable strength. Quality of movement, coordination and rhythm are more important. The goal is always to apply the strength that is developed in the actual sport performance. How is the force expressed? Can you produce and reduce the force? Force production is all about acceleration, but often the key to movement efficiency and staying injury free is the ability to decelerate and stabilize in order to position the body to perform efficiently. A good functional training program will work on the interplay between force production, force reduction and stabilization. The end result is functional strength

Where Are The Teachers?

The missing link in today’s coaching is pedagogy. Webster’s defines Pedagogy as: the art, science, or profession of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction. My generation of coaches was trained as teachers. We learned teaching methodology and teaching methods as an integral part of our education.

A huge influence on my approach to coaching from both a philosophical and a teaching perspective was my high school basketball coach, Mr. Charles Kuehl. As I look back on it he was clearly a teacher of basketball. He was a gifted history teacher who made history come alive. He took that same passion to the basketball court where he thoroughly taught us the game of basketball. He stared with fundamentals and then progressed from there but we never strayed far from fundamentals.  Practices were structured to maximize learning. My senior year in high school (1964) we achieved well beyond our talent level as team because of his thorough teaching. Ironically that was the same year that John Wooden won his fist national championship at UCLA. In those days very few games were televised, but I distinctly remember watching UCLA with no starter taller than 6’5” execute their famous zone press to perfection and play tough defense and work for the open shot. It intrigued me to the point where I wanted to find out more about them and their coach. I did not know much about coach Wooden and his methods at the time, but in subsequent years I came to study and understand his methods. It was all about teaching. Wooden was trained as a teacher, he was an English teacher, he was a teacher trained in the principles of pedagogy. That training screams out at you when read his words and study his coaching methods. They were very basic, structured and always on point. The emphasis was on instruction. His practices were thoroughly planned and organized, each drill had a specific purpose. Player improved not by chance but by design.

 

The bottom line here is that from day one as an athlete I learned that coaching was teaching and that good coaches were good teachers. This was reinforced in my teaching methods classes in college both as a history teacher, a physical education teacher and in coaching methods classes. The classes that had the greatest influence on my teaching methodologies were PE 30A and 30B at Fresno State and Ed Psych from Ruth Wilvert at UCSB. In those classes the emphasis was on how we taught what we taught. We learned seemingly simple things like: how to plan a lesson, where to stand, how to project your voice, the importance of body language, how to move a large group and get them in formation for optimum learning. Where is this taught today?

 

So much for history and background, lets talk about today. Why am I talking about pedagogy? Isn’t that a given in coaching? Yes it is, but it is a piece of the younger generation of coach’s preparation that is missing. This is not meant as a criticism but as an observation. There are reasons for this, the shift away from physical education to exercise science and sport science with curriculum heavy on theory but short on practice is a major factor. Nowhere are you taught to teach. Today the common career pathway is to get a degree in sport or exercise science, then intern or GA in a controlled college setting and go right into coaching. We have the same problem with many of the coaching certification programs. Most are sit down two to five day courses that require no practical component, no need to show proficiency in teaching the skills and techniques of the sport. Some are even online that require nothing more than watching some video and taking a multiple-choice test. There is some notable exceptions soccer being one with their licensing system. Also in many cases coaches who have little or no background in pedagogy or actual hands on teaching and coaching are teaching the younger generation of coaches. This just compounds the problem. This is a huge deficiency that I believe it is starting to show in the performance arena. It shows up in the poor skill development we see in certain sports and it shows up in the high injury rates. Somehow we need to get back to teaching coaches how to coach. It is not what you know but how you convey what you know to the athletes you are working with. All the knowledge of the intricacies of muscle contraction, neurophysiology and so on is useless without the skills of how to teach and communicate.

You Have To Do The Work

Lets not fool ourselves to get better you have to do the work, that is a given. Make no mistake that everyone who achieves at a high level does the work. All that being said just doing the work is not enough, anyone can work it is work with direction and purpose that produces results. We have this mistaken notion more prevalent today because of the “10,000 hour” myth that all you need to do is to punch the clock, accumulate hours and somehow magically at 10,000 hours you will be a champion. No way! If that work is not mindful, done with a plan that provides specific direction then all you are doing is getting tired and getting tired does not make you better. It is not the work it is what you put into the work that counts I know that is a cliché but some clichés are truisms. I have seen nothing in my experience to disprove this. Plan your work, work the plan, evaluate the results, recalibrate and keep moving forward with direction and purpose. I reminded of the words of a country western song that was popular a few years ago: "Work your fingers to the bone. What do you get? Boney fingers."

The Eye of the Beholder

It is interesting to listen to coach’s talk about what they see when observing movement. Are they really seeing what they think they see? Human vision is incredibly acute and at the same time fundamentally flawed. The longer I coach the more I realize that more often than not we see what we think we see rather that exactly what is happening. Whether we recognize it or not we all have a tendency toward a confirmation bias. Consciously or subconsciously we have programmed our brain to look for certain things. In many ways viewing motion is like looking at a Rorschach inkblot test, the shape of the object does not change as much as our perception of the shape of the object. I remember standing with three pitching coaches and three scouts watching a pitcher. Mind you six people watching the same pitcher throw the same pitch and they all saw something slightly different. As I listened to them I quickly realized that what each of them had seen confirmed each of their biases in regard to pitching. What is the solution? Obviously today we have high-speed video and a myriad of analysis tools, but we still need to be able to effectively use our naked eye to provide instant feedback for correction and instruction. First recognize your confirmation bias and work to erase that mental program. Second a very simple correction that I learned from Tom Tellez is to change vantage point. Instead of viewing a throw from the side watch from the rear or get up in the stands and view from above. You will be surprised at how many different things you see. A third solution is to learn to use you peripheral vision. Turn sideways to the action and you will be surprised at things you see. Our peripheral vision is very acute but we don’t train ourselves to use it to its fullest extent. Just like any coaching skill training yourself to have an accurate unbiased coaching eye is part of improving your skills as a coach. In words of that sage biomechanist Yogi Berra "You can see a lot by watching."