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@mcquilkin Monday 1330-1400.
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I’m challenging us to take other coaches’ perceived lack of effort, interest or desire as our personal responsibility. What are the solutions to it? How can we help other coaches?
Can you host a coaches’ only workout session on Tuesday mornings, Friday nights or Sunday afternoons? Can you meet with your coaches and have them talk to you for 5 minutes about their favorite coach of all time? Or their favorite athlete success story?
Can you have a reading list of free resources ready to hand to a coach who is struggling? And then follow up with a discussion or have them share the book with a friend?
Given how deep we’ve fallen into the PAHQ rabbit hole, how are we any different than CrossFit Level 1 Trainer’s who eat, sleep and breathe the CrossFit Journal? Because we choose to train for field sport and they choose to train for sagittal plane proficiency?
Where are we falling short in supporting our fellow coaches and creating opportunities to learn about Power Athlete methodology or any other coaching resource?
The entire industry is a reflection of us as individuals to outsiders. They won’t appreciate why we think we’re different or how incredible good coaching can be until they experience it. You can battle bullshit by shoveling your way through it or by killing the cow and sharing the steak with everyone. Let’s find actions we can take to make others around us better. Complaining about other’s actions is wasted energy. Working towards to changing them is going to make you and them better.
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Opportunity and organization are the limiting factors I see the most. Coaching is a skill that can be developed like any other and in order to progress it (just like a strength program) we need a stimulus and a plan.
Opportunity: To watch others coach, to be coached by others, to coach athletes on a regular basis for an extended period of time, to coach athletes you’ve never seen before, to coach absolute novices and to coach world class athletes. Without exposure to those situations you aren’t forced to develop your observation and communication skills to their fullest. You don’t have the opportunity to learn or create new methods of teaching.
Organization: A structure to your programs, your time and your training. Without a plan there is no focus or drive for a next achievement. Good coaches that don’t have a plan become stale and ineffective because they have no new material. They cannot progress faster than their athletes’ needs and become a limitation to their athletes’ development. Their voice and message also become stale, making athletes less receptive to their cues and methods.
I think coaches should write out developmental programming the same way they do workouts. Structure a sprint technique mesocycle where you incorporate reading and getting coached in person by a sprint specialist. Or a weightlifting mesocycle where you volunteer for a lifting meet.
Continue to track your progress as if it were a max lift. And then create at least one opportunity per month to be in a novel coaching situation or environment.
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Going UP on a….you know the rest and are equally disappointed that you can’t stop quoting Drake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp16tq040mw&feature=youtu.be
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Bringing all the fire power and raw emotion of a public radio broadcast. Part 2 dropping soon!
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Also, I look like I live on the streets of Jamaica. Someone please photoshop a bong into my hands in that thumbnail.
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That’s the greatest actor of our time in the display screen for the video, right?
Nicholas Cage?
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Another suggestion that I forgot about:
Mutual accountability. Me and four other guys at the gym have a weekly Meat Share. Yes, I meant to write that.
We all cook enough of one item to share with the other guys.
1. It makes you plan ahead so that you have food cooked and separated into portions for everyone.
2. You learn new foods and recipes because you don’t want to be the guy who makes chicken wings each week.
3. You’re pushed to make food better and better because you’re serving it to other people.
Granted we all have been cooking for ourselves for years, but it could be a way to get guys interested in cooking without having a coach leading them through a separate class each week.
Plus, Meat Share looks great on a t-shirt. Or a poster. Or a packet of food.
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Any way to attach a .pdf to a post?
Or link to it?
I’ve got a three page excerpt on specific visualization and will power that I wanted to share.
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I hear you on the frustration with lack of personal responsibility, but let’s bring this back to coaching and chunking learning.
When an athlete is struggling with loading their posterior chain in a squat, would you ask them “How bad do you want it?” or tell them to “Make it happen.”? Or would you break the movement down into remedial exercises so that they could feel, learn and understand all of the necessary components?
Do you assume that your athletes can squat perfectly but lack the will power to do so? Or do you think that they don’t have the understanding or motor control to do it properly despite their best intentions?
Is a coach who yells at their athletes to “Just squat the weight! If you want it bad enough you’ll DO it!” teaching their athletes anything? Or is it the sign of a coach who doesn’t have the skill to fix the problem?
While it may feel good, taking the Dr. Phil approach of telling people to man up and figure it out doesn’t provide any actionable direction.
Athletes need benchmarks and guidance for food the same way that they need movement prep and primal movement practice for athletic proficiency. Some athletes legitimately do not know how to go grocery shopping. Do not know how to boil water or cook on a stove top. They simply haven’t been exposed to it. And if they’re coming to you for guidance, there is also a chance that they have a legit physiological dependence on sugar, processed food and products that they have no tools for dealing with.
We provide athletes with three main tools in our nutrition program:
- A laminated print out with a picture of what a plate full of food should look like if you are following the nutritional guidelines.
- A weekly schedule they have to fill out and submit the Friday before the upcoming week that shows how they have blocked off time for:
- Planning
- Cooking
- Meal Prep
- Grocery Shopping
- Gym
- Commuting
- Work
- A sheet that includes three short term goals and two specific scenarios they have written out where they visualize a potential problem for that week and how they will deal with. THIS IS POWERFUL. By visualizing what their meals, their week and their problems look like they are much more likely to adhere to the behavioral changes needed to alter their diets.
Your athletes may be at a loss as to how to organize their lives and introduce new habits when it comes to nutrition. Their seeming lack of drive or discipline is an OPPORTUNITY for you to install a new set of behaviors. Think of them as a blank slate. Instead of turning them loose to search the internet for juice cleanses and whole wheat pizza crust recipes, give them the tools they are lacking and asking you for.
Getting frustrated with your athletes for their lack of knowledge reduces their likelihood to come to you with other questions and concerns. While I have also thrown out food for my clients, I don’t tell them to simply lift themselves up by their bootstraps and figure it out. If they’ve given me a chance to shape their habits, you better believe I’m going to exploit that opportunity for all that it’s worth.
Now, granted, most of you guys aren’t running gyms in an area that is predominantly female, overtly academic and dominantly liberal so my “hold your hand and sing kum-by-yah” approach may not be exactly your style.
My point is that we can at the very least offer our athletes resources as follow up to our tough love.
Don’t know how to cook. / Well, you when you learn how you’re going to get better results in the gym and impress girls. Here is a cookbook on how to use a slow cooker. I want you to make me 1 recipe and bring me a sample in 3 days.
I don’t have time. / Here is a spreadsheet I want you to fill out by this time tomorrow with your schedule for the next week. You need to block off two three hour periods for cooking that are at least two days apart. Why three hours? Because we know you can’t cook, so it’ll probably take your dumb ass three quarters of an hour to finish making minute rice. You need time to learn. I also want you to list what you’re going to give up to make room for that three hours. It’s probably going to be watching TV. I expect to see pictures of you cooking at the start and finish of that time window. If you don’t accomplish that I’ll assume you were watching TV and I will come to your house and take your TV or your cable/DirecTV/Apply Play device. The choice is yours.
Detailed, actionable and timely guidance that gives them something to accomplish and build on. Then be a hard ass in enforcing it.
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@benkuch Dropping the hammer from off the top rope.
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@menacedolan @train608 @chobbs
I don’t think that using compensatory acceleration changes the intensity of the lift. If that were the case, then lifting the weight slowly would decrease the intensity of the lift and you would be able to avoid taxing the CNS with heavier loads simply by moving like molasses on a cold morning in winter.
I do agree that the volume of lifts completed at a higher intensity continues to increase as the BLOS is established. An athlete that starts a 3 x 5 linear progression with a squat weight that may be 70% of a theoretical maximum effort will likely be completing 3 x 5 with a squat weight in excess of 90% after 12 or so weeks. So even though the total rep count of 15 has remained constant, because the load is significantly greater the intensity of each rep has increased and the volume of those same 15 reps is much greater stimulus.
In the 2004 edition, Siff writes “there is a linear increase in absolute strength in response to a given regime of loading, which slows down as the limit of this optimal time-span of training is reached…” (p. 357) and he continues with regard to special training for explosive strength:
“When explosive strength is the purpose of special training, there is a clear tendency for the rise in explosive strength to slow down; the sharper its growth, the earlier it plateaus. When one is emphasizing the development of explosive strength exclusively, the plateau appears within 3-4 months. In those cases, where explosive strength is not the key ability, the increase in explosive strength can continue for up to 10 months.” (p. 357)
This progress increase in both intensity and volume of work at higher intensity is supported by the work of sprint coach Charlie Francis who writes: “The benefit of maintaining all high intensity elements at all times should be obvious: firstly, it guarantees that strength or speed or power accrued will not be lost due to a prolonged downtime; and secondly, it allows for a longer period for improvement at each element.” (p. 16)
While excessive intensity and volume will tax the body beyond its ability to adapt, gradual increases in both will allow an athlete to reach their true maximum adaptive capacity in response to the stimulus of a linear progression in barbell training. The linear progression increases volume and intensity in a linear manner until the body can’t adapt anymore, which establishes a novice athlete’s base level of strength.
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@hashaw21 Your ARE the fuel for my fire baby.
