Hierarchy of Success - Approach

Continuing on the Hierarchy of Success series, now I want to move on to Approach.  In the big scheme, this is the second level as we build our coaching.  As you follow coaching "experts" on the internet, you'll likely find that far too much of coaching discussions are centered around Execution and then Tactics.  Try finding a dvd or seminar thats about anything other than which exercise to use, or how many reps and sets, or the greatest new circuit.  Of course, thats what sells.  Those topics are all about numbers 4 and 5 on the list.  Unfortunately, thats not really what makes you successful.

1. Attitude
2. Approach
3. Strategy
4. Tactics
5. Execution

In coaching terms your Approach are the broad strokes. What are the fundamental things you believe in for preapring athletes?  Do you believe in training movement?  Max Strength?  Core training?  Corrective exercise?  Heart rate based cardio programs?  Do you believe in developing general athleticism or sport specific skills?

 

From the speed and movement perspective the question is important in how you design your program for results.  If you see athletes who need to be faster will you use "technique drills" to develop speed or do believe strength is the primary focus. This can influence your training goals to be either "we need better sprinting technique" or "we need to be stronger!" The broader questions of approach will dictate how you set goals.

 

I started as a sport coach, then an Olympic weightlifting coach, spent time learning as a track coach, and today I am a sports performance coach.  For myself, after a winding road of influences, time in the trenches, and scientific research, I believe in training movement and developing physical capacity.  Training movement means different things to different coaches, for me it means both "technique" training and guided skill acquistion. 

 

There are many coaches who don't believe in "technical" training for movement.  They generally fall into two camps;

1. Just get strong and explosive because technique training is a waste of time
2. Just do the drills fast and athletes figure it out

I think there is SOME truth in both depending on the athlete, environment, goasl, etc...  Either approach will get you results SOME of the time with SOME of the athletes.  I personally strive to go 10 for 10, not for just SOME.

 

There can also be a problem in some approaches that DO believe in technical training.  If we do large volumes of technical training and enforce a rigid approach to movement, we can end of with poor transfer to on field performance and/or robotic, mechanical movements.  If we expend all of our time and energy and none for improving strength and power, we will also fail.

 

So my approach is one of "Skill Acquisition"  There are some good theoretical concepts we can apply to sports performance from the field of motor control and in particular, dynamic systems theory.  One of the key concepts here is that expert learners thrive not only with variability of movement, but in part BECAUSE of variability.  This is an entire series of posts in itself, but its important to consider for a moment here.

 

Sports are dynamic and the task constraints of reactions, opponents, surfaces, fatigue, and more are always slightly different.  The best performers can actually create the dsired movement outcome, without using the exact same kinetics and kinematics.  Thats what makes them better athletes.  Its the athlete that is stuck in only one streotypical movement pattern that falls apart come game time.  While there are ranges of kinetic and kinematic parameters that create a technical model for speed and agility, maybe they aren't as rigid as some coaches think.

 

Speed and agility are often taught by making every athlete conform to the exact same technical model.  Drill after drill is done to teach the athlete to perform in this way.  That can work fine if it truly fits the constraints.  Environmentally, thats easy when they are sprinting on a track or field without reactions, tactics, or opponents. 

 

One of the constraints however is the athlete themselves.  The capacities of their nervous system.  Their range of motion.  There anatomical segment lengths, muscle insertions, lever arms and tendon lengths.  The list is quite extensive.  Each of these is a unique constraint to that athlete.

 

 

Now don't get me wrong, I don't advocate a "just go and run fast" approach.  I think we should train our athletes through guided discovery.  Just about every speed or agility training session for a non-track athlete should include some mix of 3 components;

1. Technical drills to develop movement patterns and build kinesthetic awareness
2. Training drills designed at inducing a physiological, neurological and/or metabolic training effect
3. Applied drills that allow the athlete to develop movement solutions in a dynamic envornment by applying the movements trained

Instead I see many coaches who jump to part 3 only.  Just take your athletes out and do some drills.  Hopefully the good ones figure it out.  We also have cases where coaches spend so much time on nothing but technical drills, that the athlete develops a specific stereotypical technical model, but once they go to apply it it disappears in the actual game setting.
 
I also see problems when we have an athlete do nothing but movement training, and no development of strength, power and other physical qualities.  Of course they improve with movement training, but they will plateau as well.  There are limits to improvement that relate back to their strength & power to bodyweight ratios.

So by learning from successful coaches, coaching on the track and in the weightroom, doing the research, and most important, spending years actually coaching real athletes of all levels and ages, I came to my APPROACH.

• Train movement skills with a combination of technical, training effect and applied drills to guide the athletes to their optimal movement strategy.
• Develop the athletes capacities for strength & power.

 What's your approach and why?

  

The Elephant in the Room: Motor Control Theory

Biomechanics has been criticized at times by coaches and others because all too often, biomechanics research is done through a strict lens of observation. It’s describes for us what is happening, but not why. To many a coach and athlete, they want to know about the why so they can do something about it for a better result.

In sports performance training there are often arguments that go along the same lines, “that research only tells me what I already know, not how to get an athlete better.” Arguments over whether teaching technique matter and whether the focus is on kinetics or kinematics go on and on.

Some traditional strength coaches argue that all you need to do to get faster is increase strength & power, while the track coach argues back the focus should be technique. Then among different strength coaches we start seeing the arguments over whether you need heavy Olympic lifts and squats or “corrective” and “functional” exercises.

There’s an elephant in the room that no one seems to acknowledge. MOTOR CONTROL.

Athletics is very heavily dominated by movement skill. That means motor control plain and simple! Whether it’s speed and agility, or precision in throwing, catching or kicking. How we use our physical capacities and manage the dynamic movement challenges in a sport environment, are a question solved by motor control.

So why doesn’t anybody talk about it? It would provide the critical framework for many of these important discussions. It should be a lens through which much of our training methods are filtered.

It’s true that motor control is a much less developed field in many ways than physiology. Biomechanics is also more developed because we have a lot of methods to observe and describe movement. A bigger challenge is that the predominant approach to modern science has been through a reductionist point of view. In this view, we try to understand the whole, by learning about the parts. The complex interactions in human movement in a sporting environment do not always effectively lend themselves to this type of analysis.

I still would place some blame on our education system. Whenever I speak to strength or performance coaches, sports coaches, or trainers, I ask the group who has had even a single class in motor control. We only get about half. When asked who has had more than 1 class, it drops dramatically. If asked who has been introduced to something other than general motor program or schema theory or has heard of dynamical systems theory, its maybe 1 or 2 in the room.

That’s a problem. The very coaches, who are out there training MOVEMENT, have very little education in the theory of motor control.

Another problem is that we aren’t educating coaches any more. Coaches aren’t coming out with physical education degrees that included motor control and coaching pedagogy. Education has moved to kinesiology and exercise science as majors, and most strength and performance majors don’t learn motor control beyond the rudimentary basics.

I also have to blame the coaches. Why aren’t they demanding better answers? If you are out there coaching movement, be it speed, agility or sports skills, you should be thinking about motor control. How does it work? If you haven’t thought about this, WHAT ARE YOU DOING and WHY?

I had struggled with these questions through my graduate studies, because what I saw and did everyday coaching, didn’t match many of the motor control concepts I was being presented. When I discovered that there were other approaches to motor control, I saw how they nullified many of the silly debates in our field and gave a whole new perspective to others.

I am going to be writing more this month on motor control, but here are some places to start;
• Sport Sci.org review article
• Athletic Insight: Chaos Theory
• Progress in Motor Control

Motor Control Theory

I spoke yesterday at the NSCA Sport Specific Conference on Sprint Technique and its relevance to teamsports. One of the key topics for this which I bought up was motor control theory. It generated the most questions after the session and Dynamic Systems Theory was new to most.

If we step back and look at kinesiology education in the US, motor control is often just a side note or after thought. That which is covered is still generally based on the idea of a general motor program and schema theory. Every coach does need tolern this, but it is not up to date and does not answer many of the complexities we encounter dealing with team sports and human movement.

I was fortunate to have a biomechanics instructor in grad school who introduced me to the other theories. Then another stroke of luck was finding an old book when browsing through one of my favorite sections in the library. The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements by N.A. Bernstein. This book opened my eyes. It lead me to a much larger view of motor control, and provided an answer tomany of the short comings in GMP theory that just didn't explain what I saw going on in sport training. Progress in Motor Control, Volume One: Bernstein's Traditions in Movement Studies
by Mark Latash from Penn State is another great one to bring it more up to date.


If you are involved in coaching speed and agility to athletes in any way, you need to have a personal understandingofmotor control theory. If you don't, how can you justify what you are doing? While will those drills matter and how will they transfer to performance?

I am going to go more into motor control in comingposts and it will be the topic of a ceu webinar in March. This article on SPORTSCI.ORG is a good starting point to get introduced in the mean time.