Keeping the Athlete Focused and Motivated

I am a big believer that those athletes that will have the highest levels and longest successes need to be intrinsically motivated.  However, there are times the coach needs to help the athlete recognize their own motivation or even more likely link a training activity to that motivation.

One of the things that many coaches miss is the art of story telling.  You can tell the athlete why a drill is done based on the biomechanics, rate of force development, transfer effect, blahh, blahhh, blahh...  It has a place and it may get across.

If you want focus, and an athlete that is bought in and training with a purpose, you need to appeal to emotion.  Develop your stories. 

I read this on cathexis.posterous.com and it talks about this very thing.  Although it relates it to marketing, we are marketing our expertise and our training to our athletes everyday.

emotional storytelling

One day, there was a blind man sitting on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet and a sign that read:

"I am blind, please help."

A creative copywriter was walking by and stopped to observe.
He saw that the blind man had only a few coins in his hat.
He dropped in more coins and, without asking for permission, took the sign and rewrote it.


He returned the sign to the blind man and left.  That afternoon the publicist returned to the blind man and noticed that his hat was full of bills and coins.


The blind man recognized his footsteps and asked if it was he who had rewritten his sign
and wanted to know what he had written on it.

The creative responded: "Nothing that was not true. I just wrote the message a little differently." He smiled and went on his way.

 The new sign read: "Spring is coming , but I won't see it."


Jacques Prevert, French Poet.

An emotional story.

The key to communications. To Branding. It can be a commercial with humor, an ad with seriousness, a dramatic heartfelt presentation. The most effective communications evoke an emotional response, via storytelling. The challenge is storytelling provokes anxiety in a lot of people.

The rationalist, have a hard time getting comfortable with this. They want to get right to the ROI. Get right to the facts and deliverables. "Facts are facts" rationalist fact lovers interpret those who are not rational in their eyes as the exception rather than the rule.
Storytelling embraces the fact that people are not rational, and touches on emotions to create a persuasive narrative. You cannot put a structured, quantifying structure around storytelling. There is no formal system, no formula to arrive at a compelling, emotive story. Control freaks hate storytelling. It is subjective, and goes deep into emotional areas like love, friendship, trust, fears and dreams. an orbital instead of linear world.
Touch the heart and it gets a stronghold where it will not let go.
Like the wallet.

Heartstrings pull purse strings

Multi-Directional Movements: Base Positions

As I have been outlining my Hierarchy of Coaching Success, we have started with the big picture and keep delving deeper.  As we got to outlining the strategy, I categorized multi-directional movements.

The "base" category really isn't movement, it's the exact opposite. It's important however because athletes are moving into and out of this position .  Many movements are initaited from a static or quasi-static base position.

Many coaches use the term athletic base to describe the common, closed stance, hip/knee bent, "ready" position.  You can see it through-out many different sports.  In this position we find that the athlete is standing with the feet, hips and shoulder in-line, and they are generally facing the action.  They usually have obtuse angles at the knee and hip with the shoulder slighty anterior to the knee depending on sport and relative body segment lengths.  Their weight is distributed to the ball of the foot and they are in a balanced position to react in any direction.

This isn't the only "athletic base" position however.  In many cases, setting up in an "open" or "split" position is advantageous to that sport or the next action needed.

The split athletic base is often used defensively when the athlete either wants to direct the movement and/or is likely to move in a certain direction.  Its also common as seen in the photos above as a position thats moved into to execute a sporting action.

So from a training perspecive this means a couple of things when I have analyzed a sport and know we need this.

Train to be in the position.  This means the athlete needs the range of motion, joint stability, and muscle strength to be the proper position for efficeint movement.  Mobility and strength work come into play.  Exercises like squats and lunges have a place in developing this.

Train to get into this position.  If the athlete is moving and has to get into a base position, there is the deceleration load on the body.  Training for the eccentric strength and stability demands can have a big impact on an athlete's performance.  We will do this through progressively demanding drills that use speed, assistance, reaction, and external loads.

Train to get out of this position.  Athlete's also need to get to the next demand and usually want to do it quickly.  Here we need to make sure they can generate a high rate of force development from the position with weight training, medicine balls, plypmetrics.  We also want movement efficiecny, so I will execute movement drills from these positions and may use; resistance, weight vests, and reactive conditions if appropriate.

Base positions don't seem exciting or sexy to train, but it's critical.  Many one on one battles are won and lost when an athlete can get into or out of a base position faster than another.  What base positions are your athletes in?  How do they get into and out of them?  Are they still doing it well near the end of the game?  These questions, and addressing the training needs will help your athlete.

Hierarchy of Success - STRATEGY

You have the overall attitude you bring to the table, you've developed a series of beliefs for your overall apporach to development, so now its time to talk about STRATEGY.  What do you want to work on?

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

It's important here to differentiate strategy from tactics.  Strategy is WHAT you want to accomplish, tactics are HOW you are going to do that.  Using a sporting example, the overall goal is to win the game against the next opponent.  The strategy for that game then might be to stretch the field with longer passes because this team is strong against the run.  A specific tactic used in this strategy may be plays from a 4 wide receiver set with the tight end and running block having blocking assignments.  Strategy is the what, tactics are the how.

Talking in terms of coaching athletic movement, we need to define what we are going to try and do.  In developing the APPROACH, I talked about training movement, and using a  "guided discovery" approach.  In addition to training movement, I also want to develop the appropriate physical qualities.  The question now on both of those areas is; FOR WHAT?

To answer that I need to break down how athletes move.  In the broad picture, I'm going to focus on a universal approach for sports.

1. Analyze GROUND BASED sports

2. This does not apply to;

• Acrobatic
• Riding (cycling, snowboarding, etc...)
• Aquatic
• Combat Sports

Looking at most team sports as well as some individual sports we see more commonalities than differences in movement strategies.  Yes, there are specifics that depend on the sport, but there are only so many ways of moving the human body with our feet on the ground.

These are my categorizations of movement strategies.  This is what is going to drive how we train an athlete.  We look at the athlete, sports and position.  Consider the demands in these categories.  Then determine what it is that we should work on. 

We've developed this system over the years and were driven by by training athletes in a group setting.  Having a mix of athletes in a group, as well trying to follow some systemic approach to programing, made it essential to be able to work on categories as a whole, but differentiate aspects for specific athletes once they have basic proficiency.  Bottomline, its a system that allows us to train athletes with some degree of specificity when appropriate, in a group setting.

In upcoming posts, I will detail each category and go over examples.

Reverting to Prior Technique

One of the things that is interesting at the NFL Scouting Combine is the chance to catch up with coaching friends and meet new ones.  It's a great opportunity to discuss approaches to training.  Of course because of the setting, discussion of training the 40yd dash comes up.

I've talked about my approach to training 40 technique before.  We can modify what's there a bit, but not huge wholesale pattern changes. 

How much can you change technique in maybe 12 weeks, but often more like 6 weeks? 

Not much in most cases.

Even if you get a guy to make some changes, will they stick when the pressure is on?  Coaches are always lamenting how we taught the player this and that, but when they got out there they went back to the same old technique they used not what we taught them. 

And we're surprised? 

They have been doing those previous patterns for years.  They have accumulated thousands of reps.  They have myelinated the the right circuits (ala The Talent Code).  They have had some level of success (they were invited to the NFL Scouting Combine afterall). 

For example, every year there is at least one or two players who come in that have great "quickness."  When we first test them they have a very high stride frequency and put in 9-10 steps in the first ten.  It looks like Fred Flintstone with the feet spinning but not going far.

In reality we need to understand why some do this.  Higher stride frequency means their feet are on the ground more often.  In a game setting, if they can move at nearly the same speed, then having your feet on the ground more often is an advantage.  It's an advantage because you can only change direction when your feet are in contact with the ground.  In most team sports, the ability to react to the environment and change directions is an advantage.

However in the 40yd dash there is nothing to react to.  Maximal speed is the key and that athlete needs more stride length in that initial 10.  They need it for more speed, but to also set up the continued acceleration into the transition phase.

This year I had 4 guys like this.  During training they all got the concept.  In the 2nd week the group had a collective "ah-ha" moment when we were doing starts. 

We had already done some bounding, and bounding 3 steps directly out of the 3pt starting stance.  After several of them saw the electronic timers and reverted back to their habit's of high turn-over in the first 10, we stopped the group.  "Don't go fast, focus on driving like the bounds" we told them.  To a few we emphasized the longer, aggressive arm action.  Immediately the entire group saw the change when the first one dropped his time by 0.15 in 10 yards.  Now they were buying in and got it. 

Over the weeks we strove to build this consistently.  I wanted to see it happening rep after rep.  I wanted them to visualize it that way.  I wanted them to associate that feeling with "feeling fast."  After all this, we knew they could do it.  We knew they could do it when they are calm and confident in the practice setting. 

The problem; that is not the setting at the NFL Combine.  They have been through 3 days of ineterviews, MRIs, medical exams, and lots of stress.  They have the eyes (and watches) of GMs, head coaches, and coordinators on them when they line up on the Lucas Oil field.   They have no roar of the crowd or support of the teammates.  They have only 2 attempts, not 4 quarters.

What we see consistently is that the ones who can remain Calm and Confident, can use the technique they have been practicing for only a few weeks.  If they don't, I can guarantee they will revert to their old habits.  The good news is that 3 of the 4 were calm and confident and they stuck to it.  They acheived new PRs when it mattered.