I wrote this sitting on the plane returning from Tokyo. The last two years have been a roller coaster for athletes s they were not sure if no when the Olympics would even take place. Even once it was clear that the Olympics would go forward, my opinion has been like a roller coaster, changing nearly every day as I saw a new aspect of this unique Games.
Believe it or not, as an athlete I hated 95% of the medicine ball training we did. To me it seemed somehow stupid just throwing a ball 200 times around just to do it. The other 5% have been fun and I loved it. This 5% was the most challenging stuff. I loved it because it had concrete purpose. It might have been as simple heaving the ball up to the ceiling, but that wasn’t easy so it presented a challenge and a purpose.
If you are like me, you spend more time each day with your athlete than your spouse. As they say, good communication is the bedrock of any successful marriage. Why is it then that in coaching, where we spend even more time with our athletes, communication is always an afterthought? We prioritize biomechanics and physiology and even psychology before we begin to focus on communication. Most coaching courses do not even spend one minute on the topic.
The HMMR site theme in February was the future of training. I’m a little late to the party, but wanted to add a few points about the future of coaching. After listening to the thoughts of other coaches, many people gave insight into the future of training, but the future of the profession is just as important.
A few years ago I had a long conversation with a old and successful coach who told me that his plan fits to every athlete. As he put it: “They will get used to it after a while and then they will improve a lot.” He couldn’t convince me with this. What I saw in his group at this time was frustration and injuries. This kept coming up again and again with his athletes, but he was not willing to think where this could came from. For me the answer was clear.
In the era of big data, testing and diagnostics has become a central part of testing. But often coaches are more focused on the data than the process. To start with, there are four questions four key questions that coaches must ask when it comes down to testing in training:
