We play sports with a ball all the time. Using a ball for athletic development is hardly a novel concept, but it truly can bring a new aspect to athletic development training. The simple idea of training with a ball makes coordination essential to executing the exercises. It’s impossible to use medicine balls without using gravity and enhancing linkage through multi-joint movements.
If you are interested in the genesis and evolution of my ideas and concepts over the last 53 years, please take the opportunity to access my keynote address for the Annual Sports Biometrics Conference from last month. The title of the presentation is: Chalkboard to Virtual Reality–Reflections & Recollections. You can watch it below.
I think of late I am suffering from a severe case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). I am seeing all this stuff that looks really cool. I read and listen to the claims and I am in awe. Then I take a step back and let my experiences give me a perspective.
It is so tempting to just do what you are good at in training and to neglect the other things that you need to do to make significant improvement. It is so easy to rationalize away and then have it come back to haunt you when you need those other things the most. If you spend all your time on what you are good at then how do you get better?
The body is a system. It is a system like no other. It is a completely open system, that is highly adaptable. The whole of the actions that the body can achieve is greater than the sum of its parts. When the body needs to solve a moment problem it is almost magic what it can do. Never sell the body and its capabilities short.
This is a post I wrote many years ago, if anything this thinking is more pervasive now than it was then. A training guru to the star players (name deleted to protect the guilty) told a newspaper: “A lot of things weren’t firing — his glutes, his hips, thighs . . . I wouldn’t say his condition was the most severe, I wouldn’t say it was the best. … But if I were to classify it on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the most extreme, I’d say he was definitely in the seven, eight category.”
My vision is to develop robust, resilient, adaptable athletes who are physically, psychologically & tactically ready to compete to win in the competitive arena.
I am always trying to find ways to do what I do better. I have a defined system of training that I am constantly working to refine. With success it is tempting to stand pat and not change. I am constantly learning, learning what I do works and learning what I can do to make it better.
In today’s world of high performance sport we have the potential to bury ourselves in numbers. There is not much we can’t analyze, measure or monitor. In many ways this is a positive step forward & some ways it can be negative. The key is keeping the numbers in context.
Don’t take what you read as gospel. There is little that is new. Always trace the origins.
