Happy Sunday - and month of May - to you. Let's get the week started with some recommended reading:
The End of Average - I just finished this (audio)book from Todd Rose, and found it to be fantastic. It really makes you reconsider how we really evaluate success - or even competency or fit in job applicants.
Here's a bit of recommended strength and conditioning reading to get you over "Hump Day:"
Is There a Recipe for a Great Gym Culture? - My business partner, Pete Dupuis, speaks to how the culture at CSP-Mass has evolved over the years, and how you can take the lessons we've learned and apply it to your unique training facility.
The Do and Don't of Coaching - This was an excellent post on a wide variety of important coaching points from Mike Robertson.
Weekly Meal Prep: Mastered - Dr. John Berardi presents a great infographic for those looking to plan their nutrition effectively. I love Precision Nutrition because they are all about specific, actionable items, as opposed to just handing out diet plans and simply telling people to follow them.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
It goes without saying that some athletes pick up new movements faster than others. Usually, this occurs because they have context from which to draw.
As an example, an athlete might have a great hip hinge because they've done it previously while playing defense in basketball. Having that hip hinge proficiency helps the individual to efficiently learn a deadlift pattern (among many other athletic movements).
Establishing context is just one of many reasons that children should be exposed to a wide variety of free play and athletic endeavors. The more movement variability we have at younger ages, the broader the foundation we build. The wider the base, the more we can stack specific skills on top of it once the time is right.
It's foolish to think, however, that every individual we encounter in personal training, strength and conditioning, or rehabilitation settings will have this broad foundation of context from which to draw. This is where appropriate training progressions become so important. You select exercises with which individuals can be successful not only to build confidence and achieve a training effect, but also to establish context for further progressions.
As an example, if you want to be able to do a quality lateral lunge with overhead reach as part of your warm-up, you've got to be able to string together several movement proficiencies: full shoulder flexion range-of-motion; sufficient thoracic extension and scapular posterior tilt/upward rotation; hip adductor range of motion; hip hinge proficiency; and good stiffness in your anterior core and deep neck flexors to prevent low back arching and forward head posture, respectively.
When I'm teaching this pattern for the first time, I'll always say, "It's just like your back-to-wall shoulder flexion, but with a long lunge to the side."
Back-to-wall shoulder flexion is big-time "context creator" for me because I can teach it to just about anyone really quickly. In fact, I've taught it to seminars with 100+ people without many challenges. More importantly, it creates quality movement from the core all the way up (five of the seven movement prerequisites I noted earlier) - and that has big payoffs later on when one wants to teach anything from a push-up, to a landmine press, to a snatch, to an overhead medicine ball variation.
A lot of folks will read this article and think, "But these is just common sense progressions." I'd agree. However, as we've learned in recent years, in the world of larger group training without individualized programming, common sense isn't so common anymore - and as a result, folks wind up skipping steps and advancing to exercise for which they aren't ready.
Perhaps more importantly, though, being able to effectively sequence coaching progressions will, in my opinion, become even more important in the years ahead. With the trend of early sports specialization, we're getting "less athletic athletes;" they don't have as much context in place, and wind up having to back-track. Additionally, we have an increasingly sedentary society, which certainly robs individuals of context.
All that said, just remember that if you want to have an exercise in your program, you have to think about how you're going to coach it with all the individuals that may come your way. And, that coaching might involve devising some exercise regressions that build context from which to draw.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
I really enjoying creating features with multiple installments because it really allows me to dig deep into a topic that interests both me and my readers. It’s like writing a short book, with each post being a different chapter. That said, here were a few of my favorite features from 2015 at EricCressey.com:
1. Random Thoughts on Sports Performance Training
I really enjoyed writing this series, as I can always build on current events. This year, I drew inspiration from everything from the MLB Draft, to our gold medal win in the 18U Baseball World Cup, to books and DVDs I covered.
It's time to bring back this coaching cues series to the forefront, as it's always been a popular one here at EricCressey.com. Here are three more cues I find myself using on a daily basis at Cressey Sports Performance:
1. "Chest before chin."
One of the biggest issues we see in folks with a lack of anterior core control and/or upper body strength is that they'll shoot into forward head posture as they descend to the bottom position of a push-up. Effectively, they're substituting head/neck movement for true scapular protraction and retraction. One cue that seems to clean the issue up quite well is the "chest before chin" recommendation - which means that the chest should arrive at the floor before the chin does.
You do, however, need to make sure that the individual doesn't confuse this with simply puffing the chest out, which would put them in more extended (arched back) posture at the lumbar spine.
2. "Get your scaps to your armpits."
A huge goal of upper body corrective exercise program is to teach individuals how to differentiate between scapulothoracic movement and glenohumeral movement. In layman's terms, this means understanding that it's important to know when the shoulder blade is moving on the rib cage, as opposed to the upper arm (ball) moving on the shoulder blade (socket). Especially during overhead reaching, what we typically see in athletes is insufficient scapulothoracic movement and excessive glenohumeral movement - particularly in those athletes with noteworthy joint hyper mobility. This is one reason why we incorporate a lot of wall slide variations in our warm-ups.
Since we are really looking to teach good upward rotation (as opposed to just elevation), I always try to cue a rotational component to the scapular movement as the arms go overhead. I've found that "get your scaps to your armpits" can really get the message across, especially when this verbal cue is combined with the kinesthetic cue of me guiding the shoulder blades around the rib cage. These modifications can really help to kick up serratus anterior recruitment, as this video shows:
3. "Start in your jump rope position."
When you're working with young athletes on jumping variations - whether they're broad jumps, box jumps, or some other variations - many of them will start with an excessively wide stance. Then, they'll "dip" to create eccentric preloading (stretch) and the knees almost always cave in. As I've said before, if the feet are too wide, the knees have no place to go but in. My feeling is that many young athletes "default" to this pattern because a wider base of support generally supports a more stable position for a weaker athlete. Unfortunately, this position doesn't put them in a great posture for producing force.
The best coaching cues are the ones that build upon those movements an individual already knows, and most kids have jumped rope in the past. If you use a wide stance when you jump rope, you trip over the rope. Instead, you have to stay with the feet in around hip-width, which is right where we want our jump variations to occur.
If you're looking for more coaching tutorials and exercise demonstrations, be sure to check out Elite Training Mentorship, which is updated each month with new content from Cressey Sports Performance staff members.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
As you progress through a career in the fitness industry, it’s easy to fall into the complexity trap. In other words, the more you learn, the more prone you are to making things overly complex with your interaction with clients/athletes.
To be clear, it’s absolutely essential to continue growing as a professional throughout your career. However, part of this growth is learning to be more efficient in your coaching. It’s about figuring out how to get the same or better results in less time and effort. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the simpler you can keep your approach, the better.
This “simple” phenomenon isn’t confined to the fitness industry, though. In their excellent book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt cite numerous examples of how simple solutions generally far outperform complex ones:
-Simple diets outperform complex ones, as people are more adherent to nutrition recommendations that they can easily understand and apply. Sull and Eisenhardt note that simply switching to a smaller plate for meals improves weight loss outcomes.
-Individuals are less likely to actually pay their taxes when the tax code is complex.
-Employees are less likely to save for retirement when employers offer more than two 401(k) options, even when employers matched their contributions. Too many options overwhelms them – so the simple choice is to do nothing.
Author Seth Godin also wrote about our tendency to get overwhelmed in Purple Cow: “In a society with too many choices and too little time, our natural inclination is to ignore it [making a tough choice].”
How can we apply this knowledge to coaching? Try these six strategies:
1. Shut up – or at the very least, cue less.
The more cues you give – particularly if they all come as a “barrage” in a short period of time – the more likely an athlete is to get overwhelmed and tune you out. Think of all the things you want to say, and then cut it back by 50%.
2. Establish predominant learning style.
I’ve written about this previously, so I won’t reinvent the wheel:
I'm a big believer in categorizing all athletes by their dominant learning styles: visual, kinesthetic, and auditory.
Visual learners can watch you demonstrate an exercise, and then go right to it.
Auditory learners can simply hear you say a cue, and then pick up the desired movement or position.
Kinesthetic learners seem to do best when they're actually put in a position to appreciate what it feels like, and then they can crush it.
In young athletes and inexperienced clients, you definitely want to try to determine what learning style predominates with them so that you can improve your coaching.
Conversely, in a more advanced athlete with considerable training experience, I always default to a combination of visual and auditory coaching. I'll simply get into the position I want from them, and try to say something to the point (less than ten words) to attempt to incorporate it into a schema they likely already have.
This approach effectively allows me to leverage their previous learning to make coaching easier. Chances are that they've done a comparable exercise - or at least another drill that requires similar patterns - in previous training. As such, they might be able to get it 90% correct on the first rep, so my coaching is just tinkering.
Sure, there will still be kinesthetic learners out there, but I find that they just aren't as common in advanced athletes with significant training experience. As such, I view kinesthetic awareness coaching as a means to the ultimate end of "subconsciously" training athletes to be more in tune with visual and auditory cues that are easier to deliver, especially in a group setting.
3. Speak clearly, crisply, and concisely.
I have a bad habit of mumbling and speaking too quickly, so this is something of which I’ve had to be cognizant for my entire career in strength and conditioning. It’s important to be “firm” in your auditory cues, both to ensure that the athlete actually hears and understands you, but also to reaffirm to them that you know your stuff and are confident in your cues.
4. Consider both motivation and skill.
This was a lesson I learned from Brian Grasso back in the early days of the International Youth Conditioning Association. About a decade later, the message is still tremendously useful for coaches at all levels. All athletes fall somewhere on both the motivation and skill continuum.
In terms of motivation, they may be very fired up to train, or more disinterested. The more unmotivated they are, the more you need to engage with them to determine how to push the right buttons to get them excited to train. Conversely, the more motivated athletes are, the more you should stay out of the way. Obviously, you still need to coach them, but they're not looking to be engaged with you as much, as they already have their own intrinsic motivation to want to dominate the challenge ahead.
From a skill standpoint, some athletes will obviously be quicker learners, or have a stronger training history. These athletes usually respond best to short - but direct - cueing. The last thing you want to do is slow them down and make them feel like you are micromanaging everything about their training. On the other hand, if an athlete is less skilled, you obviously need to spend some time teaching the basics, which requires you to slow things down a bit - especially since fatigue is the enemy of motor learning.
5. Catch yourself when you’re trying to simplify programming, but actually make things more complex.
You can't out-coach a crappy program. And, when it comes to trying to simplify coaching to make it more effective, everything begins with a quality program. If you're coaching the wrong exercise for the athlete, then it doesn't matter how many key coaching principles you're employing; the movement is still going to be ugly, and the training effect is still going to be subpar.
As an example, there are still a lot of folks out there who insist machines are a good method of training because they "simplify" exercises, removing stability demands and reducing the need for coaching. However, I snapped this photo of a seated leg curl while I was lifting in a commercial gym in Japan last week. If you look closely and actually count, you'll note that there are SIX adjustments that must be made to the machine just to get the lifter in the right position.
Now, let's compare that to a 1-leg hip thrust off bench, which requires virtually no set-up and is incredibly easy to coach, progress, and regress. It also blows a seated leg curl out of the water in terms of functional carryover to the real world.
Poor exercise prescription will always make coaching far more challenging and excessively complex.
6. Learn about previous training experience to best prepare progressions/regressions.
Imagine interacting with an athlete with whom you have never had any interaction whatsoever - and he's about to conventional deadlift. Ideally, in the back of your mind, you'll always have ideas in place about how you can progress and regress. However, with you knowing nothing about him, you have no idea whether he might need to be regressed to a sumo or trap bar deadlift, or even taken all the way back to a pull-through or kettlebell sumo deadlift.
This is why it's so important to have an up-front discussion with an athlete when he/she first starts training with you. You can quickly learn whether they're folks who need exercise regressions, or just better coaching to clean up faulty movement patterns.
Wrap-up
As coaches, we have a lot of goals for our training systems. Foremost among those goals are behavior change and fun, because if we can accomplish both those things, we improve adherence to our programs and optimize outcomes. Unfortunately, when your coaching is unnecessarily complex, you overwhelm athletes - and that works against both these goals. When in doubt, always opt for the simple solution - or find ways to make complex solutions seem very simple to the athletes with whom you're working.
If you're looking for more insights on programming, coaching, and assessments, I'd strongly encourage you to check out Mike Reinold and my Functional Stability Training series. You can learn more HERE.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
It goes without saying that if you want to help trainees of all experience levels succeed with strength and conditioning programs, you have to understand progressions and regressions. And, whether we're talking about mobility drills or strength exercises, coaches need to understand how gravity impacts one's ability to perform a specific drill. As you'll learn in today's video, it can either make an exercise easier or harder, depending on how we position the individual performing the drill:
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Tony Bonvechio.
Social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk said, “Content is king, but context is God.” He was talking about Internet marketing, but the same holds true for coaching.
Our goal as coaches is to get our athletes into the right positions as quickly and safely as possible. There are many ways to do this, but the best ways all use context to flip on the metaphorical light bulb deep within an athlete’s brain. Much like marketing, the content of our coaching is only as good as its ability to create context for our athletes.
Cueing and Context
There’s lots of buzz about internal versus external cueing (with most coaches agreeing the latter trumps the former), but without context, it doesn’t matter how precise your coaching cues are. It doesn’t matter if you tap into your athlete’s auditory, visual or kinesthetic awareness. If your coaching cues don’t conjure up a somewhat familiar position or sensation, your coaching will be ineffective.
People love context because they love familiarity. It’s the reason why we leave a familiar song on the radio even if we don’t actually enjoy it. It’s why we always order the same meal at a restaurant or buy the same car, if only a model year newer. It’s not so much brand loyalty as it is the confidence we feel in a familiar scenario. And when athletes are confident, they perform at their best.
But for many, strength training is anything but familiar. Throw a new athlete into a new environment with new coaches and new movements, and everything is, well, new. Context is painfully hard to find. It’s our job as coaches to create it.
This goes beyond internal versus external cueing. When’s the last time a young athlete had to push his butt back to the wall or spread the floor outside of the weight room? Yes, these are useful cues, but they pale in comparison to referencing movements and sensations they’ve experienced over and over. Your athletes have stockpiled heaps of complex movements while playing their sport(s), so use them as bridges to new movements in the weight room.
Coaches must constantly challenge themselves to refine their coaching skills and become more efficient. Striving to provide context in every coaching interaction will help you do just that. Here are three reliable ways to create context while communicating with your clients.
Relate to an Exercise
A well-designed training program will build upon itself from exercise to exercise. The warm-up creates context for power development, which builds context for strength training, which builds context for conditioning. Fellow CSP Coach Miguel Aragoncillo often calls this the “layering” effect, where we gradually introduce athletes to layers of a movement to make it easier to learn and retain.
For example, we use positional breathing drills to get the ribs and pelvis in position for proper inhalation and exhalation. Then, we use exercises like dead bugs and bird dogs to teach athletes to brace while moving their extremities. Then, when we hit our first strength movement of the day, whether it’s a deadlift, lunge or press, we can refer to the warm-up for context on proper technique.
Context becomes especially useful when progressing athletes from low-speed movements to high-speed ones. The faster the movement, the more concise your cues must be.
For example, you’d be hard pressed to get athletes to think about what’s happening while landing from a jump. Which cues are processed more easily?
“Hip hinge! Tripod foot! Externally rotate your femurs!”
Or…
“Land where you jumped from!”
If you’ve done your job as a coach by teaching a good take-off position, the second option should happen almost automatically. Not coincidently, this position will come up during many other exercises, providing context for all of them.
The entire training session should create material for you to call upon later, so don’t gloss over the little things early on.
Relate to a Sport
Working with baseball players after playing baseball for the majority of my life gives me a distinct advantage. I speak their language. I’ve walked in their cleats. I can create context by relating many of our exercises to familiar movements on the baseball diamond. Similarly, if you relate anything in the gym to an athlete’s sport, you’ll win them over quickly.
Recently, I was working with a young athlete who was struggling to do a trap bar deadlift. No matter how I cued him or physically put him in position, he couldn’t get there on his own. Just as I was about to regress to a simpler exercise, I took a shot in the dark. Our conversation was as follows:
Me: What position do you play in baseball? Athlete: First base. Me: So what do you do when the third baseman throws the ball too high? Athlete: I do this. (Goes to do a countermovement jump) Me: Stop! Athlete: (Paused in a perfect hip hinge) What? Me: Right there! Grab the bar.
He proceeded to do a set of five textbook deadlifts and nailed every set after that. Where internal and external cues failed, context prevailed.
You can duplicate this scenario for almost any sport.
Basketball: “How do you guard the ball handler?” Football: “How do you take the snap from under center?” Tennis: “How do you wait for the serve?” Hockey: “How do you take the faceoff?”
The list goes on. With athletes, context is everywhere. Get to know their sport and speak their language. And if you can help them understand how their workouts will make them better at their sport, you’ll gain their trust and get their best effort.
Relate to a Feeling
Perhaps the best way to make your coaching cues last a lifetime is to get in touch with your athletes’ feelings. Before you dismiss me as some Kumbaya-singing hippy, let me explain myself.
Many coaching cues are transient. Sure, cores brace, glutes squeeze and necks pack whenever we ask them to, but as soon as we turn our backs, things often go awry. Even the best lifters sometimes miss a key point on their pre-lift checklist of body parts to organize, and one weak link in the chain can lead to suboptimal (and even dangerous) movement.
If you simply take the time to implant a crucial feeling into an athlete’s mind (i.e. “Feel that? That’s what I want you to feel when you squat.”), they won’t soon forget it. It’s often easier to navigate one’s way to a feeling than think about multiple body parts at once.
I consider myself a decent bench presser, but when I set up, I don’t go from head to toe, double-checking if I’m retracted here or extended there. I know what I’m supposed to feel so I just feel it and lift. That’s how mastery occurs and eventually gets us to the coveted state of unconscious competency, as described by psychologist Thomas Gordon in his four-stage approach to learning. Miguel recently drew the four-stage matrix on our whiteboard during a meeting with the interns:
Basically, we aim to go from being incompetent while thinking about it to being competent without thinking about it. We don’t want athletes to constantly think about their movement on the field. They need to move automatically or they’ll get left in the dust. Similarly, we need to coach them in the weight room with the intention of movements and exercises becoming automatic.
This is where taking 5 to 10 minutes of a single 90-minute training session can pay huge dividends down the road. Rather than hastily resorting to a regression when an athlete is struggling, create context and get the athlete to feel the right position. Get your hands on them. Ask, “What do you feel?”
Whether it’s pulling the bar away from someone during a deadlift to get their lats turned on (“Don’t let me take the bar from you. Feel that?”) or doing lateral mini-band walks to prevent knee valgus during squats (“Feel that? That’s what I want you to feel during squats.”), these extra steps are always worth the extra coaching effort.
It’s akin to the proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Are you giving fish by always hand-holding athletes into position? Or are you teaching them how to fish by helping them discover the answer so they’ll always be able to access it?
Conclusion
Familiarly allows an athlete to let his or her guard down and perform to the best of their ability. Creating context with your coaching cues puts them in a familiar setting and opens the door for better movement. Instead of simply relying on internal and external focus cues, strive to create context wherever possible. I’m confident your athletes will move better and learn faster.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
Today, Tim Geromini and I present the second half of our "notes" on Mike Robertson's new DVD set, Physical Preparation 101. In case you miss it, be sure to check out Installment 1. Here are eight more key takeaways:
8. Coach the heck out of the set-up.
It's very difficult to properly perform an exercise if you don't set up in the best position possible. If you watch Mike during the hands-on portion of this seminar, he is constantly adjusting the demonstrator until they are in the exact position he prefers. Often, your clients have the strength and mobility to perform exercises correctly, but are not in the best position to do so. It may only be a small tweak here or there, but subtle adjustments can make a huge difference. If it adds one minute on to your session, it's a minute worth paying for.
9. Remember that clients are where they are right now.
One of the most difficult aspects of coaching can be to hold clients back when they really want to do more. I always prefer the clients who want to challenge themselves over the ones you have to convince to train harder. However, emphasizing quality over quantity isn’t always easy. Make sure you let the client know we are looking for quality reps.
10. You can have a template, but treat everybody as an individual.
Mike’s R7 approach is a template, but all clients are treated individually. Too often in the strength and conditioning industry we see cookie cutter programs that are a "one size fits all" approach. For instance, those with flat thoracic spines and an extended low back are treated the same as someone with significant kyphosis and flat lumbar spine. A template serves as an organized structure for which individuals can improve. Sure, everybody who trains at IFAST will have the R7 template as part of their program, but the exercises are tailored to each individual.
11. Be an efficient coach.
When you are working with a client, you should a) name the exercise, b) describe why they’re doing it, c) demonstrate the lift, and d) coach the lift. These can all be accomplished in under 20 seconds and makes all the difference. When a client knows why they are doing an exercise, they now have ownership of it. You’ll also save yourself a lot of time in the future if the client knows the name of each exercise so they don’t have to keep asking you.
12. Coaching angles matter.
If you master the sagittal plane, the frontal and transverse planes are easier to coach. Make sure you coach from 90-degree angles; there is a lot you can miss if you aren’t in the best position to coach. The "90-degree rule" also tells us that there are times when two coaches (one front/back and one left/right) can get the coaching job done faster than just one.
13. Think of yourself as a doctor of exercise.
When you’re a qualified expert, people come to you because you’re the best. Now, this also takes into consideration the work you are willing to put in to improve your assessment and programming process. However, you should understand we are not just writing down numbers on a sheet of paper and hoping it'll work. You put in the time to learn the client’s movement patterns and compensations.
14. Remember that aerobic work has its place.
Cardiovascular health and parasympathetic dominance are important goals in any training (and recovery) program. People are far too sympathetic dominant, essentially in today’s upbeat world, where there is no "off" switch. Mike cites the equation of "Anaerobic threshold – resting heart rate = aerobic window." In other words (and quite obviously), the higher your resting heart rate, the greater your opportunity for improvements. In recent years, though, everyone seemed to want to just push the left side of the equation (anaerobic threshold) with loads of interval training.
If you can widen the aerobic window, you’ve done a lot of good things for the client even beyond just cardiovascular health. High intensity anaerobic exercise is built from a low intensity aerobic foundation, so get your "easy" gains first. Over the long haul, when you are more resistant to fatigue, you can handle more volume and recover easier.
15. Make sure clients can keep the pelvis square as they load the hips.
The biggest benefit to split-stance and single-leg work is turning the right things on and turning the wrong things off. Most people look like wounded animals when performing single-leg work, but those who perform single-leg and split-stance exercises correctly are generally improving hip mobility and strength - and most importantly, doing so without compensation.
As a friendly reminder, Physical Preparation 101 is now on sale, and it's an excellent resource for your training library. You can learn more HERE.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
It's time for the December edition of my musings on the performance world. Our twin daughters were born on November 28, so this will be a "baby theme" sports performance post.
1. Sleep might be the great equalizer in the sports performance equation.
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot about sleep quality and quantity since the girls were born. Obviously, how well you sleep is a huge factor in both short- and long-term performance improvements (or drop-offs). I think everyone knows that, but unfortunately, not everyone acts on it.
Additionally, I'm not sure folks realize that sleep is probably the only factor in the performance training equation that isn't impacted by socioeconomic status. Good coaching, gym access, massage therapy, and quality nutrition and supplementation all cost money and can be hard to find in certain areas. Getting quality sleep really won't cost you a penny (unless you're forgoing sleep to try to earn a living), and it's easily accessible. Sure, you can buy a better mattress or pillow, turn the air conditioning up, or get reinforced blinds to make your room darker, but the truth is that these aren't limiting factors for most people. Usually, the problems come from using phones/tablets/TVs on too close to bedtime, or simply not making time to get to bed at a reasonable hour. That might be why this Tweet I posted a few days ago was well-received.
I think the lesson here is that if you're struggling to make progress, begin by controlling what you can control. Sleep is usually a good place to start.
2. You need a team, but not an army.
Without exception, everyone who has ever had a child is willing to offer advice. Unfortunately, while it's always incredible well-intentioned, it isn't always useful. We've found this to be particularly true because we have twins, which is a total game changer as compared to a single baby. It's like getting a pitching lesson from a golf professional; he might "get" efficient rotation, but have no idea how to apply it to a new sport.
With that in mind, as an athlete, you have to have a filter when you create your team. Too many cooks can spoil the broth, and having too many coaches (and related professionals) in your ear can lead to confusion from over-coaching and mixed messages.
Taking it a step further, as a facility owner, this is why I love to hire from our Cressey Sports Performance internship program. We get a great opportunity to determine if folks can seamlessly integrate with our team while still providing unique expertise and value to our clients. It's also why we don't ever have independent contractor trainers come in to coach under our roof; the "team" becomes an "army"and the messages get diluted.
Speaking of internships...
3. Apprenticeships are tremendously important for athletes and coaches alike.
The current audiobook on my iPhone is Mastery, by Robert Greene. Greene goes to great lengths to describe the commonalities of success for many of history's great "masters:" Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others. One experience they all seem to have in common is a tremendous track record of apprenticeship (or internship) under a bright individual who has gone before them.
It goes without saying that we know this is the best way to learn in the fitness industry. If you need proof, just look at the loads of successful trainers out there who have never opened an exercise physiology textbook, but have logged countless hours "in the trenches" - much of it under the tutelage of a seasoned fitness professional - to hone their skills. As Greene notes, however, not all mentors are created equal, and you have to be very picky in selecting one that is a good match for you.
For us, that meant listening to parents of multiple babies, as well as the nurses at the hospital who had experience caring for twins. As strange as it sounds, it was a blessing that one of our babies needed supplemental oxygen for a few days after birth, as my wife and I effectively got a bunch of one-on-one tutoring from some incredibly helpful nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit. I could have tried to learn it from a book, but there's no way it would have come around as quickly as it did from performing various tasks under the watchful eye of a seasoned pro.
4. Don't take advanced solutions to a simple problem.
I'll admit it: screaming babies terrified me about three weeks ago. While I kept my normally calm demeanor on the outside, every time one of the girls cried, on the inside, I was actually as flustered as a pimple-faced teenager who is about to ask the captain of the cheerleading team to prom. I'd suggest to my wife that we play some music for them, try a different seat/swing, let them cuddle with one another, or play Monopoly (kidding). Not surprisingly, none of it worked.
In reality, the answer is a lot more simple: 99% of the time, they want to eat, get a diaper change, or be held. Seriously, that's it. Who wants to listen to sit in a nice swing, listening to Today's Country radio on Pandora when they're wallowing in their own turd?
Basically, the athletes needed to squat, press, deadlift, and lunge - yet I kept trying to program 1-arm, 1-leg dumbbell RDLs off an unstable surface while wearing a weight vest on a 12-6-9-4 tempo. This is a stark contrast to they way I live my life and how I carry myself as a coach. Lack of familiarity - and the stress it can cause - was the culprit.
Extending this to a coaching context, when you're working with a new athlete or in a new situation (i.e., sport with which you aren't familiar), always look to simplify. Remember that good movement is good movement, regardless of the sporting demands in question.
5. Different athletes need different cues.
Here are our two little angels:
Even after only three weeks, they couldn't be any more different. Lydia, on the left, can be a little monster. Even the slightest disturbance throws her into a fit, and she wants to eat just about every hour. On the other hand, Addison, on the right, is as mellow as can be. In fact, as I type this, she's quietly sleeping next to my desk - while her sister is in the other room doing her best to wake my wife up from much needed sleep. While the goal is to get them on the same schedule, doing so requires much different approaches for each girl.
In applying this to athletes, you'll have different kinds of learners. Kinesthetic learners will need to be put in a position to appreciate it. Auditory learners can be told to do something and usually pick it up instantly. Visual learners just need to see you demonstrate it, and they'll make it happen shortly thereafter. Your goal as a coach is to determine an athlete's predominant learning style in the first 20-30 minutes of working with him. Most athletes will require a little bit of all three (depending on the exercise you're coaching), but determining which approach predominates makes your coaching more efficient; you can get more done in less time, and fewer words.
Wrap-up
This will be my last post before Christmas, so I just wanted to take a moment to wish you all a very happy holiday season. Thanks so much for your support of EricCressey.com in 2014!
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
