The world of strength and conditioning is like trying to find your way along the shores in waste deep water while heavy waves crash into you. You may find some sturdy ground for your current values, then the sand washes away under your feet while you get crushed by a giant wave, and you are back trying to stabilize. The industry turns into white wash with the world of “fitness” colliding with “sport performance”, I see it all the time in the private sector. Good coaches ask good questions, and good coaches should have adaptive and changing values; for this I believe this wave crashing process to be a positive cycle. New theories, methods, questions, and collaborations build a path to strong values and growth for the coach. There may be times of self doubt, but if the right questions are answered back, and open mind to change is present you will come out with stronger opinions of your value.
What are your values as a coach? If someone asked me this question a couple months ago, I could have given a long explanation that probably rambled back and forth sharing everything about my philosophy of coaching. Through the HPCTL program at UBC we were asked to come up with a short presentation of our philosophy on coaching. This turned out to be more difficult than I originally thought but proved to be more beneficial than I every imagined. Spending some time to actually sit down and narrow down what my actual values are, then further turning those into a coaching philosophy allowed me see what I really valued in myself and the athletes I coach. It helped guide my programming, and most importantly the program and culture I want to see in my training facility.
We are currently in the process of building a new 14,000sq ft training facility integrated with a sports injury rehabilitation clinic along with re-branding from our previous franchise. The re-branding allows me to get away from previous corporate values and create our own. I am lucky to have a great team of quality coaches who have all stuck with us during the move as they see the importance in the common values we all share; this is rare for a training center. Although our core values are not fully set yet, it is an exciting time to put our own value into something new on a large scale. I can guarantee each one of our coaches is on stable ground with their own values at the moment.
Sean, great blog. It is interesting to hear reflections from S&C coaches in the program. Your analogy is a good one, and I think the challenge with S&C is that you support the athlete’s preparation, which is integral to performance, but never directly tied to the performance itself. We recently had a research sharing day at CSI Pacific. I really liked the philosophy that Jeremy Sheppard shares around the integrated role of performance practitioners in “serving” the performance framework. Have a look, as I think it will resonate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qof4re16QVE
11:10 AM – 11:40: Jeremy Sheppard: “Masters and Servants; how the preparation framework serves the performance model in slopestyle snowboarding”
Hi Sean
Would love it if you would share this presentation with me if you’re comfortable with it. You know, I once worked with a very very successful and accomplished coach. She was from China and had some different viewpoints based on her cultural background. One thing I learned from her was her slow and steady approach for building her training philosophy. She once gave me an analogy where she described her philosophy as a mold of clay. Every year she refined the sculpture just a little bit. She avoided smashing the sculpture into a pile of messy clay to start over in the face of new or conflicting information. I learned later that this characteristic is actually important for individuals who are the most successful at making predictions about world events (this is actually a competition). They start with a known system or belief (anchored to a probability). In the face of new or conflicting evidence they would make micro-adjustments to their beliefs. Those individuals who are really poor at making predictions tend to throw the baby out with the bath water and torch their beliefs and/or put too much stake in them depending on new information. As coaches, we are in the business of making predictions. Your hypothesis is that your program (intervention) will elicit a performance change over time so that your athlete can be at his or her best at a known point in the future. You have built a belief system based on your experience and hopefully some data to support this viewpoint. I would also say that this mold of clay, as you become more experienced, becomes more refined. The downside of the information era is that we are inundated with noise and “how-to’s”. When I started as an S&C coach, my mentor pointed me towards a handful of papers and text books. I did not have the internet. I was able to master some of the classic information into a system (my mold of clay). Over the years, I have avoided starting over even though I have had many many individuals who present conflicting or supporting information. Instead, I try to keep an open mind and make micro-adjustments as I move forward. And one final note – having worked with Olympic level athletes, I can tell you that there are many paths to Rome. The fact that competing nations arrive prepared and ready to perform against their competitors using completely divergent physical preparation systems suggests that it isn’t a matter of one being better than another and instead, ensuring that the system is cohesive, progressive and one in which the athlete believes.