Overall I don’t put too much stock in those that haven’t earned my respect.  However, once in a while I am angry.  I am honored to be called coach and take that responsibility seriously.  I’m angry because too many coaches aren’t taking responsibility.

No, not the gurus themselves, the coaches who blindly follow, and mindlessly listen to them.

I fear the concept of responsibility is missing too often in coaching today.  That’s why the guru exists.  To fill the heads of people who wont fill it for themselves.

I am amazed at how often I see these people on various online forums asking others to tell them how to do it.  Mind you, I’m not talking about asking intelligent questions and discussing, I’m talking about being lazy.  Asking exactly which exercise, how many reps, when to do it, why to do it, and “oh by the way can you send me a video of it.”

Don't look for canned answers

This type of coach (can I really call them that) isn’t  being responsible about looking at exercises, concepts and plans and deciding how and if they apply to their situation.  They want a canned answer.

I believe in young coaches following a system as they learn the basic skills, but this isn’t the problem.  It’s coaches that shirk developing a philosophy and looking for what will work best for their athletes. Even if they are brand new, they have to decide if the system they are following makes sense, if there mentors are quality, but too many just latch on to the latest trend or popular guru.

Yes, it’s much easier to do it that way.  Buying a system in a box is fast and easy.  If you take responsibility you will have to invest cognitive and emotional energy.  You will have to put yourself and your beliefs on the line.  It’s harder, but so much more worth it!

Coaches must take responsibility for their athlete’s progress and well being.  This means thinking critically for yourself.  If you aren’t willing to put in that commitment, then go find another profession.

Why does it matter what you stand for?  Because then you have a way to make decision.  Plain and simple.  As the saying goes; stand for nothing and you’ll for anything.

I was really reminded about this topic when talking with a coach a while back about the business he was working in.  He was in the private sector, as the head performance coach and frustrated with the business management.  He had received feedback he was not making everyone happy and they had imposed some changes on his programming.  It was a conversation to several I have had in recent months.

As we got to talking, I was searching for the reasons, the business manager was reacting that way.  The reason was simple, they ran the business reactively.  Reacting to monthly cash flow and to customer complaints.  They couldn’t define a financial business model of what their services needed to generate per hour, per coach, and what mix of services would achieve profitability.

They also couldn’t define what they believed in from a sports performance perspective.  They have a business manager with some ideas, another “consulting” manager with other ideas, and this new coach trying to develop and implement some other ideas.

There is no way this will work.  It can be hard enough to integrate a coaching and development philosophy with a profitable business model.  To have neither in my mind guarantees you wont get any.

If all you are doing is reacting to the money coming in right in front of you, you are going to put tremendous stock in any customer feedback.  “My kids not sweating enough and I pay good money for this!” can push the business manager to demand “better” coaching intensity.   This kind of complaint is a lot easier to answer if first you have a coaching philosophy.  “Mr. Jones, you’re right that little 10 year old Johnny won’t always come staggering out, soaking wet.  What we’ve found and the research confirms is that optimal motor learning requires an athlete to work in a non-fatigued state to create new motor programs.  Still it’s important feedback, so let’s get our head coach and find out what’s going on…”

This works if the business model has been built on getting quality results that lead to a longer customer lifetime.  Then you can expect this type of complaint once in a while and take it in stride.  You believe in your approach and accept you will try to educate these parents, but also recognize you will lose some.  You have to believe that you are doing it the best way possible, otherwise it will be hard to watch someone walk away.

On the other hand if your business model dictated maximizing profit on a sale by sale basis, you may want to take that feedback and make sure you increase your energy systems focus to please this type of customer.  Whatever you believe though, you better know what it is.

For the performance model, not only do you need to justify why you do what you do, you need to be able to decide what to do next.  Should you add more kettlebells, maybe adopt a crossfit style, more sport specific training? If you don’t have a philosophy, you just keep taking whatever comes next.  Growth is important and means you will change, but if you have no foundational beliefs you will be all over the place and really end up nowhere.

Having a defined model of training and business lets everyone in your organization make decisions, have conversations, and answer questions more clearly.  It creates the “rules of the game” for you and everyone.   Rest assured, in a for profit setting, everyone walking in your door, won’t be best served by what you offer.  That’s OK.  Just define what you offer, why you are doing it, and stick to it.

High Speed Processing

Coyle tells us about his travels to the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow which has produced a long list of the world’s top tennis players.  Instead of finding a world class tennis academy he finds what looks like a rundown warehouse building.  He doesn’t hear the thwack of balls on tennis rackets, because the athletes are swinging their rackets, but in practice motions with no balls. “.. they were swinging all right. But they weren’t using balls.  At Spartak it’s called imitatsiya – rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball. All Spartak’s players do it, from the five-year-olds to the pros.”

“It looked like a ballet class: a choreography of slow, simple precise motions with an emphasis on tekhnika – technique.  Preobrazhenskaya (the lead coach) enforced this approach with an iron decree: none of her students was permitted to play in a tournament for the first three years of their study.  It’s a notion that I don’t imagine would fly with American parents, but none of the Russian parents questioned it for a second. “Technique is everything.” Preobrazhenskaya told me later, smacking a table with Khrushchev-like emphasis, causing me to jump and speedily reconsider my twinkly-grandma impression of her. “If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake!””

Why such emphasis on technique? Because they want to build the neurological pathways in the brain to make this action more efficient.  This is where myelin comes in. 

Myelin is the insulation that surrounds our nerves. Neuroscience has become very excited because this is a major step that goes beyond the simple idea of all neurons being equal. Coyle summarizes, “The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electrical signal travelling through a chain of neurons – a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.”

Deep practice builds myelin in the right circuits.  Circuits with more myelin are like the difference of old dial-up internet and high speed fiber optics lines.  Research has shown myelination can increase overall processing speed by 3000 times!  If you gets in the reps with deep practice, you build myelin and get better.

Deep Practice

Deep practice is like strength training.  Where repeated use of the muscles will build strength and size, repeated use of neurons build strength and size through myelin.  So how does Coyle describe  deep practice?

Break it into chunks.  This is an old idea to coaches who routinely break movement into pieces.  It’s the fundamental of the whole part whole method.

Repetition on the edge of skill  Good practice happens on the edge of ability. According to Coyle “ Deep practice is not simply about struggling, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.

• Pick a target
• Reach for it
• Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach.
• Return to step one. “

This idea fits my coaching philosophy and I try to hammer this point home a lot.  I want athletes to push on that edge.  “If you aren’t making any mistakes, you aren’t getting better” is a refrain my athlete will often hear.  As coaches we need to identify practice and training strategies to get athletes working near the edge of their abilities.

Feedback  To make mistakes, train with precision and evaluate the results, you need feedback.  Immediate feedback while practicing so you can make adjustments and build the right circuits.  Good coaches always demonstrate this and know how to provide different types of feedback, teach athletes to provide intrinsic feedback and know when to give and when not to.

Motivation to Practice

Building myelin through deep practice is all well and good, but how do these high achievers stay motivated to participate in the day in and day out grind of deep practice.  Where does the grit come from.  Coyle says it a concept he calls Ignition.

One of the first elements according to the Talent Code are Primal Cues.  These are things that strike a deep cord including how we view whats possible and how we see ourselves.  Seeing someone else we can identify with achieve success sends us a cue that we can too. 

The 4:00 mile was considered “physiologically and biomechanically” impossible.  Not human could do it.  Roger banister breaks the 4:00 mile which has stood for decades.  In the weeks after another person did it, then the following season more, and in the next few years 17 people did it.  They just needed to know it was possible.

Being part of something exciting is also a primal cue.  When young (and older) athletes see other young athletes participating in something and enjoying it, they are more likely to want to be part of it.  He describes several examples of this and various research.  This is a useful idea for coaches to remember because we have to create opportunity to enjoy or be highly engaged that draws in the athletes.

There are also some thoughts on needing to be uncomfortable or even have some basic level of “threat” in life. He noticed that none of the hotbeds were really nice or comfortable.   If its too nice, if they have too many other options, they don’t have the same engagement and sense of urgency.

This idea is often talked about by many coaches, especially in lesser known Olympic sports.  The training is hard, and there are too many other options in life to enjoy, be financially successful, etc..  Small countries where those sports can offer a “way out” and into a better life often succeed. 

One other idea that’s thrown out is about the culture and environment of a place.  He calls it “the Sistine Chapel Effect.”  It’s the effect created by the entire atmosphere and culture of a training place.  There are numerous things there that help fuel the fire.  How can we build our training centers, our culture and create things that motivate and remind every day?

Master Coaches

At a point in the book, Coyle looks at consistent traits between “master coaches” of talent development.   He goes into some common observations as well as the Four Virtues of master coaches.  I have written on this topic before (Master Coaches), but here is a quick summary.

• Coaching Agile A good plan, teaching methodology, and technical eye are good and all, but only when a coach can be agile in their style on the fly, can they really progress.
• Listen More Than Talk It’s simple.  To coach well you must take in information.  The athletes state of mind, comprehension, motivation and dedication to what you are looking for.  You have to listen. 
• Small, Targeted, Specific Feedback Along the lines of the previous point.  Don’t give lectures.  Don’t overwhelm your athletes with seven different things to think about or focus on. 
• Quiet and Reserved This is one that surprised a lot of coaches.  The style often thought of is the coach that’s running around yelling instructions, giving motivation speeches, and barking out commands.

Coyle talks about what he considered the 4 coaching virtues after watching these coaches. 

• Matrix.  In Talent Code a “vast matrix of knowledge” was a common key.  It was surely domain specific, in that the coach knew very intricate details about performance and development in their field.  Master coaches could “go deeper” with more detail and had more technical knowledge when needed.
• GPS reflex.  A GPS voice instruction gives very short specific directions.  It doesn’t lecture. Same for coaches.  Feedback is short and sweet.
• Perceptiveness.   A great coach can see the technical details.  They can sense the athlete’s mental and emotional state through interpersonal intelligence.  They have a sixth sense about what and when to change for maximum result. 
• Theatrical Honesty. This is one of those, “of course” moments for me.  I do it, but I never really summarized it like this.  According to Coyle, Master Coaches are a bit like actors.  To get the point across, change the energy, or impact the pace, they exaggerate and embellish, with tone, gestures, body language, and choice of words.

Talent Development Tools

These ideas of talent development cut across different disciplines.  We can all work to improve our coaching and the ideas from the Talent Code are a basic cross section every coach can strive to develop.  This is a fundamental read for anyone in the field of coaching or involved in developing a person’s “talent.”

Practical Take-Aways for Coaches

To become more efficient in movement and thoughts, use deep practice.  Not just more practice, but better practice builds myelin faster.

• Push and pull them to the edge of their ability.
• Find  the right type, timing and amount of feedback for your athletes.
• Make training and practice focus on intensity and quality, not just time.  Our athletes today are often spending too much time, for too little return on investement.

To have the motivation and grit to engage in deep practice for many years, you need to Ignite their passion.

• Provide opportunities to show them its possible.  They have to feel like its someone like them in some way.
• Build an environment that helps them feed that fire with reminders of where they want to go, and others who have gotten there.

Master coaches guide the course of that deep practice and try to enhance the spark.

• Build the extensive knowledge through coaching thousands of athletes and hours and learning from other coaches.
• Develop your Art of Coaching to perceive needs, deliver your message, and communicate with your athletes.

1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body.

2. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

In  Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that we usually look at talent the wrong way.  We focus on looking at the qualities of the person.  Intelligence, speed, strength, giftedness, etc… Instead, we should be asking about where they came from and how they got to that high level.  Gladwell proposes that the ingredients for high level success in business, arts, music, health and sports, is more nurture than nature. 

While there is little hard science, through the book he gives anecdotal examples several factors beyond the traditional ideas of “talent” and how they lead to these outliers developing.  He proposes it’s  a combination of luck, early success, enough talent, and opportunity to engage in the intense and 10,000 of practice to master skills.

Relative Age in Sports

A key premise of the book is that talent needs an opportunity to flourish.  This opportunity is unfortunately often a stroke of luck, or may not be available to all because of society norms or economics.  One example of this is relative age and he uses Canadian hockey as an example.

When you examine hockey in Canada from the pros through juniors and the earliest youth all star squads a clear and surprising pattern emerges.  Those players born right after the age cut-off date are more common.  Because Canada’s eligibility cutoff for junior hockey is January 1, Gladwell writes, “a boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn 10 until the end of the year.” 

So the players born in Jan, Feb and March make it to higher levels far more often. 

These are the very players who may be 6 months to almost a year older than those they are playing against.  At these early ages, that can be a huge advantage, so they appear to be “better” or “more talented”.  So what happens?  They get told “you’ve just got natural talent”, “you really have a knack for hockey” and so on.  They also get picked for the all-star teams.

They are told they are good so they start believing it.  Then they get picked for all star teams and get to play more, maybe with better coaches, and against better players.  This keeps building year after year and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

They may end up better not because they have more talent, but because they had more opportunity to develop the talent they had. This same pattern has been seen in baseball and soccer.  It’s even been documented in schools’ gifted programs.

Relative age is a stroke of luck that leads to an opportunity to get better and develop existing talent.

10,000 Hours

Relative age can give someone a better opportunity to achieve the next element needed and that’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. 

Deliberate practice takes focus

The 10,000 hour rule was proposed years ago by Anders Erickson.  It has some strong support across many domains.  In recent years the concept has been picked up by several authors and the main stream. 

Gladwell notes that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, achieve their status after about 10 years. 10 years is approximately how long it takes to get in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. According to Outliers, the 10,000 hour or 10 year rule, explains how Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for basically the same reason.

In the sports examples, early selection to elite and all star teams helps young athletes get that 10,000 hours sooner.  Gladwell’s Outliers would be in strong support of Thomas Edison’s quote that “Success is 2% inspiration, and 98% perspiration.”

Is Hard Work and Opportunity Enough?

This book and ones like The Talent Code and Talent is Overrated present the idea that hard work and other factors may be more important than talent.  In some ways they may even question whether talent, in our traditional thought of it, even exists.

Can anyone set a world record?

You can train all you want and do everything perfectly physically, mentally and so forth to try and win the Gold medal in the 100m at the Olympics.  Without the right amount of fast-twitch fibers, muscle structure and physiology, it won’t happen.  You will get faster, maybe even really good and fulfill all of your genetic potential, but there is a limit.

We see certain levels of physical qualities needed for certain sports and positions.  If you are a 4’ 11” female you can do just about anything you want to, but won’t make it as an NFL offensive lineman.  There is a minimum amount of some qualities needed.

Gladwell acknowledges this and also presents the idea of a “threshold” of talent needed.  This means they need enough of the ability in movement, cognitive processing, strength, size, and/or other qualities to perform, but not necessarily the highest amount of them. 

As a coach who has worked with thousands of athletes, I’ve seen a lot of people that had talent, but didn’t put the work in and failed.  On the other hand I’ve seen many athletes who had enough talent and achieved success through hard work and focus.

Outliers’ Lessons for Coaches

Outliers is one of several popular books in recent years spreading the message of a new view of “talent” and what it is.  It takes more than talent to achieve high levels of success.  There are some important messages here for coaches.  Those messages are both in what to do to achieve success, and also what can thwart it.

Practical take-aways for coaches

Hard work counts.  The idea that it requires 10,000 hours of consistent, deliberate engaging practice to master a skill speaks to coaches.  This is why you have to get in practice and get work done.  What coach doesn’t like that idea and popular books backing up the idea that hard work counts.  If you want to get better, you have to work at it.

As coaches and mentors we need to help those talented young athletes get this idea.  “You won’t get there on talent alone!” They need to learn early that it will take practice.  Practicing all the skills needed and building the habit of focusing and working on a specific goal.

(there’s some huge negative implications of the 10,000 hour rule as well – future article)

Athletes need an opportunity to develop talent.  If it really takes more than just natural talent, an athlete can’t just spring out of nowhere.  They need the opportunity to discover it and then foster it.  Throughout the book this is shown across disciplines and education.

First of this means if young athletes aren’t exposed to different sports, they may not find the one they have talent at.  This support the idea that they need to try a bunch of sports at the younger ages.  Even if they have the needed threshold of talent to be a great tennis player, if they never pick up a racket until age 20, they likely won’t have time or opportunity to get in the 10 years in the environment they need to.

Our all star and travel youth sports are becoming dominated by a “pay to play” system.  If you can’t afford it, you won’t get to play on those teams that give you the better coaches, better competition and future opportunity to play.  How can we actually give talented athletes from poor economic backgrounds a chance to play?

Be careful how you pick talent. I think so many more coaches (sport and performance) as well as parents, need to understand the concept of relative age.  It is one of the best messages we could get across in support of a better long term athletic development model and sanity in youth sports. 

Look for actual talent in a sport, not just success.  Talent here meaning some level of physical ability, but also an enjoyment of it, the thinking and understanding of the game,  and the emotional make-up to be successful.

It also means we need to be careful when we exclude some “lack of talent” early on.  Are we really that good at identifying who has it?  The evidence from many sports says no.  We have usually picked the older, and probably more physically developed kids.

How many amazing talents have been left behind that would have thrilled the sporting world.  How many champions from smaller Olympic sports have been missed because there was no opportunity for talent to flourish?

Build Your Talent Theory

As coaches an inherent part of what we do involves the concept of talent.  Having a clear theory on what it is and how it contributes to high level performance is critical.  Not only do we need this idea for ourselves, but also to communicate to other the coaches, athletes and parents we work with.

Then I actually stopped and asked, WHY?

Those moments of max V can have an impact

“most team sport athletes never reach top speed”  It usually goes something like that or “top speed only occurs after 40m-60m” ,or  “research shows most athletes never reach top speed” and so on…  

Now I recognize that in most team sports acceleration events will happen more often.  Many positions may not reach top speed.  Still, let’s all stop and admit that in many sports that one moment where they go for a full speed run is often  very important and can impact the game.

When Do Athletes Reach Full Speed?

How many steps of pure accel mechanics?

So how long does it take to get to full speed?  Not a lot of research here beyond track, but from data from testing thousands athletes of all levels and ages, I’d say it varies anywhere from  20 – over 40yds.  For a lot of athletes though they are up to full speed in 30-40 yds.  A lot of lineman are at full speed by 20yds.  Younger, slower athletes may be at full speed before that.

Bottom line lets not take data from the worlds elite sprinters and apply it across the board to all athletes.

When are Max Velocity Mechanics Applied

Another assumption in this thought process is that you only use  Max Velocity mechanics when you reach full speed.  Again some of this is from track where the sprinters are accelerating up to that point, but accelerating (increasing speed still) doesn’t necessarily mean acceleration mechanics.

There are not a lot of athletes that can apply true acceleration mechanics past 20yds.  In team sport athletes they may only get 3 – 5 steps of true acceleration mechanics and then start to transition. 

Data from numerous sports that are tracking player movement, shows that while athletes might not be at full speed, there are lots of runs at 85% or greater.  There are many runs over 15yds.  What does that tell me, those athletes are transitioning or using some form of max velocity mechanics.

Should We Bother training Max Velocity Mechanics

Max V happens

So if the discussion is should we train max V mechanics, I think if you actually look at the sport, the athlete and the data you’ll see them using max velocity mechanics.  Don’t just assume they don’t use them because you read a blog article or heard it on a podcast.  Max velocity mechanics DO happen in lots of team sports.

I still think acceleration should be prioritized, but that doesn’t we can’t address max V.  Let’s just stop justifying it by quoting old track research. I had regurgitated this myself in my early coaching days. I’m proof you can break this myth and really look at what your athletes are doing.