Problems in Your Programming
This past week my wife and I went out to eat at one of our favorite spots in our town. Something we usually don’t do during the week! It was awesome.
We go to this restaurant at least 2-3x a month. Without fail.
Every single staff member greets us the same way, there is always warm bread on the table, the meal is always consistent and they refill your water once it is half way gone.
We’ve never had a bad experience. This place is busy all the time, yet, they do a great job at making you feel like you’re the only one in the restaurant.
If you look around social media, you’ll see some of the best training write ups, prescriptions, and detail oriented programs. These are all great things! If you work in a small setting with less than 20 people a week. For the majority of sports performance coaches, you’re tasked with managing anywhere between 50-100 athletes or more per week.
You need a standardized process for the intake, on board, programming, and facilitation of your training. Here are common problems I see with most training systems (take the principles and beliefs out of it). Another example from last week's presentation.
Everyone’s training should not be uniform. Different morphology, anthropometrics, different stressors, injury history, and limitations. However, the system should be the same. If you the owner/head operator do things one way and another one of your coaches do things another way, what kind of service is that?
If you went out to eat at a restaurant that served your filet mignon differently every time, you’re out of there! Same thing goes with your training. High level coaching and programming is accountability at every touchpoint from every single coach.
How Can You Uniform Your Training System?
At VH, we’ve spent a tremendous amount of time creating a process that any coach or gym can use. This is not about your training beliefs, ideologies, or preconceived biases. This is about creating a reproducible service that will level the playing field of every coach’s ability to deliver a great training session.
“But I’m the best and need to show I’m different” - Everything thinks they’re a snowflake.
Be the pioneer. You are the leader and will always have the most training knowledge. This will always be the case. However, you still abide by the system.
You need to teach your coaches how to do the same.
Sports Performance Stuff You Should Check Out
Podcast Recommendation: https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-258/
My buddy Jeremiah Flood out in California has a unique approach to training youth athletes. In this podcast with Joel, he breaks down a lot of these key processes that have helped with the holistic development of the athlete’s he has worked with. Check it out!
Book Recommendation: The Relentless Elimination of Hurry
Running two businesses, consulting, training athletes, and joint ventures I tend to find myself with very little time to come up for air. Always on the move, skipping meals, family/friend time, and sometimes training sessions - I realized I need to slow it down a bit. I’m currently working through this book and I think all forward motivated thinkers should do the same.
Top IG Post of the Week: Using Acceleration as a Hamstring Rehabilitation Tool
Training for me over the last few weeks has consisted of a ton of integration between rehab and performance. A task we all face. However, this time around much more is at stake. Working with NBA Lottery picks, NFL Cornerbacks, and Overseas players who are making real money - you have to have a much more detailed approach. Agents/Coaches care about the one thing - can they play? Regardless of how they are feeling. To make matters worse, very few professional health organizations have any knowledge regarding performance training. In other words, players coming back from an injury must be ready to go and quickly.
Using traditional means of rehab such as respiration, positional work, and volume control have very little place in any athlete's program who has to be ready in 2 weeks. I’ve found great success in using low level acceleration drills, coordination drills, and more technical drills as a great way to restore move, output, and neuromuscular control while still utilizing a decent amount of volume within a training session. I’ve seen a shift in “thinking” from speed work to more falling sprints and other techniques to improve acceleration. The use of technical drills and cyclic movements is not to improve the sprint itself - it’s to help develop coordination and neurological development in athletes to prepare the nervous system for the demands of the sprint. In this post CHECK OUT ABOVE - I explain in more detail.