Open minded — BASC | Strength & Conditioning

Take home message

GROWTH REQUIRES LEARNING NEW THINGS - BEING OPEN MINDED.

For Development Coaches

Teach your athletes to open minded to training methods beyond your own.

For Athletes

There are many ways to train. Your job is to be open to as many as possible to determine what works for you.

Like many coaches, I have new athletes enter the program each year from underpinning development pathways. Recently I was asked, “What’s an important quality for a developing player entering the program?” - great question. So after much deliberation, I settled on, “being open minded”.

Not the ability to overhead squat or weightlifting technique, a well developed aerobic system or resilience. I believe these can be trained and improved. When entering a new training environment, with a new culture, coaches and players, I find it is the ability for a player to be open minded to the new environment that is most refreshing and good to work with.

By open minded, I do not mean compliant. I do not want an athlete to enter “my” S&C program and immediately do everything I say. That devalues everything their previous coach did and demonstrates little awareness of what the athlete has learnt is important for them. However, equally distasteful is the athlete that enters a new program with no desire to learn why we do what we do; to be closed to new aspects that they can add or modify to their existing routines.

When an athlete enters our environment, they clearly have positive attributes that the coaches believe in. Yet despite what they bring, this is a new environment and they cannot possibly be aware of everything required to, first survive, and then thrive. They can only do that with an open mind to new things.

So a few important aspects I would consider when working with developing athletes. First, that basics are basics wherever you go and have a reason for incorporating into any program - they work! Second, there are many ways to achieve a physical outcome and what works here, for you right now, may not work for you later - and that’s ok. It is having the physical and mental tools to adapt and thrive in a variety of training environments.

But coaches, we also need to bring the open mind. I remember a coach and former mentor whowould essentially ‘interview’ every new athlete to see what they could learn about the athlete’s previous environment. Whilst this was an opportunity to learn about the other organisation, the reality was in the tight knit competition, there were few surprises - all the S&C’s knew what everyone else was doing (we all have our signature styles). The interview was actually an opportunity to see what aspects the athlete retained. They remember the parts that are important to them and that gave an insight into the athlete’s beliefs and how we could better coach them. Yes, we would always learn something, but it demonstrated to the athlete our willingness to learn new things. The open minded coaching approach helped foster a strong relationship right from the start.

I think we should strive to be open minded as a coach, but knowing that there are many ways to achieve a physical outcome, we should endeavor to have open minded athletes as well.

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Thanks again. BA.