Reinventing the wheel — BASC | Strength & Conditioning

Take home message

often, it is just doing what is already working, better.

For Coaches

Do not try to impress. Just design and deliver a solid program.

For Athletes

Very rarely is the difference in the innovation. Get the basics right.

I’m lucky I train my athletes in a multi-sport environment because I’m able to witness a variety of athletes, coaches and programs. I do find it easy to get caught in my bubble that is hockey and not communicate with other coaches, so it is good to have access to such a facility. It’s like a lazy professional development program.

Recently, whilst waiting for a one-on-one session to start, I spent a few minutes just watching other athletes training. It is always good to see another coach or physio addressing the training demands of their different athletes - good or bad, similar or different, it always provokes thinking. On this particular occasion, the practitioner was instructing an athlete on a piece of equipment. There were alternating postures and resistance bands involved that resembled some form of trapeze act. The instructing practitioner was animated in their passion and rationale for the purpose of the exercise to their fellow coach, describing the interaction of the posture and the demands this places on the athlete and the representation of the performance task.

As I am watching I reminisced on my time working with that sport almost 15 years ago. One particular athlete at the time had some success and is now a coach in that sport. I reflected on the evolution of training between then and now. The differences in our program to its modern counterpart. It’s interesting to think that if I was training that sport now, would I use the principles of the old program, or would I modernise it? A couple of points here.

Context. First and foremost, what I was seeing was one observation. I have no idea how this one example sits in the whole program. I think a lot of the time we are very quick to judge other coaches without understanding their context. So it is not about whether this exercise was correct or not, but how I started thinking about my application in my sport.

Second, it made me think about the role of innovation in training. Apple may have been completely innovative when they released the iPhone. It had apps, it could take pictures, a speaker, it was amazing. But it still made calls. It was still a phone. All these years on, and you can have all the innovations you like, but if it does not make calls, it’s just an iPod (remember those?). Your new training program can have lots of great innovations, but the sport is still the sport and the underlying physical capacities to compete are still the same. I wondered if my current observation was innovation for innovations sake because something new needed to be done. It feels that sometimes if you are not innovating you are not evolving or growing as a coach or program. Having previously worked with this sport, I felt that a contribution to success at the time was a combination of a very diligent coach and a talented, very strong, hard working athlete - a pretty good combination, that is probably mandatory in most sporting situations.

Third, and maybe more interesting, as I have developed as a coach, have I actually gone full circle? Starting out I only knew simple and as I learnt more, did I try to be more sophisticated when I did not need to be? Would I have felt a need, a desire (or pressure) to innovate my program as a younger coach to show I was thinking and developing? As a more experienced coach, have I done the experimenting necessary to determine what variables I can change and which need to remain? Do I now write really simple, to the point of boring programs, because I spent years having to work out what to keep and what to discard? This innovation was actually important for my development.

I believe the answer is definitely “yes”. I would have felt pressure as an emerging coach to innovate my program - I still feel it now and often defend programs. I would have wanted to show my athletes and coaches new and fresh ideas that I picked up reading/watching/listening to others. And that may have been a shame for the athletes but probably a necessary cycle for me to go through as a coach. On the flip side, is that a necessary path for athletes? Do senior athletes know what works for them because they innovated and found out what did not work? Probably. Do younger athletes look at their older role models and aspire to do fancier skills and moves, not appreciating the flawless execution of basics that took the senior player years to achieve that hold up during the pressure situations in competition?

I am aware of the pressure to innovate even now as a more experienced coach. Just the other day a senior coach new to our environment ‘glanced’ at my programs. Immediately I felt the mental pressure to defend my simple program, yet quickly calmed with an experienced reassurance that I have worked some stuff out and that’s why I program like I do. I look for innovation and refinement all the time, but I don’t try to reinvent the wheel, knowing to keep specificity and transfer first and foremost in the program. It is not what the event looks like that matters, it is the underlying physical capacities.

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Thanks again. BA.