500 Words a Week - Appreciating Athleticism
The more time I spend within S&C and working in sport, the broader my definition of athleticism becomes and my appreciation for movement heightens. When we google athleticism it is defined as “the physical qualities that are characteristic of athletes, such as strength, fitness, and agility”. When I started out within S&C I was too focused on the strength aspect of athleticism. I believed that getting all athletes stronger would solve every problem. My only tool I had was a hammer, and so I saw every problem I encountered as a nail needing to be hit. Building strength is still a key part of my philosophy as our ability to produce and tolerate force underpins so many athletic endeavours, as well as the second order effects derived from improvements in strength such as ability to handle larger specific training loads and a decrease in injury risk. However, it is not the be all and end all.
In my current role, I have been trying to improve my coaching eye to view movement within the sport and how to do we isolate and improve this. Something that I neglected in the past is having deeper conversations with the sport coach about the specific themes they are working on and how do we link in to better help our athletes improve their ability to perform the necessary movements within this theme. However, we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water and must ensure we are doing enough of what we deem appropriate to still ensure our athletes are improving certain physical capacities of speed, change of direction and other on-field endeavours.
Upon the topic of improving our athlete’s movement ability, Frans Bosch brings up some interesting points on coaching movement. Such as the following exert from his book discussing how we as coaches should be:
“They should be gardeners rather than conductors. Rather than indicate which component of the movement should be learned at which point in the learning process, they should above all create conditions that are in keeping with the character of intrinsic learning, and so optimize the learning process.
Gardeners do not decide when or how fast plants should grow – when the next step should be taken in the learning process – but simply hoe and fertilize. The coach’s task shifts to creating ecologically valid practice situations – in which the environment is organized so as to help find the right movement solution and the learner implicitly learns to recognise a biomechanically optimal solution.”
As with all things, a blended approach is best. We should create and foster practice situations in which learning is implicitly derived however not be afraid of dictating how and what are athletes learn at times. Continuing the gardener analogy, some of our athletes may be as self-sufficient as a cacti needing a little water every month, however some may be a rose that requires regular watering, fertilizing, trimming, pruning and if you mishandle them you could get a torn in the hand.
