500 Words a Week - Knowing your why and your principles.

In the current social media paradigm, we are bombarded with specific training modalities and exercises. I’m not saying this is a bad thing and many of the reasons behind these posts are well grounded and educational, but some are not. It is the training aspects that are backed by sound reasoning that can also be dangerous. We see many of these training modalities and want to include them all in our programme. This makes our programme look like a last minute shopping list rather than well thought out and progressive. Simon Sinek’s book ‘Start with Why’ gives us an easy to use point of reference when dealing with the endless exercise variations and training modalities we see:

This concept goes far beyond assorting through potentially useful exercises we see on social media, it also applies to our broad programme philosophy and perhaps into aspects of our life outside of coaching.

I think Sinek’s ‘Golden Circle’ links nicely with Harrington Emerson’s quote;

“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble”

By knowing our why and our principles we can easily navigate and establish what can be useful methods that can be applied to our programme.

An area that I struggled with not having a clear why and principles behind was energy system development. A principle that brought me clarity in energy system development in team sports is following an alactic – aerobic model. We build high level alactic power through increasing our athletes absolute max output, mainly through improving acceleration and max velocity speeds. This has many downstream effects, as alluded to in previous articles, such as speed reserve. By creating a gap between our athlete’s maximal outputs and operational outputs, our athletes can operate for longer as it is less fatiguing due to a higher max output level. We also know that in team sports the majority of game defining moments rely on high power and speed outputs. We build a high amount of aerobic capacity as we know this acts as recovery support for the other energy systems. A great aerobic capacity can help out athletes maintain their pace, cognitive abilities and technical and tactical efficiency throughout the game.

As we have our principle in the alactic – aerobic model for energy system development and our why in the reasons above, as long as the what largely matches into these we can choose from different methods. We may feel we would rather our athletes work on aerobic capacity through longer steady state work due to the important centralized adaptations that occur through this method. These adaptations include increased cardiac output and stroke volume through left ventricular hypertrophy of the heart. We may feel we would rather improve our athlete’s aerobic capacity through tempo running as they are accumulating an increased volume of high speed running and improving running technique at faster velocities. We may feel we want to do a little of both in sequenced block approach or in a more congruent manner. As long as our why and our principles are solid, we can sort through the what and pick methods that work best for us and our athletes.