500 Words a Week - Lose the Battle to Win the War
I’m a strong believer in letting some of the smaller issues go for the sake of the bigger picture. The bigger picture is getting our athletes engaged in the process of helping them increase their performance capabilities. This can come through increasing physical capabilities or keeping our athletes healthy to train and perform year round.
A common theme along this line is restricting some of the exercises our athletes do because of our preconceived idea about what a good exercise or a bad exercise is. If your athletes want to do some bicep curls and or some different core exercises at the end of the workout, as long as they aren’t hurting themselves, let them. If anything we should be encouraging our athletes to do more of what makes them feel good. The following quote from Zach Even-Esh on the Mike and Brooker Show (a great podcast) sums this up beautifully: “What’s a more important transfer of training than believing in yourself?”. Sure biceps curls don’t satisfy Verkhoshansky’s concept of dynamic correspondence, but your athlete feels great after doing them. Are we really going to stop our athlete achieving that feeling just because we don’t believe it transfers?
As much as I enjoy the nuances of S&C and figuring out what exercises and set/rep scheme may be more conducive than others. With our strength training, as long as our athletes are hitting the musculature we want to develop, that’s the main thing. Who cares if they trap bar deadlift over back squat, or belt squat over trap bar deadlift? So you have programmed 6 reps for today’s main lift, but your athlete feels great and would rather knock out 8 or 10 reps than increase the load on the bar, let them. Again, we are losing the battle to win the war. If we constantly say no to our athlete’s inputs and force them to do exactly what we have laid out, odds are they might not do it/ put in the effort to achieve the desired outcome we are chasing.
An important point on this, is that it can be challenging for us to really know if we have improved our athletes on-field performance. Therefore, we shouldn’t constantly fret over the smaller details as long as we are keeping our athletes safe and healthy. Sure we have models that lead us to believe we are reducing injuries and increasing on-field performance levels, but we will never truly know if we stopped an injury occurring or because of the extra work an athlete did, they were able to make that game winning block. What we can be sure of, is we can hinder and decrease our athlete’s performance significantly by asking them to perform something that is inappropriate relative to their training age/ injury history/ timing during the week’s microcycle or even dislikes.
If we find ourselves constantly chasing our athletes up on some of the smaller/ less important details, we will win the battle but lose the war and lose sight of that bigger picture. Our athletes have so many people telling them what they can and can’t do, especially those on the verge of adulthood. Some of these people don’t have the athletes wishes at heart and have ulterior motives. Do we really want to be another one of these people? Or do we want to be a person who can help them through this challenging time, and when they come to us they know we have their best interest at heart.
