500 Words a Week - Matching your programme to your culture.
When we discuss culture, we could be here for hours deciding what is a good culture and how to foster one. Nothing I have seen has better summarized trying to make a productive culture than the tweet below from Steve Magness:
To me the beauty of this is in its simplicity and if we can make our athletes feel those three things mentioned, we can hopefully create a great culture. For this blog post, we are going to focus on Magness’s second point of how we can make our athletes feel they can get better. As mentioned in some previous blog posts, I’m a fan of embedded testing, and in this context, this is where the true power of embedded testing shines.
Firstly, what is embedded testing? I had read about embedded testing before through some of Mladen Jovanovic’s work, but have never seen it as eloquently done as when I interned under Nick Di Marco and the great coaches at Elon University for a summer. Embedded testing is where you simply measure what you are training every week. If we are trying to improve a players speed, we make sure to get the timing gates out to measure various speed scores depending on the focus of the session (10m sprint for acceleration, fly 10m for max velocity, etc…). Max Velocity taken from GPS can also be a good marker to track. A fallback to the tests I have mentioned is that the technology can have a significant price attached. For the price of less than £5, you can buy a measuring tape and begin to measure broad jumps as an embedded testing protocol.
A recent webinar from Dan Howells and Jose Fernandez on “Embedding Sports Science in Daily Practices” brought up some points around embedded testing that should be kept in mind. First, the word test and the testing process always infers some form of pass/ fail result or the athlete being labeled good/ bad. What needs to be made clear to the athlete is that we are measuring aspects of performance to gauge improvements, sure at some level we will compare but seeing improvements is our focus. We are trying to show our athletes and make them believe they can get better, linking in with above.
Another point brought up from this webinar, is how quickly do you close the loop. After you perform the test, the longer you take to feedback the data to your athletes, the less impactful the data becomes. When I say feedback the data to the athlete, this doesn’t have to be through a beautiful PDF. All the athlete wants to know is did they get better. So we merely ensure that we have their best scores at hand for each test. Prior to the test, we tell our athletes their best scores, once the test has been performed we can feedback straight away to our athlete their score and so our athlete knows whether they improved or not. On that point, this is why I favour taking fly 10m sprints time through timing gates ahead of max velocity through GPS. The fly 10m sprint times provide immediate feedback, and unless you have a live GPS system, you have to wait till after the session to download the data and feedback to the athletes.
In our most recent session of taking fly 10m’s, after taking everyone times, one athlete said “everyone beat their PB’s today”. This is what we are chasing, athletes are being shown that they can get better, they are also involved in the process of improving themselves and are having an interest in their teammates performance.
