500 Words a Week - Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.

“Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken” - Pascal Finette

This article is an ode to simpler things involved within S&C. Recently, I have been inundated with different types of training means and methodologies. Instagram and other social media accounts are wonderful for allowing us to get an insight into other coach’s philosophies and what they are implementing with their athletes (they are not wonderful for a host of other reason, which we could be hear all day talking about). However, we often don’t get context behind this. I know I have been guilty of just chucking things up. Often times, the newer, more unique training methods garner the most attention. I won’t lie and say I don’t enjoy seeing this, I love getting new ideas from other coaches and messing around with different methods of training.

It’s important that even if we are messing around with these different training methods, that our plan doesn’t just become a child’s Christmas list to Santa in which the child inevitably writes they want one of everything. We must be true to our principles and the basic premise of strength and conditioning. For me, our first priority is making sure our athletes can perform in training and competition. A simple way we can do this is by making sure our athletes are available for training and competition. How can we go about this? By increasing our athlete’s ability to handle load through effective load management and building up tissue capacities. We must continue to keep in our mind that the sport practice itself will have the largest influence on our athlete’s ability to improve at their sport, not the fancy water bag isometric bosu ball exercise we seen on Instagram.

How I prevent my programming looking like a child’s Christmas list is ensuring we cover our big rocks. A big rock might be ensuring that we are doing something to improve tissue capacity and strength to hopefully improve load tolerance for the actual training of the sport. A second might be ensuring we are performing some intentful jump and speed work. Rather than seeing some video on Instagram and deciding how can I write my programme so I can include this exercise.

William Wayland has a wonderful recent post (again the great side of social media):

“Medocrity, modesty, consistency and discipline do not make for engaging content.”

“This however is how the bulk of fitness and sports performance training actually occurs in the real world.”

A trait that I value highly, and one that is underrated is consistency. The ability to show up, apply yourself and get the work done to a high level day after day after day. Of course, there will be times when you can’t keep this up, you can read one of my past blogs to see how I struggled this year. The difference is knowing that the difficult times won’t last forever, and those who can pick themselves up and get back on track are the people I admire and want to be around.

This message of consistency is something I believe we should try to communicate to our athletes/ clients for their physical preparation.