September, 2011

The Facility Fallacy

 

Here’s how it goes.

Your club has had another poor season.

People looking for answers come up with a lot of ideas on how to improve next year.

The management team determine that what the Club needs is a new high performance facility: new stadium, new meeting rooms, new computer lab, new medical facilities, a new gym and of course the obligatory new recovery facility.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

This is the Facility Fallacy. Read more

Performance Science and Why it’s time has come.

“In short science has its limitations. Western science is characterised by
reductionist principles; but we reach a point at which the reduction becomes
disassociated from the phenomena it is trying to explain” P.Jones 1998

It’s time.

It’s time for the Sports science industry to seriously change the way we do business.

It’s time we let go of  the outdated, simplistic single cause / single effect model of research and embraced a genuine integrated, multi disciplinary approach to solving performance problems.

It’s time for Performance Science to come of age. Read more

Coaching the Uncoachables

When it comes down to it, the day to day coaching of sport is not that difficult.

Get the physiology right. Teach the basics well. Come up with sensible, logical game plans and competition strategies. It’s not rocket science.

However, these things are not coaching. They are merely teaching the mechanics of the sport: they are more about learning than leadership, more about information than innovation and more about instruction than inspiration.

And, these are not the things that determine success: these are not the things that mean the difference between winning and losing.

The things that do determine success and the things that do mean the difference between winning and losing are much harder to find and even harder to measure.

They are the un-coachables: those intangible, elusive factors which make champions champions and winning teams unbeatable.

So, how can you Coach the Un-coachables?

Read more

101 Coaching Tips

 

It takes 20 years to become an overnight success. Successful coaches have by a combination of experience, skill, education and practice, developed ways and means of getting the best out themselves and their athletes.

Here are 101 Coaching Tips to help you achieve your coaching goals.

  1. Plan.
  2. Develop communication skills and never stop trying to improve them.
  3. Learn to effectively utilise the Internet, social media and email.
  4. Never stop learning. Learning is for life.
  5. Be open-minded. Never say, never.
  6. What you may lack in knowledge, make up for with enthusiasm, desire and passion.
  7. Be a role model for your athletes. Read more

Responsibility for Performance in Professional Football: Where the Buck Stops!

Whether teams win or lose, people want to know who is responsible.

Just take a look at the after match interviews.

The media want to talk to the players who were responsible for scoring the winning goal, the winning try, the incredible touchdown that won the game or the unbelievable conversion kicked from the sideline, while the final siren was blowing, in the pouring rain with a hostile crowd chanting “miss-miss”.

The media want to talk to the coach and ask why the team lost and to find out who was responsible for the lack of effort, lack of energy, poor execution of team strategies, poor skill execution under pressure, the missed tackle and the blown opportunity.

And it continues over the year to the end of season review process where people aim to pin responsibility for the team’s poor record on one person, one system, one coach, one player, one aspect of preparation…….

Professional football is very much about responsibility, so let’s try and clarify who exactly is responsible for performance in professional football: where the buck stops. Read more

Coach driven, Athlete Focused, Administratively supported? Isn’t it time we did something different?

 

Thanks for visiting the “Brain” today while doing your daily web surfing.

While you are in the surfing mood, go and check out some other sporting web sites.

Specifically check out the web sites of the funding agencies, Institutes and Academies of the major Olympics sporting nations.

You will see something like this – on all those sites:

“Our philosophy is to embrace an athlete centred, coach driven and administratively supported high performance environment”.

WOW – This is a fantastic philosophy.………for about 1993!!!!

Isn’t it time we did something different? Read more

Can you achieve the same or better performance results with reduced training volume? More on More with Less.

All coaches have five things in common:

  1. A love of the sport they coach;
  2. The passion and drive to be the best they can be;
  3. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge and learning;
  4. A desire to see every athlete they coach realise their full potential;
  5. An unbreakable devotion to their philosophy on training volume.

Why this obsession with volume of training? Why do coaches resist any attempt from sports scientists and others to reduce their training volume? Why do coaches resent any implication that they are training their athletes too hard?

Because, in spite of all the research and all the literature and all the advances in sports science, sports medicine and performance technologies, the only thing that is proven – beyond doubt – to improve performance is consistent hard training. Read more

CoachTED: A Client Focused Approach to Coach Training, Education and Development.

Coach education is at the crossroads.

One thing is for certain, the way we have trained, educated and developed sports coaches in the past is not working. It has failed.

Let’s talk about a new approach in Coach Training, Education and Development: A Client Focused Approach.

Let’s talk about CoachT.E.D. (pronounced Coached): Coach Training, Education and Development.

And most importantly, let’s talk about training, educating and developing more coaches and better coaches: coaches who can provide every person involved in sport with the environment and the opportunity to develop a passion for sport, a life long love of physical fitness and activity and the chance to choose a path to realise their potential as athletes and human beings.

Read more

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