I recently recorded an interview with Jeremy Boone from the 'Coach Your Best' podcast (check it out at www.athletebydesign.com). Afterwards Jeremy forwarded me this question that he had recieved from a High School Athletic Director...
"Do you have 3-5 strategies for how to best raise the intensity of a practice for a team? When I observe one of my coaches running practice everything is all setup in lines and a lot of talking. The kids are so disengaged and bored!"
Below is my answer....
Just to be clear about what we mean when we talk about intensity. I define intensity as effort x focus. Often I find that the players are working really hard but the standard of training is low because the mental focus isn't right. In my mind the right level of intensity is the ideal combination of effort combined with the right mindset.
So onto the how....
1. Establish what the right level of intensity looks like
Firstly I would want to give the group a reality check to ensure that we have a common understanding of intensity is in relation to theirs.
I would have worked with them to establish some goals so that I can ask the group what level of intensity they want based on their goals. If they don't want to work with that level of intensity then they have to reevaluate their goals.
Then I ask them to rate their usual/existing level of intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 (I usually go round the group 1 by 1). If they then agree that they need to be at 10 to achieve their goals then I can help to show them what 10 looks like and use this as a reference point from then on whenever the level drops below the agreed standard.
2. 'Gamification'
I use a lot of games or game forms in my coaching. This means that I can get creative with points systems that raise the level of competitiveness in the session and also keeps intensity high. One thing I do that really raises the level is create a league table where the same players or same teams of players are scoring points for their team based on the parameters that we agree.
By way of an example last night my group were focussed on a particular technical aspect involving the players carrying the ball into space, I would shout out bonus points every time I saw them perform the particular technique we were working on which really dialled them into the performance. (I also gave points for attempting to do it even if it failed as I wanted them to understand that it is the intent to try that is as the most important thing).
3. Use consequences like a volume dial
I use consequences to raise or lower intensity. If I really want the players to experience some pressure then I might use a conditioning based consequence which has the added benefit of getting them more conditioned for competition. This works but I tend to use these physical consequences more in pre season to build conditioning into sessions. During the season when I want less pressure / fear but still want intensity I will ask the players to come up with a forfeit.
Last night they said that the team that loses the scrimmage had to sing a song from Disney's Frozen to the other team...it was hilarious watching them belt out 'let it go' I can tell you! The atmosphere was really good and there was a lot of laughter but the intensity definitely went up during this.
4. Use the 'reset button'
Periodically I will create a game that is pretty demanding on the players either technically, mentally or physically and will put a time limit on the activity and start a countdown. If the level of intensity drops then we press the reset button and the countdown starts again until they have completed the set time (This one is like a rocket ship for intensity but it needs to be managed carefully!).
5. Finish early!
This might sound counter intuitive but from time to time I will finish a session or an exercise early because the players have shown high intensity and have really put it in. This sends out the message that if they bring their 10 out of 10 focus to training I won't keep them any longer than necessary (More often than not they ask for something more and we keep going but the message has been sent).
6. Establish 'acceptables' and 'exceptionals'
Before every session or every exercise we will establish what is acceptable and what is exceptional. As long as we don't drop below the acceptable level then everything is good but we want to see athletes 'striving for the exceptional'.
7. Have an 'everytime philosophy'
I am pretty relentless when it comes to maintaining the quality of practice that the group have agreed to. I will tell them that I can't step back from that because that would not be doing the right thing by them. I view it the same way as I view the behaviour of my children, if I let them get away with bad manners or behaviour then I am not doing my best as a father. Why should my players be any different?
I am very fortunate to be able to mix with some really excellent people. One of them is Ric Shuttleworth, Elite Coach Development Manager at the RFU. Ric works with professional coaches in the premiership rugby academies enhancing their ability to develop skill in young rugby players. I guess you could call him the 'Yoda' of skill acquisition!
Ric's philosophy is based on the 'Game Sense' or perhaps more accurately the 'Constraints Led' model of coaching. He suggests that skill should never be developed outside of a game like training environment, rather coaches should always challenge themselves to create what the successful Australian Hockey Coach, Ric Charlesworth calls 'designer games' so that players are learning and developing skills while inside a game like context so that the acquired skill is learned in an integrated sense rather than isolated.
Each time I get to chat with Ric I get some new nugget of coaching gold...here are a few that I describe as 'power moves'.
1. Let the players find the solutions.
2. The information should come from them to us.
3. We want mistakes. Mistakes are good.
4. Ask a question but don't expect an answer. Allow the activity to be the teacher, let them find the solution within the activity.
5. Manipulate time and space to create pressure. Players who have played a lot of invasion games are good at this.
6. Information dictates technique - the development of the skill should never be done in isolation of wider information. Otherwise the skill breaks down.
7. Expression and creativity is prized over conforming to a model. Innovation must be part of it.
8. Technique based KPIs are not important. Process is key, how committed to learning are they?
9. Establish the aim of the session based on the problems. List the problems and then work backwards towards the solutions.
10. Work out the methods of learning based on low, medium and high pressure options. Slide between these to illicit the best learning model for the individual.
11. Players want you to be in control. But you must break the control cycle. Don't offer feedback...force them to solicit it.
12. Todays’ generation get told what to do a lot. They are not used to making decisions.
13. Try to Structure 'unstructured' practice.
14. Encourage the players develop the games or solutions or constraints to solve the problem. Make them critically evaluate tactical approaches and make decisions accordingly.
15. Create repetition without repetition.
Check out this video I found of the F2 Freestylers tranfering their skills from football to rugby. I know that some of these things take a number of takes but they are impressive none the less!
One of the real pleasures of what I do is educating and developing coaches. I really enjoy meeting people working at the coal face of sports trying to do the best they can to help the athletes they work with to maximise their potential. I regularly deliver workshops for talent coaches where one of the discussion topics revolves around the question ‘what is talent’? I ask the coaches to try and come up with a definition and then feedback.
The responses always lead us down a particular route and we end up exploring the nurture – nature debate where arguments rage about the relative merits of genetic attributes inherited from birth versus the socialising environmental factors which develop human abilities.(check out the excellent 'Creativity Post' for a really interesting insight into the views being put forward)
The conversation often ends up with the room split into 3 camps:
· The ‘Nurturers’: who think that talent is largely the product of the developmental environment.
· The ‘Naturists’: (not the getting naked type!) that want to suggest that talent is innate and the product of inherited genetic attributes.
· The ‘Middle Majority’ that argue that talent is a combination of both.
There can often be quite strong views put forward by the opposing ends of the discussion and I often find myself acting as a referee between the two camps. As I see it the nurture vs nature debate is often so divisive and engenders so much passion because it can act as a metaphor for how we as humans see our world. For nurturers, the nature argument is abhorrent as it sends out a message that if you are ‘blessed’ or ‘gifted’ with certain qualities and attributes then you have a material advantage over others and no amount of striving is going to overcome that. Those in the nature camp contend that it is equally wrong to give people the false hope that if they spend enough time trying to achieve something then they will achieve their dreams or goals when the reality is that their genetic disadvantages are such that this is unlikely.
Put another way, nurturers believe that anybody can be Albert Einstein if they work hard enough, the nature camp believe that no amount of work can overcome the innate qualities that made Einstein who he was.
I have to say that the coach and social scientist in me coupled with the fact that I have a personal leaning towards a more meritocratic, egalitarian model of society leans me towards the nurture argument. It resonates with me as I believe that if we can create more opportunities for people to deliberately practise by having quality coaching experiences made available to more people more often then we will do a great deal to maximise more young people’s athletic potential.
On the other hand the more I work with different sports the more I can see that genetic differences are important especially in sports where the physiological requirements are much more prevalent as attributes such as height, weight, strength, power and speed are more advantageous to performance.
So how should we look at this problem? If we are looking for talent should we be focussed on physiological factors driven by our genes or should we focus on environmental factors which drive talent development?
I think that this polarisation of the argument is unhelpful and misses the point. You don't necessarily become a world champion just by putting in thousands of hours of practice however we also know that you would never become a world champion without putting in thousands of hours of practice.
In order to explore this topic further I met with Professor Patrick Bateson who is a leading figure in the field of Ethology (the biological study of behaviour) and the author of‘Design for a life – How behaviour develops’ to discuss this very issue. He explained to me that the Nurture v Nature debate is completely nonsensical to him as it is clear that there is a need to understand the development of human athletic potential from the position of both sides. Having said that neither does he subscribe to the position of the ‘middle majority’. Professor Bateson suggests that it isn’t about 'Genetics versus Environment' or 'Genetics plus Environment' but rather 'Genetics multiplied by Environment'.
Essentially Prof Bateson wants us to embrace a more sophisticated understanding of the issue and points to some of the latest findings in the field of Epigenetics (more on this in future posts) which is beginning to suggest that a person’s Genotype (how their body is made up genetically) is not necessarily fixed and that adaptations can occur based on a variety of environmental influences.
Dr Jeff Craig the joint leader of the Developmental Epigenetics Group at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Australia goes some way to backing up this point. Writing on a blog on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website for a programme called ‘Life at 5’ he states…
“Up to the late 90s and even early 2000s, we thought that DNA was our destiny - which is not true.Our genes are just lengths of DNA; they don't do anything by themselves - they need something to turn the gene on and turn the gene off. This is where epigenetics comes in. Epigenetics literally means 'above' genetics and it refers to the tags that sit on top of our DNA. They are marks that stick to the beginning of a gene and tell the gene to be active or to be inactive. It's like having a dimmer switch. A light bulb in a socket doesn't do anything by itself; it needs power, an on/off switch and a dimmer switch to turn it up or down”.
How I interpret this is to say that, while genes are vital in creating the building blocks which lead to establishing ourselves as humans they are not our fate. Who we are and who we ultimately become depends on a subtle and delicate interplay between our DNA and the environment. This short TED talk by Professor Dean Ornish serves to illustrate the point well.
To further expand on this point, Richard C. Francis highlighted a number of studies in his book Epigenetics - The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance that have suggested that the way an organism responds to extreme trauma could largely be determined by their genetic construction. In essence, those having a certain genetic make up would be very resilient to trauma where as others who did not have the same composition could struggle and could end up suffering from stress, anxiety, depression, mental illness well into their adult lives.
The same studies then went on to examine the effects of parenting over a period of time and they came to 2 startling conclusions.
1. The genetic make up was largely determined by the level of attachment and intimacy provided by the mother at an early age.
2. The offspring with the genetic make-up that should have left them prone to suffer badly from trauma recovered to become even more resilient than those with the genetic advantage as long as they were given the right kind of nurturing from their parents, siblings or others.
So what does all this mean for sport and coaching?
Many athletes can possess the most fantastic physical (genetic) attributes which translate into amazing athletic abilities. We all know people like this, they can turn their hands to anything and are good at everything yet they somehow fail to achieve their potential. In my view this is more often than not because they have never really been taught how to fail, it all came so easy to them that when the going does get tough they either can’t handle it or they get demotivated and drop out.
Essentially we think that what they have naturally will be enough to see them through. Even the most gifted still need to be nurtured. In summary, let’s move beyond the Nurture – Nature debate and let’s understand that while physiology is important it is also dramatically affected by environment.
For me as a coach I find this to be a really powerful motivating force. I love the notion that we can create situations and conditions through our coaching that can influence a child’s life in ways that can go beyond the sports field and can help them in other aspects of their life. I am of the belief that being a coach of talented youngsters is a great privilege and I have often maintained that a big part of my role is to help them to develop a ‘bubble of resilience’ which helps them to navigate the challenges and pressures that constantly bombard them and threaten to derail their development.
It just occurred to me that a great film to illustrate my point is 'The Blind Side' starring Sandra Bullock. I can also highly recommend the book of the same title by one of my favourite authors, Michael Lewis.