This Blog post is a departure away from my usual writing.  As some of you may know I’m as passionate about coach education as I am about coaching itself.  As part of my journey to becoming a coach educator I am now enrolled on a teaching qualification.

For those of you who are in the fortunate role to provide Coach Education I just thought I would share with you a few key learnings from my first two days on the Level 3 Award in Education & Training (AET).  I love being able to reflect on my own education journey and think how I will change the way I do things to influence the next generation.

It’s that old cliche that if you pick up one key pearl of wisdom it will be worth going.  Well my biggest pearl was to be introduced to Sir Ken Robinson.  Our tutor showed us this Youtube video just before lunch to give us something to discuss over lunch. I was gripped.

You can watch the whole lecture here

Sir Ken is an educationalist who encouraged me to think about creativity and divergent thinking, an essential capacity for creativity.  Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.  Divergent thinking is the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question and the ability to think laterally.  There are so many achievements that characterise the ascent of human culture.  But in his opinion we destroy this natural creativity in the way we educate people.

The education system:  ”They’re trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past, and along the way they’re alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose of going to school.” 

”There is an intellectual apatite where Vocational training is seen as not as good as academic training.  Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period of the history of the Earth.  They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: from computers, from Iphones, from advertising hoarding, from hundreds of television channels.  And we’re penalising them from getting distracted…..from what….??”

Boring lessons!!!!!!!

Not everyone will benefit from a standardised way of learning, being force fed information that they may or may not be interested in.

Death by Powerpoint:

We’re still getting our children through education by anaesthetising them rather than waking them up!!

Group work:

Instead most great learning happens in GROUPS.  Collaboration is the stuff of Growth.  But yet we have achievement standards that learners need to reach by working in isolation on a test paper where there is only one answer!  We need a shift from an industrial metaphor of education to an agricultural one.  Human organisations are not like mechanisms (even though organisational charts still represent most organisations like this) they are like organisms. The way you work in an organisation is deeply affected by how you feel about it.

My challenge:

So I challenged myself to think out of the box and give a 15 minute presentation on Strength & Conditioning without the use of powerpoint.

Before I did my presentation I had a really good session on Delivery Methods.  We did a group brainstorm on different delivery methods we could use to share information and here is a photo of the brainstorm on the flip chart.

So fuelled with lots of ideas I went and did my presentation.

The presentation was really well received and it gave me a lot of satisfaction in achieving the learning objectives without being constrained to the use of powerpoint.  Rather than just tell people by showing them words on a page and reading them off, I cultivated group discussions, I showed them videos and I got them to do some practical tasks.  This is what our tutor meant by Tell > Show > Do, where learning sticks more, the more INVOLVED you are in it!

Out of interest compare how much information you took in when you listened to Sir Ken speak on the full 55 minute lecture and just focused on the words, with the 10 minute illustrated version where you were constantly looking at pictures too!  They say a picture paints a thousand words!

Go out there and be creative!!!!!!!

The last few weeks I have been doing a fair amount of coach education with the Sports Studies students of the University of Hertfordshire, as well as my recent workshop, ‘5 Numbers to Live By.’  Discussions quickly came around to how to get a job in this industry so I thought I would share with you some of my reflections.  Bottom line; be a great coach and get yourself noticed.  So how do you do this?

To be a great coach I have been focusing on talking about the ‘Coaching Process.‘  I’d like to mention a few of my own mentors on this subject who have influenced many of my thoughts on this topic, namely Louis Cayer, Helen Emms, Paul Dent and all the coaching team at Gosling Tennis Academy.   So to set the scene my discussions with the students focused on:  

• Creating a culture
• Creating a training environment
• Observing performance
• Giving and receiving feedback

In this post I will focus on the first two:

Creating a Culture:

  I started by speaking about Creating a culture.  I explained to the students that if you’re looking to get a job with an organisation it’s really important to see if you are going to be a good fit for each other.  I think that great teams have a great culture, which consists of the following:

>Having a Big Goal and a set of processes in place to achieve it.

For example, at Gosling Tennis Academy, they have a goal of:

”winning now and in the future, on and off the court.”

They define winning as having a champion in the same calendar year in each of the following events:

>Junior 10 and under British Nationals

>Junior 14 and under Tarbes (unofficial world championships)

>Junior Grand slam

>NCAA Divison 1 Team

>Senior Grand slam

So if you’re thinking about approaching an organisation think about whether you’d be excited about being part of a team with these goals.  The processes they have in place that lead to winning at Gosling are:

• World class knowledge
• Clear understanding of level
• Improve performance at each stage of development
• Integrated improvement of performance

By knowing this you can start to think about where your skill sets will fit within these processes!  Then you can demonstrate how you will help them achieve their goals.

It’s also worth asking them about their values and beliefs.  I was very fortunate to part of the process that the Gosling coaches went through in 2008  coming up with their own Values & Beliefs:

Values:

• Courage
• Respect
• Excellence
• Fun
• Competitive spirit

Beliefs:

• Process focus = More wins
• Everything can improve
• Programmes are individualised
• Tennis is a team sport

Creating a Training Environment:

Assuming you’ve got this far, you’ve probably already visited the organisation you’re interested in getting a job with and spoken to them about their goals, processes, values and beliefs. Well if you’re lucky you might be asked to show them what you’ve got and do some coaching so they can see if you can actually coach!!  This is your job interview and you’ve probably heard that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression!

Creating a great training environment is not as easy as it might seem.  I really value having someone in my team who I can rely on time and time again to rally the troops.   In my sessions with the students at University of Hertfordshire I focused on a few key concepts to create a great training environment.

• Passion
• Challenge
• Competition
• Fun

You don’t have to be a ‘hoo-rah’ American style loud and animated personality to be passionate but you do need to engage your athletes some how.  But if you’re starting out then let the goal and the drill be the coach for you and make sure you stick to some simple rules guaranteed to get results!

> No finish line no race so set targets- make sure there is a clear objective that is challenging

>Keep score to switch them on and create a sense of urgency- make sure there is competition

>Make it fun by using games as well as drills to train the theme you are coaching

>Create an environment of choice and consequence.  This doesn’t necessarily link to the previous objectives of having fun, competition and challenge.  But in my experience it does create a sense of accountability if you expose them and do not afford them the opportunity of being able to hide and not take responsibility (you cannot take responsibility if it was not your choice in the first place). Choice and consequence leads to ownership, responsibility and accountability.

Encourage player ownership and control by offering options, making suggestions and providing choice e.g. Would you mind if..? How about we..? How many do you think it will take to do this? etc.

Within each drill/task there must be at least 1 ‘choice point’ for the player e.g. if you choose what is to be done, then the player can choose when. If the coach decides to feed tough balls from the basket, the player can choose from 3 options the number of balls he wants to receive.

The player can choose the level of challenge of the drill/task e.g. ‘Would you like national or international level feeds to be given to you? Would you like national or international standard targets to aim for?’ etc.

Trust me, if you do these things well you will make yourself stand out as a coach by creating a great training environment! Good luck!

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This week’s Blog post comes from APA coach Paddy James.  Paddy has been dropping into see us at APA for a few months now and formally joined the team in September having impressed at his interview.

As September draws to a close, I have been reflecting back over some key aspects of my coaching practice that have been tested during the past 30 days. Coaching is a very broad topic, with a number of key themes such as adaptability, decision making, being a leader and the ability to educate and influence your athletes being tested in every session. Each one of these topics has enough discussion points to write a book on, so I will be focusing this blog on the area of communication in sports coaching. Communication is essential for coaching success and therefore mastering this skill is hugely important. It is a large area to write about in a blog so to save you from reading War in Peace, I will start at the beginning and have a look at establishing aims and objectives for the session and communicating this to the athletes.

Setting aims and objectives for a session may sound like a basic principle, but ensuring that the athletes know and understand them can often be overlooked. Just spending a few minutes at the start of the session to outline what the theme is, and the key coaching points to be followed can have a positive effect on how smooth the session runs and also the engagement from the athlete. As well as identifying the aims, it is also important to relate the skill being coached to the game or performance. This will give the participants a clear understanding of not just what they are trying to achieve, but why!

Often in coaching, the skill is knowing what to say and what not to say. Allowing the athlete to discover the most efficient way to perform a skill can be far more powerful than the coach giving them all the answers. I have often heard that the best coaches say the least, but this is not to say they are not communicating with their athletes. Nonverbal communication includes observing how your message has been received. This again will link back to the athletes understanding of what they are doing and how it going to enhance their sporting performance. Usually if an athlete believes what they are doing is going to have a positive effect on their game, their effort and concentration will be greater. When coaching a group, this can encourage others to raise their game and, by creating some competition between them, can lead to the athletes striving to perform better.

Identifying the focus of the session, how it relates to the game, and making sure the athletes understand will help to create a positive motivational environment to train in. Creating this environment is an important part of coaching and getting the communication right from the start will make this possible. I will finish by recapping on the 4 points of communication posted a few weeks ago in another APA blog:

1. Give them the message
2. Check they heard it properly
3. Check they understand why they are doing what they are doing
4. Check they understand the consequences of doing it and not doing it

Paddy James, BSc (Hons), ASCC

 Paddy also has a successful Personal Traning business in London.  Contact Paddy here  for more details.

Here’s a little video I gave to some of the Tennis coaches at Gosling Tennis Academy.  This last week different coaches took it in turns to do a presentation to update the rest of the team on some of the key points in the area they are looking after.

In  my personal role as Head of S&C of the Tennis Academy, I spoke about the development system we are using to help aspiring professionals achieve their athletic potential.  We also looked at some of the key challenges in Tennis.

This blog has been on my ‘to do list’ for a long time but having just got back from the UKSCA Conference I have been inspired to finally write it!

So if you haven’t read up much on the APA training philosophy here’s a little background.  We are all about developing complete athleticism which includes Suppleness, Skill, Speed, Strength and Stamina.

Today I want to go into a bit more detail about the Strength and Speed side of things because together these qualities lead to Powerful athletes.  Powerful athletes are hot property in professional sport- these guys can make the difference between winning and losing.   I often read articles which refer to ‘Explosiveness’ (related to Rate of Force Development (RFD) and Power) as being a desirable quality to develop in the gym with athletes.  But at the same time I feel there is a lack of understanding as to what these qualities are and how to develop them. This blog will clear it up! But before we talk about Power we need to talk about Force because your vertical jump, sprint speed, agility and explosiveness are all directly related to your ability to produce force.

What is Force?

Force is a push or pull that can cause an object with mass to accelerate. We produce force from signals developed in the brain and delivered from nerves to control muscular contractions. These signals control the magnitude and the rate of muscular contraction to act on our skeleton to produce movement. To illustrate this point let’s use an example. We have a ping pong ball and a 200 lbs stone. To lift each will require a completely different strategy. Lifting the ping pong ball is easy and does not require much force. Our past experiences tell us the approximate weight of the ping pong ball and we send an appropriate signal to various muscles to pick-up the ping pong ball.  Lifting the stone will require the integration of more muscular force from the legs, arms, core and back. The key point to appreciate is our nervous system controls our muscles. In turn our muscles contract to produce a force that can cause an object with mass to accelerate. Note, even if there is no movement, muscular contractions are still producing forces.

Why is it important?

Newton’s second law F=ma

In order to accelerate an object (assuming its mass stays constant) then we need to apply force.

Now obviously we know that weight training in the gym is the best way for our body to develop a greater ability to produce force but there is a point of diminishing returns as otherwise if this weren’t true the strongest athletes would be always be the fastest athletes. We would simply have a group of athletes get under a squat bar, and whoever squatted the most, would also be able to jump the highest.  But there is more to jumping than just strength alone.

So this is where Power comes in.

What is Power?

In order to understand Power we need to understand Force-Time Curves.

Below we have a force and time curve. Memorize this graph, because it is one of the most important graphs for an athlete to understand. Notice force is plotted on the y axis and the time is plotted on the x axis. The Dashed Line  is the force required to move a given object. Forces below this amount will not cause the object to move.

Let’s say the object is a barbell weighing 100kg and we want to deadlift this weight. Note a deadlift is taking a stationary weight from the ground and lifting it to a standing position. When we examine the force time curve we can identify unique strength qualities.

I’ve already covered a full explanation of the curve in a previous Blog but it’s worth going over it again.

”Starting Strength”– refers to the ability to produce force rapidly at the beginning of a muscular contraction prior to external movement.  In our example, the weight will not move until sufficient force has been developed. This takes time and it reflects a very important quality.  It is always produced under conditions of isometric muscle action. This fact alone has important consequences for strength training, because it dispels the opinion that the once-popular method of isometric training should be completely abandoned in modern training.

Athletes with a quick first step from a stationary position possess this ability. People often describe this quality as an explosive start. To train this quality the weight must be stationary and the athlete develops force to overcome its resting position. This quality is very different than acceleration strength.  This quality is associated with getting yourself or an object moving which is at rest, so this is extremely important in sports like sprinting and American football/rugby who initiate the scrum from a stationary position.

It’s also extremely closely linked to deceleration strength, where you have to bring yourself to a complete stop and then immediately redirect the force for another sprint (often in a different direction).

For ease of discussion we can say there are two types of strength which are associated with high rates of force development during the actual movement of the bar:

”Acceleration Strength’‘- describes the ability to quickly achieve maximal external muscle force once dynamic movement has been initiated.  Some athletes have tremendous abilities to develop force once moving, but have trouble developing power at the start.

“Explosive Strength” characterizes the ability to produce maximal force in a minimal time and is associated with peak Rates of Force Development. These are the forces we are observing when the bar is in motion.  It is most commonly displayed in the fastest athletic movements when the contraction of the working muscles in the fundamental phases of the exercise is preceded by mechanical stretching (such as any plyometric, throwing, kicking, striking or rebounding action in many sports).

For me the exercises (such as Olympic weight lifting) that develop acceleration strength will also be the same ones we use to develop explosive strength, which we will describe shortly.

All of these qualities are associated with speed of movement and power but differ based on the load used.  We might refer to exercises which work on the acceleration part of the Force-Time curve as  strength-speed and exercises which work on the explosive part of the Force-Time curve as speed-strength- although I commonly see the strength speed exercises referred to as ‘explosive strength.‘ For speed-strength there is very little load applied to the body, 0 – 40% of an athletes’ maximal strength. In strength speed the load represents 40 – 60% of one’s maximal strength respectively. All of these qualities are important and elicit very different training effects. Current best practices emphasize a full spectrum approach, where an athlete is exposed to all ranges in a sequenced periodized approach. Research also reveals the method of loading to produce the best training effect and power output is exercises specific.

Olympic weightlifting is very popular as a tool to promote these qualities.  Why is this so? Because Elite level Olympic weightlifters are capable of snatching over 150kg and can clean and jerk over 200kg. It is impossible to perform Olympic weightlifting movements at a slow speed.  So you get a great combination of strength and speed.  You get the same amount of power generated as with a plyometric bodyweight jump, but you also get strong at the same time!

The most powerful of all movements is the Olympic weightlifting action of the second pull of a Clean, peaking at 55.8 Watts/kilogram (Garhammer, J. J. Strength and Cond.Res. 7(2): 76-89. 1993)- more on this later!!

In all these instances, the switch from stretching to active contraction uses the elastic energy of the stretch to increase the power of the subsequent contraction.

Rate of Force Development

As indicated above, all the most powerful movements in sport are associated with rapid production of force.

Rate of Force Development is the term which refers to how rapidly force is produced. It includes the period prior to external movement and throughout the movement. Mathematically, it is given by the maximum value of the slope of the force-time curve (where this slope is called the Rate of Force Development, RFD). It is very important to distinguish maximal strength from rate of force development. Maximum strength is force produced irrespective of time, whereas rate of force development is a quality that refers to how rapidly force is produced. In sport we are much more concerned with rate of force development.

What constitutes a high RFD?

Based on the physiological properties of our skeletal muscles it takes roughly 500msec to reach maximal voluntary contraction. This is very important because in an explosive sport movement we do not have this amount of time to produce force. We have approximately .08 to .2 second to produce force. We call this window of time the explosive response period.  

Simply described, explosiveness is the ability to create force quickly. This is the type of  “explosiveness” a powerlifter would need to do a squat, or a bench press or a Deadlift.  This type of explosiveness is associated more with starting strength and acceleration strength where the movement speed of the bar is low and muscle contractions are slow.

But in classical physics, power is defined as force times velocity, or rate of work performed.  To have true power we must create movement quickly.

Therefore, we are most concerned with activities where the peak force is achieved in the explosive response period in under 200 ms.  For me a simple description of Power might be:

A measure of the rate of doing work within the explosive response period associated with fast movement.

Examples of Power in Sport

Time is a key component.  That’s why Power level is greater when a relatively light shot is put then when a heavy barbell is lifted explosively

• Power output in 7.25kg shot: 5,075 W
• Power output in 150kg Snatch: 3,163 W (33 W/kg)
• Power output in CMJ 2,997 W and 3,109 W in SJ
• Power output Bench press 300 W (4 W/kg), Squat and Deadlift 1100W (12 W/kg)

• Peak force in 7.25kg shot: 513 N
• Peak force in Squat and Deadlift 1,400 N
• Peak force in 150kg Snatch: 2,000 N
• Peak force in CMJ: 2,000 N

Though the exerted force is less in shot put the power is greater because of much higher speed of movement. However, remember that the second pull of the snatch and clean (which is part of the full lift) produces power of up to 55.8 W/kg!!!!!

What’s the difference between Power and RFD?

Explosive movements are associated with high levels of ‘power’ and/or ‘RFD.’   It is possible for a movement to be explosive without being externally fast- as in the case of a slowly moving barbell in a maximum attempt, for example.

In its simplest form the way I look at it is, tasks where you generate maximum power always result in a movement happening very fast. So powerful movements have to be performed FAST

Activities requiring you to generate maximum rate of force development  may or may not result in a movement happening very fast.  It is task dependant.

Movements performed slow (but with high RFD) can still be considered ‘explosive.’  Usually, however those athletes who are capable of producing the highest RFD are the same ones who are most powerful.

Have you got some?

Have a look at these athletic feats and see how you compare!!!!

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Powerlifting: Deadlift

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Olympic Weight lifting- Clean & Jerk

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Plyometrics: Counter Movement Jump

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Summary:

Fast movements are always explosive, but explosive movements are not always fast.