Check out a training session my squad did in February in Mallorca by TriatlonChannel
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The presentations from the ITU Science and Triathlon Conference are now available free to view including my talk on Simon Whitfield's career:
"Canadian Simon Whitfield had an extra-ordinary career, spanning four Olympiads from Sydney 2000 where he was triathlon’s inaugural Gold Medalist, to 11th in Athens and then back to the podium with the Silver medal in Beijing 2008, and finally to London 2012. This presentation will examine the consistency of Whitfield’s career from his junior performances to his two Olympic Medals, spanning 8 years between them. With contributions from Whitfield himself, direct observation from Filliol as his personal coach from 2005-2008, and with contributions from coaches and training partners throughout Whitfield’s career, factors which contributed to these performances will be explored including training and preparation trends, health and injury patterns, environmental factors, lifestyle and supporting factors, as well as psychological factors."
Watch the other talks from the conference here on Daily Motion
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Triathlon Physiotherapist Paul Westwood shares his current thoughts are on the development of a model of best practice when it comes to Team & Athlete health:
- Don't pander to athletes pain/issues explain and reassure instead. Therefore possible mal adaptive behaviour is not rewarded and reinforced.
- Similarly limit the use of adjuncts / passive intervention (tape, ice, acupuncture, electro) anything that promotes the belief that 'this is something serious / more of a problem than it actually is'.
- Avoid the nocebo effect; athletes must believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with their bodies / ability.
- Therefore athletes become less sensitive / more resilient / more capable. This is spread throughout the team with athletes learning 'healthy pain behaviour' rather than mal adaptive behaviour.
- Once this culture is engendered an issue or expression of pain from an athlete can be taken more seriously as a sign of overloading / injury.
- By keeping the coaching / support staff to the limit of necessity and limiting the amount of 'shareholders' in the team allows this culture to be sustained.
- Progressive load management and therefore injury / over load prevention can be achieved from the coaching/support staff through consistent training and the layering effect of training over days, weeks, months, years. Athlete monitoring should be done on a daily basis regarding mood, behaviour, performance etc. "
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Check out this interview I did with Jason Bailey of Nature Gym:
Excerpt:
NG: With 2016 being an Olympic year, there is no doubt a lot of pressure on the athletes to perform or to simply qualify. How much pressure do the coaches feel, particularly private coaches such as yourself?
JF: I don’t look at the Olympic year differently than other years.
Every year is important to avoid making errors, every year is important for athletes to improve and make progress, every year we have big goals to work towards. It’s not productive to focus on the Olympic games as the only goal, or to judge your career by only these standards. Building to an Olympic Games is a nice goal to be motivated by, and there is a process to arrive at the start line ready to perform, but it’s not really different than other opportunities to perform despite the importance some people place on the event. For our athletes we have multiple performance objectives every year, and the World Series and Grand Final are always one for the top level, and developing athletes have many different outlets to prepare towards.
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Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) has written this timely article on bull shit in science. This has been a frequent topic in my work and was discussed on the Real Coaching Podcast
This is why the job of the coach to filter the BS is so important to be effective.
“It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before. You can both “love science,” he concludes, “and question it.
if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.”
“There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science.¹ When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks.”
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” This is the unbearable asymmetry of bullshit I mentioned in my title, and it poses a serious problem for research integrity. Developing a strategy for overcoming it, I suggest, should be a top priority for publication ethics.”
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Check out this video by triatlonchannel
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“Recently media has created a negative association between female athletes and the word “beautiful.” When news sources bring up the fact that a female athlete is beautiful it has the tendency to dumb down athletic accomplishments and shift focus to appearance rather than ability.”
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Simon Nainby's excellent monthly round up of articles and links related to coaching, a must read for coaches: subscribe to his newsletter to get these in your inbox each month:
Simon's Top 12 for January 2016:
Pacey Performance Podcast – John Kiely
New Zealand Connecting Coaches Resources
Gilbert Enoka rides rough journey to inspire New Zealand rugby revolution
Here’s the Strategy Elite Athletes Follow to Perform at the Highest Level
Ed Smith: The figure a shot makes
Ed Smith: Taxi for the coach? Team sports could do with more mentors and fewer touchline tyrants
philosophy bites – podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics…
Sports Coach UK Research Summaries
Have You Fallen Victim to the Guru Effect?
Dr Dick Bailey: The Philosophy of Science and Sport and Exercise Science
Plus an excellent take on "ABC" for coaches:
“Assume nothing
Believe no-one
Check everything”
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Jason Hettler of Hettler Performance has written a nice blog on the art and science of coaching, a topic that always creates debate and discussion on Art vs Science, when of course coaching is a continual process of testing and evaluating hypotheses, so it's not either or by any means.
The following quote nicely sums up my view on art and science in coaching:
“That being said, coaching is more than its individual parts – the sciences. It is the fluid, dynamic and ever-evolving interplay of these parts that create the whole. A whole which cannot be reduced to one element just as a cloud cannot be reduced to one particle. The art comes from blending these sciences into working with inherently individual athletes and maneuvering through any and all obstacles that will arise on a daily basis. The art comes from experience.”
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Simon Nainby's excellent monthly round up of articles and links related to coaching, a must read for coaches: subscribe to his newsletter to get these in your inbox each month:
Top 10
Here’s why academics should write for the public
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Jenny Williams: The Brave Traits
Stuart McMillan: Laconic Coaching
Sport is more about philosophy than we might think
Rethinking Games Teaching – Bunker, Thorpe & Almond
Swiss Sports Physio Association Return to Play Conference 2015 Video lectures
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Dr. Marco Cardinale has an interesting blog on the intersection of coaching and sport science, based on his experiences first as coach, then as a sports scientist. Here are some highlights:
“I still see enormous improvisation in the coaching community, with far too many people not having a programme and a structured approach to assessing what works and what does not work. There is still a lot of improvisation in too many places. Coaches turn up and do something, completely unstructured, with not much clarity and knowledge over the implications of their sessions and unclear ideas about progressions. In many cases, I see coaches picking “sessions” in random order and with limited control over loading. ”
“Coaches should be great at coaching and teaching as well as creating positive environments for athletes to improve.”
“My advice to you working as a coach, as a strength and conditioning specialist or as an “ologist” with athletes at any level is to avoid the “Nessie Phenomenon” and try to critically analyse any information coming your way. Do not accept what you hear or what others tell you. Go and find the information, try things yourself, try to assess what works and what not, document your experiences, reflect. Only in this way you will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Read the linked PDF paper: "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit"
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This is adapted from an analysis of British Swimming post 2012 from a senior US coach who compiled the following top ten recommendations from leading peers. It's not exhaustive but is applicable to all Olympic sports:
1. Abandon early selections for all but confirmed medal contenders.
2. Race in tough international competitions far more often. (French Grand Prix, German Bundesliga)
3. Hire a Head Coach from your country. Make your own people responsible for performance.
4. Feed an 'us against the world' culture.
5. Get the CEO and HPD out of the way, so the best coaches can be themselves and work in a way they have demonstrated gets results.
6. Facing the worlds best should be your only focus.
7. Hold fewer national team camps and make them more specific in a competitive environment.
8. Focus on the athletes who succeed.
9. Put your athletes in situations where they are not well paid, not well housed, not comfortable. Those will fire in their belly will rise. Same with coaches.
10. Reward top performance, not effort, at the end of the journey. Some will fail. Tough.
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James Vaughn has a blog on a research looking into characterises of the worlds best coaches.
In summary: Read a lot, know thyself, and know your athletes.
Some key highlights below:
“the study was commissioned to better understand “serial winners”. Fourteen coaches from multiple fields – team and individual sports based around the world – where chosen for their abilities to develop Olympians and title winning dynasties.”
“ This search – according to the data – is driven by a deep dark doubt, driving the obsession to ‘stay ahead’. These coaches are “always striving, driven by the fear of not being good enough””
“These elite high performance coaches are visionary leaders, described within the data as ‘benevolent dictators’ – they are future orientated with excellent communication up and down the line: they have the capacity to simplify complexity when they communicate to their athletes. This is not disregarding complexity; they embrace and understand it, but are able to communicate in simple terms.”
“Most have also undergone a shift in leadership styles, moving towards a leader-follower approach, in which care and empathy are critically important.”
“these coaches know themselves – they know their core values and what it means to embody them, or how to demonstrate those values to themselves and their athletes.”
“‘what would have improved their coaching the most’, a theme emerged from all the coaches interviewed: “they said they wished they knew the athletes better””
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Check out my interview with Ben Hobbs of TRS Triathlon and Real Coaching co-host Paulo Sousa
Some topics we covered : A podcast talking about a podcast, talking doping and the latest scandals, professional unions in triathlon, racing in the middle east why aren't more women entering Bahrain, and of course more coaching & high performance.
http://trstriathlon.com/trs-radio-joel-filliol-and-paulo-s…/
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"Olympic Coach is a publication of the United States Olympic Committee Sport Performance Division/Coaching Education Department."
If you've not seen USOC's free magazine for high performances coaches, check it out. Many good articles in the back issues on topics relevant to coaches.
2015 Fall Olympic Coach click here
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Chris Gallagher has a great article on FreelapUSA.com on what high performance is really about and what it's not. The article is filled with gems, here are a few that resonated with me:
“High performance is about much more than the name and facilities and equipment. It is not merely about capturing data”
“What, then, is a real high-performance environment? To me, it consists of three simple, yet major facets: people, philosophies, and culture.”
“People are, or should be, your greatest commodity, your greatest resource in a high-performance environment. Talented, driven, inquisitive and ambitious people are essential”
“Many coaches have a very large toolbox but cannot decide what to do because they don’t have a philosophy. – Dan Pfaff”
““Good coaches are better able to learn from history—because they have a philosophy,” he says, and adds that “a philosophy protects from the comings and goings of the various trends that permeate the profession. Good coaches maintain a core set of principles—and are far less influenced by the current trends of the day.””
“For a sports team littered with superstars, there is a humility, dedication to hard work and doing what needs to be done. “Ego has to be left at the door; there is a rigidly enforced ‘no d—head policy’ in the squad”
Read the full article here for a number of other good points.
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Check out this episode of the Pace Performance Podcast with sprint coach Jonas Dodoo. I had the pleasure of spending a few days with Jonas at a conference last year. He was very switched on, and coaches from any sport can learn from him.
“In this episode of the Pacey Performance Podcast I speak with world renowned sprint coach, Jonas Dodoo. Jonas is currently coaching one of the best young sprint groups in Europe, if not the world.”
The Pace Performance Podcast is a great resource for coaches with over 50 episodes now.
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An outstanding documentary video looking at Australian rules football (AFL) coaches. Sharing insight, wisdom and more:
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Check out Simon Nanny's excellent Underground Athletics coaching education link round up:
“Welcome to the September 2015 edition of Coaching Matters, a round up of the articles I have found interesting in the month relating to coaching, sport science, physical preparation and skill acquisition.”
Top 10
- Sports Coach UK: Self-determination Theory: A Guide for Coaches
- Science Isn’t Broken: It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for
- Perception & Action Science Podcast by Rob Gray – Also check the website PerceptionAction.com
- Joel Jamieson: 3 New Conditioning Rules
- Fergus Connolly presentations: Challenges for Team Sport Performance Analytics, Managing Information & Technology in Elite Sport & Applied Sports Performance
- Steve Magness: Science vs. Art of coaching- What actually is Science?
- Fergus Connolly: Good habits crucial when pressure is on
- Michael Carrick : Raising A Playmaker
- Edward R. Tufte – Envisioning Information
- An essential guide to learning about learning- a curated reading list for curious coaches
Check the full round up here with many great resources for coaching.
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An interesting video on training interventions, and periodisation models from the driver of the polarised training concept Dr Seiler:
"Dr Stephen Seiler from the University of Agdar talks about training methodology at the University of Kent Endurance Research Conference 2015."
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