Developing a Philosophy

I had a great talk with a former intern.  He came in and informed me that he was working as the athletic trainer and strength coach of a team where he was now working.  This is a great kid.  While he was an intern he was constantly asking questions – good solid observations.

My first question to him was right out of Coach Carroll’s “Win Forever” book; “What’s your philosophy?”  He looked at me with a blank look and said, I don’t really have a philosophy.  I said, “How will you know where you’re going and if you’re ever going to get there if you have no destination or a map?”  It was more rhetorical than an actual question in its nature. 

So I started into my foundation of discovering my philosophy.  Go ahead follow along and see where this takes you.  I asked him to shut his eyes and run a video clip of the sport (rugby) he was working with, and run it through his head.  I asked him to describe what each athlete was doing during the match.  After listening to him talk about what he was seeing for a couple of minutes I stopped him and asked; “What do all of these athletes have in common?”  He paused and looked at me with a questioning look on his face … he didn’t see the answer though he had described it so vividly to me.  I think he was looking for a bigger answer, maybe something deeper than the simple answer that was at hand.  I said, “They are all moving.”  He broke into a smile and said, “You’re right, they all are moving – but how is that the answer?”  Simple - the game he was preparing athletes for was based in movement – so his training philosophy must follow the needs of his sport.

This “de-construction” of his game is a simple way to find what you need to do to best approach your training.  Remember as a strength coach or a performance coach you do not make baseball players better baseball players or football players better football players that is their sport coach responsibility.  Our job is to increase the athleticism of the player’s; it is the sports coaches’ job to improve their playing ability.  I know some of you are going to bristle at that last comment but there is truth to it.  Unless you are teaching the athlete how to run their routes or what play to convert your route to when you have man-to-man coverage then you are not making them better football players directly.  Indirectly, a better athlete has the potential ability to take these movement skills to the field so that they can play better.  Conversely, in 30 years of coaching I have seen some great athletes who couldn’t play dead in a John Wayne cowboy movie.

My philosophy is simple: The game of football is based in movement.  In order to be more successful one must move faster, more powerfully and more efficiently than your opponent.  This philosophy came through breaking down the basic elements of the game.  After doing that I rebuilt my program around this philosophy by looking at how each part of my program could mimic the needs of the player on the field.

In order to understand what I needed to train I took a look at the trainable attributes that are needed to be a better athlete in football.  We need SPEED / AGILITY / POWER / ENDURANCE and STRENGTH.  The elements that hold all of this together are FLEXIBILITY – MOBILITY and STABILITY. 

If you look at the trainable attributes you will find that four of the five, or eighty percent are based in movement (Speed / Agility / Power (plyos-med ball throws-Olympic lifts) / Endurance) and only 20% of your needs are focused on pure strength movements (Pressing / Squatting / Auxiliary Lifts). 

With this philosophy, strength becomes a facilitator of movement.  The athlete needs only to be strong enough to play at the highest level, not lifting all the weight in the gym.  Too much strength training will turn the athlete into a refrigerator (you know the big thing that sits in the corner and doesn’t move).  This doesn’t mean that you don’t lift need to lift heavy with your big athletes you just don’t need to spend your valuable time trying to get your athletes to bench press 500 lbs and squat 700. 

But you must lift with the intent of being as strong as possible … as strong as needed.   When you look at the amount of time spent recovering between sets to accomplish these goals you will see where you can now use this time improving your player’s athleticism. 

With the limited time that we have for training it is essential that we do not waste time doing gimmick movements that are not going to allow our athletes to move as powerfully, as fast and as efficiently as possible.