Heilman's Performance's Partnership with MPS Athletic Department Coming to an End

 As some individuals in our local athletic community already knew (and some I’m sure did not), Heilman’s Performance was in a contracted partnership with Minot Public Schools’ Athletic Department since June 1st of 2019. Our contractual obligations were to provide strength and conditioning services to all athletes, grades 9-12 during the school year, and service the annual Summer Program, which was offered to grades 7-12 in the Magic City Campus weight room.

 

In our attempts to serve the contract over the past two years we struggled to convince everyone in the department that our methodology was the best fit for the athletic population frequenting that weight room. Our attempt to supplant the traditional, hyper-aggressive, strength and conditioning model that most high-school weight rooms abide by was met with consistent resistance.

 

Our training model at Heilman’s Performance is unique and we’re not ignorant to that. It’s a different way of looking at long-term development for youth athletes. It leans heavily on enjoyment, patience, and education to ensure that athletes access weight rooms early, often, and learn to conduct training sessions consistently and efficiently by their own volition. We don’t believe in hand holding and baby-sitting. We’ve coached long enough to know that this approach will ultimately allow some individuals to take advantage of us, but trust that the freedoms provided will allow the greater majority to become self-sufficient facilitators of their own athletic development. Those who are not privy to this school of thought can have a difficult time adhering to the level of patience required for the model to work. The model, like a good investment portfolio, takes time to grow into something robust and meaningful. It requires an almost blissful ignorance in the early going to keep from emotionally over-reacting, as progress can be slow moving, and faith that eventually compounded growth will occur.

 

It saddens me to announce that our partnership with Minot Public Schools’ Athletic Department will officially come to an end on June 1st of this year. We will not be designing programs for MCC’s athletes or coordinating their Summer Program in 2021. Personally, I am frustrated simply because the relationship was a unique opportunity to implement and adhere to a long-term athletic development (LTAD) model. It was our opportunity to deliver our program to a number of youth athletes in the community who don’t have access to the disposable income necessary to train with us privately.

 

Where the athletic department will go next to ensure their athletes have access to quality strength and conditioning services I cannot say, but we wish them the best of luck. I know our coaches enjoyed working in their weight room because the athletes were so overwhelmingly positive. Some athletes attended strength and conditioning sessions every single day we offered them and experienced a significant amount of progress. Not being able to see the smiles on their faces, experience the youthful energy these kids brought to the weight room every day, and watch them grow into competent lifters will be difficult for our coaches, but professionally it was time for us to move on. We thank Minot Public Schools’ Athletic Department for the opportunity to serve the youth athletes of our community in a unique capacity and offer a very special thank you to the athletes who worked so hard with us in that weight room. Please know that you are appreciated and good luck moving forward.

 

Respectfully and professionally,

Caleb Heilman

An Annual Periodization for Skill Acquisition?

Strength and conditioning professionals spend a lot of time designing programs. This requires putting a considerable amount of thought into annual periodization. Every year we take a look at the competitive calendars of the teams or individuals we work with, map out our macrocycle and mesocycles, and then sit down with the sport coach to determine what a typical microcycle might look like depending on the time of the year. This is common practice in strength and conditioning and something that we'd never get away with ignoring.

Personally I've committed a significant amount of time to making year plans for the teams I work with at the University my company is contracted, but I also spend a lot of time playing and thinking about team sports. These experiences have led me down the path of questioning why it's not common practice to have a periodization schedule for skill acquisition and if we did, what that might look like.

One evening while I was doing some of my own experimenting on the basketball court I tweeted this:

 

It was off the cuff, but the more I look at it, the more I like it as a starting point for an annual skill acquisition periodization model. 

If you aren't familiar with the research terminology of skill acquisition science I will try and better explain what I mean. I think mostly in terms of the game of basketball nowadays so I will use that as a reference, but I'm hoping you can easily extract the principles and apply them to any other sport you're interested in.

Blocked practice can be thought of as any skill acquisition prescription that is delivered without any variability. This, as it pertains to the game of basketball, would look a lot like stationary ball handling drills repeated in sequence, shooting on a shooting gun, or shooting free throws with the same routine. Variable practice, well... has variables to it. There are a lot of different ways to add variability to common drills in any sport, but the purest form of variable practice is free play. In the basketball community, pick up basketball is probably the purest form of variable practice we can engage in. The key to unlocking our potential as team sport athletes, I believe, lies in understanding how much of each practice style we should be engaging in at any given time of year.

Merbah and Meuelmans (2011) explain in a review published in The Journal of Belgian Psychological Science that "studies that have explored the contrast (between variable and blocked practice) generally show that, while the random practice condition leads to poorer performance during acquisition than the blocked practice condition, it yields superior performance on a retention or transfer test, a phenomenon that is commonly called the contextual interference effect." This conclusion is shown over and over in the literature and is an important phenomenon we must understand if we're to optimize our prescriptions in the skill acquisition arena. 

Variable practice, over and over again, has been shown to be considerably more effective at delivering transferable qualities to the competitive arena even though during the actual practice it elicits considerably lower success rates. Unfortunately, outside of organized pick up games, most training done in the off-season in basketball circles is delivered almost purely in the form of blocked practice. This isn't to suggest that blocked practice is a waste of time. It certainly has a time and a place. It's a coach's job, however, to prescribe it when it's most useful and prescribe variable amounts of information whenever possible.

My opinion is that blocked practice is incredibly useful in these scenarios:

1. When attempting to learn a novel skill. In team sports it's rare that brand new skills emerge during free play. Athletes in team sports typically compete to their strengths and utilize the skills they've already practiced in a controlled environment. If an athlete is trying to learn how to do a spin move or euro step it's probably best that their first attempts don't come during a pick up game.

2. When an athlete wants to work on something that didn't go well during free play. I've found this to be one of the most useful situations for blocked prescription. Highly skilled performers will ALWAYS remember how and when their fine motor skills failed them during the most recent competition. Coaches who are responsible for in-season individual skill sessions would benefit from understanding or even asking what those things are/were. Missed shots that athletes typically make, attempted hand exchanges that result in a turnover, or any other skill that an athlete relies on consistently during competition should be drilled through block practice as soon as the next practice in order to restore the athlete's confidence in said skill. If they are already relying on it during previous competitions you'd better bet that they'll be reliant on it again. You'll want to make sure they have confidence in it when they do.

3. When training a skill that requires coordinated execution of multiple moving parts. This scenario is similar to learning a novel skill, but would refer to something such as learning a new offensive play/set or defensive strategy as a team. These obviously require a lot of different moving parts, so implementing the details in a controlled environment is important before athletes are turned lose and forced to process the information that comes from an unpredictable environment like free play. It's worth noting, however, that eventually these things have to be drilled and allowed to become chaotic (variable practice) or the practice will never reach it's potential for transfer to the competitive landscape.

4. Pre-game There's a reason that, at the highest levels of competition, you see athletes working on very specific skills during pre-game preparation. This is probably the best time to get very specific with a blocked practice approach and work on things that the athlete will need in the hours that follow.

The above scenarios are just a few that I've found useful for the implementation of practice in a controlled environment. It's my opinion that the implementation of blocked practice should still be used sparingly, especially in the off-season. Now you're probably thinking that you can't JUST rely on free play and pick-up games for the development of your team sport athletes, so how do you use the tenets of variable practice to optimize learning? To fully deliver a method of practice in that regard would probably require a whole different blog post, but the simple answer is to use a constraint based approach that forces the athlete to process information while attempting to acquire a skill they'll need during competition. I commonly use the phrase, "No dead-brain activity." This type of prescription can be wildly misunderstood and has potential to get gimmicky. Coaches that understand how to do it well, however, get a considerable amount of transfer from their athletes. In the basketball world, I can't think of a group that has taken more flack for this style of training than I'm Possible Training (IPT). This group has taken a hard line of implementing almost NO blocked training with their athletes. Just about every drill they use seems to have a prop or some kind of constraint included in order to make the participant's environment more chaotic. Those who don't understand skill acquisition science see these things as gimmicky, but I personally believe that a lot of what they're doing aligns itself with the literature. It's important to remember that the goal is transfer of training, not perfect practice. If you have interest in learning more about how exactly to add more variability to your practice sessions, the books below are must reads. 

I'm hoping the tweet I made regarding the annual plan for skill acquisition in any sport will age well. An off-season should consist of high volumes of variable information. Concise and efficient prescriptions programmed with learning new skills and developing weaknesses in one's game are necessary, but athletes should eventually be cut loose to figure out how to implement them during free play. Coaches should lean less on blocked practice sessions during this time and work hard to find unique ways to implement more variable information in training sessions. These methods will frustrate your athletes and lead to much more failure during training, but will ultimately maximize the transfer of their training. 

Once athletes are in-season and have less time for free play because of the time allocated to learning new offensive sets, defensive strategies, special plays etc. coaches will have to work even harder schedule some chaos into the practice plan each week. This could include working through more in-game scenarios with specific constraints, making time for 1 on 1s or 3 on 3s in basketball, 1 on 1s or 7 on 7 in football, or simulated scrimmages in baseball. All have value while athletes are in-season. 

I'm hoping coaches don't read this and think that blocked practice is worthless. I still believe it has the most value immediately before or after a competition. Asking athletes, specifically, what they want to work on immediately before a competition can be valuable when trying to instill confidence in them. Likewise, working on something immediately after competition that didn't go well can help restore confidence in them before the next competitive event.

If you take anything from this writing I hope it's that you should be leaning less on repetitive, dead brain activities to develop the skills you want your athletes to acquire and trying to find unique ways to get them processing information during a session. I can assure you, the scientific community will back you up!

As always, thank you for reading!

Caleb Heilman, MS, CSCS, USA-W Owner, Heilman's Performance Director of Human Performance, Minot State University 701-340-3547 | calebjheilman02@gmail.com www.heilmansperformance.com 1928 2nd Avenue SW Minot, ND 58701

Why Every Coach Should Own a LLC

Much like everyone else during the COVID-19 stay at home orders, I attended way more Zoom meetings than I would have liked. One of the semi-monthly meetings I was a part of included all the strength and conditioning professionals from the NCAA DII Conference I work in (NSIC). During one of the calls, Mike Silbernagel (University of Mary, NSIC, NCAA-DII), had asked if we were doing anything to help ensure our graduate assistants were getting a fair shake at potential employment opportunities. Because I had just brought my graduate assistant coach (Brody Myers) on as a full-time employee at my private company, Heilman's Performance, to continue helping us manage our contracts at Minot State University and the local high-school. I felt inclined in this moment to share the unique opportunity that entrepreneurship had provided me, my staff, and more specifically, Brody.

I know it's difficult to tell for sure whether or not you've fostered an awkward moment on a Zoom call, but the depth of silence that followed my advice was too intense for anyone to ignore. It was like the first time someone had broke wind in the middle of an exam in elementary school. Minus the laughter. 

The advice that I gave to all of the recent graduates seeking employment was to go get organized with the secretary of state's office as a Limited Liability Company (LLC). My point was that nobody really knew at the time when the lockdown was going to be lifted and even more unknown was the timeline for the return of college athletics. What I was sure of at the time, however, was that there was a market for youth athletes who were looking to maintain the progress they had worked hard to obtain before weight rooms were closed by executive order. I couldn't think of a better time to be self-employed and independent of larger entities that would assuredly be spending time and effort cutting through red tape before they were able to pay assistant strength and conditioning professionals a living wage. 

Now that most of our stay at home orders have been lifted in the state I realize how lucky I was to be self-employed while in quarantine. This leads me to believe that every coach, young and old, should be organized with the state they reside in as an LLC. If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it should be that coaching is a volatile and unpredictable profession. If you're going to bet all of your earning potential on being employed by the University system you're not giving yourself much of a chance to provide financially for yourself and your family when that system isn't hiring. Much like the world of investing, entrepreneurship is akin to portfolio diversity and is a necessity if our goal is to limit risk.

If you believe in your ability to provide value in a market that is in desperate need of more value then I believe investing in articles of organization with your secretary of state's office and some basic strength training equipment to be a good move. I can't think of a single drawback from engaging in entrepreneurship. Working for yourself will provide you with an opportunity to:

• Keep your head above water if you ever end up in between jobs. 
• Create a supplemental revenue stream for you and your family. 
• Build real equity in something.
• Earn experience in a different training environment. 
• Build a reputation as an efficacious professional in your community. 
• Learn to critically think your way through problems and make decisions for yourself.
• Stay patient while searching for your next full-time position instead of jumping on the first opportunity available because of financial constraints.

The fact is that if you've just finished your graduate assistantship, you have a master's degree, at least 2 years of experience programming and coaching athletes at the collegiate level, and more than likely have earned an entry level certification. You are more than qualified to start helping youth athletes in your community learn how to properly prepare for their sport of choice. I understand why young people want to be in college and professional athletics, but the hard truth is that these jobs don't always pay well and are incredibly volatile. The beauty of entrepreneurship is that it costs you nothing after the initial registration fees. If you get organized with the state as a LLC and decide not to operate because you're holding down a stable position at University there's no harm done. In that scenario, entrepreneurship is simply a safety net. It saddens me to see good coaches leave the field because they can't find full-time employment or can't get an interview for the positions they think they need. If you're qualified and you believe in your ability to provide a service to those willing to compensate you for it, then you should get started. If the alternative is working at Wendy's until your dream college coaching job opens up I'm really not sure what you're waiting for. 

Old School vs. New School

The "stay in your lane" calling from older, more experienced professionals in the strength and conditioning world is growing pretty old and tired. I can't think of any better way to expose your professional insecurities than telling younger professionals in your field to slow their role.

Anyone paying attention can recognize this trend in just about every field. I've seen it play out in my dad's carpentry business, family run farming operations, and with my wife while she was in public education. The strength and conditioning industry feels as if it's entering a new era. The coaches who adopted the profession early and blazed trails for us younger coaches are finally starting to earn some recognition and a profession that was once notorious for being overworked and underpaid, now has six-figure earners. More strength and conditioning professionals are segueing into administrative roles at state universities and a profession that was once seen as a trade, is developing more established curriculums and certification processes that are being recognized as barriers for entry to the field.

This, of course, comes with the subsequent trend I previously mentioned: young people becoming interested in the field and a difference in education and practice between older and younger professionals. This gap in education inevitably leads to young and old professionals practicing different methods and many disagreements about how to best prepare the athletes we work with.

I feel a sense of responsibility to the up and coming generation of coaches who are consistently being told to "slow you role," or "stay in your lane" because I've been there more than once. I was fortunate enough to start earning experience in the field before I ever graduated college at a local private performance center during my summer break from school. This was my first experience working for older, more experienced professionals, and I quickly became frustrated with the lack of consistency or structure to our methods. After college I was hired on as a full-time employee and I wanted to do and be better so I started asking questions, trying to change some things, implement operational systems, develop updated training protocols, and adopt better recording and publishing systems for the interventions we were prescribing. All of these things probably seem like reasonable requests, but I was met with a considerable amount of opposition. I quickly became the young, over-ambitious employee at the company who was trying to change the way we did everything. It became so difficult to get anything accomplished at a reasonable rate that I eventually decided to move on from the company and open my own, which ended up being the best decision of my life.

The most common way to discredit a young person who is trying to think outside the box is to tell them that they're trying to "re-invent the wheel." I think elder tradesmen could benefit from asking more questions that will help them determine whether or not a coach is trying to re-invent the wheel or simply trying to improve the wheel. As you can see, the wheel hasn't been re-invented, but it as been improved a lot over the years. I often wonder if anyone worked as hard to stymie those improvements as experienced S&C Coaches do to avoid having to accept change. Thank goodness wheel innovators persevered so now we can all get to work on time.

I don't believe that young coaches coming up in the S&C industry are ignoring the importance of fundamentals I just think a number of us are questioning what we believe fundamentals should be. Strength and conditioning for field sports has been so heavily influenced by powerlifting and olympic lifting circles that if you dare start training a youth athlete with anything but a barbell in a bilateral stance you'll be called a snake oil salesman. Personally I think all youth athletes should learn the fundamentals of great kettlebell training before they ever start loading up a barbell. Squatting, hinging, swinging, overhead pressing, carrying, can all be performed with kettlebells to help a young athlete learn proper bracing strategies and movement patterns before ever laying hands on a barbell. 

How many of the movements in the video below would you utilize with a developing athlete? How many would have an incoming freshman prepared to train on your program? If your answer to both of those questions is "zero", do you think it's fair for me to call you incompetent? Coaches need to get past the idea that it's the job of high school and private strength and conditioning professionals to prepare athletes for college strength and conditioning programs. It's not, it's our job to prepare athletes for their sport. If there's some crossover in program design, great, but 99% of the people I work with at my private facility and in our local high school weight room aren't going to a Division 1 University so I apologize if you have to spend more time teaching than you'd like. Just because my program doesn't prepare young people to take on yours doesn't make me bad at my job. It just means that you have to do yours.

https://youtu.be/Vqx87pr7Vg8

The fact of the matter is that the loads prescribed via kettlebell training would be more than sufficient to facilitate a beneficial adaptation in a novice lifter, are much safer, can be easily scaled to facilitate further adaptation, and are much less awkward to work with.

Below is a video that I think demonstrates what good youth training looks like. We sprint and load movements with implements that allow the athlete to be successful early and still learn to produce force and brace properly while preparing them for other implements. When they're ready for a barbell, a coach will know, but this shouldn't be rushed for the sake of tradition.

https://youtu.be/5C0VXCvv9Qk

Whether you agree or disagree with the methods a young coach is utilizing to prepare athletes for field sports, simply telling them they're in the wrong because they aren't copying and pasting your programs is doing absolutely nothing to push the profession forward. It's getting old, tired, and detracts from the efforts young people in this industry put forth to earn entry level positions. Most young coaches who have been hired in these positions have multiple years of experience in the field and have obtained Master's level degrees. Should we really be telling these people that they're incapable of developing their own methodologies? Do we really think that's good for the field? What kind of education and experience does someone need in order to to earn the right to start applying, testing, re-testing, adjusting, and re-applying? Is a decade of experience necessary before I take on that $35K per year position? Do I need a PhD?

For anyone who needs to hear it: Most young coaches are doing nothing different than you did when you were their age. They're trying to be better, that's it. Because of the information age, we just have access to more. We apologize for our privilege and if we misconstrue some things. We all know that nobody has ever earned long lasting recognition in the field without achieving great results so why get so hot and bothered when somebody tries to circumvent the process? We all know it won't last, so unless you're going to educate and assist, leave them be. Their success or failures have literally nothing to do with you. Your criticisms do nothing but showcase your own insecurities about people who think or feel differently than you. I like to live by Jay-Z's quote "Oh, you're not feeling me? Fine. It costs you nothing to pay me no mind."

Different doesn't equal wrong and when someone finds a method that works for them it doesn't disparage yours and suggesting so does little to help move the industry forward. Asking questions and listening rather than discrediting anyone who attempts to improve the standard operating procedures that have been passed down to them may actually serve you well. Who knows, you may even find yourself getting more comfortable with change.

Caleb Heilman, MS, CSCS, USA-W Owner, Heilman's Performance Director of Human Performance, Minot State University 701-340-3547 | calebjheilman02@gmail.com www.heilmansperformance.com 1928 2nd Avenue SW Minot, ND 58701

The Accountability Spectrum: The One Constant in all Successful Cultures

Accountability is a buzz word that gets used in leadership circles all around the world and I'm convinced that if you can conduct a litmus test on the level of accountability for any particular group you can get a pretty good feel for how successful that group may be in the long term.

I think of accountability as a subconscious condition that is exists in all cultures and is forever evolving along a spectrum, either for better or worse, depending on the daily decision making process of the culture's leadership. Pushing your team further along the accountability spectrum takes consistent effort. It requires that leaders are capable of having open, honest, and often times difficult conversations while unwaveringly adhering to highest level of accountability themselves. It's positively and negatively affected by the actions we do and don't take, the decisions we make, and the language we use.

I've experienced individuals, teams, and cultures that could be plotted all over the accountability spectrum and I'm convinced that if a group is plotted on the left end of the spectrum then it should be the number one focus of the group's leadership moving forward. In positions of leadership, our ability to manage different personalities, establish Leadership Led accountability, and foster a culture that pushes people to be more Self-accountable will ultimately determine the success we'll have leading the group.

Here's how I think of the accountability spectrum. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider where you, the individuals you work with, and and the groups you lead might be plotted.

Leadership Protectionism - Group Protectionism - Leadership Led - Group Led - Self Led

Leadership Protectionism

This is where the most unsuccessful groups/teams will find themselves plotted on the spectrum. On this end of the spectrum the leaders of the group protects his/her constituents when they break team rules or norms and makes excuses for them when they underperform. This is akin to the over-protective mother storming into the principle's office to get her son/daughter out of detention that was clearly earned or a coach blaming the officiating crew for a loss when they made one bad call throughout a 60 minute competition. Another common form of protectionism presents itself in the form of favoritism. Leaders who give individuals preferential treatment simply because of their talent level, give an inch and get a mile taken from them. These individuals will damage your culture from the inside out, whether they intend to or not. These individuals will never reach their potential because there's no consequences for not putting forth the effort to do so. These individuals will disregard the attempted interventions from your junior staff members, marginalizing their roles, because they know any attempt at law enforcement will fall apart at the top of the chain. I believe this type of culture matures out of a leader's inherent need to be liked by his/her constituents. I think we all want to be liked. Our jobs are easier if the people we work with like us, and this certainly doesn't suggest that our goal should be disliked, but we have to be realistic about what our culture's goals are and the role we play as leaders in keeping our people on track toward those goals. This requires leaders to be disliked from time to time. As long as you don't conduct yourself in a manner that loses your people's respect, you and your team will be better for it over the aggregate.

Group Protectionism

The second level of the spectrum involves a majority or highly influential minority of the group engaging in protectionism. In these types of cultures the members of the team are always covering for each other and looking for ways to keep one of their own from being held accountable for their actions. This is a very real problem in some cultures, and it makes it really difficult for leadership, especially new leadership, to do their jobs well. It needs to be understood by group members that covering the ass of your team member isn't the same as providing them with support. These groups are basically made up of enablers, and non-contributors (that's a bad mix) that feed off of each other. Both allow each other to continue contributing nothing to the greater good and cover for each other every time they violate rules/norms, make a mistake, or underperform. I've learned that I can get a pretty good feel for what kind of lengths a group will go to protect one of their own by investigating situations I already have information for. Some probably think I'm crazy for these mini-sting operations, but they can prove incredibly useful when trying to determine who you can trust in troubled times.

Leadership Led

This is probably the most common form of accountability that exists in teams and groups. The boss or coach carries the majority of load when it comes to holding individuals accountable to group norms and expectations. This is why choosing the right leaders and managers is of utmost importance and why we can witness an almost instantaneous change to a culture after a new leader steps into a role. In order to keep moving cultures further to the right of the accountability spectrum, we have to establish leadership led accountability. No constituents of a group will begin holding each other accountable or themselves accountable unless the group managers are willing to do so first.

Group Led

"That's not how we do things here," can be one of the most powerful phrases muttered in a team or group. I've watched groups grow along this spectrum and when you finally get to a point that the majority of the individuals who inhabit the group are so bought-in and so passionate about the culture being established that they hold each other accountable to rules, norms, and expectations there is a huge load lifted off of leadership's shoulders. This requires that leaders foster a level of emotional maturity in their groups that allows constituents to understand that being held accountable by your peers is something to be grateful for and not something to get emotional about. In a college athletics setting it's difficult to get normally non-confrontational, 19-20 somethings, comfortable holding each other accountable to a higher standard, but once you get a couple on board, an epidemic is inevitable. These trail blazers will give other people permission to do the same and before you know it, you'll have a group bonded by respectful communication that makes up the majority of the people you lead. According to Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, fostering this kind of culture requires that you make use of three kinds of people: connectors, salesmen, and mavens. These three archetypes are highly influential to groups of all sizes and can help you establish norms, rules, and expectations quickly and effectively. This, again, speaks volumes to the ability of manager's to properly hire/recruit managers of their sub-groups.

Self-Led

Growing up, my dad would always say, "If you want something done right, sometimes you've gotta do it yourself." This always stuck with me. I didn't know at the time that he was instilling in me a sense of self-accountability. Working with a group of individuals who are self-accountable is the gold standard for groups and teams. Holding oneself accountable takes a lot of practice, but once it's established as a habit, it can be incredibly liberating. I believe there are the two primary reasons young people resist achieving high levels of self-accountability.

1. The first is that no mentor has ever instilled it in them. A lot of young people have been told their entire life how wholesome and perfect they are. When these people become a part of large, productive groups, with high expectations for every individual, they're expected to identify, come to grips with, and get to work on all of their limitations. If they've never been told those things could potentially exist, or worse, always had them covered up by someone else, they may be crippled before ever getting started.
2. The second reason young people resist being unwaveringly self-accountable is that they don't yet realize that it can set them free. Once you open your mind to the idea that everything that goes right is a result of treating people with respect, making good decisions, and using proper language and everything that goes wrong is the product of treating people poorly, poor decision making processes, and using detrimental language you can literally TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE. As a self-admitted control freak, once I realized that taking responsibility for my own flaws and limitations was the first step to being in control of whatever life could throw at me, I was free. It's difficult to develop the habit of introspection, but as soon as you lay blame on someone else, you relinquish control. Blaming yourself allows you do to do something about it. If it's not your problem, you can't be the solution. Taking Extreme Ownership and developing high levels of self-accountability keeps you in the driver's seat. Your problem? Your fix. I believe that if we can get the majority of our group members thinking along these lines, our group will be unstoppable.

Closing

I use the analogy of a jar full of marbles to help explain the way I see groups moving along the accountability spectrum. I can't say for sure who taught me this, but it's proven useful for me when considering how our character and leadership is perceived by those we lead. When it comes to accountability and character, for every one thing you do well (actions, decisions, language) you get to add one marble to the jar. Treat someone well? One marble. Make a decision that fosters trust from the majority of the group? One marble. Use language that changes the perspective of the group for the better? ONE marble. 

Engaging in behaviors that are detrimental to moving your group or team further along the accountability spectrum, however, costs you a handful of marbles. We know this, intuitively. One poor action or decision can undo a decade's worth of work in establishing a culture of high integrity and character. Make a bad decision? Take a handful of marbles out. Break rules and don't take responsibility? Handful. Waver (even just a little bit) from your group's expectations of accountability to avoid a short term setback? HANDFUL. 

I learned from reading Ray Dalio's book 12 Principles for Life that the word integrity, in Latin, is integritas, meaning one, or undivided. We should all strive to determine who we are and simply be that. If we stray from integritas we confuse those we lead or share space with and it can happen in a hurry. Treat people well, but be genuinely yourself and people will adjust. Hold everyone accountable to the same standard and people will follow. Keeping adding marbles to the jar, one at a time, without ever taking out a handful, and before you know it people will be putting marbles in the jar for you. 

Good luck. And as always, thank you for reading!

Caleb Heilman, MS, CSCS, USA-W Owner, Heilman's Performance Director of Human Performance, Minot State University 701-340-3547 | calebjheilman02@gmail.com www.heilmansperformance.com 1928 2nd Avenue SW Minot, ND 58701

Strength Coaches are Supplements, not Saviors: Why I think our inflated self-importance sets us up for blame.

Watching The Last Dance in my free time, the documentary covering the story of the historic 1990s Chicago Bulls, has provided me with a unique perspective on a number of things. I was pretty young when the Bulls first started having success so I only have vague memories of their playoff runs in '96, '97, and '98. My family was always at our lake cabin on the weekends during the Eastern Conference Finals and NBA Finals. and I distinctly remember our neighbors crowding into our living room, fiddling with the antenna on our TV to get the game to show clearly, and salivating over the greatness of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and company.

The story line for Episode three of The Last Dance highlights the struggle that the Bulls had overcoming the more physical play of the "Bad Boy" Detroit Pistons. The Pistons were big, strong, physical and they played the game a lot like that guy at your local YMCA noon ball who form tackles and karate chops everyone that tries to attack the basket on them. It drives me bonkers that this style of play, for some reason, earns the "toughness" label, but that's another post for another time. Regardless of whether or not you think the way these guys played the game has a place in a professional league, this style of play motivated MJ and his teammates to hit the weight room during the following off-season.

For a brief time, Tim Grover, author of Relentless, enters the film to discuss his work with MJ and his teammates in the weight room.  This segment and the subsequent social media reaction made me realize that strength and conditioning coaches are victims of confirmation bias as much as anyone else and I think it has the potential to hurt us in the long run. After episode 3 aired, strength and conditioning circles on social media platforms blew up. S&C coaches around the world hopped on Twitter like they finally had the ammunition they needed to convince people their work was the holy grail of team sports development. Judging by some tweets, you would have guessed that the six Larry O'Brien trophies may actually be housed safely in a glass case in Al Vermeil's living room. The message from these circles was, "MJ would have never realized greatness had he not found the weight room!" 

I would never want to intentionally minimize the important role strength and conditioning plays in the athletic development of team sport athletes, but I felt different than most of the coaches I was reading tweets from. My train of thought was more along the lines of: "It's great to see that the 90s Bulls realized the importance of engaging in consistent resistance training, but how crazy is it that MJ and Scottie were two of the most dynamic team sport athletes on the planet without ever laying hands on a free weight?"

It's nice to be recognized for our efforts, but I believe our rush to take credit in scenarios like this can create problems for us down the road if the teams and individuals we work with aren't realizing results that are expected. When we paint ourselves as the deliverer of all physical qualities we put ourselves in a position to take responsibility when "all those physical qualities" aren't developing in the manner or as rapidly as a sport coach may think they should. The fact of the matter is this: During high volume training phases (off-seasons) the most time we ever spend with a team is roughly 4-6 hours per week. That leaves 162-164 hours per week out of our control where our work can be sabotaged by poor dietary strategies, excessive alcohol intake, irresponsible sleep habits, and other ineffective training stimuli. As much as it is our responsibility to develop physical qualities in the athletes we work with, it's just as much the responsibility of the individual and the sport coach not to sabotage them.

Can our work positively affect injury rates? Yes, but if an athlete refuses to adhere to quality sleep patterns or their sport coach prescribes stimuli that promotes overtraining syndrome our efforts will be largely diminished. Can we help an athlete add fat free mass (FFM)? Of course, but if the athletes aren't taking in enough calories or their sport coach is prescribing stimuli that promotes a caloric deficit rather than a caloric surplus, they'll never gain a pound. Lose unwanted mass? Sure, but again, if their diet sucks we haven't got a chance. Improve their speed and force development? We sure can, but if you read my most recent post, you know now that in order to do so optimally, we need our athletes in a non-fatigued state. If we're in the off-season and our focus is strength and speed, but a sport coach or athlete wants to improve their "conditioning" we're chasing two rabbits and we're going to catch neither of them.

I think we've all experienced having the finger pointed at us when a scenario with a team or individual doesn't play out the way all parties involved would have liked. Whether we like it or not, highly touted Division 1 schools and professional athletes will always be what the results of our programs get compared to and the default setting of the human condition will always be to find someone else to blame when results aren't in parallel with expectations. Most of us do the best we can, but we're human, so we miss some things, and often due to circumstance, intentionally sacrifice others in an effort to "fry the big fish." A performance professional who is truly attempting to optimize their performance culture knows, intuitively, that they'll never actually achieve it. We are merely a small part of a high performance program. We are not THE high performance program. We are not solely responsible for all the aforementioned variables and the reality is that in some settings, we have almost zero control over them. 

My final point is this: if we want coaches, athletes, and parents to take extreme ownership and be more introspective about how they can better manage the 164 hours they're responsible for, it starts with us. We can't continue to paint ourselves as Superheroes when the opportunity presents itself. We are not the captain, we are merely a vessel in a large fleet. I'm as guilty of it as anybody, but the sooner we come to grips with our own inflated sense of self-importance, the sooner we will be able to get the holistic adherence we need to build a high-performance culture. I don't know Al Vermeil, but I'd love to meet him. The second hand information I do have about the professional he is, leads me to believe that even he would admit his program may have given the Bulls of the 90s the extra 5-10% they needed to overcome the Pistons in the finals, but none of it would have mattered if the other 90-95% wasn't already there. 

As always, thank you for reading!

Caleb Heilman, MS, CSCS, USA-W Owner, Heilman's Performance Director of Human Performance, Minot State University 701-340-3547 | calebjheilman02@gmail.com www.heilmansperformance.com 1928 2nd Avenue SW Minot, ND 58701

Fatigue is the Enemy

The list of things that central nervous system (CNS) fatigue keeps us from performing optimally is long and something every coach should understand in order to give athletes a fair shot at realizing their potential.

There's something about the experience of being extremely fatigued that makes some coaches, athletes, and parents assume that it should be priority #1 of any quality training regimen or practice. I've had athletes tell me and my employees after sessions "That workout was really hard!" as if to suggest it's the only thing that matters. I was recently included in a social media thread in which one individual boasted their program as being "Probably the hardest!"

The first thing we need to understand about doing "really hard workouts" is that fatigue is a limiting factor in the development of almost every conceivable performance trait we wish to develop in our athletes. This means that unless the goal of the session is fatigue, you are creating a sub-optimal training session by allowing fatigue to set in. Most "experts" that put athletes through these "really hard workouts" and then slap them with a badge of honor for surviving it are usually just compensating for their inability to develop the other cognitive and physical qualities necessary for sport performance improvement.

I theorize that our obsession with providing extreme fatigue in our training exists for a number of reasons. The first is that it's really easy to do. It takes an expert to deliver desirable adaptations that actually improve an individual's performance, but just about anybody can guide a session that will make that same individual feel like vomiting and defecating at the same time. The second reason we have a love affair with fatigue is likely due to the hormonal response associated with it. Rigorous exercise signals a cascade of hormonal responses that can make us feel good. These hormones are highly reliant on the intensity and duration of the exercise regimen and longer, more intense sessions typically yield a more robust hormonal response. It's important that we don't let our emotions misguide us in this scenario. If the goal is to achieve a hormonal response to improve mental health, a hormonal response that will leave the trainee with a better chemical balance is win, but if we're in pursuit of more efficient neuromuscular coordination and fine motor skill acquisition or improvements in force output, doing a really challenging conditioning session won't deliver optimal results.

As coaches we have to be able to ask, "What does this individual need from me and what is the primary goal of this session?" If the answer to those questions are either of the aforementioned traits (more efficient neuromuscular coordination and fine motor skill acquisition or improvements in force output), then avoiding high levels of fatigue while trying to deliver them is in our best interest.

We are all human so we are inherently at the mercy of our own emotional states. When a session gets rolling and blood gets flowing it's really difficult not to cut the leash and let our athletes push themselves into a state of oblivion. It's important we don't allow ourselves to fall victim to these emotions and there are ways to do it, but we must remain highly disciplined and trust what the science tells us is true. I've conducted basketball skills sessions for players for roughly 5 years now and worked consistently in a weight room for almost a decade. I've worked really hard to understand what is and isn't best practice (according to scientific literature) in the development of the fine motor skills necessary to excel in basketball and force output for team sport athletes. Because of my experimentation and experiences in these realms, I'll share with you some of the things that have helped me keep my exercise prescriptions aligned with what the sports performance literature suggests is optimal.

1. Identify the goal of the session or drill and KEEP THE GOAL THE GOAL.

I learned this from Dan John. If you're a young coach I would highly recommend reading all of his books. Often times, in our S&C and skill sessions we get so wrapped up in delivering multiple qualities with one stimulus that we diminish our ability to deliver the quality we originally set out to deliver. In a basketball session, for example, it's not uncommon for ball handling drills to be performed so dynamically, for such a long duration that we allow extreme fatigue to set in and compromise our athletes' ability to improve the skill we're really trying to improve: ball-handling. This happens all too often in shooting drills too. We say things like "game-speed" and fail to realize that athletes can go "game-speed" during the repetition and then we can allow for proper rest in between reps to insure fatigue isn't compromising our ability to acquire the fine motor skill. As a coach, it's our job to challenge our athletes, but it's also our job to be the experts and identify when practice is becoming sub-optimal. Learn to identify when fatigue is limiting your athlete's ability to develop the skills you want to develop and stop the drill to take a break, coach them up, or move onto something else. If the goal is metabolic conditioning, great, keep them moving. But if you're trying to develop a fine motor skill, keep them fresh and fast.

2. Organize sessions optimally

Hopefully by now you understand that fatigue compromises our athlete's ability to achieve high levels of cognition, produce high levels of force, and acquire fine motor skills. To give ourselves the best possible chance of not allowing fatigue to interfere with our ability to deliver these things we can organize our sessions in a systematic manner. Stimuli that require these qualities should be delivered at the beginning of the sessions, in micro-doses, and managed properly to keep fatigue from negatively affecting them. In S&C sessions if we want to develop speed, which requires high levels of force development, we run our sprints before we do anything else and we NEVER allow our athletes to get tired while performing them. In a skill development session, the tasks that demand the highest levels of fine motor skill should be performed first, while the CNS is fresh. This strategy should apply to team practices as well. Drills and teachings that require high levels of cognitive demand such as learning a new play or defensive scheme should be taught early in practice before fatigue limits an athlete's ability to learn.

3. Practice prescribing the minimum effective dose (MED)

The MED is a term that we use to describe an exercise or performance training prescription that achieves the goal we set out to achieve while subjecting the biological organism to the least amount of stress possible. This is where holding ourselves accountable to the concept of micro-dosing can be incredibly effective. I'd rather see an athlete run sprints 5 days per week at 3-5 repetitions per day than 2 days per week at 10-12 repetitions per day. In the former example we get 15-25 reps in a week, never in a fatigued state, and the skill of applying high levels of force are reinforced on a daily basis. Comparatively, the latter example has an athlete engaged in roughly the same amount of volume, but they don't get daily reinforcement, and a number of reps will likely be ineffective because of the ill-effects of CNS fatigue. Emotionally, this may be difficult for some coaches to lead because the athletes will never put their hands on their knees and gasp for air, but scientifically, it works.

Closing

As coaches it is our job to facilitate adaptations in those we work with. In order to facilitate an adaptation we must apply stress. No stress? No adaptation. What we have to learn to grasp, however, is that stress doesn't always have to equal exhaustion. I understand the fear that coaches have of their athletes not being well conditioned enough to compete, but allowing fatigue to creep into sessions where fatigue is not the goal is not only limiting your ability to deliver desirable adaptations in the current session, it's likely creating some kind of "hangover" so your ability to optimize the next session is also compromised. Being under conditioned really only comes back to bite us during a specific time of year so it's important that we're patient with the stimulus. I've always said, it doesn't matter if you're in great shape if the other team is so much bigger, faster, stronger, and more skilled that we're down by 20 at halftime.

I'm hoping this writing can help you identify when fatigue is affecting your training sessions in a negative way and provided you with solutions to make your training sessions/practices more optimal.

As always, thank you for reading!

Caleb Heilman, MS, CSCS, USA-W Owner, Heilman's Performance Director of Human Performance, Minot State University 701-340-3547 | calebjheilman02@gmail.com www.heilmansperformance.com 1928 2nd Avenue SW Minot, ND 58701