Letter to Athletes and Parents

It’s recently been brought to my attention that a number of my athletes won’t be joining us at Heilman’s Performance for our annual 10 Week Summer Program. These are athletes that have worked hard for me in the past, achieved notable progress, and as far as I know have enjoyed their time training at Heilman’s Performance. As more and more athletes in our public school systems informed me that they wouldn’t be attending the summer strength and conditioning program, conversation about why naturally developed. The reasons these athletes aren’t training at our facility this coming summer troubles me.

As a business, any time a client decides to discontinue use of our services, we want to try and understand why.  If we have overpriced the market or provided that athlete a disservice, we want to know so we can make a change and make things right. Through conversation, we came to find that these athletes weren’t unhappy with our services or the price. These athletes were making the decision to discontinue their training with us because they felt pressured to do so.

I’ve come to find that many of these athletes are hesitant to train with us because they feel the consequences of doing so may be affect their playing time during their competitive season. If this is not the message our coaches have intended to send then they have miscommunicated, because this is how a plethora of athletes feel. Whether purposeful or accidental, the number of times the term “playing time” has come up in my conversations leads me to believe that the threat has been in some way articulated to these kids. This leaves me both upset and disappointed with our public service officials.

I wanted to write something to the parents and young athletes of the surrounding community so they understand that they have a choice. Before I explain to you why it’s important you exercise your right to choose where you train for your offseason, I want to diffuse an allegation that will assuredly be thrown in my face.

If you think that I’m just another private business owner concerned about his bottom line, I want you to know that you are dead wrong. I’ve had opportunities in the past to make more money for myself and have turned them away because of the effect they may have had on my freedoms and happiness. This is not and never will be about money. One of the opportunities offered to me was a buy out offer from a private corporation’s human performance department in Minot. The offer came with a significant salary increase, eradication of my debt, a flashy title, and the opportunity to coordinate the performance training for the public school system. I could have sold out (literally), but I turned it away because I was happy where I was. So again, before you think I’m writing this for my own good, please know that not all of us are in private business to make money. Some people get into entrepreneurship for the freedoms, challenges, and excitement of building something they can be proud of.

Athletes, you have the right to choose where you conduct your off-season training. Here’s why:

1.    Consequences can’t be attached to something that can’t be made mandatory.

Athletes everywhere need to understand what they can and cannot be leveraged into doing. Every sport at every level has some type of governing body that is put into place to protect and serve the athletes’ best interests. At the professional level there are player’s associations and at the collegiate level there are restrictions on training and practice hours set forth by the NCAA along with student-athlete governing bodies assembled to ensure the athletes have a voice and are being treated fairly. For example, Minot State University has the SAAC (Student Athlete Advisory Committee). As a high school athlete in this community, your governing body is the North Dakota High School Activities Association. The NDHSAA puts forth restrictions on when exactly coaches can make practice and training “mandatory” for a sport that takes place during a specific season. As far as I know, Fall sports like football and volleyball technically can’t make anything mandatory for high school athletes until August 1^st. If you are being told that you HAVE TO be somewhere before that date, you are being misinformed. From the time summer vacation starts to August 1^st, you should be free to choose what you do with no consequences attached.

2.    Choosing where you train may be the only way to grow.

I’m in no position to tell you that training in one environment over another is what’s best for you. I’ve never set foot in the public school weight room or my competitor’s weight rooms while off-season training is being conducted so to tell you who offers the best environment for you would be, at best, speculation. You do need to understand though that you have the right to choose. I think there are 3 archetypes that should be encouraged to seek alternative training methods:

A.     If you’re an athlete who is on the bubble of being cut from the team, I don’t think a one size fits all program (doing exactly what the person you’re chasing is doing) is going to help you avoid cuts. Finding a way to earn a leg up on your competition is a necessity for you to ensure you get to continue playing the sport you love.

B.     If you’re an athlete who has the potential to receive an athletic scholarship to a university, seeking alternative methods to separate yourself from the pack shouldn’t be frowned upon, it should be applauded. Investing your money now to save money on tuition later is a fine plan. School loans come with an interest rate attached (albeit a low one) that you’ll probably pay well into your mid-life. Nobody should make you feel bad for trying to cut future losses.

C.     Most importantly, if it is your first year navigating a weight room, one-size fits all programs might be the worst thing for you. Exercise prescription and great coaching are the best ways to ensure young athletes learn to properly load the neuromuscular system without excessive stress to the connective tissues. Learning to move properly under load at an early age can be the difference between having and not having a long healthy athletic career.

3.    Choosing where you train keeps the marketplace competitive.

Have you ever played on a team in which an athlete has never had to compete for his/her spot? I have, and with nobody to push them, that athlete rarely improves and often times regresses. Anybody who understands anything about economics will tell you this: healthy competition in a marketplace breeds growth and a lack of healthy competition breeds complacency. If you are feeling pressured to train at a particular venue and you succumb to that pressure, the unintended consequence will be a watered down training environment. If the only reason you are training in a specific environment is because you feel you HAVE TO BE, it gives your strength and conditioning provider no reason to continue to improve. Your freedom of choice is the only reason people providing human performance services have to keep getting better.

Look, I know that by writing this I’ll be under a lot of scrutiny. Coaches will probably feel like I’m trying to undermine them and rally local athletes to become disrespectful and entitled. My relationship with local coaches is important to me so it’s important that athletes and coaches alike know that this is not my intention. My only intention is to inform athletes and parents that they should be given the right to choose how they pursue their athletic development without any consequence. I think it’s a good thing that coaches encourage our athletes to train in the facilities provided by our public school system. I also think it’s a good thing for those athletes to understand that they’re able to respectfully explain that they are choosing to train somewhere else during their offseason. When athletes start to feel that they can’t do that, we have done them a disservice.

I think disagreement and passionate discussion is the best way to continue to push forward. I opened Heilman’s Performance three years ago because I wanted to offer the community I grew up in something different that athletes could take advantage of. Something that, if I had access to growing up, I would have never left. Because I know there will be disagreement and what most of those disagreements will entail, I’d like to explain my stance before my house gets egged.

Teams HAVE to train together to win.

As both a high school and college athlete, when it came to competition time I rarely thought “Hey, was this guy lifting with me all summer?” The only thing that mattered to me is that the guy who was playing was the guy who earned that right. The best players played, whether they trained with me or not. Great athletes want to WIN, that’s it, if the guy next to them offers them and their team the best opportunity to WIN, they couldn’t care less where they lifted their weights. I dropped the rah-rah stuff a long time ago.

Colleges and professional organizations tell their athletes they have to train with them in the offseason.

I work as an assistant strength and conditioning coach for a university and have done internships with professional organizations and can tell you, you’re wrong again. The NCAA only allows us at the college level to make certain times of the year mandatory. We encourage athletes to stick around and train with the university, but attach no consequences to their decision. Likewise, the collective bargaining agreements in almost all professional leagues give their athletes freedom to pursue training and treatment from whoever they so choose during their off season. They’re sent on their way and given a specific date to report back to the organization with which they are affiliated. When they report back, the best players are the ones who play no matter where they trained.

Private human performance venues are grossly overpriced.

This is a matter of opinion and for the parents and athletes to decide. To tell people that they’re throwing their money away by training with a private venue when you’ve never set foot inside that venue is unfair. At Heilman’s Performance we put our athletes through a refined screening and assessment process that allows us to determine what exercise prescription best fits a particular athlete on an individual basis. If parents and athletes determine that this provides more value, despite its price tag, they should be allowed to make that decision devoid of consequences.

I understand that there are more pressing issues facing the world today than the issue this writing covers, so a number of people will roll their eyes at it. I want you, the reader, to understand that it may not be important to you, but it’s important to me and the young people I work with. Some of them and their parents are feeling pressured to make a decision they don’t want to make and I just want them to know that they have the freedom to choose.

The young people of our community work hard and deserve every opportunity they can afford to achieve their goals, taking those opportunities away from them is doing the public a disservice. I’m sure by writing this I’ll lose some friends, but as the saying goes:

“If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader – go sell ice cream.”

As always thank you for reading,

Caleb Heilman

Becoming more Objective in a Subjective World.

This past winter, a couple of trusted friends and colleagues (Scott Peters of the Toronto Blue Jays and Kirk Mason of Premier Chiropractic Minot, ND) and I hosted a weekend workshop on the campus of Minot State University dedicated to a simple concept: becoming more objective in the field of human performance. We called it a “Movement Workshop” but I think the title of the weekend workshop was a bit misleading. It was less about movement and more about how we as professionals need to have a general understanding that we are humans. And as humans we are inherently fallible, whether we like to admit it or not. The message that we wanted to convey was that if we are truly doing what’s best for our athletes and clients we need to get out of our own way and allow the scientific process, not our biases, to dictate the decisions we make.

Since the workshop ended I have dedicated a large portion of my professional thought processes to how I can adapt my own methodologies in order to become less conventional and more objective in my approach to developing bigger, faster, stronger and more durable athletes.

Because the science of Human Performance is in its infancy, the field has been and still is dominated by subjective biases. The conventional approach in strength and conditioning, at least in my experience, often looks like this:

1.     Collect some data (usually performance measures like vertical jump, 40 yard dash and the bench press)

2.     Store them away for an extended period of time.

3.     Train on a periodized, one size fits all performance program filled with exercises the coach says "Everyone should be doing."

4.     Recollect performance measures hoping that what we did in between our data collection was just what our athletes needed to improve their scores.

Hey, to this point, it's worked. What most young athletes need is just some consistency and guidance, so often times getting them to do just about anything consistently will yield some type of result. My issue with the conventional human performance approach is this:

1.     It really doesn’t “fit all”.

·      A fraction of athletes always get left behind in their development. Even though these programs are most often designed to fit the “elites” in the program, they’re probably the athletes that benefit the least. The law of diminishing returns works in performance just as it does in business. Think of it this way, if we were to rank “athletic prowess” on a scale from 1-10, it’s a whole lot easier to get an athlete ranked as a 2 to a ranking of 6 than it is to get an athlete ranked as a 9 to a ranking of a 10. The 2 can do just about anything and improve, but the 9 requires a more intricate approach. As my friend Scott would say, you need to use a sniper rifle, not a shotgun. To say that everyone NEEDS to do anything is a blanket statement.

2.     Most periodization schedules are designed for a utopian world.

·      Here’s where I contradict myself. I think the principles of periodization are effective and necessary. In my opinion, we’ve just allowed periodized schedules to become entirely too complex. They too often assume that everyone is eating well, getting 10 hours of sleep per night and managing their social life exactly the way we’d like them to. But that, especially for college athletes, isn’t how life works. Athletes have homework, exams, long bus trips, girlfriends/boyfriends, parties, Netflix (Man, I hate Netflix), and a host of other variables all mixed in with the stress and anxieties that a rapidly changing social structure brings. We ask our athletes to work on different sets and reps on different weeks and that’s about the extent of it. I think it’s important we toe the line of micro-management when it comes to periodization with our training.

3.     A lot of the data we collect might not even correlate with improved performance and durability.

·      Improved performance and durability should always be the end game, right? As human performance professionals we always want our testing numbers to improve but we often fail to ask a pretty important question: “What if the data we collect doesn’t matter?”

Let’s do another thought experiment: The NFL Combine has become the most popularized data collection event in the human performance field. So naturally, high school and colleges assume they're doing everything right and copy them. The bench press is one of the most popular measurements gathered at the combine. So high school and college programs follow suit and gather pre-test and post-test numbers on the bench press. Why, though, hasn’t anyone stopped to ask if there is any statistical correlation between the bench press and high performers? (At the NFL level that could be Hall of Fame or All-Pro Selections, in college it could be All-American or All-Conference selections and high-school it could be All-State selections) I have no idea what the answer to the question is, but has anyone bothered to ask? And if the answer is that there is no correlation between performance in the bench press test and high achievement on the football field, why are we so interested in it? You could say the same thing about the 40 Yard Dash. Every year millions of dollars get spent on a guy that tears up the turf in a straight line while high achieving football players sit and wait to have their name called. We continue to make mistakes because we make important decisions based on data that doesn’t really mean anything.

4.     Last but certainly not least: Rarely does the data we collect have any significant effect on the way we design programs for our athletes.

·      This is a problem, because if our decisions aren’t based on the data we collect, we have absolutely no way of knowing what worked and what didn’t. Consequently, we’re completely unaware of our professional biases and are unable to make the changes necessary for progress. The purpose shouldn’t be to avoid making mistakes, it should be to have a system that makes us aware of our mistakes, so we can take appropriate action.

As someone who knows what it’s like to be both an employer and an employee I like to think that I understand the importance of having people who aren’t afraid to speak up when they think they’ve identified a problem. We need more people like that in this world and we all need to have them in our lives to keep us grounded. I love my employees most because none of them are afraid to tell me when I’m acting like a tool. As someone who takes leading by example seriously, it always stings when someone gives my ego a gut punch, but it’s ALWAYS good for me. That being said people who identify problems without offering solutions are just complainers. Being a problem identifier takes little to no effort, but offering solutions to problems takes courage and hard work. The thought alone that their prospect for change won’t pan out or a disagreement will ensue scares most of them off. My goal with this blog is to be more than a whiney problem identifier and try to offer up some simple solutions.

Problem: One size fits all.

Solution: Individualized programming.

Individualized programming is something that a number of great coaches have been preaching for a long time. The biggest issue with the concept is that it takes a lot of time and effort. More time and effort is something that a number of human performance professionals aren’t willing to give. To design individualized programs we first have to identify some standard measures that matter. I have been using the functional movement systems for a number of years now and think their group offers the most time and cost effective methods for collecting data that can drive individualized programming based on the way an athlete moves. Their standardized scoring system with the Functional Movement Screen and the Y Balance Test Kit gives legitimate objective measures that can help us decide not only what will help make athletes more efficient movers, but also what exercises will fit best in their training program.

The FMS group’s popularity is growing rapidly in the human performance field because of their progressive philosophy on performance and rehab. All of their methods and principles are rooted in research and they are as selfless as they come when it comes to sharing their findings.

Problem: Periodization Schedules

Solution: Daily Monitoring

I touched on it earlier; I think periodization schedules can be a good thing if we’re keeping them simple and realistic. To date, they’ve probably been the best method to ensuring steady progress in athletic performance with the fewest setbacks. I also think there may be a better way.

To me, daily monitoring makes a ton of sense if we can find affordable methods. Things like Omegawave and Heart Rate Variability are some of the coolest ideas out there right now that people can be using to determine how ready they are on a daily basis for certain training intensities. The problem, however, is affordability if we’re talking about large group training sessions like we have in high school and college weight rooms. If we can find a time and cost effective method to help us determine how ready an athlete might be to take on a particular training session, I imagine it to be incredibly valuable in avoiding over training syndrome.

A graduate students at our local university and I have been working on a research project looking for a correlation between an athlete’s reported fatigue and broad jump and grip strength scores. By the end of the study we may be able to confirm that you can get a pretty good feel for how your athletes are feeling with just a tape measure and a grip dynamometer, but we’ve yet to compile our findings. If the numbers correlate, both of these methods would be both cost and time effective for high schools and colleges.

Here is my best solution for now: trust and autonomy. As coaches we need our athletes to trust that we are putting them in the best position possible to be successful. We, in turn, need to be able to trust that they will give us their best effort on any given day. With my athletes I mix up different set and rep schemes throughout their training block and trust them to pick a level of intensity that suits how they feel on that given day. Believe it or not, when that level of trust is developed and the culture of your environment is well established, you rarely have trouble with applied effort. Our athletes work hard when they feel good and work smart on the days they aren’t feeling so great. Does that mean that we don’t do little things like ask athletes to add more weight to their bar or hold them accountable to performing ALL of their sets and reps? Of course not. We’ve just turned our focus to developing a lunch pail culture and hold everyone accountable to the same standard. They trust us and we trust them. It works.

Problem: The data we’re collecting doesn’t matter.

Solution: Ask better questions and follow the research.

The best way to combat this problem is for us to continue to ask questions. The right questions. I hope I gave you some insight earlier into the idea. Instead of asking “What’s his bench press?” we should ask “Does his bench press even matter?”

The best way to determine whether or not we’re asking the right questions is to do our homework. I probably sound like a broken record, but the FMS Group, in my opinion has done the best job of finding measures that matter to not only athlete durability, but to increased performance. Once we know which standardized performance measures align with high achievement and durability then we know what we should be working on. In order to do that, we have to collect and analyze the data.

Problem: We don’t use our data to make decisions.

Solution: Adopt a system.

The adoption of a particular system is the best way to become more objective. It eliminates human error from our decision-making process and shines a big spotlight on the specific areas we need to improve. Using a system to help drive your program isn’t to say that you’re incompetent; it’s just to admit that you are imperfect. I’ve recently designed my own program using Microsoft Excel that inputs the data we collect using the Functional Movement Systems standard units of measure to choose resistance and performance exercises that best suit my athletes. The system isn’t perfect, but it has allowed us to not only offer performance programming completely free of professional biases.

At Heilman’s Performance we allow the data we collect from tools like the functional movement screen and Y-Balance Test Kit to provide the path to programming and tools like vertical jump and 40 yard dash testing to give us extra feedback.

Conclusion

One of the most common misconceptions with trying to inject objectivity to the human performance environment is that we are in turn sacrificing our subjectivity, or the “human element” if you will. In reality, though, becoming more systematic and data driven actually allows us to be MORE subjective. It frees up our time and thoughts and allows us to focus on the art of coaching, relationship development, and our culture. Just because the computer selects an exercise for an athlete because of a given set of data, doesn’t mean that we can’t find a regression for it if it looks like crap, or find an alternative if the athlete hates it. The ultimate goal is to give our athletes the best opportunity to be successful right out of the gate and adapt from there. Adopting and mastering a system isn’t easy, but it is worth it. It takes humility and persistence, and those are both qualities we could use more of in human performance.

As always, thank you for reading,

Caleb Heilman