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
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