I had the idea put in my head years ago that eventually the
world of sports performance would no longer accept a one size fits all
approach. The trend is already obvious to me that the best in the world at what
I’m trying to do are the ones that are taking the time to figure out what
exactly it is their athletes need at the individual level. I firmly believe
that individualization and those who apply the concept the best will ultimately
prevail as the next generation’s most sought after human performance
professionals.
Individualization is a difficult concept to grasp for a
number of reasons. Groupthink has drilled into our heads that all athletes must
do certain things and perform certain movements or exercises because they’re an
athlete and well… these are the things that athletes do. I hear these assumptions verbalized every day.
Some of my favorites:
“Every athlete should squat, bench, or clean every day.”
“All baseball players need more flexibility.”
“Your knees hurt because your ankles don’t have enough
mobility.”
“He/She is slow on defense, he/she needs more agility
training.”
All of these statements have become cliché for a reason. The
ideas/problems are common and a lot of times the solution is too. The notion
I’m trying to put forth is that without a systematic assessment process, these
are all blanket statements. They’re the equivalent of throwing spaghetti at a
wall and hoping some of it sticks. No exercise is a great exercise because
you’ve seen it work for someone else and no movement is a great movement just
because you like to coach it. Eric Cressey says it best: “Assess, don’t guess.”
The largest obstacle for taking an individualized approach
to human performance will always be that it takes time and effort. I think we
all know more than one coach or clinician that is just simply not willing to
apply those two things, so hoping that everyone is going to jump on board with
the approach would be asinine. We’re always going to have the coaches that
would rather put eight of their favorite exercises on a whiteboard, and force
everyone to do them. If they don’t work for Sally well that’s just too bad,
because they work great for Johnny! Something must be wrong with Sally.
For those who can conceptualize the value in offering an
individualized approach and are willing to put in the hard work necessary to
offer our athletes the best we are capable of I’d like to organize the
framework for you the best way I know how.
Developing your ability to create individualized performance
programs should start with these three key ideas.
1.
Knowing
what to look for. This may seem obvious, but collecting meaningless data is
a huge mistake I’ve made in the past. Although I’m far from perfecting my
assessment process, I can confidently say that I no longer collect any useless
information. Everything we look at in our assessment process at Heilman’s
Performance has a purpose and has an effect on the programs we design for our
athletes. As young human performance professionals, we need to constantly ask
ourselves “Does this matter?” If you can’t explain in a simple manner to your
athlete why it is you are measuring something, then take it out of your
assessments.
2. Have a standardized measure for what you’re
looking for. Everything that we think is important, should be measured, and
in a standardized manner. If you are going to tell a group of people that
assessing a lunge, single leg stance, and overhead squat are important, you
better offer a systematic framework for scoring those things. Eyeballing
something and offering your opinion as truth is professionally ineffective and
irresponsible. It can be quite the slippery slope pretending to know something
you don’t. If you tell me an athlete is fast, I have a standardized method to
determine whether or not you are correct or incorrect in your assumption. This
should be commonplace in everything we deem important to human performance.
3. Have a systematic approach to manipulating
the variables that matter. This is the piece of the puzzle everyone wants
to have. When we first start out we all think “Just show me the exercises so I
can start using them.” It’s the reason we YouTube the workouts of all our
favorite athletes. We think that if we just do what Cam Newton is doing, we’ll
be Cam Newton in no time. (It’s amazing how long it takes people to realize
that they’re not Cam Newton) If I were to give any advice to aspiring human
performance professionals it would be to focus on getting really good at steps
one and two, and step three will present itself to you. Once you know what is
important and how to measure it, then you can get to work on creating positive
change.
Now that you have this 3-step mini system in mind, let’s
talk about the things that matter. The best way I know how to establish that
“Human Performance” is a multidisciplinary endeavor is to discuss those
disciplines as “buckets.” Men who have pioneered this industry like Mike Boyle
and Dan John talk often about assessing what you have in your “buckets” and
then allocating your resources accordingly to ensure you’re filling and
emptying the “buckets” that you need to be filing and emptying most.
In my opinion, these “buckets” look something like this:
1. Movement Competence
I think of movement competence like this:
“Does the athlete have the degrees of freedom necessary to perform the
movements his/her sport(s) require him/her to perform?” and “Does the athlete
have the requisite control over those degrees of freedom in order to perform
the movements his/her sport(s) require him/her to perform?” If you determine
that baseball players need a requisite amount of mobility in their thoracic
spine then you need to check for and measure thoracic spine mobility. If you
find that Athlete A has a stiff thoracic spine, then player A should get
T-Spine mobility drills. Consequently, if Athlete B’s T-spine moves just fine
and they have control of those degrees of freedom, they probably don’t need to
do the same amount of T-Spine mobility drills as Athlete A. Had you not taken
the time to look, you may have just assumed all baseball players need the same
amount of T-Spine drills and done Athlete B a major disservice. In my opinion,
the functional movement screen is the best method to determine an athlete’s
ability to move well. We also measure ankle dorsiflexion in all of our athletes
along with shoulder rotation and flexion measurements in our overhead athletes.
2. Absolute Strength
Strength is defined as the maximum force
you can apply against a load. Three simple time-tested measures of strength are
the power lifts (squat, deadlift, bench). These are standardized measures,
because they come with specific numbers attached to the tests. Pretty simple:
Someone who can squat, deadlift, and bench 800 lbs. in total weight has more
strength than someone who can perform the same three lifts at a total of 600
lbs.
I will say that I don’t like these measures
for everyone. A vast majority of athletes don’t have the technical mastery
required to explore their one rep maximum in these movements and throwing heavy
barbells on your back and picking them up from the floor isn’t the best for
everyone. I am a firm believer that the ability to absorb force is a direct
reflection of how much force one can create, so at Heilman’s Performance (where
we currently work with mostly youth athletes) we have had good success with the
Y-Balance Test as a measure of lower extremity strength. It also gives us
standard scores to compare bilaterally with a large pool of data suggesting
that asymmetry may be a precursor to lower extremity injury. In my opinion,
it’s a great alternative.
3. Power/Speed
While strength is the maximal force you can
apply against a load, power can be thought of as the maximal force you can
apply against a load in a specific amount of time. Speed is just the maximum
rate at which someone is able to move. Power and Speed generally progress together,
but are technically different variables. To measure power at Heilman’s
Performance we use the vertical jump test and a broad jump test. Both are very
common in the industry and are unrivaled in my opinion when it comes to
simplicity and time/cost effectiveness. As for speed, our facility’s size doesn’t
allow us to collect a 40-yard dash or 60-yard dash (standard measures in the
industry for speed) so we collect a top speed on our Woodway treadmills. This
is our way of being resourceful when you lack resources. I’ve grown to like the
measure, because it’s electronic so human error is next to impossible (outside
of the coach reading the number on the screen wrong) and although my evidence
is anecdotal, it’s very transferrable to real life. The kids who generally
record the highest scores on our Woodway sprint test are the kids who run the
fastest in sport.
4. Work Capacity/Cardiovascular Endurance
You can think of this bucket, basically, as
how much work an athlete is capable of performing over a specific period of
time. The gold standard for measuring cardiovascular endurance is a V02 max
test, but there are a number of other good ways you can get a good measure of
what kind of shape an athlete might be in. What’s important to remember, is
that this bucket is almost ALWAYS the most over trained variable by sport
coaches. At Heilman’s Performance we hardly ever spend time training
cardiovascular endurance because most of our kids either have to go to
basketball practice and run 4,000 wind sprints the next day or have a weekend
full of 90-minute soccer games. In my experience, this bucket almost always
gets filled by someone else, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be observant.
5. Sport Specific Skill
Sport specific skill is a difficult thing
to quantify. Measurables like throwing velocity and bat speed in baseball, and
in-game statistics like field goal percentage, assists or rebounds per game in
basketball can give us an idea of where an athlete is in regards to their
specific skill. New methods to have a more objective measure of sport skill are
being developed every year and new statistical metrics in all sports are giving
us a more microscopic look at a player’s true value. The point is, that a lot
of times, an athlete doesn’t need more time in the weight room, they need to
develop their skills. If you’re a basketball player it doesn’t matter how fast
you can run or how high you can jump if you can’t dribble, pass, and shoot.
6. Nutrition/Recovery
This is a bucket that, in my opinion, is
the most overlooked and underutilized bucket in all of our youth, college, and
likely professional athletes. Every day there are new methods to measuring an
athlete’s dietary choices and recovery methods. At Heilman’s Performance our
resources, again, are limited in the sense that we don’t have a registered
dietician or recovery specialist on staff (yet), but that doesn’t stop us from
being resourceful. Having athletes create food journals to bring in for you,
filling out surveys, and just simply asking them what they’ve been eating and
how much sleep they’ve been getting at night can go a long way. I try and put
simple ideas and recipes on my SnapChat for our athletes to see and copy every
now and then. If we can just get our young athletes to start eating more lean
protein, natural fats, fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts and being satisfied
drinking only water we would put a major dent in this problem. My message to
our athletes is pretty straight forward: Eat real food, read books instead of
your phone and video games before bed at night, and sleep as often as you
possibly can.
7. Psychological/Social Factors
This bucket is another one that is currently
being heavily researched in a field that is constantly evolving. This can
relate to how an athlete manages their stress and anxiety, what their network
of support is like, how happy they are with their current social situations and
a host of other factors. You may have an athlete who on paper, looks like they
have everything they could possibly need to be successful. Unfortunately having
above average performance measures and being highly skilled doesn’t always tell
the whole story. If that athlete isn’t capable of quieting the noise in their
head, creating positive self-talk, utilizing positive imagery and developing
the ability to be “in the moment” they may never reach their full potential.
Ask any NBA skill coach how notoriously bad free throw shooters shoot from the
stripe in practice and you’ll understand the importance of brain training. You
may not have access to a sport psychologist, but you can still help. With the
Minot State University Baseball Team, for example, we practice meditation
during our deload weeks. Getting the guys together to sit still, practice
living in the moment and create positive self-imagery is something our guys
have grown accustomed to and really seem to enjoy. I am by no measure a sport
psychologist and therapist, but through my own practice have experienced the benefits
of meditation. That, in turn, has allowed me to pass on the skill to my
athletes and it seems to help.
As I alluded to through the preceding list, which buckets
you’re able to effectively fill and empty will be impacted by the resources you
have available to you. I hope I pointed out, however, how important it is to
never allow our lack of resources to affect our resourcefulness. Make no
mistake, these are two completely different things. If an athlete needs a
therapist, and you’re a strength and conditioning coach, refer them to a
therapist, but in the meantime, you aren’t out of your scope to recommend they
do some research and start a morning meditation routine. This is just a simple
example, but one is a resource while the other is an example of being
resourceful.
My hope is that this writing gave you a better idea of how
Human Performance can be viewed as multi-disciplinary endeavor. With an
understanding of the specific disciplines hopefully I’ve convinced you of the
importance of individualization when dealing with athletes of all ages and
abilities. At Heilman’s Performance, we work with a large number of youth
athletes, so we see a lot of similarities in which buckets are full and which
ones are empty. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to be prepared for everyone.
Having an established framework to gather the information that matters in a
standardized fashion and the ability to manipulate the variables necessary will
allow you to help anyone that walks through your door. More importantly, it
will allow you to ensure that the athletes who have already walked through your
door continue to achieve the results they most desire.
As always thank you for reading,
Caleb Heilman
