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!
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