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"When it comes to developing elite athletes, if you're not assessing, you’re guessing”
When an athlete first walks through our doors there is a lot that must happen before he steps a foot on the training floor.
Before we can train, we have to know why? Why are you here? Why are you wanting to get stronger? Why are you wanting ______? Why? Why? Why? It is the foundation for everything you do. If you don't know why you are doing something you will have a hard time staying motivated and disciplined when things get hard..and they will get hard.
When it comes to goals, we say that goals have 3 characteristics to them:
1. Fear factor. Goals should elicit a change in intent and intensity. Intent is your discipline and intensity is your output within that discipline. You can drive a car at 30mph and do just fine on a country road, but that won't get you to the winner's circle at a NASCAR race. Intent without intensity is simply going through the motions.
2. Expiration Date. A goal is not saying," One day I want to ________." That is a dream. The difference in a goal and a dream is you put a time limit on it. This elicits a sense of urgency.
3. Challenging: This ties in with the fear factor component, but with this we tell athletes that their goal should be challenging to the point that there is a chance they don't achieve it. If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you.
"If you shoot for the stars and you land in the clouds, at least you got off the ground."
Once we established goals with an athlete, we can begin to build out a needs analysis. Here we will begin to develop KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that the athlete wants/needs to develop in order to reach their goals.
Part of developing KPIs is getting an objective understanding where the athlete is and based on where they want to go creating realistic and objective measurable that the athlete can begin to set out to achieve. The KPIs act as markers to know that the program and process is working or if it needs to be adjusted.
Once we've established goals and the KPIs, it is important that we establish a baseline of where they are; a 'current location' if you will. Here we take the athlete through a series of assessments including a movement assessment, an orthopedic exam and photo and video analysis to assess posture and any structural pathologies that may be present.
In this we are looking for 2 things:
1. Movement competency: How well the athlete's body communicates movement dynamics global and local movement patterns.
2. Movement capacity: How much actual movement range does the body have in regards to global and local movement structures (osteokinematics and arthrokinematics)
“The best program is the one that is dynamic; it adjusts with the athlete and the athlete's needs, not to the coach or the coach's ego.”
With goals set, KPIs development and movement assessed we can now create a plan of action and a systematic program.
There are so many factors that go into writing a program for an athlete, such as chronological age, biological age, experience, injury history, background, learning preference, intelligence level. All of these things, and more, we have to consider when developing a program for an athlete. That is why we say, "mold the program to the athlete, not the athlete to the program."
Once the we created a plan, we do performance assessments every 4 weeks to make sure that the plan is accomplishing the goals that we want. This IS NOT MAXING OUT! These are strategic performance metrics that measure specific outputs not, how much weight you can lift 1 or 3 times on the bench, squat, and deadlift. We like these movements and use these movements in a variety of ways, but your 1-rep max on any of these are not indicative of your performance in a sport.