Some ideas hurt: best and worst days

There is a lot to unpack in the concept of best versus worst day but I'll do my best to stay with the basic idea.
Young athletes have the impression that their best and worst days are poles apart.  Feel free to test this.  Is it reality though?  If we're gauging on outcomes alone then maybe.  Maybe?  No, not even then.  It just seems that way.  If we look away from an outcome and instead at the moment to moment behaviours and actions it is quickly obvious that not much is different from one performance to the next.  A win or personal best may contain a handful of well constructed moments but performances do not transform in the short or even medium term. 
The idea of a miraculous 'best day' is damaging.  It's simply not true and that's a problem all by itself.  A PB or win can appear as a new standard but what does that mean?  Any performance is a large collection of moments and a PB represents a higher than normal 'average' standard of execution.  It's actually not a requirement of a high performance standard that new physical standards are reached, only that the overall standard of work is high.  Exposing an athlete to the idea that they must become better than ever before is a very different kind of idea to executing better than ever before.  We are aiming for transformation in sport but it is not instantaneous and never miraculous.  Adaptation is a response to training and it involves immeasurably small improvements or differences over a long period of time.
The ultimate driver of progress is time, so our most important responsibility as parents and coaches and colleagues is to support ideas and attitudes and experiences that nurture and encourage participation.  Ideally, we need to prick the fallacy of competition as a transformative physical experience early on.  For the same reason it cannot transform, competition also cannot destroy.  We need to take the time to explain to children that there are no catastrophic days.  Certainly we can have catastrophic experiences but the greatest driver of these are emotional responses to the disappointment of not achieving what are, if we think about it, unreasonable expectations to begin with.  If we train well and keep practicing it is just a matter of time until we execute better than ever before, and just a matter of time also for our tools to grow and evolve to higher levels.
We all need good days, and proof or evidence also that progress is occurring but first we need to understand what this 'proof' is and what it's not.

Reflections on performance. Part-2

Many of our kids were involved in the recent National age group swim championships. I make a point of asking every swimmer how their meet went and I am happy to say many gave me the only answer I hope to hear: they enjoyed it! Some - usually more experienced swimmers - rarely seem to have a rewarding experience.

This needs to be unpacked as there is a common response pattern: immediate response is negative, and relates to swim performance. When asked specifically if they enjoyed themselves (at the meet), most say yes. Probed a little further, and it's actually also common for these athletes to have achieved one or more personal bests. However, even when it's acknowledged that the overall experience was enjoyable and there was at least one best ever performance, the trend is to stick with the first response - it wasn't a good meet.

This response pattern to competition is common. It reflects an expectation landscape that is virtually impossible to live up to. It goes like this: I have trained hard and nothing less than a good personal best in my target event is acceptable. Is this reasonable? Not even a little bit. Young athletes rise to the energy of an occasion but it requires extraordinary control to pull it all together in one moment. It's more likely that conditions will align some time during competition week and more likely again over a series of competitions. What's vital in all of this is an understanding of what high performance is constructed from: a positive mood or attitude, a physically ready mind and body, pre-prepared skills, and practiced race strategies. If I can look back on a swim, or any sporting performance, and recognise that I managed all or most of these responsibilities then I have every reason to be satisfied because it's just a matter of time until it clicks.

'Bests' and 'firsts' are blunt measures of performance - all or nothing. If your concept of a positive experience is pegged on a binary outcome then you're asking for trouble. Most disappointingly of all, however, is the fact that there are often a multitude of things that go well during competition even if the big race didn't. Consider the big learning from the first reflections blog: athletes can't control the outcome but the factors that make the outcome possible. The better and more often we stack conditions in our favour, the closer we get to our strongest performance. The greatest battle for any athlete is the mental one, and the very last thing we should permit is a young sports person to be blind to their own achievements.

We build self-esteem and belief not with dramatic leaps ahead but with smiles every day for the small things done well.

Reflections on performance. Part-1

Preparing for performance is one of the most difficult things for an athlete.  New city, new course/ court/ pool/ ground, lots of noise and distraction.  Different routines.  Certain personalities can really struggle, making life difficult for themselves and teammates.  Coaches and managers have a lot of work to do introducing responsibilities and helping athletes manage detail.  Some (coaches and managers) are better at this than others.

There are two big pieces that an athlete needs to grasp.  It helps also if coaches and parents understand too, and can reinforce the key messages:

1. There are lots of variables, and time and plenty of practice is needed to discover them and find a sweet spot.  The critical goals are to ensure good rest/ recovery processes, effective eating strategies, and comprehensive warm ups.  Errors are common in each
2. Athletes aim for personal bests and high performance levels at specific events but we cannot, despite best efforts, guarantee an outcome.  What we can do is give ourselves 'the best chance possible', and the probability of a good or great outcome depends on how often we achieve a 'best chance possible' state.  More of one improves probability of the other

Our performance strategy is not to hit a personal best or win the event but to arrange things in such a way that we achieve a 'best chance possible' state.  Winning is somewhat out of our control much of the time.  What we can control are the variables that make it possible.  This is a key message that young athletes need to hear and learn to grasp.

Why young athletes slow down during puberty, and many tap out soon after

Young athletes end their involvement in sport for two reasons: because it's no longer enjoyable, and/ or because they stopped making progress a while ago.
Many young athletes experience a performance plateau during puberty.  Speed/ endurance athletes often get slower.  The body grows significantly before puberty, and power to weight rises.  This, more than any other factor - coaching included! - is responsible for progress.  With the onset of puberty the nature of weight gain changes.  For females, the extra weight is non-lean mass (not muscle) due to the expression of the hormone oestrogen.  Before puberty, weight gain is associated with linear increases in strength (and power to weight).  With the onset of puberty, weight gain now has the opposite effect - it increases body weight for no additional gain in strength. 
There is a secondary factor superimposing all of this, which is that sporting skills tend to mature around the time of puberty as well.  This is a natural consequence of practice over time.  The problem is that the brain and body are running out of resources or tools with which to keep things moving forward: the body is now much heavier but not stronger with it, and the brain is also finding it harder and harder to refine skills.  We call this diminishing returns: more and more training time for less and less reward.
This is all very normal and impacts the majority of female athletes and some boys as well.  It also doesn't have to be the end.  What's needed, in the first place, is an explanation to them that this is what's happening.  In the absence of an understanding, children think it's their fault; they're just not good enough any more.  This interpretation couldn't be further from the truth.  New rules now apply and these need to be articulated and understood by the athlete as well.  There are there things children need to know:

1. what happens to my body and my performance, as a consequence
2. what do the changes mean - what are the new rules
3. I will be the best I can ever be another decade and a half further down the track (or more) - I have loads of time to get used to, and take advantage of, the new rules

Parents it's your responsibility to understand all of this and play a role in communicating to your child.  It's also critical that coaches understand, and true as well that most don't.  Hold them to account and insist they get off their butts and go find out.  It will likely change their coaching at every level, and if that means they stop treating every child like a performance athlete and do a better job of making sport more enjoyable then that's the biggest win of all!

Simple things

Happy children are happy when they’re loved; made to feel good, and good about themselves.

When we are happy, we try and, if we try often enough, two things occur: we find pursuits we enjoy and have talent for and we make progress in things we don’t.

Christmas gift: Exercise routines to use over summer

Merry Christmas and a safe and happy holiday to everyone

downloadable PDF: 2018 Xmas exercise routines

Brains not brawn

Solve the problem that is my perceived deficiency as a player or solve the challenge of todays game, as it’s playing out in front me? Those are the choices. Too many young people get stuck in the former and, therefore, don’t recognise and adapt to the challenge of the game. Why? Fear and insecurity; a focus on what they can’t do over what they can. They also don’t know, because no one points it out, that their brains are a remarkable learning machine. Every child has a super computer between their ears that is a far more powerful tool than any physical capacity could every hope to be. There is no magical transformation when it comes to calming and quietening the mind, but we are all capable of learning to be better at it if the commitment is made. Tell and show your children that greatness is between the ears and not in the hands or feet. A sharper mind is the real goal, and it's available to all.