Winning In A Nutshell

I was at the top of my game. I was playing for both of my school sides. We had an A and a B team, as well as a program that sought to promote activity for everyone at very age. This is what is called the House League here in Canada. The result, a different kind of league that featured up to 9 teams per age group. So strong were my performances week after week, I was tipped for the captaincy of my provincial side as well. With Rep, House, and Provincials, my week looked like this:


Monday: Practice: Provincials

Tuesday: Practice: Rep followed by Provincials

Wednesday: Rep Match

Thursday: Practice: Rep and House

Friday: Practice: Provincials

Saturday: Matches (Rep and House)

Sunday: Prov...

I woke up. I mean I was awake but the body that step off the side of the bed wasn't mine. The thing my mind was connected to was weak. It shook, refused to hold my weight yet it was taut with tension, ready to retch. It was not satisfied with lying on the cold bathroom floor, nor was there comfort in warmth of my bed. It was feverish, and the speed of movement that had always been my signature seemed to hurry me only into the darkness of unconsciousness if I didn't stop it.

There would be no practice for me that Sunday. No game. No spot on the provincial team. No captaincy. I have experienced first hand the punishing side of unrestrained passion. We had 2 hours of practice per session. That was almost 18 hours of soccer that week, in the punishing heat from above, with the hard ground offering no cushioning from beneath, and 2 orange slices during a 5 minute half as the pinnacle of nutritional replenishment. From my experience I have learnt that More is NOT More.

MEANS vs GOALS

To that end I have attempted to provide information on my blog about efficient and effective strategy. From Warm ups to off field training, from thoughts on using drills wisely to a better practice metrics, my goal is to give you what works so you can achieve your goals. And less works better than more. There is no doubt that practice, drills, running, "fitness" and strength training are important to success in soccer. But ultimately, these are the means not the goal. It's difficult to scale, but while mastering the elements of the practice plan and eventually executing that on game day falls on the players, the goal for coaches is to figure out the highest level of intensity, duration and challenge that will result in a residual increase in performance. Indeed, the ability to differentiate between laziness and doing just the right amount to get the job done is a mark of a winner.

Here are some principles to get you closer to that goal as a coach.

Practice should have a scalable, challenging goal. Challenging means that the task is difficult, sure to have mistakes. The key is that they are manageable mistakes, something Gray Cook calls the Edge of ability. Make it too difficult and you will only succeed in frustrating and demoralizing your players. Make it too easy and no learning happens. Remember, it is not in rehearsing the things you are already good at that you will grow. Strengthen your weaker areas.

• Focus on the quality of work, not its quantity. Any fool can smoke athletes with tough, exhausting workouts. Again, practice is not the goal, it's the means. And if it's true that a training session should put in you more than it takes out, what's the benefit of mopping your players off floor after doing laps and laps. Today's fitness motivation has things like, "I pass out, please record my time." "I don't stop when I'm tired. I stop when I'm finished." When they give a gold medal for passing out, and there are World Championships for fatigue, then we can celebrate the pinnacle of the fitness oxymorons. If you are passing out, vomiting and unable to function the day after, what are you for exactly? Focus on quality. Once it starts to decline, stop.


More will result in less learning and poorer performance. Bondarchuk made a stunning revelation that the harder you push the body, the more stubbornly it refuses to change: "In our practice, with each year we have become more convinced that the stronger our desires to significantly increase the level of achievement, . . . the less the effect. . . .This is explained by the fact that the stronger the complex of training effects, then the more harmony there is in the defense functions in the body. . . .This in every way possible creates barriers or prevents a new level of adaptation, where in the process of restructuring it is necessary to expend a significant amount of energy resources. . . .The defense function of the body systems in high level athletes is more “trained” than in low level athletes. From here a very “bold” conclusion follows, that the process of increasing sports mastery takes place at the same level as the process of developing defense functions. In the end result, the defense functions prevail over most of the time of sports development. . . . Up to this time, all of this is a “superbold” hypothesis, giving food for very “fantastic” propositions, but there is something in all of this....Today it is only sufficiently clear that in the process of sports improvement, the body always defends itself against the irritants acting upon it."

In case you missed it- as a coach, you hold stress in your hand. The right amount produces adaptation. Too much challenges the body to summon its defence systems and it's a battle you will lose every time. Remember how I felt on that Sunday morning?

These principles apply to the tactical coach as much as they do to the strength and conditioning coach. To the latter, the wording takes on more specific terminology:

• Stop your sets and your workout before you get fatigued. Strength training... must take up as little of your time and energy as possible—all in the name of leaving you as much gas in the tank as possible for practicing sport specific skills.

Strength Training

Strength training is the most under-utilized and the least addressed skill in youth soccer. Despite the evidence for Strength Training for Juniors, and the considerable risk for various injuries whose genesis is in general weakness or in specifics like Hamstrings or ACLs, there continues to be no structured weight training in the majority youth clubs. Many players with all the talent in the world fail to make it to the highest level because they haven't the strength to compete. The entire premise behind Easy Strength is that at any given challenge, if the competitors are equally skilled, the stronger will win every time. So why do your players not have a strength training program? I'm amazed at how many players 15, 16, 17 years old who cannot do proper push ups. Of those that can, an embarrassing percentage can match that number in pull ups and hold a proper plank for 60 seconds. And these are elementary, body weight exercises. By this time, they should squatting, deadlifting and pressing respectable amounts.

To paraphrase the great John Wooden, if we ever come up against a team with similar skill levels, we will win because we are better conditioned. I'm inserting that here to highlight that victory often lies beyond skill but is very much within the realms of strength and conditioning. Yet it would not be prudent to advocate for the benefits and therefore use of strength training without offering a warning there as well. I have already made reference to this, but it's worth repeating.

The strength regimen must deliver great strength gains without exhausting the athlete’s energy or time.

The late Dr. Mel Siff put it well:

To me, the sign of a really excellent routine is one which places great demands on the athlete, yet produces progressive long-term improvement without soreness, injury or the athlete ever feeling thoroughly depleted. Any fool can create a program that is so demanding that it would virtually kill the toughest marine or hardiest of elite athletes, but not any fool can create a tough program that produces progress without unnecessary pain.

To finish, some more great quotes from Easy Strength (By Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline) Chapter 3

Sprint coach Charlie Francis never hesitated to cut back on the weight or drop the strength session altogether either when Ben [Johnson}] was tired from sprint training. Insists the coach: "If there is any degradation in training, stop. If there is any doubt about one more rep or run, don’t do it. If you are trying to learn with reps, you won’t get it later if you haven’t already. Leave it and come back to it.If the previous workout has been spectacular, I will pull back and force an easier workout as a matter of principle.The athlete will usually want to build on a spectacular workout and train even harder. . . .As this can lead to overtraining and injury, it is always better to err on the light side—do too little rather than too much. . . ." (More about Charlie Francis' coaching methods here.)

Tommy Kono has a powerful insight:

After each repetition, erase any flaw detected so the next repetition will be even smoother. . . . If you perform a total of 20 repetitions of snatches in a workout, your twentieth repetition should be the one most efficiently performed! That is productivity! If fatigue (of mind or body) is setting in by the twentieth, it is better to quit snatching, because you begin to fail in refining your technique.

In the mid-1990s, a curious book came out in the States: Body, Mind, and Sport, by John Douillard. One of his techniques was practicing a competitive sport without keeping score. In his words: “Focusing on the score attaches you to the result. Focusing on the process lets you access your greatest skill and increases your fun.” That rang true.