One thing that I’ve learned in the last decade as a coach of different disciplines (track and field, S&C for a variety of sports) is that, of all coaching qualities, intuition and creativity is one of the most needed qualities in our field, but is also probably the most elusive.
We live in a world of the 9-second attention span, and most young coaches these days do a majority of their learning on social media platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter.
In a similar manner regarding creativity, many coaches will simply take the exercise templates, drill set and coaching ideals of established coaches for granted, living in a copy-and-paste world, and thinking that their results will be guaranteed for years to come. Understandably, we all need to start somewhere (and an established program is a good place to start) but ultimately, we need to make training our own, and put our own positive energy into it.
Others are afraid to try things outside of what has worked for years, and in the process, they deprive athletes of the change that is so needed to break through performance ceilings as time goes on.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that no drill or exercise is sacred or should be around forever in an athlete’s training. There is also no exercise that is “the exercise you are missing to get you to the next level and the reason you are where you are as an athlete is you haven’t found this exercise yet”. A great many scan Instagram hoping to find this magic exercise that must be the reason they aren’t jumping 40 inches or running a 4.4 40-yard dash.
Just look at the training system of Dr. Bondarchuk where every exercise is switched out at each developmental cycle, and you’ll see that exercises are merely tools that can steer an athlete towards their peak biomechanical technique in the skill they want to get better at (often jumping, throwing or sprinting for the sake of this article).
Granted, some exercises have much more resonance than others, and therefore should be used when an athlete wants to be at their peak performance, and cycled out in other training periods (been learning this through Derek Evely’s new online course), but outside of actually doing one’s sport skill, all exercises are merely tools.
This is where creativity becomes of the essence. The ability to know the sport skill to be improved from the inside out, and then have the intuition to regularly come up with fresh and exciting exercises with good biomechanical transfer (this being largely based out of the SDE category from Bondarchuk’s training system… where most purported magic exercises are from the SPE category, one of lower transfer) is an aspect of a coach firing on all cylinders when it comes to giving athletes their best performance.
To this end, I’ve been asked how I was able to be as creative as I am when coming up with training pieces. Firstly, I’m definitely not the most creative coach out there. Guys like Adarian Barr and Paul Cater are my mentors and role-models in this aspect of coaching.
This being said, I regularly enjoy putting together ideas that fit life in general, and coaching, and I’ve come up with a list of some things that have helped me become more creative in my approach to training over the years.
Before we get too far into this list, an important rule with creativity is to be pragmatic. What I mean by this is measure the skill you are trying to improve, and see if the creative training means you employ can make that skill better in the immediate or short term. Or, at the least, see if they can solidly make a significant biomechanical element of one’s sport skill show improvement on high-speed camera. Trust me, nobody who is already properly warmed up will run speed-ladder patterns and then run a sport-specific agility route faster. Creativity in context of specificity is a huge portion of this system.
The world doesn’t need much more exercise clutter, so make sure what you are creating is doing something useful.
Keys for upcoming (and current) creative coaches
- Prime your environment
- Turn off your phone
- Meditate
- Write it Down
- Maximize your sleep as a creative weapon
- Go to seminars with hands on training
- Get mentored (in person)
- Watch sport skill video (more than exercise video)
- Train with less tools, or only one tool, for a prolonged time period
- Your own workouts are your creative source (audience of 1)
- Work out with another coach on the same mission
- Play a different sport (or learn from a coach in another sport)
- Use the research, don’t live in the research
- Don’t be afraid to fail, or lose an argument
1. Prime your environment
A cluttered house or work area often can yield a cluttered mind. A step to allowing creativity to thrive is to keep your work area clean. Along with this listening to music that fosters creativity, such a binaural beats or classical music can be a great 1-2 punch in optimizing your work space.
This idea goes outside of just writing workouts and learning about training systems. Spending time training in a different environment, particularly outside will stimulate new creative growth. When in a new environment, use that environment and whatever is around to train.
A new environment (and the training tools it contains) could be the stimulus to change that you or your athletes have been waiting for. Using rough trails, shrubs, trees, rocks, benches, and rivers in the outdoor environment can provide a massively helpful training stimulus. Just recently, Paul Cater and I were doing some interval running along the shores of Monterey, and we came across a trail rife with shrubs and hardly any room to sprint in a straight line for more than 20 meters.
This was an awesome opportunity, as it instantly became a hurdle/long-jump course. The creative mind can also imagine that you are a warrior native on the hunt, chasing down prey, or perhaps running away from an angry lion or opposing tribe. As with anything, lighting up the mind lights up the nervous system, which lights up the athlete. The possibilities here are really endless.
Getting outside helps to keep you away from the next killer of creativity…
2. Turn off your phone
In my mind, screens and social media are a massive detractor to creativity, especially in a world where most coaches are learning in 60 seconds or less.
The most creative times in my life, and the best ideas have come when I’ve spent significant time having my phone turned off. I’m at the point almost where no matter where I am, if I spent the day (or the better part of the day) off my phone, I can call it a vacation.
The phone learning oriented 9-second generation (9 second attention span) has the unfortunate side-effect of only getting bought into a philosophy of training exercises only if it stands out enough from everything else, but unfortunately, this difference often takes away the transfer of the movement.
The best training is simple, but with a lot of complexity behind it. The only way to learn this complexity is to spend significant time immersed in a system of movement without getting distracted.
3. Meditate
Meditation is a way that the brain can connect itself, as well as a point where we can open ourselves up to the higher workings of our mind and/or the universal intelligence (you pick based on your belief system). When we can get into a place where we are in alpha or theta brain wave state, we become idea-machines, where our workout problems synthesize and a solution is offered.
Whatever way you look at it, clearing your mind and getting in the present is absolutely key to the flow state that helps yield creative prowess. We must slow down to let our subconscious minds offer us solutions.
4. Write it Down
We have a lot of ideas that pop through our heads throughout the day (and night). The key to holding onto this information is to write it down, preferably in a pen and paper format, but electronic if necessary (I use Evernote for this).
I’ve found, and learned from great coaches, that writing things down (such as workouts) are fundamentally different on paper versus on a computer. Good ideas generally start on paper as something about it is more organic and linked to our creative and intuitive machinery.
Times where we aren’t working are typically the best breeding ground for ideas, such as when we are in bed, exercising, or in the shower, so keep a notepad close in these cases.
5. Maximize your sleep as a creative weapon
We all know that it’s important to get a proper amount of sleep to do things like recover from training and be mentally fresh for each day. What we don’t look at much is not how much we sleep, but rather, how we sleep.
A simple practice that I’ve seen multiple authors suggest (Wayne Dyer and Srinivas Rao) is to plant ideas or questions in your head prior to bed time. If you are writing a training program or seeking a motor learning solution to improving an athlete’s technique, simply place the question or thought in your mind for a few moments before you fall asleep, and see what your dreams on the subject entail.
I actually got the idea for the Vertical Ignition training program here. I’ve heard that Jay Schroeder got a lot of his training ideas in his dreams (which were totally unique), and I’m sure that there are millions of great ideas for coaches waiting for us in our own dreamscape.
Ask yourself questions before bed and see what you can create.
6. Go to seminars with hands on training
A lot of people like to go to seminars to get CEU’s, slog through the presentations, and drink with their buddies after it’s all over. This isn’t optimal learning, and doesn’t foster creative coaching.
To optimize your creativity, it’s important to go to seminars with not just learning in mind, but learning that stimulates the intellect and the body. Hands on training is important to actually feel the point of the knowledge in your body. When you have a feeling of the content, then it’s easier to find the flow of new ideas.
This point fits with the next.
7. Get mentored (in person)
In a similar vein to going to hands on seminars, being mentored in person is absolutely key to finding new creative ideas and outlets in your own coaching. As coaches, we don’t get coached by others nearly often enough. It’s pretty easy to get stuck in the same lifts, drills and movements that we’ve found validation in as athletes in our younger years, but as the saying goes, “what got you here won’t get you there”.
Something I make a very regular practice of is finding opportunities to have other coaches train me or run me through workouts. I’m the coach I am today because of it. Not only have I learned in this manner from other coaches, but I’ve been able to creatively synthesize new ideas from their impact on me. Find an in person mentor to help you reach new heights.
8. Watch more sport video than exercise videos
This is one of the biggest factors on this list, if not the biggest on this list. Too many coaches are obsessed with exercises and training methods without knowing much at all about the biomechanics and sport skills these exercises are trying to improve.
Without knowing the nuances of a sport skill, how can you really create exercises to maximize that skill? I get a lot of questions to the tune of “is this a good exercise”? Exercises are only as good as they can capture elements of transfer, so it’s more important to know the sport skill you are trying to improve than go to exercises first. It’s like trying to learn calculus before you know how to add and subtract.
Some of the coaches I have the utmost respect for, and those who have really changed the way we look at speed training (e.g. Adarian Barr, Lee Taft) swear by spending lots of time watching and analyzing sport video. You’ll never get far if your only reference is exercises and not the actual sport skill.
On the health/performance spectrum, knowing sport mechanics will also help you to better show (and know when to show) athletes the opposite (such as a forefoot and inside edge dominant athlete being able to find their heels) in an injury prevention scenario.
9. Train with less tools, or only one tool, for a prolonged time period
If you want to be a more creative coach, run your training tool box down to only one item and work with it for weeks, or months at a time. You’ve heard these stories of things like Dan John having only a light barbell to use, so he had to do overhead squats… and got really strong and athletic in the process. I’ve heard Mike Bledsoe (Barbell Shrugged/The Bledsoe Show) say similar things about training with only a Macebell. You could make the same argument about a kettlebell, a set of parallettes, an overhead bar, or any other training piece.
Sometimes it’s hard to really know something unless you can free yourself with the distraction of all other training tools.
(bonus points here: the human body counts as a single training tool)
10. Your own workouts are your creative source
When it comes to being creative as a coach, it all starts with things done for an audience of one. By this, I mean doing things that help you as an athlete improve.
My own workout time is absolutely my number one source of new training ideas, and always has been. Obviously my own reference is limited, as I am distinctive in my own biochemistry and inner workings, and the more I learn about things like Neurotyping, and use that as a reference as to why a particular person have thrived on certain movements and exercise sets, and another didn’t, I become better in terms of understanding where my own scope is limited.
Regardless, the most creative individuals I know in training and coaching will work out themselves and use that as an incubator for new creative thoughts and workings.
11. Work out with another coach on the same mission
Some of the best creativity comes when two similar minds come together with the same goal. In working out with coaches like Adarian Barr and Paul Cater, I’ve never failed to come away with a fresh new perspective on how athletes can be better stimulated by training.
Coaches of a like mind are like a multiplier for your own creative outputs so be sure to train regularly with other creative coaches.
12. Play a different sport (or learn from a coach in another sport)
Just like track and field is a welcome outlet to the grind of playing football (and vice versa), so does learning and coaching other sports have a tremendous effect on our outlook of the sports that we work with.
Learning from aquatic sports has made me a better track and field coach, and strength coach in general. Knowing how coaches in a variety of sports train and approach skills helps us see the unifying components between these sports, and open our minds to other ways of looking at things.
In watching video, be sure to spend time checking out the movement patterns of different sports, and even different trends without closely related sport skills. Something I’ve been interested in lately is the subtle differences of rotation in baseball hitting, golf driving, and javelin throwing, and how we might look to train these, as well as the physical strength components of the front and back legs in these situations.
13. Use the research, don’t live in the research
It may seem like a bit of heresy, but being overly “evidence-based” can be a creative limiter (not for all, but for many). Remember that research doesn’t birth any new training means, it only seeks to validate existing training that coaches have created, and found to be successful.
This isn’t to say that I don’t have a great respect for practitioners out there doing relevant research in the sport science community, I just think we should treat all research in this “soft” field (lots of variables in any study vs. say, materials research) of athletics and sport science, not as gospel, but as another viewpoint to consider in the grand equation.
In many cases, people will say “show me the research on this” when they are afraid of trying it out themselves and seeing that it might actually work! I’ve seen this when a prominent coach announced that bracing the core shuts the body down neurologically. The people saying “show me the research!” in response were of the crossfit/powerlifting vein, which is a braced, sagittal plane bilateral community. In this sense, their personal validation was being threatened by the core bracing statement, and therefore closed their mind to the fact that perhaps actual athletic, asymmetrical, rotating movement did not rely on this same paradigm.
This being said, I have great respect for those practitioners who are not only creative, but have gotten Ph.D’s along with it to show and serve the portion of the world who needs it, scientific proof to back their intuition and creativity.
An over-reliance on the research can stem from fear of being wrong, or seen as being wrong, and fear is an entity that can take the roots out from the tree of creative coaching.
This brings me to my next point.
14. Don’t be afraid to fail, or lose an argument
This one picks up from my point on research, and that is being afraid of failing or losing an argument. Lots of time is wasted on social media (who knows how many millions of hours) in the coaching community arguing about exercises, not with the intention of serving the greater athletic community as a whole, but rather, with the intention of being seen as being “more right” than the other guy.
When we can shut down this personal validation engine, we open ourselves up to seeing the brilliance in the viewpoints of others, and using their viewpoint in context with their background to build up the coaching community as a whole.
This is one of my biggest breakthroughs as I went through my mid-20’s and then early 30’s. The first breakthrough was being willing to ask for more help from my immediate peers, and not seeing that as being weak and having a lack of knowledge. I now realize that you are seen as wiser by being willing to ask for help, rather than the other way around.
In my mid-30’s I started my podcast, and this has opened me up to a new world of understanding in a way I could have never imagined by speaking to the world’s top experts in nearly every corner of our field.
If I could go back in time, I would have started trying to arrange call-time with those who had great knowledge in the field, rather than spending time on forum threads, hoping my writing and opinion would give me respect. I spend little to no time on any sort of social media thread these days, as it is 99% distraction and 1% beneficial most of the time.
Again, it is the fear of being wrong that holds us back, and how we approach social media interaction is no different.
Conclusion
So there are a few ways to stand out in a world of grey. Know your sport, know yourself, and find ways to let the power of your subconscious mind unleash fresh, fun and most importantly, relevant training into this world. Coaches and athletes will all be better because of it.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and trains athletes and clients in partnership with Evolutionary Fitness in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and trains numerous clients in the in-person and online space.
In 2011, Joel began Just Fly Sports as a central platform to promote information for athletes and coaches to reach their highest potential. In 2016 the first episode of the “Just Fly Performance Podcast” was released, now a leading source of education in the sports performance field. The evolving mission of Just Fly Sports is focused on teaching athletes to realize their true, innate power, and achieve the highest joy in their training, competition, and in the community.
Free Training Guides!
Sign up for the newsletter, get your FREE eBooks, and receive weekly updates on cutting edge training information that will help take your knowledge of athletic performance to a new level.