What makes an athlete… “athletic”?
It’s an important question to ask if you work with athletes.
Those coaches whose full time job is sports performance are tasked with improving athletes strength levels, conditioning capacity relative to the needs of their sport, and reducing the likelihood of injury in the process.
Beyond this… there are some pioneers and innovators that are covering more routes to better on-field performance, such as perceptive ability and vision training, but these aren’t standard issue by any means. Not yet.
Something interesting to me is that a common theme is that a strength, or sports performance coach, call it what you will… generally liked training more than they liked actually playing (or at least analyzing) their sport of choice.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this… I don’t mean to offend anyone by that statement… I myself absolutely love training. I will until the day I die. Barbells, kettlebells, center of mass bells, mace bells, sprinting, jumping, climbing, plyometrics, trail running, calisthenincs and borderline physical exhaustion. This is a portion of my life I’ll never release. I also have a love for getting the best out of my athletes in this domain.
Even with the many terms for a sports performance trainer… I’ll still refer to myself as a “strength coach”, because the idea of strength is transcendent to all facets of life, and sport.
The thing is, I wonder if it can be easy miss the forest of true athletic greatness from the “trees of iron”. Can you fully see what makes a great athlete just that?
I love playing sports, and the older I get and the more I learn about my mind, the more I have found means to get over the frustrations that held me back in my younger years from being the athlete I knew I could be.
In a nutshell, what I really love about athletics is all the factors that allow our human body to move optimally, and the human brain to process the needs of sport. When I watch sports (if I even do), it’s much more about observing human movement than banding with a group of geographically proximal individuals in the hopes of squashing the local team representation of other geographically proximal individuals.
Looking at the future of the industry… say 50 years from now, will the duties of a strength coach be beyond the scope of improving maximal strength, improving conditioning levels while helping reinforce team culture? (Clearly those things are important, so I didn’t write that text in a polarizing light as I could have).
This is a good job to have… but should it stop there?
I recently attended Pat Davidson’s “Rethinking the Big Patterns” seminar (which I highly recommend) and Pat flashed a slide of Lebron James with the question… can any of you make Lebron a better athlete for the needs of his sport?
If you couldn’t guess, the answer is no. Putting 100 more pounds on Lebron’s squat or deadlift isn’t going to make him any better on the court and the risk factor in getting there certainly isn’t worth it in the grand scheme of training.
Also in Pat’s seminar, something highly intriguing to me, and perhaps the reason the sports performance industry is called “strength and conditioning” is in fact, because maximal strength and aerobic capability are the easiest two facets of sport to improve. Athletes (and anyone training) loves to see improvement, and when it comes to serving a job description, these are simple metrics to cover.
Creating enough strength, or muscular tensile qualities, for the needs of the athlete’s particular sport relative to the average body-type that breeds success is hugely important. College basketball strength coaches are often tasked with getting a skinny freshmen an “NBA body”. There is a reason that strength and conditioning programs in high school will often be a driving force in turning football teams around.
Getting an athlete up to speed in the physical demands of one’s sport is essential. The ability to jump higher and run faster also brings needed confidence.
Beyond this, however, I come back to the original question… what makes an athlete “good”?
For me, many times it is hard to accept that the scope of this field could end at “I put 50lbs on my athlete’s squat max, and improved their repeated sprint ability, so if they lose, I still did my job”. I always want what I do to be tied to the wins (and losses) however I can… I want to have a responsibility for that factor, since improving in anything in life hinges on critical feedback.
These strength/conditioning metrics are very important… but what happens when you already achieved them in a manner necessary to ensure an athlete is prepared for their sport?
I’ve heard from the best coaches… those who work with athletes at the highest level that at the all-star level… the best players are not those who are best in the weight room. NBA, MLB the weight room warrior isn’t making that clutch 3 pointer. They aren’t the one making that creative game winning play.
In the NFL, it’s laughable how little the combine means for your success on field once you hit basic markers that mean you are fast and powerful enough to compete in the big league. (Clearly, nobody will play in the NFL who runs, say 5.0 in the 40 as a running back, but what if you ran 4.50 versus 4.40? Does it matter?)
The best athlete in my high school was a 5’9” white guy who could dunk, and he hated strength training. In my high school strength and conditioning class the most he ever lifted for legs was quarter squats with 135 (while carefully watching to see that the coach wasn’t looking), and he also proceeded to mock me for getting intense about hang cleaning 185 for reps. This guy was first team all conference soccer and basketball, and even played golf in the spring (basketball and golf… remind you of anyone?). He had a fearless attitude towards competition, and could hang with anyone physically, as well as having a creative playmaking ability.
So what makes an athlete then? What makes one “athletic”, able to put points on the board, and make the big play? To constantly make defensive stops?
In my years as an athlete, coach, podcaster and active observer of those who are great, I’ve begun to think of some important qualities that exist in the best athletes. I like to think in terms of everything a coach can do to improve the raw physical and mental machinery of the body, before we start crossing over and actually becoming a sport coach, or at least a sport movement coach (respect to those individuals who are).
Let’s start with the obvious ones that highlight the primary roles of those in the industry, and move outward into less common domains that I believe will be big players in the future. We’ll also include those that we can’t change that are really important… such as neuro-chemistry and body proportions.
- Armor and muscle mass as needed by sport
- Horsepower as needed by sport
- Aerobic condition relative to what is needed by sport
- Confidence
- Discipline
- Parasympathetic tone and awareness
- Perception and reaction
- Variability and adaptability
- Joint manipulation, sensation and coordination
- Tri-planar movement ability
- Vision
- Experience level in one’s sport (or very closely related sports)
- An intense drive to be great
- Character
- Acetylcholine and muscle spindle responsiveness
- Body proportions
With this list, I understand that there is in many situations, a particular scope of practice to the sport professional. I wonder how this scope may change over time… (i.e. vision and perception) and will our field become more integrated, or divided? We stick to improving what we can, but I believe what we can improve is a wider scope than what we may think.
Armor and muscle mass as needed
This is the wheelhouse of pretty much any sports performance professional. Most were drawn to the job because they liked to get jacked so this aspect of a strength coach is second nature.
Of course, the ability to put on armor and mass is more important for some sports than others. For collision sports, it’s critical. For contact sports, it’s important, but not necessarily the end of the line, and the more aerobic the sport, the more fine of a line is drawn. For racquet sports there is much less value.
Gaining a level of muscle that’s enough to elicit a basic level of confidence and function to withstand the need of the sport is key.
Horsepower as Needed
I think horsepower is a good way to talk generally about the ability of an athlete to activate a large motor pool of muscle units in a short period of time.
Horsepower is the basic engine size an athlete has to work with, and their coordination and manipulation of their joints is what can help turn that horsepower into elite sprinting and jumping ability, as well as any other movement on the field of play. This is also an area that is hugely within a sports performance professional’s wheelhouse, and is probably the biggest area for me throughout my 20’s and is still massively important today.
Realize that some athletes naturally have great horsepower, and barbell movements may have less value to them relative to lower horsepower individuals.
Aerobic Condition Relative to One’s Sport
If you want to play in the game, you have to have the fitness for it. For a few reasons, conditioning for team sport is actually an area that I’d consider to be my weakest in terms of knowledge at this point in terms of knowing what terms and markers exist and how to precisely reach them.
That being said, I’ll leave this short, but training one’s heart rate to match what is needed in sport is both easily trainable and critical to success. No wonder “strength and conditioning” is labeled as it is.
Confidence
In terms of what a barbell program can deliver, confidence is a factor that cannot be understated enough.
Is the benefit of the 500lb squat the actual physiology and neurology behind that lift, or the confidence one can derive from it (if you are an individual who relies on raw physicality in your sport)? I’d say the confidence is often more important unless you are an Olympic weightlifter or a track and field thrower.
Strength training delivers huge benefits in the realm of confidence, especially for those individuals who may be insecure about their own physicality, which in this day and age of social media is a great, great many.
Confidence also digs into the mental training realm. Knowing how to create and use anchors (such as superstitions in baseball) is a huge key to becoming more consistent, especially in a sport that demands it (well, all sports do, but ball-skill sports are even higher tier here).
Learning ideas in mental training can go a long way when the increased weight on the bar may no longer provide a benefit to performance.
Discipline
When it comes to a cornerstone that can improve team dynamics, there are few things that compare to personal discipline and accountability. Discipline starts with the individual and lots of little things will always add up to big things. Small changes in the detail of personal discipline, all the way up to the total team dynamic make a huge difference in winning and losing. This is a common area of a sports professional, strength coach, sport coach or otherwise that is of the essence.
In many cases, rather than obsessing over sets and reps, deeply considering the improvement of team and personal discipline can be a difference maker. This is an area I’ve grown considerably as a coach in the last 5 years and is something “they don’t teach you in school”.
Parasympathetic Tone and Awareness
I’ll leave this one short, but consider two athletes. One is the mouth-breathing, hyper intensity guy who can attack the squat rack with fury, but struggles to make good decisions under pressure on the field. The other athlete is a nose-breathing, mindful individual who has a strong awareness to his or her surroundings.
Being great under pressure means not going “over” the inverted U of arousal, and understanding how to teach athletes how to do this under pressure is an important factor in not only training, but game preparation.
Also, knowing an athlete’s neurotype and dispositions here can be of huge benefit, as noted in Christian Thibaudeau’s latest podcast in helping athletes reach better gameday performance.
Perception and Reaction
As we move further down the list, we reach a world that is just being discovered an unlocked. Who cares how fast your running back is if he makes bad decisions and gets tackled in the backfield? This is an area that my dudes Michael Zweifel, Scott Salwasser, Cameron Josse, Korey Van Wyk, and the OG Shawn Myska (Myska, Zweifel, Salwasser podcast), as well as many others, are making a huge contribution to our field, and a contribution I believe will be commonplace as any modality in sports performance in a decade or two (it does take time for great ideas to get over initial resistance, as with anything).
This also marks an area that, within any governing body regulations, can easily be done within the scope of any sports performance coach. It also is an awesome creative piece to training that allows for a generation of FLOW state on the part of the creator, and is a huge breath of fresh air to the field. For more info on this training or relative examples, check out Michael Zweifel’s recent articles on the topic.
Turning the Weight Room Warrior into a perceptive Monster
Here are also some simple warmup drills that Michael uses that can become as complex and specific as coaches can make it over time.
Variability and Adaptability
If you checked out the latest podcast I did with John Kiely, you may have noticed a gem; which is how the size of the area of the brain responsible for a skill responds as we train that skill. When we train a skill too heavily, that area of the brain can shrink to the point where we actually hurt ourselves in performance (musician’s cramp).
I believe the greatest athletes of our time our highly adaptable. I believe they don’t ever let that area of their brain get “too small” and always keep an open level by which to adapt to outside stimuli (aka game performance).
For some reason, my most skilled athletes I’ve ever trained (the smoothest tennis player with the best technique, or the swimmer with the best feel for the water) have just never seemed to instinctually want to push weights to their maximal level. They always seemed to want to push a weight by which there were a few more movement solutions… as the closer a weight gets to maximal, the fewer “solutions” to lifting it successfully exist, and the lower variability the task has.
In other words, lots of work north of 85-90% 1RM can reduce adaptive ability. Knowing the brain, and how fine and gross motor skills may at some point be inversely related is important to helping athletes achieve to their highest potential.
Joint Manipulation and Coordination
I talked earlier about how coordination can take horsepower and allow an athlete to fully utilize horsepower to sprint and jump to the best of their ability. The best athletes create immense torques by the transmission of force from joint to joint in the transverse plane, as well as through the utilization of the arms and ribs.
Watching the video below, can you tell me why the athlete in the black shirt jumps higher?
Here’s a hint, it’s not what he does in the squat rack. Coordination and joint torques are critical to fully unlocking athletic potential. I’ve learned a ton of this from coach Adarian Barr, and he has put another layer of awareness into my understanding of what it means to be an athlete.
Tri-planar Movement Skill
To be a great athlete, especially in any sport where multi-directional movement and rotation is a factor (just about all sports), the ability to rotate joints is of the essence. When you really hone in on abilities in the sagittal, frontal and transverse planes, you can start to link every-day movements to what an athlete is exhibiting on the court or field of play.
Roger Federer is a good example of an awesome athlete with full function in all three planes… he doesn’t need to lift the house… or even half a house, to be able to fulfill the demands of his sport, and it’s blessed him with excellent career longetivity.
A coach will inform me a tennis player has a tough time moving laterally on the court. Turns out, he has very poor mechanics and movement of his thorax, so we need to work on his ribcage and sagittal plane to begin to unlock better movement in other planes. Just throwing the slideboard at him won’t give him what he needs to move better.
I’m starting to realize that even the ribcage and thorax of an athlete is a “constraint” and a problem for the nervous system to solve. If you can’t get from A to B in a manner that someone with a high and narrow ribcage can do, then you’ll have to create a different strategy.
Different athletes have different dynamics of the pelvis and ribs, and many times there is only so much we can truly do to improve things, but there is always a difference to be made. Learning how to breathe properly and master sagittal plane movement (learning how to turn on abs and hamstrings) is a great starting point, before you dive into the PRI rabbit hole (a rabbit hole I’ve gotten a heck of a lot from).
Vision
If there’s one thing that defines athletes who have to deal with a very small ball moving at very high velocities, it’s vision. Heck, any sport has a demand on an athlete’s visual ability, but the actual mechanics of vision itself can be trained and improved. I’m pretty much banned from playing pro baseball or high level tennis, because amongst other reasons, my vision is 20/25…. not good enough to see the ball when you need to in order to make that rapid fire decision on how you’ll react.
Coaches like Jeff Moyer of DC Sports Training are doing a great job integrating it into their practice, and pioneers like Dr. Bill Harrison are doing things that are making a huge difference for players.
I think vision is a tough one for many coaches, either because of scope of practice, or knowing what you are doing well enough to get past the hokey light-tapping idea of vision training, and really be able to hone in how vision works in the game itself. Either way, as more headway is made here, and more tangible success continues to manifest itself, I believe this will be a big area in the future.
Experience
We have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, but in reality, to be elite at one’s sport is more like a range of 3000-20,000 hours. A fair amount of exactly how long it takes probably comes down to practice habits, as well as many of the other factors in this article. Early exposure to similar game like stimuli is important as well, as many of us have heard stories of how early many stars have experience in their sport. Of course, there is a very fine line with how early athletes choose to specialize, but in terms of getting a level of myelination down with the pathways of one’s sport is important.
I also believe a diversity to be of huge importance, in looking at experience combined with the ideas of variability and adaptivity. Play one’s only sport for too long at too high of stakes, and the results in terms of injury and burnout are clear. Kids should play in their sport for a good long time before seriously competing or doing focused training for it. Also interesting is that the “focused training” for an athlete to get better in their sport is often only a couple pieces from this list.
We now move to the list of things that are harder to change…
A Drive to Be Great
Nobody “accidentally” became a professional athlete, and the first rule of being a good athlete, or anything else in life, is the intention to be great. Kobe Bryant is in the gym hitting shots before anyone else for a reason.
I am a believer that our reality is largely the result of our intentions, imagination (dreams) and the wirings of our subconscious mind. If you want to be successful in your sport, it must take a 500lb farmers-walk level grip on your daydreams.
In many cases, an athlete either has this, or they don’t. No matter how good the training, coaching, nutrition and any other intervention… if an athlete doesn’t want to be good… they won’t be. This is where as coaches, peers, and probably most importantly… parents, realize that the best direction to be steered is that which we are most passionate.
Character
When it comes to success, John Wooden says it so well that “winning takes talent, but to repeat it takes character”. Selflessness, honesty, and a strong work-ethic are keys to teams working together and winning in the longer haul.
Why is it hard to change character? Well first, character absolutely can be trained and improved, but the older an athlete gets, the harder this is.
By the time an athlete is in college, subconscious programs are set to the point where John Wooden himself had mentioned that if an athlete didn’t have character by the time he arrived as a Freshman, that he likely wouldn’t have it by the time he left.
On the other hand, those coaches gifted with working with younger athletes have a tremendous responsibility and blessing in being able to make an impact on character.
People can absolutely change, but they need to want to change. Expansive awareness, often driven by a personal crisis or conflict can be a force of change in our older years, but this is outside the scope of many professionals.
If nothing else, knowing that athletes are sponges, and how we carry ourselves as professionals, and what athletes can detect of us personally, is critical in making a full-circle effort in this department. If you can do nothing else, model the person that you want your athletes to be (and of course the person you want to be).
Acetylcholine and Muscle-Spindle Responsiveness
Very simply put, some people are just more skilled in movement. If you look at the neuro-typing spectrum, the 1B and 2A have more Acetylcholine, have better peripheral movement capability and can harness the stretch shortening cycle better. These are the guys and gals that more naturally find the “coordination” box of this listing of athletic qualities and abilities. It is often the people outside of this… or those 1B and 2A athletes who have “lost their roots”, that various coordination training means can have the biggest impact on, although this training is certainly useful for anybody.
Body Proportions
The final aspect of being athletic, and the least changeable unless you have a time machine and can change your parents, is simply body size and proportions.
As sport becomes more competitive, body types become more and more specialized, to the point where in some cases you can’t compete on a high level unless you fit a very specific criteria!
Since we can’t change this… I’ll just let this sit here.
Summary
So that’s the list… I think the world of sports, and performance within certainly will become better and better as we band together and push forward with our own talents within the field. This list probably isn’t even exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point.
As always, the basics are the basics, get athletes fit, strong disciplined and confident, but beyond this, the scope of a sports performance coach in terms of ability to deliver training means and methods that strongly impact an athlete is vast, and it’ll be exciting to see how our field presses forward in this regard.
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