This is an excerpt from Joel Smith’s weekly newsletter. To get posts like this delivered weekly to your email inbox, head to just-fly-sports.com/free-ebooks/ to sign up or fill out the form at the bottom of the page.
Coaching strength and power for athletes has developed heavily over the years, with many effective training systems out there.
At the same time, I can’t say the same of “technique coaching.”
A big reason is that strength and power training has a simple formulation (exercises, sets/reps), where one’s technique is more complex and stems from a confluence of factors.
More often than not, technical training or instructions go “in one ear and out the other” regarding an athlete’s actual movement preferences in their sport, largely due to a lack of integrated understanding of what sports skill fully entails.
All of the time, you hear things in running or jumping like:
- “Drive the knee”
- “Dorsiflex the foot”
- “Be tall”
- “Keep your elbows at 90 degrees”
- “Attack the ground”
- “Have a long penultimate step” or “short last step” (in jumping)
“Take a short last step” in jumping is a common cue, but JM Echevarria, with this 29-foot bomb of a long jump, would beg to differ.
But do these instructions really help our performance? Where did they many of the popular ones come from in the first place?
As I’ve seen it, they originate from the following:
- Coaches using the cues and instructions they were told by their coach when they were an athlete
- Over-generalizations of human movement in an attempt to reduce complexity and make it more “cognitively workable”(such as reducing sprinting down to “be tall and lift the knees” or reducing a jump down to “take a short last step”)
- In the case of technical over-coaching, a coach wants to feel like they have more control over the athlete’s movements when ego becomes more involved
- (Related to the last point) Falsely assuming the athlete’s body lacks the intelligence to problem solve and learn skills on its own in the absence of coaching cues.
That all being said, where do we actually know what good technique really is, and how do we go about facilitating the development of that technique?
Based on what I’ve learned in my almost 20 years of coaching, it starts with a close observation of nature and natural processes.
This includes studying how children move and learn skills on their own, studying animal movement, as well as watching elite athletes in motion.
Nature is a go-to when it comes to understanding the brilliance behind our existence, including how we are built to move.
Take, for example, in general life, a very short list of inventions that came from a close observation of nature:
- Velcro (based on burrs of burdock)
- Sonar (based on bats and dolphins)
- Bullet Train Nose (based on Kingfisher beak)
- LED Light Efficiency (based on fireflies asymmetrical structures)
- Turbine Blade Efficiency (based on whale fins)
Velcro: But one of the many natural inspirations for modern invention
When we watch animals move, like a bobcat leaping across a gap, we can see a brilliance of problem solving capabilities, manifested through orchestra of nerve signals, muscle, bone, and pressure gradients.
We can also watch high-level athletes move, in their natural environments, especially those who haven’t received much, or any outside “coaching influence” in that movement.
Do the Maasai dorsiflex their feet while achieving unworldly RSI marks? Does watching this cause you to consider why dorsiflexion (pointing the toes up at the top of the jump) is so often “coached up” in plyometric movements?
I was once told by a swim coach, that the best pure swimmers he had seen, with the greatest “feel for the water”, and fluidity of swim motions, were the pacific islander natives he worked with; who simply grew up playing in the water, without being given coaching cues.
I’m not saying that a coach doesn’t have a role in facilitating technical development (it’s a big part of their job), but what I am saying is we should pay close attention, and reflect heavily on how we do put forward means to improve one’s technical abilities. (This means more emphasis on constraints, special strength, helping athletes feel primary mechanisms, using analogies, etc. and less on using cues for “correction” constantly)
Thinking on terms of nature, we also need to consider the role of environment in movement, which is often disconnected to our observations.
For example, it’s quite common to label athletes as faulty “butt kickers” in running. We may see a video like the bottom that is used to validate bringing in the “frontside mechanics run coaching”, so athletes don’t end up like the poor athlete on the right.
It gives validation in creating a “problem” that needs to be fixed, which gets people excited.
For the most part, we can admit that we wouldn’t like our athletes running like the individual on the right (and track sprinting is definitely a great expansion of a team sport athletes sprint library)… but here’s the thing we can see as soon as our lens of understanding expands.
Movement is strongly impacted by one’s environment. The athlete you see with a chest harness, on the treadmill on the right, running with a significant lack of torso-connection and core-integration is likely not going to be the way you see them running on the field of play.
This is a “problem” that usually doesn’t exist in actual sport play.
Team sport players are by nature, more “backside” dominant than most track and field specialists (part of it is 400m sprinter-like efficiency, and part is the high frequency nature of sport movement) but the trunk is rarely out of control on the field like you see it in the treadmill video above.
This video is more representative of team-sport athlete sprinting mechanics in a game environment than the treadmill video. Some athletes may exhibit more backside foot mechanics than this, but the torso generally remains in control.
When athletes are playing their sport, something changes in how they move.
Like sport coach and movement expert Michael Zweifel has observed, athletes move differently when changing directions in response to a sport stimulus, than they do in a “cone drill” change of direction task. Even in linear sprinting, I’ve seen swimmers who could run in a pickup soccer or frisbee game adequately, faceplant when sprinting a 10m dash for time, with just them, flat ground, and a timer.
At the end of the day, athletes are integrated beings who are hardwired for tasks and stimuli.
The moral of all of this, is that athletes are natural problem solvers, environment matters, and “technique” does not exist in isolation. In addition to environment, we also have the structure and strength of an athlete, that heavily plays into what we see from a technical perspective.
Strength and structure impact an athlete’s technique
Athletes who produce less muscular force will run differently than those athletes who produce more muscular force. Athletes who have a less dynamic trunk that can handle rotation, will run and move differently than athletes who are “rotationally enabled”.
At the end of the day, I have a growing list when it comes to facilitating technical development for athletes, which includes the following:
- Is this truly “bad” technique?
- How do athletes do in the same skill when presented with a competitive or external task?
- What does their physical strength, structure and alignment look like, and how might they be problem solving based on those factors?
- How well do they manage rotational energy through the pelvis and ribcage?
- Can they move with a sense of rhythm?
- What is their competitive sport and movement history?
- What is their personality like? Studious and structured? Free-Spirited? ADHD?
The answer to each of these is going to help you to paint a much larger picture of an athlete’s complete profile and help you realize that what we see as “technique” is part of a greater total system. The fun part is the more we understand about that total system, the more enjoyable the coaching process, and “technique training”, becomes.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance/track coach in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and has released courses taken by over 500 coaches in, “Elastic Essentials” and “Sprint Acceleration Essentials”.
Joel was formerly a strength coach for 8 years at UC Berkeley, working with the Swim teams and professionals, as well as tennis, water polo, and track and field. A track coach of 15 years, Joel coached for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club for 7 years, and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault and multi-events on the collegiate level, working at Wilmington College, and the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, along with his current work with master’s, high school and collegiate individuals.
Joel has had the honor of working with a number of elite athletes, but also takes great joy in helping amateur athletes and individuals reach their training goals through an integrative training approach with a heavy emphasis on biomechanics, motor learning, mental preparation, and physiological adaptation. His mission through Just Fly Sports is: “Empowering the Evolution of Sport and Human Movement.” As a former NAIA All-American track athlete, Joel enjoys all aspects of human movement and performance, from rock climbing, to track events and weightlifting, to throwing the frisbee with his young children and playing in nature.
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