Today’s episode features Fergus Connolly, renowned expert on team performance success factors and holistic integration and welcomes back coach Cameron Josse, director of sports performance for DeFranco’s Training Systems.
When it comes to athletics and sports performance, we tend to start in the world of muscles, forces, tissues and exercise physiology. What isn’t often covered when working with athletes is the multi-factorial considerations that go into actually winning ball games such as game speed, ball speed, technical abilities, tactics and psychological considerations. One of my favorite quotes on the industry of strength and conditioning is from Mark Watts, which basically says, “don’t take credit for your teams wins when you won’t take credit for their losses”.
Most strength coaches want to be able to play a greater role in what it takes to win a ball game than just getting athletes stronger, since eventually that becomes an end unto itself. On the flip side, sport coaches having a better knowledge of exactly how strength and fitness (and the specificity of that fitness) fit into gameplay helps the total effort of training athletes become better. To create a better model that can help all parties working with the athlete work in better cohesion, Fergus and Cameron teamed up to write “The Process”. which is a follow up to Fergus’s renowned book “Game Changer”, on holistic factors in sport success.
Today’s podcast is all about the big picture in what it takes to win games, write great training programs from a team sport perspective, and integrate the goals of the sport coaches with strength training more optimally. It also draws many parallels between concepts such as “short to long” in track and field and in the technical development of team sport athletes, as well other similarities in building a “base of technique” and working from “little to big”. Other concepts discussed include the 4 Coactive Model of athletic success, the importance of a unified model of winning factors, trends in a successful training week, and more.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Key Points
- Why it is important for a strength and conditioning/sports performance coach to understand a unified model of factors that lead teams to win games
- The role of fitness and conditioning in a unified model of sports performance, and how “lack of fitness” often takes the fault in a loss
- Trends in a successful sport practice training week in team sports/field sports with the goal of optimizing all four elements in the 4-Coactive model
- What a “Morphocycle” training template looks like for team sport training
- Cameron and Fergus’ take on building game speed and the role of the strength coach
- How to optimize sport movement and game speed training from a “small” to “big” manner
“If we have this game model approach, then we can communicate that to the entire staff” ~Josse
“Nobody asks you what your bench is or your squat is when you walk on the field, it’s can you play the game. If we focus on adding 5 more pounds on a bench or squat, that’s not really solving the problem” ~Connolly
“I see a lot of strength coaches nowadays that want to have too much control over the whole process (of game conditioning)” ~Josse
“The game is what’s most important so we’re looking at all the layers that go into that preparation process leading into that game, and that’s got to align all four co-activates, and by four co-actives, we’re referring to tactical preparation, technical preparation, psychological preparation and physical preparation” ~Josse
“They are starting to understand two key things (the importance of) the alignment and cohesiveness between all the different stakeholders in the team’s operation, and second, the ability to reduce the total amount of work the players have to do. Because now you have sport coaches and strength and conditioning staff being more aligned” ~Connolly
“Some of the better teams in rugby and soccer, they’ll take the day off following the game.” ~Josse
“If you give players that first day off, that allows them an extra day to recover emotionally from what just happened on game day” ~Josse
“The day after the game you aren’t going to get any quality work done or teaching done… you want to give the coaches as long as possible to review film” ~Connolly
“Take the day off after the game, bring the player in individually the next day, work with them individually, develop their strength at the same time” ~Connolly
“The advantage of going short to long is not simply force output, it’s technique correction. Take that principle to team sport, and we’re going from individual to unit to team in the same way, it’s just that when it comes to team sport, it looks different” ~Connolly
“The game has so much complexity in it, that learning is always prioritized, and you want the player to be as fresh as possible for practice to learn what the coach is telling them” ~Connolly
“We (sports performance coaches) may not be using the tactics, in the offseason (that’s the sport coaches realm), but we can meet them in the middle on the technical side” ~Josse
“You can get fit playing games, believe it or not” ~Connolly
“You tell me what’s going to make more sense for a player that’s gotta cover a guy man to man: having him cover a guy man to man and experiencing that anxiety over and over again against the best receivers, or carry a log over his head?” ~Connolly
About Fergus Connolly
Fergus Connolly is one of the world’s leading experts in team and human performance. He is a keynote speaker and consultant to high performing organizations around the world. Fergus is the only coach to have worked full-time in every major league around the world.
Fergus is the author of the books, Game Changer and 59 Lessons, and most recently, “The Process”, which he co-authored with Cameron Josse.
Fergus has served as director of elite performance for the San Francisco 49ers, sports science director with the Welsh Rugby Union, and performance director and director of football operations for University of Michigan Football. He has mentored and advised coaches, support staff, and players in the NBA, MLB, NHL, Australian Rules Football, and international cricket. He has also trained world boxing champions and advises elite military units and companies across the globe.
Fergus is a keynote speaker and consultant to high performing organizations around the world. His website is fergusconnolly.com
About Cameron Josse
Cameron Josse is the Director of Sports Performance for DeFranco’s Training Systems in East Rutherford, NJ.Cameron has been working with DeFranco’s Training Systems since 2013 and has quickly built up a resume working with a multitude of athletes in high school and collegiate sports, as well as professional athletes in the NFL, NHL, UFC, and WWE superstars.
Cameron earned his bachelor’s degree in kinesiology while playing football at the University of Rhode Island and holds a master’s degree in exercise science from William Paterson University.
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