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.
Modern speed training is rarely presented on the level by which athletes actually learn and display skills.
Here’s why.
Speed coaching is typically marketed and presented, as if athletes are all mechanically broken/inept, and just need to learn “the right technique” to get faster, as if a technical puzzle piece is missing that can simply be inserted, and “voila!”, “perfect sprint form!”. (This can be applied to any sport skill, not just sprinting).
Yet… the more you learn about sprint technique principles (the principles of movement, such as the use of levers, gravity and rotation in movement) the more you see sprint problem-solving showing up on a high level, very early in young athletes. I’ve seen 8-year old sprinters at my old track club run with an absolute mastery of their levers and fascial system, with no “teaching” required. The same thing often happens with long jump takeoff mechanics, performed on a high level at young ages before “positions” are introduced into the equation, such as “drive and hold the knee” that actually start to “cap” an athlete’s potential distance.
I’ve seen the same thing in my own son’s progress in his own throwing abilities, starting with flinging rocks at the creek at 18 months old, to hurling snowballs with speed and accuracy at age 4 in the recent winter wonderland of Ohio, using his levers and rotation on an already good level as far as physics is concerned.
Watching most training videos and coaching education, you would think that a key to technique might be found in teaching a “position” that athletes were formerly “unaware of” but can now be “enlightened” towards.
Yet, nobody learns this way (learn by position) naturally, and our natural learning processes are the ones that really matter.
There is a profound disconnection between “sport science”, and the actual art of learning powerful athletic movement. Most folks teaching various positions as a holy grail of athletic movement do not actually train themselves. They don’t feel any of it in their own body.
As Adarian Barr would say, “They don’t taste their own cooking“. There is an absolute art form to these things.
The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 28 reads:
“Understand the masculine (Yang)
but treasure the feminine (Yin).
Let a river of life flow out of you
Understand the white
but treasure the black.
Be an example for the whole world.
Serving as an example for others”
In modern coaching, the masculine (mechanical positions and related theory) is treasured. At the same time, the “art” is often referenced, or alluded to, but it’s rarely, if ever actually taught. It’s usually presented as… “don’t forget this is an art, and a science”, with coaches nodding in agreement.
But yet, as long as I’ve been a coach, and athlete in tandem, something continually grows on me.
This is the concept that an athlete’s perception and experience of the training itself (the “yin”) is going to play a critical role in how they end up adapting to it. This goes beyond using the “art” to just smooth technical edges and create buy-in… it permeates all of one’s training, and results.
We don’t spend much time discussing the nuts and bolts of the “art” in coaching. Many may struggle even listing elements that go along with the art element that can be attuned to and improved while facilitating athletic development sessions.
One of the most basic, square-1, elements of the art-form of coaching is “feel”.
“Feel”, after all, is how we all learn by nature. We may throw dozens of baseballs, hit scores of tennis serves, and take thousands of jump-shots. We remember how the release felt when we swish the 3-point fade-away, smashed the 140mph serve, or threw a record-breaking fastball. We associate particular feelings with good or failed performances.
But yet, that natural learning is thrown to the wayside, in much of modern coaching. Instead, the proliferation of drills and magic exercises takes the place of the athlete’s actual learning process.
With all that said, what if we could have it all?
What if we had a training system that took solid workout structuring and principles (Verkhoshansky, Issurin, Bondarchuk, etc. etc.), and then dove into the art of how athletes feel movement, how they perceive it, and how to break the psychological limits keeping their art form from reaching its full potential?
To get that, we have to study all of it.
Study the great coaches in the field, study training setups, tactics, technique, and transfer, but once you have an understanding of this, live in the art of sport and movement in the same manner that a musician lives in their music. Regularly find the feeling of movements, the energy, the flow and find how things organically fit together. Remember you are training human beings, and not machines. The same energy that powers our existence, and what it means to be alive, also powers our day-to-day training process.
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