This is a weekly newsletter from July 25th, 2022. I do most of my writing in newsletter form these days, forcing people to get yet another email in our culture of information overload, but hopefully, the best ones of their week.
If you don’t have a mastery, and grasp of the present moment your training, results and game-play, you will never reach your full potential as an athlete.
Most information on training has to do with sets, reps, exercises, drills/constraints, etc. etc., and don’t get me wrong, those are very important to have a solid understanding of.
But they aren’t the only thing.
Not even close.
There are a lot of people who are great at “training”, but then fail in competition. There are also a lot of athletes who overly intellectualize, and over-analyze their training. They fall out of the present moment awareness that makes training more fun, embodying, and even more effective.
An athlete who is in more of a flow state in the midst of their typical strength and speed training will adapt better to that training than an athlete who is going through the motions, reading the workout card, “trying/striving hard”, and mechanically trying to hit various body positions.
Part of the reason training may be referred to as “the grind”, so often, is because the athletic “human-ness” of sport, competition, and play itself is taken out of it, and replaced with rote repetition, under-emphasis of problem-solving ability, and a priority on quantity over quality.
For the first 20 years of mine as an athlete and coach (starting from when I began training at age 12, and coaching at 22) you could say that my main focus was just that… those sets, reps and ideal periodization schemes. In my own training I suffered from “over-attachment” to the result of each training day (part of why I’m so thankful now for the book “Easy Strength” by Dan John and Pavel).
When competing, I was ridiculously inconsistent, unless I knew I was significantly superior in terms of athleticism, to the other team. I failed to connect to my senses, my surroundings, and my breathing pattern, disconnecting me from the joy of sport and movement itself. Even in my power training for sport, I ended up loving training much more than I loved competing. I didn’t explore the links between training exercises and actual sprint/jump movements well enough, and it made me more mechanical, compressed, and down-force oriented (too much time going into the ground) in my movements in my 20’s and early 30’s relative to my high school days.
When you watch so many elite athletes warming up for their competition, be it Steph Curry, or perhaps the late Diego Maradona, you don’t see an over-attachment. You see fun, variability, fluidity, joy, and everything that makes us human. When you watch high jumper Stefan Holm jump train, you see focus and power, but you also see fun and exploration.
(One thing in particular I like about watching Steph Curry as well, is that you’ll notice, after a miss, sometimes he actually speeds up the release in the next shot to “take his mind out of it” (at least that’s my thought) which usually results in a make).
I recently had the pleasure of being able to chat with Simon Capon, who is an NLP Practitioner, and has worked with a wide range of athletes, from novice to elite across multiple sports. In my latest podcast, Simon digs into an array of techniques to get into that present minded FLOW state more readily, as well as combat the pitfalls of the “Dopamine Nation” habits that take us out of a greater connection in our movement practices.
In relation to variability, I also released a recent YouTube (yes I have a YouTube channel) video where I speak on how to plug in variability into your own training process. You can have the “paradox” of more enjoyable training and better results when you have a basic understanding of how variability works in sport.
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 in 2021, released the integrative training course, “Elastic Essentials”. He currently trains clients in the in-person and online space.
Joel was formerly a strength coach for 8 years at UC Berkeley, working with the Swim teams and professional swimmers, 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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