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How To Coach For Tomorrow, Even If You Only Started Yesterday
This Week’s Gameplan:
What’s in a Name?
Smarter Strength
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Winning Plays
This week’s tip might be slightly cheeky but recruitment is often an important part of a community coach’s role. If you are running a ‘bring a friend’ week or a ‘come and try’ day and have new players joining your session, try to learn their names as quickly as possible.
It can take a bit of juggling to commit new names to memory while trying to run a session but you have a limited window to work in. You need to make a good enough impression on the new person to get them to come back again so you have to make it count. Using their name shows a prospective recruit that you care about all of the players in your team and who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
The Strength Side of the Equation
This week we will be covering the ‘S’ in S + C (Strength and Conditioning). No matter the sport, a little strength goes a long way. The particular requirements will vary between sports and even roles within a sport but out on the oval without a fully equipped gym, those distinctions don’t matter as much. At the community level, it’s better to just get everyone doing something.
If you don’t have a degree in sports science, this can all seem a bit daunting at first. You might be wondering what the right exercise is or worried about someone getting injured. If you don’t have a qualified fitness professional at your disposal to bounce ideas off, the most sensible thing is to focus on functional strength with bodyweight training.
The basic idea of bodyweight training is to move the weight of your body in various ways to make your muscles work. You can find and adapt exercises from various fields, such as calisthenics, yoga and pilates to name a few. Exercises you may already be quite familiar with are pushups, squats and situps.
Quality Matters
I’m sure you’ve all seen someone doing such shallow pushups that you can’t be sure they aren’t just shaking. Instead of them doing twenty pushups like that, get them to aim for five solid pushups. Even if they can only do one proper one to start with, that’s worth more than fifty shiver pushups.
Getting your players to aim at quality rather than quantity is also much more effective from an injury prevention front. Large repetitions of a movement with poor form can put pressure where it isn’t mean to be and the chance of injury rises quickly.
Focus on the journey and don’t set the expectation for yourself or your players that they will be able to do even the hardest of exercises after just a couple of weeks. Being reckless and rushing will only lead to issues. Focus on consistent improvement and being better than you were yesterday.
Progressions Keep it Fresh
Just like I spoke about several issues back with training exercises, progressions in bodyweight training can help stave off boredom as well as keeping momentum going. Doing 50 reps of the same exercise leads to diminishing returns and a loss of player enthusiasm.
For example, the humble pushup has many variations designed to vary the challenge. Want to make it easier? Put your hands on a raised platform. Want to make it harder? Raise your feet up instead. Moving your hands closer together or turning them in or out will change the amount each muscle group is contributing, which will also change the difficulty.
Avoid Unhealthy Competition
Friendly competition can be a great thing in a playing group. Whether it’s trying to be better at a skill or run that bit faster, healthy competition drives the team forward. Competition can go either way when it comes to bodyweight work and you, as the coach, can have a big say in how it turns out.
Players doing inflated reps of terrible form just to get a bigger number than the person next to them is not healthy competition. Players doing progressions that are clearly beyond them is not healthy competition. You want to cultivate a competitive atmosphere where shortcuts don’t count and competition is second to quality.
Yes, Girls Too
Bodyweight exercises are good for everyone and I mean everyone. In my experience, girls may raise an eyebrow initially but they will soon get into the routine just as well as a team of boys. They are usually slightly better as well because they are less likely to try and show off by taking shortcuts.
You may find it a good idea to let parents and players know ahead of a session that they will be doing training that will involve a larger range of motion than they may normally be exposed to in their sport, so they can be forewarned and dress appropriately.
Set The Tone
Especially these days when you are likely to have quite a range of physical ability and fitness levels, it’s absolutely vital that you are very careful to encourage everyone and not accidentally shame them. Avoid direct comparisons between players (which is good advice no matter what you are doing).
Work with your stronger players on their leadership skills and get them to encourage all of their teammates. Hopefully you have already been doing this in your normal training exercises and this is just a further extension of that. Having peer acceptance can go a long way to helping players who may be struggling to keep working instead of giving up.
The aim is to foster a love of functional training for the benefit of the player outside of the sport. If you can get them to do further work by themselves outside of training because they want to, then you have succeeded. Not only will they be better for your team but they will be healthier in general.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, from a coaching perspective, strength training isn’t really all that different to the skills exercises you are doing. It’s still about players doing the best they can, the coach using progressions to keep the challenge at the right level and everyone encouraging all the members of the team. There is plenty of content out there around specific exercises and if you have someone in your club or in your friend group, reach out and get some tips.
Nothing is without risk so it’s worth trying to do some research to get basic form tips for exercises.