We live in a system!

A discussion about individualisation being explored amongst training systemisation.

When I began coaching, I was drinking the kool-aid of athlete autonomy and individualisation. A driving force for me becoming a coach was that in my own experience as an athlete, I felt (incorrectly, in hindsight) that my needs as an individual athlete were often not met and that if I were to become a coach, I’d be able to create an environment which would provide bespoke needs for every one of my athletes. A quote from The Wolf of Wall Street, which randomly (especially given the context of the scene and themes of the movie) resonated with me as a driving force for coaching inspiration, was: “...I never ask my clients to judge me on my winners. I ask them to judge me on my losers because I have so few.” This quote resonated with me so heavily as I felt that in the world of athletics, the perceived quality of a coach can be defined by the success of a single individual and, for whatever reason, the unknown graveyard of athletes and failures of the coach are not taken into consideration. Within a coaching system, how many athletes improve, stay the same or fall apart? Is it ever over 50% success rate? During my origins as a coach, and for a few years after, I felt as if it was the fault of coaching systemisation that so many athletes leave the sport broken and unmotivated. I didn’t want to have one shining star in my squad, but a whole squad of champions and this would be my defining quality as a coach. Ironically, only a few years into coaching and my losses far outnumber my wins.

If these rigid coaching systems, in which an entire training group were put under the exact same ‘loads’ of running and lifting, were the cause for athletes being injured and dissapointed then surely individualisation must be the solution. Training environments in which everyone had their own catered program for their needs as an athlete would ensure that the athlete’s weaknesses are addressed and that training loads are appropriately managed. You can absolutely nail possible issues such as previous injury history, exercise preferences and create precise environments for technical development. It may be a false dichotomy, but a coaching contemplation some may have is whether or not you should be coaching the event (in athletics) or coaching the athlete. If you are going down this rabbit hole will be a surefire way to say that you’re coaching the athlete. Coaching in this manner, you truly feel as if you’re doing the best possible thing as a coach. If you are going down this rabbit hole, you’re probably doing it with the best intentions of caring for the athlete and ensuring they’re getting the coaching that you think they need. Early on, I must have felt as if I was better than a system - and I’d say that I began to create negative connotations to the word ‘systems’ within a training context. To me, words such as ‘generic’ and ‘ unspecific’ were where my mind went when I thought of systems as, surely, a system was not capable of serving a wide range of athletes. I put systemisation against individualisation and created a false dichotomy. I thought that every athlete deserved their own system and I was dead wrong in this assessment.

As a coach, you should create a system and that system needs to reflect what you believe to be the most important pillars of success in your chosen sport. What is actually going to move the needle in creating a positive influence for the performance in your sport? In my opinion, the greatest system which consistently answers those questions is the Bondarchuk system - a system which has such consistency in exercise selection and session organisation to the point where you can truly understand the correlation between exercises, athletes, time and performance. In the example of creating a system for short sprints athletes (100m - 200m), physical qualities and skill sets associated with acceleration, speed, the endurance of speed and general fitness (power, global and localised strength, mobility, aerobic capacity) are probably going to be the pillars of your system. Once the most important components of training are identified, you then need to organise how these qualities are to be trained and what methods you’ll explore. The organisation of training is probably going to consist of questions such as: “are each of these qualities going to be organised into individual units of work or mixed?”; “what are your training logistics like?”; “what facilities do you have access to?”; “what is your competition schedule?”; “what time do the athletes finish work?” etc. The organisation of work will probably have hard limitations set by external factors unrelated to sports performance and you’ll rarely be able to have the most ‘optimal’ training schedule possible. You just have to rock with what you’ve got and factor that into the creation of your system.

Upon acknowledging the organisational constraints existing within your environment; you then need to create a list of methods which reflect the qualities and skills you wish to pursue. “What does speed or power development actually look like; and how can it be progressed and regressed for different stages of the year and at different stages of athletic readiness”. If you’re cognizant of the fact that things look different at different times of the year, do you have principles which guide how things should change throughout the year? Some simple principles may be that you wish to be more general, extensive and accumulative away from competition and then lead to more precise and intensive methods closer to competition. In planning these methods throughout the year, you need to ask: “How do these methods actually look when executed? What are the key biomechanical markers you want to see as a coach? Do these biomechanical markers have different bandwidths of ‘acceptability’ at various stages throughout the year?”. I guess these questions become more a matter of periodisation - but it’s important to have progressions and regressions not as time stamped moments within a system (i.e. 2 months out from first competition we do ‘X’) but as entry points to cater for the various capabilities athletes bring to a training environment or to be robust to the realities of injuries and niggles.

Now that the system is ‘set’ (what are you training for, what are the important qualities, what are the methods and how are they organised both at a macro and micro level); a clear outline as to what it takes to be good at X (lets just say sprinter, for the sake of the article) exists. If the goal is to be a better sprinter, you should be confident in saying that regardless of who you’re training, in your system, all components will be addressed and the athlete should get faster. Within this system now, you’ve created something in which individualisation can be explored. You can still have an ‘athlete centred’ training environment with a system designed solely by the coach. This is a reality found within the teaching profession which helped me understand this.

When I was teaching English and you’re faced with 28 students in a non-streamed class (a class with a range of capabilities), you broadly teach everyone the same things in a similar manner. In order to complete an assessment task (in this instance, an essay), all students need to understand the content (e.g. a poem and its context); the metalanguage and structure specific to the task (e.g. metaphors, similes, stanzas, etc.); how to organise an argument or analysis (sentence and paragraph structure, understanding the demands of the assessment question) and then how to do it within the context of an exam (time, pressure, etc.). You then have a certain period of time to prepare for this task and the manner in which you prepare for the task has so many comparisons with athletic preparations. You initially start quite generally by addressing requisite content (read the poem, understand the history and the author, probably have to address what different techniques mean and what purpose they serve to communicate ideas - akin to getting ‘work’ in, addressing the ‘basics’ such as strength, technique and capacity) and then as the term progresses and assessment looms; class tasks become more specific (assessment simulation, exploring specific themes or ideas - similar to race modelling and simulation). At different stages during preparation, you’ll explore different methods (perhaps group work; relying on peer-to-peer teaching; visual tasks; written tasks; creative tasks, etc.) which will expose and develop different strengths and weaknesses of the students. Throughout the entire process; you’ll find that as long as you allow for bandwidths of expression and you’re not too controlling of the interests and learning/writing style of the students and you’re providing feedback personalised to the student (sometimes the whole cohort can be enough also), students will take it upon themselves to learn the way they want to learn and produce something for an assessment task in their style. To me, this process highlights that individualisation is something that occurs within a framework or system; as opposed to creating a system labelled as individualisation itself. This may seem super obvious, but it’s something which I’ve only come to accept within my own coaching practice somewhat recently.

A few other reflections regarding the power of a system:

• Inherently, athletes (or students) create a closer community when they’re all going through something similar or attempting to undertake a common task. In a classroom, if different students were to be assigned different tasks based on a particular metric, it may have psychological or social ramifications. These students may feel like an ‘other’; they may feel more special than other students; they, or other students, may become envious of the work that the ‘special’ student gets to do. This phenomena occurs in a sporting context as well. As long as there’s variety within a system, different athletes will shine and struggle at varying points of the training process; but there is a commonality between them which they must collectively overcome (even in an individual sport environment). This is a powerful social tool which often pushes performance more than any perfectly curated program ever could.

• If your training system reflects the requisite demands of the sport (physically, psychologically, strategically and technically) and the athlete isn’t able to get through the work, then perhaps they’re not in the ‘right’ sport or that the system is too advanced for the athlete. I think that everyone should be able to enjoy any sport, but there are unavoidable truths for performance in sport which make each sport unique. I would get demolished if I were to be put into a training system designed for a rugby prop, for example. That’s ok - the system is likely made for a target athlete demographic in mind. Perhaps the athlete is not ready to fit into the system due to being out of shape or not athletic enough - if I were to walk into Rana Reider’s training environment, I don’t think that the most regressed version of whatever that system is would save me from being absolutely shattered but it’s designed to get someone running 9.9 to running 9.7.

• Peer-to-peer teaching can never be underestimated. As much as we, as educators or coaches, would like to believe we have the greatest potential on athletic outcomes and teaching, all pedagogical theory would point towards athlete to athlete teaching as the most potent and effective way to learn skills. I think this may be more relevant in the developmental stages of athletic development.

• If everyone undertakes a system and no one succeeds on that system, you should be confident that the training system has something to do with the lack of success. Likewise, if everyone’s on a system and you have positive results across the board, you should be feeling pretty good about your system. If everyone’s undertaking the same system, and there’s a 50/50 split of good/bad results and there are commonalities amongst the successful and unsuccessful groups, you may want to consider creating a more flexible system to accommodate a broader range of athletes or you may just need to acknowledge that your system is made for a particular kind of athlete. If everyone’s on something different, it becomes murky as to how you attribute success and failure. Sure, all training works, but if you are able to systemise the training experience, it may become easier to progress year-on-year as you can monitor what truly makes an impact on the improvement of performance for individual athletes.

• If everyone’s undertaking a similar task, training becomes logistically more viable. Training and teaching flow; workplace safety; sharing of space - all these ‘atmospheric’ variables which exist but are hard to quantify or define, become complimentary to the training process.

• There’s no such thing as a perfect program for an individual. Training itself is the only commonality between all great athletes.