After a hiatus Coaching Matters is back for the September edition.
A very busy off and pre-season (including the small matter of getting married!) has cut dramatically into the reading and writing time I have had so some posts below will date back to May.
My comment this month regards the ever increasing use of creative language in sport. Or in plain English…..”Bullshit”.
From “False 9’s” and “the corridor of uncertainty” in football through “Short Arm Penalties” and “Jacklers” in rugby to imports from the business world such as “leveraging best practice” and “analytics” these words and phrases are not only meaningless but cause considerable confusion. Last weekend I asked 5 different people what a “Bodyguard” is in rugby and got 5 different answers.
With more and more sport coverage on TV there is more time for pundits to fill and they invariably use flowery language to camouflage their lack of actual insight while coaches and players wish to seem more intelligent than they really are.
I distinctly remember a new player at a club I coached at a few years ago struggling in defence for over a month. When one of the other players recognised he was targeting the wrong player at every ruck we finally discovered he had no idea what was meant by a certain “trigger call” being used and had totally the wrong idea about which player was referred to as a “Post” and was too embarrassed to clarify!
So the next time you are tempted to refer to a rugby ball as “the pill”, a free kick as a “short arm penalty”, “KPI’s”, “kinetic flow” or “non negotiables” ask the person next to you to give you a High Five. In the face. With a chair………..
The whole point of this blog is sharing and interaction so if you have written or know of similar content that would be good for future posts then please let me know via simon@undergroundathletics.co.uk or on Twitter @SiNainby.
As usual I have linked to all the articles, videos & media below that I have found of interest in the past month separated in to headings of Top 10, General Coaching, Skill Acquisition, Physical Preparation & Sport Science.
Top 10
- Analysing Fooball as a Dynamic System – Paul Power
- Role of psychology, profiling & psychometric testing in player development and recruitment
- Worcester back schoolbooks not supplements as key to players’ growth
- A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making – Cynefin
- Spotify Engineering Culture – part 1
- Spotify Engineering Culture – part 2
- Dave Collins on Talent Development
- John Cleese on Creativity
- Open mindedness
- 35 Secrets of Brilliant Coaches
General Coaching
- Pseudoscience has nested in schools
- 10 polite reminders from a football coach to pushy parents
- Manuel Pellegrini: How ‘The Engineer’ quietly fixed Man City
- The CV is dead… Are You Ready
- Coaching philosophy: David Rudisha and Colm O’Connell
- Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing?
- The way forward: A lesson in game intelligence
- Old School Coaching is Cutting Edge Technology – Carl Valle
- The Secret of Effective Motivation
- How neuroscience is being used to spread quackery in business and education
- 35 Secrets of Brilliant Coaches
- Louis Van Gaal speaks to Gary Neville about the philosophy he believes will transform the club
- A day in the life: Behind the scenes in Ireland’s Women’s World Cup camp
- Skill vs Luck
- Sports Should Be Child’s Play
- Thinking simply, in context
- Pseudo intervention and the power of placebo in teaching
- The SCIENCE of Coaching – 5 key resources
- How good was that kick, really? Two men decided to find out
- Non linear learning: Lessons from photography
- Designing a curriculum for learning
- The Backfire Effect: The Psychology of Why We Have a Hard Time Changing Our Minds
- I Don’t Want to Be Right – the power of false beliefs
- Dr Wade Gilbert – Talent Development
- Manchester United defender Nemanja Vidic lifts lid on David Moyes era
- How losing creates culture of misery and selfishness
- Pixar Cofounder Ed Catmull on Failure and Why Fostering a Fearless Culture Is the Key to Groundbreaking Creative Work
- The Managers – BBC Documentary
- Deprogramming the cult of the coach
Skill Acquisition
- The Perfect Golf Swing: Dispelling the Myth
- The Science of Play – why adults structuring ‘unstructured learning’ is essential
- Explicit pre-training instruction does not improve implicit perceptual-motor sequence learning
- Coffee with Mark Upton, Coaching Science Manager EIS
- You can’t teach speed: sprinters falsify the deliberate practice model of expertise
- Genes, Environment and Sport Performance: Why the Nature-Nurture Dualism is No Longer Relevant
- Does practice make perfect? Not nearly as much as you might think
- Experimental and differential practice for golf Part I
- Experimental and differential practice for golf Part II
- Coach Dan Pfaff on what drives successful performance under pressure
- Teaching Games for Understanding, the chicken and the egg
- The POWER of using ‘Teaching Games for Understanding’…
- Learning v Performance & Challenging Traditional Coaching
- Coaches’ Self-Awareness of Timing, Nature and Intent of Verbal Instructions to Athletes
- Neural Mechanisms for Interacting with a World Full of Action Choices by Paul Cisek and John F. Kalaska
- Transfer of motor and perceptual skills from basketball to darts
- How To Prevent ‘Choking’ When Goal Kicking
- The Key Ingredients Of Kicking | Rugby
- How To Get The Most Out Of Coaching Cues: Use An External Focus To Increase Performance
Physical Preparation
- Nic Gill S&C Coach with New Zealand All Blacks: Who is the fittest All Black?
- Do the Philadelphia Eagles run too much in-season?
- Ironman Mark Allen: Building an Aerobic Base
- Optimal Tempo Training Concepts for Performance and Recovery
- Clarence Callendar: Biomechanics of Acceleration
- Soccer as the Battle between Endurance and Speed by Steve Magness
- Steve Fudge: Physical Preparation for sprinting
- Tony Hadley: The need for speed
- Coach and Athlete Perceptions of an Athlete Monitoring and S&C Program
- Podcast interview with Adam Trypas, Director of Performance Munster Rugby
- Latest in Strength and Conditioning – ACSS 2013 Keynote Address – Robert Newton
- Dan Pfaff & Stuart McMillan: lessons in programming and practical application
- Serevi Trainer Chris Tombs Talks Importance Of Fitness
- The 1×20 Podcast with Michael Yessis
- Interview with Landon Evans, Strength & Conditioning Coach & Nutrition Coordinator
- Applying the “High-Low” Training Concept to American Football
- 7 Scientific Answers to Common Coaching Questions for Sprinters
- Strength and Power Coach Dan Baker Interview
- Rest, recover and get ready to go again by The Secret Physio
- Periodization, planning, prediction: And why the future ain’t what it used to be! by John Kiely
- An Interview with James Smith (aka. “The Thinker”)
- Interview with Swedish Athletics coach Håkan Andersson
- Training for intense exercise performance: high-intensity or high-volume training? P. B. Laursen
- A Q&A with Zac Brouillette – Assistant S&C Coach at Ohio University
- Dan Pfaff: Guidelines for the Implementation of Plyometric Training
- Throw away the needles & orthotics & teach them to run….. by Andrew Franklyn-Miller
- 3 Warm Up Tips For Better Kicking Performance
- Cian Healy: ‘There’s a lot of satisfaction in being able to lift a lot of weight’
- A Look Behind The Gold of Chinese Weightlifting
Sport Science
- Fulham say farewell to Magath & the crazy world of Felix the madcap
- Big Data: The next revolution in sport
- How our botched understanding of ‘science’ ruins everything
- Combating bad science – Metaphysicians – Sloppy researchers beware. A new institute has you in its sights
- Timing: the ignored factor in training and performance: chronotyping and chronotraining
- How Do Morning Workouts Affect Sleep?
- Recovery in Team Sports – Lessons Learnt In The Southern Hemisphere – David Joyce
- Recovery Strategies for High Performance Athletes
- Melding China and the West: Experiences of a Sports Science Professional in the Far East
- New research finds that world-class sprinters attack the ground to maximize impact forces and speed
- Behind the scenes at Port Adelaide AFL
- Why Bogus Therapies Seem to Work
- Your body on brain doping
- Individual Characteristics of Developing Elites
- Behind the scenes with the Australian track cycling team
- Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks
- Winning the Tour De France: A Sport Science Perspective – David Martin
- Everything You Know About Cramps Is Wrong, And Gatorade Is Full Of Shit
- Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different
- How GPS Technology Is Changing Rugby
- The ethics of the placebo in clinical practice
- The placebo effect: Why it’s actually great for athletes
- Inflammation Reduced with Behavioral Training
- A Neuropsychological Model of Mentally Tough Behavior by Lew Hardy, James Bell, and Stuart Beattie
- Rationale and resources for teaching the mathematical modeling of athletic training and performance by David C. Clarke , Philip F. Skiba
Force-Velocity-Power profiles sprint&jump: Theory: http://t.co/5FvNZGFbav Practice: https://t.co/a64kmItGb8 Papers: http://t.co/v6STwXExhV
— JB Morin (@jb_morin) August 20, 2014