[powerpress]
A More with Less World.
We live in a world where people are looking to get a better result with less effort and with the investment of fewer resources.
Sport is right in the middle of that mix – the “more with less” generation.
Coaches are continually thinking, “how do I get the best possible result with the least amount of work?”
This is a significant change to where we’ve come from in the past.
We went through a phase in coaching in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, even into the 1980’s where the focus of training was on how much work could we do. We found that athletes were doing enormous volumes quite often of non specific work to get some sort of a result.
Coaches started to get a little smarter in the 90’s into the 2000’s working a lot closer with sport science and realized and valued the importance of recovery and incorporating recovery into the fundamental aspects of every program that athletes were undertaking.
With recovery, athletes could work harder more often, provided they were really thinking about cryotherapy (or ice therapy), massage, nutrition, hydration, meditation and spending as much time on recovering from hard work as they were actually doing the hard work itself.
But right now there’s a real shift.
And Now….
There’s a real shift now as coaches in all sports – particularly the big “time-commitment” Olympic sports, are facing the challenge where the athletes, particularly young athletes, (and their families) are demanding that coaches find new and better strategies for getting great results with the least amount of time investment.
Parents are busy, coaches are busy, athletes are busy, everyone is very busy and has a limited time to invest in coaching programs and getting the best out of themselves. So it’s all about efficiency.
The Big Question.
The number one question I get asked when I travel around the world at the moment is “Can you get the same or better results with less work?”
And I’ll answer, “Yes, you can get the same result or better result with less work providing you coach a lot better.”
So if you’re a coach who coaches while standing still, you don’t engage and you don’t interact with athletes and you decide to decrease the volume of training, if all you do is do less training and expect a better result, you’ll be sadly disappointed.
If you decide to decrease the volume of your training, but at the same time significantly improve the quality of your coaching, improve your communication, improve the quality and quantity of your feedback to athletes, improve the way you work with athletes, improve and enhance your sports specific technical and strategic ability, then yes you can do less work and expect a better result.
But…and it’s a very big BUT.
If all you do is decrease volume, you’re not even going to get the results that you’ve got now.
But there’s an opportunity here for smart coaches.
There’s an opportunity for coaches who want to change the way they coach, enhance the way they coach and coach far more effectively to get more with less.
Take the challenge.
