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The Top 20 Tips on Being the Best: 20 years of experience in 500 words!
The Top 20 Tips on Being the Best: 20 years of experience in 500 words!

I have been lucky to be involved in high performance sport for the best part of 20 years.

I have been very very fortunate to work with Olympic Gold Medalists, World Champions, World Record Holders, Premiership Title Winners, World Cup Winners…champion athletes, teams and coaches in many different sports and in several different countries.

Quite often, when I do professional speaking or training with corporate or sporting groups, someone in the audience will ask, “What do all the winners have in common” or “From your experience, what things do all the great athletes, teams and coaches do that makes them the best”.

There are indeed some things all the great ones have in common: The Top 20 Tips on Being the Best: 20 years of experience in 500 words!

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Improve your Coaching by NOT Coaching

By Wayne Goldsmith |

You read right – improve your coaching by NOT coaching.

Coaching improves performance.

But too much coaching – over coaching – can have a negative influence on performance.

Who OVER coaches?

Typically five types of coaches OVER coach:

  1. Young, inexperienced coaches who are trying too hard;
  2. Coaches who lack real belief in themselves and who try to make up for it by giving too much information. These coaches will often want to be liked – and feel the more coaching they do, the more the athletes will like them;
  3. Coaches who lack belief in their athletes and feel the need to control every element of preparation and performance;
  4. Coaches who are being evaluated or assessed and aim to impress by being SEEN to control every element of the training session, i.e. they believe that great coaching is talking more;
  5. EGO driven coaches who see athletes / players as a vehicle to promote themselves and their reputations.
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Teaching Skills – A Performance Focused Approach to Teaching Skills.

What’s the difference between learning sports skills to play sport and learning sports skills to win in competition conditions?

Playing the sport is about learning and executing the skills of the sport.

Winning in competition is about executing skills to a high level of mastery, at high speed, in fatigue conditions and under pressure and consistently making the right decision about when, where and how to execute the skill.

So, why do so many coaches insist on teaching the basic skills without progressing them from playing level to performance level?

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Thinking Outside the Box in Coaching in High Performance Sport – Creativity is King!
Thinking Outside the Box in Coaching in High Performance Sport – Creativity is King!

There is a tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea who have never seen modern technology, who could not even imagine using the latest electronic tools, who can not comprehend western society concepts of computing, social media, high speed Internet links, laser technology or satellite navigation.

This tribe, believes that the best way – the only way – the way everyone must adopt  to cut down a tree is to make an axe by lashing a sharp rock to a piece of wood. This knowledge has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries….this tribe knows for certain that the only way to cut down a tree is to use a hand made stone ax.

And then, one day, through the forest, comes a man from the USA carrying a chain saw……. 

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Can you achieve the same or better performance results with reduced training volume? More on More with Less.
Can you achieve the same or better performance results with reduced training volume? More on More with Less.

One of the greatest challenges many traditional Olympic sports face is how to achieve the same or better results in less time. Kids and parents have very little spare time and for sports like swimming, track and field, rowing, diving, gymnastics, tennis and cycling, finding ways to optimise athletic development and enhance sports performance efficiently: i.e. achieving better performances in less time has become an increasingly important aspect of coaching around the world.

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Talent Identification in the Western World – Over funded and Over rated.
Talent Identification in the Western World – Over funded and Over rated.

The concept of Talent Identification – TID for short – makes sense.

Do some standardised testing and screening of lots of kids, find the ones who can run faster, run further, jump longer, stretch better than the rest and bingo- you found talent!

It all grew out of the now “mythical” talent identification systems of the old Eastern Block (and more recently China) – and the countless stories we have all heard for the past 30 years about how the centralised government systems put every child in the nation through a series of TID testing protocols and then funnelled them in to the specific sports where their talent was most likely to be developed to its full potential.

But in the western world, in spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at TID in Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Western Europe, with the exception of a few minor and specialised sports – it has failed and failed badly.

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Multi-Disciplinary (Performance) Sports Science: The Future of High Performance Sport.

There is no doubt that successful sports performance is multi-disciplinary in nature. Athletes and coaches need to be aware of the physiological, biomechanical, psychological, nutritional, medical and immunological and other issues that can impact on their competition performances.

It – performance – is rarely – if ever -about one thing in isolation! 

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