What’s the biggest issue in training athletes today?
The biggest issue is today’s modern society and its inherent contradictions.
• We live in an entitlement society that expects something for nothing, and wanted it yesterday.
• We raise kids whose self-esteem needs constant reinforcement then turn them out into a competitive world that doesn’t care about an individual’s self-esteem.
• We have raised a generation that often lacks a serious work ethic.
A secondary but perhaps more topic-specific concern:
It is my unscientific belief that we have a lesser pool of true athletes at the same time the gene pool is continuing to improve. Through natural selection, better health care, etc, we bring healthier, more gifted children into the world but from day 1, poor parental decisions and later on, the individual’s poor choices, are detrimental from an athletic development standpoint. The race to get little Jimmy or Janey to walk and not crawl, progresses to throwing them into Super-elite, Traveling Team, All-Star, Regional Select Soccer programs at age 4 which then leads to hiring a personal trainer because they are falling behind by age 6. Too often this trail of tears leads to the final nail in the coffin, the discovery of the one game that is not strictly regimented and parent-coached, NINTENDO.
Drive through a residential neighborhood and tell me how many kids are running around in dynamic, unstructured play? Or, how successful has the US been in International Basketball as of late? Do we really believe that our little Air Jordan’s are going to develop a foundation to provide for their later success when they play (say at age 12) in a game where zone defenses don’t teach man to man defense skills but simply how to occupy space. Worse still, by employing a zone there is no offense because the little skippers cant drive the lane packed with zone defenders and they are too little to heave up 20 footers. I know, I am off on a rant here so let me try and get back to the question at hand.
The biggest issue in training athletes today is:
The poor quality of the best intentions of many adults working with our youth. This is much of why at the higher levels we have to waste time in remediation due to the lack of basic athletic competencies. Pick a random youth – teen – HS athlete and ask them to skip or gallop? Got a blank stare did you? Ok, now take something that they do well athletically and see how well they perform the same skill bi-laterally. Getting the picture? Jimmy or Janey has a shelf full of trophies at home but struggles with basic motor skills. The cut-backs to Physical Education in our schools is also of huge concern here.
Which changes now taking place in your field that should be encouraged, and which resisted?
It seems to me that in the US we have become successful? at creating boneyards filled with the athletes we put into accelerated programming before they are fully vested in the bio-motor skills & psyche necessary to handle the physical and mental impacts of high level training & pressures of competing at that same level. Think about how many athletes burn out long before their projected careers should come to a natural end.
Worse still are the horror stories one hears of programs that apply a Battan Death March approach to training. That is where you bring kids in and run them / plyo them / lift them / and compete them to near death with the survivors benefiting from a That which does not kill me, only serves to make me stronger – super compensation effect. Not quite in the spirit of Bompa, and this unique training method often parallels the athlete’s academic half-life at an institution. I recently read a European athlete’s trashing of anyone considering coming over to the US on scholarship, for many of the same reasons I sighted above.
We had an interesting situation here with a distance runner. One of the greatest talents to come out of HS in this country, she ran only casually here for a number of reasons including injury. She may never run at a high level again. But by not beating her up physio/psych wise, maybe she will get her legs under her again, so to speak. Whether she does or doesn’t, from a holistic, career, lifetime view isn’t that the proper approach? How about from a moral- ethical / responsible point of view?
To try and bring this back in line with the question, perhaps a good question would be:
What should constitute functional conditioning at a given age for a given athlete? And what should the training priorities be along the way?
I have serious concerns with the proliferation of web chat room’s self-anointed gurus and hired gun private coaches. It’s quickly becoming the case that where a kid doesn’t like or agree with their coach, that they go on line to find an expert to support their contradiction. While in many cases the local coach may not be fully aware of current theory or technique, the man on the ground remains the best bet for the athlete’s success. Mail order coaching is no replacement for hands on interaction. 99 times out of 100, adherence to a lesser gifted coach’s guidance will still get you better results than going it alone and or from part-time interaction with a hired gun or website guru.
As far as so called private coaches, there are loads of issues. Unless that same individual runs the program the athlete competes for, there is a huge disconnect. More than one coach, working with differing technical models, conflicting conditioning, different terminologies, etc, is of serious concern. While there are successful examples of athlete / team coach / private coach relationships, this remains a minefield fraught with both real and potential problems and liabilities.