Coaching... Think Outside The Box

Through both my articles and seminar series, I discuss the Art of Coaching quite frequently.

The Art of Coaching infers that it is not what you know as a coach that matters.

It's how you can relay it to young athletes.

This is a common concern I see especially with younger coaches just out of college and still looking to impress people with there high intellect and advanced vocabulary. In fact, out industry is littered with coaches who talk a great game, seek out as much PR and notoriety as they can, but don't truly have any degree of experience or ability when it comes to effectively applying training strategies to athletes in unique and varying settings.

In that, I want to discuss today a coaching strategy that I have used that truly enables young athletes to master a given technique.

Rewrite Strategies

If you have ever been driving in a car with a small group of teenagers and had a familiar song come on the radio, you have already experienced in practicality the essence of a rewrite strategy.

By most contemporary definitions, a rewrite strategy is simply a teaching strategy designed to help students explore content area topics using music.

For the purposes of sport and training, it involves using common musical tunes to both learn and support the retention of a given set of instructions.

Those teenagers in your car, once they hear that familiar song, all begin to sing along word for word. That is the point we all tend to remember the lyrics of our favorite songs. Even if 20 years has past, we can still sing the words or hum the tune of a given song, because of music's innate ability to stay within the long-term memory of our brains.

Training Application

As you know, I am a strong proponent of teaching young athletes the skill set of a given exercise. That is, a 4-point instruction series on how to set-up their bodies prior to initiating movement (primary skill set) followed by a brief one or two instructions, which define the movement (secondary skill set).

Let's take the basic squat for example.

My secondary skill set is as follows:

Hips Back - To ensure that the athlete is driving into hip flexion/extension and using the powerful muscles of the hip to execute rather than the anterior thigh.

In-steps Off To protect against valgus knee motions and further elicit a kinetic chain that runs outside heel to gluten medius.

Although the young athletes are taught this sequence and have it reinforced constantly, some youngsters may still fail to execute session to session.