Oct 5th 2019, 24 tweets, 11 min read Read on Twitter
For those who may be interested, I will share a few of the slides, as well as brief messages from my presentations the last two days with Rangers and Man City ... before commenting, please understand these are just slides outlining a 2 hour talk ... <<THREAD>>
1st up, I discussed the relevance of speed to field-based sports ... i.e. why should field-based sports staffs worry about speed (& more specifically the kinematics that govern it)
... leading to what I think is a fairly uncontroversail conclusion: if speed is important, perhaps we should teach our players to sprint better
... next I shared this quote from Ackoff (one of my favorites!), as an opening to a discussion around our objectives as performance professionals in this industry - and whether we are truly having the effect we assume & expect to have

Think about these two questions deeply!!
... examples of what I term ‘small problems’ & ‘big problems’

We bias to those problems that are easy for us to ‘solve’ - but are they truly moving the needle in our ultimate objective of positively affecting the health and performance of the atheltes we work with??
Now some controversy

I have been thinking deeply about this for a few years - the marriage of ED-type and IP-type approaches to movement in sport. This isn’t a perfect description of it, but it is how I currently organize it in my simple brain

EDers will get off this train now
This is a heuristic I have repeated for quite some time now. And it kinda goes against my bias towards an ecological approach. It has forced me to really challenge myself on understanding the role of CONTENT as opposed to CONTEXT
This is a work in progress - so don’t judge!

Content = the technique
Context = the skill

One requires stability; the other adaptability
One is ‘normal’; the other ‘chaotic’

Performance is an iterative process of learning & breaking the rules
... the CONTENT (the technique) provides a ‘metaphor’, to which to refer back to in more CONTEXTUAL - technical situations ... @mljanderson’s ‘neural resuse’ is heavy, but is helping me work thorugh this
“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused ... When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.” - @barbaraoakley
... I refer to these ‘content metaphors’ as Foundational Anchor Points (FAPs) - SHAPES & PATTERNS to which we can refer to (consciously and unconsciously) within more contextual situations.
SHAPES!!

We can either focus our attention on what is common - or what is different; our POSTURE or our GESTURE.
SHAPE FAPs (common to all good movers):

📍Flexion of the free-leg
📍Extension of the stance-leg
📍Counter-balancing arms
📍Dorsiflexed free-leg foot

Focus on these!!
PATTERN FAPs:

📍RHYTHM
📍RISE
📍PROJECTION

(appropriate to the individual, the task, and the environment)
... while we appreciate the folly in building individual athlete-specific ‘models’ - we CAN coach to the most-appropriate SHAPES and PATTERNS - and then perhaps ‘mailbox’ athletes into various ‘groups’ - as defined by their ‘movement biases’
To remind:
POSTURE is what is common
GESTURE is what is different

What is different is determined by an athlete’s technical-tactical objectives, and governed by her inherent organismic constraints. This is SUPER-COMPLEX. Rather, spend time on the FAPs - the commonalities
And perhaps MOST-importantly - and the primary reason why HEALTH & PERFORMANCE teams MUST integrate fully - is the distinction between a technical fault & a mechanical aberration
Only when we can identify the ‘driver’ of any ‘dysfunctional’ SHAPE or PATTERN, can we determine our management strategies.

A technical cue for a mechanic problem is just adding fuel to the fire!
The preceding was a VERY brief overview of my thoughts on speed in field-based sports - of which some are admittedly still in progress, and not fully worked through. Thanks for reading 👊🏼
Traditionally, we have been more concerned with the CONTENT (in simplified S&C terms - bigger, faster, stronger), and have allowed the technical coaches to deal with the CONTEXT.

But should the performance staff-team have more responsibility for both?
More recently, led by folks like @MovementMiyagi, some in this space have been operating from a CONTEXT-first perspective - seeing our roles in this industry more as it relates to the PURPOSE (in systems-thinking parlance) rather than the ELEMENTS of performance
As I wrote - there’s room for both.

I personally feel the IP v ED ‘debate’ is a false dichotomy, and this has played out recently with those who critique (without understanding) self-organization, for example.
The most-relevant scale of analysis is the person-environment-task relationship - i.e. the athletes in the context of performing their sport.

This CONTEXT though is governed in part by the CONTENT ...
... both the tactical-technical objectives as well as the inherent organism constraints that govern what is available. Affecting the CONTENT within this will also affect the CONTEXT

It is not just one way - it is both

Circular causality
Missing some Tweet in this thread?
You can try to force a refresh.

Like this thread? Get email updates or save it to PDF!

Subscribe to ALTIS PTC | coming soon
Profile picture

Get real-time email alerts when new unrolls are available from this author!

This content may be removed anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just three indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!