Last week I wrote about my biggest struggles within coaching, this week I’m going to explore what I believe to be my current strengths. In my working life I’ve held various roles within a gym setting either taking personal clients or group fitness. The art of planning and executing a lesson will never leave me. Combined with an understanding of strength and conditioning within a professional environment has undoubtedly translated to my football coaching.
I’m not a S&C guru by any stretch but I do enjoy the topic in relation to my own training. That passion has given me a grounding in the how too’s of warm ups and planning plus building my confidence in the process. I’m not saying football coaches can only be bred from S&C coaches, that’s obviously not true. But we all develop our own skills in different arenas. Eddie Jones is a former teacher, Jose Mourinho a sports scientist and Pep Guardiola a former player. All reached the top of their sports, each from different backgrounds.
Warm ups
With this understanding of fitness, I like my warm ups to be interesting. Though this isn’t a novel approach and I won’t be making waves by saying that but I just can’t bring myself to send a group of young footballers off for laps to warm up. RAMP (Raise, Activate, Mobilise, Potentiate) serves has a great framework to deliver interesting warm ups. Yes, you could do a lap, a few exercises and a sprint to get you ready for training, but that’s amateur. Especially when Raise and Activate can be merged by a simple game, recently we used the ‘upside down cone’ game. A simple way to get them to mobilise is to change the way they can travel in the box eg. skipping or high knees. Then potentiate with a ball game. At this point the players don’t even think they’re warming up, they’re playing games and having fun. RAMP is a very simple process but so effective. So if I’m not being creative with warm ups, I’m just being lazy and I don’t want to be a lazy coach.
Planning
When planning a session, I used to use STEP, most people learn it on their FA level 1 course. It’s alright but I would rearrange it to task, space, equipment and people. TSEP doesn’t spell anything though. For me, it’s illogical to plan your session based firstly on the space you have, great you’ve got an acre of field to use but what are you trying to achieve?
I think drills, practice or games, ultimately pick themselves and that’s why I start with task. I need a place to go, an objective, something to work on. Once I’ve decided that, now I can consider what space I’ve got to use. It’s made easy though since we train at the same pitch each week. Same with equipment, I know what’s available to me so unless I’m using jumpers for goal posts, I’m good to go. Last but not least, how do the people fit into this i.e. the players. I’m usually considering whether they prefer games or do I need to change it up often and do I need to keep the rules simple? Once I’ve answered all these questions, now I know what tools I need to complete the objective. So if I’m including a rondo in a warm up, it’s because it’s related to the aim and it satisfies my need for space and equipment and finally, it’s been tailored to suit my players.
Confidence
I remember the first large group session I took, there must have been about 30 people all of different ranks of seniority. My legs had gone to jelly and I was sweating profusely. Essentially I was shitting myself. Luckily, by the time I came to stand up in front of 15, 10 year olds, I was pretty confident. But the early days are going to be rough and it’s going to be scary. The simple reason being, you don’t want to look a dick. You’re in the best position to make a fool of yourself and you’ve got to roll with it. You will do the wrong thing and say the wrong thing.
It’s easy to say to someone, ‘just have confidence’. But that’s shit advice, it’s like telling someone to not worry when they’re anxious. But I would say the need to have confidence never goes away. I realised this when I took a session a few weeks ago, that day I’d had some bad news and was feeling anxious. Emotionally, I wasn’t up for it. Predictably the session wasn’t my best. But I still needed to dig deep to have confidence to show up and be positive for the players sake. Luckily or unluckily, confidence comes from experience. Good and bad experiences will build your confidence simply because you’ve been there and done it and the experience isn’t new to you anymore.
I think it’s important to get as many experiences as possible. If you don’t have a related background, go find stuff that translates. Like the athlete must try lots of sports as a kid to learn new movement patterns, coaches must expose themselves to as many sports, topics and experience as possible. I’ve already mentioned my fitness background but today I’m learning from the worlds of business, teaching and other sports to develop my coaching. The more varied your learning, the more unique your experience will be.
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