SimonHarlingBlog Posts

A coaching friend of mine has been feeling overwhelmed and under-committed. 

There are not enough hours in the day.

In chaotic, complex situations, constraints enable creativity. They buy time. 

If you only had two hours in which to work a day. What would you do?

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The way in which something is placed or arranged, especially in relation to other things. A tendency to act in a certain way. 

One way to adapt very quickly is to monitor the disposition of successful groups that work in your field. Once matched for constraints. The only thing left to do is shine a light on what works.

It’s that simple.

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Creating change is hard. Harder still when we can’t see it.  

Radiologists are trained to look.

When asked to review a set of slides for cancerous nodules, 83% of the radiologists sampled missed a picture of a gorilla, 48X times larger than the average cancerous nodule, superimposed on their last slide.

You are not looking for hairy gorillas when you are trained to look for cancerous nodules,

Send your kid to a football camp and the coaches are trained to develop technical football skills. Coaches who are trained to see technical skills, look for technical issues to fix. Making it hard to see the physical and psychological mix that helps kids develop in full.  

It is tempting to simplify the challenge and fix it. Teach coaches another skill, add another responsibility, and produce another process. You only have to look at job recruitment posts to see how that plays outs.

But, that would be missing the point. Change is not easy exactly because it is owned by the majority but driven by the minority. In this example, only 17% of the radiologists saw something different.

Before coaches learn to take on specialist skills. Perhaps, it is time to first teach coaches to be open, curious, and experimental in their approach. After all, isn’t that what we ask of the recipients of coaching.

Are you willing to change?

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Perhaps you are a team leader, a coach, or a teacher, and dealing with people’s problems is what you do. 

They can’t see it.

Maybe they don’t care.

And that’s your problem. 

It can change how you show up, it changes the focus of your work, and it can weigh you down. 

People change when they are ready. Which might be never. And that is not your problem.

Far better to change the environment and play, don’t you think?

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More and more coaches are turning to social media to help them design training sessions. 

This might be a good time to remind ourselves about one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. 

Social media is designed to create connection, not context.

Content gets your attention. 

Context focuses your attention.

Perhaps it’s time to connect with coaches who like you want to focus on what actually matters. You can register your interest in the Athletic Kids Conference here.

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In 2001, the year my daughter Ellie was born, I completed the Tour Divide in 27 days. Canada to Mexico, 2700 miles, unsupported, on a mountain bike. Cycling through British Columbia, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and New Mexico traversing the Rocky mountains.

From the snow pushes of Montana to the hot desert of New Mexico, the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest over 10 times. Ask a local where the nearest town was, and they would often say, “it’s downhill all the way.”

Maybe they thought I needed some good news.

It is said that if you can get out of Montana you will make it through the Tour Divide. Each year, less than 60% of those who enter will finish. Most bail in Montana, but not all. I was with one cyclist when he decided to quit. We had spent the day cycling through the mud in Wyoming, continually washing our bikes off in the nearby stream just to make a few miles.

It was not hard to see, why he quit. My friend for the day was the stronger cyclist, but things had not gone his way, he expected to be much further up the track. But, he wasn’t. Progress had been too slow, and the prospect of the trail ahead no longer held him together. So he quit.

My progress had not been smooth either. But every so often, I had a small win, something that told me, I could and should keep going. 

Riding 80 miles on a ripped tyre that I had Macgyvered was proof I could adapt

Getting out of Montana felt like a landmark.

Riding solo for 4 days was tough but it showed me I was mentally strong enough.

Soaking up the big climbs in Colorado, I knew I had it in my legs.

The difference between me and the cyclists that quit was that I was growing in confidence, they were not. 

Any journey of discovery is much the same. Regular wins that somehow signpost you to success are not reality. But take a win at random, collect it as evidence and use it against any doubt you may have. And you are in with a chance.

Tour Divide Profile Image

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We could but we choose not to.  

Strawberries are no longer seasonal. It used to be that the cost was too high or the availability was just not there. The market fixed that. 

Sport so is no longer seasonal. 

We can’t blame the market. After all, it is our choice. The market simply puts the item in front of us and asks the question. Do you want to buy it?

If we want kids to be active, healthy, and curious we need to help them make better choices. Not the same one, over and over again. 

Who do we think they are going to learn from?

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Define it. Do it. Live with it. Repeat until successful.

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To help people relate, we often compare the thing we are selling, to something we already know. 

It’s like that only it will help you with this.

Making Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS) relatable to sport is one such example. 

“A squat is like the set up in a golf swing and it will help you generate more power.”

When sport is at the centre all else revolves around it. Sports scientists are guilty of selling Fundamental Movement Skills into sports like a bad timeshare salesman. But that is a distraction to the real issue of the day.

Article 3 of the UNICEF’S Convention on the rights of children. “The best interest of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect the child.”

Fundamental Movement Skills are fundamental to humanising. Sports skills are not.

To help you realign your priorities. Know how much time a child in your care spends developing their movement vocabulary through play.

Every child gets only one childhood. We need to respect their time. Not exploit it.

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We all come across situations that require more. More time, more money, more people. When we put more resources behind it, we get more of what we want. Whether you start, from a place of plenty or a place of poverty, the thinking is the same. We all wish for more.

Like the kid running down a steep hill whose face has changed. Wanting change is not the same as creating change. Be clear on what you wish for.

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Questions for when you are in a rush to get where you are going. 

What is this about in 3 sentences or less?

Why you?

Why do we need it?

What do you plan to do with it?  

What will happen if you don’t get it?

What will happen if we don’t get it?

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1 in 4 kids in Wales is obese.

If obesity didn’t come with significant risk factors I doubt many would care. But it does. And it costs society a lot of money not to fix the problem, but to manage it. 

One of the ways we manage the problem is to encourage activity which in turn improves health. But when we are stuck in our ways as we clearly are, maybe there is something that is needed before activity and health. A skill that transcends activity and health, I’d argue that skill is curiosity. 

The curious ask, “what else can I do?”  Curiosity gets you off the sofa and out exploring. Curiosity gets you eating things that are different, and just maybe not in a packet.

I’m launching the Athletic Kids Conference. A live online conference for teachers, parents, and coaches who want to raise active, healthy, and curious kids. You can register your interest here. 

It is not a conference with experts, opinions, and best practise. 

It is a place to meet others who like you want to create change. 

I look forward to joining you there. 

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I once thought everyday athlete was a cool title for a project. But it wasn’t. The people it was aimed at helping thought it made them sound bland.

Everyday value, suggests it won’t cost you much but that’s ok because you are not expecting much.

Everyday is bland, monotonous, and not much fun.

I write every day and someday I don’t think I can do it.

The kids ride to school every day, it rains, often it’s dark, and too many motorists are inconsiderate and mean.

Yet, every day, we can, if we choose to see it, consider the payoff and its value.

Active, resilient kids.

A body of work.

And sometimes, every day, not every other Tuesday or when you feel like it, is extraordinary. 

Thank you to Lily, Sara, and Dyfydd from the BBC. We had a lot of fun filming our family bike story in the sun yesterday.

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Has anything been more important?

Stuck in the middle between bored students and a university that needs bums on seats. 

The edge that made your project worthwhile rounded off in a meeting room.

Working for a group that prefers the powers of telepathy to the skill of communication.

Sure there is the hustle of the side gig. But, the side project is a chance to change the culture. How things are done. Without, waiting for the green light from inside a room.

If you whinge twice about the lack of progress in work, at university, or at the club you work at. Well, the third time, just maybe it’s time to actually get out of the box.

Think small, act big.

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It can happen to you. 

Or it can happen for you. 

When I was younger I was involved in a near-fatal RTA while out running. I went traveling to figure out what to do next since every day thereafter was a bonus. 

Some twenty years later, I experienced another instant life-changing experience. Only this time, it happened to me and for me.

The difference?

The one, well that was on someone else, it happened to me. At least that is what I thought.

The other, in time, became an invitation to grow, and take on skills that were missing, so as not to go back.

I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on anyone. Except maybe those who want to grow.

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The closer one gets the clearer the sound becomes. Move further away and you move out of earshot. 

Of course, you could amplify the sound to attract more people but that risks distorting it.   

Leave it and your most important task, your only task. is to turn up each day and delight those who love the sound as much as you.  

We have the time. The trap is to think we don’t.

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The kid with all the skills is easy to see. 

Young technically proficient kids, win a lot when the others are not as well drilled. And that casts another vote towards the expertise of the sport-specific technical coach. Day after day she is reminded that she knows what she is doing.

And because there are enough kids to point towards and say “that was me.” Some success is enough to continue to breed. Survival bias.

Here is how we have fallen into the trap. A positive feedback loop of sport-specific technical coaching. The foundation of sport in this country.

It’s obvious to see the technically proficient kid.

It’s desirable.

It’s easy, just follow the others.

And if you win, you tell the others. 

And yet, technical and tactical sport-specific success is not breeding success anywhere else in the community. Far from it.

The answer lies in the definition of success. 

Not a skewed definition of success. But a more well-rounded definition. A definition that serves the community, for the many, not the few.

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A mentor who doesn’t have the experience you require is not as helpful as a network of people who have done what you want to do.

An informational coach is not as helpful as a storyteller when you want to initiate change. 

A friend who allows you to offload is not as helpful as a motivational coach when you want to keep your engine running and stay in the game. 

A storyteller is not as helpful as a transformational coach when you have an honesty problem.

I hope you weren’t expecting the answer. But here is the point. 

If you find yourself misunderstood, don’t redesign the label, work harder on the message.

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Standing with the fridge door open “I’m bored.”

Stressed and anxious “I’m fidgetting.”

Working too hard to impress (self or others) at the gym “I’m breathing through my mouth.”

Calling it out because we want to get better. Improve how we do things. That’s not hypocritical because we are working towards something that may never be perfect. 

But calling it out when it suits. That’s for attention, not to resolve the issue.

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Take my kids to a restaurant and the chances are they will order pizza or spaghetti bolognese.   

When I ask the kids I coach to show me different ways to get from A to B by jumping, rolling, or running. I might get a few different options, but not many. 

I could choose to get furious or passive that my kids don’t choose something other than pizza. The alternative is to encourage them to try something else, and if they don’t like it, I’ll eat it. 

When I coach my kids I like to show them a few different options and then create a game, where they can try applying their new jumps, rolls, and running styles. 

If we want our kids to develop a comprehensive movement vocabulary, we need to keep going back to the table to try again. Over time, with persistence, an open mind, and a sense of adventure, it is possible, that the vocabulary of our kids will expand to include new tastes, movements, and experiences. 

We could wait until they are a little bit older, and wiser, and try again. Only, the time has passed. Our kids know what they like and what they don’t like, in their world at least, and now it’s even harder. 

Since everyone missed practise.

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I’ve lost count of the number of different ways we have tried to get the kids to eat vegetables. When we wanted our kids to eat spinach we hide it in their eggs in the morning. And that worked for a while.

Then we made a spinach curry and the rest was history. 

Lesson learned.

The issue was not the spinach. The issue is what we did with the spinach.

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Hype can validate your existence. 

But for the hype to create change, it has to be true. And that requires validation.

Validation is the act of proving that it is right, or accurate.

Not to be confused with thinking you’re a right, wanting to be right, or thinking it’s your right. 

If the change is worthwhile, the hype will come. 

Create change, not hype.

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Design from the top down and it is tempting to focus on features and ease of use. 

Work from the bottom up and design comes with feeling. After all. Why else would you continue if it didn’t make you feel good?

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It was youth football, kids kicking a football around, But not anymore. Now it’s “grassroots” football.

I’m not sure when it changed, or why it changed, but it did.

Grassroots, is to gather everyone up at a local level and create change at a national level.

Odd then that the change in name to “grassroots” has occurred at a national level, to create change at a local level. 

You couldn’t make it up. Could you?

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A salmon swims upstream to spawn.

Endless pools help swimmers produce a stroke that is more efficient.

Going against the tide can make you stronger, and give you insight. But perhaps it’s most useful when it provides purpose.

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In or at the centre. When there is nothing else to do but focus on the centre, whatever that may be, then you are “centric”. At the heart of all that matters.

I’ve been coaching for 20 years plus and not once has anyone asked me what I do. Not in any great detail at least.

I’m also a parent and again nobody has asked me what we do with our kids or told me what they do when they have them in school, at clubs or in activities, week in week, in any great detail.  

Which is odd. It’s odd because we are living in a world that is “child-centric”, kids are at the centre of what we do as parents, teachers, and coaches. And you would think that we would all want to know what the other was doing, for redundancy, for gaps, for progress or to find out where we are stuck.

But perhaps the friction is to do with the word “audit”. A word most of us turn away from. We might want to know the good stuff, but the signal that something is missing might not be worth the risk. Not, now, maybe later, likely never. 

Our intent brings us full circle, back to the word “centric”. If we are truly child-centric then we would want to know, right?

“Until we make the unconscious, conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung. 

The upside, of any audit, is awareness. To move from unconscious to conscious. The downside is the risk, that you have done something wrong, and that can be hard to ignore. 

So, let’s make a deal. No judgment. It gets in the way, and besides, as you will see from the Athletic Skills Audit, it’s an unrealistic position, to begin with. No one person can do everything, so relax. 

Here is what I want you to do.

Take the Athletic Skills Audit and talk about it amongst teachers, coaches, and other key people who are involved with your kids. Ask them to contribute, details on how to fill out the audit are on included. Share the findings with everyone involved. 

The real upside to all of this is, that I’m sure you are already there, connection. A way to start a conversation about the best way forward. With the question. How do we raise active, healthy, and curious kids? At the centre of that conversation.

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I write to help coaches, teachers, and parents commit to what is important to them. 

Let me tell you a story about my two kids that might help.

My eldest is quiet, unassertive, and happy to go along for the ride. My youngest is on the fake it till you make it tip, and it works often enough, for now at least. 

The eldest has on her wall “I will speak even if my voice shakes.”

The youngest. “Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn.”

In reality, my eldest says very little and occasionally erupts at her little sister when it’s not going to plan. And the younger is too busy being angry every time it doesn’t come off to learn very much at all. 

Nothing really worked. The journaling. Not even the long life lessons from dad. 

Until we started to introduce the idea of the eldest asking questions. Rather than “I want” or “ I feel” it was about asking a question. The eldest had an idea about what she wanted or how she felt but was not ready to verbalise it. Easier to begin with a question. 

The youngest now had someone who challenged her thinking.

And here is my point.

Whether we are on a fake til we make it tip or happy to follow someone else. If we are happy to accept that we are products of our environment. The smart move is to speak up, learn to accept the challenge, and begin to explore. 

Here are some edges for you to explore with your kids, partner, teachers, and coaches. 

Sport Specific Skills – Functional Movement Skills

Uncontested – Contested

Niche – Developed 

Fast – Slow

Chaos – Control

Success – Failure

Simple – Complex

Follow – Lead

Safe – Unsafe

Certain – Uncertain

Engaged – Compliant 

Self-Paced – Timed

In Sync – Out of Sync

Isolation – Collaboration

Strength  – Endurance

Stiff – Flexible

Mobile – Stuck

Accurate – Inaccurate 

Begin by asking questions, it might just be the easiest place to start. And then in time learn to ask better ones. 

After all, anyone who cares about what they do loves to talk about what they do.

The alternative is to pretend to know or just not say.

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The idea of Supermarket Sweep is to answer riddles and if the answer is correct dash around filling up your shopping trolley with high-value items.

The winner finds the highest value items using the least amount of effort.  

Here is my shopping list for my 9-12-year-old kids football teams. 

Things you might notice:

Some items take longer to complete but no one item is more valuable than the other. 

Not every item is stocked in one shop

Every recipe requires at least one item from each of the 5 sections.  

A communication tool. Shopping lists become useful when more than one person can use them. The work is to pass on the message by making the label clear, you can see this is a work in progress for me by following the links in the shopping list. 

Let me leave you with my own riddle. 

I have the highest value. I cannot be bought, yet I am created.

What am I?

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Acting as if you are all in, is not the same as learning what it takes to play all in.

Top sprinters, athletes, and weightlifters have learned what it takes to peak when it matters most. 

Let’s do it all again tomorrow, only next time better. Might just be a better place to begin.

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When it doesn’t happen that often, you might be able to count the number of times on one hand. 

My kids taught me this. 

Trace your inhale up your thumb and trace your exhale down the other side of your thumb before holding your breath at the knuckle. Repeat as required.

Last night we sat for a while, mouths closed, tracing our breath as it slowed until we could count it on one hand.

The things you can count on one hand are not always rare, or extraordinary, but often they are.

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“The intention is not to move the ball, rather to move the opposition.” Pep Guardiola.

Holding space is the result of good coaching. Players trust the coach enough to stay put despite what appears to be unfolding in front of them. And they trust each other to stay put because each knows what the other needs. 

The space a youth coach holds for her players is less technical but no less important. Because in that space, is the collective doubt that it is not working. A collective of parents, kids, and the coach themselves. 

This is why it makes no sense to me to have novice coaches working with young kids and inexperienced parents.

Good coaches hold the space in which kids need to work. Creating experiences that inform. Bad coaches move when the opposition moves.

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James Clear in the book Atomic Habits reminds us to:

Make it obvious

Make it attractive

Make it easy

Make it satisfying

So why are 10-year-olds kids standing on a rugby pitch, out of season, on a grey, wet and cold evening in May listening to a coach explain the optimal position for a jackal? 

The honest answer is that none of them has anything better to do. And that might sound harsh, but what if it was true?

If you want someone to do something different, you just need to make it better than the alternative. 

“Just” is to lever the fear of missing out in your favour. And right now we need to do better, a lot better because JUST is a lot stronger than you think. 

Here is an alternative suggestion. And here is how you create leverage through connection, community and coaching. 

Make it obvious:

Track each kid in your club and see what they do and more importantly see what they don’t do. That way you begin to see the barriers to developing a kid’s movement vocabulary. 

Provide support and connection to the kids who need it most.

Make it attractive

Reward positive behaviour changes with club socks, hats, and shoutouts, helping the kids be seen. And most of all, find ways to support those in the group who are hiding. 

Make it easy

Get the more active parents to facilitate the activities as long as they promise to get out of the way. Bring groups together and invite friends outside of the circle to join in, including the quiet ones,  Be inclusive, and have fun with activities. It might surprise you, and that’s the point. 

Make it satisfying

Encourage positive behaviours by getting the kids to post photos and videos of themselves doing the activities within their groups. And if they don’t want to post photos get them to write in, draw a picture, or tell you about it on a call.

Above all, have fun with it and give your kids something better to do this summer.

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The aim of the game is to score as many points as possible by recording one score for each of the 10 activities listed below.  

You have one week to complete the tasks. 

Some tasks will need some practise, and you might find some easier than others. So make sure you plan your week to make sure you give yourself enough time to complete the tasks – good luck. 

Throw, catch, hit and aim: 

Throwing and catching against a wall. This activity gets you 5 points: Throw and catch the ball with your right hand. Now try it with your left. Now try it balancing on your left leg, then on your right leg. Now complete 20 throws using a mixture of the throws you have just practised. 

Another 5 points are on offer if you can take 5 long steps away from the wall and still complete 20 throws and catches without dropping the ball once. 

Jumping and landing:

Not everyone has a skipping rope. But I’m sure we can all find a line to jump over. Find as many ways as you can to jump over a line. For example, try sideways, with wide feet, narrow feet, forwards, backward, twisting, and turning each time you jump. 1 point per day up to a maximum of 7 points.

Running:

10 points if you organise a game of tag or bulldogs with your friends. 

Or you prefer to run on your own. 

Run around the centre circle of a football pitch, clockwise and then anticlockwise 3 times each way. 

Then try starting, stopping, going sideways, backward, fast, and slow as many times as you can in 10 minutes. Use the lines on a football pitch to remind you to do a different style of running each time your feet touch a line. Have fun. 

Kick and shoot:

This activity gets you 5 points: All you need for this game is a wall and a ball. If you play football already, use a tennis ball, if not use a football.

This game is all about building rhythm. Can you complete 20 passes without losing control of the ball? Use only your right foot. Switch and use your left. Finally, alternating right and left feet.

Rolling, ducking, and turning:

How many different types of rolling do you know? 5 points if you can go the width of a sports pitch using different rolls.

Here are 3 to get you started. Pencil roll, forward roll, and teddy bear roll.

Balance and falling:

5 points for finding 3 trees that have fallen down and keeping your balance as you walk the length of the fallen tree. If you fall off, go again, until you make it across without touching the floor. 

There are another 5 points up for grabs, if you create a balance where you are inverted, upside down, it doesn’t need to be a full handstand, get creative, pull some shapes, and use a wall if you don’t have a partner.  

Move and make music:

There will be dance and theatre classes running in your area. Go along and give them a try. 

No access to classes. No problem, music in the garden or a U tube video will be just as much fun. 10 points when your feet find the beat.  

Wave and swing:

Not all parks have monkey bars so this challenge might take some research. Pick up 10 points if you can make it from one end to the other. Not yet? No problem, you get 5 points and now you have something to work on.  

Climbing and scrambling:

Climb 4 different trees for 5 points. The same 5 points are on offer if you go to a bouldering wall. 

Pushing, shoving, and fighting:

Let’s not start a fight with your brother or sister. Instead, get 4 friends or members of the family and have a tug of war match. Best of 3 wins. Don’t forget to tell us how you get on. Good luck. I’d love to know how you get on. You can contact me here.

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If we tracked what we did all day like the chores, taking the kids to school, and showing up for work, most if not all of it gets done. But, what about the important stuff? 

And maybe that’s the point. What is important?

It is tempting to create a plan for all the others things we want to do…..taking care of ourselves, connecting with others, and going on an adventure. And when it doesn’t happen we can blame the plan and promise to get better.

Yet, start with a blank piece of paper and a conversation about what is important and you might see a difference. 

Each day you start with a blank piece of paper. Lock in the nonnegotiables (non-negotiable for now at least) and decide the order in which to put the rest. 

Breakfast

Kids to school

A call from the boss

And then 10 press-ups. 

At the end of each day:

What happened?

What was good and bad about your day?

What else you could you have done?

What you would do differently?

Now go again. 

A conversation with yourself, your team, or your partner, sometime in the future about the long list of things that you have yet to do might not be as valuable as the one with a blank piece of paper and the possibility of today.

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Dogs chase their tails because they are a bit bored and want to have some fun. How much fun is not obvious, but it keeps them busy. And that’s the point. 

What’s the plan when you catch up with your tail?

Here’s a tool that might help.

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When players say they will do your training plan for the offseason they won’t. 

So why is this helpful? 

Because it’s better than thinking your players are lazy or know better, or that they don’t like you. 

Instead, you work with the heuristic and get curious.  

The alternative is to defend what you can improve.

Your choice.

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Don’t make training suck. Is great advice for youth coaches.

Tags games work. Playing the sport the kid has signed up for, the same. But what doesn’t work, for many, is relentless practise. 

At a young age, Andre Agassi was hitting 2,500 tennis balls a day. The task and Andre’s skills were clear. The environment, murky. 

Conflate the task with the environment and you too will muddy the water. 

The job of a coach is to engage kids in learning a task that is fun. The work of a coach is to create a learning environment that requires effort, inconvenience, and a willingness to want to improve.

Engage to create change. But know you can get one and not the other.

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Who wouldn’t want to create coaching environments that help their kids grow in confidence? 

Here are three common approaches. 

Fake it till you make it approach. 

“I am not confident”/“I am confident”

The least you can do is look like you know what you are doing. And that’s helpful until it’s not. 

Uncontested approach. 

Everything you do is great. 

Until someone else does it better. 

Smoke and mirrors approach. 

I wish my kids would be more confident and communicate.

The coaching equivalent of telling everyone else to take a step back to make it look like you are stepping forward. 

But there is another approach. An approach that doesn’t involve a white coat and a diploma on the wall. 

The nonconsequential failure approach.

What’s the hard part?

What did you try?

What did you do well?

What can you try next time?

You guessed it, coach. Now is not the time to lose your mind. But it is the time to experiment and find a way.

What’s the hard part?

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Maybe it was the PE teacher, a Geography teacher, or a coach at your club. Whoever it was, you will recognise the steps taken.

Someone saw you struggling.

For that person to take the time to help you figure out where you were on the task. Two things happened. This task is worth it and so are you.

As a result, you began moving, no longer stuck. Even if you did not know it at the time, deep inside, you wanted to get better. You began to see value in what you were doing, and so did someone else, you began to make it yours. Ownership.

Whoever was helping you made your progress feel like a big deal, to you at least. 

Part of the deal was giving you the space to get frustrated when it didn’t quite go to plan. 

So you kept coming back to get better. Frustration was a price worth paying.

Now you the all-conquering hero are a teacher, coach, or parent with a story to tell. 

But even with all the above steps, there is still one missing ingredient in the recipe. 

Can you guess what it is?

The coach, teacher, and parent wanted you to get curious and try, so they got curious about you. 

Coaching is a mirror. You get what you reflect. Pass it on. 

The Dot

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Games are the default option of the youth coach.

Simple. Slow. Easy to understand.

Complex. Fast. Difficult to understand.

Some are more useful than others.

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(On the way home from school pick up with his two kids following )

You’re an idiot you don’t belong on the road and you don’t pay road tax (argument spoiler; neither do electric cars).

You’re an idiot, you should get out of the way (argument spoiler; place those most at risk of a collision at the top of the hierarchy. Give way to cyclists and pedestrians).

Don’t bang the roof of my BMW because next time I’m going to send people to get you (argument spoiler; my dad is actually bigger than yours).

Anyway, I looked up the definition of an idiot. An example of an idiot is someone who thinks it’s safe to play in traffic.

So next time you see me on a bike, please be considerate, and drive safely around me and my kids, after all, I’m an idiot.

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What kind of football coach would teach a kid to catch? A goalkeeping coach. 

True, but think wider. 

Why would a football coach teach a kid to catch? Because it teaches the kid to track a moving object. And in time, with the right skills in place, move to effect the moving object, in this case, catch it. 

How does a football coach teach a kit to catch? I’m glad you asked.

Next time you see a young kid flinch, duck or turn their back when a football bounces towards their face, think. What kind of football coach teaches a kid to catch? 

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Risk slowing down progress. 

Ridicule and humiliation are risk management tools. Ridicule the problem and it is likely that it may just feel less important and go away. For those in the group who are out of synch, humiliation teaches what it looks like when we don’t comply. 

Coaches beware. 

Dynamic tension might not feel like the progress we want but it just might be the progress we need.

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I wanted a place for my kids to explore different movements, not worry about getting it right or pleasing their dad but to begin to find their own way.

So I created “The Squat Garden”.

Here are the rules that help my kids explore the squat pattern and shape how I show up, so I don’t get in the way.

Don’t look for the right answer. Do allow yourself to experience different ways to squat.

Don’t compare the different versions of the squat. Do know you will like some more than others. The ones you don’t like are not being mean but they are likely to be trying to teach you something. 

Don’t think you need to do a set number or even do them in order. Do play and be curious. Watch what happens when you change the order in which you do things. Does one squat version make the next version feel easier or harder? 

Don’t hold your breath. Do try inhaling on squatting down and exhaling on coming up and then try it the other way around. Does one make it easier than the other? 

I talk about breath a lot. Here are a few resources that will help. 

Close your mouth

Press up Garden

Teeth and taglines

There are rules to this game

Don’t just do the ones you like. Do try them all and by all means, do more of the ones you like the most. 

And perhaps the most important rule of Squat Garden? Talk about it. Create an information-rich environment for your kids to enjoy. 

Here are the videos my kids made in their very first Squat Garden. Enjoy

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Who learns quicker? The kid who wants to hit the skin off the ball. Or the kid who watches and tracks the ball.

Coaching is seen as a way to speed things up. And that might just be confusing for a youth coach. 

Toni Nadal, noticed something different when he threw a ball at his nephew Rafa Nadal. He moved towards the ball, the other kids just stood there. Rafa Nadal was watching, tracking the ball, and then deciding when to move. The others had no decision to make, they just waited. 

The role of a youth coach is to develop context, not speed.

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From an early age, we are trained to spot the difference. 

Parents, teachers, and coaches are all trying to do the same thing. Raise, active, healthy, and curious kids. Researchers of Physical Literacy are doing their own thing.

Arguing about the definition, of physical literacy is just one of those things. With a stiff definition of terms, you are rewarded for colouring in between the lines. Open and flexible and it becomes difficult to judge a watercolour against a piece of graffiti. 

We rarely see the value of the creative process. Instead, we reward those who stick between the lines since it’s easier to judge the difference. 

But perhaps the lesson in all of this is simple. 

Who do you serve? Yourself, your peers, or those who are doing the work of trying to develop physical literacy?

Different for different sake is not nearly as useful as explaining the value of what we are doing, in a way that is useful to the others. 

That way maybe we can all join in.

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We copy behaviours from those closest to us, mimic those we aspire to be, and find ways to fit into the groups we want to belong to, tribes.

Here are the 5 C’s of groups. 

Common Goal: It needs to fits the narrative we have now or the one we aspire to. 

Community: Clear rules that make it easy for us to belong.

Coaching: Every successful group is active, turning ideas into action. People like us do things like this. 

Curriculum: The agenda. Where we plan to go and what it will take to get there. 

Content: The to-do list. For today and tomorrow. 

The most successful groups, change what we do for the better, and it’s inspiring. 

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Might just be anywhere you like. 

If you are thinking of jumping, hopping, leaping, or landing anytime soon, you might find this guide useful. 

Here are the three skills you will need:

Take off: Produce enough force with enough parts of you that will work together and you will get air time.  

Hangtime: How much time you have in the air and what you do with it. That’s up to you.  

Landing: What goes up must come down. Let’s not land with a bump.  

No clue how skillful you are? No problem.

We all know the environment we create for learning is important. But what we can’t say for certain is how we create it. 

Here are some edges that will help you shape and much more importantly, own, your environment. Choose the ones you think are the most important. Then put the most important first. Now choose the ones that you can compromise on for now at least. 

Chaos – Control.

Engagement – Compliance 

Success – Failure

Fast – Slow

Accurate – Inaccurate 

In Sync – Out of Sync

Simple – Complex

Isolation – Collaboration

Follow – Lead

Self-Paced – Timed

The skill and the task are important to understand. But they are not the difficult bit. The difficult bit, is the environment you create, the grey area. 

Black and white make grey. Grey is in the middle. Neither here nor there. In areas of grey we need leadership. We need the expert on the ground, to tell us what is most important, given the circumstances.

That expert is you. Nobody knows what is important to you. We need you to tell us.

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Joseph Pilates suffered from ill-health as a child. His father, Heinrich, introduced gymnastics and bodybuilding. Today we know Joseph Pilates as the inventor of Pilates. But only because Joseph, overcame adversity to improve his own physical health.

Villains and heroes have the same backstory. The only difference is how they react to pain.

I won’t let this happen to anyone else.

Or

I’m in pain and you will pay.

Teaching kids from difficult backgrounds about plumbing, bricklaying, and plastering might not be nearly as useful as teaching them methods of resistance. 

Problem-solving

Resilience

Storytelling

We need kids who can tell us how they are working their way out of adversity. Not kids who can tell me how to unblock my toilet.

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I can’t lead change if you believe something else to be true.

I won’t change your mind if you can’t see what I see. 

And, I am certainly not going to make a difference if you sit on the fence. 

No. The change is on you. You lead, I will follow. And just maybe together we can learn how to apply a new order, a new way of doing things.

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If you spent your sporting childhood standing in line, waiting your turn to follow the instructions. What can you teach your kid about exploring movement through play?

Kid centric and it’s about fun, participation, and engagement. Coach centric, and you wait in line for your turn, while your coach gets her point across. One requires you to be very comfortable with chaos and the other is about control.

Leave skipping ropes on the floor of the playground and some kids will learn to skip. Follow this framework and the same thing will happen, some kids will through structured sessions learn to skip. 

If you have kids between the ages of 6-9 years old who can’t skip (a few of mine can’t) and can’t jump backward, sideways, and forwards with control. Freeplay may not be the answer, as they are simply not engaged enough. It is equally, difficult to imagine that you will have many kids wanting to spend their time in line waiting their turn to jump. 

But, what you can do, is do your best to try to turn the lights on for those kids. Show them what is possible. First through structure, if that is what it takes until you find a way to cover the skills required, in a more playful way. 

Today I used, follow my leader and partner mirror drills to help me. The error rate was high and it felt chaotic. 

And that might just be the point. We are all learning how to play together.

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Some of the kids I coach are not better but they are more confident than the others.

“When panic comes through the door I want you to kick it back out with your courage. I want you to try something. Protect the ball, get your head up, and try a new skill. If it works, it will give you the confidence to try it again.  It doesn’t work. Good! You get to learn something and try it all over again.” 

The fear of failure can be paralysing. It can stop us in our tracks. But, it’s still way better than mistaking selling out for progress.

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How many times has your answer to a question been so long that you forgot the question?

It pays to get clear on the question before you get good at the answers.

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Has a big job on her hands. Since everyone is getting there. Some are taking longer than others but all seem sure they are getting there. 

The Mayor of There knows the city’s limits, boundaries, and resources. Having done the work of being clear on what you can expect. The Mayor of There is sure to provide you with a warm welcome when you do eventually get there. 

But for now, the Mayor of There is waiting. For you.

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“In chess, the infantry are the pawns, a long line of pieces stretching across the board. Your first move with the pawn is a choice between moving forward one square or two, after that, there is no choice, it’s one only. To capture another pawn, you move one square diagonally forward. That’s it. Not very exciting!”

I’m teaching my kids chess. I’ve taken all the other chess pieces off the board and most of the prawns (a desperate dad trying to make it fun). The board is set up for the kids to play 1 v 1, and 1 v 2. We talk ambushes, trial and error, and then I leave them to it.    

When I come back to the game some 30 minutes later, one of my kids had a long line of pawns, and the other has three. They have made their own rules. “ When you win the battle you start the next game with another pawn.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. But I do need reminding. Take dad, his lame jokes, and his fear out of the equation. 

Only joking….reduce the task to its simplest form and let them play.

Chess for kids

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Next time you have a bunch of humans, large or small, in front of you try this. 

Split the group into two teams.

Split the room/pitch into two halves. 

And you can’t get tagged in your half of the room/pitch.

The objective is to get across to the opponent’s half without getting tagged. Each person across is one point. The team with the most players to have successfully crossed the opponent’s half into the end goal is the winner. 

Now watch what happens. Who stays around to defend and who wants to score points for the team?

I can tell you, that in my girl’s football team, out of a group of twenty, I have two girls who do the same thing each time and every time. One bolts to try to score a point. The other is always the last in her half, defending. 

I’m telling you. I never tell them. I just let it happen. 

And my point?

Watch what people do. Some are very clear about what they do, most are not. 

Hard measures work for some people. Points scored. Money made. 

Soft measures work for others. How do you make others feel? How do you feel?

And perhaps the most helpful is a combination of the two, hard and soft measures, particularly if you are not yet sure what works for you.

Keeping score is helpful. But we don’t all keep the same score.

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While watching a tiger at a zoo and wondering how the tiger was so strong yet it lifted no external weight, Charles Atlas developed the idea of Dynamic Tension. A self-resistance exercise method that pits muscle against muscle.

Continue to push a kettlebell above your head and there will come a point at which you will lose a large amount of shoulder stability. Push the kettlebell while pulling your shoulder blade down and you create tension. In creating tension, you also create stability.

The more you push and pull the stronger you become. 

Perhaps we should not move away from people who push and pull. Instead, we should engage them so that we can find our own position. The place we feel strong and stable. 

Who is providing your dynamic tension so that you can grow?

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If you knew then what you know now. Would you still do it?

That’s a pointless question. Since you didn’t and even though you do now the world has moved on. 

Yet we do it all the time. “Stop the game. Go back to where you were. Stand there. Now let’s look at what you were seeing and what you did with the ball.”

Keen to impart our knowledge and help people to see what we can see. All too often we coach the Blindspot. Coach the blindspot and you bring awareness to a situation. But unless you can also improve their capability, all you are really doing is shifting people to Known Weaknesses. Now I know I’m shit. 

And that might not be nearly as helpful as coaching the two remaining areas on the blindspot matrix before you double down on blindspot coaching. 

Can you see them?

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This question came up on my Twitter feed today. 

“How do you avoid coaches and the committee doing everything while the parents of the kids you coach are bystanders?” 

The problem comes when you try to measure the contribution of the members of your group. Who scores more points? The parents who run the cake stall at the club’s annual fete. Or the parent who cuts the grass for games each week. 

Football might be a team game but some players are worth more than others. In 1979 Nottingham Forest paid £1 million pounds for striker Trevor Francis. But it took a full 10 years before a club would the same amount for a goalkeeper. It was 1989 when Crystal Palace bought goalkeeper, Nigel Martin for £1millon pounds.

And this is my point. Your club, association, or team needs to be organised around a common goal. When that becomes clear, then the roles and their value also become clear. Be clear on your intent.

If you need to raise money the cake stall might just be more important than the length of the grass. For now at least.

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Organise your coaching around the rights of the child and it’s clear that the guiding principle of child-centric coaching is humility. 

Ever wondered why the customer is always right? 

It’s a simple enough rule. If you try to convince them otherwise, they are unlikely to remain your customer.

So where does that leave the coach?

Fire yourself. You don’t have to coach kids. Maybe it’s better that you don’t.

Give people the choice not to choose you. Make it clear who you serve, what you do, and how you do it.

Just don’t make promises you can’t keep. 

And if you need help making it clear this is a great place to start.

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25 years of working with sports coaches who want their kids to pick up skills that help them win.

25 years of being assertive about the importance of fundamental movement skills and not winning the argument. Instead, wearing compromise, frustration, and failure.

But this time it’s different.

Ask any coach what they struggle with and they will tell you one of three things.

Lack of contact time.

Lack of money and resources.

Player buy-in and adherence (compliance).

Ask a coach what they need and they will tell you a mentor (what they actually want is someone to tell them they are right). But for now, stubbornness will do.

Sport-specific coaches don’t develop fundamental movement skills in their athletes because they don’t have the time.

Sport-specific coaches don’t develop fundamental movement skills in their athletes because they don’t have the resources.

Sport-specific coaches don’t develop fundamental movement skills because the kids want to play [insert sport] not train.

Coaches are stubborn.

I thought I was right. I wanted kids to be athletic and THEN play sports. If I argued for long enough I got 20 minutes at the start of a session.

But, sport-specific coaches were and are right. There is little time to prepare kids. We don’t have enough of the right kit and kids like to have fun. Playing sport is fun. Press-ups are not.

Big ideas need 3 things.

A narrative change.

Some data to back up the start we are selling ourselves.

And a to-do list. A new way of doing things,

What’s exciting about this new opportunity is there is no narrative change and no need for more data. This opportunity is about how we use our time.

In football, Funino, a small-sided football gives kids more touches of a ball, more decisions to make, and more movement in a 7-minute period when compared to technical drills or large-sided games typically used by a coach. Sport-specific coaches can deliver sessions in less time.

Is the change worth it? Yes. More in less time. What’s not to like?

What changed?

I made the jump. I was wrong and sport-specific coaches were right. So while I wait in line to get picked, for a grant for more money to buy kit, get a better pitch, and more resources. I’ll follow the guidelines and make my games small-sided.

And I’ll make better use of my time. Since I have now given the kids more touches of the ball, more decisions, and more time using sports-specific movements. I can use my spare time to teach them how to sprint, jump, throw, catch and chase.

You don’t need a big idea. Instead. Meet people where they are. Give them what they already have and something they don’t.

You might enjoy this. Kit was from parents bringing in hula hoops, one small goal, and a stack of tennis balls.

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I was lucky enough to spend an hour with Prof Matthias Lochmann talking about the changes that the German Football Federation has made to youth football in their country, You can catch it here.

Here is the link to a Funino resource mentioned in the chat.

Matthias has spoken on a number of other podcasts, I particularly enjoyed this one from John O Sullivan at Changing The Game Podcast.

And if you would like to know more about Matthias’ work or get in contact you can find his details here.

I hope you enjoy my chat with Prof Matthias Lonchmann as much as I did. And as always you can get in contact with me here

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A friend of mine runs a trail running company and we talked about her ideas to grow her business. 

A forum and membership were one option on the table. 

“What do you want to do with your time?” I asked

I can tell you what wasn’t an option. Being desk-bound. 

Spending most of your day answering queries, managing membership, and keeping your audience entertained is not much fun. When you love the outdoors, running trails is.

The upshot? 

It helps to be clear on what you want and what you need. Wanting to spend your time on the trails is not the same as the need to make money.

I know plenty of people who think their happiness is exclusively out on the trails, on the road, or in the gym. But that is not true. The happiest people have balance. Go find yours.

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The challenge is to think and act like the underdog. Not to accept dominance but to challenge it, often and with conviction. Like your life depends on it.

David and Goliath.

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Yesterday I watched as a mother and father threw a baseball over twenty times at their kid holding a bat. Each time it was a swing and a miss.

As I walked away I wondered how many times within the next 10,000 hours would that kid swing and miss in the pursuit of mastery.

Want it bad enough and you persist. But you might not want it that bad. 

Here is what might feel like a shortcut. 

Can. Can. Can’t. Can.

I can skip.

I can hop.

I can’t repeatedly hop through a series of hula hoops placed on the ground.

But I can hop repeatedly on the spot. 

Not a shortcut to mastery,  a cop-out, or taking it easy on your kid, just a method to help you meet kids where they are. 

Two strikes and your out. Or two strikes and you have a good idea where I am.

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Focus on one thing until successful is good advice. To avoid overwhelm. When busy. 

With a poor track record for knocking things over. Making your next step more obvious, more attractive, easier to do, and more satisfying makes a lot of sense. 

This is why in age-group football aiming at two goals maybe better than one. 

The pitch has 4 goals. It’s obvious. 

The chances of success are higher. It’s attractive. 

There are more opportunities for every player to shoot. It’s easier.

 Kids love to score goals. It’s satisfying.

You can’t take a second step unless the first one is successful. Crawl. Walk. Run.

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There is a rule in dry stone walling. Don’t go looking for a stone to fit a place, pick up the next stone and do not put it down until you find a place to use it.

No waiting for a better option. Or perfection. Just working with what you have to make something more beautiful and functional than the pile of rocks you are surrounded by. 

With no other option but to work with what they have. A dry stone waller learns to see which stones fit best. In time.  

Rather beautiful. Don’t you think?

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Build your email list. Tell your story. Sell your products.

Tell your story to find the others. Share and test your ideas. Discover unique insights. 

One approach might make you rich the other will change how you do things.

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As part of a journaling process, for longer than I should have. I wrote BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. CREATE LEADERSHIP and many other positive self-affirmations. Yet,  nothing changed. 

Aristotle wrote in the complete works volume 1, “We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.”

Yet, doing was not the whole answer. 

I learned:

First, you need to decide what you are willing to commit to. Then bring it to life. Create a definition of what leadership, being bold, or being brave means to you. Paint only in primary colours.

Build constraints and be specific. Do this. Don’t do that.

Create a question to reflect on. 

What am I creating that demonstrates personal leadership?

The value of curating examples from my journal over 90days. You are looking to bring awareness to your actions. Don’t cherry-pick, positive and negatives examples are helpful. 

Writing affirmations might move us from passive to active.

But, unpacking our actions and thoughts to better understand what we mean might just be the activity of choice for a leader.

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If courage is the mother and father of self-confidence.

Then sharing your coaching philosophy is not arrogant since you are not asking anyone else to follow it. 

But it might be courageous.

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We shut down possibility.

A beginner’s mind asks you to get clear on the problem before you look at the tools that might solve the problem. 

The person who is reluctant to save £500 a month towards a pension, because they don’t have the money, they want to go on holiday and the kid’s fees need paying. 

Is the same person who is happy to accept they require a pension pot of £500,000 to provide a £3,000 a month income to pay the bills when they retire.

When we bypass today’s feelings, assumptions, and biases to take in possibility. We get the chance to start again. Only this time without the faulty thinking that holds us back.

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At what point do you get to call yourself an athlete? Once you have completed a marathon, lifted 100kg off the floor, or completed your gym induction?

If I like running does that make me an endurance athlete? Polarized training is not optimal for endurance athletes.

If I don’t want to enter races do I even need to train like an athlete? 80:20 Training. Get fitter. Race faster.

It’s hard to know which tribe you belong to.

If you missed the real punchline from the first article. It’s this. First, know your reality. 

Check the difference between the training you think you are doing and the training that you are actually doing. 

Do the work of getting clear on the story you are telling yourself. Hold yourself up against the data and definitions you are using to reference where you think you are. 

That way you get to keep your definition since you are actively using it.

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Here is a thank you to all the volunteer coaches, mums, dads, parents, and friends who give up their time to coach.

A look at the history and etymology of the word “amateur” and we can imagine it borrowed from the Latin amātor “lover, enthusiastic admirer, a devotee. 

The amateur coach gives up their time because they love what they do.

Because they want others to feel good too. After all, coaching is a mirror. We get what we reflect.

Thank you all for contributing.

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“The only team I would coach would be a team of orphans”. The quote is taken from the Matheny Manifesto. Mike Mathey is an ex-professional baseball player and well-respected coach.

Parents are the biggest issue in sports. They simply get in the way. Rather than be a silent source of encouragement they are a distraction. Mike is not the only one, sporting governing bodies feel the same way.

I’m not going to disagree with the sentiment. But I am going to add much-needed context. And highlight what I think is one of society’s biggest opportunities. 

So here it is:

Kids should not focus on picking up sport-specific sports skills until they are at least 9 years old. Instead, kids should be focused on developing foundational movement skills.

Kids/parents need emotional maturity to handle the competition. Kids should not play sports in which they keep score until they are in senior school. 

Age group (9 -11 years old) coaches should use competition as a risk-reward tool, not as a method of ranking kids. 

So what’s the upside?

We all need an excuse to become more active. And it can start with stressed out, time-starved, and inactive parents.

Parents become the experts. The convenience of sport-specific youth experts is replaced by a simple recipe of throwing, catching, running, jumping, skipping, climbing, hopping, hitting, walking, kicking, balancing, falling, and rolling. And parents get to do it with their kids.

And the downside? 

It’s on us. Dropping kids off at little kickers would no longer be an option. Instead, parents become actively involved in helping their kids become active, healthy, and curious.

And after all of that. The increased connection. The creative process of play. And learning what it takes to master bodyweight control and movement. 

If you are prepared to forget it all and stand on the sidelines and shout and bawl your way through the introduction of competition to a 12-year-old kid. Then, you know what to expect. 

Teaching kids sport-specific skills and competition at such an early age sends the wrong signal. To both competitive sporty parents and to kids.

But there is a better way. A more flexible, empowering, and positive way for everyone. And that way is to begin by providing an example worth copying.

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Set up a goal. Have a direction of travel. Give yourself something to aim for. 

Share your coaching principles. Create your definition of success. Lead on principles, not metrics. 

It’s possible to hold ourselves up to the standards we set and watch our progress. If we are ready to slow down and get the order right.

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“If their eyes are shining then you are doing it.” Ben Zander. 

The conductor of an orchestra does not make a sound. Instead, they rely on their ability to make other people powerful. To awaken possibility in those around them.

The question becomes “Who am I being that my players’ eyes are not shining?”

The more shining eyes you have around you, the better.

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Birds of a feather stick together. And that works. Ideas spread quickly within the group and communication feels easier, since everyone is on the same page. 

Until the ideas run out. Or ineffective, unhelpful behavioural habits are socially reinforced. 

Closed systems are just that, closed. No new information. No new ideas. 

Play football all year round in tournaments, leagues, and festivals and the chances are you are in a closed system. The name of the competition changes but not much else. Same faces, same decisions, same game. 

And that’s the challenge for sport. Diversity. New ideas worth spreading.

Kids want to play football. For the same reasons birds of a feather stick together. 

Kids need to pick up a wide range of movement skills. For the same reasons, new skills promote a diversity of options. 

Sport mirrors life.

Talk a good game. Or learn how to play a good game. The choice is yours.

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Yesterday my eldest went to the Cardiff City open training day to get signatures of all the players. She managed one and cried all the way home. The day had not lived up to her expectations.

Good! A teachable moment and another long explanation from her father. Not so good!

Our expectations are not a great indicator of what might happen. We can guess, we can try to control, we can worry, but we can’t know for sure. 

I might have wanted to give my kid chocolate and condolences, but what I needed at that moment was emotional control because, in the absence of leadership, my eldest would have got what she wants not what she needed.

On reflection, yesterday was not a perfect day, but a good day. We both got what we needed not what we wanted.

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On Sundays after the under 9 and 10’s football tournament. I always ask my kids the same question. Out of 5 how do you rate yourself today?

 “5” came the reply from my youngest. If you knew my youngest, that would not surprise you!

“One of the girls on the other team made it more fun for me because she made it more difficult for me, and so I played better.”

The follow-up question is always. “What would have made it a 5?” Or in the case of my youngest. “What would have made it your best 5 ever?”

My eldest said, “4, if I had scored, it would have been a 5.” 

The world is competitive. And one of the best ways to take action in a competitive world is to reduce the risk of getting it wrong. 

Low-risk actions allow us to discover, develop and test our ideas. The payoff, our reward, needs only to be a small win, to encourage us to keep going. Get it wrong and we can have the resources to go again. 

Ways to increase the risk include: 

Reduce the reward. 

Increase the complexity of the decision

Increase expectation 

Increase the resources required.

In a competitive world, competition helps us rank our efforts.

Competition can also help us make better decisions when used as a risk-reward tool. For example, for kids that are less confident in their decision-making, the argument for small-sided games, with multiple goals, that provide a greater number of opportunities to score, is hard to ignore.

It is on us to decide how we use competition. I know plenty of coaches who tell me their kids are competitive. I don’t know many who tell me that their kids make good decisions.

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Often we wait for an expert to tell us what to do. It feels safer to wait for best practise. But that makes no sense. The world is already full of best practise.

What is way more useful, generous, and impactful is to find a way to turn best practise into standard practise.

That doesn’t require an expert that requires you.

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Much of British Cycling success has been pinned to marginal gains. But that’s not true. The success of British Cycling started with one simple decision.

Find the fastest kids on bikes. Then keep them on bikes, until successful. 

When British Cycling started its talent development program they wanted to know who was quick on a bike. So, they gave everyone bikes and told them to race. The fast kids in each school came up against each other. And then the fastest within regions came together until it was clear who the fastest kids were. 

We make things complicated when we don’t want anyone else to know what we are doing. 

Simple is having the guts to do something. Watch what happens and then edit until successful.

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When we all get medals the message is “it’s the taking part that counts”. 

When only the first three get medals then the message is “it’s not the taking part that counts”. 

And when you design a tournament to encourage participation and then hand out medals to the winners the message is confusing.

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Question 1.

If an under 11-year-old rugby player can pass 5 meters sideways (they can’t but let’s keep it easy). 

And a rugby pitch is 70 meters wide (maximum width).

How many u 11-year-old rugby players does it take to pass a ball the width of a rugby pitch?

The answer. 14.

Question 2.

If an adult football pitch is divided up into 4 squares each allowing 14 ( 7 v 7) under 11’s players on each pitch. 

How many more children are playing football when compared to one game of 7 v 7 on an adult-sized pitch? 

The answer. 42.

Question 3.

If we assume that children make on average 3 times as many decisions on ¼ size football pitch compared to an adult size football pitch. 

How many more opportunities would be created to help children make decisions by playing on the ¼ size pitches? 

Answer. 126 times as many

Now you might be wondering. How come he has so much time to think about this?

Wed nights are usually football training. Over 50 girls ranging in age from u 7 to u 11’s get together and play. Last night the Chairman canceled training because of waterlogged pitches. I had the time.

So, I took a walk to watch the Urdd rugby festival that is supported by the WRU. 

Look through the lens of participation and the Urdd and the WRU have done a great job. Hundreds if not 1000’s of kids, parents, and teachers are going to walk away from that tournament happy.

But when we look through the lens of producing active, healthy, and curious kids that changes.

I saw waterlogged adult pitches, one food vendor (a burger stand), and kids who had no choice but to make a decision that would make no sense in the adult game.

We might not like what we see when we ask better questions. But, it does give us the opportunity to do better.

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In Germany, football is the dominant sport. Ten percent of the German population are members of the German Football Association, DFB. The world’s largest sports federation. 

The Bundesliga, the top league in German football has 18 teams with over 500 registered players. When your talent pool is in the millions, you don’t have a supply problem. Even when your talent development system is at a rate of less than 1% of throughput (1% percent of 1 million is 10,000).

A bad loss at the last World Cup. Declining membership numbers. And the Bundesliga increasingly buying skillful foreign players at the expense of homegrown talent suggests that although there is no supply problem, yet. There might have a quality problem.

But, German football has been here before. Boom follows bust.

Big ideas are the stuff of boom and bust. And they require three things. A narrative, some data to support the new narrative, and a new way of doing things. 

Inventor Matthias Lockmann has proposed to constrain the involvement of coaches, encouraging players to develop game intelligence, rather than learn through overly prescribed solutions provided by coaches. 

Dominance and predictability are appealing in a competitive world. And perhaps it is valid to question the link between increasing coaching structures and decreasing participation and activities levels. The industrialization of sport has seen the rise of the entrepreneurial coach in the same period as declining activity levels. 

But, perhaps the biggest challenge faced by German football is to embrace continual development. Crawl, Walk, Run. 

In Crawl, propositional and procedural knowledge works just fine. “Do this, don’t do that.” But to move to Walk requires perspectival knowledge. Perspectival knowledge is about testing your ideas, and concepts, in different environments and contexts. The reward is a nuanced understanding of how your concept works. The downside is unpredictability.

If you want flexible players capable of making decisions based on their task and environment then you need to provide an example worth copying. Be the change you seek.

I wish German Football and Matthias well.

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A friend of mine has got into coaching.  I was speaking to him today about his experiences of attending coaching courses. Quitting had crossed his mind. Each course had left him with an overwhelming feeling of compliance.

The problem comes when we teach propositional knowledge, do this, don’t do that, and procedural knowledge, if you do this then, as if it’s the end of the journey, not the start.

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When we have a big idea. New information is not always welcome.

Why?

Because it doesn’t always fit with our existing narrative. The story we are telling ourselves about how we collide with the world. It might also challenge what we think we know, the expert opinion of the day, or how we do things.

So here is a filter to help when new information does arrive unannounced, and at precisely the wrong time.

What story are we telling ourselves and how does this new information change that story?

How does this new information change what we think we know?

How does this new information change how we do things around here?

If you haven’t already guessed it. New information is not the problem. But our big idea might be.

In fact, new information is showing us the way. And giving us another chance to examine, our story, what we think we know, and how we do things.

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Are you a glass-half-empty or a glass-half-full type of person?

Perhaps a better question would be.

What are you committed to achieving?

Because then you might know whether you need to fill the glass up or empty it.

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90 days. 90 blogs. From January to March over 17,000 words written.

90 small wins that tell me I can do it. I can sit down every morning and write on 3 themes. Fitness, Coaching, and Personal Leadership.

Every 90days I ask myself the same question. What experiences can I create for myself that inform?

And for the next 90 days?

I’ll do it all over again. Why? Because when I distilled down what I had written into directives for my coaching, for myself, and for my family, I felt proud of what I had learned and achieved. I felt good. So why not? I can make the time.

Surprised? Yes. And that’s my point. So I’ll go again and see what I can learn this time.

What experiences can YOU create for yourself that inform?

You can let me know here.

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When the eldest argues with the youngest over the “best” piece of fruit to put in their lunchbox. It can feel like an advantage when they get their way.

In a world where the advantage appears to be what’s in front of us, instant and accessible. It’s on us to help our kids see what that advantage really is. And at what cost, to our health, our relationships, and the environment in which we live.

Rarely is the advantage, that we were so quick to grab, worth the price we will have to pay.

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Anyone can collect stamps because they are cheap and accessible.  

Patiently building up their bite-size chunks of information into narratives. Collectors curate their stamps into geographical areas, historical moments in time, and many other themes. There might be better ways to educate yourself on a subject, but you can’t deny their curiosity.

The world is full of bite-size chunks.

To whom does the world belong? Those who post because they can. Or those who are curious enough to patiently curate stories?

The choice is yours.

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Kids grow and mature at different rates. Measuring your kid’s height and weight is active parenting. It’s good practise.

A valid concern for parents is by collecting data on our kid’s growth and maturation we make them self-conscious about their height, their weight, and maybe their appearance. 

Besides growth and maturation are complicated. Any information we collect is only part of the puzzle, fragmented. Parents are not code breakers.

The hardest part for a code breaker is to keep a secret. Keeping the bigger picture in their mind. Not letting on, they know, letting slip the advantage. 

When our kids enter a growth spurt, we know, physical abilities, motor control, and body awareness fluctuations make movement and coordination difficult. 

Attaching emotion to numbers is not good practise. Measuring your kid’s height and weight is good practise.

If not for your kids, for you.

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Who needs a coach? The active or the passive? 

Passive

If you want someone else to blame find a coach.

If you want to enrol someone else in your story find a coach.

If you want motivation, intention and resolve find a coach.

Active

You don’t need a coach it’s on you.

You have enrolled all the help you need.

You are self motivated, intentional and resolute.

A better question might be. Are you ready to change your position? 

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What if the problem you thought you had, was not really the problem at all? 

The first 3 times that Boris Becker played Andre Aggasi he beat him. 

1988 Indian Wells 4-6, 6-3, 7-5

1989 USA v Germany 6-7, 6-7, 7-6, 6-3, 6-4

1989 Masters 6-1, 6-3

The main reason Agassi could not beat Becker was that he found it hard to pick the direction of his serves. 

Then in 1990, it all changed. From 1990 to 1999, Agassi beat Becker ten out of the eleven times they met on court. It was as if Andre Agassi could read Becker’s mind. Or at least that is what Boris Becker thought. 

Agassi wasn’t reading Becker’s mind, he was reading his tongue. After watching tape after tape, Agassi noticed a tick in Beckers’s serves. If Becker put his tongue to the middle then his serve would either go down the middle or towards the body of Agassi. If Beckers’s tongue went to the side, his serves would go out wide. 

And the hardest part for Agassi? Not giving the game away. Agassi knew he could pick off Becker’s serve at will. Instead, Agassi held out and only picked off Becker’s serve at crucial points in games to turn the match in his favour.

Agassi beat Becker at will because he became an expert at his problem. Maybe it’s time to stop looking for the answers and get clear on the problem instead.

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Padel is the fastest-growing sport in the world. Considered a donor sport for tennis (and vice versa). Padel helps players transfer varied and specific movement experiences that support their tennis performance.

Supporting each other while pursuing our own interests, is the basis of collaboration. And what’s interesting about collaboration is the more we experience it, the more likely it is to happen again. Another chance to learn, imitate, and pass on our experiences.

Fear spreads just as quickly. Drop our regard for others and our pursuit of exactly the same agenda becoming competitive.

The LTA has recently announced that Padel is now officially recognised as a discipline of tennis. 

It pays to know if we are competing or collaborating. And that starts by being clear on what is behind our actions. Fear, or concern for others?

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I think we all know the press-up is going to be on every physical exam we ever take. 

Revise for the exam and we do eccentric press-ups, incline press-ups, kneeling press-ups all kinds of funky-looking press-ups. 

More often than we should we take a D in press up class just so we can do more.

But, here’s the thing. What if we didn’t focus on the exam paper, the end goal. And just learned to love the process instead. Would we still make progress?   

I say we would. But, I don’t want you to take my word for it. Instead, I’ve built you a press-up garden to play in with the help of my friends from Parkour EDU.  

I’m not affiliated. I’m not going to make any money. I just thought it would be fun. 

You might too. Of course, you could just revise hard for the exam and get a “C” but was that really the point?

1. Cat Cow

2. Front plank

3. In place crab walk

4. Quadrupedal walk (forward)

5. Quadrupedal walk (backwards)

6. Forward crab walk

7. Backward crab walk

8. In place quadrupedal walk 

9. In place crab walk (on your bum)

10. Table top push up 

Coaching notes:

The body is sensory. 

Teach the kids to breathe first. Then teach the kids to breathe in each of these different positions while static. Each drill has the hands in different positions and each will present different challenges, especially to those whose breathwork needs improvement. 

For the breath aficionados. Teach the necessary. Then the possible to achieve the impossible. 

Necessary

1. Learn nasal breathing. 
2. Resting tongue position
3. Control Pause

Possible 

4. The Stack
5. Full exhale

Impossible

1. Deep abdominal control on inhaling

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Yoga is complicated. A physical, mental and spiritual practice with more styles and nuances than I will ever care to remember. Best practice is just not possible. A reductionist approach would provide too many gaps down which to fall. 

Yoga is simple. “It is not about how you look it is about how you feel.” Judging by the number of people taking yoga classes, the simple message is working. 

I was one of them. Only there was no best practice. Just you, a mat, and a teacher (I tried lots of teachers). 

At the time I was asthmatic. And a lot of us asthmatics use secondary muscles to breathe, to aid the expansion of the thoracic cavity. In short, upside down, struggling to keep shoulders away from ears, we can’t breathe effectively, respiratory distress.  

Yoga is not simple. It’s stressful. Yoga feels complicated. 

And here is my point. Yoga could be made simple for more people. If there was best practice. 

1. The body is sensory. Act accordingly.
2. Learn to breathe through your nose.
3. Learn breath control.
4. Learn to put the tongue on the roof of your mouth
5. Learn to breathe in side-lying, inverted, and through movement
6. THEN begin to connect breath to movement.

When we are in a rush to prove that something is simple (or sell it). We make things complicated by forgetting the rules that made it simple in the first place.

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will

Provide you with perspective. Who are you? 

Help you to decide where to put your attention. What is important to you?

Challenge where you put your time, money, and resources. What do you want to focus on? 

Encourage you to think past a busy to-do list. How do you want to show up?

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One of the quickest ways to elevate status is to become a coach. 

One of the quickest ways to lose status is to make a mistake. 

Perhaps you can see the problem. And why the idea of “marginal gains” is so popular in the world of sport and coaching. Drip, drip, drip. 

The world of marginal gains works well within the rules of what’s possible. One step at a time until hopefully inspiring happens.

But when people rethink the rules and what is possible, change is rapid. And that itself can be inspiring. 

Maybe it’s time to reconsider how sports and activities can inspire children. Is it the drip, drip, drip of marginal gains? Or to be given the chance to change the rules and then to learn from our mistakes?

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My Friend’s 10-year-old daughter is fearless, explosive, and athletic. An outgoing kid, she likes being active and having fun. 

Is my friend’s daughter more likely to be a tumbler or a footballer?

I learned about the dilemma at the school gate yesterday. Does my friend’s daughter increase her tumbling sessions from 3 to 4 a week and give up football? Or continue to kick a ball around and stick with 3 tumbling sessions a week?

The problem with active, curious, and healthy kids is that coaches see potential. My friend’s daughter looks a lot like a successful tumbler. Rule of thumb over relevant facts. 

But, that is not helpful. The question. Is it worth it? Is. 

Here are some relevant facts:

There are more footballers (team) than tumblers (individual). 

Only 15% of gymnasts remain active by the age of 16.

The number of kids taking part in gymnastics is declining. The talent pool is shrinking. 

When we ask age group sports coaches to predict the future they get it wrong. 

So instead. It is time to reframe the question. And give age group (9 to 13-year-old) coaches a question they can all answer correctly. 

Am I increasing or decreasing my chances of creating an active, healthy, and curious kid if I………..

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To achieve success you need to learn how to win.

I thought If I worked hard to get a degree I would be ahead of the pack. 

To achieve success you need to learn how to acquire skills but unless they help you win you will never succeed. 

I learned how to use Lithium aluminium hydride as a reducing agent but didn’t much care about the result.

Winning is not the hard part. Neither is acquiring skills. The hard part is being honest about what success looks like. 

Because then you can acquire the right skills to solve the problems that will inevitably come your way. 

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