The Glory of Mastering the Foundations
Many programs highlight the fact that you can train like the pros, or train like a college athlete, but what does that actually mean? Does that mean that you will be doing accelerated drills, even if youre not using the correct technique?? Does that mean that you will be doing hardcore conditioning? Who should want to train like a pro? The pros, of course.
I believe that striving to emulate professional players in your training is commendable. Every athlete should want to maximize their input to receive the biggest output in their training. However, these activities should be one step outside your wheelhouse, and you shouldn’t expect to start there.
College athletes, semi-pro’s, and pro’s have all built a baseline of ability to train the way they do. Because of that, coaches can implement activities and drills that require more thought, tactics, weight, or sheer will. These players have worked up to it, they have earned their challenge. If you take Jane Doe off the street and throw her into a collegiate level soccer practice, or weightlifting session, or conditioning session. I can guarantee you she wont get half the benefit as the athletes who have mastered the foundations leading up to it.
Why is this? First of all, we need a skill baseline. If the foundational movements and skills are not quite mastered, there will be nothing to build upon. Everyone is familiar with the analogy to building a house, right? You must have a solid foundation before you can add walls, a roof, etc. Same thing with fitness and skill. You must have a basic understanding of; and ability to execute; movement, balance, body control, and strength before you go out and run sprint repeats without tearing a hamstring, or clean and jerk 200 pounds. Walk before you run. This is why we include balance, body control, & basic agility technique with our younger and newer athletes. We need to assess how they move before we can complicate the skill.
Knowing our athletes skill baseline, we learn if player in question will be able to execute foundational movements without much thought. If they are well versed in a movement they can spend more of their mental capacity on a higher level objective (tactics), rather than lower level objective (the technical ability to kick a ball, i.e: their foot position while passing a ball), and therefore are able to execute higher level movements since their brains are not consciously processing the tens of things associated with the task at hand. If they have to think about every small movement because it is unfamiliar, they will likely be unsuccessful. “Practice Makes Progress”.
The amount of attention that you can direct at any stimulus is finite. That is, we have a limited amount of attention to spend on any certain task. In Winnifred Gallagher’s book, Rapt: Attention and The Focused Life, attention is treated like a precious commodity. When executing a task, you only have so much of it. So, the more you practice a skill, the less cognition you have to spend on it, leaving your mind free to focus on something else.
As an example, have you ever tried to find a new friends house while driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood? Have you had the radio on while you were attempting to locate the house? Did you turn it off because it seemed like it would help you “look” better? Yeah, that’s because your brain was attending to too many stimuli simultaneously. In fact, turning the music off did help you “look” better, because your attentional focus was not spread too thin.
The ability to shift your attentional focus becomes increasingly more important the higher level sport you play. If you have to consciously process every movement on how to collect, pass, and move - you are not going to be as successful as those athletes who do not have to spend their attention on those simple movements - because they’ve trained their muscles to ‘remember’, so they can place their attention elsewhere - like where they need to move on the field after playing a pass. Once our athletes have put in the work to master the foundational movements, we can encourage them to train harder/heavier/faster/more complex because they no longer have to spend their conscious energy focusing on the basics.
So, what’s the point here? Too often players want to do “high level” technical training without the baseline ability to connect passes, or have a quality first touch, or dribble through tight spaces. Players want to get in the weight room and bang out heavy squats but can’t quite get the mechanics down for an air squat or a lunge. See what I’m saying? How are you going to get to a high level of play if you haven’t mastered the foundations? The answer is simple: you can’t.
Repetition of the same simple movement, done correctly, is one way to achieve mastery. After a skill is mastered, then you can add complexity. Ya dig? Go google how Alex Morgan trains. You wont see her doing a bunch of hurdles and somersaults before shooting. You will see very simple movement patterns done strikingly well. AND SHE'S AN ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL!
Don't get me wrong - every once in a while you will come across a monster of an athlete that has the ability to pick up skills quickly, no matter what you throw at them. If so, you've hit the athlete lottery, you will be able to accelerate their training until you've found their threshold. However, you will still have to probe the foundational movements. I'm sure every soccer player can always use more first touch training. :)
As coaches we shouldn’t be promising “college level training sessions” to our 11 year old players or “train like a pro at this XXX facility” that happens to have a ridiculously high price tag. A squat is a squat whether you do it at a multi-million dollar facility or your garage. You just have to be able to execute it properly, and that where coaching comes in.