It’s definitely been a little while since I’ve written anything.  Over the past couple months, I’ve really been reconsidering almost everything I know when it comes to training and how I’ve been manipulating and applying it in my sessions.  This has left me with a lot of uncertainty in regards to what is “the answer”.  However, now I’m realizing that there is not a singular solution, and this can be a great platform to air out some thoughts about how and why I might want to try changing up some of the training.  This takes us to today’s big topic of revamping my thoughts in regards to athletic development. 

Initially, I used to use lots of simplistic, passive drills that focused on jumping, landing, decelerating, shuffling, running mechanics, body control, and coordination.  Then I switched things up and went for a more sensory development approach.  This included exercises like running and spinning out to the side, jumping with turning in mid-air, crawling, and jumping/landing on different surfaces.  The purpose here was performance is built from the platforms of sensory systems, so the more developed our sensory systems, the better we’ll perform.  After playing around with different concepts in this regard, I went back to more passive drills in an effort to drive movement efficiency.  The reason being that the more efficient we move, the better we can express athleticism.  However, now my approach is one that is more concerned with the environment.

Where I am at now with athletic development is focused on the environment.  I’ve recently started trying to incorporate aspects from Ecological Dynamics and the Constraints-Led Approach, both of which have changed my views on how to train youth athletes.  While this isn’t a complete 180 where I’m disregarding movement mechanics, I think the bulk of training needs to be centered around environmental processing.  I look at it a couple ways:

• Increasing number of one-sport athletes (meaning experience in movement response to low variability in input)
• Increasing number of less physically developed athletes (meaning they lack the ability to “just move”)
• Environment dictates movement response, not the other way around

So let’s break this down.

When athletes are exposed to only one-sport, they slowly begin funneling all their experience towards what occurs within this sport.  This isn’t an article where I’m going to get on my high-horse about one-sport athletes, but I will say this:

Yes, when it comes to potential success in a sport, the more exposure to what occurs within that sport will theoretically lead to better chances of success.  However, with youth athletes I’m looking at their peak potential, and for me the prerequisite to building a high peak is a broad base.  The more experience they have in situations with different environments (indoor/outdoor, large/small ball, loud/quiet crowds, large/small teams, etc.) the more developed they can become.  While playing soccer might not have “direct carryover” to a tennis player’s success, that’s not the goal with youth athletes.  The goal is how can we help guide them to reach their peak.

Along with one-sport athletes, there has been an increase in the number of athletes who are not physically developed.  The growing trend (from where I’ve been watching from) has been for kids to become more involved with sedentary activities.  This has led to a shift where athletes do not possess the basics to movement.  With some of the athletes we work with the most important thing we can offer them is working towards general health.  With more sedentary populations, the most important training is simply moving.  We need to get them moving in all different planes, methods, and manners.  I liken it to this: you can’t mold metal into a sword if you don’t even have enough metal in the first place. 

On top of the previous observations, what I’ve also found is that the majority of youth athletes cannot handle input processing with regards to movement. This is where environmental factors come into play.  We can work until the sun goes down on the proper mechanics to shuffling or running but throw in just one attacker/defender (let alone multiple) and everything goes away.  Now, if the issue with this isn’t how they move in comfortable, no-stress situations, but how they’re moving when they have to provide a movement response, I don’t see the benefit in continuing to work passive drills.  If their biggest issue is building up experience, frameworks, and comfort in high-stress situations where they have to quickly process what is occurring and provide an appropriate response that will allot them success, then why would I skip that entirely?  Our environment dictates our decision-making and that dictates our movement responses. 

Now, if I can build up experience within changing environments and develop these athletes to become more comfortable responding, chances are we’re going to be on the right track.  An athlete who is more comfortable handing his environment will be largely more comfortable experimenting with different movement solutions and even have an increased likelihood of transferring the mechanics learned from those passive drills than the athlete who freezes up and shuts down whenever he has to provide a response.

So this is a simple insight into where I’m at now with athletic development, and I think this thought process might be in for the long-haul.  This isn’t to say in 6 months or a year I won’t have deviated from it, but currently this seems to be the best foundation from which to deviate.  Along with this though, I actually hope in this time-span I change how I view and implement this since that’ll mean I’ve learned something new and have once again challenged my own beliefs and thoughts.

When it comes to handling our athletes, I’m always trying to find a better way to tie everything together.  I want to be able to better answer the question “What is the governing principle?”  Overall development, getting them more comfortable and confident with movement, physical literacy, sensory development, systems development.  These are all different aspects that we incorporate, and while they all play an integral part within the approach, I kept feeling like there was something that was missing; it felt like there was underlying structure missing.  I’ve been spending that past couple weeks trying to look at training with different lenses, and I think I’ve come up with a good way to describe what it is that I’m after in regards to that governing principle.

Input vs Output

When it comes to the overall training session, I’m starting to view it in the context of where it falls along the Input/Output Continuum.  This continuum essentially just states where the measure of the focus lies. 

The closer we get over to the input side, the more I am giving the athlete.  By this I mean, the more I am manipulating factors that will challenge how the athlete internalizes and processes the session.  This is going to favor more of a sensory challenge than physical. 

The closer we get over to the output side, the more I am focused on what the athlete is giving me.  Here the measure of the outcome becomes more important.  This is where the more traditional ideas of training fall.  Training for strength, hypertrophy, speed, or power would be located on this side of the continuum.  Or simply put, output-driven sessions favor more of the athlete’s expression of traits.

While all sessions will fall somewhere along this continuum, there are instances where I want to favor one side over the other.

Youth Athletes/Beginner Athletes

With our youth athletes, I am going to program their training to be driven more by input than output.  I want to widen their foundation as much as possible during this stage of their training.  When looking at the different stages of development, input-driven sessions are going to provide much more benefit long-term than focusing on the external outcomes for our youth athletes.  I want them to learn how to feel movement.  I want them to learn what movement feels like on different surfaces and in different contexts.  I want to them to learn how to coordinate movement based off different types of information they are receiving.  I want them to learn how to use conscious and unconscious feedback to regulate their movements and positions.  By challenging the information that they are receiving, we can better develop them for when they will later need to express that response. 

Along with youth athletes, I am also going to lean more towards the input side with beginner athletes.  Even if they are older in years, that doesn’t make up for a young training age.  If an athlete has never had formal training before (or never even stepped into the weight room!) then my approach is going to be geared more towards providing opportunities to interpret different information with regards to movement.  As with our youth athletes, I want newer athletes to learn how to feel different movements, positions, and ways to load the body before we begin actually loading them up.  An athlete who understands how to use his/her body will be much better at expressing physical traits than one who doesn’t know how to move.

Advanced Athletes

As athletes become more proficient in movement, interpreting different stimuli, and providing appropriate responses, their training will shift towards a more output-driven approach.  Now that an athlete understands how to appropriately load the body, I want them to become better at the physical side.  Now we can become more concerned with the outcome.  What do they need to better express their athletic traits?  Are they getting stronger, faster, more explosive?  Do they need to put on more muscle?  This is where we can begin to answer these questions and let the training approach provide the solution. 

This is just a general oversight, but I feel that using this context helps me to provide a structure to then get more detailed within.  Being able to define the governing principle behind the training then allows me to better cater some of the non-programmables, such as cueing.  Two athletes could perform the same exercise or drill, but I might cue it differently to drive more input or output.  By labeling the type of training with this context, it allows everything else to fall in place to provide a better experience for the athlete. 

Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about how an athlete’s ability to accept force (or decelerate) impacts their performance.  I think a lot of emphasis and focus gets placed on the ability to produce force, and rightfully so, as an athlete who can produce more force possesses the capability to be faster, stronger, and perform better.  However, force production is just one piece of the puzzle and while important, it may not be as big of a piece as it’s sometimes made out to be. Today I want to bring to attention the importance of accepting force, and how it’s potentially more influential to performance and health than the ability to produce it.  (As with everything there will be exceptions but stick with me for a second before exiting off this page and blocking it from your browser for the rest of forever.)

First, let’s just start out with the simple physics of movement.  If we want to change direction (whether that be up from down, left from right, or forwards from backwards) we first have to stop moving in the current direction to move in the new direction.  If we all get together and start running to the left and someone decides they’re tired of going that way and wants to turn back, they first have to completely stop moving in the direction of their left.  If that person never stops moving in that direction – well, they can’t ever go in a different direction. Therefore, if we have to change direction quickly (which is what sports are all about) then we need to be able to decelerate and then accelerate quickly.  The first component of that equation (deceleration!) is arguable the most important, as nothing can ever happen until it has. Now, let’s switch gears from athletes for a second and use cars. Imagine we have two cars that are completely identical in every detail.  Same make, same model, same horsepower, same fuel levels – literally everything is the same. We are going to race them down a 100-yard track that has a stop sign at the 50-yard mark. Both cars will accelerate at top speed and be tied going into this stop sign (as their acceleration capabilities are identical).  Now, the only difference in this scenario will be the manner in which the drivers stop at this stop sign. One driver will stop abruptly and then accelerate out of it. The other driver will slowly ease into the stop and then accelerate out of it. Even though the cars are absolutely identical, the driver who was quicker getting into the stop will win every time.  They both accelerated out of that stop at the same speed, but the first driver got a head start by stopping quicker. The same goes for our athletes. Sport is a hodgepodge of constant bouts of accelerating, decelerating, and then accelerating again. By giving our athletes the tools to be quicker decelerating, we will be giving them an instant advantage over the athlete who spends all of their training working on acceleration.

Building off of this point, it’s not enough to just be quick with our deceleration, we must also be controlled with it.  Even if we quickly decelerate, the inability to control our bodies during this phase means it’s going to take us longer to get into a position to accelerate (and potentially cause injury!).  Let’s put our imagination to work again. To try to make all things equal, let’s say we have a very constrained change of direction drill. Two athletes (Athlete A and Athlete B) are going to run 10 yards forwards, turn around, and then run 10 yards back through the starting line.  Now, for all intents and purposes, if both athletes slow themselves down at the same speed, how could deceleration further factor into who’s going to win? If Athlete A can control his deceleration better, and Athlete B tips over like the little teapot who’s all steamed up, then Athlete A is going to win.  This is because it took Athlete B a lot longer to find a position to accelerate out of than Athlete A.  Having fast working brakes is great, but if we haven’t learned how to use them, then they aren’t going to be of much use.

Lastly, successful athletes are successful because they outperform other athletes during competition.  A commonly overlooked prerequisite to outperforming the competition is being able to compete. That 60” vertical or 4.2 40 doesn’t matter if you’re sitting on the bench with an injury.  Now, not all injuries are the same and if someone karate kicks your leg into two pieces then no amount of deceleration training could have affected that. But, when it comes to muscle strains (or pulled muscles) there is a correlation.  A review of the literature on hamstring strains by Kenneally-Dabrowski, et al. concluded that the majority of these injuries occurred during the late swing phase.¹  For those that are unfamiliar with the gait phase of running, the late swing phase is when the heel strikes the ground as the leg prepares to position itself to push off for the next stride.  This is also the beginning of the deceleration phase of running, when the body must eccentrically load itself. Along with this analysis, Dr. Lawrence Gulotta, of the Hospital for Special Surgery, reports that muscle strains occur more often during the eccentric phase than any other phase.² Again, this eccentric phase is the deceleration phase of movement.  While these are only two specific examples, what we can gather is that if the body is unable to accept the magnitude of force required to halt movement, injury will result. Even with injuries that occur during the force production (or concentric) phase, I’d encourage you to consider if the athlete was positioned well to produce that force. Remember our scenario with Athlete A and Athlete B from earlier?  Athlete B had a rough time controlling the deceleration and couldn’t find a great position to accelerate out of. This sub-optimal position could be placing lots of undesired stress on the body. If we can’t find good positions to produce force in, we may be asking the body to perform beyond its capabilities. So even in the instance that the injury does not occur during the deceleration phase, failure to decelerate properly could still be a culprit in injury occurrence.  

For those who stuck by me and made it to the end, I appreciate it.  This may have just been review for some of you reading, but from my experience it seems a lot of focus gets placed on force production, and when issues arise from this training focus, there’s a tendency to just double down and try to hammer home more force production work. This is just a call to consider the importance of accepting force and appreciate its role within sport.

Links to the cited sources:

1. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13437
2. https://www.hss.edu/conditions_muscle-injuries-overview.asp

Thank you to everyone who has stumbled their way onto my site.  While my writing can use some practice, I hope that at some point there will be something on this page that encourages everyone to reexamine their training and coaching methods.  Disclaimer: I am not here to say that my way is better than anyone else’s.  However, I hope that by providing context to the methods that I use, I can stir up some discussion and debate that will benefit everyone (myself included) that finds their way over here.

My name is Kevin Klett, and I am a sports performance coach. I graduated from Temple University with a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology and have earned the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) credentials through the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). I work with athletes of all sports and ages, with a focus on long-term development of youth athletes.

You can check out some of the work I do over on Instagram @kevin.klett