Prepared Blog Repost: Goals Versus Purpose

Prepared Blog Repost: Goals Versus Purpose

Working with high performers in different parts of world I have encountered many driven and highly focussed individuals, both within the realm of sport and beyond. From time to time it is serves us well to take a step back, and reflect on the wider purpose. This allows us to zoom out from our myopic focus on whatever goal we set ourselves, and to consider what it was that originally drew us to do what we are doing.

Prepared Blog Repost: Physical Preparation as a Non-Negotiable for Females

Prepared Blog Repost: Physical Preparation as a Non-Negotiable for Females

EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following was originally shared via the Prepared Blog for our sister project Prepared Athlete Training & Health, which was created in June 2019 to support aspiring athletes in Vancouver, Canada, and beyond. I hope you enjoy the read…

GIRLS HAVE A TOUGHER TIME THAN BOYS…

Young female athletes get nothing for nothing. Girls have to work for everything, and in the absence of appropriate intervention, it all becomes harder when they hit their adolescent years. When boys hit puberty they benefit from spontaneous gains in size, strength, power, and speed. Girls get no such luck.

Prepared Blog Repost: Coaching the Mind

Prepared Blog Repost: Coaching the Mind

EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following was shared recently as part of the regular updates for our sister project Prepared Athlete Training & Health, which launched in June this year to provide independent coaching support to aspiring athletes locally in Vancouver. I hope you enjoy the read…

The theme I chose for this week’s post is coaching the mind. An athlete I have worked with for the past couple of years during her successful transition to elite-level bobsleigh kindly shared a testimonial for the site recently. Aside from being gratified that she took the time, it was also interesting to see that the part she focused on was how our sessions had helped with the mental aspects of performing and athlete life in general. And so I decided to follow Mackenzie’s lead, and take a deeper dive on a critical element that can easily be overlooked.

Prepared Blog Repost: The Growing Needs of Kids

Prepared Blog Repost: The Growing Needs of Kids

EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following was shared recently as part of the regular updates for our sister project Prepared Athlete Training & Health, which launched in June this year to provide independent coaching support to aspiring athletes locally in Vancouver. I hope you enjoy the read…

KIDS THESE DAYS…

Over the past week I came across the latest in a series of reports on the steeply declining levels of physical activity among children and adolescents. This latest publication, commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO), reported on the present state of things on a global scale, based on nearly 300 surveys across 146 countries. The report also tracked trends over the past two decades, drawing comparisons to data collected in 2001. Based on data from 1.6 million kids aged 11-17 years, somewhere in the range of 76-80% of boys and 83-88% of girls reported insufficient levels of daily physical activity, based on WHO guidelines (60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity daily).

First Do No Harm: Iatrogenics in Coaching and Practice

First Do No Harm: Iatrogenics in Coaching and Practice

Iatrogenics is a term most commonly used in medicine. As attested by the Hippocratic oath (and the premise ‘First Do No Harm’), the medical profession is familiar with the concept that an intervention may pose potential risks and unforeseen consequences. In contrast, the idea that we may either not be helping or through our involvement inadvertently making the athlete worse off does not necessarily occur to coaches and practitioners. In this post we explore how iatrogenics applies in the context of coaching and practice, and make the case for considering potential risks as well as benefits before we intervene.

Marshalling the Mind Under Stress

Marshalling the Mind Under Stress

High stakes and heightened emotions are characteristic of competitive sport, particularly at the highest level. For those who operate in elite and professional sport the presence of stress seems ubiquitous. Coaches and athletes alike regularly face high pressure scenarios where there is a great deal of expectation and much riding on the outcome. Anticipation of an important event, such as a big game, major competition, or selection trials naturally inspire a host of feelings, thoughts, and emotions, ranging from excitement to anxiety and even dread, sometimes simultaneously! In this post we explore how we can equip ourselves and help our athletes to meet the psychological and emotional challenges we will inevitably face on the journey.

Clues for Successful Youth Sports Parenting

Clues for Successful Youth Sports Parenting

Parents play a vital role in supporting their child to participate in youth sport. Parents are quite literally the driver, providing both the opportunity and transportation. Youth sports parenting is a full time job in itself, demanding considerable investment in terms of both money and time. It is parental support that affords kids the opportunity to participate and derive the myriad benefits associated with youth sports, which span athletic, health, scholastic, and life skill realms. Naturally, parents are invested in their child’s youth sports participation, and this investment often leads to increasing involvement. Yet despite the best intentions there are adverse consequences when parental involvement or intervention becomes excessive. In this Informed Blog post we unravel the complexity and challenges of being the parent of a youth sports athlete, and attempt to offer some clues to help guide parents to walk this fine line at different phases in the youth sports journey.

Leveraging 'Agency' in Athlete Preparation

Leveraging 'Agency' in Athlete Preparation

Agency can be defined as the sense that we are in control of our own actions and the outcomes that follow. Agency is central to how we perceive our interactions with the outside world. For instance, sense of agency permits us to feel that through our actions we are able to influence external events. In this way, agency is integral to the notion that we have some degree of control over our situation, our standing in the world, and our future direction. In this latest offering we peel back the layers of agency in the context of athlete preparation, exploring what it means (and what it doesn’t mean) in relation to our work with athletes.

Tempering Athletes: Future Proofing Versus Acquired Fragility

Tempering Athletes: Future Proofing Versus Acquired Fragility

Tempering is a process used to impart strength and toughness, and essentially serves to bring out the intrinsic properties of the material under stress. Athletes forged in the crucible of severely testing conditions may be similarly rendered highly resilient to future challenges and stressors. Those who successfully come through such trial by fire paradoxically often prove stronger from the experience. The notion that stressors can not only make systems more resilient, but in fact stronger and better as a consequence, speaks to the concept of antifragility, a phenomenon observed in nature and highlighted by Nassim Taleb who famously coined the term. In this post, we will bring this antifragility lens, and a general reticence to accept that sports injuries ‘just happen’, to reframe how we think about preparing athletes to ‘future proof’ them to risks and scenarios that we cannot fully anticipate. In place of safeguarding measures and interventions that seek to protect, we will make the argument for tempering athletes to harness and develop their intrinsic reserves and coping abilities. Adopting this perspective and general strategy for managing injury risk, we will outline some tactics to help guide practitioners in their approach.

Emotional Aptitude in Athlete Preparation

Emotional Aptitude in Athlete Preparation

Emotion has traditionally been viewed as something to be suppressed. The logic goes that as leaders and people in positions of authority we should be detached and act ‘without emotion’. If somebody is described as ‘emotional’ generally this is construed as a bad thing; when we become ‘emotional’ the implication is that we are no longer being rational or we are not capable of reason. Conventional wisdom advocates we avoid an emotional response or making emotional decisions. In contrast to these established views, more recent study in this area demonstrates that emotion is in fact integral to reasoning, decision making, guiding our behaviour, and our ability to relate to others. Emotional intelligence is accordingly becoming recognised as being at least as important as more established forms of intelligence. Indeed we increasingly hear commentators proclaim that ‘EQ trumps IQ’. In this latest Informed Blog we delve into the role of emotion in coaching and our work with athletes, and explore what aptitudes we need to possess in this area as leaders, coaches, and practitioners.