As your internship progresses, you’ve possibly come around to the idea of training philosophies and are beginning to figure out how to go about developing yours. This philosophy is paramount to give a lot of thought to, seeing as it effectively functions as the “North Star” that you will follow on your career’s journey. It’s also likely that you will need to be able to articulate it to prospective employers during job interviews. Before we push ahead into the meat of the article, let’s start with a working definition of the word “philosophy” around which to orient ourselves for the entirety of the article and why the conventional idea of a training philosophy tends to be misguided.
Per Oxford Languages, the definition I find to be most applicable is this one:
“A theory or attitude held by a person or organization that acts as a guiding principle for behavior.”
Inherent to behaviors are decision-making processes. As you need to be able to decide what behaviors to carry out and then the subsequent associated actions in line with those decisions. So, it can be reasonable to say that a philosophy is, “A theory held by a person that acts as a guiding principle for decision-making processes and thus, emergent actions”. If you disagree, stop here, and jump in my DMs on social media to voice your dissent but if we can agree with this, then let’s continue forward.
Via Negativa
“I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not him” -Michelangelo
You’ve probably seen this quote in one form or another on the internet and it speaks to a robust pedagogical ideology for how to learn; by learning what something is not. Thomas Edison also spoke to it as well when he was working to invent the lightbulb and was quoted as saying,
“I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
Nassim Taleb speaks to this idea of via negativa knowledge by defining it as such,
“The principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.”
Based upon our working definition from above, I think it is critical to understand what a training philosophy is not before you can begin honing in on what your philosophy is. A training philosophy is not:
Do we see what part of our definition these fit within? They are systems and ideas that emerge as the result of a decision-making process that decides to utilize them as the “tools” by which to prepare athletes for their respective sports. Yet you will see many veteran coaches who say that the above systems are their training philosophies, which is a poor conflation to make. It would be akin to contracting an architect to build your home and when you ask about their architectural approaches for the end vision you have in mind, they respond by telling you they use a hammer, saw, and screwdriver…
You’d walk out of the room too, right? I contend that the general issue of coaches conflating training systems and ideas for philosophies stems from the profession’s predilection for copying what others do without critical appraisal of what they’re copying. Going one step deeper, I believe it stems from working within a profession that commits a substitution bias far too often, taking complex problems and exchanging them for simpler problems that can be more readily solved. Just as coaches would rather simply ask themselves, “how can I make athletes bigger and stronger?” and reductively approach the job under that pretense. Instead of asking what should our driving question be and a more complex one of “how do we improve the athletes’ abilities to perform their sport?”. What’s clear is coaches would rather avoid critical thought to figure out their theory of guiding principles for sports preparation and would rather just simply say that their theory is a particular group of lifts. Very few coaches stop and look around to ask, “how does a preference for a particular set of lifts do anything to inform the decisions you make regarding athlete preparation”, this line of thinking perpetuates. The ones who have stopped to ask these questions are generally regarded as outliers/rebels who are disruptive to an odd world order of how this job is “supposed to be done”.
Succinctly, a training philosophy is not a set of lifts, particular loading schemes, or an ideology about how athletes should move; rather, these elements are tools that are simply tools in the toolbox. Coaches who hang their philosophical hats on particular lifts or training schemes are the workers that carry around a hammer and then look at every task as though it is a nail. Try and use that hammer to weld piping or wire electricity into the house you are building and let me know how that goes.
What’s a Philosophy then?
So, now that we understand that arriving at a training philosophy is not as simple as tying yourself to a particular training system. A bit of mental heavy lifting is now required to arrive at one, but where do you start as a young coach? I believe you need to start with the definition laid out at the beginning- you are trying to find a theory that acts as guiding principles for decision-making and emergent actions; the decision-making being the training means utilized and the emergent actions being the deployment and execution of these training means.
We are working towards building a theory, meaning we will need a centralizing theme around which this theory will orient. What should the central theme be? Probably the thing that matters most, which is the next question you need to ask yourself; what matters most? I happen to think this question has/should have a universal answer when it comes to sporting organizations, and that answer to me is winning. At the end of the day, you need to do enough of it to keep a job and/or advance up the ranks, or your training philosophy doesn’t matter, because you will be tossed out of a job with no athletes to apply that philosophy. I am not here to spoon-feed you a training philosophy though, so if you don’t believe winning is the central theme, you will have to sit with that question until you arrive at what your centralizing theme is.
In expanding your theory beyond your central theme, you will need to consider what the underpinning factors contribute to the emergence of that central theme, whilst understanding the role you play as a performance coach. Consideration should be given to the immediacy of your role in physical preparation, but possible peripheral roles of sport preparation as well, as more and more performance coaches are blurring the lines between performance and sports coaching. Again, this is for you to determine what is important through the lens of your role when you look at what the central theme of your philosophy is.
This begs the question: what do you believe is your role as a performance coach? The layman’s term is strength coach or S&C coach, but this seems reductive. Do you believe our job stops the moment athletes leave the weight room? Trends in the profession would seem to point to what should be an obvious notion that the lines of sport preparation are not nearly as siloed as the conventional model would have you believe. GPS systems tell us about competitive and practice loads, and performance coaches are typically best-equipped as practitioners to understand and utilize such information. We also understand that sports practice will always have an inherent physical component. It may be more technically and tactically dominant, but the reality is that if technical and tactical development isn’t done within a training environment that is representative and strategically manipulative of the bioenergetic, biodynamic and biomotor demands of the sport, there is going to be an immense gap between competitive demands and the athletes’ capabilities to meet them. Again, I am not here to spoon-feed you a philosophy but to postulate questions that you should consider as you develop and iterate yours.
Whatever you arrive at, aim for brevity while being as comprehensive as possible. There is and will be space to delve into the depths when speaking with others about it, but you want something you could fit on a PowerPoint slide that conveys the entirety of your approach. You should be able to discuss it at a 30,000-foot level and then seamlessly dive in and talk more qualitatively about how the methods and tools you utilize serve to support that approach. Also, make sure that whatever you arrive at is presentable and digestible for sports coaches and others who work in support of the team. As you ascend the ranks, sports coaches and other staff members will become a bigger presence in your interviews, so you will want to be able to meet them where they are at, and avoid jargon. This is not to say dumb it down, as you certainly do not want to do this and undermine your intelligence, but opt for words that may be more universally recognized and understood by those from other subdomains of sport.
The last pieces to remember are that you should not just copy what some other coach utilizes as their philosophy if you do not fully understand it, support it, or have the ability to go deeper on it. Make it authentic to you and where you are at as a professional, or you will get quickly exposed by a coach who asks you to dive deeper into particular aspects of the philosophy you blindly pass as your own. Inherent to that is the willingness to learn, grow, and iterate your philosophy as you gain more experience and knowledge in the field, and realize it is a never-ending process of chipping away at what you hold to be true.
Conclusion
Beginning to hone your training philosophy is a step you should look to take during your internship. It is important to distinguish that a training philosophy is not a particular training system or loading parameters and progressions, but rather, that it is a “theory that acts as guiding principles by which to make decisions that influence emergent actions”. This perspective should help you to realize that these training systems and loading schemes are nothing more than tools that you can equip your toolbox with to ultimately deploy for the right job that warrants them, assuming deployment of those tools is in line with the philosophical approach that you believe to be appropriate for a particular sport/organization/athlete. Firstly, this requires some time and thought, to arrive at your philosophy, and then secondly, critically appraise methods as you come by them to figure out if they agree with your approach to sports preparation.
I am fully aware this article was fairly vague overall, and that was done intentionally. I do not want to spoon-feed you a philosophy, but rather prompt you with questions you should sit with and consider as you begin to figure out how to piece together your philosophy. It is not something that will happen overnight, and it is not something that will be cemented for life. Put in the mental effort of thinking through those questions, lay out some ideas and chip away at them until you find something that sits well with you, but comprehensively expresses your approach. If looking for feedback, I would encourage you to head over the discussion forums inside Strenght Coach Network and bounce your ideas off of other coaches.
Next month’s instalment will begin winding down on your internship experience; how should you close down your time at your current internship and what steps should you begin taking in preparation for the next rung of the career ladder. Simply put, the goal is to get PAID at the next stop, but doing so requires an elevation of everything you did to get your internship.
Per Oxford Languages, the definition I find to be most applicable is this one:
“A theory or attitude held by a person or organization that acts as a guiding principle for behavior.”
Inherent to behaviors are decision-making processes. As you need to be able to decide what behaviors to carry out and then the subsequent associated actions in line with those decisions. So, it can be reasonable to say that a philosophy is, “A theory held by a person that acts as a guiding principle for decision-making processes and thus, emergent actions”. If you disagree, stop here, and jump in my DMs on social media to voice your dissent but if we can agree with this, then let’s continue forward.
Via Negativa
“I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not him” -Michelangelo
You’ve probably seen this quote in one form or another on the internet and it speaks to a robust pedagogical ideology for how to learn; by learning what something is not. Thomas Edison also spoke to it as well when he was working to invent the lightbulb and was quoted as saying,
“I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
Nassim Taleb speaks to this idea of via negativa knowledge by defining it as such,
“The principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.”
Based upon our working definition from above, I think it is critical to understand what a training philosophy is not before you can begin honing in on what your philosophy is. A training philosophy is not:
- Olympic Weightlifting
- Powerlifting
- The Hatch System
- Westside Barbell Training
- HIT Training
- 1×20 System
- 90o Eccentric-Isometrics *shudders*
- GOATA *enters fetal position*
Do we see what part of our definition these fit within? They are systems and ideas that emerge as the result of a decision-making process that decides to utilize them as the “tools” by which to prepare athletes for their respective sports. Yet you will see many veteran coaches who say that the above systems are their training philosophies, which is a poor conflation to make. It would be akin to contracting an architect to build your home and when you ask about their architectural approaches for the end vision you have in mind, they respond by telling you they use a hammer, saw, and screwdriver…
You’d walk out of the room too, right? I contend that the general issue of coaches conflating training systems and ideas for philosophies stems from the profession’s predilection for copying what others do without critical appraisal of what they’re copying. Going one step deeper, I believe it stems from working within a profession that commits a substitution bias far too often, taking complex problems and exchanging them for simpler problems that can be more readily solved. Just as coaches would rather simply ask themselves, “how can I make athletes bigger and stronger?” and reductively approach the job under that pretense. Instead of asking what should our driving question be and a more complex one of “how do we improve the athletes’ abilities to perform their sport?”. What’s clear is coaches would rather avoid critical thought to figure out their theory of guiding principles for sports preparation and would rather just simply say that their theory is a particular group of lifts. Very few coaches stop and look around to ask, “how does a preference for a particular set of lifts do anything to inform the decisions you make regarding athlete preparation”, this line of thinking perpetuates. The ones who have stopped to ask these questions are generally regarded as outliers/rebels who are disruptive to an odd world order of how this job is “supposed to be done”.
Succinctly, a training philosophy is not a set of lifts, particular loading schemes, or an ideology about how athletes should move; rather, these elements are tools that are simply tools in the toolbox. Coaches who hang their philosophical hats on particular lifts or training schemes are the workers that carry around a hammer and then look at every task as though it is a nail. Try and use that hammer to weld piping or wire electricity into the house you are building and let me know how that goes.
What’s a Philosophy then?
So, now that we understand that arriving at a training philosophy is not as simple as tying yourself to a particular training system. A bit of mental heavy lifting is now required to arrive at one, but where do you start as a young coach? I believe you need to start with the definition laid out at the beginning- you are trying to find a theory that acts as guiding principles for decision-making and emergent actions; the decision-making being the training means utilized and the emergent actions being the deployment and execution of these training means.
We are working towards building a theory, meaning we will need a centralizing theme around which this theory will orient. What should the central theme be? Probably the thing that matters most, which is the next question you need to ask yourself; what matters most? I happen to think this question has/should have a universal answer when it comes to sporting organizations, and that answer to me is winning. At the end of the day, you need to do enough of it to keep a job and/or advance up the ranks, or your training philosophy doesn’t matter, because you will be tossed out of a job with no athletes to apply that philosophy. I am not here to spoon-feed you a training philosophy though, so if you don’t believe winning is the central theme, you will have to sit with that question until you arrive at what your centralizing theme is.
In expanding your theory beyond your central theme, you will need to consider what the underpinning factors contribute to the emergence of that central theme, whilst understanding the role you play as a performance coach. Consideration should be given to the immediacy of your role in physical preparation, but possible peripheral roles of sport preparation as well, as more and more performance coaches are blurring the lines between performance and sports coaching. Again, this is for you to determine what is important through the lens of your role when you look at what the central theme of your philosophy is.
This begs the question: what do you believe is your role as a performance coach? The layman’s term is strength coach or S&C coach, but this seems reductive. Do you believe our job stops the moment athletes leave the weight room? Trends in the profession would seem to point to what should be an obvious notion that the lines of sport preparation are not nearly as siloed as the conventional model would have you believe. GPS systems tell us about competitive and practice loads, and performance coaches are typically best-equipped as practitioners to understand and utilize such information. We also understand that sports practice will always have an inherent physical component. It may be more technically and tactically dominant, but the reality is that if technical and tactical development isn’t done within a training environment that is representative and strategically manipulative of the bioenergetic, biodynamic and biomotor demands of the sport, there is going to be an immense gap between competitive demands and the athletes’ capabilities to meet them. Again, I am not here to spoon-feed you a philosophy but to postulate questions that you should consider as you develop and iterate yours.
Whatever you arrive at, aim for brevity while being as comprehensive as possible. There is and will be space to delve into the depths when speaking with others about it, but you want something you could fit on a PowerPoint slide that conveys the entirety of your approach. You should be able to discuss it at a 30,000-foot level and then seamlessly dive in and talk more qualitatively about how the methods and tools you utilize serve to support that approach. Also, make sure that whatever you arrive at is presentable and digestible for sports coaches and others who work in support of the team. As you ascend the ranks, sports coaches and other staff members will become a bigger presence in your interviews, so you will want to be able to meet them where they are at, and avoid jargon. This is not to say dumb it down, as you certainly do not want to do this and undermine your intelligence, but opt for words that may be more universally recognized and understood by those from other subdomains of sport.
The last pieces to remember are that you should not just copy what some other coach utilizes as their philosophy if you do not fully understand it, support it, or have the ability to go deeper on it. Make it authentic to you and where you are at as a professional, or you will get quickly exposed by a coach who asks you to dive deeper into particular aspects of the philosophy you blindly pass as your own. Inherent to that is the willingness to learn, grow, and iterate your philosophy as you gain more experience and knowledge in the field, and realize it is a never-ending process of chipping away at what you hold to be true.
Conclusion
Beginning to hone your training philosophy is a step you should look to take during your internship. It is important to distinguish that a training philosophy is not a particular training system or loading parameters and progressions, but rather, that it is a “theory that acts as guiding principles by which to make decisions that influence emergent actions”. This perspective should help you to realize that these training systems and loading schemes are nothing more than tools that you can equip your toolbox with to ultimately deploy for the right job that warrants them, assuming deployment of those tools is in line with the philosophical approach that you believe to be appropriate for a particular sport/organization/athlete. Firstly, this requires some time and thought, to arrive at your philosophy, and then secondly, critically appraise methods as you come by them to figure out if they agree with your approach to sports preparation.
I am fully aware this article was fairly vague overall, and that was done intentionally. I do not want to spoon-feed you a philosophy, but rather prompt you with questions you should sit with and consider as you begin to figure out how to piece together your philosophy. It is not something that will happen overnight, and it is not something that will be cemented for life. Put in the mental effort of thinking through those questions, lay out some ideas and chip away at them until you find something that sits well with you, but comprehensively expresses your approach. If looking for feedback, I would encourage you to head over the discussion forums inside Strenght Coach Network and bounce your ideas off of other coaches.
Next month’s instalment will begin winding down on your internship experience; how should you close down your time at your current internship and what steps should you begin taking in preparation for the next rung of the career ladder. Simply put, the goal is to get PAID at the next stop, but doing so requires an elevation of everything you did to get your internship.
