Let 'Em Mess It Up

You’d think something like this didn’t need to be written anymore, but that’s not the case. Matter of fact, I'm sure this is at least the 2nd time I've scribbled something down on the subject.

I am 100% of the belief while success breeds success, you can’t grow without failure. There are a couple of examples in each of my coaching roles that come to mind.

Training

The first rep; As Todd Bumgardner has said, "Let the first rep suck." Hell, as long as there’s not some catastrophic issue with someone’s form, I’m willing to let a whole set go with less than perfect technique before making an adjustment. After we’ve made the adjustments between sets, I will cue and coach the next set focusing on the adjustments. About 9 times out of 10, it hits the right note.

Missing; Others that are more power lifters than I can tell you better, but when you miss on a big lift, a PR or whatever the case may be, assuming nothing super bad happened (injury) it benefits you. You can look at the flaws that were the reason the lift was missed, however major or minor we are talking about, and hone in on the technique. Also, does missing a weight not motivate you to train a little harder so you nail it the next time?

Rugby

Losing; Like with missing a lift, when you get beaten, especially either on the last play or hammered into the ground (either end of the spectrum as it were), you learn plenty. When you get beat by a wide gap, there’s tons of issues to be pointed out on the tape both for individuals and for the team. Likewise, when teams lose on the last play, there’s a glaring issue that caused the loss to occur on said last play (the official doesn’t count, as much as I want to blame them sometimes). In either of these cases, it forces you to look internally hard and can get you to bounce back even better,

Trying stuff; When I coach my teams, I’ve come to the point that I want the players to try stuff in our open play portions of practice. If it sounds like something crazy to do on the field, try it in practice and mess it up there. There’s minimal consequence for trying something in practice for us; a bonkers pass, an amazing step (juke move), absurd kick and so on. While all these things will probably take bravery to perform in a game, I’m happy to give players the chance to try this wild stuff in practice so we can talk about how it might be executed better, even if it looks like a bad idea on the field.

So the lesson, once again, is to screw up, mess up, make errors and then learn from them. Understand where things went sideways, address them, try again, maybe mess up some more and then find success. Thanks for reading fam, feel free to comment or message me with questions or just for discussion.