Less is More

Happy Days everyone, today’s bit should be fairly quick and to the point. I hope if you’re not an athlete  or a coach yourself you can still take some good out of it, enjoy.

Coaches in many sports and even in the training world, tend to overlook how beneficial it can be to take the foot off of the gas for a minute when amidst a sports season. For some odd reason, the default setting for sport coaches is to press harder when things seem to be going poorly, simply baffling to me.

The better thing to do for me is to look at your athletes' body language. Are they sluggish, no matter how much sleep they got, or before you’ve even started practice? Chances are they might just need a day off, maybe reel back the conditioning.

It’s not ALWAYS going to be the answer, but just automatically going to, let’s push them harder to get more out of them, is downright stupid. There is evidence out there, coaches that give their athletes proper rest when it’s need and only put the pedal to the metal when required, often perform better in their contests, week in, week out.

I’m not Jurgen Klopp, Bill Belichick or Graham Henry, but I still don’t think this is wrong either. It’s always about balance, coaches just tend to go right for swinging that pendulum towards the “more” side when the team probably needs less.

That’s what I got for you all today. Thank you very much for using your time to read my thoughts and I hope have yourself a week!