The first lecture was great as it pertained to changing behavior, and I don’t mean seeing a psychologist/psychiatrist. Some fundamental ideas to consider are to involve the people in goal setting and what activities are going to better the outcome. Allow failure. Focus on the challenge. Science will help. And something that has been said to me regarding athletic programming since the beginning is “build a plan that starts at the end”. The data we collect isn’t very predictable, instead it is much more complex than that. To find the solution–emergence–we must follow the lessons from above and create viable solutions. This seems like a complex mash of words, but quite simply we need to, as coaches/clinicians, question everything that we do on a daily basis. Doing this, we can reflect on the basic lessons to create a behavioral change in our athletes/clients. There is a time and place to try “new ideas” to add to your programs, and that time is early in the novice training cycle. This way we can decide early what will work and what will create a stagnant environment.
As promised from the Day 1 write up, collaboration is a great way to create success. Listening to the Canadien Basketball Performance Team, the main takeaway was clearly that communication between the different fields of study was essential for a fluid environment, as it also eliminated most of the ladder effect which is created in most scenarios. Nutrition is able to communicate with Strength & Conditioning to let the coach know that player may not be performing as well today because of poor diet choices, this way the S&C coach knows not to absolutely hold the athlete at the same percentile projected for the day. This is a simple example, however, take away this communication avenue and the S&C coach doesn’t know anything about what is going on with the athlete other than that athlete isn’t able to achieve the same 5 rep percentage that was projected for the training that day. The coach then believes that it has something to do with program design not meeting the needs for the athlete, and so goes the tailspin (among other reasons).
Finally, to wrap up this event, I was able to see the integration of some “new” tactics into the evaluation process for an initial eval with a patient. This is something that is difficult in my young therapist mind to do because everything was so concrete in the evaluation process in school. The follow through of what the information was saying is incomprehensible to some of my peers, however, it works–and there is plenty of research to support it. When broken down, the body is absolutely assymetrical, and to achieve symmetry would require a new human design. I digress. Bottom line, Orthopedics is neuro and neuro is ortho. One cannot exist without the other, therefore, both need to be considered in treatment. And so to create optimal motor learning, especially in the beginning a blocked program must be used, rather than throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.