Time, Structure, Play and Athleticism

Is our hyper-attention to time and structure holding us back from being (or coaching) the best athletes we can be?

I’ve been reading through the book “Sapiens”, after hearing great things about it from several sources, and I came across the following section, discussing the idea of time and structure in daily life:

“The typical person consults these clocks several dozen times a day, because almost everything we do has to be done on time. An alarm clock wakes us up at 7 A.M., we heat our frozen bagel for exactly fifty seconds in the microwave, brush our teeth for three minutes until the electric toothbrush beeps, catch the 07: 40 train to work, run on the treadmill at the gym until the beeper announces that half an hour is over, sit down in front of the TV at 7 P.M. to watch our favourite show, get interrupted at preordained moments by commercials that cost $ 1,000 per second, and eventually unload all our angst on a therapist who restricts our prattle to the now standard fifty-minute therapy hour.”

The thing I often consider in training (and life in general) is that play and rigidly timed structures are opposing constructs. Flow doesn’t happen when you have approximately 10 minutes to achieve it. You can’t force yourself to fall asleep. This isn’t to say that structure isn’t essential to our modern life. If we didn’t have time and scheduling, we would be lost!

I also understand that some people have structure innately wired into them, while others like a looser and more free flowing daily routine. Before clocks really existed, however, we relied on the (ever changing) schedule of the sun to decide when we went to bed, woke up, and worked. The rotation of the earth gave us variation in our day to day routine. Of course, all that has changed these days.

Athletics, and the incredible abilities of the human body are largely rooted in things found in play. The more we structure everything we do, the less play-like it becomes. Workouts become robotic. Coaching becomes based on pleasing-paradigms, as I’ve heard Dan Pfaff say. Every movement and breathing pattern is structured and assessed. How did humans ever run fast and jump high before all this?!

“Is this what athletes are becoming through modern performance methods?”

Let’s not forget that when we coach anything from a technical perspective, we are working with an organism that’s ability to subconsciously organize it’s own movement goes far beyond the capability of the most powerful supercomputer. Many coaching cues do more harm than good. Pat Davidson in his recent article on knees in and squatting says it incredibly well:

“Where I would start giving recommendations is to quote Charlie Francis in regards to advice to coaches…think twice and speak once or not at all. When you start thinking that you’re smarter than the millions upon millions of years of evolution that led to a human organism standing in front of you executing patterns that are the result of protein behavior that were coded for by a genome and wired up by a nervous system that has figured out the most effective way to guide someone through the complex and multi-faceted environment that they’ve lived in for their entire life, you’re starting to border on being someone who is either way too ego driven, or ignorant of the depth of reality, that you could be problematic.”

Athletes lift weights 2-5 days a week for an hour a day to fit the scholastic system and class scheduling. Private training is dictated by the need to make money and give children back to their parents after the workout. These are of course, largely of necessity. Our work flow becomes a slave to the schedule, and it works its way down in to how are workouts play out.

Why is this important? Well, it’s not like we can (or should) get into the idea of letting athletes work out whenever they feel like it, etc. On the other hand, it helps us understand a little more about how to engage the time we have.

Spontaneous play is huge (and the younger the athlete, the more this is true)
Coach less robotically, and allow athletes to be athletes more often
Just because you are in the weightroom for an hour, or two, or whatever doesn’t mean you have to “train” formally that entire time.
Be aware of the difference of, and specific need for “training” and “flow”

One thing I have always kept with me comes from Dan John, where he mentioned that often times when we were young we would achieve a personal best in an athletic feat without having that perfect structure in all our sets and reps. We just did what came naturally, and our body responded. When we later worked hard to find that perfect training template, results weren’t what we expected.

What we can do then, with this in mind?

Offer up spontaneous games and/or competitive challenges to athletes when the situation calls for it (which you know through experience)
Occasionally have “uncertainty” based work in training (such as through use of a dice or coin flip)
Consider the total number of “coached” movements and positions in a workout, and investigate the rationale behind what is coached and where the athlete is left to their own movement strategy
Know, as Lee Taft has mentioned, when to simply coach effort and not movement paradigms
Have primal and “fun” movements in a workout, such as doing loaded carries with a teammate, or navigating monkey bars
Don’t constantly nitpick complex SPP movements (such as Olympic lifts) every single workout for each athlete
Don’t be afraid to take days off, or come back to the intended workout when athletes are better prepared for it
Follow up a structured series of movement (say weightlifting) with an opportunity for an athlete to freely express movement, such as 15 minutes of messing around shooting hoops.

This wasn’t the longest article, but I didn’t mean it to be. As my friend Paul Cater often says, one of the most important aspects of coaching is dismantling robotic controls. Save some time reading, and use it to enjoy the instinctive nature of play and being an athlete.

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