Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 2 Episode 8: Crafting a Dynamic Training Philosophy for High Performance Sport

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Embark with me, Jason Weber, on a solo flight where we'll unravel the intricacies of creating a training philosophy that's as resilient as it is dynamic. With Darren Burgess away at an AFL event, I dissect the core of what makes us tick professionally across strength and conditioning, rehab, and physiotherapy arenas. 

As we traverse the nuances of cultivating a successful approach to professional growth, I'll share personal anecdotes and the inevitable missteps that have sculpted my career. It's a candid conversation about the art of decision-making in pro sport—from the complexities of running mechanics to crafting an athlete's career trajectory. Get ready for an episode that highlights the importance of humility, a scientific mindset, and the invaluable influence of both positive and negative mentorship. Tune in and discover how to navigate your professional journey with a philosophy that's not set in stone, but rather, one that evolves with each sprint, hurdle, and marathon you encounter.

SpeedSig Intro

Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com

Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. I'm Jason Weber and I'm by myself today. Sorry to say that, due to Gather Round, which is a big gathering in Australia of all our AFL teams in South Australia, my co-host, Darren Burgess, is not with me today. So in place of that, I've put together a quick video blog about some of the ideas I use in professional sport, particularly in this case, building a training philosophy. So, in the absence of the ideas I use in professional sport, particularly in this case, building a training philosophy, so in the absence of the wonderful conversations that I have with Darren, I hope you enjoy this episode and I hope you take something out of it. Thanks, hi, my name is Jason Weber and welcome to the SpeedSig video blog.

Jason Weber:

In this blog today I'm talking about philosophies. Now, I used to call philosophies training philosophies, but really they're far more than that. They cover the entire profession, not only of strength and conditioning, rehab, athletic training, physiotherapy. It could amount to anything, any profession that you're involved in, but fundamentally, a philosophy is the skeleton upon which you build your career. It's the central ideas that dictate the way you conduct yourself professionally. Now we build those philosophies over many, many years and they start based on research. Those research comes in many different forms Academic, okay. Obviously. We're reading research in the strength and conditioning, physiotherapy, athletic training world. There is a plethora of research out there, in fact. Sometimes it's too hard to keep up with. But that's the starting point. We build the basis of our philosophy on that research.

Jason Weber:

The second key part about developing research for our philosophy is our industry. Our industry comes in a number of parts as well. Number one is your group of friends. Who are the professionals you hang out with? Who are the people you speak to? Who are the people that you test your ideas on? Say, hey, what about this? What about that? No, you're a fool, don't do that. Or, hey, that's a great idea. That's how you build confidence in the concepts that you're building and basing your practice on.

Jason Weber:

The next one, which is a really hard one from an industry-based research perspective, is social media. Now we know in social media there's no particular categorization or qualification. You need to put something out on social media. So your ability to filter information from a social media construct is absolutely critical and you've got to test it against something. What are you testing your social media observations or viewings against? Well, for me. I'm always testing them against my philosophy. It's a really simple model. Here's my philosophy I read or I see something and I match it against my philosophy. Does it fit? Read, or I see something and I match it against my philosophy. Does it fit, yes, no, if it doesn't fit and I'm opposed to that then it's gone. If it does fit, well, is it something I should include in my philosophy? Can I learn from this? That's how we develop our philosophies based on research.

Jason Weber:

Another one of the great developers of philosophies, of personal philosophies, is experience. Is how much do you learn from being on the job? Now, people always ask me where do I get started in sport? Where do I get started? How do I get into it? Well, when I started, I started coaching anybody, anybody and everybody that would listen to what I was saying, and you learn and you've got to learn fast.

Jason Weber:

Now, as you progress and you deal with higher and higher level athletes and more and more complicated situations, you start to learn more. And you've got to accept one thing You've got to make mistakes and you've got to learn from them fast. You hope we never want to do damage to people ever. Our primary responsibility is to get people healthy to their sport of choice. But the reality is there are going to be mistakes and you need to learn fast. And every time you make an error or even if you don't make an error but you see something and go, look, I'd never do that again Well, they're the things that develop your philosophy and they develop them fast, and you've got to be fast. If you keep making the same mistake twice, well you're not going to survive.

Jason Weber:

But experience is everything and that means if you can get experience by coaching a young person, you know coaching kids. You know coaching high school. I still, at the ripe old age of 55, I still coach high school, because it's an extraordinary environment in which athletes get to start from the very, very bottom and develop motor skill and physiological capabilities. Plus, in this day and age, when kids are doing all sorts of weird things, we've got a high injury count with athletes. So I'm quite often dealing with athletes that are young and have injuries based on overuse. So, making sure you expose yourself to as much experience as possible and as you go further and further up the experience tree, you can take those experiences and develop them, not only just, as I said before, into training philosophies, but you start to build them into management philosophies. So when we start to talk about things like how do I become a high-performance manager, how do I become a department lead? Well, as you're going up that chain, you're starting to try and get those experiences as you go along and you're going to get them from working with your senior.

Jason Weber:

You might work with someone and go, hey, I would never behave the way that person behaves. Or alternatively, you know, there's a great person, what can I learn from them? I can take three or four things and build them into my philosophy Because ultimately, we're all a function of the people we worked with. There's no question about that. There's a great author out of Texas. A guy named Austin Kleon wrote a book called Steel Like an Artist Sorry for the pause there, steel Like an Artist and in that book he talks about how everybody, every artist, is a function of everybody they've seen and studied. And it's the same in performance, sport. Everything we are is a function of the people we've worked with and learned from. Sport, everything we are is a function of the people we've worked with and learned from. So you've just got to make sure you work with good people and build those education and experience moments into your philosophy. Okay, so it's time to start developing your own philosophy. How do we do it? Well, here's my top six points for developing your own philosophy and getting it set and making sure that you can develop over time, because philosophies are not about a one-stop shop. They're going to keep evolving over time. So let's get into it.

Jason Weber:

Tip number one get off the fence. Okay, with respect to any subject matter that comes up, you don't want to get stuck on the fence. Oh, I do a bit of that and a bit of that. All right, you want to say, yes, I'm that way. Now, getting off the fence will lead to some other points we'll talk about in a moment, but what it means is you're making a decision Am I for or against that practice? Same thing we talked about with social media. If I watch something on social media and you're going to look at it and you go, yes, I like that exercise, that's getting off the fence. Yes, I would do that. Yes, I would ask an athlete to do that. Now, down the track, you may reevaluate that position. But if you get to a position where you're like, oh, I'm for single leg or I'm against single leg. I do them both. I do a bit of each. Okay, you have to get off the fence. Now you can qualify those sort of statements to saying I would use single leg activities in these cases, bang, bang, bang. I would use double leg. I would use a squat in these cases, I would modify a squat for these things. Now, that's getting off the fence because you're making a decision about the components we're talking about and qualifying exactly where and when you might use it.

Jason Weber:

Now these things get more and more complicated over time. But what you've got to do is be brave. You've got to be brave and take a stand. You've got to say yes, I am for or I'm against that thing, or I would do that, but I'd only do it under these conditions. Understanding that you've got to commit to a decision makes you put yourself in a position where we develop that philosophical structure, skeleton, backbone of what we're going to be. If you're constantly hedging your bets, what you're going to end up with is you'll work in programs that you do a bit of this and a bit of that and you're just covering off. You're not really committing to trying to understand what makes change in an athlete and how we can help them.

Jason Weber:

Now, the other great complexity of this is the human condition, that one particular philosophy may suit different people. And again, as you get older and older and more experienced, you can start to build those out. So you can say, yes, I would use a single leg squat in this condition for this and this and this, and they may be different reasons. They may be vastly different. For some people, putting a heavy bar on their back and squatting psychologically doesn't suit them, but psychologically they can handle single leg. That's not even a strength-based observation, but that may be a philosophical intent that you have within your structure. So get off the fence, make a decision and accept the ramifications and we'll talk about how we modify that as we go along.

Jason Weber:

Okay, tip number two for creating a. Okay, tip number two for creating a philosophy, a professional philosophy for your career. Number two is commit to paper. So that means not unlike getting off the fence, you've got to make a decision, you've got to put it to paper. Now the first thing I'd say about that is you don't need to share it with anybody. Writing down your philosophical perspectives are for your benefit, all right. They're for you to develop your philosophy. They're not about sharing it with anybody. Writing down your philosophical perspectives are for your benefit, all right. They're for you to develop your philosophy. They're not about sharing it with anybody All right. Now, committing it to paper is like getting off the fence, but it's making a rigid decision. Now. These things work together.

Jason Weber:

If you can commit to paper and start to develop your ideas, then over time they become solid. If you just make them ethereal and they're just these ideas that you have in your head, they're not rock solid and as we go down the track later and we talk about the Terminator, which is towards the end of this, you need to have that locked in right, because this again is this idea about committing to a path. Right, I've committed to a path, I'm going that way. Writing it down makes it real, right. So it's like sometimes people talk about having dreams and aspirations. Write it down, commit. This is what I want to be. It's not this ethereal idea that's just changing up here.

Jason Weber:

Sometimes, when we're working in highly complex environments with a lot of information we talked about the academic research background before. There's so much of it, not to mention social media. There's so much stuff, right, you need to sometimes say, hey, I can't deal with all of it. We're focusing on this. This is the way I'm going Now committed to paper. It's a critical step in getting your philosophy right Now. This links very closely to step number three, or point number three.

Jason Weber:

You are going to be wrong, right, get comfortable with it right. Even in my experience, 30 years plus in the game, I am still wrong. Right, I'm a lot less wrong than I used to be when I started, and you'll find that as you go along. But everyone's still learning. So being wrong is about not saying that you're going to make deliberate decisions the wrong way, but you've got to start moving. You've got to accept that. Yes, that was wrong and we correct it, and that's why we get off the fence.

Jason Weber:

If you never get off the fence, then you can kind of never be wrong. And the same with the commit to paper. If you just leave this idea floating around your head and this is what I believe about running mechanics, this is how I see it implementing in performance and injury prevention If you never commit to the path, then it's just this idea that floats around. You'll flip from one idea to the path. Then it's just this idea that floats around. You'll flip from one idea to the other, one concept to another. You need to get locked in Again.

Jason Weber:

Like I said earlier, with the get off the fence, you can always qualify specific things. So I would use an A drill in this circumstance, but I'll use a B in another drill. Why is there some cases with a B drill? I would never use it. Well, there are some athletes that I wouldn't use it for. There are some that just aren't suited to it. That's fine, but you build those ideas through.

Jason Weber:

If you're always leaving your ideas up in the air, all right, you'll always be indecisive, right. So you've got to be strong and commit and accept that you're going to be wrong. But being wrong is about finding the best way forward. There's a big thing we talk about in the entrepreneur world Minimum vol, product iterate, iterate, iterate, which means get your first idea up, make it functional and then make it better all the time, all the time. That's what a philosophy is.

Jason Weber:

Philosophy is going to be where we start out with a single point and then we're going to get better and better and better. But we're going to accept that we might need to be wrong on occasion and you might find that you trail off on one path based on your research, be it in experience and research. But then you become, you get mentored by an experienced person. You might say, hey, this person's really taking me the direction I want to go. I can see the results are effective, I can see the logic behind what they're doing and I'm going to adapt a lot of that. You may end up turning some corners and that happens. That happens.

Jason Weber:

We can't all know everything, but building a philosophy is about acquiring knowledge over time and putting it into a structure, like we said earlier, a skeleton on which you can build everything else. If you've got that skeletal structure in your framework of your professional activities, you can build on that. But if you don't have it, you can't intend up like you'd imagine, a body with no skill and it's going to blob out in all different directions. That's kind of the way your practice becomes. It's all over the place. So accept you're going to be wrong and get on with it. Minimum, viable product, iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. We just keep getting better and better.

Jason Weber:

Step four Step four tightly ties in to step number three be humble. Part of being humble is being able to accept number one, that I made a wrong decision. I've got to move on. But being humble is also about being able to continuously learn. If we get to the point of arrogance, arrogance is one of the first things that stops learning. Now I often talk with my staff when I am in my professional career, I always talked about a zealot phase. Lots of people, including myself, go through a zealot phase. In a zealot phase, you know everything, you've got the answers to everything. A zealot phase. In a zealot phase, you know everything, you've got the answers to everything. But unfortunately, until you get a little bit older, you realize the one thing I know is that I know nothing. Classic Socrates, all right. So be humble. Be humble all the time. I think if you can do that from point three about understand, you're going to be wrong. Okay, I went that path, but now I can pull it back. But it's about being humble.

Jason Weber:

I can't speak for other careers, but the career of sports science, strength and conditioning that I've been involved in over 30 years. It's constantly evolving and I'm going to learn from different people. I've learned from great strength coaches. I've learned from great running coaches. I've learned from great physiotherapists and I'll tell you what I've even learned from great interns. I was in a conversation a little while ago where I was talking about my philosophy of just how I group exercises and this young coach said to me hey, what about this? And I just stood there and went man, that's brilliant, that's just something I'd not considered before. But I weighed it up against my philosophy and it fit and I started to work through it. So being humble is about being to learn, being able to learn from multiple sources. Okay, step number five in our top tips for building philosophies Be scientific in your approach.

Jason Weber:

All right. So by that I mean work through a system. Now I talked before about the entrepreneurial mindset minimum viable product iterate, iterate, iterate. The scientific approach is a little bit more structured. We want to postulate an idea, we want to test that idea, we want to iterate and we want to repeat. So being scientific is about saying, yeah, okay, here's this idea, I've got this idea. How do I test it? Well, I'm going to test it through the experience, through getting out into the field and doing it. Now this becomes challenging and sometimes there are risks involved.

Jason Weber:

So, particularly when you start going through the rehabilitation let's say the classic hamstring, right, you want to read the research and you're going to understand that. But then you're going to speak to other people. You're going to speak to people in track and field who said I've done this, this and this, we can get them moving faster, right, you're going to have to start weighing that up and at some point you might need to push things here and there and I've done that over time. I've done that over time many times. And collectively, in groups. I would never say we go off on a tangent by yourself and make decisions, but when you're working in a collective group you might say, hey, we've got a time scale of this, we've got to move, and in that breath there are errors and you would never go back and do that again. And I can look back now and say there are things I would never do now that I did 15, 20 years ago. And I've got to say, with respect to my development of SpeedSig, Speedsig has taught me so much about what athletes are, so many things that we assume we know, but we don't. I mean that's the entrepreneur journey. Right, we need to minimum viable product, collect some data, understand, test, move on. It's exactly the same in the scientific approach.

Jason Weber:

I postulated that I felt within the construct of what I did as a professional in high-performance sport, particularly in the AFL 10, 15 years ago, that there was a big gap in what we're doing. We're measuring physiology, we're measuring heart rates, we're doing a great amount of stuff off the field. We're jumping isometrics, all those wonderful things. When we get them on the field, it's just displacement how fast from point A to point B, how much distance, how many reps? And my postulate, my idea, was well, maybe, maybe the way we're failing and maybe the way we're not getting results in all fields performance, injury prevention, rehabilitation is that we don't understand how the athlete's doing things. So I postulated the idea, I tested, I collected information. Now, I did it at a super high nerd level. Right, we go out and collect 100 hertz sensor data. But I tested the idea. I didn't get it right straight away. We iterated, we kept iterating, iterating and we go back and start the process again. Now, that's my tech story, but there are plenty of stories.

Jason Weber:

Simple, simple, simple things. How do I get bench press better? What's the optimum hand position? Well, you're going to have to have an idea about that. Where do we start? We've got to start. When I coach bench press, I start in a single position, but then we start to modify it based on arm length of the individual and where they get most comfortable.

Jason Weber:

So you're going to have a philosophy and this philosophy brings itself into every aspect of what you do. I have a philosophy about how I treat my staff. I have a philosophy about how I lead. I have a philosophy about how I spend my day. . I have a philosophy about how I spend my day. I have a philosophy about hamstring rehabilitation, calf rehabilitation, all of those things.

Jason Weber:

But if I go through the steps you know, we get off the fence, we commit it to paper, we understand we're going to be wrong, we're going to be humble, and that's going to allow us to apply that scientific method. Be postulate an idea, test it, iterate, repeat. I still apply that scientific method. B postulate an idea, test it, iterate, repeat. Step six and this is probably one of my favorites be the Terminator. If everyone doesn't know who the Terminator is you're too young for that you need to go and search that up. You can YouTube it, you can Google it, no trouble. But Arnold Schwarzenegger was the original Terminator.

Jason Weber:

In the original Terminator movie there's a scene where Arnie walks in to the bar. He's just been transported through time, he's naked and he walks into a biker bar and they give you a point of view of Arnie. He's looking through the bar and you can see the red screen and all the data coming up beside it, and I've always thought that's how we need to operate. You need to be systematic In order to make our profession the strongest it can be. We're going to work off this philosophical approach and we're going to be systematic, so we're always going to hit that mark.

Jason Weber:

If we need to change it, we can change it, but I feel like I want to be the terminator. So when I look at a situation, when I look at an athlete running, I'm going to run through a checklist against my coach's eye. Are these the things I would accept or not accept? Should I change it quickly? Is there a danger to the athlete? I'd stop it immediately. Is the athlete just learning? They're exploring, so maybe I don't say anything too quickly, but that's all being measured against my philosophical approach.

Jason Weber:

But I want to try and be the terminator, same as when you're interacting with staff. Right, you want to understand what's the list of things that I need to deal with. I've got to treat the person first, I can't treat the problem right. So we've got to engage as a person. Then we step down and you've got to be genuine, you've got to be real, you've got to be authentic. You can't be this cold thing. I talk about Terminator being a robot, but you can't be that. But the Terminator approach allows you to build your philosophy into an actionable item every day. So every day when you're practicing, when you're doing your task, when you're out training, you're always ticking off. Would I accept this?

Jason Weber:

Now, running mechanics again is a really interesting one. We have constructs that are built around fundamentally sprint mechanics, right Sprinters, elite runners and, yes, a lot of those things are correct. But there are athletes that have more heel strike than they do forefoot strike and that's the way they run and they aren't going to change. And particularly when you see them in field sports, they're not elite runners. That's the reason they never did track and field. They had a penchant for other aspects of sport, more skill related, but their speed is the way they do it. Now you've got to start to decide for yourself. Do I accept that and do I work with it, or do I move a different direction? Do I try and change the way they're doing it. Again, philosophical, bent, philosophical direction. But as far as being the Terminator goes, you've got that list running in your head. Okay.

Jason Weber:

So that's my take on building a professional philosophy. Clearly, it can be applied to anything, but from where I come from, which is strength and conditioning, sports science, athletic performance, injury prevention and rehabilitation, that space, that's how I do it and that's how I've always instructed my staff to do it. Over time, I think you can figure out your own methodology within that. There's no problem, of course. But I think you've got to start. I think, as a young practitioner, even as an older practitioner, if you kind of find yourself getting caught between subject, particularly when things get complicated, when things get real complex, when there's high level injuries and you've got timescale to get an athlete back, you're going to find do I go this way, do I go that way? You need to get off the fence and you need to make a decision. You need to make an action because you need to get results and I can guarantee you over time that the more you do, that that philosophy will build.

Jason Weber:

As I said earlier, be humble, understand that we're going to learn through the course of our career and we're going to learn from lots and lots of different people. And don't be afraid, you don't have to learn. Everything doesn't have to come from the guy who coached the Olympics. Like I said earlier, I learned off a kid who's second year university but just made a great observation. I missed something that was hiding in plain sight. Simple as that. Be humble, but I hope you've enjoyed this. I try to offer as much as I can in this space. We're going to continue to do this, so please check in with my website, speedsig. com, our YouTube channel, all of our social media, all the rest of it. But I hope you enjoyed and you can take something out of this. Thanks,