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Two Coaches & a Coffee
With nearly 60 years of professional experience between them across the world in Premier League, International Rugby, AFL and consulting in a plethora of other sports and industries; two old bulls of the performance, injury prevention, and rehabilitation world: Darren Burgess and Jason Weber catch up over a brew and discuss all things Sports Performance.
Two Coaches & a Coffee
Season 3, Episode 6
Drop us a message and let us know what you'd like us to discuss!
The coaches discuss managing ambitious staff in high-performance environments and the challenge of balancing career progression with proper skill development. They explore approaches for developing both expertise and the ability to effectively manage multidisciplinary teams.
• Young coaches often want to advance quickly without developing adequate depth of knowledge
• Understanding mechanical principles behind training methods is essential before advancing
• Expand knowledge beyond your specialty by spending time with practitioners from other disciplines
• The most valuable professional development comes from extended time with experienced practitioners, not just courses
• Success requires making yourself uncomfortable – studying when others are relaxing
• Present your ideas and methodologies to receive feedback and refine your approach
• Embrace honest review and criticism as essential components of improvement
• Build empathy by learning the language and perspectives of other disciplines
• Social media can be a platform for sharing knowledge and connecting with other professionals
Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com
G'day and welcome to Coaches in a Coffee Bit of an early morning fast one. Darren and I are still figuring out some new schedules, but as I'm going with the bleary eyes, I'm keeping my glasses on. Darren's been good enough to get his off. He looks too younger than me. So, mate, welcome. How are you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, going, okay. What are we 10 days away from first?
Speaker 1:game AFL kickoff 14, 15-week preseason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been an interesting time. A couple of things that we can throw to because we're going to make this one short and sweet because of your schedule. You're now looking after a bunch of strength coaches and end of season presents an opportunity to have end of season staff reviews, and I'll layer that with. I listened to Dave Carroll on Martin Bouchard's podcast. Yeah, not sure what it's called, but those outside will know what it is, but excellent. I listened to Dave Carolyn on Martin Boucher's podcast. Yeah, not sure what it's called, but those outside will know what it is, but excellent. Just a tremendous conversation between two experienced practitioners.
Speaker 1:I might even yeah, if you just go to Martin Boucher, just look him up, look at his website. It's on his interval training website, his podcast there. He's awesome yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, obviously we've mentioned Dave a lot on this.
Speaker 1:Dave we mentioned Dave a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but.
Speaker 1:Martin loves the.
Speaker 2:Guinness, you know how to brand yourself and market yourself and whether that's doing good or bad for the industry, and the positives and negatives of LinkedIn and I won't steal their thunder because we don't have time, but it made me think of some staff reviews and how to manage extremely ambitious staff who want to climb and quite rightly climb the high performance landscape.
Speaker 2:And I'm mentoring a couple of people now as well, in and out of the sporting world, and had a conversation only this morning before we spoke with one of the people that I'm working with and he wants to progress in his field, which is couldn't be further, more further removed from sporting, the sporting world. But the themes are the same, jason, so staff reviews are interesting because most people want to, jason, so staff reviews are interesting because most people want to progress through. And how do we temper that with what we think are the best things for the staff versus what they think and what their ambitions are? So, given that you've now taken on a suite of young strength and conditioning coaches, and without naming names, how do you manage that walk, that tightrope between what you think is better for the person and their career versus their ambitions to?
Speaker 1:get. Yeah, I'm gonna, oh, look, and this isn't. This isn't aimed at anyone in particular at all, not, not one bit. But this is something. Just I'm gonna go with, just what I do, my, my approach.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, I was a young one when I came through, like in the late 90s, in pro rugby, the world was physiology. It was just like everything we did at university at the time just physiology. There was no understanding of strength training. I was very lucky to have been educated lifting through the Australian Institute of Sport as an athlete, so I learned that path. Now, as I went on, I was just desperate to learn everything. And back in the 90s there was no internet, there was no this, no that. So you were writing away to people for books et cetera. But the point of that all is a movie that came out back in those days, a movie called Wall Street.
Speaker 1:The great Gordon Gekko right, greed is good, irrespective of greed is good. He also said that if you want to know money, if you're going to be that, you need to be the smartest person in the room. So you need to study, you need to know everything, you need to know as much as you can At the ripe old age of 55, I don't know everything, and I think my PhD taught me that right. You don't know everything, but you've got to strive for that. So if you're doing a job, if you're a strength coach or you're a speed coach or you're a rehab coach, you need to absolutely saturate yourself with every bit of information you can, because your next step up is predicated on the knowledge you build there. And what I see, I've seen for a bunch of years in younger coaches, is almost this, and I'll be an old man, I'll say it's like an Instagram thing. We're going to go that and we're going to zip, zip, zip, zip. How about learning all the steps, learning all the components, right, really starting to understand.
Speaker 1:If you understand the mechanics of an exercise, understand the physiology, the set and rep structures, how they work, what am I trying to do? I have a simple question to most people why are you doing that? Just explain it to me simply. Why are you doing it? If you don't understand the influence of velocity, balance and force on a weight and strength exercise, you can't get caught in the middle. We all bag physios and we do, and that's fair. They sometimes deserve it. One of the things physios will do. They'll tend to get their exercise selection. I'll just use that as an example. So it's not got much force, it's got no real velocity, it's got a bit of balance in it. So it's kind of doing a mishmash of what, like you're not really challenging a particular aspect of a muscular contraction. So that's where I get to.
Speaker 1:I think some of the younger ones really need to work harder at studying in more depth about what they're doing, so that then they come to a job review and you go Darren, I've worked hard at this, I'm on it and, as someone doing the review, you're going to be looking at them going wow, these guys are impressive. And from my perspective I'm an old boy but I should be learning off young guys. They're studying something new. Now we know the proliferation of research. There's more research than you can keep up with. So those younger, as you said, coaches on the rise. They should be pushing, pushing, pushing, and I don't see that. I think they're pushing, but they're pushing without depth of knowledge. That's my rant.
Speaker 2:Yes, and yes, one of the things that Dave and Martin spoke about was the generalist, specialist thing I think that's where I'll start is that if you're a sports scientist, everything looks like sports science. If you're a strength coach, everything looks like strength, and that's okay, that's fine, and you might have a PhD by the time you're 26, which is way better than what I certainly did, way better than me, I think. The way to expand your knowledge is a couple of ways. One is studying and research articles and, you know, maybe doing a master's, and some of the masters, by practice and the professional doctorates at the moment are outstanding and so, yep, big tick. But again, I'll lean on those guys, and you talk about this a lot. Go and spend some time with physios about why they do the things they do. Go and spend some time with doctors about reading mri, so you have a basic thing of it. Go and spend some time with a sprint coach or do an Alters course.
Speaker 2:I used to hate doing psychology as an undergrad, and so this is a long time ago, jason. But one of the statements that I can't remember the American Psych at the University of New South Wales used to say was all knowledge is personal knowledge. Go and, um, go and learn how to disagree with it, don't just disagree with it from the outset. I've spent some time with chiropractors recently and straight away people go oh, chiros, they're you know, but understanding why they do and how they do things that they do. And we've got players who go and see movement specialists and you know people who post prolifically, prolifically, prolifically on instagram about, you know, about how they work with players and things like that's fine, go and spend some time with them, okay, yeah, I disagree with that.
Speaker 2:Um, that's not the way I would do it, but now I'm better informed as a result 100% what I would say you get at your job and better in a more general space, before I get to, before I let you speak, people you know there's a lot of questions about how do you handle difficult players and how do you handle difficult coaches and how do you? That's all great and I'm happy to have those discussions with people, but get the basics right first and get your knowledge of sets and reps and physiology and and programming and medical and physio and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:Once you're good with that, then we'll start about talk about handling managing up and managing down and communicating with boards and things like that.
Speaker 1:I think, mate, that's another subject that gets raised is professional development In changing. Now I'm in an institute system there's a lot of discussion about I'm like, okay, there's courses, but I think, again, the investment I've made in career is what you just said Finding a few coaches and physios. I've worked with a lot of physios who are unbelievable and have impacted me massively. Right, but I spend a lot of time with just those people, as opposed to a course that goes for three hours where you get the maybe you get the top of the iceberg To go deep with people. I really think there's value in that.
Speaker 1:We've talked before about visiting.
Speaker 1:Like do we go to the US and we visit three universities, being there, done that, not real fussed with that, because I don't think you'll learn much, but embedding somewhere for as long as you viably can and I used to have when I was in AFL, we would have coaches come in.
Speaker 1:I'd have them stay like for a week and really just like be in as long as you can, and in that time, you know, you can hang out at lunch and like really talk through, like why are you doing this? Well, I'm doing this, what are you doing? And then you're getting this flow both ways and I just think there's so much more development from that. So the obsession with PD and getting and that's the thing, because with qualifications these days or different institutes that you have to have a certification with, you have to keep your PD up, so I'd be trying to figure out how you get PD time for those meetings that you have and those conversations and the time and I spent a lot of time yesterday with a guy on the gym floor like just talking through all the elements and there's so much more in that than there is in, you know, as I said, a three-hour course. Not blowing off all the courses, that's a thing, but investing in developing your skill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think just lean outside your area as well a little bit.
Speaker 2:If you're a generalist it was. We had. So the AFL High Performance Association. It's a great association. We had Damian Austin speak last night on a call. We had 42, 43 people on the call. It was great and hearing how Damo managed, I think they had four years of bottom four in the AFL. And then in the last six years Brisbane have barely missed a prelim final and have been unbelievable and obviously won the flag last year. But he said I never knew how hard it was until I stepped into the show. I always looked outside at high performance managers thinking, yeah, I can do that, I'll be able to do that, no problem, that looks okay. But then sat in the chair and just went my goodness, that's um. There's a lot more to it than that. So I think you can arm yourself as best as you possibly can before you sit in the chair by broadening your skill set a little bit.
Speaker 1:You more, you brought up the subject of generalist I, I think, to be honest, I couldn't agree more, man. I don't think you can go to that position of management as an absolute specialist in one area, because your skill set has to, can, has to transfer across multiple people. Um, I think that generalist I think it's a harsh term I think you can be very good at a number of fields. But you mentioned before the whole spending time with docs. Understand their language. That would be one thing I'd say to people Listen to how they communicate, listen to the terminologies, understand them. No different to when you have to learn to speak. Coach, right, you and I have talked about this. Every coach has their own anomalies, their own little bits and pieces. It's our job to learn their language. But I think it's the same. Becomes of medical physiology. Well, whichever field you're stepping into from yours, same for physio learning S&C, they should be coming in and understanding that language. So, yeah, working that. I think it gives you a great empathy.
Speaker 2:It's not a bad thing, by the way, being a specialist, and it's more. We're just trying to give advice for anybody who's willing to take it no, no, it's not a bad thing, of course it's not a bad thing. It's that gap and and what you're saying is is really clever in that we could sit here and say you need to do a speed course, or we could, or you need to do an altus by the way, you should do a speed secret you need to do a ask, a course or something like that, and they all have their values, but they all have their passions.
Speaker 2:Yeah is spend some free time, you know, just free time. Yeah, investing in yourself by learning a few different skills. And I'll throw in one more listen to a podcast after dropping the kids off at school, from michael gervais, who's a sports psychologist, and he says some really good things and and some stuff I don't agree with, but that's just fine. But he's a sports psychologist and he says some really good things and some stuff I don't agree with, but that's just fine. But he's a successful sports psychologist that's worked with Seattle Seahawks and Red Bull and a whole bunch of stuff. I've come across him a fair bit with Nike and Red Bull in the past was put to him how do you become, how does a tradie or a fitness coach or a stock market worker become better at what they do and live their best life? And he just said regardless of your profession, whether you're an athlete or high performance manager, you've just got to be a little bit uncomfortable and you've just got to go to places that and the metaphor that he used was great For those who have kids you would do anything for your kids If you saw them upset.
Speaker 2:You would climb over whatever you needed to climb over to do anything for your kids or your partner, whatever your poison is. The really successful people in any walk of life would do that for themselves to get themselves better. Not to climb a career ladder or anything like that, but to better themselves. They are constantly and almost callously looking at ways in which to do that in an uncomfortable often in an uncomfortable setting. And by discomfort you might mean when everybody else is going to bed, you're doing a bit of studying. When everybody else is taking the public holiday're doing a bit of study. Else is taking the public holiday off. You're not doing that. When everybody else is having three weeks holiday, you're spending that time meeting a doctor or physio. That's what I'm certain he meant. So it's not for my, I'm with you.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. I'll throw. Let's throw one on. Throw one practical to pay, because I think you said making me self uncomfortable. I'm gonna say, throw one practical to people, because I think you said making yourself uncomfortable. I'm going to say to people present your data, present your information, talk about what you do Right, do the master chef thing, you know, walk up and go. This is what I've got, this is my heart on a plate, right. And by that I mean you don't have to go to a conference and present, but present to your people you work with. Present to hey. Boss, can I talk to you about this? I've got this idea.
Speaker 1:This is what I'm thinking, because every time you speak and I've said this a number of times this week every time I speak, even now on this podcast, I am testing myself, I'm making sure that what comes out of my mouth makes sense to people. If it doesn't, the feedback comes back to me. I've got to change, I've got to adapt, I've got to fix. So I think, getting people out of your comfort zone to present, present your ideas, get off the fence, don't sit there and have an opinion one way or another. Yes, you may be absolutely wrong. But mostly people are going to say, hey, like you said, it's not the way I do it, but here's another view, but you learn in that. So I think putting yourself out there like to do a professional development thing at work and have your youngest staff member present on something they're working on is ideal. They get the opportunity to put their ideas out.
Speaker 1:The only other thing would be humility. Be prepared to take some honest feedback. Hopefully people aren't terrible about it. But if you're in a good environment the old military thing after action review like you do a job, you've got to discuss it. If you don't discuss it, you'll never get better. And if you look at you talk about being absolute. You look at any special forces unit. Irrespective of all the weird things they do, what they strive to be is as perfect as possible in an environment that is absolutely uncompromising, unpredictable, ambiguous, a very hard place to be perfect. But they review, review, review, and it's always every book you read about. The more people you meet. They always say it's about being absolute in your review. And surgeons do the same thing. To be honest, surgical teams do a very, very same thing.
Speaker 2:We spoke about recently people saying, yeah, we review, we review, but how well do you review and how often do you review that presented data is interesting because, again, martin and Dave spoke about this and martin suggested that put your stuff on linkedin, put your stuff on instagram.
Speaker 2:Make yourself open for interpretation if you don't have another platform, put it as much as you can release information about your club. But I remember speaking to jake jennings, who's a sports scientist up at Brisbane Broncos and a really talented sports scientist and strength coach, and he put his stuff on Twitter and I wouldn't have come across him had he not put some of his dashboards online. So, yeah, it can lead to criticism, but it can also lead to people saying, hey, how did you do this? And I'm curious to why you said that, and so, yeah, I think it's ballsy. I wouldn't do it, but if I was an up-and-coming youngster I probably would. So, yeah, rather than taking Instagram videos of your athletes doing, you know, squat jumps or plyos, or, yeah, he put his dashboards online, which I thought was really, really innovative and ballsy.
Speaker 1:It is, and it's a different mate.
Speaker 2:the social media world's a different world, and you've You've had to really embrace that You're just so prolific these days, Jason.
Speaker 1:I would like nothing better than to hide and do. I'd love to do my speed-sig thing and all that. Just do it Like, just talk to coaches, work with athletes, but that's not the nature. You've got to get it out there. So you know I'm a great example. I suppose I put myself out there. You know, I've put out a product that is completely disruptive, completely new and, to be honest with some people it blows their minds Like literally they cannot grasp it, because thinking about the way you've done your job for the last 20 years in a completely different way is challenging.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'm putting it out there and no doubt, like you've got to have a thick skin, no question.
Speaker 2:In my involvement with Peak, the performance team here in Adelaide as well. It's been A great Sean Baker With Sean Baker. Yeah, it's been uncomfortable being on social media and doing it that way. Yeah, I'll probably have to get better at it. Now you have to go and We've got to go mate.
Speaker 1:We've got to go. We've got athletes waiting. Athletes take precedence. Mate it's been a pleasure, as always, and we'll try and figure out a more constructive time.
Speaker 2:Look forward to it, mate.
Speaker 1:See you, buddy. Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye.