Create a Fun, Autonomous Learning Environment for Better Results

This morning, I tuned in to Joel Smith's Podcast with Michael Zweifel (highly, highly recommended) about the importance of autonomy, creativity, and freedom in warmups. When we think about our standard dynamic warmup, what does it look like? Everything the whistle? Everyone in lines? Same thing every day? 

Keep in mind, they were primarily speaking in the context of warmups, but this can apply to workout, practice, and even game settings as well. If we constantly funnel athletes into what feels like an assembly line of drills, controlled environments, and drills that they're working alone in, the athletes adapt to this. They lose creativity, autonomy. Now, most time it isn't this obvious, but in my opinion, we have to start working more towards the creative and free-flowing end of the spectrum.

Sport isn't a controlled environment. It's chaotic, crazy, and unpredictable. so when training is controlled and predictable, it doesn't truly prepare us for the competitive environment. 

How can we do this?

• More games: allowing players to interact, engage with each other socially, and compete to stimulate the nervous system in the way that prepares us for the challenge ahead. Coach Mike G spoke about this at our Player Development Conference and absolutely killed it.
• More autonomy: more choice. "What game do you all want to do?" "What score are we playing to?" This helps athletes feel like part of the practice (which they absolutely should), and has been shown to breed better results as a byproduct.
• More variability: not variability for the sake of variability, but doing the same thing every single day leads to monotony quickly. And studies have shown that monotony can lead to overtraining. Boredom. Lack of engagement. Less results. Just consider that.

Yes, it's easy to have your athletes memorize a monotonous warmup or set of drills each day, but it's not about our job being easy. Let's all get more creative and put our athletes in engaging environments!

​- Coleman