This past weekend I meandered my way to Elite and was privileged enough to get to listen to some awesome speakers at Dave's Elite Sports Summit.
I'm not going to dive into everything that was said and everything I took away. Instead, I'm going to go into, albeit briefly, the overall takeaways.
- Simplicity always wins. No matter how advanced your athletes are, simplicity ALWAYS wins. When Buddy Morris talks about keeping things simple with NFL athletes (the greatest athletes in the world) it's a VERY SAFE bet that the knuckleheads you work with will benefit from the simplest methods. Why? Simple methods stick around and stand the test of time because THEY WORK. When Buddy talks about the weight room being GENERAL and NOT sport-specific, listen. Again, he works with the greatest athletes in the world. If you think you know more about training athletes than Buddy, check yourself. You don't.
- When new ideas come out, DON'T JUST ON THE BANDWAGON just because they sound good. SIngle-leg training "because sport is played on one leg", for example. Don't be lazy. Do some research. Dive into all kinds of things like ground contact forces when sprinting... When you read this you'll understand why exclusively training single-leg in the weight room is STUPID. Explore new ideas, but don't abandon your ideas because this sounds Holy Grail-ish. There's no such thing in training. And, it SHOULD make you question your own beliefs if you are so easily swayed by some thing fancy and new. If it's new and fancy, it probably sucks and someone is trying to make themselves relevant. That doesn't mean the idea doesn't hold water. It just means you need to research and let it play out and see if it hangs around. If it does, we might have something.
- ALWAYS BE LEARNING. This doesn't mean you should use everything you learn. It means you should have a hunger for knowledge. Even if the ideas suck, take the time to get a rudimentary understanding. It will strengthen your belief system and could open doors to new avenues/authors that you haven't previously learned from. If you act like you know everything and have an answer for everything, you're probably extremely limited in your knowledge. If, "You know? I really don't know about (insert topic)" isn't something you ever say, I'll guarantee you don't know shit.
