Every System is Perfectly Designed to Get the Results It Gets

?????? ?????? ?????????? “???????? ?????? ?????? ?????????????? ???? ????????????????” ???? ???????? ?????????? “???????? ?????? ?????? ?????????????? ???? ????????????????????.”?

I came across this Joe McCannon quote whilst reading ‘Upstream’ by Dan Heath. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Dave Collins, of Grey Matters, where he said, ‘we need to stop trying to make us (S&C coaches) look good and, instead, start making the athletes look good!’

?? Isn’t that what you’re trying to do!? ??

Take some time to reflect on the testing you do, the data you collect from that testing, and when you do that testing. What is it telling you that you don’t already know? What is the data going to affect regarding your program content? If the answer to these two questions is ‘NOTHING’, I’d say the system you’ve designed is there to justify your existence and nothing more.

I mean, if you speed test athletes at the start of preseason, then you put them through a well-programmed block of speed development and test them again, they should have gotten faster…if they didn’t pick up a hamstring tear from the initial testing session, that is! Then you look like an awesome coach AND you got to create a fancy, colourful spreadsheet to share with the coaches…who couldn’t really care less about it so long as the players are available for training.

Look, I love an Excel spreadsheet as much as the next S&C coach. I also think it’s important that you document the progression of your athletes and their individual responses to what you expose them to. Let’s just put things in perspective and realise that testing, and data collection, is often not a time-efficient process and unless we are learning from the collated information it offers us very little.