Don't Skip Conditioning, Redefine It

As coaches, we have an endless supply of information at our fingertips. You can find drills, practice plans, clinics, strength programs, and X’s and O’s from thousands of sources instantly. Well… if you're on a school campus, it's a little slower than instantly—but still a whole lot faster than it was in 2003 (my rookie year). 

With this amount of information available sometimes it gets hard to figure out what’s the truth and what’s fiction. It’s hard to discern who I should ignore and who I should believe. As Assistant D.A. Jack McCoy once said in a season five episode of Law & Order, “I don't know whether you're a sadist or a conman, or just a fanatic.” 

Too many ‘online’ coaches fall into one of three categories when it comes to their posts on social media: looking to prove a point, sell a point, or join a point. These coaches want to gain money, likes, or follows via their absolutism. And to do so they need you to join the movement and spread the hashtags, too! 

How do you discern the coach from the sadist, conman, or fanatic? Vet the source. 

Vetting Sources 

When it comes to accepting criticism, Dr. Adam Grant said in his book Hidden Potential, we must determine if the source is credible, caring, and familiar. The same could be said for accepting new coaching techniques and tactics. When you learn something new you must ask yourself: 

1. Is the source someone who cares about athletes and development or just making a quick buck? Note: It’s perfectly fine to monetize your coaching. Just do it with athlete safety in mind. 

2. Is the source familiar? Not necessarily with your program, but by that I mean do they have a similar group of athletes to work with? A familiar situation to yours. I can’t do the same things with my high school lacrosse teams that another strength coach can with their pro football players. 

3. And lastly, is the source credible? Are they certified or well-established in the topic and do they submit work to peer-reviewed journals or websites in the field like TeamBuildr? 

Accepting New Information 

If you can answer yes to all three of those questions, now it’s time to figure out how to use the information you’ve been given. My philosophy is to break the new information down into three steps: accept, filter, and align.

I created this process to use after attending football coaching clinics 

1. Accept: The first step in learning is admitting there are things you don’t already know. That you aren’t the smartest coach in the room. If you went to the coaching clinic or on the TeamBuildr blog looking for new ideas, now it’s time to accept them. 

2. Filter: And with that being said with this new rush of information it’s like drinking from a firehose. One of the hardest things to do with the amount of new information coming at us is to figure out what works for your program. If you’re a high school coach with a 28-person roster and you are learning from a Power 4 coach with 100 people on the roster, you might have to filter some of that new information out. 

3. Align: One of my favorite parts about learning a new coverage or run concept as a football coach was figuring out how to marry it to what we were already doing. Torrian Gray stands as one of my all-time favorite clinic speakers. Coach Gray offered a plethora of information both on fronts, coverages, and even program culture. 

While at one coaching stop I took one of his coverage ideas and married it to what we were already running and to our existing terminology. It was a highly successful alignment and part of the puzzle piece to three straight years of allowing fewer points per game than the season prior (in fact 300 less points in one season at one stop). 

Sadists, Conmen, and Fanatics 

So now you’re asking- what does all this have to do with conditioning our athletes? One of the hottest social media topics is conditioning, and even more so- conditioning versus speed training. Whether it’s soccer, lacrosse, hockey, football, or basketball I get a ton of questions and see even more posts about whether or not teams are ‘fit’ enough for competition. 

When it comes to conditioning versus speed training there are plenty of sadists, conmen, and fanatics on both sides of the aisle.

This is a gray world to see this much bi-coachisan thinking when it comes to speed training and conditioning. Our two parties, the condocrats and the sprinticans, feel they have to sell to the world the extremes of their viewpoints. 

The extremes for the condocrats are: 

*If you condition your team they will be more mentally tough and in better ‘shape.’ *If you don’t condition after practice your team will be mentally weak and lose in the 4th quarter. 

The extremes for the sprinticans are: 

*If you believe in speed your teams will be faster and up by 40 before the 4th quarter anyway. *If you do any conditioning your teams will be slow and injured. 

It might not be lucrative to sell online programs or to get likes quite like the dogmatic messaging is, but the best answer is always both- condition your athletes and train for speed. 

Work Smart and Hard, Not Stupid 

I am a firm believer in Simon Sinek’s “The Golden Circle.” I use The Golden Circle as both a teacher and coach. The circles say that we must know the “what,” “how,” and “why” of our venture or risk losing sight of what makes us unique and gives us our competitive advantage. 

Simon Sinek’s “The Golden Circle” 

First, let’s define conditioning (what). I define conditioning as preparing an athlete for a specific task or event. So rather than just mindlessly run 300’s until Timmy or Jenny puke, how about we plan our conditioning for the task we want to be prepared for. 

Speed training sessions, practices, tryouts, and games all need a conditioning element before their start dates. It’s just a matter of how coaches condition athletes, not if. Why? Because we have to prepare the athlete for the upcoming demand. 

Sprint training is a demand, practices are a demand, and games are a very specific demand on the athlete. If our athletes aren’t ready for practice they’ll be more likely to suffer an injury. 

Conditioning your athletes comes into play in every phase of the season. I break my athletic calendar into different blocks: recovery, early off-season, off-season, preseason, and in-season.

The final piece of The Golden Circle is the how. How do you condition your athletes for the event without running them into the ground? 

First, ask yourself the work-to-rest ratio of the sport. In football, the work to rest is 1:7 with five seconds of work and 35 seconds of rest. The method for conditioning can change based on the sport. Ice hockey players will often condition off ice on an assault bike. That’s one avenue to conditioning that one might take in the off-season to keep players off of their feet while doing extra work to prepare for speed skating in the off-season. 

For ‘bigs’ in American Football weighted sled pushes and different grappling games, often called contact prep, are options for conditioning. For ‘skills’ momentum sprints (weighted low sled drags around 30% of body weight) and cutting off of defenders could be an option for conditioning. 

For all football players, tracking a defender or avoiding being tracked can be advantageous ways to prepare for practice. Soccer players can play small-sided games and vary the number of teammates, opponents, obstacles, and the size of the playing surface. 

Bandit Ball for Football 

When coaches ask me what they can do for conditioning for American Football instead of gassers, 300’s or 110’s my suggestion is always “Bandit Ball.” 

Bandit Ball is a high-paced version of football where the ball carrier is ‘tagged’ down instead of tackled. Bandit Ball was invented by Don Matthews and borrowed by Mike Leach and Hal Mumme after a trip to see the Orlando Thunder practice. 

The Bandit Ballers of Wake Forest (NC) Middle School, Fall 2021 

If the play is a pass and the receiver catches the ball the defense tags the player and the player finishes to the end zone regardless of whether he was tagged or not. The ball moves 10 yards up the field and horizontally around. Both players are subbed out quickly and the next play is

snapped as fast as possible. This keeps the bench players engaged, energy high, and bodies moving while the team conditions by playing the sport. 

Since Bandit Ball is a ‘tag’ game, it can be played year-round and is the perfect way to replace mindless conditioning drills like gassers to end a practice. 

Dials, Not Switches 

As you plan your practice schedules moving forward don’t skip out on conditioning. Whether you condition via small-sided games, up-tempo periods, or repeat fast sprints- get your conditioning in. As coaches, we must make sure our athletes are prepared, whether that’s for the volume of tryouts or high-speed sprinting of max velocity days. 

Coaching and sports, much like life, are filled with dials, not switches. Switches turn things on and off, they’re binary- ‘all or none’ mechanisms. Dials turn things to different levels, like a dimmer on the dining room chandelier at Granny’s house. 

Athletes don’t need 110’s, 300’s, or gassers but they do need conditioning. Remove the mindless “work stupid” training for working hard and smart. Once you’re playing games you no longer need to condition (limited minute players being the exception), the game is conditioning you for the game. 

Redefine conditioning and adjust the dials, don’t turn the conditioning switch completely off.