Keegan Smith argues that expansion, building a broad athletic foundation through varied movement and training, is the key to higher performance. He cites neurogenesis research showing adults can develop new abilities, and points to rugby players whose elite coordination came from diverse childhood activities like BMX and break-dancing. The wider your base, the higher you can build.
One of the key ideas in New Athlete is expansion and the idea of building abilities that were previously foreign to you with your force training. This is being able to do lifts that you might have avoided in the past doesn't necessarily mean that you have to max them out and become extremely strong in those areas. But if there's been things that you've avoided, you've never tried, maybe try them, maybe lean into it a little bit as a skill, test it, see how it feels. This is expansion with the skill side of things. The more general abilities you have, the easier it's going to be for us to express elite ability. So we have expansion, which is kind of the lateral movement at the base of the pyramid, and then expression, which is the peak of the pyramid. The thing that holds most people back from becoming the very best in what they love is not having a big enough foundation. The way that we build this foundation is naturally within our childhood. We take on lots of different challenges. We dance a bit, we play with all the different balls, we play all the different sports, we balance on things, we jump around. And that's why we have this balance balls and beats primary skills foundation. Everyone sort of talks about the idea about we should have done gymnastics and judo, martial arts as a child to develop a foundation, to then be great as adults. But if you're not dead, you can still build that base. When I went to university, they told me that we didn't build new neurons, we didn't build new, we couldn't have new neurons. Neuroneogenesis, they said it wasn't a thing. But it turns out that it is a thing and that at any age, if you challenge the brain, you can build new neurons and you can build new connections. So at every age we can develop abilities. So if it's useful to develop as a child, why don't we just develop it as adults? If we missed it or if there's areas that are missing, and it turns out that all athletes have areas that are missing. And when we fill in those gaps in the primary abilities, we open up a new possibility for higher performance. So rather than drilling that same thing over and over again, which is kind of counterproductive, we want to fill in the general gaps. This philosophy comes from differential training, which we're going to go into. It's used more in Japanese sports than in many other cultures. And the Japanese have. They're getting outlier results in lots of different sports because they have this broader approach to working on a specific sport. I'll talk more about Japanese sports But I'm very, very passionate and deep in research about helping athletes to go to the next level. And this idea of expansion is one of the big ones. So when you take on these abilities that seem somewh more abstract, they're filling in the gaps or bringing back the capacities that you had as a child, and they give you the opportunity to go further in whatever it is that you want to specifically move forward in. Now, if you don't have a specific sport or a specific area that you want to move forward in, you're just going to be better at everything. You're going to be ready to move forward with everything, and you can embrace all of the areas equally. If you have a special sport that you love, you can tailor a little bit more which methods within the expansion method, you put more time into the ones that are more likely to have a direct input into what you do. When I worked with the professional rugby league players, I often asked them, like, what did you do as a child? Like, what was. What did you do growing up other than rugby league? The best players, they were answering things like, I rode a lot of bmx, I could do backflips on a BMX bike, or I was doing a lot of break dancing, or I played a lot of basketball, or I played afl. The ones that mostly focused on rugby league, they generally danced and they were part of a dancing culture. I think that's part of the advantage. There's a lot of Polynesian athletes in rugby league. I think part of their advantage is they come from dancing cultures. There's other things as well, but there's almost always something that that was a really powerful tool for expansion that underpinned then their ability to get to the highest level and then be exceptional at the highest level. The athletes who were missing that bit of baseline coordination, who worked really hard, they were just never going to get to that place that the athletes who'd done that foundation work could get to. The big idea with new athlete is that we can always build this foundation. So that's why we use the expansion method and that's why encouraging you to build a much bigger general foundation.
