General & Specific Athlete Development

The best athletes have the biggest general base. They're able to do reasonably well at a number of different sports. When you have an athlete who has massive gaps where they're really, really poor at other foundational abilities, they don't tend to be the best athletes. From my experience working with hundreds of athletes, this is true. You then have the specific ability that you layer on top of that. So what they can do in that specific sport, each sport is made up of many characteristics. So if we have this general base, let's go back here, the general base is going to be health, it's going to be general skills, and it's going to be force. So force includes force, endurance, power, elasticity, all of the different kinds. We've got this foundational athlete, the general athlete. Now that's what I was speaking about yesterday. Then you have the specific athlete. So what is it that the best in a sport are able to do the best in different attributes of the sport? So if we're talking about basketball, for example, we could have long range shooting, we could have dribbling, we could have defensive footwork, we could have jumping ability, and we would break it down into all of the key areas. What are the ones that make the most difference? If we can identify those key areas and then we build the athlete in, in each of those areas. Now, at times, for example, with force, especially like slow force, there's a big cost for doing a lot of work in that area. And some of these abilities, they might have a big cost. For example, in rugby, if it's rugby or if it's American football that we're talking about, if their collision or their tackling or their wrestling is the weak link, then it has a big cost for us to do a lot of work in that area. So we have to weigh up, do we want to work hard on that area or not? It matters about how much, how important it is for that athlete, specific game, it matters about how much it is important for that, that sport. But then we can decide if we have this evaluation of where they're at in terms of those critical abilities in the sport. What I found with rugby players is that a lot of them weren't very good at catching and passing relative to if they had played basketball. If they played basketball, they would have been catching, passing, dribbling. They get thousands and thousands and thousands more hand contacts every single training session, every single week, every single month. So they're going to have much better hands because of that volume. You don't get better at skills by doing the Skill. You get better at skills by showing your brain what you want it to be able to do. And then your brain will go away and work on it and the next time you come back, you'll be better at that thing. So we don't actually need to force ourselves to be able to do anything. We just enjoy doing the thing and then it's going to get better on its own. There's no point bringing frustration to that. That doesn't add to the skill development. We do our best skill development in the first two years of our life without a coach, when we're just attempting to do things over and over. And you see, if you watch a baby, watch them closely from a movement perspective and consider how much development they're getting every month. They're completely rebuilding themselves as an athlete. They can do so much more month on month, every month. What if we had that mentality? If we go back and start to develop some of these fundamental skills and maybe develop some of the force areas that we haven't developed before, like maybe some more elastic work. Generally athletes will tolerate quite a lot of elastic work. We're talking about this cost benefit. Go back and build some of these skills, maybe build some balance, maybe build some ball skills with the hands, with the feet. We might find that we can make a big jump in specific performance without hardly any cost. And it's always going to be this cost benefit. But if you're not evaluating the foundational skills, balance beats balls, then you wouldn't know. Okay, they've got this massive gap, but nobody knows about it. There's an athlete here at the moment who's got blue belt in jiu jitsu, he does break dancing, never played soccer. And so he doesn't have balance on his feet. He can't move his feet quickly. So when we do some stand up wrestling, he's going to have a massive disadvantage because he can't move his feet. He can't. He doesn't know where they are in space. He can't get them to the place and time that they need to be. So that's going to hold him back for every single sport that requires you to be on your feet, which is, which is most of them. So if we can work on those foundations and we can do thousands and thousands of kicks against the wall and we can do matrix drills with foot placement, we're going to make him a better wrestler faster by getting to that root cause of the issue, that big foundation that got missed in his childhood development, really. But most athletes will have this These gaps because there was no framework, there was no evaluation system to identify what's missing. And then our last piece here is the team game. Why is it that teams pay so much money for specific players and not for other players? Well, it's because they've got these specific abilities, but the specific abilities are there because the general abilities are there. This is the thing, this is the connection that recruiters aren't making necessarily. They're not looking, they're not evaluating, they're not part of the combine test. You can't really see them that much. But we know that the athletes who play high school multiple sports, play college multiple sports, they're much more likely to be top athletes. Kobe Bryant played a lot of soccer. LeBron James played a lot of American football. Michael Jordan was really good at golf. He crossed over to baseball. This multi sport story runs across many, many athletes. There will be the other, there will be the odd one who, who specializes a lot. But even if you look at someone like Tiger woods, who is an extreme specialist, he goofed around so much with the golf club that he was intuitively building this bigger general base that wasn't just hitting the ball in that one pattern over and over again. They play around with stuff, hitting it on the other side of the body, hitting the ball in the air. They build this general base instinctively for fun. But there's an intuition there that it's needed. And there's the same way there's an intuition in the baby. Babies have intuition that they need to be able to crawl, they need to be able to walk, they need to be able to run, they need to be able to do lots of things and they intuitively go to that next step. You don't tell the baby, okay, now it's time for you to start doing this. Just giving them an environment where they can do it. We've got a river here. I put the baby in the river on the stones and he works out where he's going to go and scramble and where he's going to stand up. Now, it's not for me to tell him what he needs to do. It's for me to put him in an environment where he can express himself. You hear what I'm saying? We need to put the athlete in an environment where they can express themselves. Now, fortunately for my son, he's got lots of good role models around who can walk, who can run, who can pick things up and put things down. And so he gets to see the next level of what it would look like. But the further we go along with all this stuff. The better we get, the harder it is to find elite examples to mirror. So we need. We have these things called mirror neurons. And most of our learning is done through mirror neurons, most of our behavior. This is why there's so much effort put into television and movies. And now it's, you know, YouTube and social media. We. They want the attention on what they want the attention on because the mirror neurons are going to do the work. If you watch it enough, you'll start to do it. You probably noticed this with yourself when you're watching certain television shows as a child, maybe even things you're watching now, lines will start to come out, behaviors will come out, tones will come out. So these mirror neurons are at work. That's why it's so valuable. If you can get yourself in an environment where there's excellence here and there's excellence here. If you have. If you're in an environment where people are doing amazing things and you're watching them, you're going to go that next step further. And we don't have to identify every facet of the neuroscience to understand this. You can see it with a baby. You can feel it in yourself. You know that it's happened when you, when you're in that environment, okay, everyone's doing backflips on the trampoline. You're goofing around with some drills. You're trying different things. The chances that you do the backflip on the trampoline that day, when you've had the trampoline there for the last 12 months and you haven't done a backflip, the chances go up exponentially. Part of its mirror neurons, part of it's just, you know, wanting to be a valuable member of the brotherhood, member, valuable member of the tribe. We're going to get better if we're in environments where people are doing great things. But that's why it's so important. That's why the best athletes come out of. You know, everyone's talking about Dagestan wrestling, Dagestani wrestling. Before it was the Gracie bjj, or it still is. It's not just about the techniques. It's about actually that country, how they're doing that thing. And they, they get better and better and better, and they build it up as a castle of culture. It's a castle of culture that goes through multiple generations and the systems get better. And you, you just, you need to get in that environment if you want to experience it. And so this is the thing to Encourage. If you wanted to become an elite athlete, you need to create this environment around yourself where the standards are very high. In health, the standards are very high for skills, the standards are very high for force. With the roosters, I wanted 140 kilo power clean from my big boys. I wanted 120 kilo minimum power clean from, from the, the backs and smaller players. We had a lot of players go past 140. The top was 155, the biggest that I've heard about from a rugby league player. 155 kilogram per power clean. It's because we set these standards and it's because we had this framework. I want the athletes who produce the most forced fastest. And when you throw weights with a barbell, it's very different to just jumping with them. You have a specific moment of impulse where there's maximal acceleration of that load which is going to carry over more to your acceleration neurally. And with those specific muscle groups it is good to do position specific strength stuff in the Bosch mechanism of lining up the exact biomechanics of the exact force and vectors and, and loading the specific movements. There's value in that, but there's also value in how much absolute spark and electrical power can you get out of your brain, out of your nervous system into those specific muscles. We were the team who could produce the most forced fastest. Other teams were asking you, what, what are you guys doing? Like, how is it that you're so much more athletic than us? It's just so hard to play against you. Literally players in the opposition team were asking that and I saw the program of the players before, I saw what they were able to do the year before. And it's true that someone could be weak in the gym and strong on the field, especially if they're not being asked to be strong in the gym. But I was definitely getting 5, 10, 15, 20% more out of players on lots of different movements, lots of positions. We're doing weighted chin ups with lots of weight and they were pulling guys into the ground and we had the most zero score lines for opposing teams. Now of course there was a team component to this, but why is it that we pay so much money for the top players to bring them in? If it was all about the strategy, then we just want to pay the top coach because it wouldn't matter about which players you have now. You need the top coach because the top coach also creates this environment for specific excellence and, and sometimes general excellence. But the majority of the efforts we're Buying these top players. And we know you put LeBron James, Steph Curry, someone else. I'm not really a basketball fan, but you get the idea. If you put, if you put three of these guys on the same team, they're going to win. Doesn't matter. I can go and coach them, they're going to win, probably. Obviously you're not looking for any disadvantages. So there's a, there's a chance that if you put those three personalities together and you don't have a good coach, maybe they fight with each other, maybe they don't like each other, maybe the other players stop turning up to practice and start drinking and yeah, who knows? It's, it's a complex system of what can happen. But in general, if they were to stay somewhat like they are now, you put those top players on any team and they're going to be physically dominant, they're gonna, and they're going to be athletically dominant. They're going to be dominant in some skills and force as long as they have their base of health. So we need to build these general athletes. We need to identify what are the specific areas of the sport, especially for their position, what are the specific areas and then how can we make that 1% improvement. So where my mind starts to go when I'm thinking of like, so what will the best soccer players look like 10 years from now? There's a few guys in uncommon brotherhood who are interested in playing professional football. If I was coaching them, they would 100% go and play professional football at a high level. If I was able to consistently specifically coach them, I had them come and stay with me for a week or two last year. And the breakthroughs that they have in their mentality as well as their performance are powerful. So for these soccer players, I'm thinking, well, what is being absolutely excellent, extremely excellent on your feet look like? And to me I'm thinking parkour, I'm thinking tricking, I'm thinking ballet. I'm thinking break dancing. So specifically excellent on the feet, I'm thinking karate. And you're thinking, he's freaking insane. How are they going to have time for that? They've got 600 games a year. Don't worry about that, don't worry about that. My athletes will come back, they'll take a year off. They'll come back and they'll be worth double the value. They go from being a twenty million dollar player to being a forty million dollar player. Well, they'll give them that year off. They'll find a way, the player will find a way. Now I'm just taking a year out because I'm not making it. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna go from being a one million dollar player to being $100 million. There's ways, there's ways at least. The coach needs the paradigm and then we can talk about it, whether it's with the junior athletes, what else? We need to be able to move more balls faster. If you look at these games of one on one, soccer, the five, five a side soccer transformed the game, right? Everyone's like, okay, yeah, the Brazilians have got it worked out. They're playing this street football. They're on the ball all the time. And they're getting much better than the English who were kicking the ball from one end of the field to the other. They're playing 11 a side against each other. And they, the game had to change for the English. The Brazilians changed the game because they played this little tight game. So how do you get tighter? You get tighter by having each player be just extremely, not just to be extremely dexterous on the ball so they're able to make the finest adjustments of the ball. And how do you take that to the absolute extreme? Doing it spinning, doing it inside of the foot, outside of the foot, top of the foot, bottom of the foot, ball on the ground, ball off the ground. Okay, and then just, just to give you one more, because this, this goes on and you've got to identify the top 10. But kicking the ball hard, kicking the ball accurately. So making very sharp hard passes over short distances and being able to kick the ball far, being able to kick the ball very hard and very accurately. How do we do that? Could we learn something from punt kickers? Could we learn something from Muay Thai? Could we learn something from kickboxing? Okay, so we need to start to measure how hard the ball's been kicked. And you might be like, no, no, look, how hard they kick the ball doesn't matter. In soccer, I'd argue that it does. And I'd argue that we're going to get less injuries, we're going to execute lots of different things better. If we can submaximally kick the ball harder, faster. But let's just say it doesn't matter. Okay? We identified that fact is not very important. And we, and we give it very little emphasis. If we identify that the balance of footwork, speed to the ball is getting more important in the game, then we ramp this one up. If you recognize that individual ball control and being able to beat someone one on one is getting more important. Then we ramp this one up. But we've got these dials with each athlete and then within the training system, within the training year, within what our team needs and we can play with these specifics. If every player is getting significantly better all the time, the job is going to be so much easier for the team. Play all the strategy and structure and, and whatnot. You go and take the best 14 year olds and you put them against the best 18 year olds. Who wins? The 18 year olds, you know, the 14 year olds get hurt. If it's rugby or if it's American football, the 14 year olds are going to get hurt no matter how skillful they are. This is men's versus women's sport. You can't put the two together. You can't put 18 year olds and 14 year olds together. So that's why you want to be the ones who produce the most force. At the same time, if you go and take the most skillful 18 year olds, it doesn't matter how strong and fast the opposition is in soccer, if the skills are on another level, then those 18 year olds are going to dominate. So we want to level up both to the maximum. I hope this was valuable. I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback on this. We're going to keep going deeper on this and build the best coaches, build the best athletes, build the next generation of athletes and coaches. That's what it's really about. It's not about best because best sets the limit of what is currently the standard. And what is currently the standard of the best ever is much lower than what it could be because it grew up in times where we didn't have these paradigms and we weren't really developing things as fully as we could. And the other reason that today's athletes have to be much better and tomorrow's athletes have to be much better than today's is because the environment keeps improving. We're able to create more professional environments and, and that feeds on itself. So there's a beautiful journey ahead. I'm personally loving going through this process. I'm mostly focused here because I actually have this specific team or sport that I want to play in at the moment. I'm enjoying the personal journey of this development. Every athlete should be enjoying the personal journey of, of their general development as well as the specific development. I'm looking forward to doing more specific stuff. I do like it when there's someone with specific ability that helps me improve that specific sport. And the bigger my general base is and the more specific sports I've developed, the specific sport becomes a general base for something else. So being really good at soccer means you're not going to be terrible when you go and do Muay Thai kicking or being amazing at mutai kicking means you're going to have some balance and some power when it comes to, to kicking in soccer. So there's the specific becomes the general. When we do lots of different sports and this is the idea I was like, I wish I played lots of different sports or I should have gone to a multi sport high school or college. Well no, you don't need to do that. You just need to develop those specific abilities. You don't have to be wearing that specific item of clothing with that number of players on the court. Just dribble the basketball. If you want to develop that footwork, hand stuff or whatever specific element of basketball that you need. If you have an athlete has really poor hands, then yeah, okay, we want to be getting, let's, let's get a thousand dribbles a day. There's almost no cost to it. There's no energy, effort cost. But their hands are going to become more dexterous. If we do that with the, with it, they build that basketball ability, they build some hand juggling ability. They're doing some, some baseball type throw catching or cricket type reflex catching. Probably going to drop less balls that year in their sport. Maybe there's a force element to it as well. Maybe we do some crazy grip stuff with more emphasis on this. This will get better. Hope you enjoyed this. Love to hear your thoughts.