Keegan Smith argues that athletic skill explodes early when you learn across different sports under good coaching. Hugo Sánchez used gymnastics for aerial play, Lomachenko borrowed dance footwork, Kobe planted his feet like a soccer player. Smith's New Athlete program offers monthly challenges and templates to build that broad motor foundation before specialization hits its limits.
Skills improve exponentially at the start. You learn really fast and things get better. If you can put yourself and stay in the moment, stay in the challenge of doing something that's foreign to you, especially if you've got a good coach and you've got a good environment around you, you can improve really quickly. Now you can also then go and learn other skills and you can continue to have that exponential improvement. And what that does is that the specific thing that you would like to be best at, the potential for that to improve increases greatly. Hugo Chavez did this. Hugo Chavez. Hugo Sanchez, the Mexican soccer player, did this with gymnastics. He developed his gymnastics ability to a high level, and then he went and scored tons of goals in the air with bicycle kicks and dominating in the air. Lomachenko took time off from boxing to improve his Ukrainian dancing, and his footwork is his trademark. And what sets him apart from the rest in boxing, these examples run all through sport of going deeper and specializing in something else to be able to be able to then get to the next level with a specific thing that you want to do. Kobe Bryant did it in some ways with playing soccer a lot as a high school athlete, but also then working on his left foot plant and his right foot plant. So with skills, we always have this potential for exponential improvement, especially if we start to focus on the base or bring into focus the base. What it does is also brings a mentality for the specific training that you want to do as well, where you're going to improve in your specific areas of your game. You're going to be able to apply that same focus and the same beginner mind that you need. If you take on rope flow or learning backflips on a trampoline. The more you do that, the more you're going to become comfortable with doing a new thing and not being embarrassed about not being good at things you haven't practiced. But then you carry that same courage across to your specific sport and to the areas of your game that others might be good at, that you might never have really developed and you might not be good at at the moment. So this is the idea of this exponentially improving athlete, which we can and should aspire to be. In terms of force, it is the opposite curve that we see even when you change the movements, but you change the movement, you get a steeper learning, but there's only so far that the biological tissues of the body can go. So as far as you know, how elastic can we become? How much force can we produce? It can improve, and we should improve it, but realizing that at some point we get to a place of very slow, diminishing returns and it's not really within our nature as humans to specialize and persist in one micro area. If you look at children, if you look at a baby, if it was to choose, I'm just only going to work on golf. I'm only going to, I'm not going to develop any of my other abilities. I'm not going to crawl, I'm not going to walk, I'm not going to jump. I just want to be a golfer. Obviously you can't choose to do that because you need to be able to walk and you need some degree of balance. But even as a five year old, it's not natural to be able to say, well, I'm not going to go and play at the playground and I'm not going to play play basketball and soccer. I'm only going to focus on tennis. Somehow when we become adults, it becomes normal to stop working on ourselves generally in a way that children never do, never could, never would. It's against our nature and doesn't mean don't try and become really good at one thing, but it means never give up on your general base and balance and never give up on the idea of taking on new things and new challenges. This is the big idea. This is the core idea of this article. If you'd like to be challenged and be supported to take on new abilities, you can do that with new athlete. We've got three challenges every month and the template runs year round, six days a week. There's athletic challenges, there's leaderboard scores and the support for you to continue to expand as an athlete alongside at the moment, hundreds of others, but soon to be the thousands and tens, tens of thousands of others. I do believe we're onto something really, really big with this. It's a quite a different philosophy to anything that you see out there. I was implementing this with the World Champion City Roosters back in the day. I didn't understand what I was doing in the way that I was implementing skills training with the players so much, but it was what we were doing and it did build a world champion team and it continues to transform my athletic ability and the athletic ability of the athletes and coaches that I'm working with. Test it for yourself, then you'll know.
