Training Talk - Conversations with a dozen master coaches

Training Talk - Conversations with a dozen master coaches
G. Martin Bingisser
Bellevue, Washington
HMMR Media LLC, 2018
203 pages


Fireside chats. Talking shop at the bar with the lecturer you flew to see. Q&A during bathroom breaks. The sixth or seventh email on a thread you never thought you would get a response to. Skype calls. Those three-sentence notes surrounded by multiple asterisks, underlines, and boxes...

This book emitted those feelings you get with each of the above.

Filled with nuggets and pearls, Bingisser curated hours upon hours of chats with the best of the best and transcribed it into this book of conversations with a dozen master coaches. 

This book was divided into two parts. Part 1, "At the Track", contains interviews with track and field coaches. In Part 2, "On the Field", Bingisser chats with leaders in team sports. Although unconfirmed, I believe this book was an edited and curated transcription of discussions from his podcasts and personal interviews with each of the experts. 

Bingisser makes you feel like you're sitting in Oprah's audience. Surely he doesn't send you home with a car or a new television, but you also don't feel like you need to highlight or take copious notes while reading. You're in the audience. In the interview. You're digesting the wisdom that perspires from, cumulatively, hundreds of years of coaching and thousands of athletes coached. And what's noticed immediately are the commonalities in practices and simplicities in approaches, amongst the coaches.  Here are some examples:

Posture, Position and Movement Quality:

Harry Marra

• "I think it is always better to be slow and in correct positions to apply forces than fast and out of position. If you are out of position, you cannot apply forces to build on it."
• "Do you need to be strong? Yes. But you need to be more technically sound."

Gary Winckler

• "If you are training speed and power, you need to be training qualitative movements, and if you are training qualitative movements, there has to be the element of speed in the movement at all times."
• "Posture is simply about finding the best position to apply force, technique is the same."

Simplicity:

Gary Winckler

• "In working with some young coaches the last couple of years, I keep telling them they are videoing too much because you’re not allowing your eye to develop. You are too dependent on being able to go back and look at the video later... A video can be a nice supporting feature, but I don’t take too much of it."

Pat Connolly

• "On training philosophy: is it specific to the event? And, if not, is it essential to injury prevention? The rest of it you don’t need."
• "There are endless amounts of drills..., but what works and what is important, in the time that is available for each athlete, is to weed out the things you don’t need to do."

John Pryor

• "The more complex something is, the fewer rules you can have."

John Kiely

• "I feel the majority of what’s been published in periodization is actually obscuring our vision and getting in the way of proficient training management."

Athlete-Centering:

Dan Pfaff

• "Look at KPIs. Not just key performance indicators, but also key performance inhibitors."

Anatoliy Bondarchuk

• "No scientist can tell you what to do. Everyone is different, and what works also changes."
• "The questions is always: what do I need for my athlete?"

Tom Myslinski

• "The two big differences that separate pro guys from college guys are their self-awareness and ability to conduct deliberate practice."

On the Dynamic Nature of Programming and the Reality of Experience and Trial-Error:

Dan Pfaff

• "Contingency planning is a staple of great generals."

Derek Evely

• "Intense exercise selection must follow the principle of polarization of intensity. Exercises need to be either specific and intense enough to highly transfer, or they need to be non-specific enough to contribute to general athletic abilities and recovery processes."

Dave Tenney

• "Utilize technology to accurately measure the actual physiological impact of a coaching staff’s “training philosophy."

John Kiely

• "Appropriate training management is about resolving paradoxes"
• "Sticking to the plan religiously isn’t a virtue. Consistently turning up in the best possible state of mind and body and making an informed decision on how best to target technical quality, volume and intensity to most appropriately move you towards realizing your goals, on the other hand, is."

Frans Bosch

• "If a strength training program or a proposal for a strength program doesn’t also mention the program’s negative effects, it is probably a very poor program."
• "Just writing what you have done does not give you the adaptations."
• "People make a caricature that if you just do these exercises, things will sort themselves out. You still, as a coach, have a difficult task to apply this approach in such a way that the system is under enough pressure to improve."

Overall, Training Talk was a nice discussion about experiences and lessons learned in applied training theory with a little bit of coaching sprinkled in on top.

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