Week 11: Planning a program

There is a dangerous concept floating around that coaches see their athlete as machines. It is important that the coaching pedagogue still recognises that their athletes have emotions and feelings, just as any human being. The coaching pedagogue will pride themselves on their ability to both engage with their athletes physical state but also monitor and develop the cognitive and mental state of their athletes.

Moving onto another topic it was established in lecture that every strength and conditioning coach will understand that a program must consist of planning cycles like: mesocycle, macrocycle and microcycle, along with the phases, preparation, competition and transition. This is all well and good but in planning a program the coach must first work out is what is the athlete doing wrong. What technical skills or physiological segments are out of order during the sequencing of a movment? Is the timing right or wrong or is the athlete stabilising the required segments?

In this weeks blog I will like to focus on the role of the performance analysis. The reason being is that the other night I decided to go down to my local oval with a good mate of mine Mitch Mooney (who works as performance analysis at the AIS) Mitch brought along his Ipad and we analysed one anothers technique upon ball contact. What we discovered was that if the ball hits the foot perpendicular it is likely to go in a straight, desired direction. Now this is a rather complex skill and requires the stabilisation of the trunk and hip upon ball strike, keeping in mind that only one foot will be on the ground upon ball strike.With experimenting on ourown technique in kicking an AFL ball. By use of the Ipad and slow motion, lines and angles were drawn, Mitch discovered that my ball drop was not ideal and as a result I tended to counter rotate my shoulders inorder to direct the ball towards the goal.

Here are a few pictures taken from Mitch's Ipad to explain the above. Here are two photos displaying the techniques errors as noted above. These photoes are in sync with the videos. As you may notice the photo on the left shows a counter rotation of the shoulders with the right arm swinging backwards. This is the result of poor ball drop where the ball has landed on the out edge of the foot and my trunk counter rotates to try and 'steer' the ball toward the desired direction. On the right hand side, a far better kick is shown. Here the ball has landed perpendicular on the foot with the goals and everything is in alignment (note. hips and shoulders) as a this technique resulted in a direct kick and goal!

Produsing resources for coaching resources

In returning to my list of previous blogs there is this underlying theme of sharing knowledge and experiences to impart information from one person to another. As also mentioned in my previous blogs, the globalisation of the modern world will allow this free flow of information as a major tool for learning. There is potential that people can not only gather information but can gain online qualifications to enter the employment world. In my opinion his is both a scary thought but one that is filled with optimism and excitement. Knowledge will no longer be limited by monetary means but rather time and energy to access such resources. This is what I believe the future of online sharing and 'produsing' will result. For example, If I were a cricket coach analysing the biomechanics of fast bowling in cricket. My knowledge can be shared with other coaches from any nation in the world of cricket. I could share and display my findings to coaches in the West Indies, India, Pakistan, The UK, South Africa etc. On the flip side, by developing an online resource like a wiki page, these coaches could in turn display there research and innovative ideas. This sharing and imparting of knowledge allows coaches to further improve their understandings in their desired field.

Building on this idea, and as Keith mentioned in todays lecture, we all live in a 'cloud space'. At first I had no idea what he was going on about! But what this means is that the expert pedagogue will live in two worlds. One that is an online identity for e.g I have identities by sharing my profiles on facebook, twitter, archive, slideshare or blogger etc. the other world is the  material and physical world where we eat and breath.

One subject that surprised me was Keith's support for wikipedia. Let's face it, most students have looked over this as a source to gain knowledge in a particular topic! But throughout my own education wikipedia was frowned upon by all my lecturers, tutors and teachers, to the point that if you were to source wikipedia in an assessment piece an automatic fail would be coming your way! Yet, as Keith discussed, wikipedia is viewed and edited by millions of people everyday. Some would regard this editing as 'unreliable and inaccurate' but in fact, wouldn't all this editing ensure its accuracy? This constant updating of information could in fact improve its validity as people accross the globe share their knowledge by editing its text.

Based on sharing of information I have shared a list of other ways inwhich to share images. Images quite often speak louder than words. so here are a few ways you too can share you experiences rather than write it in a blog:

Pininterest, Instagram, Flickr

Images quite often link to further viewing and so this is a great way in order to experiment with sharing information accross a greater range of audience!

So where does all these ideas fit into place? The overall point is that each and everyone one of us have experienced life differently and that our thoughts, knowledge and ideas have grown from these experiences. In sharing these experiences we will develop a sustainable resource of information for both ourselves and anyone else who spends the time and energy (rather than money! :)) to simply learn. Because in the end, gaining knowlede should be free!