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!