{"id":948,"date":"2020-02-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/reports\/a-four-step-plan-to-help-ensure-your-athletes-adhere-to-your-conditioning-plans\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:12:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:12:23","slug":"a-four-step-plan-to-help-ensure-your-athletes-adhere-to-your-conditioning-plans","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/a-four-step-plan-to-help-ensure-your-athletes-adhere-to-your-conditioning-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"A Four-Step Plan to Help Ensure Your Athletes Adhere to Your Conditioning Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n Feb 03, 2020 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

A Four-Step Plan to Help Ensure Your Athletes Adhere to Your Conditioning Plans<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Human Performance<\/a> <\/div>\n
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Four tips from the Utah Jazz, England cricket, Dublin GAA and the Belgium men\u2019s national football team.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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The physical demands of periodisation, preparation and recovery differ from sport to sport but the challenge of getting the athletes and coaches to buy-in tends to be universal.<\/h4>\n
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By John Portch<\/h6>\n

Whether it is an Olympic sport or the NBA, those charged with overseeing effective periodisation need the trust and understanding of the players, who need to understand the value of your work in its most distilled form, as well as that of their high performance peers, who all want their slice of the performance pie.<\/p>\n

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute brings you a four-step plan to bringing everyone on board with your strategies and rationale.1<\/p>\n

1. Prioritise athlete education and help to gain their trust<\/strong><\/p>\n

The worlds of the NBA and Gaelic sport could not be more disparate on the surface and yet performance staff working in each would notice some parallels.<\/p>\n

The challenge in the NBA – and numerous other elite leagues across global sport – is to find a balance between the conditioning work being done in-house and that being done privately by the player.<\/p>\n

Some NBA teams, such as the Boston Celtics, are developing practice facilities that keep the players onsite for as long as possible, and that phenomenon is covered here.<\/p>\n

Back to our analogy, extra-curricular work is far from being the preserve of millionaire athletes, in the amateur world of Gaelic games in Ireland, the inter-county players must build their way into a season away from their county panels.<\/p>\n

Bryan Cullen<\/a>, High Performance Manager for Dublin GAA\u2019s senior men\u2019s football team, told the Leaders Performance Institute of the importance of educating players in their own physical performance needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they want to do more outside of collective sessions then I\u2019m aware of it and there will be some guidance in terms of what they should be doing,\u201d he explained. \u201cI won\u2019t overload them with science but I do like to broadly outline the training phases to the group so that they have an understanding of what\u2019s coming down the track. We\u2019ll outline the periodisation process as well as the potential negative effect of unstructured activity when they should be resting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given that Dublin have long-been the most finely-tuned team in the country, Cullen\u2019s message is clearly getting through to the players.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cYou build up that level of trust with each player to encourage them to take your advice on board. Sometimes it\u2019s necessary to compromise and give individuals a little of what they want but I would always tailor an individual\u2019s personal programme to ensure that it does not compromise their performance during collective sessions.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. Find the right language with athletes<\/strong><\/p>\n

The develop the trust that Cullen speaks of means giving athletes the necessary detail without bamboozling them with science. It can be a delicate balance but the S&C who accepts that it is not about them or the theory gleaned at university but the players practising in front of them.<\/p>\n

Rob Ahmun<\/a>, the ECB\u2019s National Lead for S&C, spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute about the importance of cricket-specific, colloquial language.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had always been a \u2018by the script\u2019 kind of coach,\u201d he admitted during a conversation about \u2018internal\u2019 and \u2018external\u2019 cues in training.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would previously approach a role with the view that I needed to make them better athletes. I\u2019d worry about numbers, squats, speed \u2013 these are internal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The focus has shifted to external. \u201cThis time I was more interested in making them better cricket players, which meant relating everything they did on the field or in the gym back to their performance. I challenged them to ask me at any point \u2018how will this make me a better cricketer\u2019 and I would always provide them with an answer and a game-specific scenario \u2013 these would be external.\u201d<\/p>\n

Often it came down to the use of language. \u201cIf you need the players to perform a movement and you issue instructions like \u2018head and shoulders back\u2019 or \u2018hips back\u2019 there\u2019s research to suggest that these instructions can compromise performance because the athlete is suddenly thinking about these; the alternative is to give them an external cue to focus on; something outside of the body for them to think about or an analogy that helps them to pick up movements quicker.\u201d<\/p>\n

What would be some examples of the cues an S&C coach might use? \u201cWhat you\u2019re trying to get out of that cue is a movement. So if there\u2019s a running drill and they\u2019re not lifting their knees up during the sprint then a good external cue would be to tell them \u2018imagine you\u2019re running through knee-high grass or knee-high water\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re trying to create analogies and visual images to try and ensure better translation into performance. In coaching terms, this has been a big challenge for me, but that kind of cuing gives you better transfer to performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Hold regular check-ins with your\u00a0 high performance colleagues<\/strong><\/p>\n

All high performance staff have the wellbeing of the athlete at heart but, in multidisciplinary scenarios, that wellbeing is not automatically well-served when everyone is having their say.<\/p>\n

The best solution, as former the Utah Jazz\u2019s former Director of Sports Science Mark McKown<\/a> told us, is regular formalised check-ins to ensure that each player is on track.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s important and you need to have healthy dialogue or even a healthy disagreement, which happens sometimes,\u201d McKown told the Leaders Performance Institute during his 20th<\/sup> season with the Jazz, in 2017.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe work well together. I\u2019ve been in a situation where you don\u2019t necessarily get along with everybody but in this case we do. If you look across the NBA, everybody\u2019s staff is growing on the performance and sports medicine side; this makes sense if you talk about the investment that the teams have in these players; that you do everything you can to keep them healthy and on the court; and then it\u2019ll improve their performance and make them better athletes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a collaborative thing and that\u2019s not just the company line.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Be sure to gather all the data you need<\/strong><\/p>\n

This fourth and final point might be one for those S&C professionals working in international team sports but there is a lesson for all in ensuring you have the right data at hand.<\/p>\n

Richard Evans<\/a>, the Head of Team & Individual Fitness with the Belgium men\u2019s national football, works for a team that meets only sporadically throughout any given year. For most of the time, the players reside with their club teams, which are scattered throughout Europe and the world.<\/p>\n

Keeping track of the physical condition each and every player, as well as those who may be called or recalled to the national team, is an arduous task.<\/p>\n

Evans, having previously worked in the English Premier League, saw in from both sides and that sparked an idea in his mind, as he wrote in this Leaders Performance Institute exclusive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was an opportunity for me to help plug that performance gap,\u201d he said in 2017, just eight months after taking a position in Head Coach Roberto Mart\u00ednez\u2019s coaching staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cAhead of the first meeting of the squad last summer, I went back and emailed a couple of former colleagues and counterparts who I knew from my time in the Premier League and asked them if I could have the last three weeks of training data; any pre-conditioning programmes and any conditioning programmes so that I could have a full understanding of what the player has been doing prior to international camp and what program the player will be expected to continue during camp. This helps us prepare the players more appropriately for the demands of training and games.\u201d<\/p>\n

The response was as Evans hoped. \u201cMy experience of the past few international breaks has been eye-opening in terms of the team\u2019s willingness to share their GPS data, pre-conditioning programmes; it\u2019s really helped to break down some of the barriers of resentment that can exist because of players going away on international duty.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome clubs have even changed their rationale when players depart; they\u2019ve said if we\u2019re doing this with Belgium then we\u2019re going to do it with other countries and they\u2019ve taken to providing player handover reports. So now when they\u2019re handing over a player they\u2019re providing a full programme of what the player has experienced recently in terms of training and nutrition, sleep and recovery, and what he\u2019s expected to do to carry on his programme when he\u2019s away with his national side.\u201d<\/p>\n

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What is it going to take to win in 2020?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is the focus of our latest Performance Special Report. Download The High Performance Manual: Winning in 2020<\/em>, which features sports organisations as diverse as Red Bull<\/strong>, the Brisbane Lions<\/strong> and the Royal Military Academy<\/strong> discussing the pertinent topics across Leadership & Culture, Coaching & Development, Human Performance and Data & Innovation.<\/p>\n