Coaches Corner

And now for a post full of lists...... The issue of performance enhancement in sport is complicated, but people are constantly blending together two separate issues, so lets separate them: What are the ethical and purely practical issues about whether drugs in sport should be policed at all? What do you do with people who, according to the rules as they are currently stated, cheat? Lets tackle the second one first. In sport there are rules, and there are clear consequences for breaking the rules. Unfortunately human nature means we can assume that: people will push the rules to the very edge of what is allowed  then people will push past what is allowed  if someone pushed past and wasn't reprimanded (caught AND appropriately punished), they will push further  Therefore, if there are rules, they need to be enforced in order to (this is the important part) protect the innocent. That is, protect those who choose to follow the rules of competition. Much is made

I really like the idea that ' if they haven't learned it you haven't taught it '. It completely turns around the paradigm that it is the responsibility of the learner to learn. And if you adopt the idea, it challenges the standard paradigm of high performance sport. Yes, that's right! The key difference is the way you approach things. If only one person needs to learn for you to be successful coaching your squad, then you can afford to do the same thing until someone ends up working it out. You don't need to change how you are doing things, you don't need to personalise, you don't need self-reflection and research to find better ways of doing things. But if you need all your athletes to be the best they can be, you have to work differently. I've written before about the 'High Performance Pyramid' ( here and here ), which is basically a theory that says if you have a certain number of athletes successfully involved in your sport at t