Functional First Forum by Coach Daragh

Unpopular Opinion: You do not HAVE to do Olympic lifts with athletes to improve their speed/power. Sometimes getting athletes to adjust to these advanced and frankly complicated movement patterns is not a productive use of valuable time when priming them for competition. Oly lifts are not the be all and end all of VBT. There are countless ways of incorporating other methods to implement into programs that will directly correspond to their performance within their specific sport. That being said, the proprioceptive adaptations required to adjust to proper technique within the Olympic movements can provide a huge benefit to the athlete’s overall capability to better move themselves through space efficiently.

Worrying about what ‘harmful properties’ are in diet fizzy drinks while you continue to consume a consistent diet of refined/processed carbs is like a cyclist trying to smooth out the gravel along the path they cycle to work on with a cheese grater instead of pumping up their flat tire.

Worrying about implementing things like BCAA’s into your diet when you aren’t even hitting a sufficient amount of protein to build muscle, let alone sticking to a consistent workout program, is like sticking a thomas the tank engine plaster on the bonnet of a fiat 500 after it has literally just been tag-team decimated at 45mph from both ends by two 55 ton tayto lorries.

Warning: This post is not for the faint sighted 🧐
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Not only will your mental health deteriorate if you look at food as something you must 'make up for' but your physical health won't be in a much better state. Attempting to punish yourself with extra training sessions or heightened intensities of training due to a guilt of overindulgence not only causes a terrible outlook on nutrition but will also effect your ability to properly utilise the intake of food for exercise due to the lack of important nutrients. The reason people harp on about balance is because that is the most effective way to keep yourself content with the food you consume as well as fuelling your body with what it needs to perform.

𝐌𝐲𝐭𝐡: You can out-train a bad diet.

𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡: A sustainable and wholesome diet along with consistent physical activity with the incorporation of intense bouts of exercise will allow the body to better utilise the nutrients you provide it with, providing a byproduct of better body composition.

𝘾𝙤𝙉𝙨𝙄𝙨𝙏𝙚𝙉𝙘𝙔 𝙞𝙎 𝙠𝙀𝙮 𝘽𝙧𝙊 - annoying but true.
Motivation doesn't have a shred of relevance when the robust habits you've built for yourself keep you accountable without you even knowing it.

The idea of the '𝙋𝙀𝙍𝙁𝙀𝘾𝙏 𝙒𝙊𝙍𝙆𝙊𝙐𝙏 𝙋𝙍𝙊𝙂𝙍𝘼𝙈' in my own opinion leads to a very narrow outlook and stance on exercise prescription, not to mention also causing individuals to act as if they are literal robots when tackling important and unique characteristics of clients. The perfect exercise or group of exercises simply DOES NOT EXIST. There is far too much variability in each individual's genetics, goals, anatomical variance, injury history, medical history, lifestyle, etc for this to ever be a thing! This way of viewing the situation provides a misconception that there is always only one set way to more appropriately target a set individual's circumstances. What a boring way to look at it, as well as causing hesitancy within coaches to be creative and productive with their knowledge out of fear of administering something outside of that 'perfect method'. In order to become a truly effective coach one must learn adaptability within their methods and become more aware through actual experience about the differing styles and methods of implementation. There is never only one way to achieve a person's goals!!

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I frankly don't see the point in physical testing without the implementation of appropriate technique first. There are so many aspects to physical fitness testing that are unreliable if it is implemented for the case of program manipulation. On a monday you might get a completely different answer than on friday when a technique variable has been altered. A hop for distance / vertical jump test isn't going to be valid and reliable source of information that can allow for understanding of the athlete's physical ability if the athlete has not first learned to master the technique needed. All you're going to gather from testing younger athletes who have not be primed/honed to complete these movement patterns efficiently and effectively is data showing random error as their performance is often very highly fluctuating.

Robust and repeatable technique must be ensured before physical testing will provide any sort of valid data worth taking into account.
Questions to ask yourself before incorporating physical tests to determine performance:

- what does this test actually tell us?
- does it actually enhance decision making for exercise prescription?
- is this new prescription demonstrably superior to what we've been doing in the past?

Data is only useful if it becomes information. If a majority of your data gathered shows itself to be NOISE rather than SIGNAL then it wouldn't be wise to utilise this as reasoning for program alteration.

How many times did it take you to perfect the squat the very first time around? It takes multiple workout sessions to perfect a movement pattern, so why shouldn't you go re-read that book? It would be naive to assume we consume every valuable key concept of writing the first time around, the same way it would be naive to assume a new client will perform a perfect squat on the first session. You're sure to have missed some golden nuggets. 🛠