Mark Applegarth Coaching

Afternoon all,

Please see the link below to my latest newsletter. Sign up at www.markapplegarthcoaching.com

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Hope everyone is having a good day

Cheers

Mark

Mark Applegarth Coaching Coaching Solutions

Afternoon all,

I’m going to be chatting all things coaching, rugby and my new ventures in about an hour on BBC radio Leeds.

Tune in!

Cheers,

Mark

Please see the link below to my latest newsletter. Hit subscribe for a weekly update

Focus Is The New Super Power I hope everybody is having a good week and didn’t go too hard on the Easter eggs! If you have, don’t beat yourself up about and and just keep focused on the rest of the week.

Evening all,

Just a reminder if you like the content and want a weekly drop into your Inbox to sign up to my newsletter please

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Cheers

Mash

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Building Grit: Authentic and not something you can fake.

A topic I love reading and hearing about is peoples endeavours through struggle and the character they developed through the experience of coming out the other side. Sometimes they’ve been successful and other times it’s given them a new perspective on life but ultimately, they’ve all stayed in the fight and gained something from the experience.

I find it inspiring, and it reminds me every day to hold myself accountable to a standard I want to set for myself and make sure I can look at myself in the mirror knowing I’ve shown up when I didn’t want to and put myself forward through experiences even when I didn’t feel like doing so. By doing this you’ll develop what people call grit.

I thought this would make for a good article in its relevance to coaching.

“Grit” Is a big factor behind how I coach as the people I’ve coached over a period of time would vouch for. I expect people to show up every day and fight, whether the chips are down, or they feel on top of the world, I expect people to show up and compete with themselves and each other every day to get better and not bring excuses as to why things aren’t working or why we shouldn’t have to do so.

For example, last season was a test of this when I was 14 games into my first season coaching first grade rugby and my team hadn’t picked up a win. As the head coach it was important that I owned the responsibility of the results but also showed up each and every day, ready to motivate the team to move forward and to keep showing up for each other to fight through the adverse experience. Ultimately, we failed but one thing I don’t think anybody would say is that we didn’t go out without swinging.

Did I feel like doing this every day? Absolutely not. There were some days where I’d have loved to have taken the opportunity to blame others or locked myself away for the day but ultimately, I knew I had to show up and keep persevering not only as it was my job but also because I knew I’d learn a lot about myself and the others around me in the face of adversity.

I can look back knowing that I owned my stuff and kept a level head when my character was being tested under pressure. I now know the answer to a lot of questions that were being asked of me in my own head as I answered them by showing up and staying true to my character and in the fight.

I was first introduced to the concept of developing Grit when reading a book by Angela Duckworth simply called GRIT. It’s a psychological examination of the concept of grit. In summary, Angela highlights how your effort is the most important aspect in life. Through passion and perseverance towards your long-term goals and keeping going even when you feel down, or a task seems impossible. People often focus on talent, but it means nothing if the effort isn’t there. By doing this is will allow you to develop grit which will allow you to bounce back from failures or setbacks.

Now if I relate this to my coaching, I think it’s important individuals acknowledge that their success is rented and not owned, and that rent is due every single day in the actions that they take. I use a saying ‘kill or be killed’ every single day when coaching or training myself. It started in jest when doing something tough but now it’s a reminder that that you either deliver in the here and now or somebody else will. Basically, show up and get the work done else somebody else will do it for you and take your place.

This is why in the people or teams I coach I expect people to show up every day trying to improve else you’ll go backwards due to the people willing to show some grit and stay in the fight that will keep progressing forward. If you are willing to show up every day you will get your rewards. As stated, it could be success in terms of winning a game (took me 15 attempts), a league or a cup. For me personally it was knowing my strength of character stayed intact under pressure and having the confidence in myself knowing this moving forward.

Building grit into people is not a smooth road, you get it through adverse experiences and getting through them which is going to look different for every individual reading this article. Think about your own experiences and how they’ve helped define you as a person, when did you feel like giving up, but you pushed through it? Now think how do I use this concept as a coach?

For me personally as a coach the main thing people need when going through adversity is support and honesty. It’s not simply a case of breaking somebody down and seeing if they can build themselves back up, it’s not a one size fits all approach. Every person will need something different from you. Think about how you can build this into your training methods and how you can support the growth of grit into individuals and the team.

Grit has got to be authentic and not something you can fake. Ultimately people will see straight through you if you don’t have it. As a player for example, it could be showing up on days you don’t want to and doing things you don’t want to do but doing them anyway to the best of your ability as you know you need to. It’s the willingness to push past your comfort zone and find out about who you actually are. It’s making sure you hold others accountable to the standard you know that needs to be set and sticking to it.

As the coach you can provide an environment for your athletes to do this but ultimately, they must go through the experiences themselves to develop it. This can happen in training or games. Your job then becomes offering that guidance and support to stick to task and push themselves through their comfort zones. Like anything they will be a risk and reward. The more you push people the more chance of something snapping so make sure this is factored into the equation. I’ve got this wrong many a time but made sure I’ve learned from every experience.

As people grow stronger, both physically and mentally, the more they can be pushed. Again, relating this to coaching - this will look different to different age ranges as well. For example - A training drill performed at first team level may be a 5/10 in terms of overall difficulty for the people performing it. The same drill at academy level may be 9/10 for the people performing it. This could be down to several factors, it could be the speed of the passage of play, it could be the manipulation of certain skills or energy systems and the threshold people currently have to it. As a coach you need to be aware of this and the desired outcome you want to achieve. You also need to be aware of this when coaching younger members in a first team setting to make sure you know when to save them from themselves.

I use a drill in defence called the 10 wins game. In a nutshell you must defend a channel of your choosing (20,30m etc) with a small number of players and gain 10 defensive wins. A win is defined as a player on their back with a controlled pin and peel to marker and a set defensive line. You get a point for each tackle win with the idea being if you front up and get 10 wins on the bounce you are straight in and out of the drill. Sounds easy doesn’t it. You lose points by the opposition getting an offload, making a break, or poking their nose through for a quick play of the ball.so you could be on 9 points, have 2 offloads performed (-2) get a quick play the ball (-1) and then not have a set defensive line (-1) suddenly you are back at 5 points. It tests all aspects of your tackle technique and ruck defence system along with the mental aspect of pushing through adversity.

Now the obvious benefit of this drill is stress testing tackle technique and processes under fatigue. As you tire your technique becomes tested and could become sloppy so it’s a good drill to see how robust your defence is. As a coach you can see whose technique needs support and whether your system can handle stress as you thought.

It also helps build grit into players as the secondary part of the drill as a coach is looking for who gives in when it takes 20-30 contacts to get the 10 wins and who keeps getting off the floor and putting themselves forward again. I absolutely love this drill for this reason.

Players will fail and it’s important to understand that and make sure you offer that honesty and support in your feedback to help them become better. Players will ultimately know what made them reach break point as well, it could be they simply give in as it got too tough, it could be a bad day etc but as a coach its important you facilitate that learning experience for them and make sure they feel supported enough for them to be honest with you so you can help facilitate learning.

As I coach, I think it’s important to also understand people change and so do different generations. What built grit into our grandparents or parents would not necessarily transfer into younger people of today. Their values will but they’ve grown up with different experiences and contrasting environments so it’s important you adapt coaching methods and experiences to accommodate this.

I personally see grit as a lifelong learning and a commitment to an emotional and intellectual investment in myself and the people I coach. Making sure I show up every day for the people that count and do my part to try make it better. I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and paying my deposit as effort is the only thing that counts.

Hope you get something from this and can take something away.

Cheers

Mash

Morning all,

I hope everybody has had a great start to the day and is getting after it.

Each week I’ll be sharing 1-2 articles covering subjects from coaching strategies to the fundamentals of health and fitness. My aim is to provide you with valuable insights that can help guide you on a more defined path.

If there are any particular topics in mind that you would like to explore, feel free to respond here under this post or drop me a message. I’ll do my best to address them in upcoming posts.

Appreciate you taking the time to read this and have a good day!

Cheers

Mark

Morning all, I hope everybody has had a great start to the week. Thank you to everybody for liking and following this page as well. It's always daunting putting yourself out there and sharing information so it means a lot. I'd appreciate it if people would be kind enough to subscribe to my newsletter as well by following this link http://eepurl.com/iLoXiU

Hope you all have a good day

Cheers

Mark

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Skill acquisition: How does youth coaching differ to first team coaching?

This article is for coaches and will hopefully give you basic insight into how youth coaching will vary to coaching a first team. When I was in my role as a Head of Youth Performance and youth phase coach the job in a nutshell was to nurture talented players from the age of 14-20 and produce well rounded players ready for the demands of first team rugby.

Naturally, players developed at different rates, some were already pretty well developed by the time we got our hands on them at 14/15 – what you would call ‘natural talents’ and some wouldn’t show their talent till a little further down the line (slow burners) but that’s a completely different topic. I want to focus on how to acquire and progress skills.

Last year when I was coaching first team rugby a common question, I would be regularly asked was what training we would do with the first team. Without getting too in depth- as first team players you obviously still work on their skill acquisition but they already have a solid base so you can focus on more advanced aspects on the main field session. A youth team is about developing players to be ready for the demands of first team rugby so naturally training will look different, and their main field session will reflect this.

Now there are many of elements to consider in the above statement such as emotional and physical strands of development etc, but I wanted to talk specifically about skill acquisition, and to understand how a ‘skill’ is acquired and the process you go through.

What is a skill?

A skill is basically a learned ability to bring about a pre-determined result with maximum certainty. It’s a purpose of a linked sequence of movements to perform a specific task through using your motor skills. Motor skills are muscle movements you use in everyday life that you have acquired through practice and repetition such as walking and running.

You aren’t born with them, but you can do them now through practice with little to no effort but with a great accuracy. This process is called motor learning - your body’s nervous system, muscles and brain are all working together to execute a movement pattern you have learned. We go through three stages of motor learning:

1/ Cognitive – Novice phase - You are working out what to do and why.

You will have to concentrate hard on all aspects of the movement, and you will more than likely be overwhelmed by the information you are processing. Think of learning to pass a ball in rugby. How do I hold the ball? How should I have my feet? How should I move my arms, how do I time my movement? Where am I aiming to? These are just some of the internal dialogues going through your players head as they are learning to pass.

They will be inconsistent in their ex*****on of the skill as they problem solve and make sense of the task they are trying to execute. Improvements will come quick at this stage of learning and good gains can be made with less practise than as you get to the later stage of learning.

2/ Associative - Intermediate stage – learning to execute the skill well and adapt it.

At this stage your players will know how to execute the skill and are learning how to do it. There isn’t as much self-talk in the players head but performing the movement still requires cognitive thought and problem solving taking up a player’s attentional capacity still.

For example, a player will know how to pass and will start taking onboard information from their environment. Where is the player they are passing to positioned? what depth are they? how wide? How fast are they moving? Where is the defender? Etc. They are now creating the optimum movement to execute the skill (known as perception-action coupling).

Certain aspects of the skill are done with less thought such as where to place the hands on the ball or how to place the feet, but the sequence of these actions is still requiring attention in the learners thought process. As a result, they can execute the skill better than the cognitive phase, but the skill will still vary in outcome compared to an elite level performer.

This stage of learning can continue for long periods of time and some players may never progress past this stage if they don’t invest heavily in developing their skills. This is why you see elite level players constantly executing skills and even though they are in the autonomous phase will revisit the cognitive and associative stages to relearn or refine a skill to enable them to reach a higher level of performance in the future. How often do you hear players or coaches talking about stripping a skill back and progressing it. This is what they are talking about.

3/ Autonomous – the skill is automatic and requires minimal thought.

When you hit this stage of a skill the player will often feel like the action feels effortless to them as they dont have to focus their attention on the demand of executing the skill. They can focus their attention more on perceptual cues such as where is the space? where are their opponents? how can I manipulate the space I’m seeing with the pass I’m going to execute?

They are now producing the movement alongside other demanding tasks as their attentional capacity is no longer needed to control the action of the skill. This is why elite level performers can see passes others can’t as they are processing on their perceptual cues whilst a lesser abled performer is having to still focus on certain aspects of the action the elite level performer doesn’t have to.

Think of the best players in the world in whatever sport you follow. Messi will put the ball into space others won’t see as he’s not thinking about the pass itself but where the space to put the pass is. A lesser abled performer would be still worrying about what pass to execute and where the space is which results in less accuracy on outcome then the elite level performer.

Now this is a very simple explanation of learning a new motor skill and there a lot more factors to consider but this covers the basics.

As a coach or youth practitioner your job is to help your athletes get better by creating an environment that facilitates this. Understanding skill acquisition will hopefully help you understand why a first team environment looks different and will be coached different to a youth environment. It will also help you evaluate your athletes and assess their current skill levels and how you can best help develop them. A first team will still visit the cognitive/associate phases in small group sessions etc but the main field sessions on their heavy days will involve lots of external ques with skill executed at and above match demands with players pushing their own and the teams’ boundaries to aid an improvement in individual and team performance.

I tell coaches a messy session is a good session when learning new skills in youth rugby. You may be covering a skill that the player hasn’t either covered yet or not gone into detail on so the session must reflect that as that will take up most of their attention.
They will be a lot of errors as players self-discover learning ques along with the information you are providing as their coach.

When in this stage keep a skill closed (no external factors). For example, when learning catch and pass selection keep the distance the same, the pass selection the same etc as these will reduce the amount of thinking and problem solving required by the player. As they progress through to the associative stage add more variables such as more people to pass to, static defenders to avoid or what pass they can execute or how fast they have to execute it. These changes require more attention as more information is being processed but it is still done in a controlled manner with the aim of progressing the skill to the next desired phase. As performers hit the autonomous phase you can overload the skill as I described above and players will start pushing boundaries on what the skill looks like and the desired outcome. Think of passes round the back of defenders one handed flicks. They may look lucky to some but normally by the time a player is confident enough to execute on a game day under match demands it will have gone through a fine-tuning process taking it from a cognitive phase to the autonomous phase you see on a match day.

If you think I could help you or your team in terms of coach mentoring or session design, please contact me.

Thanks

Mark

WHY HIRE A COACH?

One of the most frequently asked questions is why hire a trainer or coach so I thought I would share my thoughts on this.

Firstly, there’s a lot of good coaches out there and the biggest thing you can do to start with is to have an informal meeting and make sure you feel comfortable working with your coach to help you achieve your goals.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you might not feel a connection and its important you feel comfortable being uncomfortable around the person you chose to hire. At the end of the day, facilitating growth or change, which is essentially what you are doing by setting a goal will initially make you uncomfortable, so you need to be willing to show that vulnerability to whoever it is that is coaching you.

Hiring a coach is a personal investment in yourself by holding yourself accountable to the actions you say want to achieve. Here are 5 great reasons in my opinion to hire a coach:

1/ Accountability
A good coach will hold you accountable to what you say you want to achieve and not just give you lip service to take your hard-earned money. Accountability is a great tool for creating change and making sure you follow through with your actions. The simple act of sharing your goal with somebody can have a massive impact on your desire to achieve it. Having somebody by your side holding you accountable to it creates even more weight in your corner to facilitate change.

2/ Knowledge
A good coach has a wealth of knowledge regarding exercise science and physiology, but they aren’t scared of saying they don’t know and will get back to you. They also understand coaching is more than just telling somebody what to do as this is what science tells you. Human psychology is a massive part of coaching, whether 1-1 or in a group setting. Everybody on the planet is unique and tapping into what makes people tick is for me, the very essence of coaching.

A common thing I came across in my career to date was coaches/support staff with good knowledge, but they also knew how to get excellent buy in from the people that they were coaching. Good coaches will let you know they care, and they get you. Once you establish this and form a trust then you will buy into the knowledge you are receiving knowing the person coaching you understands how you are feeling.

3/ Motivation
A coach should motivate you to become better, End of. They should make you want to push yourself and move to that next level. When you hire somebody to share your journey its important you get inspired by the person that is helping you along the way. They will be sessions or periods where you lack motivation and having somebody in your corner to provide that can help massively.

4/ Tailored sessions
The fundamentals of training do not change. No matter how much people tell you about the latest trend or package they are trying to sell you the fundamentals of training will be the pyramid of any robust programme. For example, when strength training; Progressive overload, intensity, frequency, volume, and rest will be the staples of it. It may be packaged up in a way that lures you in, but it will follow them principles.

A good coach will get to know your specific needs and design a programme following fundamentals that suits you and your lifestyle. For example, you may be carrying chronic injuries that prevent you performing how you used to or coming back from a period of inactivity or injury. A good coach will get to know all these factors, speak with the relevant people (i.e. doctors, physios etc) and deliver a tailored session to your specific needs, tweaking their sessions on how you respond to the stimulus they are providing.

5/ Return on Investment
A good coach will show you a return on your investment. You will only change if you want to change, a coach cannot do the work for you, but they can quantify the results of your effort when you do commit to what you said you wanted to achieve. For example, you will lose body fat if you stick to your nutritional habits and a coach can provide monthly updates through measurements such as skinfolds etc that show you how you are progressing. Seeing a return on the investment you put in wants you to achieve more and creates the positive habits that leads to continuous personal growth.

As you can see from the above, hiring a coach is not just for beginners who want to learn how to exercise safely but for everybody.

If you feel I can help you in any way, shape or form please contact me asap and let’s get you achieving what you want to achieve!

Cheers

Mark

RUGBY COACHING PACKAGES

INDIVIDUAL RUGBY COACHING AND DEVELOPMENT

WHO IS IT FOR?
Professional or aspiring professional players
WHAT IS IT?
Review of individual clips with a development plan put in place showing areas of focus
WHY SHOULD I DO IT?
Get feedback specific to your own game with areas of development highlighted to enhance your own performance and game understanding
COST: £50 (1 hour)

TEAM DEVELOPMENT AND SESSION PLANNING
WHO IS IT FOR?
Teams that want session plan templates provided
WHAT IS IT?
Session plans provided so you can just coach. Mark will design sessions that are inclusive to your team designed to progress whatever aspect you require
WHY SHOULD I DO IT?
Sessions designed by a professional coach.
Takes away the stress of planning
COST: £60 per month (£15 a week)

COACH DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

WHO IS IT FOR?
Aspiring coaches looking for guidance and feedback to take their coaching to the next level. It may be you are looking for help to pass your coaching qualifications or already established

WHAT IS IT?
Provides feedback and guidance in a collaborative, appreciative and dialogued process. Designed to help increase your capability in coaching.
24/7 WhatsApp support
Weekly check in
Round table discussions with other established or aspiring coaches.
Coach education

WHY SHOULD I DO IT?
Marks coach mentorship provides you with valuable guidance, knowledge, and networking opportunities. Mark can can offer insights based on is extensive experience in professional rugby and help you avoid common pitfalls, and provide support as you navigate your journey.

COST: £200 a month (minimum 3 month sign up)

1-1 IN PERSON AND ONLINE COACHING

IN PERSON COACHING

WHO IS IT FOR?
Anybody wanting some accountability to their health and fitness objectives

WHAT IS IT?
Train 1-1 with Mark at St Johns Fitness
Limited availability so book your spot
Bespoke programme service specific to you and your needs not a generic programme

WHY SHOULD I DO IT?
Will provide you with the tools ands systems backed by science and extensive experience
Will be with you every step of the way doing what I can to help you achieve your goals
If you follow the programming you will get results.

COST: £400 (block of 10 sessions)

1-1 ONLINE COACHING

WHO IS IT FOR?
An online coaching service for anybody wanting accountability to their training.
People who want to train with Mark who cant make the in person sessions.

WHAT IS IT?
Initial consultation and questionnaire
Monthly training delivered to an app specific to your needs
Nutritional support
Weekly video check in and 24/7 support

WHY SHOULD I DO IT?
All workouts provided on an app where you can easily record your training sessions and track progress
Email, WhatsApp and in app support 24/7

COST: £150 per month (minimum 3 month sign up)