Coaches: Your Training Program Should Not Be Set in Stone

One of the things that bothers me about the way training programs are sometimes presented is the idea that there is a perfect program somewhere. Find the right techniques, put them in the right order, follow the plan, and if the athlete does everything they're supposed to do, development will take care of itself.

I don't think it works that way.

A training program is a starting point. A coach looks at the athlete, considers where they are and where they need to go, and builds the best plan they can with the information they have. Then the athlete actually has to train. That's when the plan meets reality.

You can design what looks like a great program on paper and discover that the athlete responds differently than expected. Maybe a skill develops quickly. Maybe something that seemed simple turns out to be a major problem. Maybe the athlete can perform a technique perfectly in a drill but can't recognize when to use it against resistance. Maybe they develop a strength you didn't anticipate. That's not necessarily the program failing. That's information.

This is why I think good athlete development is a continuous cycle of design, implement, observe and redesign.

You design the training based on what you know, implement it, and then pay attention to what actually happens. The athlete's performance gives you information about what they need next, and that information should influence the next stage of training.

The observation part is where coaching becomes more than simply delivering information.

It's easy to look at a class and ask whether everyone completed the technique. It's harder to ask whether they actually learned it.

• Can they recognize the opportunity to use it?

• What happens when the opponent resists?

• Do they make the same mistake repeatedly?

• Does the skill disappear when the situation changes?

Those questions tell us much more than whether someone can perform a technique during a drill.

If an athlete is consistently getting passed from a particular position, the answer isn't necessarily to give them another technique. Maybe they need more time working on that specific problem. Maybe the resistance needs to change. Maybe they don't understand the underlying position. Maybe they're making the same decision incorrectly every time. The coach has to figure out what is actually happening before deciding what to do about it.

The same applies to strengths. If an athlete develops an exceptional ability that wasn't part of the original plan, I don't want to force them back into the program simply because the curriculum says that's what comes next. The athlete has given us new information, and good coaching should make use of it.

That doesn't mean abandoning structure. In fact, it's one of the reasons structure matters.

People sometimes hear the word curriculum and imagine a coach standing in front of a class with a checklist: technique 1, technique 2, technique 3, technique 4. Once everything on the list has been taught, the athlete is supposedly developed.

That's not what I mean by a structured development system.

A curriculum gives us a framework for what we're trying to develop. It gives athletes a logical progression through the major skills and problems of their sport, gives coaches a common language, and helps prevent important areas from being overlooked.

But there is another responsibility that comes before all of that: the coach has to understand the sport.

Not every technique deserves the same amount of training time simply because it exists. In a combat sport, there are techniques and strategies that consistently prove useful against resistance and in competition, and there are techniques that are much more situational, difficult to apply, or simply lower percentage. A good coach has to know the difference.

That means the curriculum should emphasize the skills athletes are most likely to need and the techniques that have demonstrated a high percentage of success against skilled resistance. We don't want to build a curriculum that is simply a collection of everything that can be done. We want to identify what matters most, make sure athletes become very good at those things, and then give them enough breadth to understand the situations surrounding them.

But even that isn't enough.

A curriculum shouldn't be a list of techniques. It should develop the ability to use those techniques. That's an important distinction.

A student can learn a hundred techniques and still have very little ability to fight. Knowing the steps of a takedown isn't the same as recognizing when the opportunity is there. Knowing a guard pass isn't the same as being able to pass when someone is actively trying to stop you. Knowing a combination isn't the same as recognizing when an opponent has given you the opening to use it.

That's why I've written before about the difference between learning and practicing. The goal isn't simply to accumulate techniques. The goal is to take those techniques and develop the ability to apply them against resistance, make decisions, recognize reactions and solve problems.

The technique is the tool. The ability to use the tool is the skill we're actually trying to develop.

That is part of the coach's job before the athlete ever walks onto the mat. The coach determines what is important enough to teach, how much time it deserves, and how it should be introduced. Then the athlete's performance gives the coach information about how that plan needs to be adjusted.

So the curriculum is the map.

Coaching is navigating.

As athletes become more advanced, this becomes increasingly important. Beginners have many problems that are common to almost everyone. They need fundamental skills, positions and concepts, and a structured curriculum is extremely useful for establishing that foundation.

As they develop, athletes become more individual. Their strengths become more apparent, their weaknesses become more specific, and their experiences begin to influence how they solve problems. Two athletes can go through the same foundational curriculum and eventually become very different fighters. The job of development isn't to make every athlete look the same. It's to give them the tools and experiences they need to develop their own ability.

Assessment and sparring are part of this process because they give us more information. An assessment tells us what an athlete can currently do. Sparring shows us what happens when they have to make decisions against another person who is actively trying to stop them. What problems keep appearing? Which skills hold up? Which ones disappear under pressure? What decisions are they making?

Those observations should feed back into training.

This is also why I don't believe a good training program can simply be written once and followed forever. The athlete is changing, the problems they're encountering are changing, and ideally the coach is learning too.

A coach shouldn't be embarrassed when an athlete teaches them something about the program. If a drill consistently produces the wrong behavior, that's information. If something that looked great on paper doesn't work in practice, that's information. If an athlete finds an unexpected solution, that's information too.

The goal isn't to prove that the original plan was perfect.

The goal is to make the athlete better.

That's ultimately what we're trying to do with the BLAST development model. The structure matters. The progression matters. The curriculum matters. But none of those things are meant to become a ceiling for the athlete. They're a starting point. Then we train, we watch, we learn, and we adjust.

Sometimes that means sticking with the plan. Sometimes it means spending another month on something that wasn't supposed to take another week. Sometimes it means moving forward because the athlete is ready. Sometimes it means changing the plan completely.

The important thing is that the decision is based on what is actually happening rather than what we hoped would happen when we wrote the program.

Design. Implement. Observe. Redesign.

Then do it again. Because the best training program isn't the one that looks perfect on paper. It's the one that gets better as we learn more about the athlete.