Have We Made Coaching Too Complicated?

The longer I coach, the more I learn about coaching. That probably sounds obvious, but it has changed the way I think about what we do.

When I first started coaching, I thought good coaching was mostly about knowing the techniques, being able to demonstrate them, and having enough experience to help someone fix their mistakes. Over the years, that idea has become much more complicated. I've studied different approaches to learning. I've learned about deliberate practice, spaced repetition, ecological dynamics, constraints-led approaches, curriculum design, athlete development models, strength and conditioning, nutrition, testing, recovery and a dozen other things that can potentially make an athlete's development better.

I've tried to apply a lot of them. I've built curriculums. I've reorganized curriculums. I've thought about how skills should be introduced, practiced and integrated. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what an athlete should be doing at different stages of development. I've tried to make our strength and conditioning more purposeful and our nutrition more systematic.

And I still believe much of that work has value.

But sometimes I look at all of it and wonder if we're making coaching more complicated than it needs to be.

What Was Wrong With the Old Way?

Think about how a lot of great fighters were developed before we had all of this language and methodology.

• They ran.

• They hit the heavy bag.

• They sparred.

• They competed.

• Then they did it again.

There wasn't a sophisticated developmental model explaining exactly why each practice was occurring at a particular stage of the athlete's development. Nobody had a curriculum organized around spaced repetition or an elaborate framework for manipulating constraints. And yet some remarkably good fighters came out of those environments.

There were plenty of problems with old-school training. Athletes got injured. Training wasn't always intelligently organized. Conditioning was sometimes based on tradition rather than evidence. Nutrition was often terrible. Coaches could be dogmatic. Athletes were frequently expected to simply endure whatever training was thrown at them.

We've learned a tremendous amount since then, and some of those lessons have made coaching better. But the success of those old-school athletes does remind us of something important. You don't need a complicated coaching system to develop a great athlete. You need an athlete who trains.

And not just an athlete who shows up. You need someone who is willing to spend years doing difficult things, experiencing failure, solving problems, learning from mistakes and coming back tomorrow.

That part hasn't changed.

The More You Learn, the More You Can Add

I think there is a strange trap that comes with becoming a better coach. When you don't know very much, coaching is simple because you don't know how much you're missing. Then you start learning.

• You discover that simply telling an athlete what to do isn't always the best way to teach them. So you learn about ecological approaches to learning and constraints-led training.

• You discover that athletes forget things if they don't revisit them. So you learn about spaced repetition.

• You discover that teaching isolated techniques isn't enough. So you build a curriculum.

• You realize a curriculum doesn't necessarily tell you how an athlete develops over time, so you build a developmental model.

Then you start thinking about physical development. Strength. Power. Aerobic capacity. Mobility. Recovery. Nutrition. Assessment. Monitoring.

Then you start connecting all of these things. And suddenly you've built a pretty sophisticated system for teaching someone how to fight.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, I think some of these ideas can solve real problems. A well-designed curriculum can prevent random technique accumulation. Spaced practice can help athletes retain important skills. Constraints can create useful problems for athletes to solve. Strength and conditioning can address physical qualities that aren't developed simply by practicing the sport.

The problem isn't complexity itself. The problem is when complexity becomes a proxy for quality. We can start believing that because we've put more thought into something, we've necessarily made it better. I'm not sure that's always true.

Complexity Should Solve a Problem

This is probably where I've changed the most as a coach. I used to think that the goal was to keep improving the system. Now I think the more important question is: What problem are we actually trying to solve?

If beginners aren't retaining important skills, maybe we need better repetition and review.

If athletes are accumulating techniques but can't use them under pressure, maybe we need to change the way we're practicing. If someone has a physical limitation that is holding back their performance, maybe strength and conditioning can help. If athletes are constantly getting injured because their workload isn't being managed appropriately, then we should probably rethink the way we're training. Those are real problems.

But sometimes there isn't a problem.

• Sometimes an athlete just needs more practice.

• Sometimes they need more rounds.

• Sometimes they need to compete.

• Sometimes they need to spend another six months doing the boring fundamentals.

And sometimes the best intervention a coach can make is to get out of the way and let the athlete figure something out. That's an uncomfortable thought for a coach because coaches like to coach. We spend our time looking for things to improve. But not everything needs to be improved.

The Athlete Still Matters

This is where I think the conversation about coaching can become a little misleading.

We talk a lot about methodologies, systems and environments, and those things matter. But sometimes I wonder if we give the coaching system too much credit for what the athlete accomplishes.

I've coached people who were incredibly motivated. I've coached people who weren't. I've watched athletes take the same instruction and do completely different things with it.

I've seen people make enormous improvements because they simply decided they were going to work at something until they figured it out. And I've seen people with access to excellent instruction, good training partners, good programming and every opportunity to improve who simply didn't put in the work necessary to take advantage of it.

• You can design the perfect curriculum, but you can't make someone care.

• You can write the perfect strength program, but you can't make someone train consistently.

• You can build the perfect nutrition plan, but you can't make someone follow it.

• You can create the perfect practice environment, but you can't make someone become deeply invested in getting better.

At some point, the athlete has to bring something to the process that the coach can't provide.

Desire might be one of the most important pieces of the entire system.

Maybe Greatness Is Less Controllable Than We Think

This is something I've thought about a lot as I've gotten older as a coach.

We like the idea that if we can just figure out the right system, we can produce great athletes. It is a very appealing idea. If we understand learning better, organize training better, develop physical qualities better and manage everything more intelligently, maybe we can reliably create greatness.

But I'm not sure greatness works that way.

Good coaching can create better conditions for development. It can remove unnecessary obstacles. It can provide better information. It can expose an athlete to better training partners and better problems. It can help an athlete avoid years of unnecessary mistakes.

But I don't think coaching can manufacture greatness. There are things inside an athlete that are difficult to quantify. Curiosity. Competitiveness. Persistence. Creativity. Obsession. The willingness to keep working on something long after it stops being fun. And maybe some of the athletes who become truly exceptional simply possess an unusual amount of those qualities.

That doesn't make coaching irrelevant. It makes coaching more humble.

I Still Want to Make It Better

None of this has made me want to stop learning. I still want to understand how people learn. I still want to improve our curriculum. I still want to make our strength and conditioning better. I still want to understand nutrition and recovery better. I still want to experiment with different ways of teaching.

I don't want to go backward. I don't want to pretend that everything I have learned over the last few decades is unnecessary because some old-school fighters trained without it. But I also don't want to fall into the trap of believing that the newest methodology is automatically better because it is newer, or that a more complicated system is automatically better because more thought went into it.

Maybe the real skill in coaching isn't simply learning more things. Maybe it's learning which things matter. And then knowing when to use them.

There are times when a sophisticated approach can solve a problem that a simple approach can't. There are other times when we've built a complicated solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

The older I get, the more I think good coaching requires both the willingness to learn something new and the discipline to leave things alone when they already work.

Because at the end of the day, all of our methodologies still have to serve the same basic process.

• The athlete has to show up.

• They have to practice.

• They have to struggle.

• They have to adapt.

• They have to do it again.

• And they have to want to get better.

Maybe our job isn't to build the most sophisticated system possible. Maybe it's to build a system that is as sophisticated as necessary—and no more complicated than it needs to be.