In the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segal’s character takes surfing lessons from Paul Rudd’s character. It’s one of my favorite scenes from the movie, because it says so much, especially with regards to training. In short, Rudd keeps telling him, “you’re doing too much, do less. Don’t try to surf, don’t do it. The less you do the more you do…” How true!

Charlie Francis told me once, “less is more.” When Charlie spoke (like EF Hutton), I listened and listened closely. In this country, we often believe that bigger is better, more is better, one size fits all. We want to believe in top-secret exercises, miracle protocols and performance enhancing tools or gimmicks. When will we learn that a good coach can get a ton done and go a long way without any of these? Hopefully soon.

When I train my athletes, I train them to continually enhance and improve their performance. You can always fix under-training, but you can’t fix over-training. I’d much rather under- than over-train my athletes. Training too much, too hard, and too often will destroy your athletes over time. They should feel good/eustress after a training session not exhausted or beat up/distress. I train as much as necessary in order for improvement, which is the intent in the first place. You hardly ever see injuries from under-training but do you see careers shortened from over-training. So how do you fix under-training? Not necessarily by training more, which is often the go to.

Over time, it’s the volume of work that gets you, intensity can be handled easier than loads of volume. I prefer consistency in training my athletes. It’s not about how sore they are or if they are puking, this should not be criteria for a good training  session. This is called “maladaptation” to training; in other words, they were given a stimulus they were not ready for. It doesn’t take a genius to train someone to near death, but rather it takes a detailed thought process to enhance performance.

How often do you see a coach develop an outstanding athlete? But, what you don’t see is the countless ones that were destroyed along the way. James Smith and I used to talk about this for hours. There’s an optimal window between training load effect and injury load effect; it’s a delicate relationship. Each individual has their strengths and weaknesses. What is one athlete’s “go to” exercise my be another’s downfall. Every individuals ability to cope with and handle stress is highly specific to that individual. It’s subjective. Athletes need to be developed and only given what they can handle at that point in time (training readiness).

Between the opinion of the coach, the athlete, and the athlete’s body, listen closely! That is why we decided to open our performance center. We wanted to offer elite sports performance training for athletes of all ages.

For more information on Buffalo’s premier Sports Training facility please visit this page (Buffalo Sports Performance Training).