Specialists take a narrow view that goes very, very deep. That makes them an asset when you have a narrow, specific problem. For most Masters athletes, your orthopedic surgeon, your physical therapist, your trainer, your dietitian, your sport psychologist, and your sport coach are specialists. All those specialized assets are a serious liability to your long-term success.
If you want to be the best possible athlete that you can be, you have to also be a specialist: training for and performing in your sport are all you have enough energy and attention to do. Planning your training, assessing patterns in your performance, managing all the little things that snap and crackle and pop as they emerge…these tasks are too intensive and cognitively-demanding to do while also giving 100% to your training. When Masters athletes self-coach, this is exactly what you are taking on: not only building the plane as you fly it, but also plotting the route and coordinating with other planes, then doing maintenance on the runway between flights.
The alternative is that you hire a lot of specialists then let them guide specific parts of your preparation. Sometimes, your specialists fall into a natural sequence and you have enough time to walk that path from start to finish: massive injury is triaged by an athletic trainer (or EMS for the really bad ones), then you see sports medicine for a procedure, then you see a physical therapist for restoring function, then you see a trainer for general strength, then you see your sport coach again. This system could work because you follow the chain of specialists, doing only the work that fits within their narrow expertise before advancing to the next person giving advice. This system should work.
Except it never does. Each specialist has a really unique, perfectly crafted hammer, designed to drive exactly one type of nail. Your goal is never that just-right nail. Each specialist operates on a specific timeline of interventions and follow-ups and milestones, largely driven by cost and legal factors. Your goal is never on that timeline. Each specialist collects different data about you then doesn’t share it because there is no common set of measurements which apply to every step. Your goal is bigger than all of those measurements combined. So your chain of specialists, however diligently you take their advice, ends with a stack of assessments, suggestions, and calendar dates many printed pages high…yet doesn’t end at returning to your sport at your desired level on your timeline.
Consider that individual performers in an orchestra are specialists. Violinists aren’t specialists just on their instrument, the violin – they are specialists on the specific part they play whether melody or harmony. When an orchestra performs, a conductor conducts to help keep them in common time. When an orchestral piece is written, a composer orchestrates to assign specific parts to each specialist. Your specialists need both a composer and a conductor, just like an orchestra.
As the athlete, it is your responsibility to ensure your selection of specialists – referred to in a previous article as your care team – are both orchestrated (given a specific part to play within the journey to your goal) and conducted (guided as to when and how much to advise). But, as an athlete, you may struggle to organize what all of your specialists do because you are not, yourself, expert in all of their specialties! If you spend all of your free time studying what the test results, scientific and medical literature, and thought leaders suggest is best practice for each stage of your rehabilitation, training, and peak performance, you will have very little energy or time left for giving your best efforts to rehabilitation, training, or peak performance.
If your goal is on a long enough timeline, 10-12 years for example, you can explore these narrow domains and collect enough knowledge over that time to know how to interpret an expert’s advice in terms of your own goal. If your goal is on a shorter timeline, though, you need one more specialist on your team. That may seem absurd, given how complex this process probably already sounds. But the specialist you need…is an expert generalist.
In order to let you be a specialist yourself (a current or future high-performance athlete), you need someone who can orchestrate your care team before the work begins and conduct your care team as the work progresses. In college athletics, this is almost always your position or event coach. They take control of your entire training process. They have leverage and authority over nearly everyone in your care team, since all members of said team are employed by the college. They can assess your current state as an athlete, your key competitions, and your development plan to advise which specialist to see, which advice to take, and when to move on. (If you’ve ever wondered how in the world horrendous abuses of college athletes can occur, know that it is this power combined with misaligned incentives in the sports system and perceived helplessness by young adult athletes which makes those abuses possible. Thankfully, most role coaches take this power and its attendant responsibility seriously!)
A Masters athlete assembles their own care team. You found the doctors and coaches and other experts who work best with your personality, location, and budget. You are the hub; they are the spokes. If you also closely manage and direct your care team, then you are also the wheel. If you do not closely manage and direct that care team…
…
…where is the wheel?
At risk of taking this metaphor too far, without a unified approach to your preparation, you have no wheel. You cannot make your way to your goal on time because you cannot roll a wheel which does not exist.
I’ve argued that I am not a strength & conditioning coach. “S&C coach” is the same type of specialist as “trainer” within your care team. The S&C part of your process is to become strong enough, mobile enough, and conditioned enough to pratice harder with your sport coach. I frequently fill this spot for athletes because they come to me without direct guidance on speed development, strength training, or mobility practice, but that is not the value I actually offer athletes.
I am an expert at being a generalist. My expertise is about emotional beings playing explosive sports. I am great at noticing patterns, comparing patterns to obscure sports science findings, and giving advice based on probable outcomes. I am an analyst of human performance who cares a lot about individual feelings. So when I say I am a performance coach, that implies I help you perform better. Yes, definitely that. But in more ways than “I played well on the field.” As a performance coach, I want to help you perform pre-op activities better so you most likely have a simpler, cleaner surgery. I want to help you perform permissible workarounds to your immobilized limb, so you maintain general health and have a faster physiological recovery. I help you find the allowable and tolerable limits of load in partnership with your physical therapist, so you get back to your sport skills sooner. I help you translate physical sensations into expressive language so your psychologist and sport coach can understand your readiness state during practice. I help you train to run faster, jump higher, throw farther, hit harder, and all that other stuff in my business tagline. Finally, when your season ends, I dig up all my notes from your entire process, summarize what you’ve done to arrive at this point, then ask you what you want to perform next.
I specialize in a unified approach to individual athlete performance.
If you are performing at the level you want and are not frustrated by a rehab, you have no reason to work with me. You’ll pay too much money and be asked for too much feedback after every training session.
If you are eager to find your limits, done with battling nagging injuries, and overwhelmed trying to organize all the advice you’re getting from your team of specialists, I can help you. My job is never to tell you what to do. My job is to enable your long-term success by coordinating the messages and activities of your specialists. My job is to organize all the disparate inputs you’re faced with in the context of your goal. My job is to take away the planning, vetting, researching, and summarizing so you can just be an athlete.
But you don’t need me to unify your training.
If you play conservative with training time, leaving yourself a few hours each week to take and review notes on your training, you can spot your own patterns.
If you demand that every one of your specialists cite their sources and fully explain each part of their recommendations to you during follow-ups, you can align their advice to your goal.
If you can consistently get quality sleep and prepare foods that leave you energized to train, you can sustain any training program for years.
You can do it all yourself.
It’s just, as someone who made a business doing this for others, I don’t choose to do it myself. I don’t have the capacity to do this for others then handle myself the same way. I don’t have the objectivity to separate my current state from my goal state so I don’t get discouraged by sick days and little pains and canceled competitions. I hire specialists to support myself, just like you should.
As a performance coach, I’m here for those who already have too much going on, so would appreciate having a single person to call when advice seems at odds or when plans and goals change. If you want a performance coach who will walk with you from where you are to your goal, rather than another specialist who hands you off when their part is done, let’s talk.