Guardrails for a [Life] of Adjustments

Coaches’ development is an integral part of what we do at DEUCE and yesterday I was in a feedback meeting with a coach offering a framework that I find helpful for communicating movement standards to a room full of people. Soon after sharing the framework I did what my brain loves to do and looked for the essence of the framework to see if it had universal appeal. I wanted to strip away the details of this framework for it’s principled core. If I could do that, then it may become distilled enough for more skill transfer.

The framework is simple. If you can communicate two things to a group of people when communicating the standard, I’d be hard pressed to find any two things more important than these:

• How do I know I’m doing a great job?

• If things went wrong, how do they normally go wrong?

If you have the answers to these two questions, you’ve essentially put up effective guardrails (like Bumper Bowling) to help the athlete internalize, course correct, and increase agency in their movement. As I alluded to above, I’m sharing this with you today more for universal application.

Life is particularly more complex and less orderly than life in the gym counting reps and sets, making or missing a lift. As such, you’d be surprised at how helpful it is to create guardrails to know when you’re going great and create indicators to inform you when things are going badly in a common way. 

After all, no one is rolling strikes down the middle all the time. Life, like most anything, is a constant act of course correction and fluid adjustments. Ask yourself “how would I know I’m living well?” and “when I drift off course, what’s it look like? Are there times when I should be particularly alert?” 

Logan Gelbrich 

@functionalcoach