1. Adaptable!Will Kirousis MS, CSCS, CISSN | @willkirousis | will@tri-hard.com
Fixed/Rigid Athletes And Coaches Break…
To Be Your Best, Choose To Be:
2. Who am I?
• Will Kirousis, MS, CSCS, CISSN
• Live in MA with my wife Rosemary and twins Emily and William.
• Focused on coaching AG cyclists, triathletes, runners and other
endurance athletes.
• 20+ years of coaching experience.
• Coached AG and Pro athletes to world championship and national
championships podiums in 6 disciplines between triathlon, Xterra,
cycling and mountain running.
• Enjoy coaching folks from beginner to elite – anyone wanting to and
open to growing!
9. In Other Words…
Forethought
+ Situational Acknowledgement
+ Curiosity
+ Implementation =
NEW EXPERIENCE!
(You Shape Your World!)
10. Distal goals do not work alone, proximal goals
are needed to create tasks of focus. Goals are
simply symbolic representations of what we
choose to strive towards.
Goals – Why Don’t They Work?
11. Self Centered = Loss Of Task Focus…
That = Loss Of Our Best Performance
• Fear of consequence, self focused/centered. Self centered takes one
away from the task and thus hurts ones performance.
13. View Failure As Informative Vs. Demoralizing
• Vince Lombardi was not hired for a
HS job due to lack of football
knowledge and low motivation…
• Warner bros said talking movies
wouldn’t work “who’d want to see
actors speak”
• Beethoven's teacher called him
“hopeless as a composer”
15. • Autonomy
• Relatedness
• Competence
Athletes owning their way perform best!
Adie, J. W., Duda, J. L., & Ntoumanis, N. (2008) Autonomy support, basic need satisfaction and the optimal functioning of adult
male and female sport participants: A test of basic needs theory. Motivation and Emotion. 32, 189–199. Doi: 10.1007/s11031-008-
9095-z.
Self Determination and Buy In
16. The KEY of SDT… Maximizing INTRINSIC
Motivation!
17. Build Competence By Calibrating
Challenge TO The Athlete.
• Challenge alone does not
yield growth.
• To much challenge = Self
focus and anxiety.
• To little = apathy/boredom
• All about goldilocks!
High
HighLow
Low
Challenge
Skills
Anxiety
Apathy Relaxation &
Boredom
18. Sport Isn’t Played in
a Box…
Don’t Train in ONE!
Consider a Non-
Linear Approach
19. Coaching To Build Adaptability…
• Progressively couple Perception and Action
• Make training increasingly blend information available and the actions athletes use.
• DON’T JUST BUILD PHYSICAL CAPACITIES
• Build small tasks into more complex/challenging tasks…
• Long and short term
20. Non Linear Pedagogy, Help Athletes Drive
Their Experience.
• As a coach – recognize how dynamic the coach-athlete-sport system
is.
• Goal: Understand the degree of complexity/challenge which will help
the athlete walk the stability-instability line, thus improving their
sense of SDT and performance.
• Choose challenges that are developmentally appropriate, keeping the
decision making and actions of the athletes at level with reasonable
constraints.
21. Am I Coaching, If I “Let” Athletes Learn?
Guided Discovery w/ cooperative-competitive approaches.
Mistakes viewed as informative! (Thus foster competence, autonomy
and relatedness)
Regardless of level, enjoying the task/process, challenges, mistakes
and all, is required to sustain the power of self determination.
Task focus, task focus, task focus!
22. Hands Off… But Relatedness ON!
• Athlete choices are made based on ability for self
projection/foresight.
• Uncertainty in what athletes understand, increases self focus, draw
away from task focus, INCREASE anxiety. DECREASE performance.
• Coach can help over time, by asking questions about performances in
training and racing – guiding the athlete to greater understanding.
• Developmental level creates the opening for athlete questions.
Athletes cant ask or ponder what they cant yet imagine!
23. If We Let Athletes Learn… Where Do We
Focus?
• Needs of each athlete, and the interaction of the personal,
environmental and process/task orientations
• Encourage athletes to solve problems, to view sport as a fun riddle.
• Your role, GUIDE athletes to create and seek their own feedback,
creating a consultatory or facilitating role for the coach rather than a
punitive role.
24. Contextual Interference (CI): Blocked
Practice v Open Practice.
• Blocked, tightly structured practice improves practice, does not
improve actual performance as much!
• Open practice challenges the learner (athlete) to seek out the best
“answers” via consistent adjustment and organization of their choices
– from motor control to tactics to fueling and everything in between.
Open practice will create greater adaptability, due to
the athlete developing a broader and more durable
“data base” for future projection and task modification.
25. Self Organization: Blending Of Constraints
• Individual constraints: structural (physique) or functional (motivation,
memory, attention, etc)
• Remember that rate of change limiters often originate in the ability of various
subsystems to develop at the same speeds. Gains can only manifest when all
relevant sub systems have exceeded a specific point.
26. Create situations that re-create the exploratory and
growth focused activity…
We all experienced as children!
It’s important to remember that as a coach, we are best served when we are Athlete Centered. Being athlete centered implies your methodology, the eclecticism you employ to help that athlete grow is focused on what THEY need. You may have a favorite method or idea. You may love a certain strategy or concept… But if that wont work for that athlete… And you do it anyway, you are centered on yourself – not the athlete. The goal here, as a coach, is to impart information, to shorten and enhance the learning curve and stimulate growth. This is why many coaches who have been around a long time, and many in other educational and psychologically focused fields err towards becoming a generalist. You need to understand many ways – NOT just a single way or two. And you need to be willing to morph the strategies you employ to fit a specific athletes needs. Don’t be a one trick pony!
extent you can regulate thought process, emotions behavior; need a standard to compare against to move fwd based on falling short or exceeding