A crystal clear example of a high performance team

I hate to keep harping on Cal, but they are the epitome. Read this article and see if there is anything magical about them that we cannot do ourselves. Its a matter of collectively getting up each morning and saying today I will be better than yesterday.

The Long Blue Line

Creating a high performance team

Creating a high performance team is really simple. Look at what other successful organizations do and emulate them. Here a short list off the top of my head.

-Use the best personal equipment possible. This means uniforms, balls, shorts, cleats, and pads. This applies to game and practices. You can't practice or play if you are wearing crap.

-Use the best practice equipment possible. Rucking bags, cones, whistles, scrum machines, agility ladders, tees, and balls. Good practice equipment makes practice meaningful, constructive and enjoyable. Good practice equipment teaches proper form and reduces injuries.

-Practice and play on the best field possible. A good level field is essential.

-Have plenty of water and sports fuel available. You simply cannot learn, exert, and excel if you do not rehydrate and refuel throughout practice. Every practice should have water, Gatorade, Accelerade, Endurox for recovery plus sports gels. Its not weakness to hydrate and fuel, its essential.

-Have structured, efficient practices that build skills, patterns and athletic abilities to a game plan.

Other broader high performance ingredients include:
-Have a set pre-season, in-season, and recovery training plan.

-Practice 4-5 days a week, goal is 10 to 1 practice to game ratio.

-Play meaningful games.

High performance teams prepare for games in the following ways:
-Organization-everything is taken care of so that players and coaches can focus 100% on performance.
-Nutrition-players prepare for competition with balanced, nutritious meals.
-Hydration-players begin hydration days before the match, and ensure they are hydrated before, during and after.
-Sleep-often overlooked, sleep patterns affect performance more than realized. This is related to travel strategies to game and the hotels the players stay in.
-Mental preparation-players use mental imagery, goal setting, relaxation, and focused pre-game arousal to prepare for competition.
-Physical preparation-teams use dynamic stretching to prevent injuries and prepare the body for explosions, contact and exertion.
-Strategy-each player knows the entire team strategy in each important game situation and their role in the strategy.

In watching high performance teams dominate outsiders might observe that they have better coaches, more money, better players or some other advantage. This is not true coaches coach better, players play better, and money is spent more efficiently if teams follow high performance strategies. Successful team cultures are build one high performance characteristic at a time. Stronger team cultures attract, develop and keep better coaches and players. Nothing is as attractive as success.

Expert performance

I like this article on the freakonomics blog about expert performance. It really gets to the heart of how to be great at sports or anything. Your college years are designed for you to focus on self improvement. The habits you set making your self a better rugby player will pay tremendous dividends later in life. The challenge of rugby in America is to find good models of the skills you need, and to find good feedback mechanisms to measure your attainment of skills.

Enjoy and keep working hard.




http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/how-did-a-rod-get-so-good/

What you do and how you do it changes your brain

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2008/02_26_08.html

This article talks about how jazz players manipulation their brain activity to perform. Its something we as coaches and players should incorporate into our practices, game preparation and game plans.

Interesting read.

Crossfit workout for in season fitness

I hope many of you tried the Cal preseason workout. It was designed to give rugby specific conditioning. It provided strength, explosiveness, cardio and flexibility. I've done it a few times and had the Air Force Academy team do a similar workout. Unfortunately its an old school workout. Most top rugby programs now use different styles of training.

Belmont Shore, the most successful superleague team in America follows crossfit. Last December I talked to Josh Burgin a 2001 alum who plays for them about the fitness program. What he said is that the workouts are short, high intensity, highly varied and effective.

I've been doing crossfit since December and love the results, can't wait to see what the workout of the day is and can get in and out of the gym in under and hour most of the time.

I have recommended to Jared and Tim that they adopt elements of crossfit into your training. In a sense Jared's functional strength stuff, hippity hops, 400's and other things are crossfit.

I am strongly recommend you checkout crossfit.com and spend an hour reading about the program. Its a great site, the greatest thing about the site is the free workout of the day that you all can start doing right now. It also has great instructional videos for all exercises.

Start doing it now. I recommend you do crossfit on Sundays, and Wednesdays. Jared and Tim will give you crossfit like workouts in practice.

Most importantly start practicing it now so you can do it over spring break.

Two caveats about the program. First, its really intense and some exercises like hand stand push ups, and muscle ups are almost impossible. You need an internal goal to overcome this initial frustration. Beating OSU and IU would be mine. Making all-midwest, or all-american is another good goal. Second the workouts put stress on the groin, the squats, and olympic lifts take a period of time to get used to. Pay attention to this and skip of modify the workout of the day until you adapt to the new program.

There's no motivation like self motivation.


Toby