🥇 The Athlete Development Journal

Developing speed, strength, power, health, and character, so athletes get the most out of their athletic career.

Listen to this episode in the car with your athlete. ⬇️

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Mind. Why you did everything right and it didn’t work.

You can’t conflate the outcome with the “correctness” of the process.

In non-nerd speak, that means that you can do the wrong thing and get a good outcome. Or, you can do the right thing and get a bad outcome.

That’s the blessing and the curse of existing in a complex world.

With so many unpredictable variables having a say in the outcomes, you cannot guarantee that doing everything the right way will lead to an ideal outcome (and absolutely everything that deals with human biology or psychology has essentially infinite unpredictable variables).

Our brains don’t like this, though. One of our key survival mechanisms is to simplify the world down into nice and neat rules; to sort the gray into black or white.

We assume that if the outcome was good, the process was also good. So, we start playing the role of history revisionist:

• “Suzy played softball year round since she was 11 years old, now she’s a D1 softball player. Therefore, you should play softball year-round to go D1.”
• “Johnny came back from his ACL tear at 6 months and never got hurt again. Therefore, it’s safe for me to come back at 6 months.”
• “Kyle did 2-hour long fancy ladder and hex ring footwork drills, and he was one of the best defensive players to play in the NFL. Therefore, 2-hour long fancy footwork drills help you play in the NFL.”

Instead, I implore you to think of the world as probabilistic.

Good processes enhance the odds of a good outcome, not guarantee it. Bad processes enhance the odds of a bad outcome, not guarantee it.

Think about it; if doing something gives you a 95% chance of success, you’re still going to fail 5% of the time.

Doing something that has a 95% chance of success is almost always the best course of action you can take, even if it didn’t work out in the end and despite what your hindsight tells you.

Body. Mobility is overrated

In the spirit of continuing with counter-intuition, I want to knock mobility off its high horse.

The athletic world as a whole is always pursuing more mobility.

“They’re way too tight” or “They never stretch enough” are some of the biggest concerns I hear from parents during their athlete’s initial eval.

Sometimes, that’s spot on. There’s a mobility deficit that needs to be addressed.

But, other times, that’s just not the case.

Mobility is not a “more is always better” quality.

You need to have enough mobility to get into the positions that you’re asked to get into in your sport, plus a little more to hedge against some of the awkward, unplanned positions that you’ll get into.

After that, the returns on investment diminish. Actually, at some point, too much mobility becomes detrimental. If you can passively stretch yourself into positions that your muscles can’t actively control and stabilize, your odds of injury skyrocket.

(If you’re a very flexible individual, you’ll want to read ​this​.)

So, work on your mobility, but know when you’ve won that game and it’s time to move on to a new one.

Soul. The key to life?

We started this journal entry off by talking about the imperfect match between process and outcomes.

Initially, I found this point really demoralizing when combined with an equation that I can’t help but find viscerally true:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations.

If you have high expectations and reality doesn’t match up, you’re going to end up with negative happiness (aka being unhappy). But, I want to chase excellence. Part of chasing excellence is having an insane level of belief in yourself, which is inevitably tied to having insanely high expectations of yourself.

Is it then a futile endeavor to want to be simultaneously both happy and excellent?

I think the key here, and maybe even the key to life, is to have high expectations of yourself in the process, not the outcomes.

If it’s a daily, weekly, or monthly action that you have entirely under your control (like getting your lifts in 3x per week or logging all of your food intake), then you should have incredibly high standards and expectations for yourself.

If it’s something that you do not have directly under your control (like getting that scholarship as a high school senior in the era of the transfer portal madness), release your expectations.

Let’s wrap it up with a couple important things…

1. This newsletter and podcast is completely free. I spend many hours each week researching, writing, illustrating, recording, editing, and uploading. The best way you can support it and allow it to continue is to share it with people you know. You can just send them to ​gtperformance.co/newsletter​ and they can subscribe there!
2. Everything in these newsletters, podcasts, social media, and on our website is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice for you or your athlete. Consult directly with a healthcare professional.

Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!

Be >,

Zach

Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS