This decision meant moving my family across the Atlantic for an adventure fraught with more than the usual amount of uncertainties. Yet, three and half years later, with my feet firmly planted back in the USA, I am happy to report that the decision produced one of the most professionally and personally fulfilling experiences of my life to date.
In the paragraphs that follow I will discuss what I thought were the most important lessons from my time at AS Roma.
Movement Is a Skill
For those of us who have worked in the field for any significant length of time, we have likely developed a good eye for movement. For Performance Coaches it is one of the ways in which we evaluate athletes on a consistent basis. The quality and efficiency with which an athlete starts, stops, changes direction, and performs general and sports specific movements alike, provides important data points in their profile.
Having seen and tested many athletes spanning half a dozen professional sports over the last twenty years and noting the vast discrepancy in the quality of the movement, I have come to firmly believe that movement is a skill, and like any skill, it can be improved when the right type of training and coaching is applied.
Yet, there seems to be a prevailing thought in the European soccer community that once a player reaches the top level he or she no longer needs to be coached in the finer points of movement. However, in my experience many top-level players have achieved top level status through incredible technical skill and talent that effectively hide significant movement deficiencies.
The majority of these players have never been exposed to quality movement training as they get transferred from one team to the next. This is starting to change at the academy level of many large clubs but needs to continue to evolve and be applied at every level, including the top levels, even in small doses as part of the warm-up or team gym sessions to reinforce high quality movement patterns that produce better performance and mitigate the potential for injuries. From what I have witnessed, the biggest objection to integrating movement skills training into practice sessions is lack of time.
The perception that is will take valuable time away from the Head Coach seems to restrict and/or eliminate movement skills training. Yet, if you can get your technical coaches onboard it often works well to pair movement training with your strength/plyometric training sessions in order to create training themes that incorporate similar force vectors and amplitudes that will complement the on-pitch training.
Conditioning With or Without the Ball
There has been a long running debate between S&C Coaches and Soccer Coaches regarding the most effective way to condition players for the physical demands of the sport. Many soccer purists insist that you can and should do all of your ESD work with the ball.
While those of us with more traditional performance backgrounds see the need to supplement the conditioning with the ball with conditioning without the ball. However it is worth noting that there is a long standing tradition in some European countries, Italy for example, to do plenty of conditioning without the ball.
The problem is that much of that conditioning without the ball tends to be longer, steady state work vs the more sport specific need for repeated sprints. I see a solution in the theme based training model I referenced in the previous paragraph regarding the integration of movement training.
If technical coaches divided their training emphasis themes into linear vs lateral, (or stride vs tight work to use some GPS terminology) as some performance coaches would prefer, you could tailor the format of the conditioning to fit those training themes.
An example training week would look like this: (assuming a six day match week- Saturday to Saturday)
|
Match Day |
Theme |
Activities |
RPE Range |
|
+1/-6 |
Regen/Active Recovery |
Roll Bike for 20 mins @60-75%MHR Upper Body Lift Lower Body Corrective Circuits Core Stability Massage |
1-3 |
|
+2/-5 |
Off-Physical &Mental Recovery |
|
0 |
|
+3/-4 |
Longer Pitch/Stride |
Linear WU/Movement Skills Linear Plyos *Acceleration Drills Repeated Sprints *Longer Pitch Tactics/matches |
4-6 |
|
+4/-3 |
Strength/Change of Direction (C.O.D.) |
Total Body Lift *Multi-Directional WU *C.O.D. Circuits *Pressing Tactics *Small Sided Games |
7-10 |
|
+5/-2 |
Taper/Tactics |
Lower Body Corrective Circuits *Multi-Directional WU Tempo Runs Match Tactics |
1-3 |
|
+6/-1 |
Match Prep |
Potentiation *Multi-Directional WU *Match Tactics *Short (2-4 mins) 11 v.11 Games |
2-4 |
|
Match Day |
Work Hard/Believe in your process |
Pre-match WU Play to Win! |
7-10 |
For players who played less than 45 minutes in previous match
|
Match Day |
Theme |
Activities |
RPE Range |
|
+1/-6 |
Combo Day w/ Emphasis on Linear Movement
|
Total Body Lift Linear Movement WU/Skills Tempo Runs *Pitch Work - stride emphasis |
5-7 |
|
+2/-5 |
Off-Physical &Mental Recovery |
|
0 |
|
+3/-4 |
Longer Pitch/Stride |
Linear WU/Movement Skills Linear Plyos *Acceleration Drills Repeated Sprints *Longer Pitch Tactics/matches |
4-6 |
|
+4/-3 |
Strength/Change of Direction (C.O.D.) |
Total Body Lift *Multi-Directional WU *C.O.D. Circuits *Pressing Tactics *Small Sided Games |
7-10 |
|
+5/-2 |
Taper/Tactics |
Regen Lower Body Corrective Circuits *Multi-Directional WU Tempo Runs *Match Tactics |
1-3 |
|
+6/-1 |
Match Prep |
Potentiation *Multi-Directional WU *Match Tactics *Short (2-4 mins) 11 v.11 Games |
1-3 |
|
Match Day |
Work Hard/Believe in your process |
Pre-match WU Play to Win! |
7-10 |
*Denotes the integration of the ball into this activity
The contents of the above tables represents a simplified outline of a six day training week. Obviously there is quite a bit of detail omitted that would go into each of these training activities but the RPE range 1-10 gives you a decent idea of what the intensity is like for each training day.
Keep in mind that the activities listed are total team activities and do not include some pre and/or post-training individual work we often prescribed for certain players who needed to address specific areas of weakness. And a final point regarding conditioning with or without the ball; in my experience creative integration of the ball into conditioning drills when possible elicits superior effort from players over an extended period of time, this is an observation that has been verified by studies done with players at all levels.
Yet, it's very rare to see a player reach the necessary speed thresholds (95-100% of max speed) to mitigate muscle injury risk in ball based conditioning drills. Therefore, repeated sprints at or above 95% of max speed without the ball, can and should be combined with other ball based conditioning drills that harnesses player's love of the game with their competitiveness.
I think in this scenario everyone can get what they want; high intensity, quality movement without the ball and the prescribed volume done with the ball.
The Role of Technology
There is little doubt that our industry, like many others, has developed a collective infatuation with technology over the last 10-15 years. The amount of metrics, both internal and external, that can be tracked, quantified, monitored, and analyzed in real time or after the fact, is astonishing based on what was available only 10 years ago. In the 3 seasons I worked fulltime at Roma I received multiple emails per week from different tech companies claiming to have cracked the code of human performance and injury prevention through their latest innovation.
I know my experience was not unique as technology has become a prominent feature of the professional sports landscape. And whether some of us like it or not, technology and big data are here to stay. With that said, I believe it is incumbent upon us as S&C coaches to work with developers and sports scientists to improve the practical application of tech products and more importantly, improve the ways in which data and technology are used in the arena of human performance.
In an interview with David Epstein, the author of "The Sports Gene," he said that "we have a tendency to make something important because we can measure it, instead of measuring it because we thought it was important."
For me, this sentiment does a good job of summarizing the issues we face when using data and technology, and it all goes back to your process. We should be using our process to identify the important metrics we need to monitor and analyze in order to produce successful results, and then develop systems that efficiently collect and apply that data to our daily workflows.
One of the critical first steps is explaining to our athletes why tracking these metrics are important within the context of our team's process. They may not like the idea of wearing GPS pods or heart rate monitors, but if you can show them how the data collected from those devices effects training volume and/or intensity on a given day your compliance rates will most certainly he higher than they would be otherwise.
And once this relationship and two way communication is established the data often becomes a valuable entry point for all types of important performance related conversations.
For example, many of our players at AS Roma reached a point of interest about their data whereby they would frequently ask to see it, and in these brief, unscheduled meetings we could use the data to explain why and how the gym work we do addresses deficiencies in their physical profile as an athlete.
In fact, this approach proved successful in converting some "non gym guys" into players who came into the gym everyday before training for individualized programs to address their deficits and would return to the gym after training for the appropriate regen work that set the table for the next day. A notable example of this was Mohammed Salah, who started with a passion for improvement, then applied his work ethic to produce a laser focus on each one of the weaknesses we were able to help him identify through objective feedback.
Conclusion
The gratification of working towards a common objective with like-minded colleagues with whom you share common ambitions and values is worth its weight in gold from a life purpose perspective. I had experienced this feeling in doses as an athlete and later as a young strength coach on the staff of MBSC from 1998-2007, doing my part to help a business that now serves as a model for private athletic performance enhancement training centers all over the world.
Yet this feeling was emphatically confirmed in my 3 three years with AS Roma. The everyday mission of creating and implementing a process that would help our players perform at their best, coaching and working alongside great people with a shared sense of purpose produced an infectious desire to get better and better.
A relationship particularly worthy of note was the one I enjoyed with Darcy Norman, the person whom I recruited on behalf of AS Roma to lead the performance department and assist in its evolution towards an evidence driven, functional training approach. Arriving and leaving AS Roma at the same time, Darcy and I served as each other's co-pilots on our shared journey, enjoying the peaks and supporting each other through the valleys.
Therefore, this experience was a reminder of my early days at MBSC, and that working in the right environment, with the right people, towards a worthy objective is the key to job satisfaction, which also contributes significantly to one's overall life satisfaction and makes work feel less like work and more like a calling. During my time at AS Roma I was blessed to work with great people in an incredible city and for an historic team, all of which combined to produce an experience I am extremely grateful for and that I will continue to grow from for many years to come.
In Part II of this article I will focus on some of what I learned about developing an organization and how the decisions made behind the scenes can have a profound impact on what happens on game day.
Here is a list of books I read during my 3 years at AS Roma that, combined with my experiences and discussions with colleagues contributed to the evolution of my thoughts on building a winning mentality.
Reading List 2015-2018
"Legacy" by James Kerr
"Start with Why" by Simon Sinek
"You Win in the Locker Room First" by Jon Gordon and Mike Smith
"Black Box Thinking" by Mathew Syed
"The Art of Learning" by Josh Waitzkin
"How Bad do you Want It" by Matt Fitzgerald
"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni
"Beyond Measure" by Margaret Heffernan
"The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield
"Creating Magic" by Lee Cockerell
"Ego is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday
"The Obstacle is the Way" by Ryan Holiday
"Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh
"Top Dog" by Po Bronson
"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell
"The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis
"Leaders Eat Last" by Simon Sinek
"Resilience" by Eric Greitens
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
"The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook" by Peter Senge
"The Energy Bus" by Jon Gordon
"Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi
"Head in the Game" by Brandon Sneed
"What Doesn't Kill Us" by Scott Carney
"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl (second time)
"The Real Madrid Way" by Steven Mandis
"The Sports Gene" by David Epstein
"Daring Greatly" by Brene Brown
"Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispenza
"Getting Things Done" by David Allen
"Why We Sleep" by Mathew Walker, PhD
"Conscious Coaching" by Brett Bartholomew
"Nudge" by Robert Thaler