The longer that I am coaching, I am starting to think more about how I think around planning blocks of training for individual clients, athletes and groups. The more I try to learn and understand, the less I realise I actually know. And I am saying this as someone that started coaching in 2003…
In the last year I listened to a podcast interview with Dr. John Kiely, which led me to his infamous paper ‘Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth‘. This was both a blessing and a curse for me as it clearly verbalised a lot of the frustrations I was experiencing over decades of meticulous planning, where I would see those careful plans unravel as soon as they were thrown into the real world. But this also fed my nihilistic tendencies and led me to wonder what the point of any planning was…
Around the same time I was reading the Strength Training Manual from Mladen Jovanovic and this led me to think more about my own underlying principles, philosophies, experiences and known biases when it came to coaching. It was refreshing to hear more knowledgeable coaches explain that it is common for speed bumps to arise within a plan and that the goal is ultimately to develop a robust plan as opposed to chasing a perfect (unrealistic) plan.
Mladen talks about various processes and philosophies in his books but one that resonated with me straight away was the Top Down Bottom Up approach.
This is something that I had inadvertently been doing for years but never took the time to step back and really see what I was actually doing. I was just putting out ‘fires’ day to day in an iterative process, trying to be more efficient than the last time.
The Top Down Bottom Up approach is about merging that big picture, broad plan with the messier day-to-day problems at hand and then using smaller lenses of time to observe and collect data and use this new information to make decisions going forward.
Like everything, there are pros and cons to both approaches …
Top Down planning can provide a structured plan and some comfort in assuming a reliable outcome and it can give clear goals. The downside is that a plan can be too rigid, not taking in to account any surprises that may arise in a given timeframe and it also does not take into account the reality of the individual or athlete in front of you.
Bottom Up planning is something that improves with experience. It is the ability to navigate the unpredictable terrain of the day to day. This approach looks at what the coach can do at that moment with the present constraints (injuries, lack of equipment, limited time frames etc). The athlete / client input matters here and the coach is more of a collaborator than an authoritarian. The drawbacks to Bottom Up planning is that it can lack direction, can limit options and may reinforce biases.
Ultimately this is where the craft of the coach comes in to play – merging these strategies and using experience and context to come up with the most appropriate path of action for the individual(s) in front of them in order to ensure long term progress.