Transcript

Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Ani, how are you today? I’m good. Thanks, Brian. How are you I’m ready to roll. You ready to get into it today? I’m ready. What are we talking about. Talking about you and your you’re marathoning and you’re running and talking about I actually I think your idea for this topic actually was around natural laws and athletic performance.

Oh, you know why though? It was not because of me. I have had a few certification program students and grads ask me about a specifically level one like, hey, I really think that this stuff, somatic practices would be really good for high school and college sports teams. What do you think about going in and doing somatic practices for high school and college sports teams?

And with the people who were asking about it, we were having such a rich conversation that one of them said, you should really talk about this on your podcast because other people would love to hear about it. So I think that there’s just so many elements to the conversation. But one of the things just to set the stage.

So we just sent our youngest to college. So we have like kids this age. You know, one of the things that I think is really interesting is the evolution of high school sports and the elite ness of so many kids and how they how they play. Like when I was a kid. Well, I didn’t really do the traditional high school and sports thing.

So the other kids, they were I mean, I was an elite athlete as a as a kid, as a high schooler. I was a professional dancer. But kids in high school, back in my day, they were kind of like, play high school sports, you know? And occasionally there would be a kid or two who would be on a league or something.

But nowadays those things are so popular, like when our kids were going to high school. There’s all this talk about and we live in a really small area. There’s all this talk about, are you going to do club sports too? You know, and I just think there’s a lot more of that now. But I think there’s also like a lot more elite stuff that kids have to deal with.

I mean, we just got three kids into college and the level of, I don’t know what, where do you want to use stuff? They had to do hoops they had to jump through, like when you applied to college, you didn’t go through nearly the stuff our kids went through, right? No, no. It’s basically you fill out a bubble form application and send it in and you either get in, you don’t get in, and off you go.

Right. Yeah, yeah. The level of paperwork and time and resume is, etc. that our kids had to go through to get into college was just like something else, you know, so kids have to deal with like a lot nowadays. And so when I was talking to these folks about going in and talking to high school sports teams, you know, one of them in particular was talking about talking to like a league sport, a club sport, and how she said, I think somatic practices would be really handy for them because the coaching that they get is very one sided.

It’s like, go, go, go work harder. If you take a day off your week kind of coaching. And we had this really interesting conversation about how I’m not really sure that that’s the kind of coaching that, you know, everybody gets when you’re an elite athlete. Now I’m hesitating here for a second because there’s always the amazing coaches and there’s always the coaches that stink and there’s always or the coaching that stinks.

There’s always coaches that are really hard on kids or coaches that are really soft, like it’s it’s all across the spectrum with how I don’t want to make any blanket statements. You know, this person was experiencing that there was a lot of what felt like very pushy coaching, especially in the club sports. And she was thinking that by bringing in the somatic practices that that would give the kids a way to kind of get into their bodies, because so much of the coaching is intellectual.

That was like one aspect of this conversation. But then the other aspect of the conversation was this idea about how hard we are on kids. And as we were talking about it, one of the things that I brought up was, I think developmentally from having worked with kids and having studied pediatric care and stuff like that, that I think it’s really, really important.

With middle school and high schoolers in particular, to trust them more than we do. And if we’re going to be an outside person going into a sports team, I think rather than showing up as the person who’s on the pedestal, as the expert who’s just another person in their lives telling them what to do. I think, I think in order to help them to be their best and perform their best, one of the best things we can do is show up and be curious about their experience and ask questions and actually trust them.

But then that conversation led to, you know, this idea. For example, what if a kid, for example, sprains their ankle and you know the coach is going, suck it up, push through, should they, shouldn’t they? And I mean, it’s hypothetical, I don’t know. But when we can trust a kid to kind of like, what do you think we should do?

How are you feeling? What we’re doing is we’re starting to help them develop their decision making. Right? Which of course requires us to let go of some things. Like what if that was the star athlete? And what if we don’t win? Or, you know, all of those, like it’s very complicated kind of kind of scenario. But the thing that I wanted to bring up today is about the natural laws and how that I think is such a valuable conversation to bring in to the high school athletic scene.

One of the reasons is because some of the best elite athletes use those kinds of strategies to be able to perform at their best. When I started training for my marathon, one of our clients who studied mindfulness and stuff in the past gave me a recommendation of a book called Thinking Body Dancing, Mind Dow Sports for Extraordinary Performance.

And so it was all based on the Dow. And the Dow has all of these law based principles and a natural law based principles in it. And I found it so beneficial as a recreational athlete to, to read, to remember things like when I have a hard day, it’s just that I’m having a hard day. It doesn’t mean that my entire training is going down the tubes just because I had a hard day, or in the total contrast of that, just because I had a great day, doesn’t mean that I’m great all the time.

It means I’m having a great day. You know, one of my main goals in running my marathon was to be kind to myself, because I can have a tendency to be hard on myself, and I thought that would be a really great goal. And so I used tons of these ideas from the laws sparked by reading this book about Daoist sport to help me to meet my goal.

And so I was thinking about how, you know, I don’t I don’t know about for you. I want to hear about your experience. But my experience as a high school athlete, there was it was very one sided conversation from my coaches, my teachers, and the idea was basically work harder. And that’s still not enough. And that’s it. You stink and you get yelled at, you know?

And I think you kind of had a similar experience with, with coaching when you were in high school. Was it different? No, I would say that was pretty similar. You know, as you’re talking and I’m listening, something that’s I’m remembering was when in my back in my strength and conditioning training days when I worked with athletes more so and I, you know, I worked with some semi semiprofessional athletes and soccer and cycling, some Cat one cycling professionals.

But I also had the opportunity to work with youth soccer, and I was brought on to a soccer team as a strength and conditioning coach. And so these kids were these kids were like probably 12 to around 12 years old, no, 12 to 14, something like that, like middle school age. And so this was in a in Colorado at the time, and it was in a league where I would say for that age of kid, they were considered a lead athletes for that age.

Right? It was like the the top division of soccer players. And so they asked the coaches asked me to come in and do some strengthening with them. And I thought it was really funny though. I put together a whole strength conditioning plan. And then they said, okay, Brian, so you have five minutes during literally you have five minutes to get them stretched and I’m like five minutes.

What are we going to do in five minutes? It’s like, that’s all they all they are going to allow because they have to do skills practice. And you know, you know, passing and all this stuff. They had to do teaching plays like all those things. And it occurred to me that and I think in youth athletics high that includes high school and club.

The the season is often compressed so much that it feels like there’s just not a lot of time. And I think that’s why there’s a tendency from coaches to just push all the time, because there’s not time to create really what we call periodization cycles of training that include both stress and rest stress and rest, stress and rest.

We know that to improve athletic performance, to improve physiologic performance, you need both of those things, right? You need to be able to stress the system, but also rest the system. And in high school sports, the seasons feel so tight. And and it seems like every game is important to move on to whatever the championship rounds are and whatever league that you’re playing in, or whether sport you’re playing in, that there’s just not a lot of time allowed for that Rest component, or people are expected to rest on their own.

But when you’re in high school or even college, like you’re studying outside of those risk periods or outside of the practice periods, which are sometimes two hours a day and maybe a couple hours on weekends. So you’re talking like six days a week. You’re practicing. And outside of that you’ve got studies, and also you’ve got hopefully hanging out with your friends a little bit, doing something like that too.

So there’s not a lot of time built in for really good rest. Right? Right. Really planned rest. And I think when you get into more professional level sports, right, it becomes a long game and it doesn’t feel so compressed anymore because you’re training 12 months out of the year, and then you’re peaking for certain events that happen at certain times of the year, which is different than kind of a high school cycle.

But I do wish we treated high school sports like that in middle school sports like that, because we’re talking about the life span of an athlete here. I mean, in my mind, we don’t treat it like that and a lot of kids blow themselves out. I mean, I’ve watched kids get injured really badly in high school. You got injured really badly in high school senior year, didn’t you?

Yeah. Well, so I totally understand what you’re saying from from a long view. I think part of this, too, is what? How wide is the aperture that we’re looking through from what we’re talking about? Because from, from a coaches from a coaches aperture, they’re like, I got this kid season for this season. And so I needed I we need to win this season.

And so there’s a lot of pressure put on a kid. Unless, you know I had a couple of coaches that would develop in football, would develop younger athletes and really plan for them like their junior and senior year to like they’re going to be a standout player their junior, senior year. We need to let them develop like eighth, ninth, 10th grade.

That was different and it was a little bit different, but it was but it tended to be with certain athletes, not all athletes. Yeah. And for whatever reasons that happened to be so. But when that did occur, you did see athletic performance rise for those individuals because they were kind of nurtured, you know, cultivated up through that, up, up through the ranks in a certain way to peak their performance at a certain time.

Right, right. But, you know, not all like I think about the high school basketball team that our kids played on. There wasn’t like a lot of kids on the team to begin with. So there wasn’t a very deep bench. And so when young kid came on the team, they were immediately kind of just thrown in because that’s what they needed to do.

So it wasn’t time to develop. They were just thrown into the game day and every game pressure was a lot of like, you got to win it, you got to win it. You got to win it. You got to win it. Yeah. And then there wasn’t rest days because even the one day off they would get a week.

There would be non non mandatory practice that if you didn’t go to you were going to get crap from the coaches. Yeah. So so they were every single day. And then what happened multiple times because we saw kids go through these. The basketball program for like 1234, five, six like seven years between our three kids. Kids will get sick and finals.

It happened a whole bunch because nobody got enough rest to take care of themselves. So again, I think it’s from the lens you’re looking through. So I can, I can understand. I’m not saying I agree with that. No, I, I can understand from a coaching lens the pressure for performance is in a very tight window. Right. And there are some more enlightened coaches that can widen their aperture and look at the development of a of an athlete over a course of many years.

But then again, it’s a little different because you’re dealing with school seasons and those kinds of things. So then where do they go in the summer? They play club sports. It might not be with that coach. I think in graduate level athletics, let’s let’s say so after you’re talking about school level and you’re talking about where you are a recreational level.

But I would call it like a graduate level. You know, you’re not beholden to a school schedule anymore or even semiprofessional athletes. There’s a lot you can widen the aperture of the lens to create training cycles that match the natural laws, especially the what? The natural law rhythm more sustainably than that, right? Logarithm states that everything goes in cycles, and you can just look at the cycles of the season as a model.

For that you have summer, fall, winter, spring. It always goes in that cycle. That’s the same direction it goes all of the time. So that’s the same kind of training idea for athletics, right? In the spring you’re kind of ramping up. You’re starting to kind of build some tolerance or building some basic level fitness. In the summer. You’re working it harder.

You’re working on growth phases, you’re working to peak for late summer where you’re going to compete, and then you have after that you have a recovery cycle, and then you have kind of a resetting cycle in the winter. And those cycles don’t have to last a whole year either. They can last a short amount of times, but it’s always that cycle that if you follow that cycle of training conditioning, then your performance is always going to continually improve the same way that nature always continuously improves every year after itself, after itself.

Right? So that was part of the conversation I was having with these students, was going in and asking the coaching team what their goals are, because we shouldn’t assume that. And if we’re going to go in and do somatic work or do a talk with the kids about the laws or any of that stuff, we really need to understand what the coaches are trying to accomplish.

And to your point about the law of rhythm, like where are they in the cycle that they want us to come in? And is that the most appropriate time to help them get their goals met? And and having a really good conversation about that with the with the coaching team before you go in and do it. I mean is is somatic going to somatic.

We’re going to make it better anytime you go in. Yeah I think so because you’ll help the kids to learn how to regulate their nervous systems and to to calm and center. And that always, I think is a really good idea for performance and rest, by the way, too. So when you’re doing somatic practices, you’re actually have a purposeful, intentional rest state that you’re working into.

And there’s some research. This goes all the way back to Herbert Benson’s research with the relaxation response back in the 70s is that when you meditate, you have profound physiological changes of metabolic quieting down to the system. Right. Blood pressure lowers, you activate the immune response. So actually and you some people have compared it to sleep in some ways and say, you know, is can you can you if you meditate a lot, you don’t have to sleep as much.

That debate is still kind of running. But we do know that you can amplify your recovery by doing somatic practices and meditative practices more so than if you don’t, for sure. And we know that if you do those kinds of somatic practices, they actually support better sleep, which helps you recover better as well, because we all know, you know, youth athletics like kids in their teenage years, they don’t really sleep.

The sleep quality isn’t always great, right? And they’re staying up late and getting up early, eating weird. Right? So they’re not even getting really good sleep. So we know that somatic practices as a way to really focus in rest and physiological recovery in a very focused way that can be built into practice sessions. It certainly can be. And again, going back to talk to the coaches about their goals, because when you get a coach who is in alignment with how you’re thinking about it and they need the schools, the tools to be able to help the athletes like that is such a great combo.

It’s so good. Also want to let people know who are going to go into those places that emotions can come up for kids, especially once we create the safe space to be able to rest and center, emotions can come up. This is really, you know, as I think back to my, our kids experience with sports, like highly emotionally charged, there were so many emotions.

I think the most emotions that came out from blessing our kids came out around sports stuff in high school. And as a person who is a part of that team, that could happen. So just making sure that you’re either really confident, capable of being able to handle those kinds of conversations with the kids or you know who to refer them to when those things happen, because you can become a valuable part of the team, but also know know your role and know your right referral systems.

So I think it’s a fantastic match. I also think that, as with most things, there’s a due diligence to be done about making sure that intentions and goals are in alignment and that everybody’s on the same page about where you’re going and what you want to accomplish. And, you know, when you go into the high school environment, when remembering those extra things and doing your due diligence to take your time and do that.

And it’s my view, even if the coaches aren’t thinking along these lines, that, you know, one of the things I would love to see that we do with high school athletes is to help to set them up to become and middle school, help them, set them up to become people who want to continue to take a care of their bodies, you know?

And how can we help them to do that? I think knowing the natural law is, like you were saying, especially with the law of rhythm, can really help with that because it it gets us in alignment with the things we already know to be true, that so often we push against not necessarily to our benefit in sports, but to really align with nature and help kids to develop a lifelong appreciation for being healthy and active individuals.

I think we have a unique opportunity to be able to do those things with those in that time frame for for a kid. So yeah, so thanks for having this conversation because I just thought it was, you know, like I said, one of the students that you really should talk about this on the podcast, if you do anything with sports, I highly recommend the thinking mind dancing body Dow Sports book is really it’s really great, and it puts a lot of the stuff that we teach here at the Academy, kind of in alignment with something we do not talk about very often, which is a light sports.

Yeah. And you know, you can there’s also some tethers to what we’re talking about also of course in the For Dummies book, in the Health manifestation part of the book, as we talk about belief systems and how they affect physiology, autonomic nervous system, like a lot of those things that when we’re trying to manifest really optimal health, optimal wellness, optimal performance, it really does start at the body and the level of physiology.

So there’s a whole part in the manifestation for dummies book about that as well. Yeah. Which you can share with your kids and your coaches and all that stuff. So share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Maybe it’s a coach or a teenager or, you know, another parent or something like that. And we’ll see you next week.

Bye bye.