Landon Strength & Conditioning

Intent is missing from coaching. It's not necessarily your fault. It's just not clear or emphasized enough. Coaches love to talk about effort and work ethic. We love to see that. It's easy to fall in love with effort because we have the illusion if you just do more, good things will happen. - If you just run more you'll get faster. - If you just lift more you'll get stronger. - If you just jump more you'll jump higher. If you can do all 3 then obviously you'll be a better athlete and that'll translate to more scoring and wins right? The missing element in that is intent. You can do 100 reps of an exercise and get 0 benefit from it. In fact you might get worse. On the flip side: you can do one lunge for 30 seconds, one single rep of a pushup for 30s and it might be the hardest thing you've done in a week. The difference is intent. It is mentally and physically taxing to hold a lunge in a perfect position while trying to actively drive yourself closer into the ground. Meaning that front leg glute and hamstring are driving down and back and the back leg hip flexor and glute are pushing as hard as possible forward. There's no net movement going on. This is still an isometric. But the difference between this vs. What you see at any given gym or practice it's like another world. Intent is clear specific instruction, executed exactly, with full effort and intensity. It translates to literally every exercise, drill, and workout. Think of the most common problem you see with beginner sprinters. There's no intent. They can hardly hold themselves up. They let their feet cast out in front of them lazily, their actual feet are weak and mushy, their foot doesn't strike the ground, they let it fall to it passively. This is slow and trash. There's no intent. It's just going through the motions with no lights on at home. Contrast that with the best sprinter you've ever seen. It's like every move they make is done by design with violence. When their foot hits the ground it is an explosion of force. They don't let their foot fall to the ground, that'd waste time. They drive it down into the ground and cycle it back up as fast as possible. It doesn't even look like the same sport. Every detail matters because every detail is an opportunity for improvement. They're fanatical about owning the positions of sprinting. There's a right and a wrong way to move and the wrong way costs time and championships. It's not acceptable. That's intent. The key is that intent has to be taught. You have to be clear on what your expectations and standards are. You also have to be so good at teaching and breaking them down that everyone can achieve that level. This can't be something only for the genetic freaks. When your worst athlete can execute even the warmup with intent that's when you see the culture change in a program. It's not even that the old way wasn't good enough. It's that it isn't even acceptable anymore.