StrengthCoach: Three Years Working in European Football...What I Will Take with Me. Part I - Sport Specific Observations

Ed Lippie  http://bit.ly/StrengthCoachLippie

On the evening of May 30, 2015 I sat in Terminal E of Boston's Logan Airport waiting to board a flight to Rome, Italy, wondering if I had made a monumental mistake in taking the position of Head Performance Coach for AS Roma in Italy's Serie A.

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.....Join StrengthCoach.com to read the full article....