Back in 2011, a young Parisi Coach taught his very first Parisi Sports Performance session in change of direction…
… It was me, Casey Lee, now the Director of Coaching Education for Parisi Training Systems.
It was a blast. It is one of the things in this industry and during my time as a Coach that I will always remember.
We did a bunch of awesome things…
- Lateral movements focusing on how our foot contacted the ground.
- Hip specific rotations – making sure athletes didn’t over rotate their cuts
- Deceleration out of linear cuts and jumping
- Low amplitude plyometrics to reinforce ground contact time
Good times, good times.
Nostalgia aside, if you look at the list above, there is an equal list of athletic skills jammed in to one session…
- Pre-scripted cutting
- Reactive agility targeted trunk and hip rotation
- Deceleration
- Plyometric-specific
And that was the issue Parisi Training Systems wanted to solve when we sat down as a team in 2019.
You see, it’s not so much that you can’t coach all of those skills in a single training session, rather how can we optimize a learning environment for an athlete.
In sports performance there is always going to be overlap between skills. That’s the nature of sport. But when it comes to optimizing learning environments, we feel it is best to sub-genre and really focus on unique skills.
So, let’s take a deep dive into the skill of Change of Direction, or simply put, COD.
COD, in Parisi-Land is any scripted movement that an athlete is going to go through. It’s the baseline teaching platform we use to teach our baseline anchor drill, the speed skater.
Speed skaters help us teach athletes how to understand their center of gravity management, the ultimate test of COD.
We start athletes off stationary – literally, not moving their feet – and take their arms out of the equation, like this…
We then progress to including their arms…
And as an athlete masters their ability to control their center of gravity, we progress them to this skater with a foot exchange…again, starting with arms behind the back and then progressing to adding back in the arms.
As the athletes start to gain control of single exchanges, we progress further in to multiple exchanges…
Once an athlete gets to this point, we build them up in to transitioning in and out of movement. Our go-tos are the following…
Once those get ironed out, we unlock the athlete and get them moving in a variety of planes, out of a variety of movements, for a variety of distances.
The key here is that everything is pre-scripted. This script allows the athlete to work in a very controlled environment as they start to display this skill.
Coaches will often ask why we bother working movement skills out of pre-scripted environments when sports is often played in a reactive manor.
Well, the answer is two fold.
- From a motor learning level, with young athletes learning a new skills, the scripted/controlled environment allows them to practice safely and then progress to reactive.
- Sports still have a scripted element. Drawn up plays out of time outs, movement sets on offense, zone defenses, etc. These are all examples of largely scripted movements in a very reactive athletic environment.
I can’t prove this, but there is something to be said about telling an athlete how to perform something, have them process it internally, and then regurgitate it back in their performance. Kind of like a Coach calling a play and the athlete having to remember it in their sport.
What’s next?
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What Comes First, Strength or Speed?