I’m pretty sure that most big time collegiate and professional sports teams have it down to a science, but I often wonder what things I’d achieved if I understood the process of change and motivation a little more when I was younger.

I still remember hating those drills in football running every 10 yards at the end of practice, and how much torture it was. I think mostly because I wasn’t in very good shape. I remember as a sprinter in track, hating do to anything longer than a 200 meter run, and those days of doing 400 meter drills were the worst!

As I relate this back to what we’ve learned in the process of this film, and some of my experience in training others, I’ve come to believe that most of us hate doing the things we are bad at. It’s uncomfortable! It doesn’t feel good at all. And so I wonder if when coaches and teachers decide to make a whole football team (or whatever you want to relate this to) run for 30 minutes, back and forth…if we’re missing a big piece of the puzzle in trying to find each individual’s potential.

It’s much like putting everyone on a treadmill and starting them off on the same speed. This doesn’t work from my experience, because the tolerance we all have for discomfort is different in the beginning, and some people really just give up if it’s too hard from the start. Some choose a speed far slower than they could be running at, to get by. Some might call this natural selection, but we ARE trying to figure out how to help even the “worst case” scenarios in finding out what they are capable of doing.

While this may be totally outside of what we can call practical, the effort to restructure our thinking in training young athletes (or students) to reach their potential might be far more exciting if we structured our conditioning (and skill) training in terms of “current levels” and set more specific goals and incorporated more measurements and motivators for each individual. If we grouped those who couldn’t run a mile in 10 minutes together, and trained them every day to run it faster, through different drills, intervals etc. would they progress more systematically than randomly? What if kids could actually SEE the progress that were making every week? Running back and forth for 20 or 30 minutes is hardly gratifying.

I remember in High School we followed a plan called “Bigger Faster Stronger” (not to be confused with the documentary about steriods), and this plan was on the right path, because it had a very big journal component. We tracked all of our weight training pretty carefully. What I don’t recall is a measure of our consistency in training, however…and there wasn’t a piece on cardio-vascular conditioning.

Being that it’s 20 years later, I’d suspect that things have moved forward and the benefits of tracking each young person’s progress has made some leaps and bounds.

I relate this to watching our documentary subjects who are very consistent, and very gradual in their training process. After only a few weeks of consistent training, changing little things each week, their progress adds up tremendously. Those who do things inconsistently and without any method, end up at nearly the same place after a year’s time.

Any experienced trainer would think these ideas are pretty basic of course, but I still find myself curious how many opportunities there are for us to find our untapped potential in nearly every area of our lives, if we adjust the way we are “training” for it. Perhaps we’ll save that for the next film!