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| This guy is better suited for volleyball, basketball, or maybe fruit picking, than weightlifting! |
What talent identification criteria are important for you when working with a new lifter?
This is a really interesting discussion that I ran across recently. Posted below are some responses from some top American weightlifting coaches from past several decades. I would propose that identifying throwing talent would follow a similar paradigm.
I remember about 24 or so years ago Angel Spassov, who was billed as a Bulgarian weightlifting coach and sponsored by the NSCA, toured the United States giving seminars in several major cities. I attended his lecture in Phoenix. One memory that stuck with me over the years was when he was asked about "sport psychology" in Bulgaria. At the time this was kind of an emerging field here in the U.S. In fact I was just completing a master's program in exercise science at Northern Arizona University at the time we had just done a unit on "sport psychology". The main emphasis was on motivating athletes and facilitating the mind set for high performance. Well, I remember that Mr. Spassov did not understand what was being asked. I'm sure the language barrier was part of it, although he spoke very good english. It took a few attempts at questioning him to get to the crux of the issue. He said that in Bulgaria (at least at that time) that there was no such thing as "sports psychology". Athletes were motivated by opportunities for a better lifestyle and those who did not perform were sent home and replaced. Not much wisdom there for those of us in a free market economy where the opportunities are greater and where there are many more lucrative activities.
That is the gist of the responses below. All the inate talent in the world is worthless without the right competitive attitude and you can't really maufacture that. Sometimes lack of inate talent can be compensated for (to a degree) with a high level of competitiveness, determination, and hard, smart work. Of course there are limits to what can be accomplished without sufficient genetic potential, but who knows until we try. It is apparent that those who have dealt with it over the years prefer to work with those who really want to do it and don't waste much time trying to "sell" the sport to those who may seem to have the physical attributes but are mental midgets or emotional basketcases. Spoiled rich kids who have never had to fight for anything are generally a waste of time for anything beyond computer games.
In our last post we brought your attention to "
Bones of Iron" by Matt Foreman. In the 4th chapter he also tackles this issue and is pretty much in line with the coaches below.
Gene Baker:
I have never had a talent identification day where athletes came to me to be tested to see if they are suited to be weightlifters.
I use the following criteria when working with athletes, primarily high school football and track athletes to screen them prior to teaching the Olympic lifts. After some observation and training time, I have suggested that weightlifting could be a good sport for them. Most of the time this is a smaller kid who may play some high school football, but at 5'2" and 110 pounds won't have a big time future in football. Or it may be one of my female throwers who is looking to do something after high school. Back when I was coaching weightlifting full time I was like Brian, and coached everyone that walked in the door.
1. General Physical Traits
Height, weight
Body proportions - Length of arms, legs, and back (helps in teaching technique that is most comfortable and powerful for the lifter)
Size of hands - Small hands may limit the lifters ability to hold heavy weights.
Flexibility - Look for good flexibility in ankles and shoulders
2. Athletic Ability
Knowing the new lifter's athletic background helps you determine if he/she is in shape, a good learner, and a good competitor. Usually if the new lifter is a star athlete, then teaching the lifts will be easy. If the new lifter has minimal athletic background or ability, then teaching the lifts can be difficult.
3. Heart
There are a lot of diagnostic tests used to evaluate athletic ability. You can measure speed, power, flexibility, etc. These tests don't tell you about the size of the heart of the competitor. The ability to compete and fight heavy weights is key trait for a lifter and must be considered. One thing I've done with new weightlifters and high school football players was to have a barbell loaded to 200+ pounds sitting in the weight room when the new lifters come in for their first workout. I watch for the people who walk up to the bar and try to lift it. This has been a good indicator in identifying who has the internal fire to lift big weights. Those who stand back in awe usually don't have the aggressive nature to attack heavy weights.
Brian Derwin:
Let me recall the first and LAST time I did talent identification. We did presentations at several middle schools and ran the kids through a battery of five or so tests. The top seven or so guys measured pretty talented and had NO interest in weightlifting.
What a complete waste of time. First and last time for me. I now coach any warm body that wanders in.
The pecking order of things I look for:
- A desire to do weightlifting as a sport (I have no interest in the strength and condition aspect for other sports)
- The discipline to prepare and an understanding of delayed gratification
- A modicum of flexibility
Pretty simple list, not so easy to find.
Harvey Newton:
As mentioned by my colleagues here, we all usually take whoever walks in the door. That's not to say we don't have an eye on certain characteristics, but who ever turns down a kid that says he/she wants to be a lifter?
A few years back, when no USA reps took part in a junior world championships (yes, at one time, we had the policy of 'no qualifying total, no travel'), Roger Nielsen and I traveled to the event. I officiated and both of us spent plenty of time talking with our international contacts. At one point, the Polish team doctor explained some of their talent ID criteria, which included looking at thumb length (key to a good hook grip) and blood testosterone (the higher, the better).
I asked the doctor what happens in the case of a young man wanting to learn weightlifting whose testosterone happened to be low? "Figure skating" was the doctor's response!
Maybe in a state-controlled system, but here we take whoever walks in the door. Vertical jump can certainly predict explosiveness. Flexibility, particularly of the ankles, hips, knees, elbows, shoulders, and wrists is crucial to early success.
Joe Hanson, well-known coach out of Jacksonville, FL, reminds me of an old adage I shared with him a few years back: "Nurture the oddballs." What I meant by that is, weightlifting draws out some non-mainstream characters, many very strong individualists. This is a challenge, especially for a dictatorial type of coach. But from this pool of "oddballs" weightlifting is likely to get its best candidates, at least in my opinion.
Roger Nielsen:
I simply look at the common traits of overhead squat for flexibility, pull-ups for upper body strength, and squatting for lower body flexibility and strength.
Bob Takano:
Motor learning ability, history of athletic participation, and strength potential in that order.
Daniel Coyle recently wrote the following on his blog (talentcode. com). Pertinent to the recent discussion.
So I recently returned from a London sports-science conference where the discussion revolved around the mystery of talent identification. All over the world, in everything from academics to sports to music, millions of dollars and thousands of hours are being spent on singling out high-potential performers early on. And the plain truth is, most of these talent-ID programs are little better than rolling dice.
Take the NFL, for instance, which represents the zenith of talent-identificati on science. At the pre-draft NFL combine, teams exhaustively test every physical and mental capacity known to science: strength, agility, explosiveness, intelligence. They look at miles of game film. They analyze every piece of available data. And each year, NFL teams manage get it absolutely wrong. In fact, out of the 40 top-rated combine performers over the past four years, only half are still in the league.
A lot of smart people have been thinking about this, and what they've decided is this: the problem not that the measures are wrong. The problem is that measuring performance the wrong way to approach the question.
According to much of this new work, what matters is not current performance, but rather growth potential – what you might call the G-Factor — the complex, multi-faceted qualities that help someone learn and keep on learning, to work past inevitable plateaus; to adapt and be resourceful and keep improving.
Thing is, G-Factor can't be measured with a stopwatch or a tape measure. It's more subtle and complex. Which means that instead of looking at performance, you look for signs, subtle indicators — what a poker player might call tells. In other words, to locate the G-Factor you have to close your eyes, ignore the dazzle of current performance and instead try to detect the presence of a few key characteristics. Sort of like Moneyball, with character traits.
So what are the tells for the G-Factor? Here are two:
One is early ownership. As Marjie Elferink-Gemser' s work shows, one pattern of successful athletes happens when they're 13 or so, when they develop a sense of ownership of their training. For the ones who succeed, this age is when they decide that it's not enough to simply be an obedient cog in the development machine — they begin to go farther, reaching beyond the program, deciding for themselves what their workouts will be, augmenting and customizing and addressing their weaknesses on their own.
Another tell is grit. This quality, investigated by the pioneering work of Angela Duckworth, refers to that signature combination of stubbornness, resourcefulness, creativity and adaptability that helps someone make the tough climb toward a longterm goal. Duckworth has come up with a simple questionnaire that measures the responder's grit. It has only 17 questions, and the respondent self-assesses their ability to stick with a project, see a goal to the end, etc.
Duckworth gave her grit test to 1,200 first-year West Point cadets before they began a brutal summer training course called the "Beast Barracks." It turned out that this test (which takes only a few minutes to complete) was eerily accurate at predicting whether or not a cadet succeeded, exceeding the predictions of West Point's exhaustive battery of NFL-combine- esque measures, which included tests of IQ, psychological profile, GPA, and physical fitness. Duckworth's grit test has been applied to other settings – academic ones, including KIPP schools — with similar levels of success. (Here's a good story about grit.)
From Harvey Newton:
....The question resulted from discussion with Kyle Pierce, who told me that his recent experience with the Columbian team training at LSU-S caused him to reconsider the mainstream talent ID mantra of vertical jump, etc. In fact, he mentioned current US coach at the OTC, Olympic Champion Zygmunt Smalcerz, responded to Kyle's inquiry on this topic by suggesting the bench press (!) as a key to talent identification.
Before you move to another page, consider what Zyggie was really saying. He evidently prefers to watch the amount of struggle a novice lifter will put into a repetition bench press when instructed to continue to lift. If the kid works hard, perhaps distorting his/her positions, but struggles (not giving up) to make another rep, this is the kind of kid that Zyggie wants for weightlifting. He's looking for psychological fight (heart, see Gene Baker below), not necessarily anything to do with upper body strength.
Quote from Geno Auriemma- coach of the Uconn Womens Basketball team:
"I'm still trying to figure out what motivates kids beside anger," Auriemma said. "I am still working on it, still trying to figure it out.
You try to tap into people's competitive spirit. And the top thing you try to find when you recruit kids for UConn is how competitive they are. If they are, they will respond to anything. All you need to do is push them in the proper direction because they want to win, play well and they take pride in what they do.
