Debrief: James Marshall

James Marshall of GAIN and Excelsior Athletic Club joins to talk how he came to coach three sports, knowledge sharing and the athletic insights of Nassim Taleb.

Check out his website: https://excelsiorgroup.co.uk/

Link to James’ substack newsletter.

Debrief: James Marshall Chris DeSantis

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hello, and welcome to the swim brief. I am Chris DeSantis, and it is my pleasure to be joined today on the debrief, where we interview coaches, knowledgeable figures, sports scientists, sometimes parents, all kinds of people to learn something and improve our own capabilities. I'm joined by James Marshall. He is, well, where I met him is as coaching network coordinator for Gain Swim, the Gambetta Athletic Improvement Network. But he's also director and head coach of Excelsior Athletic Development Club. Am I leaving anything out in your bio?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

That's that's good. Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Yeah. I'm based in uh Willand in Devon in the UK. So that might be explain my funny accent to your listeners.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Where is Devon in the UK?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Dev Devon is in the southwest corner, the bit that sticks out into the sea. Whereas I'm sort of right in the middle of that bit that sticks out into the sea on the bottom. Uh sorry, bottom left-hand corner. Bottom left-hand corner. Yes, the southwest, yeah. It's coastal. Yeah. Yeah, we're like 12 miles from the coast, yeah. Awesome. Must be beautiful. It's a beautiful part of the uh the country I live in. Very lucky.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Yeah. Um we've had a few we've had a few uh UK guests on here before, and we have a lot of uh, you know, I do a fair amount of work in Europe, so uh we even have a fair amount of uh English as a second language guests on here, and um they do they do wonderful, but we we we welcome all accents on the swim brief podcast. We're ready for it. I want to get right into it today and explain a little bit more in depth who you are before we get into some of what you know. Let's start here because as I said in the intro, I met you at Gain, but you've been coaching for a long time before you got involved. Tell the audience like a little bit like your own background in sports, perhaps as an athlete, how you got into coaching and how that sort of the five-minute story of how that got you to where you are today.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Okay, so uh serendipity has played a big part in my life. So I'm not gonna say it's a master plan, it's a bit of luck and making the most of opportunities when I came my way. So it sounds all organized. That's not how it's happened in reality. I started out working really in health and fitness clubs. Years ago, there weren't such a thing as strength and conditioning coaches, believe it or not, and there wasn't even something called the internet, so that's how old I am. And then it got to a stage where I really enjoyed helping people get fit, I enjoyed in the environment, and then it became very commercialised and bought out. And by randomness, I got a flyer through which said uh advertised a degree in uh master's degree in sports coaching at Brunel University in uh the UK. So I thought I'll apply for that. Didn't have an undergraduate degree, but I got in on a course, did two years of that, and that's made me think, right, I want to leave health clubs. Because that's when I set up my own business. That was when I was lived in London. Wait a second.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

You got you got into a master's program with no bachelor's degree? Like you undersold that part of the story. How did that happen?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Well, without turning it into a big humble brag, you don't just having a degree doesn't mean meet you're cle mean you're clever, and not having a degree doesn't mean you're not clever. And so when I got onto the course and my first two assignments were grade A's, the director of the course, Dr. Miser Jervis, said to me, We've had a faculty meeting and we're reassessing how we screen people coming onto this uh degree on the master's code because we realise that we're missing out people like you who've got good life experience and can offer something.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Okay, go keep keep going with your story.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Uh where was I? Yeah, and so then uh at the time I I moved to London to do karate. I was doing something called Shotokan karate, and uh I was on the England squad for three years, competed in the World Championships, and then retired from that in 2004, met my wife, decided to set up my own business, finished my master's degree and do the world championships all in the same year, which was really stressful, so I'd burnt out. Anyway, then I moved out into the countryside, and from there I got my strength and given qualifications, and I worked with as an SC coach as a support staff for England rugby, Exeter University, Bath University, some professional rugby clubs, and then over the next 10 years over some other governing board bodies like British fencing, England volleyball, England golf. So I was a consultant, and two things were happening then alongside just at early stages. I could see from the textbooks from my SNC background that this is what I was supposed to be doing. But my eyes on the ground, that's a oxymoron, my feet on the ground and my eyes in the game were telling me this textbook's telling me this, but these athletes can't do this. I need to find something else. What they're saying in the textbook isn't working. It doesn't matter what the periodization says of the foot content, they can't do it. Why is this? Then I met a guy called Kelvin Giles on a course in the UK, uh, and he opened my eyes up, said, You're not the only one. These are the things we really should be looking at. Uh, and then I'd wanted to, I'd been reading Vern Gampetta's blog for a couple of years and thought, well, this makes sense. So I funded to go over to the first game, and game was like uh five and a half or five days of intense learning from 0, 6 30 in the morning till nine o'clock at night. Have you have you ever been to big game where the No, I want to go to Big Game.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

I gotta go to big game.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

It was like this, whoomph.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Uh and that and it was loads, but it was really good. World-class practitioners, and what was good about it was interdisciplinary. So we had physiotherapists, physical therapists for you over there, athletic trainers, physical education people, SC coaches, track and field coaches, all sharing ideas. And what's good about that is you see an athlete, it's like the um blind men trying to describe an elephant, you know, when they touch his trunk or his tail or his ears, and they all come up with different animals. But here we're all looking at the elephant from different angles and coming up with common solutions. So what it made was it that really enhanced my learning and gave me a whole different level of tools. So my experience told me something was wrong, and then game helped gave me the tool to do something to correct it. So I then went to about another nine games in total, and over the and and it became a real learning community, whereas I'd go, I'd learn from game, the game I went to, I'd go and apply my knowledge. And again, this was really before the internet kicked off. Then we come back, and then all the other coaches would have applied it in a slightly different way. So then we would apply that knowledge back and we'd all be learning. So it's all these little hot houses of learning going all around and experiences, and they'd see something from different tangents, so the medical people would see it from this way, physical educators from this way, and then suddenly come back. And so the knowledge was, I don't know, exponential. How it was gonna, I can't describe how good it was, transformed me as a club. It also made me highly un unemployable because I kept seeing how wrong things were. How wrong things were, and as you go, what this this isn't gonna work, or you know, all so much. And that's when I decided to set up my own club. Not because I'm an egotistical, monomaical like a person trying to set it up, but I just thought I just want to do things the best way I can. And I was stuck in these constraints of having to do it with the NGB way. And the NGB way is trying to get as many people into a performance area as possible to gain more funding, no matter what happens underneath. And I my heart has always been with the underdog. I was a slow fat kid at school, I was a year-up academically, so I was always the smallest, and so I never got into anything. It's just I've had to fight my way up to get um selected. And I thought, how can I? But I had a couple of good people in my corner who recognized something and helped me, and I always wanted to be that person for the next generation. So that's how I set my own club.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

I think you point to something that is something that attracted me to gain as well. You know, in in my field, I operate more, you know, from the vantage point of psychology. And I've talked about this many times on the podcast. So I was really privileged to be the first athletic coach to get an advanced degree in positive psychology. And I actually got a degree that says that I have an degree in applied positive psychology. And the applied part of it was total BS. They did not teach me one iota of anything in terms of application. And I I even sort of criticized them at the time. They were like, well, you go out and figure it out. And in some ways, now I'm grateful for that because I ran into the same thing. These interventions that they were coming up with, the the big thinkers, the researchers, the people that were, you know, doing these controlled experiments, many of them just fell flat on their face when you took them out into an environment, like a dynamic environment with real people, or you know, you went beyond the time boundary, right? Like a lot of this, like science research, you know, I know specifically in the field of like strength and conditioning and stuff. So many of these like science-based studies, they go and they take people who are not athletes, right, completely untrained, and they do an intervention with them for maybe like three, four, if you're lucky, six weeks or twelve weeks, and then they and then they fuck off. That's my one square for the podcast, right? And then they don't follow anything like, and so is the knowledge useful? Yes, but it's not complete. It's nowhere near the complete picture. And I think to me, Gain is one of the organizations that actually understands that. Yes, they are trying to do things in a knowledge-based way, but they're actually trying to solve that. They're they're they're really working on the translation from what looks good on paper, and how can we actually translate it that into a dynamic environment with with real people, real coaches, personalities, you know.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

So two things on that. One of the reasons the academic studies are so short, and they're normally done on 18 to 22-year-old males, sports science or physical education undergraduates. Uh females are uh maybe coming into the research more, but they're deadly because the menstrual cycle destroys all the research because it's too is another variable they want to eliminate. Uh and so they they only have the students for an academic term. So they have to get everything done because they can't have them go away for four weeks because they can't measure them. So everything has to be in the constraints of like test them or get them, test them, train them, retest them, and then come up with summaries. So it's all have to be within that term, which is why the thing's so short. So you say, okay, it's short term, and they're untrained subjects as well. And the other thing is like um von Clauschwitz said the first casualty of war is the plan. Well, my the first casualty of a long-term athlete development model is the model itself, as soon as it comes in contact with a parent. Because the parent has no idea what an LTAT model is. They're just busy trying to stumble from one short-term thing to another because they're trying to do they've got the best, most of them, 95% have got the best intentions for their child and just want to do the best for little Billy or Johnny or Jemima and say, right, how can I help them? But they're making short-term decisions based on where's their knowledge coming from. They're not researching long-term athlete development. They're listening to what another mum said or where this facility is, or just what's on schools and offer. It's chaotic. It's carnage out there trying to do it. There's so many inputs. And then yet these long-term athlete development models are still being pounced out from national governing body, they're still using them as a as a data point or as a scientific evidence, although it's not evidence, it's just a model. And yet I can tell you I've run my club for 11 years. Every single athlete is different, every single athlete has got a journey, and all the principles are the same. There's no way I can plan more than two to three weeks in advance.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

And I think something else that you're pointing to is, you know, anything that's top-down, right? Anything that comes from the NGB down, they can't. I'm not, this is not even really like a critique of NGBs as much as like this is really an inescapable sort of reason for their existence. They are focused on elite level performance because that is that's how they exist. That is that is existential for them. If they cannot ascribe what they are doing to creating medals in the instance of Great Britain, like the Commonwealth Games, you know, world championships, Olympics, then they don't have a reason to exist. And so like when you're at the when you're at the base of the sport, they're really not thinking about what you're doing. They're only thinking about you the second that you have somebody in your environment that can contribute to their mission. And that's just sort of the way it is.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yeah, and our club is uh I had to retrain because all my trainings and uh although I've got masters in sports coaching, like I said, they strengthened it, didn't apply. So I had to retrain. I got my weightlifting coaching qualifications, my gymnastics, and my athletics. The weightlifting was okay, but I've got a good background from that with coaches I've worked with. Gymnastics, the coaching courses weren't that good, but the mentors I had around me, because they're really big on mentoring and showing me through, they were brilliant. So I really learned a lot from that. That was really good. Athletics was a farce. The athletics coaching, compared to what I'd learned at that game with top track and field coaches from around the world, they're teaching you as if you're a 16-year-old child coming in and doing your first coaching, even though I'm a man. They keep saying, This is what you do with the children and juniors. I said, I'm not, I'm, I'm coaching these people. And there's so much money in the sport, so much money in the sport, and yet they look down at you if you're working, they call it grassroots, which is fine, but it's quite patronizing. Frank Dick, who used to be the director of British Athletics, um, he's a coach educator now, he he once told me on a course in the year 2000, you want your best coaches with your beginners. Uh and yet, in that's inverse the the relationship you normally get. Yeah, so I wouldn't say I'm the best coach, but I'm pretty good and I want to focus on giving these people fundamentals. Um, yeah, like you say, that's ignored. But I don't mind because the work is rewarding. And guess what? By focusing on all these fundamentals, strangely enough, we have people start coming out winning. So the winning is a byproduct of what we're doing, not the raison d'etre of it, but it's not the sole focus. And yet, if you're doing good things, good things happen. And what I found is instead of trying to tell everyone to compete, the natural competitors will start coming out. They will start developing. They'll say, well, when's this competition? When does this come into the competition? The opportunities are there for all, but those who really want to grasp it, start taking it. So I'll give the opportunity to everyone, give the foundations, um, but there's no pressure.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

I mean, we've we've gotten ahead of ourselves, but talk a little bit uh more about Excelsior Athletic Club. Because I was I was looking at it and I was like, for me, I don't think I've ever encountered something like this, right? Where it's a youth athletic club for, as you said, athletics we call track and field in the US, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Gymnastics and weightlifting.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

How did you come up with those three sports and put them together?

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Well, gymnastics is the fundamental of all movement, okay? And it's not competitive gymnastics. Um, a couple of guys, uh, Greg Thompson at Gain and Ed Thomas, Dr. Ed Thomas, they sh they brought me up into some um old school physical educators called Molden and Lacey, who wrote books in the textbooks. And this was all based on someone called uh Rudolf Leban's movement framework. And gymnastics in schools in the UK in the 1960s and 70s were all based on this Rudolph Leban's movement principles. And they call it educational gymnastics. That's what I was really interested in the coaching cues, uh, how to develop the inf uh the myriad, infinite ways of movement available to children. I put it under the gymnastics umbrella because parents know gymnastics. If I start talking about movement frameworks and Rudolph Leban, no parents are going to come in. I'm not interested in competitive gymnastics, that leads down to a dark tunnel. Okay, there's a lot of there's a lot of problems with that. Okay? The children compete, put on displays. I've I stopped coaching gymnastics here about ten months ago because we'd gone to a natural timeline after doing it 10 years. But anyway, but that was the foundation. So that was why I put gymnastics in there. And my children were young as well. They were uh four and seven when I started the club. So there's no gymnastics around for them to coach, to take part in. So I thought sometimes you've just got to build your own pyramid. So I learned how to be that and then I could do that. Back and feels the next step running, skipping, jumping, throwing. These are fundamentals that are just not taught in schools now. Um and then less and less children have uh the ability to do that on their own. So that's fundamental as well. And I felt quite confident after all doing all the game work about teaching speed, uh, and then I learned how to do jumps and hurdles. So long jump we concentrate hurdles and throws. Guy called Nick Garcia, again, really helped me with the rotational throws. In fact, it's funny, I didn't learn any of this on the athletics coaching courses, but Nick Garcia took the time out. He's a shop putt coach and discus coach at Notre Dame High School in California. Anyway, so there's one of our weightlifters last week practicing shop putt, a spin throw with shopper, after school PE. The PE teachers weren't around, so she went out there, she got the shop putt, started practicing. So the PE teacher comes out, sees a 15-year-old girl doing spin technique with a shopper. And you think, here's an opportunity to praise someone. One, we know that girls aren't doing much. Here's a 15-year-old doing something. Two, she's trying something she's not really confident at, but she's having a go. So what do you think the PE teacher's reaction was? Good girl that I won't mention her name. It's really good. Where did you learn that? Is there anything I can do to help you? No? Oh, that's very Eastern European, isn't it? That was a comment. It's just like, oh, then your heart sinks. But anyway, so there then I'll say I was winning because there's a girl who's trying out doing something on her own. And then weightlifting is just a good sport, it's strong. I I've got a background in it now. I compete as a master's weightlifter now, and it adds it adds something to what we're doing at the club. I hope that explains.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Yeah, I think I think when you talk about gymnastics, I mean part of what I've arrived at philosophically is the same thing. People talk to me, people come up and ask me what I think in terms of like, you know, kids and what they should be doing and all that piece of it. I'm I'm with you a hundred percent. Um my daughter is 12, she's on a soccer team. Literally none of the girls on the team know how to run. They do not know how to run. It's like it's a mind-blowing moment for me because I'm like, nobody, I don't remember anybody teaching me how to run, but I guess we did learn how to run. Or, you know, P was was certainly different, and it's it's been a pretty dramatic change, and I think it's pretty much universal, right? It's it's very um, at least in the Western world, pretty, pretty widespread. Um, on the gymnastics end of it, I I've said this to many people as well. I would love for all young athletes to do gymnastics, not competitive gymnastics, but actually learn the the movement of the movements that you learn in gymnastics. And um, one other thing that I'd draw out of your bio and advice that I give people all the time too is like, I think from a psychological perspective, you know, and that's the angle that I come at things from, I think it's incredibly valuable for kids to do some kind of combat sport. So will it be wrestling, martial arts, something like that? Because I notice in in more and more kids sort of this unwillingness, this fear, right? Because they haven't been put perhaps in competitive situations where it's just them, you know, sort of against another person. And, you know, if they lose, like it's a little bit dangerous. I don't mean that it's, you know, that they're gonna get seriously hurt, but I think that you learn a certain confidence in yourself participating in those sports that you can't necessarily recreate in other sports.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, and it has to be confidence building with a good coach as well, not like Flight Club, we just put into a ring with other people cheering and crapping at you. It has to be confidence, you know, building as well. I didn't start karate till I was 21. Uh, I did a bit of judo before that. One of my game colleagues and good friend is a P teacher and wrestling coach in Richmond, Virginia. Yeah, so we we did these wrestling moves for a rugby workshop as well. When I was when my son was growing up, even my daughter, we just wrestle in the sitting room. Yeah, just and that creates that body language. So it doesn't always have to be like a sports club. What's happened to Rough and Tumble with your parents? So we play in the garden, and my wife's going, Oh, take it easy. But the the child wants to wrestle. I'm not sat on his head and punching his head, you know, sat on and just we're just wrestling and they want to push. But then when he came to rugby, he could understand leverage, he can get his body low, even though he's all leggy now because he's grown, but he still understands that. And plus, I'm doing something with my kids. You know, it's just people just don't seem to want to play catch with their kids in the garden, teach them how to ride a bike, or kick a football around with them. They want to outsource all these things. So that's another problem as well. But uh I thought, what's the point of having kids if I'm outsourcing all the good bits?

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Yeah. Let's take a dramatic right turn from what we've been discussing to um to an author that we share a love for. Because uh I don't know how this came up. Maybe I put something about Nassim Talab in uh my first presentation that I was doing to Gain, and you wrote me after.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

I think we put it in an email and I hadn't read about I said I haven't heard from it for ages, and then we left it there for some other reasons. But I hadn't yes, yes, and then you re I agree with it.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

And I'm always so thrilled to find another sports Nassim Talib fan out in the wild, and I've been dying to have somebody come on a podcast to discuss it. And so this section may be of no interest. There's probably like, you know, 50% of my listeners like just you know moving on to a new podcast right now because they're like, I have no idea what Chris is talking about. Stick with us. This is so cool. I promise you, I've been here and there doing kind of a hard sell on the Seam Tala books. Just briefly, how did you get exposed? Like, what was your first uh book that you probably read?

SPEAKER_01 21:08

I think I re I must have read. I've got I must have read, I'm looking at my bookshelf now. Must have read them in order Black Swan, Anti-Fragile, and then Skin in the Game. I think I've read it in those four. Oh, is it? Oh yeah, I haven't read that. I don't think I've read that. So just the three, yeah. So four books. Is that worth reading? Do you think I should start with that if I've read the others?

SPEAKER_00 21:27

So just to catch the audience up so they understand, Nassim Talib came into popular knowledge. I think actually, where I encountered him first was he was in a Malcolm Gladwell book. I believe he was in Outliers, very popular Malcolm Gladwell book. And Malcolm was writing about him from the perspective of he was a guy that made a ton of money in the 2008 financial crisis, 2007, 2008, 2009 financial crisis. And because he had built a whole model basically. That operated differently from other f I'm yaddy yaddying over a lot of stuff so people can get caught up, but you know, operated differently in terms of he was content to lose steady streams of money over long periods of time and basically have optionality that when things went really, really bad, he stood to sort of make a windfall around that. And as a result, uh Black Swan, his his next book really blew up because people wanted to know, right? They were like, how did he philosophically arrive at this point? And Black Swan was a lot about um the unpredictability, right? That that you can build all sorts of models and and to you know predict what's gonna happen. And then these completely unpredictable, gigantic events can come and just, you know, take basically take the whole game table and just dump all the pieces on the ground. And, you know, how can you build a philosophy around saying there's there's there are these completely unpredictable, unpreparable events that are going to happen in the future? I would say to come back to your original question, when I have read, I've read the the three that you have read and fooled by randomness, it's almost like you're reading drafts of the same work. You know what I mean? Like you can see how he is progressing in his thinking. So does fooled by randomness have a lot that the other books don't have in them? No, but it's pretty interesting. I'm a person who really nerds out on processes. I love to see the path that took people took to arrive at certain conclusions. So I enjoyed reading it very, very much because I sort of thought like this is the first time that he tried to put this all into a work, and I could see, therefore, like sort of the progression over time. Let me ask you this. This is a big question. What do you think from from Naseem Talib's works? Where do you see crossover into everything that we've been talking about? The coaching side of things. And what what could what could a coach, because my audience is mainly coaches, what could they learn from reading a Nassim Talib?

SPEAKER_01 24:08

So three things that I think for coaching. One, uh, I what I took is that um you get addition by subtraction. I know that's a coximor. Is that you get things by taking stuff away. Most coaches are looking for the next secret. What can we chuck in? What can we chuck in? And Talad talks a lot about taking stuff out. You know, when you look at your training program, you might think, uh, well, what what do I do all the time? Is this having a benefit? You know, and we know that young people are overwhelmed with everything. My son that I just mentioned, he's got his under six he's 16, he's got his end of that period of school exams coming up. He's doing 10 subjects, he's got 24 exams coming up. Oh my goodness. I don't know, I don't know how on earth that helps anything, but I'm telling you, he doesn't need any more because uh he he's just getting put off education, you know. Um I don't want to go onto that side, but it's just come on, is all that necessary to you know, it's so what are we doing in coaching? You know, are our athletes tired? Are we is everything we do necessary? Um uh Gambetta talks this about this as well. You know, if you see an exercise, how how does this fit into my underlying philosophy? So I think sometimes we need to take stuff out. Um, and that doesn't mean being simple. Um, it could be that you do things in rotation. I was just looking back at some old exercises, and there's something called a hip lock where we try and get a hip high and running. I've been doing it quite uh straight on, but I've completely forgotten to do side ones. So next week's plans, I'm taking the linear ones out and I'm gonna do the side ones in. So it's the same, but variation. So I haven't just added it in. That's it that's an example of that. Number two, um we did mention this a bit in the um uh about governing bodies and the long-term athlete development model. You've got to have skin in the game. When I go on a coaching course and I went to gain, and there's people like Jim Radcliffe from Oregon University out there delivering his coaching session, you can tell he's doing that day in, day out. He is sharp, his cues are good, he's got good, and he can do it. There's lots of people coaching from the sidelines or shouting out from the sidelines, hey, you're all doing this wrong, this is how I would do it. But they're not doing it. You know, even if you're coaching a primary school class, and I'm I'm not saying that's detrimental to the primary school kids, you're doing it. So then you've got some feedback. But if you're just shouting from the side saying, this is how you do it, this is how you do it, oh I used to do this, well, all right, but then it looks slow and it doesn't look sharp. You've got to have skin in the game. And the people posting this LTAD model around, you know, who's saying everyone should be doing this, well, it's ten years old now, and you haven't shown anyone that's come through this model. So stop touting it. Okay? I've put my skin in the game by setting up my athletic development club and trying to help people from five years old on the progression through it, okay? And it shows. May make mistakes, learn mistakes, doing that all the time, but I've got skin in the game, so at least that earns some respect. And then the third one, he talks about this a bit obscure, he calls um it's known as the Lindy effect, I think. Where things, if they've lasted, lasted for a long time. And then he also talks about I think it's neologism, where people like something new. But if it's work for 50 years, it's likely to be worthwhile doing. So for example, we know that running downhill makes you slightly faster, and that running uphill develops leg strength. So, pretty much, if you're trying to get a faster runner, you want to do a little bit of downhill and a few hill sprints. They're gonna help you because they've worked for ages. Same as the squat as an exercise, bodyweight squat, barbell back squat. There's big transfers because they've worked for a long time. Um don't always be um having to uh look for something new. And on on my bookshelves by me, there's a couple of books like um Ken Dockerhead's uh track and field omnibook. It is superb, it's got really good coaching cues in there. So there's lots I go back to that. These um Thomas Curitan, um, the Brown encyclopedias just up here, they're encyclopedias physical education. Some of them are outdated, the physiology and stuff, but some of the principles are still in there. So those are three things. What did I say? Takes take stuff away, don't be afraid to take stuff away, have skin in the game, and then the Lindy effect. It's been working for a long time, it's probably gonna work for you.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Yeah, I I I just want to take a little bit of a different angle on the same concepts and how I see them applying. When you talk about the Lindy effect, one thing that I have found a really interesting application of this is when you look at the way athletes move. For instance, I'm I'm a swim coach, right? So we're we're constantly evolving in terms of what we think of as swimming technique, right? And a lot of that, I think, is really athlete driven. You know, I've been harping on people for since the beginning of time to sort of let them know that, you know, the sort of big, the last big revolution in swimming technique, more or less, was the underwater dolphin kick. A coach did not come up with that. That was athletes that started, that's what basically were athletes that were fooling around and a coach like didn't tell them not to do it. Basically, a coach got out of the way, but a coach didn't like build that from the ground up. That was something that was athlete driven. But the other piece of it is we tend to look at like older, you know, if you watch a video right now of, you know, some athletes racing, like if you watch Mark Spitz in the 1972 Olympics, and you look at his technique, you go, man, that's not very good, right? He he his he looks very unrefined in comparison to some of the swimmers we see today at first glance. But what I think is most valuable, especially about watching some of the highest performers from the old time, is look at what they're doing that is the same as elite athletes now. Because that is the stuff that is probably really, like, really important. And the rest of it, you know, is a little bit like different body types, different capabilities, different limb lengths, you know, you have to make certain adaptations to the individual who they are. There's not just like one template for technique. But if you have this long body of work where pretty much, you know, like I watched Dawn Frazier some freestyle recently. And of course, she's doing an open turn, she has no cap on, she's got her head like looking straight forward, all these things that we wouldn't do now. And yet there's so many aspects of her technique that was 60 years ago, she was dominant that are still true for elite freestyle sprinters today. And that is the stuff that I think those are like the fundamentals that we want to be transferring and teaching athletes how to do because if it's worked, you know, at the elite level forever, it's there. Um now I'm forgetting your your other two. You had uh your first one.

SPEAKER_01 30:38

Additions through subtraction.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Yeah, addition through subtraction. I didn't have so much to say about that. And then um skin in the game. Skin in the game, I have often looked at that from a leadership perspective. I think before we started recording, I was talking about how hierarchical specifically I find sports structures in the United States. I don't really know how it is in the UK, if it's very hierarchical, maybe the same as as we run into. But one of the things I've constantly challenged in that respect is we seem to, because of that hierarchy, the higher up you are in a hierarchy, the more immune you seem from the consequences of anything that goes wrong. And I find myself constantly challenging that because I'm I'm thinking, no, that's backwards. If you are getting paid a lot of money, for instance, to uh work at USA swimming, or you're Bob Bowman and you're the highest paid swim coach in America, I'm I'm with it. Like Bob Bowman, pay him really well. Also, he should have the highest potential risk because he he should have more skin in the game, not less skin in the game, right? He should be held more accountable than, you know, for instance, uh a high school swim coach that's, you know, getting $5,000 for the season. But a lot of times we have that reversed. And I think that that is uh, you know, from from my Talib vantage point, a flaw in the system. The most resonant concept from his work, and I think this is resonant because it has an application in psychology, it has an application um in the physiological training concepts we do, you know, the title of one of his books, Anti-Fragile. I've written often and and spoken often about, you know, we've come to this point, particularly with some of the mental side of things, where we go, oh, we really want to build up mental toughness, right? And mental toughness really is very analogous in that way to Tallib's model. He has this, you know, he has fragile, he has robust, and he has anti-fragile. And robust in that model is sort of resistant to harm from unforeseen events. And I think that is often where we try to get with the mental side of things. We get to try to build up just resistance to harm. And where I see positive psychology slotting in, where I think any good psychological practice slots in, is like we can do better than resist harm, right? The whole point of training is that we introduce these kind of dynamic stresses to people, and we expect that they're going to actually benefit from the introduction of those things. They're not going to just withstand them. They are going to come out stronger. I even think about you, you know, somebody with a strength and conditioning standpoint. I think Talib has a section in Antifragile where he's he's very into deadlifting, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

He loves his deadlifts.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

He loves his deadlifts. And he gets into talking about, you know, sort of at a elemental level, like the concept of how do you do a deadlift PR? Well, you you go in and and you train and perhaps you lift a certain weight, and your body, in some ways, your physiological system is anti-fragile. It has never lifted your PR, but somewhere in the back it goes, we should prepare to lift more weight than we've ever lifted. And it does it, right? And I think that's such a like mind-expanding moment for me.

SPEAKER_01 34:04

I had this conversation with uh a rugby coach. Her name's Georgie. She's got 36 caps for England as a scrum half, and she's now a successful rugby coach in her own right. When I was explaining to her that we had this, the girl I mentioned earlier, the Shockfoot girl, she competed in the England age groups championships at weightlifting back in February, I think. And she got she got four personal bests in the competition, two in each lift. So the first lift she'd done before in each, snatch and then clean and jerk. But then the second and third in snatch and the second and third in clean and jerk, she was attempting lifts she's never done before in her life out on the competition platform. And Georgie said, I can't get my head around you. I'd like to know what I could do it. I said, Yeah, but the time to do this big stuff is when it counts. There's no point doing it in the gym. You need to do it there. So then we're talking about anti-fragile. There's that girl going out there in front of an audience and lifting more weight than she's ever tried to lift above her head. Um, and she got the second lift, but missed just missed the third on each time. But that's a success. And I think I hadn't thought of it in terms of anti-fragile then, but we're trying to encourage these people to go out and attempt this stuff. I remember when I was a kid, we didn't have parkour, it hadn't been invented yet, but we had building sites in the village. So I just run along porter cabin, like these temporary porter cabins, roofs, and jump to the next porter cabin. We'd run up scaffolding and then run along the benches and then jump down from the buildings and roll. We'd run around the found empty foundations, all the stuff you're not allowed to do now. Now you have to pay someone to go and let you do that in an inside environment. And I guess that's that point come back to the wrestling that you were talking about as well. You know, we got muddy, we scraped our knees. I'm sounding a bit old now. Sure. But these were the things that, you know, you've got to be able to scrape your knees and get up. It's only his cut knee. Now, I don't think giving my son 24 exams is making him anti-fragile. I think it's just bashing him on the head. I don't think any there's any plus side to that as well. It's not it's not enabling him or encouraging him or anything like that. So it's always a balance about how can we do it. But if you give them opportunities, the children will do it themselves as well. They'll take risks. And that's where I think gymnastics is another good thing as well. You have to do risks. You're going upside down, you're going fast, you're going backwards. All the things you can't do in normal school. So, yeah, do we have environments where we could do that? But I think if adults are trying to control it, I think we lose a bit then and it becomes a bit um imposing and we can risk it. We've got to we've got to support the children in taking those risks, not um force them.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

Yeah, I think what you're pointing to is the difference between, you know, running around pre-parkour on uh construction sites and your son getting 24 exams is there was no top-down organization. You know, there wasn't like uh somebody telling you to do that as a child, right? You were just allowed to do it. You were allowed to take those risks.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

I don't think anyone knew I was doing it. So I'm not saying allowed, but we were we were allowed to go out and play, but they didn't know I was doing that. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Yeah. I think if probably if they did know you were doing it, they they probably would be a little bit more worried, right? So yeah, I mean, I think the more that we try to kind of organize and corral and systematize, we do lose something in that process. It's not it's not just pure addition. And I think that brings it back to actually your first point, right? Is we how did we get to 24 exams? I think we probably had some exams that you know people agreed were universal and important. And then, you know, over time somebody said, Well, what if we added this? And somebody said, Oh, yeah, all right, that's important too. Let's add that. And nobody ever like pared the list down. They just add, add, add, add without, you know, sort of thinking about what's the actual overall structure of what we're doing. Um, let's let's pivot to the last part. Let's get a little bit personal. I'm always interested, you know, from the very first time I talked to you, and this conversation I think has revealed you to be exactly who I thought you were. I noticed, you know, that you're a person who is is genuinely in love with learning. You're you're constantly, you're seeking out people, you're seeking out books, you know, all these sources of knowledge. And what I'm curious about is because I think this is the one of the big questions that we find ourselves in the internet age, in the 2026 age, in the social media age, where there's more sources of information, there's more potential stuff that you could seek out than ever. How do you filter? How do you figure out, like, okay, I think this is gonna be a fruitful avenue for me to go down to improve my knowledge set? And how do you sort of filter out on the other hand and be like, I don't think that that's gonna be valuable for me to pursue?

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Yeah, it's hard, isn't it? It's funny, when I coach weightlifting, I'll say something and the weightlifters ignore it. Then they'll find some American guy on YouTube with a beard sat there pontificating. They said, Yeah. Yeah, oh my goodness. They sat behind a desk. I said, Well, just first first of all, just because someone's on social media, I know we're on social media now, does not mean they're good. Some of the best coaches I know have no social media presence at all. They don't even know how it works because they're busy coaching. So that's that's the number one thing. Two, have they had skin in the game? Have they done something? And that doesn't mean necessarily medal winners, you know, like I say, PE teachers have just been in there doing it a long time. And are they open to learning? So I think I learned from learners, Chris. If that sounds a bit, you know, are they open? Are they are they saying, hey, James, have you read this book? Have you seen this? And so, for example, just in my non-fiction writing, there's a guy called uh Scott Bradfield. He's known as the Master Bather, because he just talked about reading books in the bathtime. I follow his YouTube channel, he's he's entertaining, he recommends all these old books. I don't take all of them, but 95% of the time there's a there's a link to, hey, he's I've discovered this old book he's found. So that's an example. Um in the coaching world, someone like Wade Gilbert, do you know Wade Gilbert? He's um he's a director of coaching, uh, he's he's written a brilliant book on sports coaching, um, which covers all that. Uh he's a learner as well, and so he he's recommended people to me. Vern Gambetta, uh Kelvin Giles. These are these are big readers as well. Who else? So they they they've put me in touch with people. Um I don't does that help or not? I'm not sure whether it's good or not. There's a list.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

I don't think I was looking more I was looking more for a process than necessarily a list. And I think you revealed a few things, and I I I agree with you, especially I maybe hadn't thought about it in quite the same way, but I think the insight of trying to learn from other people that seem like learners is really big. And I like I attend like a lot of conferences. I've been making a bigger effort to get out to more conferences. Personally, it's very good for it's very good marketing for my business if I get out to a conference and and speak and get myself in front of an audience. But you know, whenever I get a chance to get to these things, I'm not like showing up to do my talk and then running away. I'm just like, well, I'm here. I'm gonna sit in on some of these other things. And I don't know, maybe sometimes I can't decide whether people find me annoying or not. I guess I don't really care in the end, but I am always the guy who's got his hands up at the end of it. And yes, partially I am asking questions because I have a genuine curiosity. I genuinely sat there and thought about what somebody's saying and want to find out, but I also find the way that they respond to questions is incredibly revealing and dictates how much I will how much I will pursue knowledge from them in a f in the future. If I ask that question and somebody's really closed off and defensive, I almost like a that's a sign to me, I just move on, right?

SPEAKER_01 41:20

And so when I got known for asking questions at game when I was there. But for my mind, I spent a lot of money when I went first yeah, and I'm I'm here. Right, I've got to get as much back because I might never come back here again. Every time I went the first time, especially, I didn't know whether I was ever gonna come back. Right, there's all these people, how can I get? There's a guy called Steve Magnus who was an endurance coach, uh Franz Bosch. Oh, yeah. Steve Magnus is huge now, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but um at the time I was like, he was when he was exploring in middle distance, I was coaching some pet athletes and some middle distance runners. He said, I'd always have lunch with Steve and just take down notes. And uh he he he he he made a couple of oh, James is always asking me questions. Um he signed a couple of his books for me and stuff like that. But I was I was trying to help my athletes, and the only way I can help it, well, here's someone who knows a lot about middle distance running. I don't know much. How can I do this? And the same with that, I'd go around and Franz Bosch had breakfast with me a couple of times when he was over at Gain and he was talking about jumping and principles, then we'd go on to about philosophy and stuff like that. And I've and I've used that stuff, and I was just like an educational vampire trying to drain the lifeblood out of them and all their knowledge as much as I could in order to help my athletes become better. But then I think they know that you're trying to ask questions so you can learn to help your athletes rather than just to verify how good you are as a coach. Um, because I'm always looking, I'm only interested in what can help either me get better or my athletes get better.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Yeah, and I I think there's a networking point in there as well. One of the times, I mean, I do a lot of coaching of coaches, and some part of that I do help coaches, you know, career-wise. I think interpersonal relationships, networking, that's probably the most important thing. And one of the things I end up saying to them is, you know, because they'll be intimidated, they'll be go, Oh, I really want to get to know that coach, but like he would never talk to me. And, you know, I go, Do you know what? I have a pretty much a 90% success rate in my life approaching people from the angle of I've observed this about what you're doing, and I really want to know more about that. Would you be willing to, you know, talk to me about that? Would you be willing to go out to lunch with me? People love that. Who wouldn't like that? Wouldn't you like that if somebody just said, like, James, I just love what you're doing at Excelsior and I just want to know more about it? Like, who's, you know, you have to be in a really bad mood, I think, to say no to that. You have to be extremely grumpy to say no to that. It's it's a fun conversation for the person on the other end as well, who doesn't want to be admired for their work and, you know, and genuinely like got into it because they're excited about what they're doing. I, you know, so I think that's just a word to people, I guess, probably more general advice for sort of seeking out some of this knowledge on an interpersonal level. Last question for you, because I'm so fascinated. To have somebody with this interdisciplinary approach, and we've sort of been talking about it the entire time. But how do you approach taking knowledge from different sports, right? Across? So, you know, you have stuff that you're, I think you've you've referenced this that you're learning, for instance, in a weightlifting context. How do you think about like, oh, you know what? This really applies to what I'm trying to teach in athletics. This is going to sort of be cross-disciplinary and vice versa. Like, how do you, you know, not make athletics into the exact same thing as weightlifting?

SPEAKER_01 44:35

I think the common thread that runs all of it. I got asked a few years ago which of the three sports I like coaching the most. And I got the sports are good, but it's the people I really love. It's that human connection, and that is the common thread. And I think my old weightlifting coach, Keith Morgan, I learned from him is compassion and empathy, although he comes across as grumpy old man, he's not. He really cares about the person. I think that's what you can, and you don't get then get caught up in traps of folklore within the sport. I think that's maybe the thing. I think I'm more open-minded. I think probably that's what it click teaches you because if gymnasts can be all like this, and track and field coach can be like a weightlifting coach. But I just say, well, hold on, this is the human body here, this is how it moves. And so I'm not necessarily tied down to that that that sport way of doing things, especially with areas of warm-ups and preparation, physical preparation, and the all-round holistic stuff. I remember track and field coaches looked at me like I was the like the devil when I got the athletes going across the track lines doing zigzags in the water. What? It's like swimming coaches. What? You've taken the lane ropes out. What carnage is this? Right. How on earth are you telling them to do? No, we want you to swim in zigzags today. What what are you doing here? You know, yeah. So maybe that's it. You know, I'm more maybe open-minded and uh not hidebound to the constraints, the physical and the uh without without saying that everything's done is bad. I'm not saying that at all, but I think maybe that I could come up with a fresh perspective.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

You know what's my white whale in that regard? You talk about myths in sports. I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. If somebody's listening to this podcast and they feel super confident that they have the answer to this question, please reach out to me. I want to bring you on. I'm gonna, you know, drill down with you for a whole hour just on this simple subject. James, I do not understand why in swimming the conventional wisdom is that as you get older, you should adjust your event set down into shorter distances versus longer distances. When I look at other sports, I see, for instance, in athletics, the distance runners move up in distance as they get older. And it and to me, it makes sense because the thing that they don't have in comparison to perhaps when they were 25 or 26 is they have a little bit less power. They probably have less strength, they have less speed. That makes sense. That's not what happens in swimming. And it just seems to be, and to a certain extent, like accepted cultural wisdom that, like, oh yeah, you know, as you get older, you gotta like, you have to scale back your training so much that you must just, you know, sort of go down and and specialize in in sprints. And we continually have world-class sprinters that, you know, pop up sort of once a generation, even in the 35 to 40 zone, or you have Nicolas Santos of Brazil who was like winning world championships in his 40s, but in sprint distances. Katie Ledecki's about to turn 30 years old. And in my lifetime, I think she will be the first elite female distance swimmer that is 30 or older. And that just makes no sense to me. I don't know. If you have any thoughts about that, you can share them as we're on our way out.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

I will do. I've got to go and coach now, Chris. Okay. But otherwise the worst. Yeah. Okay. I will do it. Yeah. I think about it.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

You'll share that with me offline and maybe we'll bring you. If you're the person to answer that question, then you have an invite back. James, thank you so much for coming. I will include in show notes links to Excelsior Athletic Club. You sent me a link to something else, I think, as well.

SPEAKER_01 48:00

My SubSac newsletter, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:02

My subsack newsletter. Oh my god, we didn't plug the newsletter. Don't worry. It's gonna be in there. You should follow his newsletter. He's he's he's big into coaching education. I think you probably learned that by listening to this podcast. If you want to reach out and contact me, Crdesantis at gmail.com. That's my email address, Christy underscore coach on Instagram. You can go to my website, Christycoach.com. If you're gonna be at the uh College Swim Coaches Association, this is actually probably coming out as I'm at the event. So come say hello to me. Uh, if you're a listener of the podcast, I'm looking forward to seeing you there. And uh once again, thank you to James. Thank you to everybody for listening, and I'll be back with you guys again.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

Thanks for having me, Chris.

SPEAKER_00 48:38

It was a it was a joy. Thank you. Absolutely.