Posts by stevemagness
Going to Exhaustion. Even When You Aren’t Prepared.
Let me tell you about one of the hardest physical things I’ve done in the past few years. A time when I ran my slowest ever, but one I was most proud of. A time I looked, and felt, like absolute death afterward… In the first few years of coaching, I was young & fit,…
Read MoreEpisode 175: Fast Losers-Racing vs. Time Trialing
Racing is a skill. How do we get comfortable in a pack? Running from the front, or perhaps stuck in the back? How do you deal with the rising tension of a tactical race? Steve and Jon discuss all of this in more in helping your athletes develop the skills of racing! If you haven’t…
Read MoreHow to Build Tough Teams
“We believe that being elite is not about how talented you are. It is about how tough you are,” wrote Urban Meyer in his 2015 book Above the Line. Toughness has long been held as a fundamental key to achieving peak performance. Famed football coach Vince Lombardi called it “essential to success,” and NBA legend…
Read MoreCare and Support: The Secret to Great Performance
At the 1960 Olympic games, a 60-something-year-old man, rail thin, with a full head of white hair, took to the practice track adjacent to the main Olympic stadium and commenced to run as hard as he could. The gangly elderly man grimaced and strained to complete the 3 and ¾ of a lap which makes…
Read MoreThe Desire to Quit is Normal. Here’s What We Do About It.
We often hold up elite performers as some sort of superhuman. Impervious to the doubts and insecurities that the rest of us face. We call them tough, gritty, resilient, clutch, to show that they have figured out how to perform under immense levels of pressure. Something, that us mere mortals simply can’t do. Yet, every…
Read MoreEpisode 174: How to Do Hard Things: The Art of Suffering
How do you handle pain, fatigue, and discomfort? Do you look for a hole to step into or do you work your way through? In this episode, we discuss Steve’s new book Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness. The book is out and available now! If…
Read MoreEpisode 173: The Difference Between Extraordinary and Mediocre
What game are you playing? We all may think we are all running the same race. A 1,500m race in high school is the same as in college, and the same as in the pro’s. That’s incorrect. In this week’s episode, we use an obscure book on tennis, written by the developer of Intercontinental Ballistic…
Read MoreEpisode 172: The Importance of Leaving Room to Grow
One piece of advice I always give coaches is: Always have somewhere to go. The younger your athletes, the more important this is. We should leave room to develop and grow. In this episode, we take on the debate on whether we should maximize everything, or if we should leave something in the tank for…
Read MoreEpisode 171: The Headcase phenomenon: Stop Blaming Athletes for Poor Performance
“He’s a headcase!” We’ve all heard it as coaches. Maybe we’ve even said it. In this episode, Jon and Steve discuss why this is the wrong approach to take. It’s a self-limiting mindset, that allows the coach to blame the athlete, shirk responsibility, and in doing so defer their responsibility to help figure out what’s…
Read MoreEpisode 170: Everyone is an Outlier
We are all an experiment of 1! We often talk about individualization in coaching. In this episode, we talk about the contrast between applying your training program to a group, versus adapting your training program to the individual. We discuss how to let go of your preferred philosophy and try something different. Steve & Jon…
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