Posts by stevemagness
Episode 177: Sympathetic Overdrive- How to Get Out of Stressing Out!
Athletes stress out…a lot! And once you are in stressed mode, it’s hard to get out of it. You can’t sleep hours after competing because your mind is still racing and your body is still buzzing. You can’t let go of the tough loss. It lingers. In this episode, we talk about how to move…
Read MoreBONUS: Sink or Swim, Survive or Thrive
Welcome to this special bonus issue. Steve does his best revisionist history impression, telling you the story of Paul Bear Bryant’s famous Junction Boys football camp, while discussing the origins of ‘old school toughness.’ This is adapted from his new book Do Hard Things, which you can check out wherever books are sold. It’s currently…
Read MoreEpisode 176: Individualizing Training in Larger Settings
Individualizing training is easy at the professional level. You’ve got a handful of athletes, all very good, and can adjust as needed. In larger settings, it’s much more difficult. The athlete’s abilities are spread out, there’s only one of you, and practice can be more akin to herding cats. In this episode, we explore how…
Read MoreGoing 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…
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