Sam Portland - Speed Coach

Ask them how they’d develop speed.

Five methods.

Ask about strength.

Seven options.

Ask about conditioning.

Three competing models.

They’re knowledgeable.

That’s not the problem.

The problem appears when they have to choose.

Because every new method creates another possible answer.

So the internal conversation becomes:

Could I do this?

Or this?

What about this?

I saw someone else doing that…

Maybe I should change this…

And eventually knowledge creates decision friction.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that expertise isn’t demonstrated by how many options you can produce.

It’s demonstrated by how quickly you can eliminate the wrong ones.

The developing coach asks:

“What could I do?”

The experienced coach asks:

“What does this athlete actually need?”

Those questions produce completely different programmes.

I got this message after a call with a coach recently.

And I think it highlights something I’ve become increasingly interested in with coach development.

Sometimes you don’t need more information.

You need somewhere to take the information you already have.

A real athlete.

A real programme.

A decision you’re struggling with.

Something in your environment that doesn’t quite make sense.

And then have somebody help you pull it apart.

What are we actually trying to solve?

What evidence do we have?

What are we assuming?

What options do we have?

What happens next?

That’s very different from watching another course.

Because the objective isn’t for me to give you the answer.

It’s to help you build a decision process that eventually doesn’t require me.

And I’ve noticed that sometimes 15 minutes spent working through a real problem can create more clarity than another few hours consuming information.

That’s increasingly how I want to approach coach development.

Less information for information’s sake.

More conversations that help good coaches make better decisions.

Still choosing exercises and then trying to justify why they belong in the programme?

Reverse the process.

Start with the athlete.

1. What can’t they currently do?

Not what exercise are they bad at.

What performance outcome is limiting them?

2. What needs to change?

Force?

Velocity?

Elasticity?

Technical organisation?

Capacity?

3. What training intervention creates that adaptation?

Only now do we select the exercise.

That changes programming from:

Exercise → Hope → Outcome

into:

Limitation → Adaptation → Intervention → Transfer

It’s a subtle difference.

But it’s one of the reasons I’m far more interested in teaching coaches how to select training than giving them lists of exercises.

Once you understand the decision…

the exercise library becomes far less important.

That’s essentially the thinking I built the Transfer Tables around.

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Most coaches think consuming more information fixes uncertainty.

At some point, it can actually create it.

Your first course might close a genuine knowledge gap.

Your fifth gives you more options.

By your twentieth, you can have five respected coaches giving you five different answers to the exact same problem.

Which one is right?

Potentially all of them.

In the right context.

And that’s the problem.

Information has diminishing returns when you don’t have an organising principle for deciding what to do with it.

Eventually you need a filter strong enough to say:

This fits.

This doesn’t.

This changes my thinking.

This is interesting, but doesn’t change my programme.

That doesn’t mean you stop learning.

It means new information has somewhere to go.

I think that’s one of the biggest differences between consuming information and developing expertise.

The better I get at coaching, the less interested I become in collecting answers.

I’m much more interested in building better filters.

If you want me to help you cut through the noise the drop me a DM please.

I used to think becoming a great coach meant eventually knowing enough.

It doesn’t.

For years, that was basically the game.

Read more.

Study more.

Go to courses.

Speak to better coaches.

Find out what they were doing.

And to be clear…

All of that mattered.

It’s a huge part of how I became the coach I am.

But eventually something changed.

The more I learned, the more obvious it became that there would always be another answer.

Another methodology.

Another paper.

Another exercise.

Another successful coach doing almost the exact opposite of what somebody else recommended.

And I realised:

You can’t eliminate uncertainty by knowing everything.

So I stopped trying.

Instead, I became increasingly obsessed with building principles I could make decisions through.

Transfer.

Speed Age.

Learn–Load–Execute.

Drill Stacking.

General → Specific → Special → Tactical.

None of those frameworks gives me every answer.

That’s not their job.

They give me something much more useful.

A way to decide.

They allow me to look at new information and work out where it fits.

Or whether it fits at all.

That’s probably been one of the biggest changes in my development as a coach.

Early in my career, I wanted to know everything.

Now?

I don’t need to know everything.

I need to know how I think.