The Secrets Of Generalists - Sonny Bill & Ido Portal
Generalise to enjoy your training more, develop your brain, enjoy better body composition and be ready for anything.
When we generalise we can use more training volume! With few exceptions the very best athletes train longer and at higher average intensity than elite athletes. Overuse injuries come from overusing the same movements, not from too much total movement. Often the solution to injury is using a lot of a different movement to bring life back to a damaged area of the body.
If you're a coach you can build more adaptable, better decision making athletes through non-specialisation. This is well explored in LTAD (Long-Term Athlete Development) research.
EXAMPLE - NRL (National Rugby League - Australia’s most watched league)
The NRL has become robotic for many players. Not encouraged to develop from the age of 16 or even younger. The “do your job”, “no mistakes,” mindset means we’re missing a world of potential. When I started as Head of S&C (strength and conditioning) in France (Catalans Dragons - European SuperLeauge) I had an EXOS / American style warm-up running. It was beautiful, but the Head Coach (Trent Robinson) knew that we would be more likely to lose if we implemented it. He challenged me to re-think the time we had together and to make sure the ball was involved. I went back to the drawing board incorporating the most effective mobility drills with general skills and movement challenges.
During my time at the Sydney Rooster’s the during 2013 and 2014 all players did footwork, evasion and passing drills in their “warm-up” of every training session. See warm-ups aren’t really warm-ups, your body is adapting to every thought / movement stimulus it receives. I believe that the first drill of every training session, (“warm-ups”) played a key role in the culture and the development of the 2013 Premiership winning Sydney Rooster’s who also broke an all-time defensive record for opposition teams held to ZERO.
The start to the sessions involved games and creativity, simple but always slightly different. If I had my time again I would ask for a little more room to move even further laterally in my 6 minutes of magic to start our sessions.
Complex sport athletes should dance.
They should! Why? Because the ones that can WIN! Hayden Knowles told me this years ago when he got professional tap dancers (lord of the dance?) in to teach the Parramatta Eels about fast feet. He was right. If you saw Greg Inglis’ try a few weeks ago you’re not going to argue. It hurts me to see it against the team that was a big part of my life for 2 years, but it was magic. You may have also seen Inglis with his own version of the lizard crawl which I would think evolved in parallel to Ido’s work, not as a result of it. Inglis can move and he’s shaking up the world!
Who else can move? Sonny Bill Williams! He loved to dance in the gym and have fun with the other players. What does it mean in practice? It means he gets to be on the world stage in 4 different sports (Rugby League, Rugby Sevens, Rugby Union and Boxing)! "I've been blessed with every sport has helped me excel in the other." 142.5kg was Sonny's best bench at the Roosters, we did one 3 week block on it while he was ineligible to play.
Ido spoke about it recently at his movement camp, one of many inspiring monologues over the 3 days was about dance being a part of many cultures. He introduced dance with the rationale that we were too tired and busy with survival to include it in harsher times just for fun. Dance builds a movement base REQUIRED to adapt, fight and survive. What he didn’t talk about was what Richard Wiseman talks about in Act As If Principle, that Dance also changes psychology and physiology on a deeper level than any other form of exercise in the studies he cites.
I attempted to get Ido to do some training with Sonny Bill in 2014 but the financial barrier was too high for the Roosters at the time.
TIDAL WAVE ALERT
Now comes the OVER-REACTION - from now on the best NRL players dance, balance and train muscle-ups on rings, exclusively. Well no. The magic is in the mixture. Shooting more baskets than the other guys is a common thread in the stories of all great NBA players, Sonny Bill did more extra passing, ( plus mobility, physiotherapy, recovery) and skills work than any other player I’ve seen. You have to get the specifics done, but if that’s all you do then you’re missing out.
“Gymnastics are great for kids.”
“All kids should do gymnastics.”
“I wish I did gymnastics as a kid.”
Who in athletic development hasn’t heard or thought this??
Well.. if you’re reading this you’re not dead, so start NOW!
Handstands against a wall scare the shit out of many elite athletes. But if the wrists, spacial awareness and body awareness of elite athletes cannot deal with controlled inversion then the chance of spinal chord injury in a chaotic inversion are much higher. We owe our athletes complexity. When we generalise we find extra volume and detail in our specialisation work.
My movement towards generalisation has freed me from needing just one more kilogram on the scales or on the bar to progress.
What's great is that since learning handstands, juggling and back somersaults I've also hit personal bests on all my barbell lifts and have the same body weight and composition as when that was my primary focus. You can't be the best in the world at everything but generalising will make you the best version of yourself.