- “…We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us…” –Friedrich Nietzsche
- “…Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food…” –Hippocrates – c. 450 – 370 BC
- “…Walking is man’s best medicine…” –Hippocrates – c. 450 – 370 BC
- “…for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them…” – 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics
- “…We must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us. They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations…” ― Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, 1848
“…it is no longer possible to justify the concept of unitary abilities or general abilities such as co-ordination and agility since the evidence shows that these abilities are specific to the task or activity…” – Prof Franklin Henry – University of California – Berkley – Father of Motor Learning- Wrote Paper in 1958 - “…The specificity of movement patterns is a scientifically established principle of human exercise. There has been no wavering on this avowed phenomenon over the last 50 years. Coaches persist however in violating this basic principle with dubious arguments, false premises and distortion of facts…” – The Neural and Psychological Basis of Baseball Pitching – by Brent Ruschal 2009;
- “…the common misconception that fundamental abilities like agility in soccer, can be trained through various drills and other activities. For example, athletes are often given various ‘quickening’ exercises with the hope these exercises will train some fundamental ability to be ‘quick ,allowing quicker responses in their particular sport….There is no general ability to be ‘quick’, to ‘balance’ or to use ‘vision’. A learner may acquire additional skill at a drill but this learning does not transfer to the ‘main skill of interest’…” – Professor Richard Schmidt – PhD at USC and went later to UCLA 2011;
- “…It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary...” – – Sir Winston Churchill.
- “…Some Coaches still don’t get it right about recruiting Setters. Whether or not a Setter is a six foot two, left-hander, with a twenty-eight inch vertical jump, is about as important as whether or not a Porche has a back seat. There are only two accessories worth discussing. Does she Win? Does she make the people around her better? – …” – NCAA Championship Coach Terry Pettit – A Fresh Season
- “…As people practice a movement, like throwing a ball various distances or in various directions, or climbing stairs of various dimensions, they learn the relationship between the parameters and the outcome. By collecting “data points”, they improve their understanding of the relationship between a movement outcome and the control of the movement’s parameters – the “best fitting straight line”…..people will more quickly learn the relationship between the manipulating parameters and achieving a desired movement outcome if they practice a task in a wide variety of situations, and experience errors in the process…”. Practice that lacks variety, but is instead precise or repetitious, will not (from Schmidt’s perspective) provide enough information for a learner to fathom the rules that underlie the generalised motor program…” – Schmidt R.A (1991)
- “…Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts…” – Sir Winston Churchill
- “…If you’re going through hell, keep going…”– Sir Winston Churchill.
- “…You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life…”– Sir Winston Churchill.
- “…Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm…”- Sir Winston Churchill.
- “…Tell me how I can grow”, “Tell me how I can get better”, “Tell me how I can change…”- Kim Hill USWNT – 2014 FIVB World Championship
- “…Skill is Myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals...”- Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code, pg 33
- “…Deep practice @ 10,000 hours = World class skill…”- Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code, pg 53.
- “…By his sixth birthday, Mozart had studied 3,500 hours of music with his instructor-father…” Dr Michael Howe – Genius Explained
- “…Michelangelo , from the ages of six to ten lived with a stone-cutter and his family, learning how to handle a hammer and chisel before he could read and write. After a brief, unhappy attempt at schooling he apprenticed to the great Ghirlandaio. He worked on blockbuster commissions, sketching, copying, and preparing frescoes in one of Florence’s largest churches. He was then taught by the master sculptor Bertoldo and tutored by other luminaries at the home of Lorenzo de’ Medici, where Michelangelo lived until her was seventeen. He was a promising but little known artist until he produced the ‘Pieta’ at age twenty-four. People called the ‘Pieta’ pure genius, but its creator begged to differ. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery.” Michelangelo later said, “it would not seem so wonderful at all…”
- “…The fact is that when there is intense competition those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest. It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set. Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens up a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential….” Josh Waitzkin – 8 time National Chess Champion, 21 time National Martial Arts Champion, 3 time World Martial Arts Champion – The Art of Learning
- “…There may be no more frustrating feeling for a Coach than when he or she cannot figure out how to reach someone who doesn’t get it. But this is one of the things we signed up for. Coaching is not limited to training, strategy and tactical decisions. It is not about being understood or appreciated. It is about knocking on a door every day, until one day the player on the other side, opens it and says, ‘I’m ready …” – NCAA Championship Coach Terry Pettit – A Fresh Season
- “…Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day...” – Jim Rohn
- “…One of the most unfortunate things I see when identifying youth players is the girl who is told over the years how great she is. By the time she’s a high school freshman, she starts to believe it. By her senior year, she’s fizzled out. Then there’s her counterpart: the girl waiting in the wings who quietly and with determination decides she’s going to make something of herself. Invariably, this humble, hardworking girl is the one who becomes the real player…” — Anson Dorrance
- “…The three benchmarks many coaches look for when evaluating a recruit are: talent, attitude, and effort. To that I would add a fourth: the willingness of an athlete to be uncomfortable as she develops. This combination usually leads to an exceptional player…” – Coach Terry Pettit – A Fresh Season, Insights Into Coaching, Leadership, and Volleyball
- “…Believing in people before they have proven themselves is the key to motivating people to reach their potential…” – John Maxwell
- “…Volleyballs immutable law – Every ball touched by the team is followed by movement without the ball (changing position by every player and naturally the whole team)...”- Platonov
- “…Promise to give so much time improving yourself that you have no time to criticize others...” Coach Wooden
- “…We don’t go into any match expecting to win. There are at least two benefits to that. One is that we know we have to really work hard, and do not expect to win the next point. We know we have to go out and earn it rather than thinking it will happen on its own. And then when we do accomplish something that we do not expect, we can derive a lot more satisfaction and increase our overall level of satisfaction, not just in volleyball but in life…” – U.S. Olympic Team Head Coach Karch Kiraly.
- “…If you ponder on the score that has just been posted in the 2nd Rio Olympic Women’s Volleyball Semi-final: China beat Netherlands 3-1 (27-25, 23-25, 29-27, 25-23). There are no easy matches.That score, 2 points apart, each set, for 4 sets. That is the margin of either a Gold Medal match or no Gold medal match. Lets think about that and apply it to what we do and how we think about what we do. Our decisions, EACH AND EVERY POINT, will determine our progress. Each, and every point….”
- “…The path to improvement in passing involves executing, 3 STEP SHUFFLE FOOTWORK, FACE THE BALL (not the target), HOLD YOUR PLATFORM (after contact). These ‘keys’ applied to your passing, address MOBILITY, GEOMETRY and STABILITY in the execution of the pass….”
- “…The most important “skill” in our game is reading, which is not conditioning dependent. Being a good runner does not help you be a better reader of the game. The flow of the game and actions done by a player long before the actual ball contact of the player, are essential to development of this skill, and only occur in game play, not in any drill. Indeed, as a lefty myself, we are, again based in specificity in training, harder to read and play against, as almost all reading done by players is against right handed players. In an important paper by Drs. McGown and Bain, they note that regarding specificity in training in blocked (as in most drills) vs. random training (as in game play) that: The random versus blocked practice methods represent a fundamental paradox regarding athletic performance during training and subsequent performance during competition [29, 30]. Based on performance measurements during practice, blocked activities, in which athletes repeatedly rehearse the same task, result in superior performance during the training session [2, 31]. In comparison, performing tasks and skills in random order decreases skill acquisition during training. Consequently, based on measurement of performance effects during practice, many coaches and players believe that blocked practice is superior to random practice [25]. Such a conclusion however, mistakenly assumes a positive correlation between performance in practice and long-term skill retention [32]. The paradox arises from the fact that blocked practice is in fact very ineffective for transfer of learning to competition as performance improvements measured during practice degrade rapidly, and inefficient because retraining on the same skills will be necessary [29, 31, 33]. Conversely, random practice is both effective, transfer to competition is high, and efficient, skill acquisition is relatively permanent. Indeed, the superiority of random practice has been substantiated for a large number of sports skills including volleyball [34, 35], badminton [36, 37], baseball [38, 39], basketball [40], tennis [41], and soccer [42], and its utility and training applications thoroughly reviewed by Schmidt and Lee [2]. Finally, scientific research into the neurological reasons for this superiority have revealed that variable activities increase and strengthen the brain connections that are responsible for learning motor skills whereas simply repeating the same activities exerts no measurable effect on these brain connections [43-45] The neuronal explanation for these effects are perhaps best exemplified by our own observations (Bain and McGown), of inexperienced coaches training novice players where the instructor(s) become frustrated by the performance variability and lack of successful repetitions of new learners. As a consequence, these inexperienced coaches limit or abandon whole teaching methods for part, and random practice for blocked. Unfortunately, this course of action deprives the learner of the environmental variability and sensory inputs that are essential for the formation of motor maps and implicit behaviors, which are ultimately reflected in the acquisition of functional skills and expert performance [13, 18, 19, 29, 65]. In total, the evidence on this topic is clear; drawing distinctions between training methods based on age or ability is a coaching practice that has no foundation in either motor learning science or in the application of motor learning principles….” By John Kessel | Oct. 08, 2012, 12 a.m. (ET) – Article – Stop Teaching Running
- “…A team culture that encourages or allows entitlement drives healthy and strong “team first” people away. Then they come back and beat you…” – Anonymous
- “…A young mother was fascinated but concerned as she watched a butterfly struggling mightily to escape through the small opening at the top of its cocoon. And when the creature seemed to give up overwhelmed by the task, she felt sure that it wouldn’t make it without help. So she enlarged the hole. The grateful butterfly wriggled out. Unfortunately, its wings were shriveled and useless. The well-intentioned intervention interrupted a natural process. Forcing the butterfly to squeeze though a small opening is nature’s way of assuring that blood from the creature’s body is pushed into the wings. The butterfly escaped the cocoon but without strong wings it could never be free.” – Allow the struggles that build strength, courage and confidence….” – Anonymous
- “…We tend to think of the great Renaissance artists as a homogeneous group, but the truth is that they were like any other randomly selected group of people. They came from rich and poor families alike; they had different personalities, different teachers, different motivations. But they had one thing in common: they all spent thousands of hours inside a deep-practice hothouse, firing and optimizing circuits, correcting errors, competing and improving skills. They each took part in the greatest work of art anyone can construct: the architecture of their own talent…” Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code, pgs 65,66.
- “…A coach should take the athletes to their limits, should go beyond the comfort zone. A coach needs to be respected, to have authority. Maybe the assistant could be that friend, they could be pals, but the coach cannot be. If you are concerned about being friends with the players, you are not going anywhere….” – Doug Beal – USA Gold Medal Coach – 1984.
- “…Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence…” – Vince Lomabardi
- “…MJ will be my new name. No more Michael Jackson……I want a whole new character, a whole new look. I should be a totally different person……People should never think of me as the kid who sang ABC, I Want You Back. I should be a new incredible actor, singer, dancer that will shock the world……I will do no interviews, I will be magic, I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a master. I will be better than every great actor roped in one. I must have the most incredible training system. To dig and dig and dig until I find. I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further than where the greatest left off…” – Michael Jackson – 1979.
- “…The definition of Genius is taking the complex and making it simple…” – Albert Eienstein
- “…A learned man once went to visit a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the teacher talked, the learned man frequently interrupted to express his own opinion about this or that. Finally, the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, then kept pouring until the cup overflowed. “Stop,” said the learned man. “The cup is full, no more can be poured in.” “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions,” replied the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty your cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?…” – From a Zen Master – Quoted by Bruce Lee
- Mental Toughness….the deciding factor…“…Man is a thinking reed, but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored … Perhaps this is why it is said that great poetry is born in silence. Great music and art are said to arise from the quiet depths of the unconscious, and true expressions of love are said to come from a source which lies beneath words and thoughts. So it is with the greatest efforts in sports; they come when the mind is as still as a glass lake.” – The Inner Game of Tennis – Tom Brady Inspiration
- “…The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought….Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out…Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up…” – Professor Stephen Hawking: Royal Institution in London, speaking on the eve of his 74th birthday.
- “…Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter…” Martin Luther King.
- “…The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. …” – Vince Lomabardi
- “…It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up..” – Vince Lomabardi
- “…The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender. …”– Vince Lomabardi
- “…Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. …”– Vince Lomabardi
- “…The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. …” – Vince Lomabardi
- “…Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. …”– Vince Lomabardi
- “…The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. …”– Vince Lomabardi
- “…Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. …”– Vince Lomabardi
- “…Winners never quit and quitters never win. …”– Vince Lomabardi
- “…In clutch situations, the team that loses it’s poise usually loses. Keeping your poise is a form of discipline. Discipline wins…” – Proactive Coaching
- “…We have to win Serve, Block and Defence…that is our Identity…we have to contain the opponents offence to .200…” – Coach Cook – Nebraska
- “…Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team…” – John C. Maxwell
- “…Those times you stay up late and you work hard. Those times when you don’t feel like working. You’re too tired. You don’t want to push yourself, but you do it anyway. That is actually the dream…” – Kobe Bryant
- Master Yoda: “…The greatest teacher, failure is…”
- “…An evolutionary psychologist named Peter Gray spoke on the merits of free play, where children play on their own with limited adult intervention. Play is how all mammals’ young learn. Our children need the freedom to test their limits, discover new things, figure out how to interact with others, fail and bounce back, and solve problems. Free play, in other words, is incredibly effective at developing those neural pathways and laying the foundations for the skills our children need. Limiting free play not only undercuts one of the effective ways in which children learn, but also has a negative impact on children’s well-being…” – Kick Back, Relax and Help your children develop Neural Pathways
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The Talent Whisperers – “…It’s not about recognizing talent, whatever the hell that is. I’ve never tried to go out and find someone who’s talented. First you work on fundamentals, and pretty soon you find out where things are going…” — Robert Lansdorp, tennis coach of former world number-one players Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin, and Lindsay Davenport, all of whom grew up within a few miles of each other in Los Angeles.
- “…Those who think ‘Science is Measurement’ should search Darwin’s works for numbers and equations…” ~ David H. Hubel
- “…When you measure the wrong thing, you get the wrong thing. Perhaps you can be precise in your measurement, but precision is not significance…” ~ Seth Godin
- “…I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer…” – Professor Stephen Hawking
- “…for not just telling your story once, but telling it over and over and over again until somebody pays better attention…”– Sen. Melinda Bush, State Senate Inquiry – Butler – Chicago Tribune
- “…You don’t have to be great to Start…but you have to Start, to be Great…” – Zig Ziglar
- “…Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things – the people on the edge see them first…” – Kurt Vonnegut
- “…Routine, in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition…” – W.H. Auden
- “…Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers…” – Pierre-Marc – Gaston
- “…When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be…” – Lao Tzu
- “…It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society…” – J.Krishnamurti
- In the end…winning is sleeping better…” – Jodie Foster
- “…I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering…” – Amelia Boone
- “…If you can’t fly then run, if you cant run then walk, I you cant walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward…” – Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “…If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren’t you…” – Christopher Sommer
- “…The rule is: The basics are the basics, and you can’t beat the basics…” – Charles Poliquin
- “…What you put in your mouth is a stressor, and what you say – what comes out of your mouth is a stressor…” – Charles Poliquin
- “…The most important thing I’ve learned about Nutrition is you need to deserve your carbs…to deserve post exercise , you need to be sub-10% body fat if you are a male and 15% if you are female…” – Charles Poliquin
- “..For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought….” – https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/about-the-jfk-library/kennedy-library-fast-facts/rededication-film-quote.
- “…Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do…” – Steve Jobs – US computer engineer & industrialist (1955 – 2011) ;
- “…Persistence gets you there…Consistency keeps you there…” – Annonymous
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“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”―
- “…The Goldylocks Rule: Humans experience Peak levels of motivation when they are working a task of just manageable difficulty…” – James Clear – Atomic Habits
- “…When nothing seems to help I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before…” – Jacob Riis
- “…Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect…” – Mark Twain
- “…Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination…” – Oscar Wilde, Irish Dramatist and Novelist.
- “…73…for their military exercises differ not at all from the real use of their arms, but every soldier is every day exercised, and that with great diligence, as if it were in time of war, which is the reason why they bear the fatigue of battles so easily; 74 for neither can any disorder remove them from their usual regularity, nor can fear affright them out of it, nor can labor tire them; which firmness of conduct makes them always to overcome those that have not the same firmness; 75 nor would he be mistaken that should call those their exercises unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises…” – Flavius Josephus – The Romans
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