In this blog post we review the conversation between CebAI and former Olympic coach and England Rugby's Head of Performance, Nigel Redman. Nigel explains why experience and knowledge are not enough to coach for peak performance; there is something much more important required.

“KNOWLEDGE

 CAN BE

THE BIGGEST

INHIBITOR

OF GROWTH”

Nigel reflected on his years of coaching at England Rugby, as well as with the GB Olympic swimming team at Rio and Tokyo: “Although people say knowledge is power, my experience says knowledge can be the biggest inhibitor of growth.”

It seems crazy to think that the knowledge a coach, let alone an Olympic level coach, has built up over the years could be somehow limiting.  But when an unfamiliar problem presents itself at a crucial moment, the most effective solution can be to look outside of what is already known.

“In a lot of cases, once people feel they have the answer, they stop being curious” Nigel explains.

When working with the GB Olympic swimming team, he recalled a time when an athlete swam seven seconds second slower than they had in the British trials.

The swim coach had ticked off all the standard physical coaching boxes and looked at the problem from a technical, a tactical and a physical perspective.

Nigel’s passion now is to get members of a team to see the value of the bigger picture and brainstorm outside of their usual thinking patterns. He actively works to inspire a more curious and creative approach.

Nigel noticed that the biggest barriers weren’t related to the technicalities of swimming, but to broader, all-encompassing soft skill areas like communication and mindset.

He set out to prove to his doubters that swimming expertise wasn’t the most important instrument in overcoming challenges.

Because coaches tend to rely so much on past experience and habit to inform present problem solving, new and unexpected conditions can be overwhelming. COVID became a huge barrier for many coaches and athletes. Swimming pools were shut down, and coaches complained there was no training that could be effectively achieved under this constraint.

YOU DON'T NEED TO GET WET TO GET FIT

Nigel took a different stance: “You don’t need to get wet to get fit” he told his team.

Forced to adapt to new conditions, the swimmers were encouraged to resort to running and other activities that didn’t require their usual training facilities.

For Nigel this was a victory, as he had been a proponent of athletes training outside of their sport for years prior.

He worked around the limitation to demonstrate that no water did not mean no training.

Using a creative problem solving technique called Constraint Removal, Nigel demonstrated that keeping an open mind, remaining curious to exploring other ideas, can overcome what, on the surface, seemed to be a disaster.

Watch the full discussion to find out more