Discover your coaching enneagram
Fosbury Flop Enneagram is a model of the coach psyche that tells the coaching style of a person. This consists of a spectrum where at one extreme there is John and at the other, Robez. The result is not a black or white —an exact number—, but different shades of gray: it places you closer to one extreme or the other. They are two fictional characters who represent trends, practices, fashions... in the world of training. Any relationship with real coaches has been the result of chance.
On the left side of the spectrum, there is John, a coach of various team sports. His flexible, dynamic conception of sport makes him remain skeptical, full of doubts. He treats the players like people and knows that they are capable of learning and winning without him. This has meant that his training methods and style have been adapted season after season. The non-linearity of the process keeps him always alert and makes him doubt whether what he did last season will work differently if he applies it in the present. The players are conceived as people with a very valuable source of information. The interaction, the questions... are necessary to design the best possible training. Everything depends on them and how they explore, successfully, the competitive scenarios. He, John, just helps the team; the players have the power. What makes something good or bad to him is that: whether the thing is functional (or not) in the context in which it is carried out.
On the extreme right, we have Robez, a veteran basketball coach who loves teaching birds how to fly. For him, sport is something closed, simple and predictable: that’s why he considers that he knows everything. He thinks that his players are computers that he has to code; he feels indispensable, a savior. He has had his star method of training since he was young and assumes the linearity of it: the successes of his players have been, of course, thanks to his methodology based on the behaviorism of specific instructions. Players are computers, with no voice. 80% of the training is based on repeating stereotyped performance solutions and movement templates without opposition. Whether something looks good to him or not depends on the degree of similarity of the movement in question with the models —technical or tactical— that he has well stored in his mind.
Next, you have the Fosbury Flop Enneagram. You have two ways to do it:
Doing nothing and staying on the same page you are on. You’ll need a piece of paper or good memory. Just scroll down a bit.
Click the following link: Fosbury Flop Enneagram. It will take you to the Replit website and show you the questions and your result automatically. Access it with 3 very simple steps: click Fork & Run, register and click, again, the green Run button. The test will appear on the right side of your screen. Simple... but functional.
Choose the answer that best represents you
If you have a hard time choosing in a specific question, you can select both options. Take a piece of paper and write down your choices. It will help you with the count and the final result.
Who gives the best instructions?
a. Me, the coach.
b. The game.
How do you prefer to give feedback: ordering or asking?
a. Can feedback be given in the form of a question? What the hell I have to ask the student if I am the one who knows? The player needs that I order him directly.
b. I didn’t know that feedback can be given in other ways than with a question and without telling them the answer or what they should do.
Technique is:
a. The foundations, the cause... of perfomance.
b. The consequence of adapting to the game.
The coaches are responsible for creating stimuli that our players must adapt to. These stimuli:
a. Must be real to be transferable to the game. No variability, nothing far away from the game models.
b. Do not have to be real to be transferable. Variability: if it’s not variable or creative I don’t want it.
If the best sprinter in the world does a new exercise in the gym:
a. Let’s copy it. If the best one does it, it will be for some reason.
b. Before I change anything, I’ll ask him why he’s doing this new exercise.
What is your vision of the learning process?
a. The player doesn’t know. I, the coach, do and I am obliged to teach the player what is right and wrong and how to achieve the first.
b. Learning begins when teaching stops.
Is it possible that if the essence of the game is respected, the functional movements —“technique”— emerge without needing to be taught?
a. What? In layman’s terms, please.
b. Yes, my lord!
What role have mental earthquakes played (they destroyed your models, beliefs... and you had to rebuild new and better ones) in your coaching life?
a. I’ve never had that. I didn’t even think about changing my mind. I am faithful to ideals: I have never changed.
b. They have changed my life. I have one of them every 43 minutes when I read on Twitter the latest tweets of my favorite ecological dynamics disseminators.
What waters do you swim in?
a. In the reductionist sea.
b. In the holistic ocean.
Do you think that the exploration of different contexts, the variability in game situations... is necessary to improve?
a. Explore? We are not discovering America.
b. Fight to the death with the constraint to afford, to explore.
Direct instructions, orders... cause:
a. The learning of the player.
b. The dependence —towards the coach— of the player.
What do you think of drills where the player knows what to do and how to succeed —in short, a synchronized swimming drill?
a. When I know what’s going to happen, I feel good. The illusion of control, of professionalism makes me horny.
b. I don’t want anything in my training that doesn’t resemble chaos. I panic at directly ordering what the players should do.
Technique must satisfy:
a. The form.
b. The function.
What is your reference book?
a. The tactical periodization of Vitor Frade and the book that, in the future, will be published by Pep Segura.
b. Choosing between The co-ordination and regulation of movements of Nikolai Bernstein and Antifragile of NNTaleb is more difficult than intervening in an exercise to not interrupt the spontaneous self-organizing process of creating synergies.
One sees in the world what is in one’s heart?
a. Huh?
b. Yes! Affordances!
If somebody asks you: “Ok, but now tell me which coach has won with a Complex Systems Approach or Ecological Dynamics Methodology?” What do you answer?
a. You don’t answer anything, because you’re the guy asking the question.
b. You say that complex systems, ecologial dynamics… is not a methodology or a recipe, but a way of seeing the world.
What do you think about instructions?
a. If you give me a speaker to keep saying what the players have to do in every action, things would be easy for me.
b. Schöllhorn and the membership of the CLA Coaching Club forbids me to give orders. I let the players express themselves.
What gets measured, gets managed?
a. Yes, if I can’t quantify it in my Excel, we can’t improve it.
b. How do we improve what we can’t measure? There is life far beyond Chronojump, WIMUs and accelerometers.
What do you think of the bridge between training and science?
a. I haven’t re-read a scientific document since first grade. I learned from what the most veteran coach of the club who was always in the pavilion told me. Science is all very well... but it doesn’t tell me what to do.
b. I do not consider other ways of learning other than with a scientific article, in a podcast by Andrew Huberman or in a book of Rob Gray.
How does the athlete’s behavior appears?
a. Through the coach’s orders and the solutions one has stored in his head.
b. Depending on who one is and how one relates to the environment in which one is.
What do you do if your basketball player shoots badly?
a. You start to analyze the angles of the proximal interphalangeal joint of the 4th finger of the non-dominant hand at the moment just before receiving the pass prior to the shot. If we change it to 1.34º it will be an infallible shooter.
b. Wake up that basketball is learned by playing. A defender in front and start shooting. One is able to learn without my intervention. Trying to fix it can end up causing more damage.
How would you rate your level of insecurity about what you do and how you think on a day-to-day basis?
a. I do not consider that there are other ways of doing things well. I have the truth and I can give the ID card of the Truth Club to the coaches I think. If something goes wrong, the players are blamed.
b. I doubt whether I am doing things right at every moment, if there is a better way to do things.
Your players, in most cases, have learned:
a. Thanks to the intervention of coach.
b. Despite the intervention of coach.
What situation defines you more as a coach?
a. The only difference between you and a coach from 40 years ago is that you say the key game concepts in a modern way (or in English if you are not an English speaker: like hand-off, pick and roll…).
b. You think that the words constraints, self-organization, emergence... are used by all the people in the world in, as a minimum, one of the 3 daily meals.
Can changing beliefs change performance?
a. Yes, if the player stops believing in his parents and starts believing in me, the coach.
b. Yes, beliefs cause a cascade of effects that are reflected in actions.
Is creativity necessary to achieve a high level of performance?
a. Creativity is for those who make paintings.
b. Yes, as long as it is as creative as it is useful.
If a player makes a lot of baskets, can his shooting technique be bad?
a. Yes, it could be that he makes a lot baskets with a very bad technique.
b. No. Never. If he makes lots of baskets, the technique is very good.
During the timeout of a basketball game, which situation represents you the most?
a. Today your partner doesn’t receive your accumulated life frustration but the 5 players who just lost a ball and received a basketball alone on the fastbreak do in the form of screams.
b. You wait for the smartest guy on the team to ask a question to give him the board in Steve Kerr style and call the photographer to capture the sport coaching moment of the century so you can show off on Instagram.
What role does the gym play in your methodology?
a. The Deep Squat and Nordic Hamstrings are the key to being injury free. Amen to everything AntiCulturista says.
b. We don’t do anything off the court and without the ball.
What determines the value of the coach?
a. The trophies.
b. The transfer of what he teaches, his behavior.
The result
The result is in the form of a percentage and tells you which end of the spectrum you are closer to: John or Robez.
If you have opted for the Fosbury Flop Enneagram digital version, you will have the result automatically.
If you wrote it down on paper, add 1 point for each answer you marked A or B; if you marked both in one, add 0.5 instead of 1. Divide your score by 30 and then multiply by 100. That is = [(Your score / 30) * 100]
If you have had more responses A, the percentage obtained tells you how much you are close to Robez —and far from John. If you had more B answers, the opposite: you are —the percentage obtained— closer to John’s end.
Once you have the result, if you are more than 90% close to a specific extreme, I invite you to rethink your beliefs, to question something. They say extremes are not good, they say...
Bruno Oro said that there is a proverb that says: “When we laugh we are close to the gods.” I —like Bruno— do not believe in gods but I do believe in laugh, which prolongs life. This test has no reliability whatsoever and is the closest thing to pseudoscience ever published on Fosbury Flop. I hope you had a good time and learned, even just a little, to laugh at yourself.
“First, learn to laugh at yourself, and it will be easy for you to crack up at everything.”
—Albert Pla
Martí Cañellas | Fosbury Flop
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