Yesterday while listening to a module of the coaching program I’m in—yes, coaches need coaching too—I was once again reacquainted with John Wooden’s story.
I’m not much of a basketball fan, so I don’t consciously remember having heard of him prior to participating in this program, which references him numerous times. If you’re in the same boat, here’s the 10,000-ft overview plus how you can apply his approach to improving your health and fitness.
John Wooden: head coach
Wooden was a collegiate and professional basketball player in the 1930s and coach of the UCLA Bruins from 1948-1975. He was rather successful during his playing career, but his coaching career with UCLA was even more remarkable.
While he had a fair amount of success with UCLA from the start, winning the conference championship four times in a row with a previously mediocre team and placing first, second, or third in the conference for the subsequent eleven seasons, winning at the national level eluded Wooden and the Bruins for 15 years.
During that time, Wooden continued to improve his coaching and the Bruins strategies, and a critical point was reached in his 16th year as head coach. In that and the following eleven seasons, the Bruins won the national championship ten times, including seven championships in a row and an 88-game winning streak across multiple seasons.
Obviously numerous factors contributed to this high degree of success, but there’s one particularly interesting side story that occurred during this time.
Every season before the first practice, Wooden would teach (or remind) the players he coached how to perform one seemingly insignificant yet very important task: how to put on their socks.
Now that probably sounds more than a little bit elementary, especially considering the caliber of D1 players that made up the team, including Lew Alcindor (who you might be more familiar with after his name change to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the ’66-’69 seasons.
But as Wooden would point out:
If you don’t put on your socks the right way, you might get a blister. (Remember that this was the mid-1900s, and socks and shoes were somewhat less “cushy” than they are now.)
If you get a blister, then you’ll either miss practice or, at least, practice at less than your full capacity.
If you miss practice, you’ll lose ground against your opponents.
And if you lose ground against your opponents, then you might not win the championship.
So while numerous factors are important and necessary to win a championship—or to achieve success in fitness or life (the latter being a topic that Wooden emphasized to his players)—you simply cannot neglect dedicating the appropriate amount of attention to how you do the little things.
Like putting on your socks.
How this applies to fitness
I want to make two main points here:
First, as you might have already realized, “putting on socks the right way” could be compared to any of the mundane actions that promote better health & fitness: getting enough sleep, drinking water, exercising, and eating high-quality, real food.
All that stuff is pretty boring. But it’s all also necessary to experience results. Not only that, the more we recognize the importance of the mundane, the more we’ll also appreciate the “cooler, more fun stuff” we get to do as opposed to have to do.
Like doing curls in the squat rack. (Kidding. But you get my point. 😉)
Second, it took Wooden 15 years—read that again, 15 years(!)—of learning, practicing, and improving upon both the small and the big things before he and his teams achieved success at the national level. But when they found the right combination of actions and skills and consistently practiced them with precision, they became almost unstoppable.
There are two takeaways from that idea that can be applied to fitness (or anything, for that matter):
First, doing the right things consistently is important. (Hint: some of the “right things” related to fitness are listed above.) Those things don’t need to be done correctly (i.e. perfectly) when we first start, but they do need to be iterated and improved upon as we screw up and learn.
Second, it takes time to accomplish major goals or milestones. We should certainly experience and celebrate small wins along the way. But if (when) we get discouraged that progress isn’t happening as fast as preferred, we need to remember that the only way we can influence the outcome is by focusing on the process.
And that includes the tiny things as well as the big ones.
Putting it into practice
What “putting on your socks” practice have you been giving too little attention lately?
Is it your sleep? Nutrition? Effort at the gym? Going to the gym (be that an actual gym, your basement, or anywhere outside)? Recovery?
Why have you been neglecting it? Is there a way that you can get even 1% better today?
If so, then get to it! It may not produce noticeable results tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. But like Wooden’s winning seasons, it will eventually.
And eventually is always better the never.