S03E31 COMPARING TEACHING SURGERY TO CROSSFIT COACHING

How can teaching surgery possibly be related to CrossFit coaching? If you have never been athletic or a coach before, then drawing on your experience teaching surgery can result in some interesting comparisons to the challenges of coaching CrossFit athletes.

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bS03E31 COMPARING TEACHING SURGERY VERSUS CROSSFIT COACHING

[00:00:00] This podcast episode is about comparing teaching surgery to coaching CrossFit. Now, I know this sounds a little facetious but I do feel that there are some valid comparisons and some interesting comparisons between the two. When I was working at Cornell and at academic institutions before that for about five or six years, I was lecturing to medical students. And I took residents through a number of cases.

It's been a couple years now that I've been coaching CrossFit. I got my L1 about three, four years ago and I just got my L2 certification last year. I've started coaching more classes, and it's been a challenge. I think any new skill set that you learn as an adult, it takes time.

The other thing is, is I come from a different perspective. I was never a good athlete. The most athletic thing I did was become varsity swim team manager in high school. And the most coaching experience I've ever had was coaching my son's five year old soccer team.

One of the things that we do when we're learning something new, is to leverage our previous experience into whatever it is that we're learning now and that's the advantage of being older, is that maybe you don't pick up on certain skills as quickly, but you also have some experience that you can draw on that can help you navigate a little bit faster.

One of the first things I did when I first started coaching CrossFit was I coached a lot of beginner classes, and the beginner classes were basically on ramp classes for athletes who had never done CrossFit, many of them had never picked up a barbell or really engaged in any sort of organized fitness.

That's where I started when I did CrossFit, I had never picked up a barbell before except maybe bench press at the local New York Sports Club. And maybe I ran on a treadmill for a while. And so it's definitely a challenge as a coach to take athletes from the very beginning and teach them Olympic lifting, gymnastics, plyometrics, and many of them are learning how to really move their bodies in an athletic fashion for the first time.

And some of that is like teaching medical students the very fundamentals as well, such as suturing, tying knots, and then for junior residents, like interns, it might be learning how to assist, retracting, and basically know how to navigate the OR.

And both those activities are very fun. It's exciting to teach beginners when they're learning new skills, to see them develop quickly, to progress.

They get excited with every new achievement, and I love that. That was great both for teaching surgery as well as coaching CrossFit.

When you start coaching more advanced athletes, you obviously move beyond the basics, such as a clean and jerk, or how to do a wall ball properly, or a thruster. Some of it might be more advanced movements like double unders or handstand pushups or bar muscle ups, and it's similar to when you're taking a mid-level or a more senior resident through cases in the sense that you assume they have all the fundamentals and they're moving on to something that's more challenging. Some of the skills surgically that you need as a more senior resident does depend on what you've learned in your fundamentals, but it also depends on your own dexterity surgical sense, and surgical skill.

And I guess that's similar to how some athletes work in terms of learning some of these higher level skills as well. Some people take very naturally to bar muscle ups and to gymnastics skills, and maybe they've learned it before. Maybe they just have a really good sense of kinesthetics and body awareness.

And it's the same with some surgical residents. Some surgical residents pick up advanced level skills. They're really good at and facile at doing more complicated operations or they just have a better sense of operating and the naturals, the ones where it comes very easy to them.

It's just as easy to coach on the CrossFit side as it is to teach them on the surgical side. So having someone who already knows intrinsically a lot of these skills, they don't require a lot of teaching, and that's always a joy, both on the surgical side as well as on the CrossFit coaching side.

I think one of the differences that I've learned coaching CrossFit versus teaching residents is that I've needed a lot of patience and maybe because I'm older, but I just have more patience now. Or maybe the stakes are a little lower. I'm not sure. When I was a resident, let's just say the feedback was very, very direct in terms of when I was doing okay or when I was not doing okay. And while I don't think I really yelled at residents when I was teaching so much, I could certainly be very impatient sometimes or maybe not so polite.

But that's not something that has ever translated over to my CrossFit coaching.

The other thing is, is that when you're teaching higher level residents, they basically want to do the case. For example, if you're taking a resident through an orbital floor fracture, which is an eye socket fracture or any other procedure, you're basically allowing them to do as much of the procedure as you feel comfortable,

And at the moment where I felt like I didn't know what they were doing, or I didn't think they were doing the right thing, I would stop them and then I would basically take over the case at that point.

On an athlete's side, it's been a challenge for me to be more involved in their coaching. I think one of the things that I've constantly struggled with is identifying flaws in athlete's movements, proposing corrections or identifying how I might be able to suggest corrections to that athlete. The L2 course was really helpful, but it just takes a lot of repetition and exposure and, and practice to see athletes.

The other thing is, is that I tend to talk a lot in class, and I think some of that is just because again, I wasn't an athlete, I wasn't a coach. I was a lecturer, and so I tend to talk a lot about the stimulus or the background or why we are doing a particular workout or how this can help us and I got that feedback in my L2 as well.

And I'm trying to work on keeping my cues shorter, trying to be more visual, and use other cues for teaching, not just talking all the time.

I think one of the challenges that a lot of CrossFit coaches, including me have is figuring out when to institute those corrections. When we learn how to coach from the L1 and the L2, they're very quick and direct about telling people how to correct certain issues.

Stand up straighter, move the barbell this way, move your butt a little bit lower here. Lock out your elbows a little bit more. But when I see athletes on a day-to-day basis, many of them have been moving in a particular way for a really long time. And I think the challenge for me has been first of all identify if this is something consistent with that athlete that's happening a lot.

And two, before I just sit there and tell them, okay, squat deeper, maybe try to understand, is there a particular reason why they're not squatting deep enough? Maybe they're limited in their mobility. Maybe it doesn't feel good. Maybe they don't have the body awareness and kinesthetics to realize that their squat is not deep enough.

And so one of the things I've been working on is observing, trying to pick up and identify issues, which is always a challenge, but then also figuring out when the right time is to suggest or to help athletes make corrections if, if need be. And sometimes they're very minor, and I know we should be fixing everything, but but I also wanna make sure that I'm not nitpicking.

And so there's a balance there that I'm still learning and navigating as a CrossFit coach.

I think one of the biggest things now probably in teaching surgery as well as coaching CrossFit, is that there are just so many more resources available, which is fantastic. I literally have tons of journal articles online, which I can read from CrossFit. I have tons of podcasts which talk about coaching and how to assist coaches.

And probably similarly in terms of teaching surgery. Certainly when I was a resident, we didn't have videos of operations or really much else other than a couple dry textbooks, which were sometimes right or sometimes really wrong in terms of describing how operations went.

One of the challenges, both for teaching surgery for me back then, as well as now coaching CrossFit is not being lazy as a teacher. When you're teaching surgery, it's easy to just utilize the residents as worker bees and have them help you with the case, there's often a lot of suturing and closing and a lot of manual labor that is needed for certain types of operations, like back in the day when we did breast reductions, we had four people helping to close up a case because there was just so much suturing that was involved.

But a lot of the resident education wasn't really about the mechanical work that was done in the operating room. It was really about patient management.

Which patients should you be operating on? What operations should you be choosing for a particular situation? And that decision making process, evaluation of patients, that was really where residents learned how to become independent thinkers and surgeons and many times in residency programs and where I was, we probably didn't do enough of that type of training, because it was difficult. It was difficult to bring residents into that situation and have them make those decisions. It was just much easier to have them in the operating room and work on very specific tasks.

As a CrossFit coach, it's relatively easy, to make sure that I have the music, that I keep the time for the hour, that I just make sure that I run through a warmup and don't look critically at my athletes trying to find points of performance where I think I can help them.

And not all of the workouts really lend themselves to that. You know, if you're just doing burpees and pushups, okay, it's sometimes difficult, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to help figure out some of these specific issues as opposed to just, as they might say in basketball, just roll out the ball and let them play.

And I know sometimes the athletes, especially early in the morning, they don't wanna necessarily hear that their hips are muted and that they need to lock out their elbows. But I do feel like as it is an obligation as a coach to really try to do these things, just like it was as a surgical attending, and it's tempting not to necessarily make that extra effort to do that. And I think that that is the same in CrossFit coaching.

One of the things I do now for CrossFit coaching, which I've done always for surgery, is create lesson plans and checklists. We do that in surgery all the time. I remember taking tons of notes and a lot of that has to do with how prepared you feel with a particular situation. So in surgery when I was first learning, I would take copious notes. I would prepare as much as I possibly could for any type of procedure maybe that I wasn't so familiar with or good with.

And that preparation made up for my lack of experience sometimes. And then as you got more experience with something you felt like you didn't necessarily need that.

I still feel as a CrossFit coach, I need that preparation. So oftentimes I will be doing the workout beforehand. What I will do always is, and I've done this for every class I've ever coached, is make up a lesson plan, a written lesson plan, which has my warmup, which has my thoughts about the workout. Whatever points of performance, I feel like I can try to coach during that class or, or look for.

I still do that. It still makes me feel comfortable. For me to organize my thoughts, I will still generate that lesson plan. I probably will do it for a really long time because I don't know when I might ever get to the point where I could coach at a CrossFit class and not have to worry about prep in that way.

I like seeing if I can help athletes move better, improve their performance, be safer, especially in CrossFit where there's so much intensity and sometimes you have to remind athletes of what to be mindful for.

And then the same thing with residents. You want them to be safe surgeons, thoughtful surgeons and surgeons that can really help their patients. So there are definitely similarities, some differences. I like looking at what I've done in the past and then applying that to the new challenge that I have now.

If you have any thoughts, feedback, please let me know. DM me @BotoxandBurpeesPodcast on Instagram, or check out my practice website, bergencosmetic.com.

Thanks a lot.