Performance fundamentalists

A busy week for us at K2, hence the lack of missives. Back to it though.

We were thinking about the fundamental things that underpin performance this week and as any good student will tell you (!), the first thing to do when thinking about something is to look it up in the dictionary and provide the definition verbatim! So, here you are:

fundamental
• adjective of or serving as a foundation or core; of central importance.
• noun a central or primary rule or principle.

Having thought about that it seemed to us that a lot of the time, when it comes to performance, people forget about fundamentals, or they don’t keep remembering them! They presume because they’ve built the foundation or core once, that they don’t have to worry about the obvious things any more. It sometimes seems trivial to go back to work on things that have been put in place long ago, when there’s much more sophisticated things to be thinking about and getting better at.

From our work within elite sport, we see that there’s an explicit and continual balancing of maintaining and improving fundamentals along with developing high end abilities. There is a constant paranoia that the fundamental skills or tactics could be better, upon which the performance is founded. Is your performance foundation getting ever stronger because you’re constantly improving the fundamentals, or is your performance structure getting ever higher with new abilities, but the foundation is being neglected in search of new heights? Any other thoughts on performance fundamentalism? (Check out what we’ve written about simplicity in our thoughts too)