Disciplining athletes

The Joongang online had an article recently about problems with sports coaching in Korea. There is still a lot of 'old school' coaching in Korea where training resembles military bootcamp (and yes, I do mean Korean military). The article describes coaches using physical punishment on their athletes. I think this kind of punishment starts with extended periods of duckwalking (waddling around in a deep squat) and continues to coaches who "punched and kicked their athletes for no other reason than losing a match to others."

Before I get into my thoughts on sports training, I was amused/horrified by the report of the Korea Skating Union. Parents were upset that the coach hired used violence but also that he fabricated competition results. Violence could be a relative term but changing the results is fraud and only a country that recommends taxing bribes would allow such an appointment.

I wrote above that violence was relative. I want to be clear that I don't accept coaches punching or kicking their athletes but my taekwondo instructor used duckwalking as a training exercise (or so he said, maybe I was just gullible and he was having fun with the foreign class). Intense physical training feels a lot like punishment sometimes. I remember waking up in the middle of the night when I was a speed swimmer, afraid of the amount of butterfly I might have to do the next morning.

Of course, using swimming as a punishment for swimmers is counter-intuitive. Unruly swimmers were a challenge for me to deal with as a coach because I couldn't bring myself to think of giving them extra swimming as a kind of punishment. Making athletes do more exercise really doesn't seem to me to be that much of a punishment. I ended up kicking (no, not literally, this post is about my humane methods of coaching) them out of the practice. If they truly loved swimming, not being able to swim was the best response I could think of and if they didn't like swimming, then we were both happy they were gone.

What I really want to learn about Korean sports training is how their theory of stretching works. In Canada and, I think, the US, long (30 second) static (not bouncing) stretches are encouraged and short, bouncing stretching is considered a way to tear muscle. We are taught to stretch to the point of discomfort and hold that pose for half a minute. Koreans are taught to stretch to the point of extreme pain and to bounce their stretches (usually on the even numbers, counting "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,2,2,3,4,5,6,7,8"). Canadians are taught that feeling extreme pain means we are damaging the muscle and it will, in fact, shorten: exactly the opposite result of what we want.

Please, if you have comments of stretching or other aspects of Korean sports training, leave a comment.