Over 100 years ago, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto introduced an economic theory of “predictable imbalance” that crops up throughout our lives. As an example, in business 20 % of products account for 80 % of sales and profits, and similarly 20 % of customers account for 80% of revenues.
Years ago, when owning my own business, I was introduced to the concept that 20% of sales people accounted for 80% of the sales. While not familiar with Pareto, and the “predictable imbalance” in sales, it was predictable!
Rich Koch, updated the theory to encompass all aspects of our lives in his 1998 provocative and powerful book, The 80/20 Principle, The Secret of Achieving More With Less.
So what does that mean to athletes, athletic trainers and coaches, determining their training programs and game plans? Write everything down that your believe to be important in training, training your athletes and planning an offense or defense game strategy. Once the list has been made, identify the 20% of activities and strategies that you consider “essential” to your efficiency, productivity, and critical for positive results. Then focus all your time on those 20%.
For the remaining 80%, determine if their is a small fraction of those activities or strategies that are useful in “supporting” the essential 20%. For the remaining “important items”, dump them! They will be either irrelevant, counter productive and potentially harmful to a achieving success, a positive outcome. You will be wasting your time!
Think about it! We will be visiting this “theory” often when considering the most effective and productive methods and techniques on training athletes to become faster, quicker, stronger and more flexible.
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