Episode 7 - Improvement and Proficiency: Can You Have Both? - a podcast by Charles J. Infurna, EdD

What’s the Difference?

If you’ve attended enough track meets in your career much like I have, you may have heard coaches and athletes or coaches and coaches discussing the topic of improvement and proficiency.  I overheard the conversation take place at the lone indoor meet we had.  The conversation wasn’t between coach and athlete, but rather between two coaches from two different teams.  To paraphrase, the conversation went something like this:

Coach 1:  This is our only indoor meet of the year.  I was hoping our athletes would have consistent performances in their events.

Coach 2:  Yeah, I was hoping our athletes would have improved their times from last week.

Coach 1:  How many meets have you had?

Coach 2:  This is our 3rd meet of the year.  With such a short season, I was hoping our athletes would make significant improvements in their main events from week to week.

Coach 1:  We wanted to have more consistent performances.

This conversation may sound far-fetched, but I’ve heard stuff like this a lot.  More often I’ve heard this conversation take place at either indoor or outdoor nationals.  The end goal there is to have a performance that is good enough to win, earn All-American status, and make the finals.  Not necessarily to have the best-looking technique or form.

So, what’s the difference?

Webster’s dictionary defines ‘improvement’ as the process of improving, having a performance that was better than your previous outcome.  ‘Proficiency’ is defined as the advancement in knowledge or a skill.  For this blog post, we want to improve upon our distance, height, or time from week to week.  We may not always set a personal best, but we want to improve upon those factors.  In the same sense, we want our technique to “look” better or become more “efficient”, thus removing some technical errors that may have existed in the past.  Essentially, we want our physical form to look better.  But an improvement in physical form may not necessarily equate to a better performance.  I use both terms quite often in practice.  Our goal there (in practice) is to improve our proficiency (technical form) because in the long-run better technique in the circle will in fact cause our distances (performances) to improve.  Does that make sense?

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