You’re going to work harder here than you’ve ever worked anywhere else. And the only thing I ask from you is ganas.
Jaime Escalante
Stand and Deliver (1988)
The Ganas Factor in Youth Athletic Development
We have all seen it. The natural athlete who at an early age dominates their peers but as time goes on ends up being just a run of the mill competitor, usually peaking in middle or high school. These young athletes, born with the building blocks of greatness, never turn their potential in to actuality. Why is this. Many times it’s because no one has ever worked to develop their “Ganas Factor”.
What is the Ganas Factor?
The Ganas Factor gets its name from the Spanish root of Ganar, which means to win and achieve. The plural of the noun form, Ganas was popularized by the movie Stand and Deliver, which told the story of Jamie Escalante, a Los Angles teacher who through teaching ganas was successful at turning kids who had had been written off into academic champions. Ganas is much more that simply winning. Ganas is about desire.
Ganas is the desire to win and achieve trough extraordinary effort.
Ganas Factor = Desire + Effort
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received in sports, really in life, was the adage that “there is always someone out there who is bigger, stronger, faster and smarter than you but there should never be anyone working harder than you”.
The message, at the most basic level, is that while you can’t control your genetics you can control the effort.
It is no secret that the most successful athletes across all sports work incredibly hard to preform at the elite level. A quick internet search for hard working athletes will bring you hundreds of examples of the extreme work ethic and ganas of champions. Many coaches assume that an athlete either has that focus or does not, as if the often used trope of “killer mindset” is a hard coded binary switch. They are wrong. Ganas, that extreme desire to put in the effort to be successful, can be learned.
Training for Ganas
But how do we train desire and effort?
Developing an athlete’s ganas factor requires practice, the same as any skill. Effort and desire are habits which are not always innate, athletes must be taught and allowed to develop these habits.
The first critical point is to change your coaching.
When training young athletes it is vital to focus your encouragement and critique on effort. Instead of saying “the last lap around the track was 30 seconds too slow” focus on effort by saying “you seemed to not be pushing yourself that last lap, what going on?”. Asking the athlete to think about their effort and reflect on why, which allows that athlete to move toward learning to work at maximum capacity.
When the athlete preforms well acknowledge the great performance but emphasize the effort, for example “I’m so proud that you won the race, you have worked really hard to get that fast”.
If you as the coach consistently approach peak athletic performance as not just physical performance but an equation of winning = physical performance + effort + desire, then your athletes will consistently frame their athletic performance with the same equation.
The second critical point is to train the effort factor as part of training.
In the young athlete (ages 4-12) this training comes primarily from the positive feedback loop of encouraging effort as the standard of performance. With these young athletes we are simply training them to recognize the effort factor as being distinct from the physical performance factor.
A couple of ways we can do this:
- Introduce the concept through stories and role models. As mentioned above, there is no shortage of examples of professional athletes displaying the effort factor. That factor is most likely why they are professional athletes in the first place. Each practice share with your athletes the story of a role model athlete and focus the story on that athlete’s ganas factor. Have your young athletes understand that their favorite athletes are successful do to effort and desire.
- Reward effort and desire over athletic performance. Place the emphasis on the effort put into a practice session or event. This does not mean not praising if the athlete wins or does physically well, instead provide acknowledgement of the win and provide feedback on the effort/desire. In practice sessions place the highest praises and rewards when the athlete shows effort and desire. In group sessions, positively call out and identify the athletes who are working harder than their peers.
- Do not tolerate “Giving Up”. Quitting during a practice or athletic event should never be tolerated. To many coaches today tolerate the “I don’t feel like doing this today” excuse. Instead, as coaches you must be firm and demand the young athlete not give up. Do not give them an out. Let the athlete know that they can finish and reward the athlete when they keep going.
In the older youth athlete (ages 13-18) training and development comes from placing the athlete in progressively challenging test environments the push the boundaries of their athletic performance. This is not placing the athlete in Kobayashi Maru no win situations but instead athletic test that are only winnable with a combination of their athletic ability and effort.
This distinction is important, when training young athletes, we are not trying to “wash them out” in a Navy Seal style hell week. The goal is to train the effort/desire factor just as we train the muscles, by using progressive overload.
A couple of ideas for training older youth athletes:
- Train in the athletic performance frontier by utilizing analytics. At this age, coaches should be using analytical metrics with all their athletes. If we have a baseline of athletic performance then we can test and train in the upper bounds of that baseline. Training in the upper bounds requires effort and desire. If we set at least one practice session a week where the athlete will have to preform sustained upper bound performance, we can train effort and desire along with physical ability. This upper bound performance must be driven by metrics and analytics, this is not simply “having a hard practice”. For instance, say we are using the one mile run as our athletic benchmark. If we are doing analytical training correctly ie logging and collecting all training and event data, we can easily calculate a mean (average mile time for the athlete), max mile time (individual athletes PR). We can then measure effort by plotting performance using the calculated distribution mean/PR.
- Guided visualization exercises. These guided sessions should focus on achievement through effort and desire. Visualization is a proven tool for athletic performance. By focusing on ganas – effort + desire and walking the athlete through how ganas can translate to peak performance we can train the mind to have the framework needed to implement in actual training / competition.
Champions are created. Winning = physical performance + effort + desire
The Bottom Line: Developing an athlete’s ganas factor requires practice. Effort and desire must be taught and trained.
