The Journey to Level 2

It is almost exactly two years since I did my Level 1 tennis coaching course. If I decide to do my Level 3 in two more years, I'll be nearly 60 when I do it!! Anyway, let's get level 2 out the way first before even thinking about putting myself through yet another series of weekends and paperwork.

I must say, the level 2 course is more interesting than the level 1 course was, at least for me. Although I love the work I do with the small group of kids on a sunday morning, the level 1 course was heavily focussed on mini-tennis and games and not too much coaching. Understandable given the remit of a level 1 assistant.

The level 2 course dives almost straight in to technical stuff about stance (open, semi-open, closed), grip (Eastern, semi-Western, Western) and whole lot of other stuff. The brain gets a good work out just trying to remember them let alone actually being able to spot which grip a player is actually using. Then there's all the stuff about progressions and type of shot (apparently there are six), footwork , bodywork and racket work. A lot to think about.

Having said that, there were several things that I can't wait to try with my little group. One of the really helpful things was talking through the process of stripping back a shot to the basics. You forget as a player how difficult it is as a beginner to get in the right position to hit the shot correctly. Actually hitting the shot correctly is hard enough, let alone having to run after the thing!

We also had an interesting discussion about what you would change and what you would leave alone. Obviously if someone comes to you as a complete beginner then you would start them off in a conventional pattern for their strokes. But even when you do that people change as they develop. You might correct bad habits that are going to prevent them from improving, but you might not coach something out of them just to make their game prettier. Take for example someone who finds hitting forehands with both left and right hands and not hitting a backhand at all. You would say to them that they must develop a backhand because that's what "proper" tennis players do. I had one kid the other day who hit right-handed until he served when he turned round and served left-handed. He felt more comfortable tossing the ball with his right hand. Because it was only the second time he'd been on the court I did get his to try right-handed, but if he continued to struggle and if he could actually serve okay left-handed, they why would I coach his not to do that. After all, he might just decide to give up tennis instead of pressing on and getting better.

Anyway, I've now got a whole pile of paperwork to do before our next weekend on the course and then more after that before our final assessment. Not my favourite part, but it has to be done.

Another training course!

So today I started my Level 2 tennis coaching course. I sometimes wonder about my sanity! Every time I embark on a new course I wonder why I do it. I hear myself saying I'm too old, it's too stressful, I don't like having to role play or pretend I'm a personality type that I'm not. I find being assessed incredibly stressful. Put me on a court with a group of beginners and no-one looking over my shoulder and I'm okay. Even Anne was impressed with the way I get the moving and hitting balls. But put me on a court with an assessor looking over my shoulder and I melt!

And yet I still do it. I've done more courses with practical assessments in the last three years than I ever done in my life! First Aid, coaching, Personal Training, and of course the Sports and Remedial Massage qualification.

Each time I have to gear myself up to get through it all. The paperwork looks daunting and the assignments seem to be the best way to empty my mind of anything useful in double quick time.

Hopefully, in a month's time, I will have finished this course and got my level 2. But then you start thinking about the next level or the next skill. I'm not sure I will go beyond level 2, but I may need to in order to do what I want to do in building community tennis programmes. At least I have the argument that I've not reached a higher enough rating to qualify for level 3, but there's a way round that called the play test, so I may have no excuse!

So I better knuckle down and do my paperwork, sort out the appropriate answers and just get on with it. I've already learnt some useful things today, I just hope my brain is able to store and retrieve them over them next few weeks when I need them.

First Aid Training

I've just posted something about First Aid training on my other, work-related blog In2Motion. If you want to read it you can find it here.

I spent the weekend doing a two-day pitch-side sports first aid course and it was exhausting but so worthwhile. I won't go into detail here, you can read my thoughts and rave review of ReactFirst in the other post.

I spent the better part of my life avoiding First Aid training. I really don't like role play, and role play is really the only way to learn to do FA. I also don't like getting things wrong, especially in front of other people, and you make a lot of mistakes on a FA course and everyone gets to see them! Imagine my horror then when the trainer puts a scoring system up n the board and tells you pretend casualty to score your treatment.

First time around everyone is so nice and scores you pretty highly until the trainer asks a question and you realise you missed a vital step that falls into the "lethal" category and you score goes from a generous 4 (very good) to a 0 (lethal)! Even at the end of the course, having worked to burn the process into you memory, you might still score 1 or 2 because of something that needs work.

So it's tough, as it ought to be. After all we're talking about basic life saving protocols, not putting a plaster on a paper cut. But the skills are so important, and ! have to say that although I still hate role play with every fibre of my being, I will probably continue to do these courses because I keep learning so much and somewhere there's someone who one day will be grateful for what I've learnt. There might already be that someone, I found him on a train unconscious and slumped in his seat.

Kinesio Tape

On Tuesday I drove through rain and heavy traffic to attend a one-day workshop on k-tape applications. We covered about 17 different applications from achilles and plantar fasciitis to shoulders and lateral epicondylitis. Lots to take in, as is typical I guess of these things, and it was really about seeing the range of applications and getting the opportunity to try them out rather than trying to commit them all to memory.

The basic principle was to either preload the target muscle or tissue and then apply the tape with little or no stretch, or to stretch the tape. The tape can be stretched to between 0 and 100% of its capacity and the trick is to make sure the end is anchored before you stretch other wise it peels straight off! 

There are lots of videos on Youtube and elsewhere showing different applications and I guess you can get quite a long way just watching them, but there's really no substitute for working with an experienced practitioner.

So, all I need now are a few guinea pigs with issues that might benefit from taping to see if it works. 

My one-day course was run by John Gibbons and you can find details of future courses on his website.

Another day, another course!

I really don't know where all this retraining will ultimately lead in terms of work and ministry, but I'm trying to develop a fairly wide portfolio approach to it all. Whether I'll achieve it all, I don't know, but the plan is simple: Do something useful with my life!

Now I'm not suggesting that ministry was anything less than useful, and as I keep saying I'm not done with ministry as far as I know. That of course, is in God's hands not mine. I've never assumed that it has ever been mine to take up and lay down as I please. Heb.7:17 has always been a significant verse for me:


For it is declared:
   “You are a priest forever, 
   in the order of Melchizedek.”

Now I know the context, but at a time when I was asking many questions about ministry this came home to me in my daily reading. God spoke quite deeply and profoundly into my life that day as I realised that it was not about how I felt as much as it was about his call. The passage goes on the reinforce this when it says that God has made up his mind and that's the end of it!

So, the point is this, just because things have been painful and difficult these last two years doesn't in any change the core of my sense of call. But it's God's call on my life not my own self-determination. Then again, I'm not some sort of automaton that responds passively to a word of command. I am involved in the daily working out of the impact of this call on how I do what I do when I do it.

I believe that changing direction, training to become a Sports and Remedial Massage Therapist and Nutritional Advisor is part of that process. That's why I've also signed up to do a certificate in Personal Training. Hopefully it will create an income for me, but hopefully it will be an integral part of the shape of my ministry and life.

Here's the thing. you don't have to be in "full-time" ministry to be called by God. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of working out the adventure of being called. You get scared about leaving the security of knowing what you're supposed to be doing and losing your identity and maybe even your authority (not something I've ever really had to be honest). Too many leaders are afraid that if the delegate authority they will lose identity and value. I think that keeps the church from growing and becoming something other than an institution.

Here's a thought: If churches can't work without full-time staff, are they churches at all? It will always be a privilege to serve as a minister, but there is sometimes a hidden cost to the health of the church when we do.

And all I was going to blog about was signing up to become a personal trainer. Ah well, there will always be a vision pushing its way to the surface somewhere.

Nutritional Advisor at your service!

Well I've got my diploma in nutrition, and with merit no less! It was an interesting experience studying again and doing something so different. I'm not sure I feel at all confident about knowing my stuff yet, but then when you think about it, that's always true when you have really only studied the data and not practiced with real people in real situations. I remember learning so much chemistry at university, but only every really applying a small amount of that knowledge at work.

My next task with the nutrition studies, as far as I can see at the moment, is to grow my familiarity with the subject matter. To read and re-read, and to work with some real people. So. I'm going to put it all to work by developing some diet information for a friend who wants to lose some weight, and then I might do some research on sports nutrition, maybe supplements and prepare some leaflets I can give to interested people.

It's quite a scary thought to consider setting up a business doing nutrition and then adding the sports therapy stuff and possibly personal training to it. But these are all opportunities to create a new career for myself.

What is quite hard is explaining to people that this isn't me leaving the church behind, but neither is it me trying to find an income stream while I wait for a church to grow that can support a return to so-called full-time ministry. This is a new way of doing ministry and leadership, not a stop-gap because I don't like the established church and it appears not to like me much!

My hope and prayer is that this is a new way of being alongside people God loves and misses. I'm not a nutritional advisor to do evangelism, I'm a nutritional advisor because I think nutrition is important and interesting. But I will always take my faith with me wherever I go and whoever I see. I can't help that.

So let's see where this takes me. But for the moment I'm enjoying having got my diploma.

Back to School

I took the opportunity yesterday to begin the process of familiarising myself with the contents of the first paper for my massage course. It's all about anatomy and physiology. And it's scary! It's bound to be when you haven't studied either topic before in any detail. But I've been down unfamiliar roads before, so it's books out, head down and get started. At least I don't have to fill my head with information for a written exam at this stage.

First task was read chapter 3 of the A&P set text. Off to a quiet place I went, book in hand. A quick read through I thought and the once more making notes. It turned out to be somewhat more demanding. New words and technical terms filled every sentence. I probably got half way and my brain began to seize up.

So it's going to be slower than I thought and possibly in need of more repetition. But that's the nature of doing something new. If our only adventure was to do what we have always done before, read only about the familiar, the usual, then how would we conquer new challenges?

Church planting is not something Anne or I saw ourselves doing. We've been involved once before, but not leaders. But here we go. The house should be ours in a few weeks. The builder is working out a quote for the work. We're planning the move. Ready or not, here we come!

Stepping out in a new direction

Okay, so this past weekend I spent the two days taking my first steps into the world of Sports Massage. Stepping into the unknown is always somewhat daunting, but never more soy for me that this weekend's experience. The thing about massage is that it is literally "hands on". Who knows how one is going to react personally to applying massage to people one doesn't know. Will you be able to do it in a way that makes them feel comfortable, will you feel comfortable?

In the end, I really enjoyed my new learning experience and I've signed up for the full diploma course! So for the next 11 months or so I'll be a sports massage therapist in training! After that, who knows how things will take shape. We will have to wait and see.

I was really surprised at how much I learnt in just two days. Doing the final "full-body" massage on Sunday afternoon was a chance to put all the things we'd been learning together. Managing the time is quite difficult. How do you work out how long to spend on one leg before moving onto the other one? some of that clearly comes with experience and also with what you find. The tendency we all had was to want to look at what we were doing rather than letting our hands give us the feedback. We learnt that looking up was important for our posture.

I think the other thing we all discovered was how much effort it takes to do good massage. This isn't just lightly stroking someone's back, this is hard work! Learning to use your own body weight and to push through your legs and hips, not using your arms and shoulders takes a lot of concentration and effort at first. But it soon became more natural.

As I type this post, I'm listening to some worship from Hillsongs. It reminds me that what I'm doing is not replacing my ministry, it's reshaping it. I may never preach again, but this weekend I had more meaningful interactions with people who wouldn't consider church an option than I've had in too long. I've had my faith challenged as I was asked all sorts of interesting questions and sought to give open, honest answers.

It may be a new direction, but the good news remains the same, the passion for the lost remains intact, the desire to be shaped by the hands of God in accordance with his purposes is still at the heart of everything. I never want to lose sight of that.

Proteins, Carbs, fats and Vitamins

To keep my brain from going to sleep now that I'm no longer a church leader, I've embarked on a course in nutrition. To be honest I'm not too sure where it fits in the grand scheme of qualifications. If anyone knows what it means I be pleased to find out what an "NCFE Level 4 diploma" equates to on the NQF. From what I've done so far I'd guess that it somewhere around or just above an A-level, but given that they are supposed to have got so much easier than when I did my A-levels, who am I to say!

Anyway, I'm working away it to the best of my ability and trying to remember what I've read so far about complete and incomplete proteins, what the essential amino acids are, how to work out how much carbohydrate there is some foods and what a portion size actually should be for the average person! Next up is a module on fats and then there's a long unit on vitamins. My ageing brain is struggling to retain all this new material and I think I'll have to produce some kind of review system to help me stay familiar with  what I'm learning.

I'm using Anne and myself as guinea pigs to explore different diet elements. So last night I cooked a simple pasta meal, but rather than just sling some pasta in a pan, I weighed out the pasta according to the serving guidelines. I then did a bit of maths on the meal to see what the calorie count was. Very interesting. I'm pretty sure that one of the challenges the great British diet faces is that of portion size. Just for fun, try weighing your breakfast cereal out. Just put in the bowl what you'd usually have and then weigh it and compare it to the portion size on the packet. I was surprised how much I saw as a reasonable portion.

Anyway, it's quite interesting to explore all of this, at least it is to me.

In a couple of weeks I'm attending a weekend training course which is an introduction to sports massage. If that goes well, I'll be looking to start the full diploma course in February. All this should keep me occupied over the next year along with sorting out the house we are hoping to buy.