10 | creative people have to be fed

Johnny Cash entered my feed recently with thoughts on songwriting.

Songwriting is a very strange thing, so far as I'm concerned. It's not something that I can say, next Tuesday morning Imma sit down and write songs. I can't do that. No way. If I say I'm going to the country and take a walk in the woods next Tuesday, then the probability is next Tuesday night I might can write a song. Creative people have to be fed from the divine course. I do. I have to get fed. I have to get filled up in order to pour out. I really have to. 

- JOHNNY CASH

His comments helped solidify something that has been brewing within my own thinking for a while now: Maybe creativity isn’t a reward for progress but instead a prerequisite. And maybe it isn’t enough to provide opportunities for creativity within the context of sport preparation. Perhaps it is vital to promote experiences that foster creativity in a more general sense.

“Creative people have to be fed” also brought to mind a former baseball client, who used to speak of “letting it eat” when describing himself at his best on the mound. He even had his sponsor stitch the phrase on his glove as in-game reminder.

Next, I reflected on whether I provide athletes with enough opportunities to “get fed.” Skill acquisition has been a question of helping athletes understand how to practice and how to compete. I have viewed my role as helping to facilitate a training mindset for practice and a trusting mindset for competition. I have embedded creativity within those approaches, but it has always been in service of something else. To borrow from both Cash and my former client, I have asked athletes to eat, but perhaps haven’t been feeding them!

I now believe my approach has been incomplete, and think there are (at least) three mindsets I should consider when supporting athletes:

• Practice (or training) - creativity in service of developing targeted skills

• Competitive (or trusting) - creativity in service of desired outcomes

• Creative (or trying) - creativity for its own sake (i.e., experimentation) or experiences to feed creativity; trying as in experimenting or experiencing and not as in effort

Rather than thinking of creativity as the reward for mastering the fundamentals or payoff for discipline in training, what if I viewed it as an essential component to playing freely and enjoying the experience of competition more thoroughly?

I could work to support athletes in all three areas: trying, training, and trusting. The % might vary based on multiple factors, but there is a case for always making time for all three. After all, at most levels, the true payoff is building a relationship with movement rather than producing elite performers. And even elite performers would likely benefit from more creative relationship with their craft.

Personally, Johnny Cash left me with more questions than answers, so I will close with some questions I am asking myself at the moment.

• What would it look to like to feed creativity within sport?

• Would efforts to feed creativity vary based on the sport or athlete?

• Would efforts take place within the sport context or outside of it (e.g., Johnny Cash walking in the woods)?

• What would help athletes understand the value, especially if the activities are seemingly unrelated to their sport?

Christopher G. Ballmann, Marquis J. McCullum, Rebecca R. Rogers, Mallory R. Marshall, and Tyler D. Williams. 2021. Effects of preferred vs. nonpreferred music on resistance exercise performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 35(6), 1650-1655.

purpose: to examine the effects of listening to preferred music vs. non-preferred music on resistance exercise performance

participants: 12 college-aged males who lifted 2-3 times per week on average

design: participants ranked 6 genres of music (each of which included 5 example tracks) from favorite to least favorite; random assignment to either preferred (i.e., favorite) group or non-preferred (i.e., least favorite) group

procedure: tested for 1 RM; 48-hour wash-out period; randomly assigned to preferred or non-preferred music group; warm-up phase of 5 reps at 30% 1 RM and 3 reps at 50% 1 RM; 5-minute rest; told to lift “as explosively as possible” until failure at 75% 1 RM while listening to either preferred or non-preferred music; motivation assessment

results: listening to preferred music increased overall bench press repetitions completed (p = 0.005; effect size [ES] = 0.84); during the first 3 repetitions, mean velocity (p = 0.001; ES = 1.6), relative mean power (p= 0.012; ES = 0.55), peak velocity (p = 0.011; ES = 0.99), and peak power (p = 0.009; ES = 0.35) were higher while listening to preferred music vs. non-preferred music; motivation during the lift (p , 0.001; ES = 5.9) was significantly higher while listening to preferred vs. non-preferred music

potential translations to sport: The most obvious translation: make sure athletes listen to preferred music when maxing out! Or, at the least, make sure they aren’t having to persist in the presence of music they hate. After all, the physiological results of the study were promising, but the motivational data in this study was perhaps even more telling. The weight room can be hit or miss with motivation, so using music to enhance athlete engagement with training is a simple environmental manipulation that could go a long way.

Individualized music choices are logical, but those may bring their own concerns. I have spoken with coaches who worry that the team component gets lost when everyone is isolated within a personal music bubble. It is a valid concern, so perhaps another takeaway from this research is that it is important to find collective music that nobody hates!

Additionally, you could turn maxing out into a team event by cueing up an athlete’s preferred track while everyone else cheers on the effort. It isn’t the most efficient manner of knocking out testing, but perhaps the overall benefits make that trade-off worth it.

At the start of this episode of NASCAR’s “Drop the Jack” podcast, the pit crew athletes discuss their musical preferences, with particular attention to what music finds its way into the weight room.

A few themes jumped out at me:

• Music is a communal experience: When Jordan Paige starts singing YOU USED TO LOVE ME by Faith Evans or Mamba Smith starts singing Macy Gray’s I TRY, the others join in lyrically and rhythmically

• Music is a personal experience: Michael Hicks wants EDM for working out; Mamba Smith will take the EDM - but only in mashup form with lyrics; Jordan Paige still wants 90s RnB, with a stated goal of being calm even in the weight room

• Music is an intentional experience: Derrell Edwards describes how his musical selections vary based on how he wants to feel while cooking out, driving around, or working out; Paul Swan describes stumbling into Chaka Khan via the algorithm but taking it into the weight room because of how the beat makes him feel

This issue’s spotlight is courtesy of Kane Smego, whose music entered my orbit via Bomani Jones. Jones referenced music producer Petey Greene as a creator of theme music for his programming, which led me to a Greene produced album from Smego.

This issue’s lyrical spotlight pulls from his 2020 album, where Smego uses food as a metaphor for his lyrical prowess:

This is food for the famished
This the tool that I brandish
I've been brutal with the grammar
Since Pluto was still a planet

kane smego COLLARD GREEN MUSIC

Smego also just released the title track from his upcoming album POT LIQUOR, which is something of a continuation of his 2020 effort. POT LIQUOR will be released over the next couple months, but you can check out the title track now.

In addition to his work as a performing artist, Kane is the Associate Director and an artist alumnus of Next Level, a cultural diplomacy program that sends American hip-hop artists around the world to use music and dance in promoting cultural exchange, artistic collaboration, and community building.

I stuck to the theme and went with songs that have food or drink in the title. Some I knew. Some I discovered in the process of putting together the playlist. Some were suggested by my daughter (e.g., chappell roan COFFEE). Others were suggested by my daughter but denied inclusion because of my personal disdain for the artists/tracks! Drop any tracks you believe warrant inclusion in the comments below. As long as they aren’t on my banned list, I will add them!