Point A Performance History: Identifying Hidden Potential

Identifying the athlete's number one limiting constraint at the level of competition.

Performance History as an Element of Point A

Performance—the ability to generate optimal outputs at the level of competition—is where careers are made, and the big money flows. For elite athletes, high-level performance is not just the goal; it’s the expectation, the standard. However, the work that got an athlete to their current level of performance will not sustain them indefinitely. Over time, biological accommodation and neurological stagnation—the two-headed monster pictured below—will constrain the athlete’s ability to generate higher levels of performance, shorten the timespan for which they can generate them, or both.

The biological accommodation - neurological stagnation closed loop with sport. Special treatment/training work is the only thing that disrupts this destructive loop.

As practitioners, it’s our responsibility to strategize and wage war against this two-headed monster. Winning this battle enables the athlete to break new ground and generate higher levels of performance; losing results in stagnation, untapped human potential, and eventual removal from the level of competition.

Point A: Identifying Hidden Potential

To create a roadmap to Point B—the athlete’s optimal physical state—we must first conduct a comprehensive assessment of their current physical state. In Absolute nomenclature, this assessment is Point A, and a key element of it is Identifying Hidden Potential.

Point A provides the critical bits of information needed to design a treatment and training strategy that transforms an athlete’s hidden potential into realized performance. Just like drillers must know where oil reserves are located before extraction, Point A identifies where untapped hidden potential lies at the level of adaption.

A fast and effective strategy to locate hidden potential is to utilize the level of competition as a feedback loop. Performance at the level of competition allows practitioners to pinpoint what training ecology(s) to explore during assessment. This process extracts the athlete’s number one limiting constraint, which always corresponds to one of Point B’s fundamental elements.

Why Identify the Number One Constraint?

The logic for why in Point A we identify the number one constraint is because that is the most effective way to behave as agents of change—that athletes rely on to overcome stagnation in sport. Only the Paranoid Survive and our aim must extend beyond simply maintaining current performance levels. Instead, in both treatment and training we must be aggressive and that work should probe the edge of chaos, stimulating a new order at the level of adaptation where we actualize hidden potential into reality—which in turn enables the athlete to break new ground at the level of competition.

Point B: The Feedback Loop That Guides Everything

Point B is the athlete’s optimal physical state—a unique conjugation of the fundamental physical capacities that enables them to generate maximal outputs—that is performance, at the level of competition.

To identify the number one limiting constraint, the process starts with a simple conversation. From a systems perspective, the athlete is the agent that generates performance. Therefore, it's essential to hear directly from their experiences in competition to understand what they perceive as their biggest barrier to generating higher levels of performance. The simple question is:

What is your number one limiting constraint on performance?

Point B: Blindspot & Adoption

Our mental model of Point B is still new—only two years old—and not yet widely understood, even among our peers, let alone athletes. This reality requires us to lead the conversation and help athletes identify their limiting constraints within the Point B framework. For many—sadly, this may be the first time they’ve been asked to reflect on their biggest limiting constraint. Yet, some of our peers give us feedback like stagnation isn’t an issue? That’s why we must give the athlete space and time to think, guiding them in articulating their number one limiting constraint.

Buy-In

Just like all roads once led to Rome, this conversation always leads back to Point B. The identified limitation will loop to one or two elements of the framework, giving the practitioner a home-field advantage in guiding the athlete. Once we identify the general limitation we start to ask better questions that mean something to us and Point B—this conversation is what enables us to narrow down from general to the specific element of Point B with the athlete.

This Point A conversation is what connects the athlete to the practitioner—giving them skin in the game in this process, which generates buy-in not just for the roadmap but, but for the practitioner as well.

Using Feedback Loops at Point A to Confirm The Number One Limiting Constraint