Functional Path Training

Nero Fiddled

I need to preface this post by saying that in 2004 - 05 I worked for the New York Mets, not the greatest of times, but a big time learning experience. I also want to emphasize again that this is not a political blog, but sport and society are intertwined. This also could be interpreted as another baseball bashing, so be it. When I found out that Citibank, the latest financial institution to go on corporate welfare is going ahead and paying $400 million for naming rights to the Mets new stadium I went ballistic. This is wrong, that is your money and my money they are spending. Just think how many teachers and mortgages that could be funded for that money. The Mets owners are fiddling while Rome is burning. Having caught their act for almost a year I must say I am not surprised. Shame on you!

The Search for the Golden Arm

I know many of you think I do not like baseball that is absolutely untrue; after all I have spent one quarter of my career up to now working in professional baseball. But the sport is so backward and easy to poke fun at I can’t resist. I am sure you saw the headlines in your sport page about the Pittsburgh Pirates signing two javelin throwers from India, going to India to find javelin throwers is kind of looking for surfers in Nome Alaska. I guess they started out looking at cricket fast bowlers but took a wrong turn after a tea break and ended up at a track. This almost warrants an Ostrich Award. Wait, it gets better, then they bring them to this country and have them trained by the greatest of all pitching gurus, Tom House, the man who made Mark Pryor. The man who preaches biomechanics but has a PhD in marketing and he is good at it, marketing that is. It gets even funnier; a team actually signed these guys, of course one is left handed. If you have a male baby and you live anywhere in the world tie his right hand behind his back and get him throwing as early as possible. For left hander’s from anywhere there is gold in them thar hills! They are opening up the Indian sub continent as a potential pool of talent. How amny left handed boys do you thinkl there are in India between the ages of 16 and 20? “I’m not saying we’ve created the next Dominican Republic by any stretch,” Pittsburgh General Manager Neal Huntington said. “But it’s an intriguing market to get into, and who knows where it’s going to lead? We figured there was no cost, and it’s worth a shot to see what might develop out of it.” He added: “I’ve been greeted with a heavy dose of cynicism. Some people have asked how we can tell our fan base that we’re taking away jobs from U.S. kids, that this reeks of desperation. But it’s just a chance to spread our wings a little and see what happens.” Spread you wings and go to a track meet here in the states. If it is javelin throwers who can throw hard and far you need to go to Finland where throwing the javelin is a national obsession. I will warn you though that throwing far and hard is a lot different that throwing strikes. The learning curve is steep. It does make for a good story, I wonder who has the movie rights.

Convenient

What is convenient is not always right. Just because something is easy to measure does not mean it will improve performance. If we train for what we measure then hopefully that will improve, but if what we measure is not relevant to the sport we are training for, then we have the athletic equivalent of no child left behind - a bunch of athletic dolts who can do mindless repetitions of cone drills but can’t play the game. They know how to take the test, but don’t know how to apply it to the game. Our job as athletic development coaches is not to do what is convenient and easy, but to do what is right, to do what improves performance in the game. Sometimes it is basic, sometimes it is complicated, but it should transfer. Sometime it is measurable and sometimes it only shows up the field.

Ostrich Award

I have decided to institute a new award among the numerous awards given in sport. I am sure this sure will soon rival the ESPY’s in prestige. It will not be an annual but will be awarded more frequently to honor those who have buried their heads in the sand as deep as possible to avoid the most obvious of problems. The first winner is George Mitchell, that tireless anti- drug crusader who did his best to expose and eradicate drugs from professional baseball. Eleven months after his commission report here are his words: “There is an awareness of the problem and a focus on dealing with it,”  George you and your friend Bud Selig and all those fat cat owners need to wake up. The problem is there, but there is no problem if the people involved don’t admit there is a problem. Home run balls flying out of the park and 100 mph fastball draw fans. Asses on numbers make money. Get real this is entertainment not sport, right up there with WWF. If baseball was serious why did the club that was the epicenter of the drugs in baseball just rehire the strength and conditioning that was at ground zero during that whole period  and then was personal trainer for one of the biggest abusers? Hypocrisy!

Great Quotes

“I’ve thrown for forty-five years on an average of 10,000 throws a year. That’s 450,000 throws and not one of those throws has ever been perfect. There was always something else I could have done to make the prior throw just a little bit better. I think if we attack life in that same manner we can do some wonderful things on this earth.” Al Oerter Four time Olympic Gold Medalist

“Leadership is the flower. Responsibility is the seed. If you don’t get responsibility planted early, leadership never flowers.” Author Unknown

Stayability or Stability

Stayability = This is a posed fixed position, there is not very much transfer to real world athletic movements. There are not very many sports where you stay there. Artificial and sterile.

Stability = This represents an instant in time, it is not a position or a posture, it is definitely not a still picture. A javelin thrower or a swimmer needs great shoulder stability, the ability to maintain integrity of the joint at high velocity and under imposed stress. In some ways it is a moving target. A good sound strength training programs that is proprioceptively demanding, works multiple joints and is tri-planar will address stability.

Must Reads

Two classic books that are must for every coaches, trainers and therapists library. They are both out of print, but if you search I know Total Body Training is available, the Kiphuth book How To Be Fit is hard to find but  still out there. The information and ideas on training may come as a surprise to some of the millennial generation that thinks training began in 1998. Total Body Training by Gajda and Dominguez is the first book to  actually define the core.

Four Minutes a Day

Check out this video

http://outside.away.com/outside/bodywork/200812/lab-rat-rom.html

By the way the machine only cost $14,000 but it works magic.

Frankie Hejduk

This is reprinted from yesterdays New York Times Sorts page. Frankie is one my favorites athletes that I have worked with. I got to coach him with the Tampa Bay Mutiny and the 1998 World Cup team. This guy is fit! He came to the Mutiny late in the 1996 season after playing on the US Olympic team. We tested him on the old beep test and he scored the highest ever for a team sport athlete that I had tested. The previous best was Steve Nash when he with the Canadian national team and that was on a basketball court, not a soccer pitch with cleats on. Today in the MLS Cup I will be cheering for the Red Bull because my good friend Juan Osorio is the coach, but I will also be cheering for Frankie. He is a tough competitor, when he came to the Mutiny we had a veteran team, players that had played all over the world, when he started practicing the intensity of the practices picked up considerably. He was not afraid to take on Valderama. He doesn’t say much, he lets his tremendous work rate and action speak.

Soccer Field to Surfboard: Crew’s Hejduk Has a Passion to Be the Best

By BILLY WITZ

Published: November 22, 2008

CARSON, Calif. — If Frankie Hejduk wins the first title of his lengthy professional career on Sunday, it will be nice if the stands are filled with dozens of his friends who made the short drive from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, his sleepy hometown 90 miles down the coast.

Frankie Hejduk, the 34-year-old Crew captain, above and at left after Columbus won the Eastern Conference title. When the M.L.S. season ends, Hejduk will trade soccer for surfing in his

But he figures it will be a game-time decision.

“It’s going to depend on whether the waves are good or not,” Hejduk said on Friday after the Columbus Crew went through practice for Sunday’s M.L.S. Cup matchup against the Red Bulls. “If they are, half my buddies won’t show up.”

But Hejduk seems to understand.

With his shoulder-length, sun-bleached brown hair and surfer vocabulary, Hejduk (pronounced HAY-duck) has for more than a decade looked like United States soccer’s answer to Jeff Spicoli, the surfer-stoner character played by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” a 1982 movie based on a school not far from where Hejduk grew up.

Not only does Hejduk talk the talk, he walks the walk — all the way out to the end of a longboard.

When Hejduk was growing up, if a soccer ball was not near his feet, a surfboard was under them. He was the national junior high school surfing champion and qualified for the United States amateur surfing team. He attended San Dieguito High, where one of his classmates and best friends was Rob Machado, now a well-known professional surfer.

Though he has played in two World Cups, spent several seasons in Germany with Bayer Leverkusen and has no plans to retire anytime soon, it is not hard for Hejduk to imagine following Machado’s career path.

“Maybe I would have liked to have been a surfer, too,” said Hejduk, whose two children are named Nesta, which is Bob Marley’s middle name, and Coasten, a tribute to his coastal roots. “That’s the same type of lifestyle. They’re traveling all these places.”

Then he stopped himself and smiled.

“The only difference,” he said, “is I’m in cold, rainy Columbus and in Germany, whereas surfers are normally in Tahiti and Fiji.”

As unlikely as it seems, Hejduk said he was content in Columbus. So perhaps the surf is a little flat, but he has become a fan favorite. He shared a beer at a tailgate party after Columbus clinched the Supporters’ Shield, which is awarded to the Major League Soccer team with the best record, and met his wife there.

He has been an ideal captain for a rebuilding effort that began three years ago when Sigi Schmid was hired as the coach. When Hejduk walks into the locker room after a game, he makes sure to slap hands with everyone. He is a captain who often brings just the right touch.

“His personality takes a lot of the pressure off very tense situations,” said Jeff Agoos, the Red Bulls’ sporting director, who roomed with Hejduk when they were teammates on the national team in the late 1990s.

Agoos recalled being in Mexico City for a World Cup qualifier when the American players noticed fans whistling a profanity. Some were not sure what it meant.

“That means ‘Get a goal, Frankie,’ ” Hejduk told his teammates before making the same whistle.

Agoos said: “He made everybody laugh. It really broke the ice. That’s the kind of naïveté he offers, which is very rare.”

Also rare is Hejduk’s level of fitness. Even at 34, one of his strongest assets is his ability to run up and down the field, wearing opponents out.

Robbie Rogers, the Crew’s promising young midfielder, laughed when he was asked if anyone had ever beaten Hejduk in a conditioning drill.

“I don’t think it’s ever happened in the history of soccer,” Rogers said.

Schmid, who coached Hejduk at U.C.L.A., remembered Hejduk’s return from a torn knee ligament that had kept him out of the 2006 World Cup. He would run a two-mile conditioning test, then sprint up bleachers while the team was practicing.

“Frankie just comes with an energy about him every day,” Schmid said. “There’s not a lot of pretense there. You don’t have to worry if he’s saying one thing and thinking something else. He wants to win, he wants to battle.

“That’s what I noticed in him when I saw him play in high school. Here’s a kid who plays with a lot of energy, covers a lot of ground and wants to win every time he steps on the field. That part of Frankie has never changed.”

Neither has his desire to grab his board and feel the sand between his toes and saltwater washing over him.

“It’s no secret that in the off-season, I’m pretty much in Cardiff surfing,” Hejduk said. “You can find me on the beach, ratting out there, three times a day, every day. It’s a big part of my life, every day.

“At the same time, it gets me away from the game for a little bit. It gets me a chance to get mentally prepared for the next season. You’re at one with the ocean and the water and all that stuff. I’m that type of guy — kind of a hippie by nature.”

So there is little doubt where Hejduk will be Monday, win or lose, out where even mid-November feels like an endless summer.

Improving Movement

All training is about improving movement. Training movements not muscles is not my idea that comes from the literature, neurologically the brain does not recognize individual muscles, it recognizes patterns of movement. I think the mistake we make is thinking that training is an end unto itself; training is ALWAYS a means to an end. We have to focus on the fact that we are preparing the athlete to thrive in the competitive arena, to be highly adaptable and efficient in all aspects of performance. That demands a multifaceted training program that challenges the athlete to solve increasingly complex movement problems. There is nothing wrong with measuring strength, or jump performance or any other physical quality that can be measured, but those measure must be put in context. Just because you bench press X amount or jump Y height does not necessarily mean you will be a better player. The problem is that it is easy to get caught up chasing numbers like this and be fooled. Essentially these are random numbers unless placed in context. We must also remember that most of our classical performance tests measure one part of the performance paradigm - force  production. We know from biomechanical analysis and experience that force reduction is a bigger limiting factor and proprioception lends quality to the movement. Both are more difficult to measure, so they are often ignored.  Sound training should balance out all elements of training and recognize that we do not train various systems of the body independently, the endocrine, hormonal, nervous, muscular and cardiovascular system all work together synergistically to produce performance.