Functional Path Training

King Football

Before I moved to the South (Yes Florida is the south) I was told there were three sports played there: 1) football 2) spring football 3) off season football. I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. When I started helping coach track at my daughter’s high school I asked why the State Track Meet was the first week of May – the sincere and honest answer was so that it would not interfere with spring football practice, needless to say, my jaw dropped. When I asked why, I was given the answer that football brings in the money, at the time the team was terrible and they might have been drawing 1,000 people a game. It cost more to pay the ticket takers and turn on the lights than they were making at the gate.

On Monday football was crowned king again:

The Florida High School Athletic Association Board of Directors voted Monday, 9-6, in favor of reducing the number of varsity games — except football — in a season by 20 percent and junior varsity games by 40 percent.

Varsity basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, volleyball and water polo will go from 25 contests in a season to 20; tennis, lacrosse, wrestling will go from 18 to 15; swimming and diving, weightlifting, track and field and cross country will go from 13 to 11; golf will go from 14 to 12; and flag football from 12 to 10. Football and cheerleading will not be affected. The policy will be in effect for two school years, from 2009 to 2011.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. Why no cuts in Football and Cheerleading? This myth that high school football caries the athletic programs is just that, a myth. What about gender equity? I am not a big fan of law suits, but this one must be challenged. I know we are in very tough economic times, so let everyone share the burden, cut football and cheerleading an equal amount to the other sports. In fact why is cheerleading a varsity sport, make it a club. Does football really need the number of coaches they have? Today’s rising juniors will miss the equivalent of one third of a season in the remainder of their high school career, that is not right. Why do many of the head football coaches not teach classes in season? Get them back teaching that would save a teacher salary. If ever there was a case of misuse of public funds, loss of public trust and gross injustice this is it. This really sets a dangerous precedent.

A Big Problem

This appeared in the New York Times today, April 27, 2009 on the editorial page. This is one facet of the problem How about reinstating mandatory daily physical education that is physical and educational. We need to teach our children how to exercise, when to exercise and what to do.

Selling Obesity at School

The federal school lunch program, which subsidizes meals for 30 million low-income children, was created more than half a century ago to combat malnutrition. A breakfast program was added during the 1960s, and both were retooled a decade ago in an attempt to improve the nutritional value of food served at school.

More must now be done to fight the childhood obesity epidemic, which has triggered a frightening spike in weight-related disorders like diabetes, high-blood pressure and heart disease among young people. And the place to start is the schools, where junk foods sold outside the federal meals programs — through snack bars, vending machines and à la carte food lines — has pretty much canceled out the benefits of all those healthy lunches and breakfasts.

Federal rules that govern the sales of these harmful foods at schools are limited in scope and have not been updated for nearly 30 years. Until new regulations are written, children who are served healthy meals in the school cafeteria will continue to buy candy bars, sugary drinks and high sodium snacks elsewhere in school.

Fortunately, Congress seems to be waking up to this problem. A bill introduced by Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, would update nutritional standards and give the Department of Agriculture broader authority to promulgate new regulations for food sold in schools that accept federal food subsidies. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, has said that he will introduce similar legislation in the Senate.

Many states’ school districts have taken positive steps. But others are likely to resist, especially districts that sell junk food to finance athletic programs, extracurricular activities, even copier expenses.

Those districts should take note of a study released this year in West Virginia showing that the budgetary costs of switching from sodas to healthy drinks like fruit juices, milk and water were negligible. Even if the switch costs money, so be it. The schools should not be trading their students’ health to buy office supplies.

Over the last four decades, the obesity rates for adolescents have tripled. Unless there is decisive action, weight and inactivity-related disorders will afflict a steadily larger proportion of the work force and replace smoking as the leading cause of premature death.

More on Training Rhythm

Jay Johnson wrote this question in response to my original Training Rhythm post: Are you ever putting days back to back that are both challenging, but metabolically or neuromuscularly different? Yes to a certain extent, but not on a consistent basis. I also think that when you do this that the third day must be a real recovery day. For me it really depends on the training block we are in at the time. If we are in a foundation phase with lower intensity and no scheduled competitions I will sometime go six days of alternating a metabolic stress with a neural stress, followed by a recovery day. Seldom will put two of these microcycles back to back. Some of this is training age dependent. I have found that the higher level athletes with a greater training age operate closer to their max; they know how to push themselves. The younger developing athlete tends to undershoot and operate at a lower stress level until they learn how to train. The implication of this is that with the developing athlete I tend to go hard one day, then medium the next, followed by an easy day.

Rob Sleamaker commented on external means of recovery. That is warranted, the extent of it is dependent on the training age of the athlete. All the training theory literature that I have read over the years stresses the pedagogical design of the training program first. I think that at the elite levels we have been become over dependent on external means of recovery and therapies to cover up for poor training design. I think we need to understand how to stress the body and allow its natural adaptive reserves to operate at various times in the training year. Too much external means of recovery interferes with the athlete’s ability to read their body. Proper timing of recovery methods is just as important and proper timing of training stimuli.

More Than an Exercise

This Saturday at the Wisconsin State NSCA meeting one of my presentations will be on Designing Effective Workouts – It is More Than an Exercise. I guess because I have been preparing for this talk over the past several weeks I have been more observant sensitive to what I read and see about training and training programs. I realize it is so easy to get caught up in the trap of the new great exercise or the next great machine, but as I have said many times in this blog, there is so much more to than that. First of all, do you have a plan, a plan for that session, for the mesocyle, for the block and for the year. What are your goals? Are those goals measurable? How will you measure them? When you get down to selecting the actual exercises in some ways that is the easy part, does each exercise have a specific context? Where and how does it fit into the bigger picture? Before I will add new exercises to the menu I test them out myself. Seldom, if ever will I see an exercise and then add it immediately to a program. When I have done that it has been disaster.

Folks it is the same with workouts, what works for me will not work for you. Each workout is designed for the particular sport, the individuals I am working with and part of the plan we are executing today. I just got an email forwarded to me from a very prominent foreign swim coach very popular on the international lecture circuit. It was list of his favorite training sets. I thought, how insane, none of us have his personality, his personnel or his control. Why should we think they would work for anyone else? Frankly that is why when I write or speak I am very reticent to show or print workouts, because people want to copy them and apply them, without any thought to the considerations I previously mentioned. I will put up a couple of workouts this weekend and the audience will try furiously to copy them. My intent will be to show context, but I am sure the audience will be looking for the magic bullet, it is the same everywhere. Coaching is a creative and a scientific process, just like a surgeon gets better by doing more surgeries, the coach gets better by coaching more training sessions. ( I am not implying that coaching is brain surgery) Just like there are failed surgeons, there are failed coaches, probably for the same reason, they failed to keep honing and sharpening their skills. It is work, it takes time and practice, it does NOT happen overnight. Think and keep learning, remember it is more than an exercise.

Fantasy Camp

I spend this past Tuesday at SMU in Dallas meeting with Peter Weyand, Ralph Mann and Peter Vint. This was originally going to be the day of the first annual SMU Speed Symposium that was canceled due to some administrative and logistical considerations. The idea of the meeting was to brainstorm about a future conference and talk about potential future research ideas on all aspects of speed. Just the opportunity to sit around a table and share ideas with sport scientists of this stature was a great honor; it was like a sport science fantasy camp for me. The outcome will be a great conference that will bridge the gap between the scientist and the practitioner. Any input that you the reader could provide as to the optimum time of year would be greatly appreciated. Remember this will be an international conference.

Picture This

Picture this, you have an NBA player standing on a vibration platform, he is doing some sort of bouncing medicine ball exercise off the ground and the S&C coach has a big rubber band around his waist pulling him laterally. This was in a popular fitness outdoor magazine. When I saw it I almost fell out of my chair laughing. On second thought I realized that people were going to read this and take it very seriously and try to imitate this. It was written in very serious vain extolling the virtues of vibration training. (A free ad for the manufacturer of the vibration platform). I understand the use of any one the three modes of training represented, but the witches brew mix of the three is very confusing. I am sure it is very confusing to the body. I learned a long a long time ago that mixed training yield mixed results. Hunt with a rifle, be focused on one training objective, do not try to cover all bases in one workout. This is another example of marketing and hype trumping good training methodology.

Training Rhythm

Good sound training that result in positive training adaptations’ has a basic rhythm of work to rest. Bill Bowerman had a basic paradigm that he strictly followed, a hard day followed by an easy day. For many years I strictly followed that rhythm, and then I go smart and tried to find ways to push the envelope. I think that some of the results were more spectacular but overall more inconsistent. I have found myself over the past couple of years going back to that simple rhythm of hard day followed by an easy day. This allows steady progress because it allows time for the body to adapt and accumulate the positive stress of training. I see many programs that group too many hard days together and depend on therapy to pull them through in order to get to the next workout, this analogous to playing Russian roulette with six bullets in the chamber. I saw this day to day when I worked with the Oregon project, there was seldom an easy day, it was hard then harder. You break many to get results with a few. Training is about thriving not surviving. Training accumulates from week to week to week, month to month and year to year to year. You can’t hurry the process, make time your ally not your enemy.

Job Preservation – Some Facts

This is a must read for anyone interested in Athletic Development/Strength & Conditioning. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/ross_tucker/03/18/conditioning/index.html In my opinion based on my personal experience and observation this is spot on. This article could have been written about the NBA or MLB, the conditions and climate are the same. There is plenty of blame to go around. I think it rests equally with management and ownership who have no idea what this is all about, it rests with the S&C coaches themselves that need to professionalize themselves (Not unionize). They need to be true experts rather than advocates of machines, free weights or some other stupid idea that pigeon holes what they do. I think if we would look at some of the Performance Director models that I have seen in Europe and Australia that would be a major step in the right direction. That approach requires an open mind and a real value p[laced on athletic development. Frankly I do not think that is in the American mindset. We are hung up on quick fixes.

Kenyon College April - April 8, 2009

I was just starting my third day of working with the coaches at Kenyon College. I could not resist taking this picture to share with you. It is a beutifulcampus rich in academic tradition. As a resident of Florida we do  not see too much of this white stuff at anytime, much less in April. It has been a very gratifying and fun time visiting three time this year to work on professional development of all the coaches.Peter Smith, the athletic director facilitated this at the urging of Jim Steen the swim coach.Looking forward to next year when we can build upon what we have been able to implement this year.

Deliberate Practice

The concept of deliberate practice has been bantered about quite a bit lately mainly due to Malcolm Galdwell’s book The Outliers. Along with that, Anders Ericsson’s concept of ten years and ten thousand hours to achieve expert status is getting a lot of attention. I think that Ericsson with his concept of ten years and ten thousand hours to achieve expert status is spot on in the arts and in cognitive intellectual fields. I am not sure that it has as much application to sport. There is no doubt that deliberate practice is essential to achieve excellence in any field. I think what is not being discussed is what exactly does deliberate practice consist of? Is it just doing the sport movements or is it formal structured practice? In my opinion it must be mindful practice with a purpose that is personal to the individual. I think at the younger ages most probably before puberty it should be unstructured play, where the youngster gets a feel for gross motor skills and then begins to refine those into finer motor skills well before there is any thought of being sport specific. It is always interesting to watch kids imitate mature performers. They can copy stars movements to a tee. When I was working with the MLS Tampa Bay Mutiny I remember watching the sons of the players, all age seven to nine, playing a little pick–up soccer game during our practice. They were all trying to imitate what their dads were doing. This is where it starts, but then I think we have misinterpreted Ericsson’s work and introduced structured practice too early. We need to allow each youngster to achieve general physical literacy, to learn how to move and play. There is plenty of time for  deliberate practice. Concerning deliberate practice, it must be that, it must be planned, it must be individual, it must stress quality, but it must not be robotic, the individual should be able to find his or her own style. If you want to read a good book on this area I would recommend Talent Is Overrated – What Really Separates World-Class performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin.