Functional Path Training

The Last Decade - Now Looking Ahead

It is so hard to believe that we are ending the first decade of the new millennium. It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the turn of the century. This has been an amazing decade in so many ways. For me personally it has been a decade of change and growth. I look forward to the new decade with a renewed sense of hope that all of us will learn from past and build upon it in a positive manner to create a better world for all of us. Hopefully we will see peace and a degree of tranquility in the world in the decade ahead. I am hopeful. I look forward to continue sharing the lessons I have learned with all of you and continuing to learn and challenge myself in every way possible. My best wishes for a healthy and happy new year. 

Coaching - A Perspective

When I was sitting at the US Track and Cross Country Coaches Association hall fame dinner two weeks ago, listening to the acceptance speeches from the living inductees and the representatives of those who were deceased. It struck me again how all encompassing and consuming coaching is. Then the recent attention that Urban Meyer has received made me think even more. I have said for years that coaching is not something you do, it is something you are. It has to be the essence of who you are or you are going through the motions. Listening to those hall of fame coaches and watching the Urban Meyer interview the other day made me realize again what it takes. It is not easy to put in words. Coaching is very special, I think you have to have a passion that burns inside of you. I know it is hard on families and relationships, so it takes a very understanding support structure. I know I have been blessed with a wife and family that has not only tolerated but also embraced my passion for coaching. I realize how lucky I have been. 

I think that is what Urban Meyer was trying to convey in his press conference about going out to practice Sunday morning. There is something special about seeing the athletes you work grow athletically and more importantly as people. Believe me it is special to a get a phone call from an old White Sox player asking advice on how to lose weight or what to do in a career decision. You then realize what it is all about. That is what makes coaching special. I don’t think sport writers and other outsiders can get it. You have to experience it. It can fry you and it can invigorate you - somehow, someway you have to find a balance, most of us are not very good at achieving that balance. I know I am still trying for that balance as I start my 41st year of coaching.

Getting Strong & Getting Slow

This is a follow-up to my post last week with the statements that is it is relatively easy to get strong and it is easy to get slow. There were some good responses that basically mirrored what I am going to say. It is easy to get strong if that is your goal. By strong I mean measurably strong in the traditional sense of weight room strong. A dedicated block of eight to twelve weeks can result in appreciable measureable strength gains in any of the traditional lifts. I am not denigrating this in any way. The key here and the element that I think is often overlooked is how do you then transfer/apply this strength to your event or sport? That is the conundrum. That is what is difficult. Based on what I have seen in 47 years of lifting weights and my 41 years of coaching is that it is easy to get caught in the trap of more strength equals better performance. I reconciled this, both as an athlete and a coach by systematically changing the emphasis from general to special to specific strength depending on the training and competition objectives. In all of this it is essential to never stray very far from your event or your sport. That is the ultimate measure of performance, not numbers in the weight room.

As far as getting slow, that is very easy to do. Getting faster requires a high degree of coordination. Getting faster requires ballistic dynamic work in a very narrow range. Using heavy sleds, weight vests, running in sand make you good at running with those impediments but the transfer to speed development is minimal. Look closely at the dynamics of sprinting and what is required. Elite sprinters are already at 7.8 meters per second in two steps from the blocks. Training with heavy resistance increases ground contact time. That is not what you want; you want to put as much force into the ground in the least amount of time. Once again it comes down to understanding what you are training for, what are the demands of your event or sport. Harder is not better. Be smart in your training. If is does not look like what you are trying to do in competition then take another look. Remember you are what you train to be. Train fast to be fast!

Invictus

Went to see the movie Invictus last night. It certainly did not meet my expectations. I actually found it a bit trite. There was so much more that could have been done with the storyline and the subsequent message. It was not a sports movies, I assume it was not meant to be, but it was not a historical movie either, in short it missed it's mark on both counts. It did inspire me to read the history of modern South Africa and Nelson Mandela.  It reminded of the group of South African athletes and coaches who were visiting the US and attending our 1980 "Olympic Trials" as observers. There was an 18 foot pole vaulter, a 290 foot javelin throwers a female hurdler who had run under thirteen seconds. Interesting to note they were all white, none had been allowed to compete outside of South Africa. They also told me there was no mixed race competitions in South Africa. Essentially South Africa had not been allowed to compete is any sport outside of the country from the early Seventies until the early Nineties due to sanctions for the apartheid policies of the government.

Post Office Line

Last week I went to the post office before opening at 8:30 so I would not have to stand in line. Instead of a line everyone had put their stuff on the floor and talked, pretty neat actually. 

 

Happy Holidays

I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season. This is a special time of year, a time to give thanks for all the good we have received in the past and a time to look forward to a wonderful new year. It is a time for family and fiends, peace and love. I want to thank you all for being part of my life with this blog. I am personally enjoying the time with my family in Houston for few days before I hit the ground running again.

Training Thoughts

Here is some food for thought to spur you thinking:

It is relatively easy to get strong

It is very easy to make someone slower

I am interested in your comments, before I post mine. This is how I began my presentation to

the Throws group at USA Track & Field Podium Education program

Skill Acquisition – Beyond Motor Learning

I must admit that for a long time I did not make the distinction between skill acquisition and motor learning. At first I thought is was just semantics, someone trying to create a new field. Over the past several years I have come to understand the distinction. Skill acquisition recognizes the body as a complex system, not a computer to be programmed. The body is a self-organizing problem solving organism. Skill acquisition recognizes that there are multiple solutions to the same movement problem. One solution does not fit all. Essentially it is learning through exploration and discovery. Not about exploring limits, rather it is defining parameters. There are many learning options that allow for and encourage individual expression. Each person has distinct movement signatures; those help define us as individuals. I always felt that motor learning was trying to put us in a box, to limit us by limiting our ability to move and learn to certain strict rules. 

Coaching Personas - Which One Are You?

Flat Earth Guy

Drill Sergeant

Chicken Little

Simplifier

Complexifier

Idealist

Realist

Winner

Loser

Space Cadet

Communicator

Leader 

Follower

Technician

Scientist

Artist

Organizer

Used Car Salesman

Synthesizer

 

"The Outlaws will always be ahead of the law"

"The Outlaws will always be ahead of the law" Frank Dick, Chief Coach of Great Britain at the time, said that to Gary Winckler and myself in the cafeteria in Helsinki at the first World Track & Field Championships in 1983. In my opinion one of the reasons that this is so is reflected in the article below from the New York Times. The naive viewpoint in this article is the same stance that the medical and scientific community has taken sine the 1960's. If reserach says is does not work then obviously it does not work, this is a classsic example of the tyranny of dead ideas . Everybody who has been around elite sport knows that HGH works! These guys can keep denying it but the Victor Conte's of the world prey on and make a killing on this mentallity. I think it was Einstein who said and I am paraphrasing here - that you cannot go to those who have created the problem for the solution. If the medical and scientific community would have admited that anabolic steriods worked and were being used extensively by athletes in the late sixties and early seventies maybe we would not be where we are now.

New York Times - December 20, 2009

H.G.H.’s Conundrum: Does Costly Treatment Enhance Performance?

By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — While human growth hormone has a remarkable ability to generate controversy, exactly what it does for athletes, both good and bad, is as much of a mystery today as when it first found favor as a performance booster during the 1990s.

“That’s uncharted territory,” said Richard J. Auchus, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. “We just don’t know what happens when people use high doses for long periods of time.”

H.G.H. is among the drugs prescribed by Anthony Galea, a Toronto-based sports medicine physician who was charged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police last week with, among other things, conspiring to smuggle it into the United States. H.G.H. is legal in Canada but approved in the United States for only a few specific uses that do not include hastening recovery from injuries.

Galea has treated a number of elite athletes, including Tiger Woods, the sprinter Donovan Bailey and the swimmer Dara Torres, and is being investigated by American authorities for supplying performance-enhancing drugs to athletes in the United States. Both Galea and his lawyer have strongly rejected that allegation and dispute the Canadian charges.

Galea told The New York Times before being charged that he had never given an athlete growth hormone. But he acknowledged that he prescribed the drug to some patients at his Toronto clinic who were at least 40 and fatigued. Galea, 50, is such a believer in its restorative powers that he said he had injected the hormone into his body five days a week for the last decade.

But physicians and medical researchers who have studied people with medical conditions that lead to growth hormone overproduction said that available evidence suggested that athletes who cheat by using costly H.G.H. may simply wind up being cheated themselves.

“Ultimately I’d have to say that its main effect is that it makes your wallet a little less heavy,” said Dr. Alan D. Rogol, a professor emeritus of endocrinology at the University of Virginia. Rogol also reviews requests to the United States Anti-Doping Agency from athletes seeking permission to use banned hormones for therapeutic treatments.

Suspicions that athletes may be using growth hormone first surfaced in the 1980s. But at the time, the only source of the hormone was cadavers.

Advances in genetics, however, allowed biotechnology companies to clone and market several hormones, including H.G.H., beginning in the 1990s. Those products swiftly found an illicit following among athletes. H.G.H. is considered a performance-enhancer in sports, and the World Anti-Doping Agency subsequently banned it.

The hormones came with a long list of side effects. For H.G.H., they include cardiovascular problems, an increased risk of diabetes, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, glucose intolerance, colon polyps, skin growths, excessive sweating and serious headaches. Heavy and prolonged growth hormone use can lead to abnormal bone growth in the face, head, hands and feet. It is widely suspected, but not proved, that excessive H.G.H. may promote cancers.

Despite Galea’s practice for older patients, growth hormone injections ultimately leave users fatigued, said Auchus, who acts as the Endocrine Society’s spokesman on hormone abuse. “Rather than being some fountain of youth, the older you are the less you tend to benefit,” Auchus said.

The United States determined that potential harm from H.G.H. is so great that federal law puts it in an unusual category of drugs that doctors cannot prescribe for unapproved, or off-label, uses. (No such ban exists in Canada.) Its approved uses are not conditions common among professional athletes: it can be used in children with severe growth problems, H.I.V. patients may receive it if they have muscle wasting, and it can be prescribed to offset exceptional weight loss in people who have had much of their small intestine surgically removed.

When it came to doping, the new hormones had an attractive feature. Because they are clones of natural hormones, they were invisible to antidoping tests that relied on looking for chemical abnormalities in urine samples. Although a blood test for H.G.H. was subsequently developed, it has not been highly effective. Rogol said that it only worked if the test subject had injected H.G.H. shortly before being asked for a sample.

Some of the cloned hormones unquestionably enhance performance. Erythropoietin, or EPO, boosts red blood cells, offering athletes in endurance sports significant gains in speed and endurance.

The possible gains from H.G.H. use are more varied and far less proven.

Auchus said that it reduces body fat and increases lean muscle mass, which are desirable not just for body building, where growth hormone abuse is believed to be widespread, but in a variety of other sports, including cycling, where leanness boosts results. But, like everything, there is debate about the full extent of that effect.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some athletes use H.G.H. to increase muscle mass. But Auchus and Rogol said that there was considerable research showing that such gains were modest.

One key difficulty in determining what an individual performance-enhancing drug brings to an athlete, Rogol said, is that few people involved in doping use just a single treatment. That opens up the potential for complex interactions, both beneficial and harmful, between various drugs and treatment methods.

There is speculation that growth hormone may be used in conjunction with platelet-rich plasma injections to swiftly heal injured muscles and tendons. While Galea is a leading proponent of platelet therapy, he said during an interview that he never combined the technique with growth hormone.

But there is considerable doubt about whether injecting H.G.H. directly into injured tissue — with or without platelet therapy — actually achieves anything.

Growth hormone does not act directly. Instead it prompts the body to produce insulin-like growth factor 1, or I.G.F.-1, which then triggers growth.

The overwhelming majority of I.G.F.-1 is produced by the liver and delivered through the blood stream. Evidence shows, however, that growth hormone can prompt local I.G.F.-1 production in other cells of the body. Auchus said that it was not clear if such local production was significant enough to accelerate healing.

Even platelet therapy, widely practiced on injured tissue, is an unproven treatment marked by uncertainties; it is however legal and not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

To create platelet-rich plasma, a small amount of the patient’s blood is put in a centrifuge to separate its red blood cells from the platelets that release proteins and other particles involved in healing. A small amount of the substance is then injected into the damaged area. The belief is that the high concentration of platelets — 3 to 10 times that of normal blood — prompts the growth of new soft-tissue or bone cells.

Scott A. Rodeo, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and a former United States Olympic team physician, said that when it comes to platelet therapy, “the underlying rationale makes sense but there’s very little underlying research.”

Rodeo, who is also a physician for the New York Giants, said that Galea was far from unique in providing the treatment in North America.

“If you want to do P.R.P. today, there are many places to do it, although it may have been different two years ago,” he said. “But sometimes in sports, a name gets out and gets recycled among athletes.”