Functional Path Training

New Swim Suits

I have followed this whole swimsuit issue quite closely. Anyone involved in the sport quickly recognized that the suit made a significant difference in a swimmers performance. It was obviously that someone had not done their homework before adopting it as legal or as many suspect there was some hanky panky in the higher levels of sport to get it adopted. Most of the swim coaches I work with describe it as a wetsuit, an obvious aid to buoyancy. It looked like the NCAA was not going to legalize it for use in NCAA competition, a good move. Then I found out last week that under threat of a lawsuit from one of the manufactures it is legal for use in NCAA competition. Swimming is a sport under the gun with programs being dropped; now you are talking about it costing more to outfit a swimmer than a football player, think of the implications of that? I feel this is symptomatic of a bigger malaise affecting sport. There is this obsession with chasing records instead of focus on competition that is the essence of sport. Where can this go? What would happen if we turned off the clock and just raced? Isn’t that the essence of sport? To keep pushing the envelope, chasing records leads to the temptation to dope. Where does it stop? Perhaps a Roman circus would be appropriate. We are close to that now. When will we wake up?

Reductionist Thinking - Painting Yourself into a Corner

My basic premise is that the body is very intelligent and self organizing. It instinctively knows what to do, how to do and when to do it. Daily life activities and sport activities happen way to fast to think about some of the things people try to teach the body to do - proper lifting technique to prevent back injury comes to mind – you can bend your knees in a sterile environment when you have time to think about it, but under stress you do what you have to do. Firing the glute is another example; let’s get real, if you are standing on one foot or two the glute is firing! Why all this mumbo jumbo about glute firing, if the glute were not firing you would end up in a heap on the floor. Unless I am missing something muscles do not fire in predetermined patterns, if they did we would all be robots. That is why people that train to think about firing certain muscles move like robots. Let’s get real and use good common sense and science to recognize the wisdom of the body. Muscles work together in synergistic patterns to produce efficient  movement, if they do not it is because of diseases like Polio, Parkinson’s or Muscular Dystrophy. That being said it is interesting to go back and study the work of Dr Kabat and Knott and Voss the originators and early practitioners of Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF), a treatment system designed to rehabilitate polio patients suffering from varying degrees of paralysis. They had it right; they stressed neurological patterns that emphasized muscle synergys using aggregate muscle action. It worked then and it works now. Most of their exercises were in prone and supine positions with some seated because their patients were paralyzed, but the principles can be adapted to other postures and work equally well with a healthy athlete. To the best of my knowledge I have tried to adapt my strength training exercises and routines based on my understanding of the principles of PNF since I was first exposed to it in the early 1970’s. I think this is why Frans Bosch’s definition of strength training resonated with me. He defines strength training as coordination training with resistance. I take it one step farther and define it as coordination training with appropriate resistance in multiple planes appropriate for the movement or sport. There are is another message here that is a recurrent theme for me – everything old is new again! Training and rehabilitation did not start in 1998, we all stand on the shoulder of giants who did not have of the analysis tools that we have available to us today. They had to heighten their powers of observation and hone their skills to produce visible and measurable results.

Paul Newman

I was sad to hear of the death of Paul Newman yesterday. He was one my favorite actors. I am sure everyone has their favorite role of his, but my favorite was his role as the Luke Jackson the convict in Cool Hand Luke. His line “shaking the bush here boss” is one of my favorite movie lines and the scene of him attempting to eat “fifty eggs in a hour” is a classic. The following quote from his NY Times obituary sums up Paul Newman, the man: “We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

Change

“The soft minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.”  Martin Luther King

I learned very early on in my career that change is a constant, if you are unwilling to change and learn then the world will soon pass you by. My college consultations over the last month reinforced this. All of these coaches are successful, they do not have to change but they are being proactive and leading change rather than following. I learned that leading change is much more exciting than reacting to change. It is not always comfortable, but it is always exciting. It is particularly gratifying to see others follow and jump on the bandwagon when they do not have to lead and take risk.

Twenty Years Later

This article resonated with me. I was especially interested in the comments of Andy Higgins and Doug Clement, two coaches that I really respect.  I think this article summarizes the all the issues in a very succinct and concise manner.

Questions continue to surround sprinting

By BEVERLEY SMITH AND JAMES CHRISTIE , From Monday's Globe and Mail

September 21, 2008

Twenty years after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson's epic drug disqualification at the Seoul Summer Olympics, the sport remains cloaked in skepticism.

Perhaps it's just fatigue after a rash of doping positives in the years since. Or innocence lost after Johnson's dramatic fall from grace.

“I'm not sure there has been an athlete so identified around the world with such glamour – before the positive test,” Canadian track coach Andy Higgins said.

That made the plunge all the more momentous.

Now, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt could not rouse a crowd at the 2008 Beijing Olympics without a spectre of doubt hanging over the finish line.

Was he really clean? Could anybody so dominant – gold medals in both the men's 100- and 200-metre events, plus the 4x100 relay – really have run like that without chemical help?

It is Johnson's enduring legacy.

“I hate it,” Higgins said. “I'm essentially, by nature, an optimist. I have a positive view. … I am seriously pissed off because [tainted coaches and athletes] have made me to a degree a cynic.”

Higgins watched Bolt drop his arms 20 metres from the finish line during the 100-metre final in Beijing and still run 9.69 seconds.

“He's an immense talent. No discussion,” Higgins said. “He's 6-foot-5 and he comes out of the blocks like he's 5-foot-6. He doesn't get left in the blocks. Then, he runs away from them with that immense stride length and power. And he's completely innocent of whatever can create pressure.

“But all I have are questions.”

The questions surrounding Bolt “are a sad outcome” of the Johnson legacy, said Bruce Kidd, dean of the faculty of physical education and health at the University of Toronto.

“I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I was electrified by his performance. But it is true that the prevalence of drugs in all aspects of society makes this a question in people's minds.”

Charlie Francis, the architect of Johnson's drug-supported training regime, said last week he believes drugs weren't the reason Bolt ran world-record times in Beijing. Rather, it is the Jamaican practice of training on grass surfaces, which is easier on joints and affects the connective tissue in a positive way.

“Now, it's not my job to speculate who is doing what,” Francis said. “I'm sufficiently satisfied that the playing field is level, enough to enjoy watching races at the highest level.”

Does that mean Francis, once known as Charlie the Chemist, thinks sprinters are clean now? Or that no athlete is lacking of chemical assistance? What does it mean to be on a level playing field now?

Francis said during the federally ordered Dubin inquiry into doping that Johnson had to take steroids to remain on a level playing field with the rest of the athletes. And six of the eight Seoul 100-metre finalists were eventually pegged with drug infractions of some sort, causing experts to call it “the dirtiest race in history.”

“Sick. Shallow,” Higgins said of the drive to get onto “a level playing field.”

Higgins was the only Canadian track coach to show up outside the athletes village in Seoul wearing the team uniform the morning after Johnson's positive test. The rest of them didn't want to deal with the media.

He told the media that Johnson's positive test wasn't a sport issue, but a values issue. Athletes should be directed to learn solid values, Higgins said, so the effort to be your best holds the most meaning and that solid values serve you for the rest of your life.

Johnson didn't learn those values in the race to win at all costs, Higgins said, and he sees Johnson's story as a tragedy.

“He was a young man who was used by a very smart man [Francis] for his own ego purposes, and he'd been taken advantage of,” Higgins said. “That should never have happened.”

One of the resulting tragedies of the Dubin inquiry is that people see Johnson as the bad guy and Francis as the good guy for revealing truths about the drug culture in track, Higgins said. In his mind, however, Francis deserves to be held responsible.

In the end, Johnson has come through with questionable values, like the cult of celebrity. “He has nowhere to go,” Higgins said.

He said Johnson's demise has affected sport twofold in the two decades since:

*It has cost the sport in Canada immensely in terms of financial support and limited the opportunities for track athletes that followed.

*It has cost the sport credibility and turned people into cynics.

But it wasn't just Johnson's positive test that caused it, Higgins said. It was the ensuing Dubin inquiry, which featured Francis's revelations.

“Charles Dubin became fascinated by Charlie's bright mind,” Higgins said. “And the man is very bright. He has strong opinions, tons of them related to justifying what he did. And that kept getting aired. It was an amazing public seminar on doping. … It gave Charlie a forum.”

After the hearings, the doping hotlines in Canada and the United States lit up, with athletes asking for confirmation of what they had heard – so they could use the information for themselves.

“It added to the justification in a lot of people's minds that the only way to the top was to take drugs,” Higgins said. “It missed the entire point, which was … that it was cheating.”

Only he and fellow coach Doug Clement used the word “cheating” in their testimonies, Higgins said. “It didn't get clearly defined, because the justifiers have all kinds of other words.”

He says he has not seen a huge positive impact from the Dubin inquiry in Canada. The World Anti-Doping Agency wasn't born for another 10 years, until after the Festina cycling scandal, when a manager was found with large quantities of doping products in a team car on the France-Belgium border.

Kidd thinks that, with the efforts of WADA, drug use is less prevalent today in sport, although during the years after the Johnson positive, other countries were “just sweeping doping under the carpet.” Now, he says, there is a very strong worldwide consensus that doping is “antithetical to the value of sport and should be strongly policed.”

Higgins is not so sure track and field is as tough as it should be on the doping issue.

“There's too much money to be made on world records,” he said.

He questions the move by the governing International Association of Athletics Federations on tagging seven female middle-distance runners with doping infractions just before the Beijing Games, to send a message to any Olympic competitor considering cheating.

But why not target sprinters, who are the major marketing attraction at any event?

“Would it be smart for a huge sport to go in and create a scandal, and destroy illusions one more time?” he pointed out.

In the 20 years after Seoul, it's become clear not all infractions were made public.

Former Canadian high-jumper Milt Ottey says Johnson was used “as a scapegoat” for a dirty track scene “and the IAAF knew it at the time.”

“My suspicion was that a lot of Americans were caught but that was squashed,” Ottey said. “[The IAAF] had a chance to make a real statement, but they let it be believed it was a single event … it was Ben. Now, anyone who does anything great is suspected. That's sad.”

Asked if anything has changed, Ottey says people are now more tolerant of performance enhancement. “I think the public is more understanding of the Ben Johnson incident, though, and they think it's time to forget and go on.”

Angella Issajenko, Canada's fastest female sprinter who never tested positive but admitted to drug use at the Dubin inquiry, has always said Johnson's treatment following the doping scandal was unfair.

“He didn't sodomize somebody's child, come on, he took … stanazolol a few days a week; big deal,” she said.

Kidd said sport never had innocence, embedded in society as a whole.

“Sport is always thought to create a high moral standard,” he said, adding Johnson's positive test was a reminder that it didn't.

Higgins said Johnson blasted an illusion of innocence. In reality, coaches and athletes knew about rampant doping in the days and years before the infamous test result.

“You knew that the Eastern Bloc was into it,” he said. “You knew what you were competing against.”

Now, Higgins says, there are more than a few people performing at the highest levels that are starting “to get very nervous,” but what remains of the former Eastern Bloc hasn't changed. However, he still sees too many suspicious things.

“The human physiology just cannot do the work needed to perform at the highest levels and stay there week after week through an unbelievably long season,” he said. “It's not possible.”

Sadly, the Ben Johnson-born cynicism is just one more aspect of a huge all-pervasive cynicism about almost anything, Higgins says.

A Message for Today

I saw this at the entrance to a park next to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This is a message our leaders need to hear and observe.

Kenyon College Swimming - Sustained Excellence

As many of you know I am fascinated by sustained excellence. Just the law of averages will allow a team or individual to win one championship but to win 29 straight NCAA Division III Men’s National Championships and 22 women's championships is beyond incredible. This past week I spent three days at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. This year I am working with the Kenyon athletic department on staff development in athletic development. Jim Steen, the Swim coach was instrumental in arranging this. This is Jim's 32nd years   at Kenyon. His fire, enthusiasm and desire to excel is contagious. Three years ago I designed their dryland program and he wanted me to upgrade the program and help the other sports. Here are some lessons reinforced during my visit: You must have a system. Coaching is not something you do to the athletes it is something you do with the athletes. Quality is more important than quantity. Winning is process. Winners are constantly learning. Management and organization are essential. Continuity is essential. The premium is on coaching, not on training. Facilities do not matter you can get it done anywhere.(Just a note until three years they trained in a six lane pool, it wasn't always like this)

The sprint swimmers spent more time training out of the water than in the water. Starting at 6:00 AM they come to dryland every 10 minutes matched up in pairs. It was really fun working with this group. The distance swimmers do their dryland on pool deck. I know if I were a beginning swim coach I would go to Gambier Ohio and see how this works. In fact any sport can learn from Jim Steen, his staff and his swimmers. I did not even need an airplane to fly home I was so excited from this visit.

 

Wake Up Strength Coaches

I have been thinking of writing this post for a long time. I have been hesitant because of the risk of pissing off a whole bunch of people, but so be it. I say wake up because those of you that identify yourself as strength coaches are painting yourselves into a corner. The more you chase numbers in the weight room, the more you create adapted athletes that are disconnected with what they are trying to do on the field, the court, the pool and the track. How many of you actually attend practice and see what is going on outside the weight room? If you do not do that then you better, because if you are not connecting the weight room to the sport then you are not doing your job. Oh I have heard all the excuses why you can’t you, they are just that excuses. I have been places where there were there were eight graduate assistant strength coaches for football. They spent all their time polishing the chrome and mixing “recovery “ drinks. It takes planning, communication and organization.

Do you get along with the trainer, probably not? They are no longer on your side because they see the injuries that are occurring because of biased one sided training. They don’t get hurt in the weight room; they get hurt because of the weight room. Trainers you are not without fault, you need to get out of the training room understand what is going on and stop pointing fingers. Just getting your CSCS does not make you anymore of an expert on Strength and Conditioning than it does the strength coach. We are all part of a support team that is supposed to help the coach put the best prepared, healthy fully adaptable athlete on the field, court, pool and track.

We need to get back to coaching. We need to emphasize complete athletic development, not just strength. In the immortal words of the sage social philosopher, Rodney King  “Why can’t we all get along?” Don’t paint yourself into the corner, take charge, and be a leader not a follower. Get out of the weight room deal with the complete athlete and be a coach. It is easy to get strong and achieve numbers; it is hard to apply that strength to the sport that is our job.

Looking for Ghosts - Screening for Postural Dysfunction

A good athletic profile or screening will serve a guide for what you need to do next. I do not think an athletic profile, especially done by a coach should go searching for dysfunctions or malfunctions. Remember each sport has adaptive postural response. The longer an athlete participates in a particular sport, especially if it is one side dominant, the more evident the response will be. (An example is the hypertrophy in the forearm of a professional tennis player) It is much like when we were kids and sitting around telling ghost stories at a sleepover. As soon as the lights went out and everyone got quiet, there were noises and light flashes that everyone was sure were ghosts. The moral of the story is the same with postural dysfunction. Go to a conference on screening and dysfunction and then come back on Monday and you will see many more dysfunctions that you ever knew existed. We have to remember that the body is asymmetrical, we are not balanced and that the body is highly adaptive and self organizing. I use a variation of the Athletic Profile http://www.movementdynamics.com/index.html developed by kelvin Giles, it is practical, easy to use and translated immediately into exercise progressions that are part of my training program.I am a firm believer that a sound well rounded training program that emphasizes training the whole kinetic chain using coordinated movements will allow the body to find it’s optimum performance level in the climate of repetitive stress. Too many people have gone the route of “corrective exercise” to the exclusion of actual training. If you are doing this, you are doing the athlete a disservice. This is quite prevalent in the NBA. The solution is to include remedial components in the strength training and movement programs that address the common problems that occur. It should be transparent. Understand the demands of the sport, the position and what the individual athlete brings to the table and design a program that addresses all those demands. Get out there and coach and train them, keep the ghosts in the closet.

Fall College Tour

I have not been posting as frequently because I am on my annual fall college tour. I started out at North Carolina State on August 28 working with both Track & Field and Swimming. Very enjoyable visit catching up with Rollie Geiger, an old friend and competitor from my college track coaching days back in the Pleistocene era. Then off to University of Michigan for women’s swimming. Then a “wonderful” four days in one of my favorite places, Las Vegas for the ASCA Convention. (Notes for those presentations will eventually be posted on my web site – just need to catch up) the convention itself was great, the venue sucked. Just returned from three days with Harvard Women’s swimming, this is the second year they are using the dryland program. Always enjoy Cambridge, when I leave there I always feel a little smarter just for having walked around Harvard Square and the campus. This next weekend I complete my college tour in Gambier Ohio at Kenyon College. While there I will work on staff development for all the sports and focus on swimming with Jim Steen. This is my second stint with Kenyon after a three year hiatus. I am looking forward to the year with Kenyon. All the coaches from these programs are great coaches who are trying to grow and learn, they are all willing to share which makes it a wonderful learning experience for me.

That being said I can’t wait to get home for the month of October to be able to spend more time with Venice Volleyball and Baseball. Both teams have outstanding coaches and eager kids focused on getting better. The volleyball team is off to a great start, they are 8 and 2. I know they are going to surprise a lot of teams along the way. This group of girls has worked harder than any team I have ever worked with. They get it. They are fully committed to making themselves the best you can be. I get fired up every day I can be in the gym with them. They are young and relatively inexperienced, a great quality because they don’t know they are not supposed to beat the teams they are beating.