Functional Path Training

Trinidad and Tobago

What a great trip. My colleagues Dave Joyner and Ed Ryan and I taught a three day seminar

on Following the Functional Path to Build and Rebuild the Complete Athlete. We had 114 coaches, therapists and doctors attend. The last day was Independence Day, a national holiday and there was very little drop off in attendance. The coaches were eager to learn so the questions were really good and challenging. This is a very small country, in geography and population with a rich sport history. With he guidance of the Sports Minister, Gary Hunt, whom we were able to meet and discuss thier development plans they will be a force to be reckoned with again in sports on the world scene. I would like to thanks Mr Trevor Hewitt for organizing the trip through his business Advanced Performance Technologies and the support of the Sports Minister, The Honourable Gary Hunt.

Good Book's

Just finished a good book last night. Leading the Charge - Leadership Lessons from The Battlefield To The Boardroom.  Last week I watched an interview with the author, former Marine Corps General Tony Zinni on CSPAN Book TV, found it interesting so I decided to read the book. Nothing earth shaking here, but a lot of common sense and some really good insights into the requirements for leadership in this ever changing work we live in. What I especially liked were his personal examples of leadership and command situations that he had experienced.

Also just finished another interesting book called "Always Compete - An Inside Look At Pete Carroll And The USC Football Juggernaut" by

Steve Bisheff. The author is a bit of a Trojan cheerleader, but when writes Carroll and his coaches it is really outstanding. I have been fascinated by Carroll and his approach. He is a sharp dude. Many insights to leading and coaching today's athlete. I am not a big USC fan, but this guy has turned around a program that was stuck in the past. Especially interesting in light of their defeat at the hands of University of Washington coached by his former assistant.

On the Road Again

Leaving today for Trinidad and Tobago to teach a three day workshop with my colleague Dr. Dave Joyner and Ed Ryan. Looking forward to getting some insight as to why a small a small nation like this can produce the way they have produced in Track and Field. Should be fun.

Stop and Think

Richard MacLeish wrote the following reply to yesterday’s post (My answers to his question are in parenthesis) - How do you know what exercises are going to help a specific function. (Learn the demands of the sport and the position, know the athlete) I understand the rational, but I also see that the reason the soccer coach went to the strength coach was because he lacked the knowledge to help his players get stronger. (Point well taken up to a certain point – This is what I keep hearing. My question is stronger for what? For the game or to lift more weight?) Can you recommend a good source for "functional" knowledge? (This is not a question of function, that has become as trite a term as HIT or Olympic Lifting, a way to label or pigeon hole someone. Learn about movement. Get out and try different things and see how they feel. Be a coach. There is no holy grail of knowledge about function.)

More General versus Specific

There is another consideration in the distribution of general versus specific work that is the training age of the athlete. At younger training ages, particularly in the first three to five years of training the athlete’s window of adaptation is very large. Therefore it is appropriate to include more general work at this stage to give a broad range of motor skills and abilities. As the athlete advances in training age the window of adaptation becomes much smaller therefore the demand is for more specific work. At advanced training ages general work assumes the role of remedial prophylactic training or recovery regeneration type of work.

Another Message to the “Lost Generation” Strength Coaches

This is from my colleague Kelvin Giles. Kelvin has that unique ability to cut to the chase. He shared this with yesterday: “When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging.” Maybe the lost generation just needs to stop digging. The answers they are digging for are probably right on the surface in plain view.

Let's Stop and Think

If you go to a surgeon, what do they usually recommend? Of course, surgery. Go to a strength coach in person or online, what will they recommend? Of course a strength exercise. So for a minute lets stop and think. You are soccer coach now, someone who played the game and you are looking for advice on what to do for strength training, what do you do? Of course, you go online and look-up “stuff” on the various strength coaching websites.

I have not made this up; I learned this in an interesting phone call from a young soccer coach at a DI school who is really trying to do the right thing. Here is what the strength coaching gurus on one of these sites recommended for soccer players: Front squats and dead lifts. After I dropped my phone at those suggestions, I gathered myself and asked him why they had recommended those exercises? A brief moment of silence and the answer, the front squats to work the quads and dead lifts as an exercise that involves large muscle mass. I took a very deep breath, reached for my blood pressure medication and proceeded to answer. I guess the logic for selection of those exercises would be fine if you were a personal trainer, but what do they have to do with soccer? I encouraged him to take a close look at what he was trying to accomplish. Of course everything is driven by the demands of the game. Soccer is a skill dominant, transition game sport, with high speed endurance demands. It is a contact sport. It is also a sport with high incidence of groin and hamstring injuries. I asked him to consider single leg squats, lunges in multiple planes and step-ups both on a high and low box. Of course these need to be distributed throughout the weekly training cycle based on the position, minutes played and the number of matches in a week. My logic is that there more closely reflect the strength demands of the game and serve as an injury prevention function to help with the force reduction component of high speed stops.

I came away from the conversation encouraged that maybe I had helped guide someone back toward the functional path. At the same time I was discoursed that people keep getting unsound advice and most never question it. Remember – “Work your fingers to the bone. What do you get? Boney fingers.”

Muscle Firing – Where’s the Switch?

"A lot of things weren't firing -- his glutes, his hips, thighs," (Training Guru to the star players – namedeleted to protect the guilty) told the newspaper. "I wouldn't say his condition was the most severe, I wouldn't say it was the best. ... But if I were to classify it on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the most extreme, I'd say he was definitely in the seven, eight category." This is definitely one of my pet peeves. If those muscles were not firing how did this player walk? Let’s get logical rather scientific. If there is an injury the body is very intelligent much smarter than the coaches and therapists who try to intervene by turning muscles on or off. The body will guard at the site of the injury and call in substitutes, as in most teams the substitutes are not as good as the starters, what we need to need to do is figure how to get the first string back into the game and playing as a team. We don’t do that lying on a training table trying to get individual muscles to fire and then hope we can get them back into sequence. We need to figure out what muscle synergies we can use to coordinate all those  muscles to work together as a team. Otherwise it would be so simple, just find the  master switch, program the body, turn it on and just like flipping a light switch beautiful motion. Hate to brake to the gurus, but there is no switch. We need to understand planes of motion and muscle actions and be able to figure out how to manipulate those variables along with the ground to get the first team players back on the floor playing together in beautiful harmony. Just remember if they ain’t firing you ain’t moving. It is not about firing it is about coordination and teamwork. Join the team and skip down the functional path to movement bliss.

Learning from the Athletes

Someone commented on one of yesterday’s posts that you can learn a lot from your athletes. Amen to that. I think in forty years of coaching that I have learned more from the athletes that I have coached and those athletes that I have been fortunate to have been around than any single source. The athletes  live it. They know what the workouts feel like, they are the ones who put their ass on the line in competition. It is important to note that I have learned as much or even more from the average athletes as from the stars. There are times when I wish I would listened more and talked less. That is another lesson it seems we all must learn. Richard Aguirre who ran 8;56 in the Two Mile back in 1975 asked me one day why we always did out long run on Sunday and then came back with Monday as our hardest day of the week. That simple question forced me to go back and look at my whole distribution of work throughout the microcycle. Of course I had the long run on Sunday because that is the way everyone else did it. Pure and simple sheep walking! It is good to empower the athletes by teaching what you are doing with them. Coaching is a cooperative process, it is not something we do to the athletes, it is something we do with them.

Lactate – Friend or Foe

Where does lactate fit into the picture,  Greg Brock just nails it:
There's even a physiological correlative to this when you push into oxygen debt, you back off just a little bit, your body learns to utilize the lactic acid for fuel, lactic acid plus oxygen is pyruvic acid and guess what? - we are right back in the Krebs cycle again. What happens is your body learn to create more enzymes that speed up that reaction of lactate back to pyruvate and when you do workouts like that, that's why it’s so effective.

Why do we keep preaching that lactate is bad? It is a fuel, learn to metabolize it and make it your friend. Read Tim Noakes, Lore of Running for more on the role of lactate. Oh by then way it is not lactate that causes soreness. That is another issue for another time. Read the Noakes book and it will expand your vision.