Functional Path Training

Some Thoughts

Don’t take what you read as gospel. There is little that is new. Always trace the origins. If it is too good to be true, it is probably not true. Be a detective, think like Sherlock Holmes. Think for yourself. Ask hard incisive questions. Stop following the flock. Shake it up, be disruptive. Never be satisfied in what you know, keep learning & growing.

If You Think You Have It Figured Out

Maybe you have just completed a successful season and won a championship. The temptation is to rest on your laurels. To do the same training again. In order to stay the same, you must change. Rethink what and how you did it. What must be reemphasized? What must be changed? How can I build on this year’s success? What is necessary to avoid stagnation and continue to achieve adaptation? The athletes will quickly accommodate to the stimulus. If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got. Terrible English but an important point to consider in order to get optimum return from training. So how do you progress? It is also necessary to recognize that there are certain training periods where you just need to put your nose to the grindstone and get after it. Sometimes you don’t really need to change the training the stimulus, just change the sequence of where it is placed in a program. Change is always uncomfortable, especially after achieving success. Sustained excellence demands continual change.

Muscles Firing - Where is the switch?

This is a post I wrote over many years ago, if anything this thinking is more pervasive now than it was then.

 

"A lot of things weren't firing -- his glutes, his hips, thighs," (Training Guru to the star player – name deleted 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 and call-in a substitute, 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 break 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. 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. 

Three Books to Kickoff 2021

These three books are among the best I have read in the past several years. Out of Thin Air is terrific reinforcement of what you must do to compete successfully in an endurance sport. Great insights into training. Huge reinforcement of Seiler’s training polarization concept. The Art of Possible is not another formulaic motivational text. It really is a peak performance primer. Chock full of a practical step by step things you can do to achieve flow. Kotler really nails it. It certainly, got refocused. Think Again will getting rethinking and thinking again. Adam Grant is a rock star in my universe. So much great information here to get you thinking deeper.

Volume

Anyone can do more. Can you do more better? Is doing more really necessary? It is very easy to default to volume, in fact it is seductive to see the miles, tons or reps climb. At early stages of development doing more usually yields commensurate results, the more you do the better you get, but then what? The point of diminishing returns kicks in. Do you push through it or do you adjust?

My experience in having gone the more volume approach in several sports is the take a giant step back and rethink what you are doing. Volume is not a biomotor quality. So trite to say but so true, in so many instances less is more. Defaulting solely to higher intensity is not the answer either. The answer is to find that sweet spot for each athlete where volume, intensity and the often-overlooked factor of density are manipulated. In my experience the answer the volume conundrum is density which I define as the frequency of the training stimulus. It can be summed up in one simple axiom – a little bit more often. This is now being called micro dosing. It is easier to manage and monitor and takes full advantage of the cumulative training effect to achieve the desired adaptation.