Functional Path Training

Athlete Development or Abuse?

In the United States this is Labor Day weekend. Traditionally this is the kickoff for youth soccer season. I was reminded of this yesterday when I overheard two parents talking at Starbucks. They were talking about the tournament their kids were playing in. It was 2:00 PM and their kids had played two games already that day and were going to play the third game at 3:30. Yesterday it was 92 degrees with 73% humidity - heat index well over 100 degrees! Today they will come back and play again. They will play at least two more games and a third if they survive to play the championship game that will be played; you guessed it at 4:00 PM. This is not how you develop players. In this scenario skills quickly erode due to fatigue. As they fatigue they are more susceptible to injury. By the time they get to the second day of the tournament they look like they are playing in slow motion. The same thing happens in basketball, with heat being less of a factor. When are we going to wake up? This is borderline child abuse and highly negligent. The fact of the matter is nothing will be done. These tournaments are big money makers for the clubs that sponsor them and those who promote them. They epitomize the youth sport business that has grown up as sport has declined in the schools. I wish I could offer a viable solution, but realistically I am afraid there is none. The inertia of this economic engine would be tough to reverse. Ideally at the very least you should have a training to competition ratio of 5 or 6 to 1 with periods of no games. Despite all the hoopla of the new US Soccer development plan this is what still goes on. Players do not learn how to play the game the way it should be played. They learn how to survive. That is not athlete development.

 

Coaching That Matters

The coaching that matters is not the technical, tactical and training nuances; coaching that matters is what some call the intangibles. The ability to say the right thing at the right time. To be firm and fair. To let the athlete know the boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable performance and behavior. The ability to connect and communicate. Technical expertise is a given at the highest levels of coaching, what matters and makes the difference is so-called emotional intelligence. It is understanding the human element. Great coaches are not great by chance. I read where the great soccer manager Jose Mourinhno speaks to his players as a group in the language of the country where he coaches and when he meets with the players individually he speaks the players native language. Think about that. He sets a level of expectation for the players to know the culture and language of the country they are playing in and he connects with each player individually. If you want to be a great coach get beyond X’s and O’s, GPS data and heart rate variability and learn to connect with the athlete on a human level.

The Youth Sport Business

As the old prospector said: There gold in them thar hills, real gold, it’s called kids playing sports. The business of youth sports is the 800-pound gorilla in the room that is never talked about. Do the math – a soccer club with 1,000 members that charges $500.00 per player is not unusual. So the directors of these clubs have a vested interest in playing more games or matches. AAU Basketball is big time business with shoe contracts and huge travel budgets. They are all selling the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They are feeding the parent’s fantasy. Telling parents that that if little Johnny plays for them and takes extra lessons at $50.00 a session (After all we know you need 10,000 hours to make it  to the NFL or NBA) Johnny will be the next Lionel Messi or Tim Tebow.

I am not against free enterprise, we all have to make a living, but this does feel quite right. It is adults using kids for financial gain. Folks this is no longer a bake sale operation. The “coaches” make much more that the average high school coach or teacher and they are really not accountable to anyone. They are killing high school sports. This might be the root of the whole problem. I know I am old school, but I would like to see sports for kids back in the elementary, middle and high schools with trained teachers as coaches. I know that with all the financial restraints in education that this would difficult, if not impossible, but we have to find a way. Sports are part of the education process; they are an outgrowth of physical education that is physical and educational. There is more to youth sport than preparing to for a scholarship. There are lessons of teamwork, fair play, learning to lose and win with grace that must be part of the process. I don’t see much of this in the club sport phenomenon that exists today. Let’s bring some sanity to all this and let the kids be kids and save the parents money so they can take a family vacation and sit around the dinner table and have a conversation with the family meal. Old school values, I hope not.

Questions & Concerns from Youth Soccer Coaches on Training

Although this is written specific to soccer it can easily apply to all game sports at the youth/developmental level. In this case think of the principles behind the this not what is sport specific.

1.   When is it appropriate to begin formal speed training?                                                                                                        A common mistake many coaches make when beginning formal speed training is to prepare their players for a track meet and not for the game of soccer. Speed training for soccer should always have a game-like emphasis.  Typically, younger players between the ages of 7-9 should focus on free play.  Variations of games such as tag are a wonderful way to work on speed and improve gross motor skills. Coaching concederations prior to implementing any type of formal training include the ability of the player to handle formal instruction and the player’s physical maturity level.  Starting at an early age, soccer technique (Developed through play, not mechanistic drills) should be developed concurrent with speed training.  Once these skills have been mastered, players need to learn to distribute their efforts relative to the technical and tactical demands of the game, incorporating short explosive bursts with varied changes of direction.

2.   In need to improve my team’s endurance, should I do distance running?                                                                                             Practical experience and research has shown that slow steady distance running detracts from speed and explosiveness.  It’s the 88^th minute of the game and the score is 1 to 1. Your players should not only be able to run, but continue to run fast.  This is accomplished by incorporating fartlek and interval runs into your training.  For example, have your players perform a 30/30 run.  This is a 30 second jog followed by a 30 second run at 70% of maximal effort.  Start with a 10-minute run and work up to 18 minutes.   Carefully consider the conditioning effect that also occurs from small-sided games. This can be manipulated by changing variables such as the number of players, size of field, duration of play, ball supply, and touch restriction.  Unfortunately having only 2-3 practices per week is insufficient to get your players fit.  Additional fitness work that is relative to the demands of soccer and properly planned into the overall training cycle will help to ensure a fitter and faster team.

3.   When is it appropriate to begin formal strength training for a young player?                                                                                               Strength is one of the biggest deficiencies in players we work with at all levels of soccer.  As with speed training, the athlete’s emotional development and level of physical maturity are important in determining if the athlete can learn the routines and handle formal training.  Although research has shown that pre-pubescent athletes may benefit from weight training, heavy loading of the spine is not recommended until after puberty.  A key principle to strength training found is the player has to be able to handle his or her own body weight before adding external resistance.  This can be accomplished by incorporating pushups, pull-ups, body weight lunges, and body weight squats into your program.  Various medicine ball exercises as well as hopping and jumping games will also help to strengthen the tendons and ligaments further helping to prevent injury and establishing a solid strength base. 

4.   How can I include all of the soccer fitness activities within a normal practice?                                                                                            Integrate each component throughout the entire practice.  It all starts with a proper warm-up.  This is the time to work on balance, coordination, speed work, and high quality touches on the ball.  The objective is to work up to game effort speed, therefore, warm-up to play, don’t play to warm-up.  From this point on the entire practice should mimic the game.  This requires a well thought out training plan that flows from one component to the next with a smooth transition.  For example, when performing team drills, the length of the lines affects the work to rest ratio.  Players should never stand around for more than 30-40 seconds at a time.  Transition right into a small sided game after finishing the last team drill.  We look at the whole practice as a water break.  Have your players bring their own water bottle so that whenever they need a break, they quickly take it and get immediately back in to practice. 

5.   What can I do to help prevent fatigue when my team plays two games in one day?                                                                                                         Your players are only as good as their ability to recover.  Factors such as hydration and a pre and post nutrition plan are always important. Be aware of environmental conditions such as altitude changes, time zone changes, and the weather.  The warm-up before the first game will be more extensive while the warm-up before the second game will be much shorter in duration.  Many teams will go through a long warm-up before their second game and end up coming out flat.  This may be attributed to the players becoming fatigued from the long second warm-up. Include a cool down after each game lasting around 10-15 minutes incorporating light jogging and dynamic flexibility.  End the cool down with a short static stretching routine to help the muscles return to resting length. 

ACL Tears in Female Athletes - The Problem & Some Solutions

This article http://nyti.ms/hUy9pi and some of the information (misinformation) in article in Sunday New York Times sports page is disturbing. The topic of the female athlete and ACL injuries is complex and sometimes controversial. It is a real problem and a crisis given the economic and human cost.

Let’s look at a couple of the points of emphasis in the article and then I will look a bit more globally and offer some solutions.

The following is often offered up as a solution to prevent ACL injuries: “bend at the hips and knees to softly absorb the load, keeping their knees behind the toes, striking the ground toe to heel.” Watch a game or practice you will see it is impossible to keep the knees behind the toes and still play the game. You may do it a completely controlled artificial environment, but in the real world at game speed the knee will go where it has to go. It will go into extreme valgus and varus positions. The knee will go way out beyond the toe. The key is that the knee goes where it needs to go with control. As far as foot strike, it is completely dictated by the movement requirement, landing from a rebound could be a different foot strike than on planting and cutting. This strategy will robotize the player by taking instinctual and reflexive movements and making them cognitive, conscious and mechanical. In my opinions (I emphasize it is my opinion) we may actually be predisposing the athlete to injury with these types of prevention programs. It is certainly not time well spent.

Here is another solution from the article: “The knee should be in a neutral position; ideally, … said, the center of the kneecap should be aligned with the second toe.” Neutral is a position the knee passes through in a millisecond. In an artificial controlled environment you may be able to align the kneecap with the second toe, but it won’t happen at the speed you must play in order to be able to execute jumps, stops, starts and turns. It is a dynamic, ballistic environment that is not sterile and controlled. Once again the result will be robotic movement.

The information in both quotes represents what is thought to be cutting edge research, but it does not represent what must be done in the real world in the competitive arena. These types of so-called prevention programs and strategies are fundamentally unsound. If in doubt my rule of thumb is to go back to common sense. If these strategies worked then why aren’t they preventing ACL tears? Everyone is doing some variation of these programs; in some cases devoting up to thirty minutes a day to them, still the rate of ACL tears has not dropped, if anything it has increased.

It begs a simple question: Do these players have the physical competencies and fundamental movement skills necessary to compete? We know they have the basketball, soccer, or specific sport skill, but do they have the underlining physical competencies and movement skills to give them a fair change to avoid injury? Part of the solution is quite simple – identify and assess the physical competencies. Then train those competencies in parallel to the sport skill. The dark hole is what is being done in the off-season, preseason and in- season in regard to strength training. In many situations strength training is only done in the off-season, reduced in pre-season and almost nonexistent in-season.

For the female athlete a commitment to year around strength training is a requirement, not an option. It must continue in-season through the championship season. Unlike her male counterpoint that has a great percentage of muscle mass and higher testosterone levels, the female cannot afford to take off from strength training. Obviously the greatest investment should be on leg strength. The great majority of ACL tears are noncontact and in most of those cases they are a deceleration injuries (As are ankle sprains). It stands to reason then that we should focus on training the decelerators. Stop focusing on the knee and think kinetic chain, emphasize the linkage of ankle, knee, hip and the trunk. The knee is stuck in the middle; it is at the mercy of the joints above and below.

The sports that put the knee at greatest risk are sports that require quick starts, stops and changes of direction off one leg onto the other leg. This  dictates that the training emphasize work on one-leg and reciprocal movements. The single leg squat is the cornerstone (True single leg squat, not some of the permutations labeled as such), lunges in all planes and step-ups at various heights. Double leg squats are important, starting with bodyweight and progressing to appropriate loads based on developmental level and sport demands.

Dynamic balance should be part of daily warm-up, as should a mini band routine to work the intrinsic muscles of the hip. Once a foundation of leg strength is established then progressively add agility work that starts with known programmed movements and progresses to random chaotic movements. Incorporate jump rope as a means to teach good coordination and foot strike. Progress to multi dimensional jumps and hops.

The clincher here is that this must be systematically addressed in the female athlete starting just before puberty. Think of it as preparation to play the game that runs parallel to skill development. In most cases it should slightly precede skill development. The two must go hand in glove, not either or. The functionally strong young female athlete will be more receptive to skill learning and be better able to apply the skills to the game. TRAIN TO PLAY, DON”T PLAY TO TRAIN!

Select movements that link and connect the ankle/knee and hip as a functional unit to reduce and produce force. Include exercises that have a high proprioceptive demand. Above all train on your feet! A simple rule of thumb, if you lying prone or supine or seated you are not preparing to attenuate the ground reaction forces that are demanded in the game. You must train with you feet on the ground to effectively learn to shock absorb and use the ground.

Don’t say it can’t be done, it can. It takes organization, focus and commitment. You don’t need a lot of equipment or huge time blocks. You need to be consistent and relentless. Training can be done anywhere; it can be on the field or on the court if necessary. Apply the  “weight room without walls” concept. Make it challenging mentally and physically to prepare for the stress of competition. The bottom line is that to prevent ACL tears you must train the body for the rigors of competition. The prevention program should be a transparent component of training.

Soccer Small Sided Games – The problem, not the solution!

The is written by my colleague Kelvin Giles based on some of our conversations when we were together in England at UKSEM Conference and his everyday work with Al Ain Football club in Abu Dhabi, UAE where he is Performance Director. In soccer today at all levels there are tremendous injury issues. One soccer guru has proposed that the solution is to use more small sided games and to get rid of the conditioning coaches and give the responsibility for conditioning back to the soccer coaches.Throughout our careers (VG & KG) the starting point has always been to TRAIN TO PLAY BY PREPARING THEATHLETES FOR THE DEMANDS OF THE GAME.

The world of Soccer is currently in the midst of a serious debate on the role of small-sided games as the sole ingredient in the preparation of players. The key arguments include

(a) players spend more time ‘on the ball’ thus adding to technical and tactical development

(b) the process is specific to the metabolic requirements of the game.

As sound as these arguments may be the current dialogue from the ‘experts’ also contains such statements as, “Soccer Coaches make the best Fitness trainers”; “Strength and Conditioning should stand aside”; “Soccer is so unique it can’t follow normal preparation systems”; “Don’t call Soccer players athletes – it has caused us immense problems.” It seems that these extreme views are following the ‘guru’ pathway (and there are plenty of them to be sure) that prevails in our present day sports environment.

Add to this the current research that pronounces that metabolic training with the ball produces less injuries than conventional conditioning activities and you have another training puzzle for unprepared to worry about. Just when you thought that the commonsense approach that you had spent 40 years working towards was working along came the ‘new’ potion.

STOP! The guru’s and the scientists are missing the point. There is an order of things that you simply can’t ‘guru’ your way out of. All sports-specific postures and actions (techniques) require that the body is efficient and resilient enough to carry them out effectively. By thinking that this is all about the metabolic preparation is a ‘fool’s errand’. Of course one must be specific metabolically – there is no use in doing five mile runs slowly if the endurance requirement of the game is for endured speed, agility, acceleration and deceleration at relatively high speeds. What MUST be understood is the mechanical load that is placed upon the body while these small-sided games are being endured.

Just look at the typical journey that the soft tissue injury has:

Poor movement exposed to training / game load = compensatory movements to survive.

Continue the training / game load = micro-trauma.

Continue the training / game load = more compensatory movements, macro-trauma.

Continued training / game load = catastrophic tissue failure.

The argument from the pro-SSG camp is that the SSG process is progressive and that vulnerable players can be treated individually within this load development for their long-term safety. Volume and intensity can be reduced for certain players or for the whole group if the fixture list demands it. Still missing the point! The only tool the SSG guys have in their toolbox is ‘load reduction’. Remember that the SSG environment is an uncontrolled, reactive one – not a good place for the ‘mechanically challenged’ player (most of them) so what about the demand for mechanical efficiency and mechanical resilience? Improve these by a systematic, progressive process and you are half-way there. The metabolic requirements will be enhanced simple by moving more efficiently. The mechanical load will be tolerated more due to a body that has high quality neural efficiency and motor control.

The process is like this – build movement and mechanical efficiency and add an appropriate SSG and conventional metabolic training pathway that is within the scope of the mechanical ability of the individual player. Let the player’s mechanical ability dictate the ‘game’ load they are exposed to. The ‘conventional’ training processes are easier to control in terms of speed, load and recovery and are ideal processes for the ‘mechanically challenged’ while they develop their mechanical efficiency and resilience.

The ability to make these decisions is the key issue for all the staff in the player’s performance pathway. Head Coaches are the final decision-makers – do they understand all this?

Steve Ralston - The Consumate Professional

As a coach I do not believe you can afford to be a fan, but I also know that  you cannot help but have favorite players. Those individuals who epitomize what it is to be an athlete and a professional. For me Steve Ralston, is one of those people. Today Steve is going to announce his retirement as a player for the New England Revolution. In pro sports I put him right up there with Carlton Fisk and Jack McDowell, whom I had the pleasure of working with in my White Sox days, as consummate professionals. It hardly seems that is was fourteen years ago that Steve was a boyish looking rookie on a veteran Tampa Bay Mutiny team full of grizzled veterans of soccer leagues around the world. He was rookie of the year in the 1996, the inaugural season of the MLS. He played on the flank and was tireless in creating space, then tracking back on defense. His work rate was the best. He was fit and soccer fit. He was both quick and fast. He had a deceptive first step and getaway stride that enabled him to separate himself from his mark. He retires as the league career leader in minutes played, a real iron man.

As a young rookie on that first Mutiny team than won the Eastern conference regular season championship he was the rock, solid, you always knew what you were going to get – a consummate team player. We had the mercurial Carlos Valderrama distributing the ball, Roy Lassiter was a goal scoring machine who set the league single season scoring record that still stands. Then there was Steve, he was as quiet and even keeled as Valderrama was temperamental, as consistent and steady as Lassiter was inconsistent. Rumor has it that Steve may go into coaching, I hope he does. Whatever Steve does he will be one of the few heroes that I have from my work in professional sport. It was a pleasure to work with him and watch him play. All the best to you Steve, you are a tribute to the game and the MLS. You were a pioneer who helped get the league established.