Looking
back over the past fifty years there were many influences on my strength
training:
Olympic
Lifting
Power
Lifting
Gymnastics
Martial
Arts
Rehabilitation
Techniques
Wresting
& Grappling
Body
Building
I have
learned many times over that a sound comprehensive strength training program
incorporates elements of all the above as needed based on sport demands, the
qualities of the individual athlete and the time of the training year as well
as the stage of the athlete’s career. I have begged, borrowed and adapted from
all to develop an eclectic system that I could adapt to the sport and athletes
I was working with at the time.
Based on
my experiences I derived the following principles to guide my strength
training:
Train
movements not muscles
Train
postural (core) strength before extremity strength
Train
bodyweight before using external resistance
Train
strength before strength endurance
Train
power before power endurance
These
principles have guided and will continue to guide me regardless of the sport.
So, where
are we today? Where are we going? What have we learned? In some ways I feel we
really have not progressed very far. Many of the methods used in the sixties
and seventies are being used today without any consideration for what we have
learned and a completely different talent pool. It is relatively easy to get “weight
room” strong but the key is how that strength is transferred to the sport. I have learned that you don't need fancy equipment and huge air conditioned weight rooms to produce champions, in fact some of the most functionally strong athletes I have seen have come out of a "weight room without walls" environment. Use the the time, personnel, and space you have to get the athletes prepared.
Outside
of track & field and a few isolated pockets in other sports there is not a good
understanding that the key is the nervous system. That is what Sam Cunningham
was trying to tell me in my first year of coaching. Just because he could not
lift more weight that is not what is most important. It is how you can recruit
and fire the muscles in a coordinated pattern that is most important. Strength
training is about intermuscular coordination and neural drive; it is training
the command and control system. That is why it is so important to train
movements not muscles! This is where we have to go in order to progress to do a
better job of integrating strength training, making it specific in order to
develop athleticism. Some prefer to call it functional training, I prefer to
call it sound training where all elements of training are integrated so that
strength training is always in context with it’s proper place the training
spectrum. We need to keep striving for a balanced approach based on coaching
experiences and sound sports science research.
I continue
to strength train at least three day a week myself. It is something that I do
to stay healthy and to keep learning. I keep experimenting, trying different
combinations and sequences and methods in a continual search for a better way.
Certainly strength training coupled with the aging process offers many
possibilities for experimentation and continued learning. I hope to be around
to write an update on this post in ten and twenty years. Good luck in your
training, remember strength training is a means to an end, not an end unto
itself.
MrK
In my opinion, there comes a point, where, in an effort to “improve” and “learn”, there is a real danger in actually making things worse.
Look at American history – we thought we were “advancing” during the industrial revolution because we became more efficient at producing things and making our lives more “secure”; however, for every “good”, there is a “bad”, and little did we know that we were creating environmental pollution of an enormous magnitude. We thought we were advancing when we put man on the moon. Yet today, there are millions of pieces of “junk” polluting outer space. In medicine, our “advancements” in antibiotics have produced resistant bacteria the the world has never seen before. Our “advancements” in science has produced nuclear weapons, and genetically modified organisms.
My view is to keep it simple, and to do the simple things WELL. A former special forces and self-defense instructor once told me, “Forget learning’advanced techniques’. All you need to do is to work on MASTERING the basics.”
James Marshall
Thanks for sharing Vern. That co -ordination training with resistance that Frans Bosch talks about resonates with the Martial Arts training I have done.
Some people kick like mules but couldn’t back squat 3 x body weight or whatever research is telling us!