Author: Vernon Gambetta
GAIN 2011 – Day Three
Another outstanding day of learning and sharing ideas. Started out with a great morning practical session on Balance Progressions taught by Joe P. (www.joestrainingroom.blogspot.com) It was really balance in motion! I saw some cool progressions and sequences that I had not seen before that I am going to incorporate into my programs. Outstanding presentations of Return to Play Strategies by Ed Ryan and Joe P. and then two thought provoking presentations by Jack Blaterwick. The evening session was a panel on the Female Athlete organized by Tracy Fober (ironmaven.blogspot.com). Some real stimulating and informative discussion. Today our highlight presenter will be my longtime friend and colleague Gary Winckler presenting on Sprint Mechanics and Special Strength Training for Speed Development.
GAIN 2011 – Day Two
What a great day!! Jim Radcliffe was spectacular, honestly there are no words I can find appropriate to describe the quality and depth of the information he presented. If you want to know a big reason why Oregon Football has been so consistently successful you need look no farther than Jim's program. Spectacular demonstrations coupled with the why. Real productive evening discussion groups. Looking forward to today when Jack Blatherwick, a real icon and legend will present to us. He is going to rattle the cage in terms of looking critically at research and also will share the wisdom of 45 plus year of coaching and teaching. I am honored to be around all the faculty and attendees, great people hungry to learn and share. By the way happy fathers day to all you fathers out there. I want to wish my wife Melissa a happy fortieth wedding anniversary. With her none of this would have been possible. She is the BEST!
GAIN 2011 – Day One
We kicked off precisely at 2:00 PM. The word here is HOT!! Like in 98 degress hot. A bit tough on our attendees from across the pond. One thing we know for sure that at the end of GAIN there will be a definite gain it fitness for the attendees. It is a brisk 15 minute walk from the dorm to the meeting room. We need to do all that walking because the food is great and it is all you can eat. But we are not here for the exercise and the food, we are here for the learning, the intellectual stimulation and growth and the sharing of information. We are off the rousing start on that end. I started out out with an introduction to my coaching journey and a refresher on funtional path principles. Then I handed the baton off to Kelvin Giles who presented on the role of physical literacy in long term athlete development. We broke for dinner and then in the evening I presented a quick overview of Planned Performance Training principles. The highlight of the evening of Jim Radcliffe from University of Oregon presenting on the preparation for the BCS championship game. Jim also presented on how he starts the athletes out from day one at University of Oregon. John Larralde then presented a case study on peaking using as examples how he prepared two California State High School mile champions. We also started our journey learning the mechanics of the PCA. Today we start with a session on the track to learn active warm-up with the day devoted to Jim Radcliffe presenting on his system and concluding with his wife Janice presenting on Myths & Misconception in Sports Nutrition. The take away gems from yesterday were by 1) Jim Radcliffe – "The best way to get get in great shape is to never get out of shape" and 2) John Larralde " Sometime what you don't do is what is really important."
GAIN 2011 Kickoff
Just a few hours from registration and the start of the fourth GAIN Apprentorship. It is hard to beileve this is the fourth one, how time flys! We will be working hard to learn and share ideas to define the field of Athletic Development. Been really busy the last four days here in Houston preparing. This is going to be the best ever. 60 people will be attending including faculty. Most of the faculty arrived yesterday. It sure has been fun to catch up with everyone and talk training. We have not even started yet and I am already over stimulated. I will post brief updates each morning. I am sure some of the faculty and the attendees will be tweeting throughout the day.
GAIN Apprentorship 2011- Homestretch
I arrived in Houston yesterday evening after driving seventeen hours straight from Sarasota Florida, it is amazing what you can do when you are on a mission. Had a great dinner with my daughter when I arrived. Now just getting all the final arrangements and details to kick off Friday afternoon. I am very excited and can’t wait to get started. We have a great group of professionals attending again this year and a super faculty in a terrific teaching and learning environment. I probably will not be posting much in the next eight to ten days. I will keep you updated on twitter, follow me @coachgambetta I hope you will join us next year to help define the field of athletic development, improve your knowledge and challenge yourself.
Discipline – The Cornerstone of Success
Are today’s athletes different? They certainly are different in many ways from the athletes of 1969, when I started coaching. But the biggest differences are not in the athletes themselves, but in the society we live in and the expectations we have for our athletes. One of the biggest differences has been a breakdown in discipline. Discipline is the foundation for excellence, and self-discipline is the highest form of discipline. Of course, for youngsters to learn self-discipline they must have guidance: what is right, and what is not right? That guidance takes the form of rules. Coaches today have become reluctant to set rules, because then they must enforce them. That could be uncomfortable. What if a parent challenges them? Will they receive backing from the administration, from the school board, the principal, the vice-principal, and the athletic director? Coaches believe in discipline just as they always have, but they do not have the backing they used to have. Younger coaches are reluctant to set rules and enforce discipline because they will not be popular and they know they will not be backed. What is the answer? Sport is not isolated from society; it is a microcosm of the society in which we live. So it is naïve to think that the problems that exist in society will not exist on our teams. For the young athlete to learn discipline demands guidance. That guidance must come from us, the coaches. We must set the standards by fair rules that carefully lay out the behavioral expectations involved in being part of the team. These must be written. They must be clear so that there is no room for debate. Essentially as the coach you are providing a structure to begin to improve their abilities and their enjoyment of the sport. I think today’s athletes crave the structure we can give them, even though it may not be part of their everyday life outside of sport. But they have to understand that it’s a two-way street – that they can’t just follow the rules they like, but sometimes they must obey rules they don’t like. That’s the price they have to pay for the structure the coach provides. We must understand that we are not coaching a sport; we are coaching young men and women who are competing in a sport. We owe it to them to provide the most positive experience that we can. Through firm and fair discipline we can create a favorable learning environment that will allow them to reach their potential. Discipline will help insure a positive experience. It is not outdated, and it never will be.
Cross Training Runners
Cross Training “… is when an athlete undertakes training in a discipline other than their main sport for the sole purpose of enhancing performance in their primary event.” (Hawley & Burke P. 31) It has been primarily used as a method for retaining training adaptations. What we are really talking about here is transfer of training effect. It has been my experience that those who utilize cross training are those who already have a tendency to chronically overwork and are looking for another way to punish themselves. “Cross Training” is another garbage term that actually detracts or at the very least distracts from sound training. It certainly has very little foundation is sports science research. For a runner to get in the pool for anything more than a recovery session is time ill spent? The same is true for biking, that time on the bike would be better-spent strength training or working on flexibility, both areas that tend to be ignored. Most of the time they are ignored because the runner feels they do not have enough time to fit it in. Yet those same runners can find the time to swim for thirty minutes or bike for an hour. It is all a matter of priorities. Cross training may be OK for the recreational athlete seeking to relive the boredom of training, but for the high level athlete it is virtually useless. “Specific exercise elicits specific adaptations, creating specific training effects.” (McArdle, Katch & Katch P.394) Use your training time wisely, train to get better not tired. McArdle, William D. Katch, Frank I. & Katch, Victor L. Fourth Edition. Exercise Physiology – Energy, Nutrition, And Human Performance. Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore. 1996 Hawley, John and Burke, Louise. Peak Performance – Training and Nutritional Strategies for Sport. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW Australia. 1998
Rest – Use it Carefully
Rest is complete time off with no training at all. For the athlete this is a poor alternative. The body in training is accustomed to a certain level of activity and the more elite the athlete more the body is tuned into training. When the stress of training is taken away completely it can be a negative shock to the body. Complete rest, shutting the body down will result in interference with appetite, poor restless sleep, and a decline in mood state. In addition complete rest makes the return to training more difficult. The analogy would be like taking a high performance race car and parking it in the garage for a period a month and then trying to start the engine and go immediately into a race. It won't work. Rather than restoring the body the athlete who is coming off a day or longer of complete rest will in most cases be flat. Consider the negative reaction and de-training that can occur with a month of rest that is often prescribed between seasons. A big mistake in that situation you are dulling the knife. The viable alternative is active rest. In active rest the “muscles work and the nerves rest.” It is time off from the regular activities of training. “Active” refers to other sports activities or just general physical activity. For example the basketball player could play a game of pickup soccer, a swimmer may go for a bike ride or a distance runner could swim. It is a "break" absence from high stress not absence from activity but still gives the athlete the stimulus that activity provides to keep the engine idling so a complete restart is unnecessary.