Author: Vernon Gambetta
The Dance
I would like you all to dance today. No I have not lost it. You dance everyday, you dance all the time. Movement is just a big dance. Sometimes you dance solo, sometimes you have a partner, and sometimes it is line dance other times a circle. Movement is a big dance. Take some time today when you are at a training session, a game or a match, a rehab session or sitting in an airport or waiting at a bus stop and look at the people moving. Look at movement from a dance perspective, you will see slow waltzes, fast rumbas, sassy salsas, heavy polka, ballet, you will see it all. So take some time today and take a look at rhythm and flow of movement, look at the big dance. At the end of the day reflect on what you have seen and try to incorporate more dance elements in your training in the future. You will see a difference in how your athletes move. Dance on!
The Training Log
For the coach the training log is an indispensible tool. That is true if it is an individual sport of a team sport. It is a major step toward educating the athlete in how to train. It helps them to learn how they respond to training. I find it is a process that enables them to take ownership of their bodies. That being said if not administered properly it can be a hassle for the coach. Just like the training program it should be simple and straightforward, it should not be a burden for the coach and athlete. In a team sport setting where a coach could have as many 90 athletes it must be a checklist format. The checklist should have the absolute need to know information to assess training stress and training readiness. The following are the items I include in a training log for a team sport: Training Demand Rating (Session RPE) – 1 to10 scale with a verbal descriptor, for example 1 = Piece of Cake to 10 = Can’t take another step. I try to put the descriptors’ in terms the athlete can relate that will elicit an accurate rating of the stress of the training session or Competition. Night Sleep – Check box with options to check off from < 3hours in two hour increments to more > 8 hours Naps – When – Check boxes for morning, afternoon evening and length in 10-minute increments up to one hour. Meals – Check off breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks Soreness – 1 to 10 rating scale with 1 no soreness to 10 very sore. Check box for muscle or joint soreness, if above 5 they are asked to indicate where by checking appropriate joint or muscle area. Recovery – Circle what modality and note duration. Major Life Stress – List some braod categories like exams, relationships, family that they circle. Basically that is what I am interested in, in my system this is the need to know information. I can glance at the information and red flag anything that stands out. Mind you I am also coaching the athlete, watching the training, so I have a visual impression of their training. This can be done online with a database program or done in analog manner with paper and pencil. It demands that you spend time educating the athlete on the meaning of each of the factors and the need for honesty and accuracy in reporting. Orientation to the training log is an essential objective during the first training cycle – part of establishing a training routine; it is part of their routine. How often should you check the information? I have found that except in training camp situations with multiple training sessions it is best to check the logs at the end of every microcycle. Checking session-by-session sometimes distorts the information, it is too easy to take something out of context. You always certainly can ask for more, but here I apply the 3M principles: it must ne manageable, measureable and motivational. I encourage the athletes to keep their own personal log with more detailed information that they think would help them, but this format provides me, the coach, with information that I can then use to adjust their training.
The Lifeguard
I was shocked to find out yesterday that the lifeguard had died. I felt doubly bad because over all the years he was at the pool I never learned his name. When I would swim we talked all the time. He knew my name and knew what I did. In fact he would profess to anyone who would listen that he was big fan of my work. We would talk about training, lifting weights and above all football. He was huge football fan. We used to talk about what we had learned from Strength & Health magazine. We used to swap stories about the good old days of football. He was fanatic Penn State fan, when he found out that I was friends with Dave Joyner (Former All American lineman at Penn State) he was beside himself. Two years ago I gave him all my back issues of Milo magazine and a bunch of issues of Training & Conditioning, that was food for pre swim discussion for a while. I had not seen him since late last spring. I had been gone a lot during the summer and when I did not see him this fall I thought maybe he has been shifted to another pool or assigned to the beach. Yesterday when I was finished swimming I asked the lifeguard where he was. I wanted to give him a bad time about Illinois beating Penn State and brag about Stanford beating USC. She told me he had retired at the end of May and passed away a month later. He was 61. I was floored. It stayed with me all day. I felt bad, I had never learned his name. The news made think how each of us can make a difference, how we can effect people in positive ways. I will miss our conversations, my friend the lifeguard, may you rest in peace. Somehow swimming will not be the same now that I know you will not be there.
Collecting Numbers
You use any or all of the following: EMG, Biodex, Lactate Measurement, Heart Rate, GPS, Accelerometers, HRV. You feel like a mad scientist, buried in numbers and reams of graph paper. Now what do you do with all this information. What is real and useful and what is noise? How do you turn the numbers into action? Just because you measure something does it mean it actually has value in terms of significantly impacting how you train your athletes? Taken in isolation all the previously mentioned measurement tools are just random number generators. It is up to you the coach, hopefully with some help from others on the performance team, (if you have that kind of support) to interpret the data and make it meaningful. I have learned after using many sophisticated monitoring systems over the years that simpler is better, and less is more. Decide what measurements are meaningful and consistently use those, don’t look for more. The measurement tools you use must be part of a system and provide useful information to help execute the training plan. There is no substitute for the eyes and ears of the coach with a good plan. Technology cannot take the place of a coach. At the end of the day if you use session RPE and have the athletes keep a very detailed training log it will serve you well.
Take a Step Back
Look at movement, open your eyes, listen for rhythms, and engage all your senses. Heighten your awareness, get rid of your biases and see movemnt with a child’s eyes. Don’t look at the parts, look at the whole, the flow of the movement. Look at the connections, that is where it is happening.
Let this be your guide
The Performance Paradigm is the foundation for training and rehab. If you break down movement to it’s essential components you arrive at the performance paradigm. Every movement has a force reduction phase that leads to a force production phase. The glue that holds it all together is the proprioception. Each phase of the movement is highly trainable and adaptable, efficiency of movement is the result when the three phases time up and coordinate. Over the years I have learned to use this paradigm to analyze the movements that I am training and then determine the composition and direction of the training. It is easy to get stuck on the force production phase because that is most visible and measureable, but the limiting factor in performance and the major cause of injuries is what happens in the force reduction phase. It is force reduction that the highest loads occur; it is during this phase that gravity wins. Last but not least is the proprioception/stabilization component, this is easy to overlook until there is an injury or performance error. This is highly trainable but is best trained in conjunction with the other two components. This is a simple paradigm with complex implications. Take another look at what you are doing from the perspective of the performance paradigm. Use the Perfromance Pradigm to guide your training and your athletes will be ready for anything that will occur in a game.
A Simple Process
Thoroughly understand the demands of the sport and position or event. Then assess the athlete’s physical competencies. Use the assessment of the competencies to guide the training of the physical capacities. Continue to reassess in order to guide progress on the road to mastery. Use the wisdom of the body. Allow the body to self organize. Focus on the process and the outcome will take of itself.
The Training Session – A means to an end
The training session (workout) is a means to end. It is not an end unto itself. Each session must have a context. That context is determined by the theme of the microcycle, and the training block. On an immediate and micro level what you did in the previous session and what is going happen in the next training session determines the context of today’s session. It helps to think of the training sessions as pieces of big jigsaw puzzle with the picture of the completed puzzle always visible. That is the ultimate goal, to assemble a complete athlete fully capable of competing in the competitive arena without any limitations. Mind you we are not training survivors, we want the athletes to thrive on the training, not to be constantly beat down, sore and tired, that is not training. If each training session is an end unto itself then the athletes get tired, the strong survive, and many fall by the wayside. In that scenario it is constant crisis management. Instead have a plan, build a rhythm to the workouts so that there is wave like variation in volume and intensity. Monitor their reaction to the workout and adjust accordingly both intra and inter session. Make sure all the pieces of the puzzle fit with each other and fit into the bigger picture. Train you athlete to compete, to thrive in the competitive arena. Remember one workout cannot make an athlete but one workout can break an athlete.