Author: Vernon Gambetta
Let’s Stop and Think
If you go to a surgeon, what do they usually recommend? Of course, surgery. Go to a strength coach in person or online, what will they recommend? Of course a strength exercise. So for a minute lets stop and think. You are soccer coach now, someone who played the game and you are looking for advice on what to do for strength training, what do you do? Of course, you go online and look-up “stuff” on the various strength coaching websites. I have not made this up; I learned this in an interesting phone call from a young soccer coach at a DI school who is really trying to do the right thing. Here is what the strength coaching gurus on one of these sites recommended for soccer players: Front squats and dead lifts. After I dropped my phone at those suggestions, I gathered myself and asked him why they had recommended those exercises? A brief moment of silence and the answer, the front squats to work the quads and dead lifts as an exercise that involves large muscle mass. I took a very deep breath, reached for my blood pressure medication and proceeded to answer. I guess the logic for selection of those exercises would be fine if you were a personal trainer, but what do they have to do with soccer? I encouraged him to take a close look at what he was trying to accomplish. Of course everything is driven by the demands of the game. Soccer is a skill dominant, transition game sport, with high speed endurance demands. It is a contact sport. It is also a sport with high incidence of groin and hamstring injuries. I asked him to consider single leg squats, lunges in multiple planes and step-ups both on a high and low box. Of course these need to be distributed throughout the weekly training cycle based on the position, minutes played and the number of matches in a week. My logic is that there more closely reflect the strength demands of the game and serve as an injury prevention function to help with the force reduction component of high speed stops. I came away from the conversation encouraged that maybe I had helped guide someone back toward the functional path. At the same time I was discoursed that people keep getting unsound advice and most never question it. Remember – “Work your fingers to the bone. What do you get? Boney fingers.”
Muscle Firing – Where’s the Switch?
"A lot of things weren't firing — his glutes, his hips, thighs," (Training Guru to the star players – namedeleted 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 at the site of the injury and call in substitutes, 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 brake 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 in beautiful harmony. 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.
Learning from the Athletes
Someone commented on one of yesterday’s posts that you can learn a lot from your athletes. Amen to that. I think in forty years of coaching that I have learned more from the athletes that I have coached and those athletes that I have been fortunate to have been around than any single source. The athletes live it. They know what the workouts feel like, they are the ones who put their ass on the line in competition. It is important to note that I have learned as much or even more from the average athletes as from the stars. There are times when I wish I would listened more and talked less. That is another lesson it seems we all must learn. Richard Aguirre who ran 8;56 in the Two Mile back in 1975 asked me one day why we always did out long run on Sunday and then came back with Monday as our hardest day of the week. That simple question forced me to go back and look at my whole distribution of work throughout the microcycle. Of course I had the long run on Sunday because that is the way everyone else did it. Pure and simple sheep walking! It is good to empower the athletes by teaching what you are doing with them. Coaching is a cooperative process, it is not something we do to the athletes, it is something we do with them.
Lactate – Friend or Foe
Where does lactate fit into the picture, Greg Brock just nails it: There's even a physiological correlative to this when you push into oxygen debt, you back off just a little bit, your body learns to utilize the lactic acid for fuel, lactic acid plus oxygen is pyruvic acid and guess what? – we are right back in the Krebs cycle again. What happens is your body learn to create more enzymes that speed up that reaction of lactate back to pyruvate and when you do workouts like that, that's why it’s so effective. Why do we keep preaching that lactate is bad? It is a fuel, learn to metabolize it and make it your friend. Read Tim Noakes, Lore of Running for more on the role of lactate. Oh by then way it is not lactate that causes soreness. That is another issue for another time. Read the Noakes book and it will expand your vision.
Another Lost Generation Problem
According to an NSCA survey, when asked where they got their info for the programs they use, 93% answered, "… from another strength coach." That is pure and simple intellectual incest. Think for yourself. Possibly even go down the hall and talk to the sport coach whose team you are training. He or she might provide some useful insights. If you have access to a track coach talk to them, they should have a clue on how to put the pieces together.
General or Specific
Jay Johnson asked me to comment on balancing specificity and generality in training. Jay is a middle distance and distance coach, but I will broaden this to include all events and all sports. Obviously the highest degree of specificity of training and the most direct transfer occurs when you do the activity itself. Frankly this is where training has advanced significantly over the last sixty years. We realized that staying highly specific would result in diminishing returns. We need to balance the actual activity with other training tasks that would improve the actual activity. This is where a fundamental disconnect began. As time progressed, especially in the last twenty years we have progressed down a path of just doing work, doing exercises that looking like the sport or event, but that we overloaded and slowed down to the point where they had no transfer. I think the distortion and misuse of the Mach drills is a good example. They are not technique drills. They are drills that break the stride cycle into its component parts in order to strengthen through a full range of motion and improve dynamic flexibility. If done correctly they have a high degree of specificity in terms of special strength development and flexibility. Certainly better transfer that riding a bike or using a stair stepper for a runner. To me it comes down to similar or same. Similar is OK, but you need to understand what you are trying to accomplish. I like to think of it this way 1) The actual activity 2) First Derivative – similar or big component parts, no compromise on speed of movement 2) Second Derivative – Similar not attempting to replicate the speed of the movement, probably with some resistance 3) Third Derivative – very far removed, any similarities are coincidental. In laying out a training program I try to balance all three. They all need to be there during all phases of the training year, just with a different emphasis. I think a good example of this is what I read of Roger Federer’s training. They always touch on fundamental movements and they always play tennis. What I think has happened especially in the last twenty years is that there has arisen an emphasis on general work to get them fit. Fit for what? Just making them tired does not make them better. This is alarming trend in middle distance and distance training where too much mindless circuit work is justified as “general strength.” I maintain that that is just work, work that could be better planned and sequenced to specifically strength the movements that would make them better runners. As usual I am quite outside the norm on this, but I have seen it done better. Look at Coe’s training. The high school runner Peter Callahan who ran 4:05.2 in the mile this year used the “general work” very wisely. We need to wake up and realize that it is not about exercises and making them sore and tired it is about preparing for their race or sport.
Very Revealing
In our local sport page today there was a small sidebar article of three short paragraphs. The title was “Riley among Heat taking pay cut.” The headline caught my attention so I read it. The gist is that all employees of the Miami Heat are taking an across the board 20% pay cut to avoid layoffs. I thought well that is good everyone keeps his or her job but the last sentence blew me away. “Player salaries are not being affected.” Whoa, wait a minute. How about those fat cat players volunteering to take a pay cut? How about turning in the Hummers and Escalades for a normal vehicle and donating the gas saving to a homeless shelter. Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome is burning. I guess sport really does reflect society. We have a society of greed and excess. I feel for that poor janitor or the equipment man who took a 20% cut having to pick up Dwayne Wades jockstrap off the locker room floor. 20% off of their salary will significantly affect their lives. I know Iam from a different era, but this upsets me.
Reaching the Lost Generation of “Strength Coaches”
This post is the result of some very frustrating experiences over the past several weeks as well as my observation of the evolution of the strength and conditioning field in general over the past three decades. I am tired of hearing words and catch phrases like activate, glute firing, controlling the knee – don’t get past the toe, functional Movement Screen, movement prep, symmetry in body structure, stabilization and corrective exercise. All movement does not reduce to the double knee bend in clean technique, there is much more to assessing movement than administering the functional movement screen. Just making someone tired does not make them fit. The lost generation of S&C coaches have plenty of theory, are well versed in sports science, but they come up short on practice and coaching. The weight room is part of a much bigger picture. It is as if they have been brainwashed into a reductionist approach to training the body that looks at the body as a machine with replaceable parts. Nothing could be further from the truth. They have missed the forest for the trees. I certainly do not mean this as a blanket indictment all S&C coaches, certainly there are many fine young coaches out there who have embraced learning, are looking to find a better way, but lack guidance and mentoring to help them. My generation grew up as coaches first who used strength training as another tool in the tool box of developing the complete athlete, not an end unto itself. Olympic lifting movements were a training method, not a religion. I think there is some amazing talent out there that is being wasted because they have been brainwashed. Stop sheep walking and following the party line, just coach movement! Intellectual incest produces madness. Focus on the big picture. Seize the moment become coaches and teachers, not weight room supervisors counting reps and chasing numbers, trying to fit everyone into a nice convenient box. Focus on athletic development, strength is part of that. How should you do this? Declare a two week moratorium on reading anything about training on the internet including this blog. Get out and go for it! Look around; find someone with some grey in his or her hair with multiple degrees from the school of hard knocks. Pick their brain; learn from their successes and failures. This is a trail that was blazed well before anyone was designated a strength coach. Empower yourself, be a critical thinker. Forget the textbook and what everyone else is doing and think for yourself. Use a heavy dose of common sense; stop looking for dysfunction and train function. Just getting strong is not good enough, it must be strength you can use, and it must be put in the context of the sport. Read the classic literature of training. Find a mentor not a guru. Coach, make mistakes and learn from them. Forge your own path Recognize that coaching is not a linear process, it is dynamic, challenging, there are not many answers, there are many questions. Take the challenge. Start with a clean slate. Remember training is about manipulating the three movement constants, the body, gravity and the ground in the context of the sport you are preparing the athlete for. There is a huge difference between training them and coaching them. Coaching is a process that understands that each individual is unique in many ways and similar in many ways. Coach both. This is not about the good old days; this is a new era filled with endless opportunity for innovation and change. Take advantage of it. Create a future perspective that taps into the wisdom of the past. Orient your compass to true north. Anchor your knowledge in sound principles of pedagogy, expert practice and applied sport science. Hone your observation skills. Coach the movements, not the minutiae of movement. Don’t focus on the parts, connect and link the parts and enhance the coordination of those connections.