Author: Vernon Gambetta
Functional Training Looking Back
Yesterday when I was swimming I got this profound thought. Before I share the thought let me tell you what I think triggered it. I have been preparing for the GAIN Apprentorship which begins next Thursday, that coupled with my with my visit with Nort Thornton last week had me looking over some old material from my first several years of coaching and some material from college (1964-68). The thought is that function and functional training was what we all did before we knew any better, before we got smart. Programs were balanced and trained all components and biomotor abilities. We used the body, climbing ropes, pull-ups, push-ups, stairs, Indian clubs, stall bars and medicine balls. Why did we get away from this? Why, because of technology and the reductionism of scientific studies quoted out of context. We got more “scientific” and less pedagogically sound. We stopped training teachers and coaches; we eliminated true physical education and became too worried about the kids self esteem. We moved to Universal Gyms and then Nautilus because they were easier and “safer” to use. I am certainly not anti science, but sports science evolved out of physical education, now you have a generation of sport scientists who grew up in the lab and never were trained first as physical educators, so many of them don’t want to get their hands dirty. Go back and look at Franklin Henry’s research on sprinting done at Cal Berkeley, look at Benke’s work on body comp, those dudes got down and dirty. Look at Pavo Komi who cut open his Achilles tendon and put a force transducer on his Achilles to study forces in vivo or Dave Costill who was a subject in many of his studies. Why have we moved away from that? In sport we have gotten excessively specialized. Forty years ago coaches coached more than one sport. We need more generalists who can understand the big picture. To me that is why we have gotten less functional, we have become too narrow, too focused, to the point where we cannot see the forest for the tress. No doubt we need to understand function, which I maintain that we do understand it. We just need to broaden our vistas, open our eyes. Watch kids play that is functional training. No inhibitions, big amplitude movements, hopping, jumping, twisting and turning.
Recovery
Someone asked me to comment with my thoughts on recovery. In the training process it is during recovery when the training adaptation occurs. There is a unity of work and rest, essentially a yin and yang. It is impossible to talk about training without considering recovery both intra training session and inter session. Inadequate recovery will not allow the training adaptation to occur and this eventually leads to injury or overtraining. In my opinion there has been way to much focus on external means of recovery and not enough on proper planning and training design. I heard one coach of elite athletes in track & field say that he needed one hour of therapy for every two hours of training. That is ridiculous, if you need that much work on recovery, then something is serious wrong with the training! Certainly external means of recovery are necessary and viable if used correctly and timed properly within the training cycles. I think to understand recovery you need to understand the concept of stimulus threshold. Stimulus threshold is the optimum workload necessary to elicit an adaptive response to the particular physical quality you are training. Not maximum but optimum. Then you need to consider the interaction of all the components in training and recognize that there are different times to adaptation for different physical qualities. Once you have done this then you plan the recovery so that the various curves of adaptation will coincide at the desired time. Plan the work, work the plan and remember that after the work the rest is easy.
Leadership
Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint. ~ Lewis H. Lapham
Profound Thought
I heard someone say this yesterday and it struck me as to how true it is. “You can’t climb Everest if you are not in the Himalayas.” How many of you are in the Himalayas?
California Visit
Last Thursday I flew to California, specifically the San Francisco Bay area to present to the international sales reps for FINIS http://www.finisinc.com/. I am working with them on a new product, the Circuit Trainer, which I will talk about in a later post. On Friday I went to Stanford to visit Jon Haskins. Jon is from Sarasota and played football at Stanford and in the NFL. I worked with Jon throughout his career as an athlete. He is now Director of Football Operations at Stanford. He took me on a tour of their athletic facilities. What a great set-up, Beautiful modern facilities that blend with the campus. As we were walking around I could not help but feel a bit nostalgic when I realized that it was 35 years ago this week that I began graduate school there. It was a great year. I got to coach track as well as meet and learn from many great people. It made me so thankful for the sacrifices my parents made to give me the education the education they never had. Just walking around that campus is a humbling experience. Saturday morning I went to Berkeley another of my old stomping grounds and had breakfast with a great coach and friend, Nort Thornton. Nort just retired as the men’s Swim coach at Cal Berkeley. He has been a mentor and inspiration to me since I first meet Nort in the spring of 1979 when I was coaching at Cal. To me he epitomizes what a coach should be. After over fifty years of coaching he is always learning and working to better himself. Here is a guy who coached Matt Biondi to five gold medals and revolutionized free style swimming technique always asking questions and trying to find a better way to do things. I feel so fortunate to have been influenced by him. The world of coaching needs more people Nort Thornton.
Some Questions
What does everybody in a team sport have to do the same conditioning? Why do hockey players have to test the power clean? Why do American football players have to do a mile run test? Why is the bench press such an important lift? What does heart rate really tell you? Why do you need an aerobic base? Why is lactate bad? Does lactate really cause soreness? Why do pitchers ice? Why do female athletes have to hurt their knees more often than boys? Why do we have so many pulled hamstrings today? Why doesn’t the player who has the heaviest max in the squat always have the best vertical jump? Why is the forty so important for football? How many cones do you touch during a football or soccer game? What is agility? Why does training always have to make you tired? Is there such a thing as game speed? Why don’t we have required physical education from Kindergarten to twelfth grade? Why can’t we figure out that physical activity and cognitive learning go hand in glove?
Reverse Periodization
Mike Keeler sent in the following question: With your experience with swimming, how would you go about apply your "reverse periodization" to our sport? First let me start with a brief rant. I abhor the term ‘reverse periodization” it is either periodization straight forward and up and up or it is not. I have no idea where this stupid term started. Periodization to me refers to the timing and sequence of the training stimulus. As far as swimming dryland I approach it with basically the same concept as other sports with different application based on the distance and the stroke. Get strong first, build a good structural foundation for the greater volume of work to follow. Once you are strong you can get fast. Now once you are fast you can swim fast enough to get specifically fit. Then get specific, fine tune your racing and then compete. It is important to recognize that these are not each separate distinct phases, they all overlap. I also recognize that competition will begin for some teams as early as the end of the get strong phase. That is OK, because those meets do not count. It is also important to understand that all components are trained during all phases just in different proportions. All of this is highly individual. One of the biggest mistakes with the whole periodization issue is that people want to think of periodization as a model, when in reality it is a concept. It is a tool to help the coach predict adaptive response. I think Jim Richardson, the women’s swim coach at University of Michigan understands how all this fits better than anyone in American swimming at the present time. On the world scene I think Stephan Widmer really understands this. If you take a step back and look at the big picture this concept is not that revolutionary. Ultimately it is about swimming fast! Why spend a huge period of time learning to swim slow and then unlearn that to try to swim fast? It is not the heart and lungs, it is the brain. Read Tim Nokes ideas on the Central Governor Theory.
Bertrand Russel Quote
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination. Bertrand Russell