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Coaching philosophy Programming examples Rants

More is more, but not necessarily better

“O Icarus,”
he said, “I warn you: fly a middle course.
If you’re too low, sea spray may damp your wings;
and if you fly too high, the heat is scorching.
Keep to the middle then.

Ovid, “Metamorphoses“

Reading and listening to coaching podcasts these last six months one of the questions that the COVID-19 situation have made people to ask and coaches to ponder is the question of how little one can train in order to not revert the adaptation to training. While one can certainly see why that question would seem important in a world of quarantines and temporary lock-down of training facilities, in many ways it is an expression of the doubtful idea that hidden deep within there is something “naturally you” that you can “enlarge with stress”. A “ground zero” that if not continually challenged you fall back upon.

Hans Selye wrote his famous letter to Nature magazine in 1936, describing how rodents exposed to a variety of nocuous or toxic agents (like cold, surgery, forced exercise, adrenaline and various drugs) responded to these diverse stimulus with pathophysiological changes that had some common features (like enlargement of certain organs). If the treatment was continued with relatively small doses, the animals became resistant and their organs returned to their normal state. Later the terms “general alarm reaction” and “general adaptation syndrome” were proposed for the description of these two phases of the response.

This shaped the current understanding of biological adaptation and the associated terminology, like stress, homeostasis, fight or flight to populate the scientific and popular narrative. A narrative implicating that the physiological stress response follows a stereotypical non-specific trajectory of being predominantly caused by physiological challenge and that its consequences are primarily physiological in nature. Based on this model, for a parameter to deviate from its setpoint value, some internal mechanism must be broken.

In order to force adaptation to training, one should add enough – but not too much – mechanical stress and little by little, in a very predictable way, you would be able to expand your capacity. But as the original setpoint would still be where it always was it would mean that if the stress would discontinue you would fall back to a relatively stable equilibrium maintained by those physiological processes. However evidence accumulates that setpoints are not constant. Their variations, rather than signifying error, are apparently designed to reduce error by anticipating and modulating future needs and resource allocation.

The theory of allostasis proposes that the first mediator – the event first triggering the stress response – is not a physiological stressor. The response is rather triggered by the changing emotional state of the individual brought about by personal interpretation of their capacity to cope with the imposed challenge. This would explain why the structurally rigid and perfectly linear training systems are only successful in text-books, and that we should shift our focus to the increasingly apparent effects of non-physical factors like emotional regulation, anticipation and learning in order to design well functioning training protocols.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is

Benjamin Brewster

The perfect predictable plan might be a beautiful idea, but is as likely to be real as the treasure at the end of the rainbow. In reality adaptation is dependent upon context, constitution, history, and persistently transitioning biological states. Studying successful strength-sport coaches will reveal a common theme: very few exercises, relatively consistent loading (even from cycle to cycle) and a focus on technical mastery challenged by increases in perturbations and contextual interferences.

Coaching legend Dan Pfaff, a proponent of minimalist training plans, notes that generally training regiments are too dense and that the goal of a great coach should be to see how little their athletes can do and still improve and be great. It’s all too easy to create an addiction to work and density of work. When new athletes try harder, they get better but there is a tipping point as they develop where this actually becomes a problem, where trying harder no longer works. The athlete is now a different athlete, and would need different not more to improve. More will inevitably lead to injury, and injuries put a stop everything.

With this in mind the question posed in light of the pandemic seems to be the result of a flawed and potentially dangerous way of thinking. One does not fall back toward anything, as that thing does not exist any more. The exposure to stimulus, both inside and outside of the training facility, constantly changes who you are, not just biologically but also psychologically, and most important of all in a non-linear fashion.

You always adapt into something that is your bodies best guess at what you will be able to cope with in the current and anticipated circumstances. Thinking you do not respond in this way will potentially lead you to fall into the trap of monotony and over-saturation.

And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.

Robert Musil, “The man with no qualities”

Of course, you would say, but is this really an issue? I mean, you would have seen every coach in the world roll their eyes while talking about other coaches who do not understand this simple point. That “too much is too much” (of course it is) and that “more is not better”. And if everyone is saying that they are not guilty of making these mistakes, then no mistakes are made?

And yes, this might be true, but as true as when you are a little drunk, feeling like a million dollars you tend to fall for the tempting thought that if you double the intake of alcohol you’re gonna have twice the fun! And so, by thinking in linear and physiological terms only, and not considering the effect your (tipsy ?) emotional state has on both stress response and behavior, you go for that quick satisfaction rather than to play the long-game.

And often enough the same coaches use the image of a pyramid when describing how training works, hinting that a stable general base must be built to support the specifics. And is not that an expression of the very same oversimplification as the theory of homeostasis taking on the concept that has been successful when working with things and try to use it when working with humans?

Worse still, backed up with (faulty) logic makes it very hard not to go for the same mistake over and over which I think can be seen in a lot of training programs.

The mental image of the simple and predictable physical universe, where what worked before will always work again is so tempting because it reduces confusion and cognitive dissonance by being inherently measurable. And what is more easily measurable than training volume (but also unfortunately all too easily mistaken for functional productivity)?

I believe in the type of program often referred to as “complex” or “concurrent”. It generally includes no general preparation phases where one would do little to no specificity, as well as no specific preparation phases where one would do the opposite. Instead I have my athletes do a little but not too little of everything all the time, as growth and self-organization in a dynamic complex system can be the result of an amplification of change elsewhere in the system. Who can tell exactly what an athlete needs to be able to take that next step?

Instead of having the long term macro-perspective control what I do day to day I work with relatively little organizational variation between cycles. Then I monitor how the athletes respond (how they move, how they feel) on a daily or weekly basis. Information I use to prescribe exercises with enough contextual challenge to force adaptation and learning (rather than trying to force this with just more reps). Do I not add workload at all? Sure I do, but I do it based on acute factors rather than from mathematical reasoning.

To provide an insight in how this might look in practice: I usually rotate 2-3 very similar weeks, or blocks if you want to think of it like that. The next rotation does not have changes in loading per se, but novelty is induced by slightly changing how exercises are performed within a fairly general and simple theme.

This example is for our sprint cyclists (who all follow similar outline with some personal adjustments) but I do not structure the complementary training much differently for other cyclists or endurance athletes.

The general idea of force production as a contextual skill is similar for the CrossFit, racket sports or team sports athletes I train, but as their sports are so much more complex (than cycling, running, skiing) the outlines i write for them differ quite a bit. I will follow up with more specific examples of how the training blocks I write for open sports look in a later post.

no wave loading – once a ’program’ is prescribed, it is simply repeated over and over again without much change until an adaptation response is observed – hopefully leading to a phase shift in performance

Some benefits to this type of training is that it makes it easy to adapt to with actual performance goals in mind. Programs that empathize large variations in between phases will make it hard to see what is actually driving the trend. The smaller, simpler program allow for scalability and for data collection of the most important variables all season long.

Other benefits are that one constantly addresses the systems long-term behavior, producing a stable state of performance. While one might not always be on the absolute top, we’re always damn close to it without any drastic changes either in volume or intensity. By doing so we are reducing the risk of injury from either over or under-training.

Categories
Acceleration Cycling Exercise selection Sprinting Strength training

These boots are made for walking pt 2

Got to hurry, got to hurry, I don’t believe you worry
Take it back, take it back, You know you can’t do that
Don’t want no sleep, Just hide and seek
Yes, I’m a speedfreak, Baby, I’m a speedfreak

Motorhead

As sprinters we want to be able to move our feet as fast as possible. Regardless if we are clicked into pedals on a bike, wearing spikes running down a track or on the field in a team sport we do want to get our speed of movement as high as possible for our activity. But we are not thrown out of an airplane, finding ourselves moving as fast as we possible can with no effort. We need to get up to speed all by ourselves, by accelerating our body.

With every step or every revolution of the pedal, if our power is higher than the braking forces acting upon us our speed of movement increases, until at some point the net forward momentum equal to those braking forces and we are now moving at maximum velocity.

In track and field events extending the acceleration phase is something positive and largely correlated with lower sprinting times and better chance of winning. This comes from the fact that if you can push your acceleration phase from 25m (normal for a beginner) to 70m (world record 100m runner) then your speed at the end of that acceleration is higher, but also, since that maximum speed cannot be maintained for a very long time, that the deceleration phase of the race will be shorter. Even a short race like the 100 meters is damn long if there is 70m to go when you’re entering the “die a glorious death”-phase (or, if you’re unlucky, just the “die a death”-phase).

Actually, when it has been modeled, a longer acceleration phase always wins over a shorter one and thus the objective for a 100m sprinter should always be to increase the maximal speed, as this will also emphasize to keep accelerating. For as long as the race is if that was possible.

For the team sport athlete, or the cyclist, there are however other things to consider. The dream scenario of the straight sprint down the full fields in football or rugby, is never more than just a dream as the opponents are eager to crush you with a tackle. This makes the rate of acceleration even more important as you want to be able to get up to speed and past that defender in the little time and distance available.

One would think situation for the cyclist would be similar to the 100m runner, but there are several differences that motivates him or her, similarly to the field sport athlete, to increase the rate of acceleration rather than to extend the distance of it.

While the braking force of air resistance for the runner is not something that he or she can affect much – it is what it is – this is not true for the cyclist but something that can be changed to a large degree by assuming more aerodynamic posture on the bike. While the biomechanical characteristics of the standing position offers the higher power outputs suitable for creating the high forces needed to accelerate, the seated position offers kinematic, energy cost and mechanical efficiency.

Aerodynamic drag is by far the most significant variable for cycling, increasing by the square of our speed until accounting for 90% of total resistance over 50kph. The cyclist will at some point be able to increase his speed more by sitting down forming a smaller frontal area rather to try to extend the standing acceleration phase. Because of this the cyclist benefit from accelerating quickly in order to reap the advantages available by “going low” earlier than his opponents, spending less energy while preserving his or her speed.

If we consider track cycling there are even more constraints, as we also will not be able to keep standing up when going fast. The speed will increase the G-forces in the curves which will eventually push us down into the saddle. This makes most track cyclists stand up only until riding into the second curve (turn 3 or 4 if you talk “track geography”), giving them a distance to accelerate of something between 150 and 200m, depending on how strong and fast they are and what gearing they ride.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Aldous Huxley

So there is a difference between how to approach complementary training of maximal speed in track and field versus in field sports and cycle sprinting. In the former you could anchor the training prescription from the speed side, as it should also carry over to the improved acceleration necessary to reach higher speed, but in the latter ones we probably should address the training from more of an emphasis on acceleration. Limited by time or distance we likely should seek to improve the rate of acceleration, always get stronger and more powerful.

While there is a lot to gain at high stride or pedaling frequencies from increased tendon stiffness, when it comes to increase the rate of acceleration at lower velocities we would likely need to produce more muscular force down into the pedals or ground, something ordinarily categorized as increased strength.

Similar to the acceleration phase in track and field there is an change in the relative contribution of horizontal (forward motion of the hip) and vertical application of force in cycling. In the track and field this relative horizontal movement is largest when exiting the starting blocks until at maximal velocity almost all force is directed straight down into the ground. When out of the saddle in cycling, as speed and cadence is increased, horizontal movement of the hip also is reduced until it is more or less locked over the saddle. So when selecting exercises to provide overload to support the acceleration phase it seems reasonable to have some orientation of the force forward.

During a sprint the max power is reached within the very first seconds of the effort, but does not last long because the optimal loading conditions for power are changed with the increase of speed. With so little stimulus at this optimal velocity for power per interval of training it makes for many hard efforts to provide enough “hits at the system” to force adaptation.

Like I highlighted when describing a process for selecting complementary exercises for the start in my last article, we should seek to find exercises that provide some similarity of sensory patterns and intention. This should enhance the possibility of transferring the strength from the gym to the field of the sport. This though process should make us give prominence to exercises that has a somewhat similar finishing position as in the sport. It would also be a bonus if the starting position is distinct and if there is some actual movement of the body in the direction that the sport.

Pictures borrowed from Dan McPartlans prestentation “Why are ankles important to cycling”, see article notes.

Pedal force is ultimately produced by the muscles that span the hip, knee and ankle joints. The main function of the hip extensors and knee extensors is to generate force that is to be transferred to the pedal. It has been shown that exercises where the muscle is shortening (concentric) and exercises where the muscle is lengthening (eccentric) both are able to increase the muscles ability to forcefully open these joints.

However, as discussed in the previous article, there are some possible downside with pre-loading with a counter-movement or a slow eccentric action as it might impair the body ability to use co-contractions. Co-contractions are the only efficient option available “on the field” to reduce the muscle-slack that has to be taken care of before being able to produce movement, and this ability should be safeguarded.

The calf muscles have two functions: in addition to producing pedal force themselves they must also stiffen the ankle so that the force developed by the knee and the hip can be effectively transferred to the pedal. If your ankle-foot system is not able to transmit that force, “deforming” under tension, this impairs your technique and by extension radically impairs your performance. This stiffening of the ankle also has to happen really quickly in order for as little as possible of such leakage of force to occur.

The maximum force developed by a muscle is proportional to the number of sarcomeres, the basic contractile unit of muscle fiber, in parallel while the maximum shortening velocity is proportional to the number of sarcomeres in series.

With their pennate structure, allowing for more sarcomeres in parallel, the calf muscles are perfect for very brief efforts of very high force production. In order to support this they are also designed for a “pumping” or recurring function such as in running and cycling. In longer duration actions the blood circulation needed for this is impaired, as exposed by the sensation of pain (“the pump”) that accompanies such exercises (for example the calf raise).

Because of it’s muscle fiber orientation the calf muscles are not really suited for generating a large range of motion, and when they are used in sports remains more or less the same range (isometric). This optimum length of tension in muscle can be shifted to longer muscle lengths, especially by large range of motion eccentric exercise, but altering this length-tension relationship in a muscle could also alter it’s function and might be something to avoid for muscles of this type.

Let’s reiterate.

When selecting complementary exercises for the acceleration phase (out of the saddle) of cycle sprinting we would like to find exercises that

  1. Extend the time at high power production, at what we can call “optimal velocity”, in order to get “stronger” and be able to accelerate faster.
  2. Limit the possible pre-stretch or slow eccentric action that could affect the co-contraction ability that is necessary for the muscles to be efficient at going from slack to tense.
  3. Work the muscles around the hip and knee joints mainly through shortening (concentric action) while at the same time work the calf and ankles mainly at constant length (isometric action).
  4. Provide muscular overload and if possible, provide sensory similarity in body positioning and movement.

Sprinting on a slight incline is a good way of adding resistance and by doing that also maintain the athlete at conditions around maximum power. However doing this in the gym, where higher overload than in the specific conditions that is to be found on the bike could and should be sought, is more complicated. One could try to use a air and magnet resisted devices like the Wattbike, but while providing both a resistance increasing both exponentially and linearly with speed, it fails to provide the high force demands found in the inertia of the initial acceleration. While coming close, it just does not feel the same at those first few seconds.

When adding load to a sled and pushing or pulling it, we also, in addition to the increased resistance of the mass being accelerated (bodyweight plus sled) have to fight friction. While this coefficient of resistance will vary with different sleds (new, old, rusty?) and different surfaces (dry asphalt, wet turf?) it will always provide resistance to prolong conditions similar to the “optimal velocity” in the beginning of the acceleration, and provide more “stimuli per set” than unloaded acceleration.

The overload generated by heavy sleds should add to lower limb strength, and possibly also help to transfer strength from other less contextual strength movements like the squat into cycling (or running). This overload is placed upon all the joints simultaneously, including the often forgotten ankle joint. The sled push is also working the hip and knee joints with concentric action, while the ankle joint works isometrically, supporting their respective functions in forward acceleration.

While the definite answer to if one should load the sleds heavy or light is not yet established, there are vast amount of data suggesting to go heavy rather than not. The eminent French scientist JB Morin notes that without heavy loads, mechanical exposure to very acute angles is not possible compared to when using light loads.

Considering that we established that the sprint cyclist would rather seem to prefer increased muscular strength over tendon stiffness in order to increase the rate of acceleration, and if we accept that more overload likely shifts the adaptation in this direction then it seems reasonable to go for heavy loads.

I would make three arguments for deciding to push the sled, rather to pull it forward. First, the pushing style seem to make athletes to be able to work with heavier weights, which might be able to shift the adaptation to our muscular preference. Second, pushing with the arms does appear to further increase forward lean and alter foot placement, which may favor increased horizontal impulse. Third and possibly most important, having tension throughout the whole body, from the hands to the feet pushing into the ground is more contextual than having the hands free. The longer chain of activation is, even though in cycling we pull ourselves down rather than push our way forward, likely to be more similar in intermuscular demands of transferring force through joints all the way down to the feet.

How heavy is heavy? Well, rather than trying to find the optimal individual load it has been shown that to use a percentage of body weight correlates well between individual load and performance. In studies the groups using “very heavy” loads has been using ~80% of their body weight on the sled, but since this has been pulled rather than pushed I would not hesitate to go heavier.

In our never ending pursuit to ride bigger gears, maybe we should also strive to always push heavier sleds?

Categories
Cycling Exercise selection Strength training The standing start

These boots are made for walking pt 1

“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.“

J.P. Morgan

The posterior chain is primarily composed of four muscle groups: the calves, the hamstrings, the glutes and the spinal erectors.

The benefits of strengthening the posterior chain in cyclists is not as well established in cycling as in running, but there is no reason to doubt that they are significant. We want to avoid injuries of the like of that hamstring strain that kept four time Olympic gold medalist Laura Kenny on the sidelines in 2017. Secondly, the posterior chain seems to be a substantial contributor to performance.

Hamstring injuries are usually caused by a moment of rapid acceleration, deceleration or intense physical effort and while all too common in running, football, rugby and athletics unfortunately we do experience them in the sport of cycling as well. Knowing of the increased exposure to risk of injury when applying high power to the pedals, it should come to no surprise that they are common in the sprint oriented disciplines. Because of changed behavior between and within muscles when exposed to fatigue, that too could be the cause of a “pulled hamstring”.

While the amount of injuries of the posterior chain in cycling are not to be taken lightly, they are less common than in sports where you absorb higher forces from the ground. This makes performance the more important reason for training the muscles of the posterior chain for cyclists.

When the relationship between the exercise performance and lower limb muscle fatigue in cycling has been explored it has been shown that the two muscles most closely correlated with producing and sustaining high power are the Vastus Lateralis and the Hamstrings. Vastus Lateralis of course, the big muscle of the front legs, would be the usual guess but the significant role of the Hamstrings to the influence of exercise performance might come as a surprise.

Maximum force development takes time, and because time is limited in cycling as in almost all sports, the capability to rapidly develop force is crucial to maximize performance. When we pedal we need to be able to generate as much force as possible, as quickly as possible, before the pushing leg must relax in order to not act against the push of our other leg. Also, both for performance and for injury prevention, we should be as fatigue resistant as possible in order to turn around our pedals as efficiently as possible

The use of Hip thrust, Leg curl, Nordic curl, Deadlift – or the nowadays more popular Romanian deadlift – and Kettlebell swings are commonly used in the gym to train the posterior chain, and while all of these exercises do train the right muscles and do have merits I believe there are even better ones available.

“If risks are known, good decisions require logic and statistical thinking. If some risks are unknown, good decisions also require intuition and smart rules of thumb”

Gerd Gigerenzer

The strategy of embracing uncertainty, to deploy an intermittent decision process rather than to make that grandiose plan that could only work in a fixed and predictable world would tell us to give up finding the perfect solution. One should probably do a little of everything, all the time, as growth and self-organization in an dynamical complex system can be the result of an amplification of change elsewhere in the system. However, as we simply cannot do this, do everything, we still need to decide upon where to start.

So, let’s reiterate the list of criterion for strength work in the gym that we settled on in the Strong legs makes their own path articles, in order to see if we could use those criterions to help us in our decision process.

  1. Keep movement somewhat similar in movement patterns and stimuli
  2. Overload as much as possible while satisfying the first rule. Large load means larger neural adaptation and higher percentage of muscle fibers being recruited.

When we are keeping volumes lower and intensity higher, we get what we need from a strength point of view while avoiding being overly tired from too much complementary training. Something that could render us unable to do well on the field where that important true specificity is to be found. If we’d like to keep volume low we’d be smart to stick to few, but efficient exercises.

We could get some help to discard the exercises that are not efficient enough by examining academic studies that has been researching the muscle level activation performed with different exercises. From doing that we seem to learn to favor the Romanian deadlift and the Glute ham raise/Nordic curl rather than the leg curl and good morning.

We have more to consider! To assist the rate of force development and fatigue resistance, I would like to add the following to the list of criterion:

  1. We should prefer exercises that increase our ability to generate force, quickly, and should avoid exercises that negatively impact this capability
  2. Seek to improve strength endurance sufficiently in order to sustain power and decrease the risk of injury

“Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”

Hunter S. Thompson

When a muscle is not activated, it is relaxed. There is slack in both the muscle and tendon. Before they can generate movement of the body it first has to take up the slack and go “tense”. Some athletes struggle to produce this tension and removal of slack quickly (early phase rate of force development) and it can hinder their performance.

In many athletic movements, such as sprints, changes of direction, throws, kicks, etc, the time which force can be generated against the ground or an object is lower than 250 milliseconds. If we are inefficient at going from slack to tense this can take up to 100 milliseconds of that time without even accomplishing movement, something that could severely hindering performance. This is also likely the case in cycling, where the optimal pedaling rate for high power sprinting seems to be somewhere around 120 revolutions per minute. 120 rpm’s means 500 milliseconds per cycle, where about half of that is comprised of leg extension and the rest needed to finalize relaxation in order to let the other leg take its turn.

Strategies to reduce muscle slack is to create pretension using co-contractions, using counter movements or by adding load. This is, for instance, why a rebounding “counter movement jump” is always higher than a “squat jump” starting from a static bottom position. Better results in training can be deceiving, as practicing counter movements leads to decreased ability to produce co-contractions without the counter movement (which most sport lack time to perform on the field, and which does not exist in cycling).

Observe that claims of adding load to a movement with the use of barbells or dumbbells should be questioned, simply because of it’s potential to reduce muscle slack as it may not challenge the body to learn to develop proper pre-tension with the use of co-contracting muscles.

There are other benefits of high overload of course, but it is important to search for a balance between the possible negative effects on pre-tensioning abilities and the positive effects force production. This balance may well be carried out by emphasizing movements from a “dead” start rather than with an eccentric movement. Seemingly this could make us prefer, for instance, the regular Deadlift over the Romanian deadlifts and the Nordic raise.

For the high power ballistics movements such as jumps and throws this means to include variations, possible more often than not, from static positions even though it likely means less impressive results in the training hall.

Force production is linked to related movement patterns, not only in similar physical structure but also in similarity of sensory patterns (seeing and feeling) and intention. This means that we should, if we can, try to get some similarity of the end, and if possible, start positions when overloading a sport specific movement in the gym.

I would argue that all barbell versions of the Deadlift as well as the Nordic curl, despite highly activating the right muscles, lack in this area for all movements performed on a bike regardless if it’s in or out of the saddle. I would probably argue the same for most other sports as well, and I would want to propose the Death march as an alternative that should be strongly considered.

Regardless of being performed by “from the top”, lowering the weights, it has a finishing position similar to both cycling and running, and when used with a dead start it also has a similar start position. Adding to this is that it, similar to most sports, offers actual forward movement rather than standing still. This could very well offer better transfer into the field of play while still be possible to overload with quite large loads.

When it comes to injury prevention to fatigue resistance the slow negative provided by the Romanian deadlift or the Nordic curl are both viable solutions, but as we recognized, possibly with a cost when it comes to explosiveness.

It has been proposed by the same dutch scientists that popularized the concept of muscle slack, Bas Van Hooren and Frans Bosch, that contraction intensity may be the main stimulus for improvements seen with negative training and that isometric training – when the muscle doesn’t noticeably change length and the affected joint doesn’t move – could therefore also be highly effective when performed at a high contraction intensity.

Further, isometric exercises permits us to control at which muscle-length they are performed, opening up the potential for them to be performed at a sport specific length or around the optimum length where higher forces than a lowering only exercise can produce. This could allow for more adaptation with less overall volume, leaving more energy to hit the sport specific work.

Van Hooren proposes integrating progressively harder single leg holds, around 10 seconds of work performed for three sets, going from bodyweight only into slightly weighted into upper body rows and I have used this progression successfully.

Dealing with the radical uncertainty of biological systems it is probably wise to hedge our bets with multiple types of exercises, as we do not know what will be pushing the system into that state of increased performance and injury sustainability. Therefore, for athletes with two days of strength training per week I tend to program the Death march and the isometric holds on one of those, and to do a Deadlift variation and Nordic curls for the other session.

Categories
Corona virus Problem solving Rants Training theory

The search for the new normal

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown

H.P. Lovecraft

To stop the outbreak of the Corona virus we have radically changed almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health and educate our kids.

We all want things to go back to normal. But what most of us have probably not yet realized is that it won’t go back to how it used to be in a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will be like they were at all.

Technology has been used quite extensively and successfully in some areas in order to work and to attend schools without gathering in numbers anymore, but the exercise industry has not been able to counter the sheer amount of loss of daily movement that the strategy of social distancing cause.

There’ll be some adaptation, of course: gyms could start selling home equipment and online training sessions, which is better than nothing, but will in no way be good enough to keep exercise efficient enough to carry the slack of the situation.

So, if not home or online training is the answer, what is? How can training be modified and used to handle this “new normal” in order to maintain physical and mental health and build healthy habits to keep us strong?

When it comes to the response to training there are clear individual variations in adaptations. While something works well to increase capacity for one person, someone else generally exhibit no meaningful improvements from the same training. An outcome that conventionally leads to them being labeled as “non-responders” to this particular type of training.

This use of language is problematic. First is the risk of promoting the general perception that exercise is not universally beneficial, and hence negatively affecting motivation for exercise. And something that is well established in science is that exercise has positive effects on health over a vast number of areas including reducing obesity, enhancing cardiac functions, reducing a large variety of disease states, improving function in life and improving mental health.

Secondly it could cause people to give up on specific modes of exercise prematurely, for instance thinking that “aerobic exercise does not work for me” or “strength training does not work for me”, when possibly it is exactly that type of training that should be carried out. However there is evidence that the number of non-responders is reduced when increasing exercise intensity and/or duration. This seems to be a useful strategy for lowering, or possibly even eliminating, non-response to training. In short: if you do it either hard or a lot, exercise seem to cause measurable adaptations in everyone.

A study in 2017 by Stanford University researchers using smartphone step-tracking data to map how active people in different parts of the world are analyzed data from 111 different countries found that Swedes took 6,000 steps per day on average while Brits took around 5,500 and Americans less than 5,000. Since walking is to be considered a very low intensity physical activity it will not have the same adaptations as more intense training, but it still form the backdrop of regular motion that forms the base of all movement that we do. More intense training adds upon that foundation.

Social distancing or all out quarantine radically decreases the amount of movement performed during normal daily routines. Most of the daily movement was done going to work and various social activities. Even if one was taking the car or the bus to work, rather than walking or biking, the vast amount of small movements within a day in society, as walking to the vehicle of choice, going for lunch with your colleagues and just to fetch “that cup of coffee” added more movement than is reasonable to replace at home for most people.

With large variations my best guess would be that something like 75% of regular movement have disappeared from most peoples lives. It’s not about that number – we can say it’s 50% – it is still likely to affect general well-being negatively when not doing a large chunk of the usual physical activity.

The body adapts to the environment it is exposed to, which is a good thing and something we use to cause adaptations to training. It means that we can become stronger and healthier! The opposite is also true, that without sufficient stimuli we can become weaker, sicker and more fragile. When we remove a large portion of our movement we expose ourselves to that risk.

The negative adaptation to that loss of movement won’t be something that we notice, but instead it will sneak up upon us. And with the realization that things won’t go back to normal for a long while we also must realize that this is something we need to tackle now, not later.

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

Albert Camus

Society has evolved over thousands of years, so as to minimize the cognitive burden on individuals. And we call that minimization ‘habit formation’. We have developed rules of thumb that allow us to “just do” things that in our environment have been more or less constant. But when that environment changes, those habits no longer fit, and we cannot use the same rules of thumbs anymore.

So when normality changes it is also the time for us to rethink habit. It’s almost as if all these years you’ve been playing chess, and now someone comes along and says “Oh, now your queen moves like a pawn and the rook moves diagonally only”. Things that used to be almost automated now has to be cognitively decided. Those changes are difficult to process and confront.

Everyone wants to be healthier, but it’s very difficult to change habits. When doing so we are more likely to succeed if we impose gradual change that we can build upon, rather than a Draconian change of a large magnitude. It’s also about being able to decide to succeed: consider the difference between deciding to cut the caloric intake in half and to go to the gym three times a week. Restricting eating is something that has to be done all the time, continually throughout the whole week, whereas going to the gym is something that you just has to succeed with those few times. That’s why adding a few bouts of training are more likely to become habitual in the long run.

But like we established before, training has to be either high in load or high in volume and if we are replacing that vast amount of movement with just a few short sessions at the gym every week then it has to be rather intense. Intense here obviously means relative to the individual but “going for the heavier weights” when lifting or for the “intense and short efforts” when doing fitness. Rather than ending up doing 3 times 20 very sub-maximal reps to “get some burn”, instead opt for 4-6 reps where the last one is really, really hard. Ducking the “non-response” with 30 second sprints, with some longer rest in between them rather than going for that one longer slower interval (which could be an option if one would train more often and move more in the daily life)..

This is where home training, by yourself, through an app in your phone or with some kind of online sessions just won’t suffice in the long run. High intensity and high load training is very hard to maintain or frightening to start with on your own for most people. Social interaction and good coaching is often necessary in order to make training hard enough, in order not to be a “non-responder”.

My main point here is that people should, especially in this new normality, seek out a training facility, possibly where training is conducted in smaller groups managed by responsible and well educated coaches.

Doing so makes the step to get started minimal, and the possibility of success maximal: two things that largely benefit the habituation of training. I would suggest it to be some kind of “micro-gym”, since those have fewer members, minimizing risk of contagion while still offer social belonging and a multitude of social factors enabling you to train hard, while feeling safe and having fun!

Social distancing might be necessary in order to save lives, but they are also likely have consequences on mental health. In research conducted in China and Canada during the SARS-epidemic in 2003 found that a very large number of people that was quarantined came down with psychiatric diagnoses, especially post traumatic stress disorder. This risk was especially elevated for those with low incomes or at risk for unemployment.

Physical health benefits of exercise may take some time to happen, but where training seem to have benefits acutely is improving mental health, possible through providing some sense of control which could help to manage anxiety. A very important reason to not hesitate to keep training.

But is training reasonable during times of epidemic outbreak, or would it increase the risk of being infected, and if so, to participate in spreading the virus? Training has been shown to increase markers of inflammation, could this not be considered harmful and possibly irresponsible?

It is true that studies have shown that high intensity, intermittent exercise for relatively brief overall exercise time elicits a small inflammatory response. However physical exercise also promotes increases in the immunological function principally through anti-inflammatory response, so given a few weeks time the exposure to training have likely lowered the risk of getting sick, and with this you would be actively and successfully hindering further transmission.

Additionally, it seems that we can choose training intensity in order to mitigate the risk even from the beginning. Prolonged aerobic exercise induces a much more exaggerated inflammatory response than that of short duration high intensity interval training. So given the choice between lifting weights/doing a few sprints and adding mileage running track or road bike we might lean toward the former.

Another argument for seeking out that training facility with responsible and well educated coaches able to provide intensive training possibly conducted in small groups, because, and I repeat myself, doing intense training on your own is way harder than in a social setting guided by knowledgeable coaches.

The time to start to develop those habits for the new normal is now, not later. Things that we took for granted in society, things that are extraordinarily important for us, as human beings, human proximity and conversation and group living have been challenged. Hopefully, we will return to that again, but we might not.

A society more empirical, more analytical, more cooperative, more prosocial is something we should focus our attention towards today, maybe starting that process with a set of back squats at the gym or an all out sprint on the track?

Categories
Rants Training theory

A Case for the case study

Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory

Warren Buffett

On a course for trainers that I teach, we quite early in the course teach how to teach the squat. Since I have taught this for many many years now, I know exactly how it almost always plays out.

It starts, after the initial greetings and a short warmup, with me asking the group to do some squats. I take the opportunity to look at how the group I have this week moves and acts while doing this. Then I ask the question: “How deep should you squat?” and wait for the usual answers:

– “Below parallel”, “Hip crease below the top of the knee”, “You should not get to where you butt wink”, etc

But then, after awhile, from somewhere in the room someone will say the magical two words…

– “It depends.”

The whole class will give out an “oooohh”, and possible an “aaaaaah” and look to the philosopher of the group that just stepped out of the shadows. Of course, how could we have used such simple methods when of course it depends! The philosopher has a confident smile on his face, knowing that he not just shown that he is ahead of the pack but also that he did good to push them off the peak of Mount Stupid into the unavoidable Valley of despair. And on top of that he had let the group know that he for one had left the simple answers behind, and ventured forth into the land of the gurus.

Then I ask our friend the philosopher the question that is usually left unasked: “Sure, but of what does it depend”? Here your guess is as good as mine of what I will get back, but some usual ones are “the length of the femur”, “the client’s mobility”, “the skill level of the client”, “on what he need to do“… The theme being, again, that it depends. Very seldom do I get anything that I can actually use to say how deep the person ahead of me should be asked to squat, and when I follow up with “sure, ok, how deep should I squat?” there is almost never any distinct answers given.

In some ways the first answers was more usable, even while they were less fulfilling.

Then of course, we proceed to give an answer to that question, on what it actually depends, so that we can give clear advice on how to squat no matter femur length, mobility or skill-levels.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision

Bertrand Russel

I had a lunch recently with my friend Johan, where we, among a myriad of other things *, talked about coaching blogs. Johan voiced his opinion that this type of blogs are so full of platitudes that he bet he could internet-troll the whole genre with a blog containing absolutely no actual advice but cliches, truisms and common banality. Add in some links to the latest craze and no one would be able to separate his fake blog from most of the other (which, presumably, is not trolling the coaching world).

* I am lying of course, we pretty much only talked about sprint training

Well, he makes a good point: not much actual usable advice is given on the internet. And even when that is done the situation where it should be applied is seldom spoken about in any depth. It’s similar to if IKEA would deliver furniture, but leave out the instruction manual. How on earth would anyone get any furniture assembled then!?

With every method spoken about in broad terms, with every problem described, at least one case or anecdotal story on what was actually done in that situation should be delivered. This would make it possible for other coaches to think about how that situation differs from the one he or she has at hand, and to decide if they should try this method too.

With case stories we get a structured way to disseminate practical application and relevant localized approaches that bridge theory and situated practice, in a reciprocal process. This is the thing I love the most about trainer summits, that it’s common that the speakers describe real life scenarios, without the need to say that this would work as a universal principle.

Well, I am certainly guilty of speaking in broad terms, but I will also try to hold myself accountable to think on, and to try to present, practical applications for the concepts I put forward.

Categories
Problem solving Training theory Weightlifting

The end is just the beginning

What we call the beginning is often the end // And to make an end is to make a beginning. // The end is where we start from.

T.S. Eliot

Skills can be enormously complex, such as playing a musical instrument, making a lay-up in basketball or performing a weightlifting exercise. In such situations the trainer might have a hard time to present all aspects of the skill at once or the student might get overwhelmed by the size of the task. A frequent approach is to divide the task into several units to be practiced in isolation. This approach is often called parts practice, and the idea is to master and then integrate the parts into the whole skill at a later time.

However, some claim that practicing parts of a task in isolation transfers little if at all to the whole task, especially if the task is rapid and ballistic. They would argue for the practice to be structured as whole practice, where the full exercise is done regardless of it’s complexity.

This is reminiscent of the Holism that was summarized in one of the principal works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle as “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. The idea is that the reduction of the whole to its constitutive elements eliminates some factors. Some sort of synergy that is lost if we separate them. The holistic perspective is seen in diverse intellectual, religious, cultural traditions and diverse disciplines throughout history.

True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Irish Potato Famine has gone down in history as one of the worst tragedies in modern history. In 1845, a fungal infestation, Phytophtthor infestans, made half of the potato crop in a single year inedible and then the blight lasted for another seven years. When the hunger ended in 1852 about one million Irish had died from starvation and a culture had been destroyed.

While the fungal infestation might be technically to blame, what made the situation so severe was the lack of bio-diversity. The idea at the time was to optimize the food production and thus mostly all farming was switched to growing the same variety of potato, a variety that had recently been shown to be very efficient to grow. Had a greater variety been planted the blight would not have hit Ireland as hard as it did, for other strains would have had different exposure to the infestation.

The take away is that reducing and overloading parts (regardless in agriculture or training) means to reduce variety that could protect from downside. And that something is inherently lost in the process of reduction, which will reduce the transfer of training. Both which directs us to make the constraints of practice as loose as possible.

Traditionally cognitive science has viewed high levels of movement variability as a problem for humans when learning a movement. Repetitive practice is often conceived of as gradually reducing the amount of movement pattern variability viewed as noise and the magnitude of variability in performance has been viewed as the foremost way for assessing the quality of control.

But movement scientists have often struggled to come to terms with the complexity humans must overcome to produce even simple movements. The infinite redundancy, yet flexibility needed to navigate the world. There are such a vast number of ways for humans to perform a movement in order to achieve the same goal, that it is hard to understand how the nervous system is not overwhelmed by all those degrees of freedom.

According to Bernstein, who initially formulated the problem, the coordination patterns for complex tasks such as playing that instrument, making that lay-up or performing that snatch begin as fixed, rigid linkages between body parts. This early learning strategy helps people cope with the extreme abundance of degrees of freedom. If the task is beyond the learner’s capacity the problem of controlling the movement system is managed by dysfunctionally constraining the available freedom of movement.

One obvious example of this in the world of weightlifting would be to “lock up the hip” in the snatch turning the exercise into something looking more like a starfish than a flexible weightlifter.

Oh, that infamous “starfish snatch”

This has lead scientist to think that sometimes less variation would mean not to imply quality of control, but quite the opposite. It seems learning would be maximized when finding the optimum amount of stochastic perturbations in a movement for more, but not too many, degrees of freedom to open up. Too little “noise” and no new information is provided to the learner to gradually unfix the initially strong couplings between muscles and joints. Too much and the movement becomes to rigid to be performed in a constructive way.

This phenomenon is well researched and called the contextual interference effect. Adding some variability, or “noise”, in the form of irrelevant movement components or difficulty when practicing movement can lead to better learning than when practicing simple movement patterns alone. This amount of exploration for the correct response to a changing landscape of performance forces learners to adapt their movement patterns regularly, increasing long-term learning benefits.

We would be better as trainers if we would define ourselves from the problems we wish to solve or the advancements we wish to make rather than what is too common: from the methods we use. For every exercise prescription we make we should always have an specific outcome in mind. Is it to synchronize the catching of the bar with stability into the ground? Is it direction of force? Amount of force? Bar control or body control?

If we think along these lines the method we use become secondary. And with purposeful movement constraints we are more likely to direct learners to the external consequences of their movement patterns rather than the internal processes of producing that movement. Shifting the attention towards the desired outcome of a movement, rather than on how it is accomplished has been shown to both enhance performance and skill acquisition. But to allow for this external focus of attention we need to always think backwards, from the end-result of a movement typical to display behavior we would like to reinforce. Then adjust the complexity of the movement pattern so that the learner can succeed, but not simple enough to be performed perfectly. The key is finding that sweet spot of learning, while still anchor it intentionally, at the end result.

We could do this with any skill in any sport but let’s take the barbell snatch as an example. If the behavior we would like to reinforce is to be able to catch the bar with slightly bent knees and hip, rather than to mimic a starfish, then the end position we should start to design our exercise for this is exactly that position. Then we need to gradually include more complexity to the skill, finding where the athlete becomes so overwhelmed with “noise” that he or she cannot intelligently handle the abundance of choices, forcing, for instance, the dysfunctional freezing of the hip and knee.

This is done by gradually adding distance of the movement, in the example of the snatch that would mean distance traveled by the bar, and then, while maintaining that distance add speed of the bar. For every increase of complexity we assess if the movement is now trained at desired difficulty, if we are still are able to catch the bar the way we want us to, but that doing so is not easy.

When working with external objects we have the option to add to complexity at each position by decreasing the time available to react by increasing the weight of that object, but there are drawbacks to this strategy as it is something that also tend to alter the intermuscular strategies used to perform the movement, and this might limit the contextual transfer of the skill.

Rather to think from the ground up when designing constraints we should start from where the desired outcome is performed.

Depending on where we first see this happening we can purposely construct a constraint forming “the optimal whole” to reinforce specific outcomes and address specific problems. This would be likely to transfer more to better movement than working with parts smaller, or larger for that matter.

Categories
Maximum Speed Practical application Problem solving Strength training Strong legs makes their own path

Strong legs makes their own path pt 2 – Finding your balance

”The aim of physical preparation is to go beyond the level of motor ability that can be achieved by the sole practice of the chosen ability”

Michael Pradet

The only training that is certain to stimulate exactly the parts that makes up the full competitive movements and pathways for performance are training that is consisting of exactly those movements, performed in the same context as in competition. That is, doing the actual sporting events, and this is where training should start and what should always be included in a training program. But there is reasons for not only training the sport in specificity, such as the need for overload and variance. At some point we just can’t get better from doing the sport alone.

Training should certainly be designed to provide similarity when it comes to muscle action, cooperation, joint movements and energy systems as the movements performed on the field in the sport. But sport specific training should not only focus on physiological aspects of adaptation. Movement control needs to be universal because, possibly, of limited storage capacity for “motor memory”. Regardless of “size” of the memory, storing fixed sequences for all possible movements would certainly result in “choking”, because that would mean that you would have to find the exact match for the situation at hand before acting.

Instead movement seems to be structured by “patterns” so that the central neural system can let the body self-organize to a certain extent, and therefor fulfill both the need for speed to action and ability to handle variation in the environment where movement is performed. The same patterns would allow us the flexibility needed, for instance, to run both on grass and in sand.

Also, strength is not an isolated quality, but an integrated aspect of eventual performance. The ability to use a high number of muscle fibers in order to produce a a lot of force depends on how skilled or trained the athlete is in the specific movement.

There is a sort of “parental control” at work in order to protect the body from forces it is unsure that it can handle. A 100m sprinter can not be allowed to produce the same amount of force in a football game as when he or she is on the track. A football player have practiced to absorb the force produced when faced with the need for a sudden change of direction. A sprinter, who can produce force something like 6 times the bodyweight per leg, have not and if allowed to express this force on the pitch it would mean to risk serious injury

To cope with this, force production is linked to related movement patterns, not only in similar physical structure but also in similarity of sensory patterns (seeing and feeling) and intention. Exercises that are very specific to the sporting movements are very specific in all of these, but hard to overload without changing these sensory and intentional qualities. Movements that are easy to overload, are also very different and will therefor “unlock” less force production to use in the field of the sport.

This line of thought concerning the role of coordination and learning in order to express force and power is outlined to great detail in Frans Bosch landmark book “Strength Training and Coordination”. In the book this dichotomy between specificity and overload is neatly presented in the image above, as the central/peripheral model, a problem that all coaches have to deal with. Then he goes on to notice that most inexperienced coaches spend a lot of time in the ends of the model, which is a safe starting point, but advising that more time should be spent in the middle zones of the model. A zone where both some similarities when it comes to those sensory and intentional qualities can be included, while still also offering some overload when it comes to force production of the muscles.

“Do you want to be strong, or do you want to lift heavy weights, they are not necessarily the same”

Jerome Simian

Last year I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation from the French coach Jerome Simian, who thinks in similar terms when it comes to movement quality. Jerome, who is the coach of Kevin Mayer – world record holder in Decathlon – talked about the importance of technical movement, the fundamentals of human movement that are common to all efficient movement patterns. He gave the advice that acquiring the ability to do a strict, perfectly coordinated, full squat will help improve the hip, pelvis and spine relationship. The ability to synchronize the opening and closing of these joints in order to maintain balance is one of the fundamentally common efficient movement patterns. The main point being that there is nothing to gain for an athlete, other than a powerlifter perhaps, in sacrificing perfect form for more weight on the bar.

Actually, too much time spent during strength training on movements that are not similar at all to the sporting movements, or performed in a synchronization between joints vastly different from the sporting movements can actually lead to a lowering of the performance in the sporting. This negative transfer can arise due to changes in coordination (from changes in muscle action and cooperation) or too much fatigue, no matter how much the athlete can improve the lifts used in training. And just because there is no general answer of “how much is too much” (and if there were this would also change with time), it makes good sense to prioritize keeping track of improvements in the sporting movements rather over whatever kilos someone can squat.

But back to the question regarding single leg versus double leg and heavy versus light weights. Both science and practice has repeatedly shown increases in various measures of sports performance with the inclusion of bilateral exercise in the training program. But single leg training too has been shown to do that. A caveat being that for single leg training this has, as far as I know, only been studied in untrained subjects. My own experience however is that, if done heavy enough, single leg training is also a potent stimuli for strength.

Learning from coaches like Frans and Jerome we start to get a good idea that we would like to

  1. Keep movement somewhat similar in movement patterns and stimuli
  2. Overload as much as possible while satisfying rule #1. Large load means larger neural adaptation and higher percentage of muscle fibers being recruited.
  3. But do not let the main movement mechanics break down or change during the set

Similarity should be sought in producing force using the same muscles, in similar directions. That means that I would argue for single leg movements for developing maximal leg strength for sports played on one leg (cycling, team sports, track and field, racket sports, etc) and double leg movements for those that have movements performed symmetrically (power lifting, weightlifting, CrossFit, etc). Similarity in sensory and intention in this context is obviously hard, but means mostly to have a clear, and similar, beginning and end of the movement.

Further, I would generally do these movements heavy: 1-5 repetitions per set, and I would not do as many sets as the athlete could do being cautious of unnecessary muscle-damage.

(Nothing should ever be set in stone and obviously what the athlete in front of me enjoy the most will also matter when making these choices, but we are talking general rule of thumb here.)

Still the main problem is that for “the reps that count”, the ones where we have to use our strongest muscle fibers, the mechanics are likely to change. But I think that there is a solution: a “hack of the system” to duck the problem with lack of balance affecting the movement mechanics. Regardless if this mechanical change comes from fatigue and/or intensity.

Hand assisting the movements allows you to provide just so much balance so that the movement mechanics are kept the same (maintaining good movement), but not too much to provide sufficient neuromuscular stimuli. Further, the help maintaining stability can be controlled and increased when fatigue accumulates. This might decrease the load placed on the body slightly, but – and this is important – to exactly the extent that you are capable of handling that very moment.

In many ways it seems to provide a perfect compromise in order to build maximum usable strength! So how could this look when it comes to strengthening the legs?

My two favorite movements are for this is the hand-supported split squat fathered by Fred Hatfield and Cal Dietz performed with the safety-bar.

The key is to not allow the hips to open quicker than the knee, and slightly “leaning into” the support makes this possible with quite heavy weights. This also provides the feeling of “going forward” which might provide som similarity to the sporting movement from a sensory information standpoint. Clear and distinct final position is coupled with an equally clear starting position, that could be varied with elevation of front or back foot.

If you have access to a flywheel training device then you can replicate my next favorite exercise that we call “old man with a stick”, which is similar in design just that using the belt makes it easier to really “go for it” with less possibility for a missed lift. And with the sticks it’s also not possible to “cheat too much”.

I quite like the relative balance of the trap bar and use that quite a lot too, but apart from that I haven’t used many other movements for the maximal strength of the legs (for sports played on one leg) in quite some time.

Fewer movements and less volume on “the far end” of overload leaves more time to work that “middle zone” that Frans Bosch talks about in his central/peripheral model. Movements that might not working maximum force production but still overload force produced and with more related movement patterns. Movements as (weighted) jumps, throws and weightlifting derivatives, which I think adds so much much both to transferrable force production and to include sufficient variety in training to avoid the stress of boredom and monotony.

Just a small selection of the exercises that could be done in this “middle zone”

Since implementing this line of contextual thinking for my athletes concerning their maximum strength work I’ve seen very good results on the field while doing way less of it.

I think it’s very easy for coaches to get stuck “chasing kilograms on the bar” and ending up thinking that every athlete should commit to a “starting strength” type of power lifting program in the weight room, where in reality probably not many should. A more efficient program might yield better transfer of force production, but still free up time for specific work in the gym or on the field.

Categories
Maximum Speed Practical application Problem solving Strength training Strong legs makes their own path

Strong legs makes their own path pt 1 – Does it really take two to tango?

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

Franklin D Roosevelt

Stronger legs is associated with enhanced general sports skills as rate of force development and external mechanical power expressed in movements like jumping, sprinting and change of direction as well as specific sport performance. It is also enhanced with decreased injury rates. Since athletes started accompany their on field training with exercises in the weight room, the undisputed king of the movements to get stronger legs has certainly been the squat.

The Hegelian Dialectic holds that conventionality, staying within the box of conventional thought, gives rise to a thesis. Every thesis eventually gives rise to an antithesis, a challenger: a rebel arises, assaulting the conventional barricades of the thesis. A fight ensues and out of the ashes rises a third idea, a synthesis, resolving the conflict, and becoming the new normal, the new thesis.

It’s hard to find more obvious examples of this than when Mike Boyle stood up in 2009 and said “don’t do squats anymore” declaring the first and foremost tool used to create strong athletes is obsolete.

I am no cultural anthropologist, but it seems to me that this very moment was important in order to create the rift between the functional movement-crowd, who laugh at those training like powerlifters, and the old-school weight lifters rolling their eyes when seeing the guys doing the split squats.

Obviously the initial idea was met with a backlash, and both sides have since then sharpened their arguments. And the main arguments for single leg exercises goes something like this

  1. Most sports are played on one leg at a time, hence they are more specific and should transfer better to sports performance
  2. The requirements of proprioception (the sense that people have of knowing where the parts of their body are) and core stability is greater when doing single leg rather than double leg variations
  3. Single leg exercise balances out imbalances in strength between sides of the body, as you can no longer shift more onto your potentially stronger side making up for the lack of strength of your potentially weaker side.
  4. Less stress placed upon the lumbar spine, decreasing the risk for back injury

Whereas the bilateral (double leg exercise, like the squat) proponents line of arguments would be similar to the list below

  1. You cannot load the single leg lifts like you can the double legged variations.
  2. Specificity and mimicking is not the same thing: the goal is to strengthen a function, regardless of how it looks.
  3. The loading on the spinal column might be less in absolute terms for single leg exercises, but it is also both asymmetrical and done with less balance.

Basically the first arguments form both sides is regarding specificity and transfer of complementary training into sport performance. The main point for the unilateral-side is that regardless of the lesser overload being put on the athlete performing the single leg exercise, the movement being more similar in the joint-synchronization, the coordination of movement between body parts, to what he or she does on the field should yeld more carry-over of what capacity is increased.

Car analogies are popular to use with this line of reasoning, such as that if we “increase the engine while still driving on bad brakes and tires” we would still not be able to express the strength of that engine. This strategy seeks to increase the robustness of the movement pattern by keeping them contextual, so that the system as a whole will shift towards a greater force production.

And single leg training would potentially allow for more overload of the legs, as less core strength is likely to be required when moving lesser loads. Removing this as a limiting factor might just build stronger legs.

The comeback would be that this still limits the possible overload that you can place on the system as a whole. And because of this you would limit both the mechanical loading on the whole muscle and tendon, as well as not stimulating the central nervous system and synapses, thus missing out on neural aspects of improved force production.

Both arguments are sound to me.

Next, there is the argument of structural balance, leveling the differences in mobility and strength between sides of the body, from training one side at a time. Which is an argument that both “sides” share to some extent, for neither is advocating to train muscles fully in isolation. And with compound movement a synchronized chain of action is strengthened while being carried out.

Something that could be said against the idea to make all athletes symmetrical is that the fastest man we’ve seen so far, Usain Bolt, showed that you could be running with an asymmetrical stride (from scoliosis and a right leg a half-inch shorter than the left) and still be the apex predator of the track and field.

So while addressing all asymmetry seems overly categorical, when faced with pain or dysfunction we need to react and remedy somehow. And when the hands or legs are not connected by a barbell, or one side is trained at a time, more degrees of freedom are appears. This could good for the people with dysfunction in the hip or shoulders, because that means that they can let their body “solve the problem”, finding ways to move without pain.

So, again, both arguments would be sound depending on the context.

Finally, the loading of the spine is usually mentioned. Lesser loads on the spine and the injury risk should decrease with it. Yes, but one would not want to spare the spine from loading altogether, because this would not build the muscles needed to stabilize the spine in sports and life. So the truth would seem to be somewhere in between to much and too little. If you tolerate high loads, then that might be better. And certainly, as we shall see, lesser loads calls for higher volume of training, which translates into something that is also a possible cause for injury: fatigue.

The argument of bilateral force deficit, that the total amount force produced during two unilateral contractions is greater that the force produced a single bilateral contraction, seems quite irrelevant as it seems that both types of training can improve strength to a similar degree, but with specificity of movement yielding the most benefits (an argument already made).

When it comes to training strength there is multiple ways to skin the cat, but all of them includes sets of exercises that are completed close to, or to the point of failure to work the largest motor units and to induce sufficient mechanical and neuromuscular stimuli. This means we could be using either moderate loads and higher number of repetitions or heavier loads coupled with a lower number of repetitions.

But by keeping volumes lower and intensity higher, we would be where we need to be from a strength point of view, and never tired from too much complementary training. Which could render us unable to do well on the field where true specificity, and true speed, is to be found. Excessive fatigue alter movement mechanics both in and outside of the gym, having implications for training practice and injury risks. If we are making our athletes unable to train at the speed demanded from them come game time we are at best not setting them up to win, and at worst they are not able to react quickly enough to unexpected events rendering them susceptible to injury.

As a general rule: chasing maximal neural drive and velocity in each lift enables us to get more out of less. With more stability and balance, as you get standing both legs, you get just that which should seem to favor double legged exercises.

But irrespective of exercise used movement mechanics are changed when approaching that point of failure. Specifically a reduction in moment at the knee made up for with an increase at the hip and the lower back. And when this coordination in movement between body parts is changed we are no longer being contextual and we are now overloading muscles, rather than the desired movement.

The triple extension, the synchronized opening of the ankle, knee and hip, that is so important in sports because it allows to produce maximum power against the ground, is compromised when the knees extend ahead of the hips. This could even lead to altered extension mechanics, if we do it often enough, something deeply undesirable for most athletics.

So, heavy weights coupled with intent might offer improved force production from central stimulation – but when doing so also changes joint synchronization and muscle coordination. This seems to me very problematic for heavy strength training. At best meaning the capacity will not carry over as well as it could to the field, and at worst actually decreasing sports performance.

We are faced with a dilemma where there is no correct choice to be seen.

  1. Overly fatiguing athletes is just not ok, they must be able to perform their best in their sport specific sessions.
  2. Double leg strength movements might be less intentional, but suited for heavier loads coupled with a lower number of repetitions – minimizing fatigue – but might because of that disrupt joint-synchronization.
  3. Single leg strength movements, while more intentional, are nicely suited for moderate loads and higher number of repetitions. But when doing that, the repetitions up until those last ones are neither working the largest motor units nor giving much neuromuscular stimuli. But causing quite a bit of fatigue. And when we get to the “money reps” we still have the drawbacks of the altered movement mechanics.
Disillusioning, but we shall try to find the best way forward in the next part.
Categories
Coaching philosophy Education for grown-ups

Education for grown-ups pt 3 – Hermits have no peer pressure

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Richard Rorty

When we are making judgments we like to think that we are objective, logical and capable of taking in and evaluate the information available to us with equal weight. But in order to make sense of the world with relative speed we are prone to simplify it to the extent that we embrace information that supports our beliefs and reject information that contradicts it. Presented with someone else’s argument we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses, but we are equally blind to spot the weaknesses of our own. This is what is normally called a ‘cognitive bias’.

In the sixties Thomas Kuhns book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” changed the way we think about scientific progress. His theory sort of embraced the idea of biases, disagreeing with the idea of science as a steady, cumulative “progress”. Instead he structures science into a set of alternating “normal” and “revolutionary” phases. In the paradigm of ‘normal science’ the scientists share definitions and concepts, and engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Since they share a common language they all work in the same direction, making great advances within that theory.

We define rational belief as one which is arrived at by the methods which we now consider reliable

A.J. Ayer

While finding confidence in people who are using the same tools as you is important for the progress of those tools, in order to see the flaws of the tool such an exchange is not enough. Because those peers, if they approve us, are part of the same network, holds the same definitions, viewpoints and biases as ourselves. For that we need to look further away however uncomfortable that may be. The moment we get caught up in our own greatness, we kill our ability to reach our potential.

But – and this is important – even the education of the revolutionary or the prophet should begin with acculturation and conformity. One should know his history before trying change it, if not only because that all that is revolutionary is parasitic on what is actually in function now and at least somewhat proven to have worked before. To attempt abnormal discourse without being able to recognize it’s abnormality is madness in it’s most literal sense. Learn first why a tool is used, before you discard it: it’s good protection against the constant onslaught of gimmicks and fads.

There seems to somewhat of a gap between science and best practice in how training principles and methods are applied, which could be explained by that on the field the specific situation at hand is seen more clearly than “in the lab” where the eyes are set on the general. And while the general is well enough for developing a tool, in order for it to also serve a purpose, have external validity, one should have knowledge on the demands of the environment where it’s to be used.

Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people…or find a different room.

Michael Dell

Once I attended an Eleiko course in Amsterdam that was taught by Anna Swisher and Mike Gattone (both now with USA Weightlifting). When the audience presented itself I remember thinking that if I would be teaching now I would be terrified because among the attendees was several doctors of exercise science, coaches for PSV Eindhoven, the dutch national track cycling coach, the Japanese national speed-skating coach and the list went on and on!

Not much later, when i did start to teach that very course, it dawned on me that it’s not a situation to be terrified of, but instead to seek out. To be held accountable by coaches way more experienced than yourself, to discuss and learn from them as well as learning to take responsibility for what you say in order to be able to hold your own when presenting. I cherish every such opportunity that comes my way.

Other heroic coaches actively contribute to the meetings between people that are not exactly ‘peers’ but ‘more than peers’ differing in experience, methodology and viewpoints.

People like Anders Lindsjö the Swedish weightlifting coach, who competed in the Olympics in 1992 and in addition to his successful coaching career still help to organize meetings between coaches with great ambition, where one are expected to present their coaching philosophies.

Or take Dutch Henk Kraaijenhof, coach of such world class athletes as Nelli Cooman, Merlene Ottey and Mary Pierce. With a career that it would be hard even to dream of, but still organize “Helping the best get better”, a small invite only seminar in Holland. With international speakers of excellent quality and offering a place to meet and to learn from other coaches who know more, possess unique skills and experiences.

I turn 45 this year and have coached sports for 25+ years, but the superior experience and possibility for growth that I can find in places like that is nothing short of fantastic. Precisely because those places are full of people who you did not choose and does not necessarily share your language and can spot the weaknesses of our thinking and for that I am deeply thankful.

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you have an answer, when these passages makes sense then you might find that more central passages, ones you previously understood, have changed their meaning

Thomas kuhn

The common advice in coaching literature of “finding a mentor” is good, but not enough. You have to look further than that. To be better as a scientist, one better do time in the field, and to be the better coach one should keep an eye on the frontline of science.

My wife, who is very wise, sometimes says that “you don’t know what you have said until you get a response”. And while speaking to the already converted is important and will get you going, in order to increase your options outside of what you already know, outside of what is normal, you need to challenge yourself more and different.

Coach tip #3: Understand your roots. Get challenged by your superiors. Make an effort in understanding the opposing views, if not anything else it might make you understand your own ways better.

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Practical application Training theory

Preflight checklist – final preparations before takeoff

Just another short intermission before finishing up my series on Coaching tips. Because the Swedish national championship in track cycling (where I was set to compete in the Masters category) was postponed a few of us riders decided to make a meet of our own, challenging last years performance.

Preparation for the competition begins with the basics. For nothing can replace and nothing gives as big gains as to consistently over time do smart training, avoiding excessive stress, getting good sleep, eating good food and interacting with people you care for. Only after that should we focus on the little things, the things that give you “the marginal gains”.

I’ve found most people actually do respond well to training pretty close to their competition. Some even on the same day as the competition, the other the day before and I don’t think I have ever met anyone who performs his or her best when coming in completely from rest.

This “potentiation” should create minimal fatigue and maximum stimulation of the nervous system in order to help providing the best results in the upcoming performance. For this maximum isometric lifting, weightlifting power movements, jumping and throwing are suitable, as all of these movements activate a lot of muscle mass, but for a very short time. We should probably also include some sport-specific technical exercise or power movement, but be careful of it causing excessive fatigue. For cycling, short sprints is suitable (maybe on rollers).

And oh, yeah we should want more: those last couple of sessions should be similar to the feeling of sexual frustration.

Guess the peak cadence on the rollers?

During the last years annual trainer summit “helping the best get better” dutch sprint trainer Henk Kraaijenhof presented on peaking for competition. He told the story about when he, at the European Indoor Championships in 1987, had an increasingly frustrated Nelli cooman sit out her warm-up only to watch the opposition do theirs for the 60m sprint. And then she went out and set a stunning new world record of 7.00.

From my experience I’ve seen the same, and it extends back to the last couple of sessions leading up to the competition where I think too many do to much aerobic or anaerobic work. Some athletes think they cannot do without that, fearing they will loose their capacity, but I do not think there is much truth in that fear. The pressure of competing is better handled by learning to cope in other ways without resorting to the comfort of getting tired.

Like Henk says “in nature there not a lot of warming-up before sprinting”. And while athletes performing in longer events might do with a little more endurance in the last couple of session and slightly more for warm-up than a couple squat jumps or a few seconds of isometrics, I think it’s safe to say that most still overdo it by a landslide. ”You might pull a muscle… or you set a new world record”.

And after the basics are taken care of, just fill up with all the other little things that can tip the result over that last centimeter: swallow down the caffeine tablets with the the beta alanine and beet concentrate and pray to the sprint gods! ?