Functional Path Training

Change of Venue

2008-05-06T08:49:00.002-04:00

This blog has been moved to a new venue. The new URL is:

www.functionalpathtraining.typepad.com

I am looking forward to having you join me on the new site. Due to circumstances beyond my control the blog was off line for five days. Because of the poor service from Google and the lack of security that enabled this to occur I decided to change venue. Nothing will change in regard to philosophy, however I will moderate the posts more closely.The tone that the comments were taking was unacceptable and unprofessional. This blog is for professionals who are interested in sharing information and exchanging ideas in a sane professional manner.

England FA In-Service

2008-04-20T07:54:00.001-04:00

In my continual quest to gather more frequent flyer miles that I will probably never be able to use because award seats are never available, (That is a story for another blog) I am off to England today. Tuesday and Wednesday I will be doing an In-Service workshop for the English Football Association (Real football – Soccer for the uninitiated that still think the Super Bowl is super). This is for Fitness coaches of professional teams. It will be at Loughborough University. Should be a fun opportunity, I am honored to be invited, also will be able to spend the rest of the week catching up with some old friends.

Prisoners of Gravity – The Movie

2008-04-19T14:53:00.003-04:00

Coming soon to a theater near you, in the best film noir tradition, is the latest blockbuster movie by Broken Body Productions. The main characters are compelling and will capture your imagination. The lead character and the villain is MR GRAVITY. The good guy is THE BODY, that magnificent self organizing and problem solving movement genius. Appearing in a crucial supporting role, THE GROUND, is terra firma where we live, work and play. The plot is quite intricate and will have you holding your breath while sitting on the edge of your seat. THE BODY is trying to move faster, higher and stronger in the best Olympic tradition. In order to do that it must learn to effectively cheat that evil villain, MR GRAVITY, by fooling it with training tricks that enable to use THE GROUND as his friend. After all THE BODY knows that he must use THE GROUND as a launching pad. The spellbinding chase scene follows THE BODY on the functional path journey down one way streets, through red lights around blind corners to a spectacular ending. To find out the ending you will need to join us on our travel down the functional path – safe travels.

Playing on one leg

2008-04-19T14:31:00.002-04:00

Because we play on one leg we should train and assess on leg. The picture is a powerful justification for single leg squats, lunges, hops and step-ups. In summary exercises that involve force reduction onto and off of one leg.

Validation

2008-04-16T04:42:00.001-04:00

Is winning a validation that a training program is successful? Absolutely not! There are so many factors that go into winning. Many teams and individuals win in spite of the training programs they use. I think over the long term a good sound Athletic Development program makes a huge contribution, but to use winning as a validation that a program is effective does not do justice to the whole process. A great conditioning program without the support of the head coach and the assistant coaches will not be effective. A great program without a buy in and a commitment from the athletes is a shadow program. In short winning is not validation of an Athletic Development program. How about the situation where one year a team wins a championship and the Strength & Conditioning coach is lauded as the second coming, produces the a Winning Secrets DVD and next year they are at the bottom of the table. Did he get stupid all of a sudden? I know strength and conditioning coaches who have multiple championship rings who hardly ever worked with players on their teams. Are the rings validation of their expertise as a coach? Look beyond the hype. Look for substance not style.

Open Season on Hamstrings

2008-04-15T13:21:00.001-04:00

I lost track a bit when I was in Abu Dhabi on the current stats in regard to hamstring pulls in MLB. On doing a little checking it appears that gravity is still undefeated. Just a tongue and cheek reminder to keep religiously doing those hamstring curls, supplemented by Ham/Glute raises and be sure to add a heavy dose of pre-game static stretching especially when it is cold. If you want to add a little icing to the cake and insure more pulls be sure to do Nordic hamstring curls immediately after you do some high speed treadmill runs. Happy hamstring pulling!

Abu Dhabi - The last two days

2008-04-13T07:37:00.011-04:00

I am writing this blog 38,000 feet over Iran on my way back to the US. The trip to Abu Dhabi to work with the Abu Dhabi Sports Council was a great experience. Just getting the opportunity to spend six days with Kelvin Giles and Michael Dalgleish was worth the trip. I learned so much more about the application of the Athletic Profile, how to adapt it and use it help prescribe exercises. The opportunity to work in a different culture and a different sport culture is always eye opening. There is much potential if they take their time, emphasize the correct sports and don’t get impatient. The pictures are from physical education classes we observed on Thursday at two schools: The first was the girls Alafaq Model School and the second was the Al Ameen Normal school a boy’s public school. These were impressive lessons taught by very well trained professionals. At the girls school two of the three PE teachers trained in Egypt, the other trained in Sudan. The woman who was the supervisor of PE also trained in Egypt. At the boys school the PE teachers were women who were all trained in Egypt. The girls were aged six to nine. The boys were aged nine to thirteen. The boy’s class was large, eighty boys taught by one woman teacher. It started with a warm-up using the ABC Ladder. Great discipline and concentration. Both schools only had PE once a week. One of our recommendations was to have at least four lessons and if possible five. Later in the week when I get over the jet lag I will post some video of these two lessons.

Abu Dhabi “First Steps to High Performance Conference”

2008-04-11T02:18:00.010-04:00

These are pictures from the conference we presented on behalf of the Abu Dhabi Sports Council on Wednesday. There were 365 people in attendance. The audience included coaches, physical education teachers, Doctors, sports administrators and physical therapists. The conference was held at Zayed University for Women.

Kelvin Giles on Coaching Generation “Y”

2008-04-09T22:25:00.000-04:00

One of the highlights of this trip is getting to spend more time with Kelvin Giles. This quote from him really resonated with me. I hope it makes all of you think. “Championship winning or winning in life, whether doing this as a family, an athlete or in the corporate sector will demand that you survive at the very edge of your psychological, physiological and structural envelope. I believe that these traits are trainable. Maybe it is time to re-visit some of the methods in the light of the current “I want” generation. Why can’t we test out their mettle rather than appease them? Why can’t we expect good behaviour, punctuality, respect? Why do we continue to list all the reasons why an individual can’t achieve something instead of challenging them to do what they think they can’t do?”

Abu Dhabi Day One & Two

2008-04-08T03:37:00.008-04:00

I arrived in Abu Dubai Saturday night after a fourteen-hour flight from Houston. Frankly driving through Dubai from the airport, if it were not for the signs both in English and Arabic, I was not sure I had left Houston. Today’s world, to borrow Thomas Friedman’s term truly is flat. It is a ninety-minute drive to Abu Dhabi on a very modern superhighway. Checked in the Al Jazira Sport Club hotel that is actually attached to the football (soccer stadium). The main event of the day on Sunday was a press conference at the Abu Dhabi Sports Council to announce the initiative that we are working on. Kelvin Giles www.movementdynamicis.com, our team leader and Mahommad Al Mahmood, General Secretary Abu Dhabi Sports Council both spoke and answered questions from the press. Unfortunately Abu Dhabi leads the world in Type II Diabetes and rank high in childhood obesity. The prediction is that by year 2020 twenty percent of the population will suffer from Type II diabetes. The initiative that we are working is to create a continuum from community health and well being through to high performance to address these issues. The focal point of the visit is a conference on Wednesday titled “First Steps to High Performance,” to launch a concerted effort to address the need for exercise and health for all ages.

Monday dawned bright and early and we were off to Al Ain, the second largest city in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, a ninety-minute drive from Abu Dhabi. It was an amazing drive through desert sand dunes and farms. The drive was not without incident as our driver nodded off to sleep several times on the trip while going 180km/h. I did not even notice as I was glued to the window like a little kid at Disneyland for the first time. I even saw a herd of camels off in the distance. We arrived safely at the Al Ain Sport and Social club. On arrival Mick McDermott, the conditioning coach for Al Ain Football club who was our host greeted us. We spent the morning doing athletic competency tests with a class of schoolboys all born in 1995. In the afternoon we tested the 20 soccer players born in 1995 and two born in 1994. The soccer players tested 8% better than the schoolchildren. Those boys born in the first quarter of the year were 30% better than those born in the last quarter of the year. (How important do you think growth and development is?) When we finished the testing Michael Dalgalgeish of our group, who is a physical therapist, looked at two of the soccer players. It was very interesting to watch him work and see commonalities of problems worldwide. The soccer athlete in Abu Dhabi is not unlike the soccer athlete in the US or Australia. They play too much and train too little!

Just being able to spend a bunch of time sitting around and talking with Kelvin and Michael has been worth the trip. Together they have developed a very comprehensive Athletic Profile that gives great practical information to determine training emphasis and remedial work. It is very practical and easy to administer. I have used some this in my GAIN Network and it is superb. In my opinion this profile is something we need to institute in our schools. I find it quite ironic to be here in a foreign country doing an evaluation that we need so badly in the US.

Abu Dhabi

2008-04-04T07:21:00.001-04:00

I am leaving for Abu Dhabi today. I will be there a week with Kelvin Giles and Michael Dalgleish. We have been invited by the Abu Dhabi Sports Council. Monday and Tuesday we will be the Al Ain Sports Club doing athletic profiles on young soccer players and physical education students. Wednesday the three of us will be presenting at a conference entitled “First Steps to High Performance.” It should be a very interesting week learning a different culture and working with athletes and coaches in a different sporting culture. As time permits I will update periodically on the trip.

A Crisis

2008-04-03T06:47:00.002-04:00

Patrick McHugh sent me the following article from the Chicago Sun Times. This situation is not unique to Chicago or Illinois, it is a national crisis, we need trained coaches who are teachers. I see this all the time where I live in Florida. Often the main qualification is that you are willing to put in the time, nothing more. You are considered extremely qualified if you participated in the sport at any level. In future posts I will offer some solutions, but just as in training there are no quick fixes. Before you read the article I will leave you with a question – Why do you think basketball fundamentals have eroded? Answer - because there are few coaches who know how to teach them. This is true in every sport.

The hurdle hurting track

Lack of coaches has caused sport to idle in Illinois

BY TAYLOR BELL – Chicago Sun Times March 29, 2008

Remember when Chicago Public League sprinters, middle-distance runners, jumpers and relay teams used to be dominant factors in the state track and field meet?

Remember when Illinois competitors frequently recorded some of the fastest times in the nation?

Remember Craig Virgin, Dave Ayoub, Bill Bahnfleth, Larry Kelley, Gail Olson, Leroy Jackson, Dave Butz, Howard Jones, Willie Thomas, Bob McGee, Tom Graves, Adam Harris and Reggie Torian?

Remember when Illinois products made the U.S. Olympic team?

Remember Ralph Metcalfe, Jim Golliday, Ira Murchison, Don Laz, Bob Richards, Willie May, Mike Conley, Greg Foster, Rick Wohlhuter, Jim Spivey, Jan Johnson and Sunder Nix?

The Public League has virtually become noncompetitive in the state meet. It hasn't produced a team champion since 1974 and has produced only two individual champions since 1987.

''So many top athletes in football and basketball are starting to specialize. They don't come out for track as they used to in the spring,'' said Leo's Ed Adams, who coached four state championship teams. ''All of them think they will be the next Michael Jordan and have to practice year-round. Football coaches say they have to get bigger and stronger, so they have to lift weights year-round.''

But Adams, who has been coaching for 30 years, and others cite another problem that has crippled high school track and field in Illinois: a coaching crisis, a lack of qualified coaches in the schools.

''We are in an era where really good coaches have retired,'' Adams said. ''Because they aren't paid very well for working from January to May, no one wants to coach track and field. Schools must find coaches outside the school. It takes years for a young coach to be able to teach so many events ... sprints, hurdles, jumps.''

Adams said he doesn't fault young athletes for wanting to specialize in one sport.

''Kids see three teams in the state basketball finals, and they want to do that. But the school has to get kids involved in more than one activity,'' he said.

Wheaton Warrenville South's Ken Helberg, who has coached for 26 years and produced two state-championship teams, reminds that prospective athletes today have many more choices than they did in the 1960s and 1970s.

''Any new sport that has been added recently has been added in the spring,'' Helberg said. ''Our school is typical of a lot of schools: Only a certain percentage of kids will participate in sports. When you add more sports in one season, like boys volleyball, and the pool of athletes isn't growing, then you dilute the talent in the school.''

Skip Stolley, who coached outstanding cross-country and track-and-field teams at Thornridge in the 1970s and 1980s, said it isn't accurate to say there are no more great programs or great athletes giving great performances in Illinois.

''There are, however, far fewer of them, and the depth of qualify is far less than it was in the '70s and '80s,'' Stolley said. ''The reason for the decline is not year-round basketball programs. Quite simply, it is because track and field is a coach-driven sport.''

Stolley, who left Thornridge to coach at Indiana State and now runs an elite track club in Santa Monica, Calif., that has produced nine qualifiers for the U.S. Olympic trials, points out that two-thirds of Illinois high school track-and-field coaches are walk-ons -- non-faculty coaches who come to the campus at the end of the school day to coach.

''The need for walk-on coaches was created by the elimination of physical education as a high school graduation requirement,'' Stolley said. ''The elimination of a physical-education curricula is indefensible and an embarrassment to public school education.

''We have the first generation of high school students who are less fit than their parents. Obesity is a national epidemic, 63 percent of Americans are overweight, and childhood obesity in the United States has more than tripled in the past two decades.''

Stolley said when he coached at Proviso West, Thornwood and Thornridge, the physical-education staffs numbered 18 to 20, and almost every one coached at least one sport. Since physical education became an elective, the staffs at schools with enrollments of 2,000 to 2,500 have shrunk to three or four teachers, which almost always includes the football and basketball coaches.

''So today, high school athletics is carried on the backs of walk-on coaches in almost all sports other than football and boys basketball,'' Stolley said. ''This is not to say there are not some great non-faculty coaches in sports like track and field. There are. But being a walk-on coach makes recruiting and promoting your program in the hallways and classrooms almost impossible.''

The coaching crisis in track and field isn't limited to Illinois, Stolley said. It's a time-intensive, poorly paying part-time job that has a burnout/dropout rate of almost 30 percent a year, higher than ever before. In fact, most schools have a new track coach every three years.

''You can't effectively coach a sport with five events that are each profoundly different from one another -- sprints, hurdles, distances, jumps and throws -- without a staff of coaches,'' he said. ''Most schools simply don't have enough track coaches. The football and basketball coach isn't expected to coach every player -- freshman, sophomore, junior varsity and varsity -- in their school. They have lower-level coaches who do that. And you won't find them pulling out the bleachers or waxing the floor or lining the field.

''But all the facility preparation [setting up pits, standards, hurdles and marking landing sectors], plus recruiting and training officials and volunteers, is considered part of the job description for coaching track and field.

''That is not how you build a program and develop great teams and great athletes.''

Hamstring Pulling Season

2008-04-02T08:37:00.003-04:00

We have just started hamstring pulling season (AKA Major League Baseball Season) So far in first two days of the season there have bee two hamstring pulls. Do you ever wonder why? Is it the cold weather? No I don’t think so although can be a factor at times. Are they out of shape? I hope not they have spent six weeks in spring training getting game fit. Based on my observations over the years here is my take on the hamstring pull situation in baseball and for that matter other sports. Too much emphasis on static stretching in warm-up. Warm-up to stretch, do not stretch to warm-up. Flexibility of the hamstring is basically a non factor in hamstring pulls, it is dynamic hip flexibility that is important. You don't get that wallowing around on the ground in pregame stretch. Lack of sufficient warm-up. The current rage in warm-up does not involve enough movement, way too much at walking tempo, you need to build the warm-up in a crescendo to top speed sprints. Another reason is too much emphasis on linear running mechanics, very little on turns. The hamstring is a transverse plane muscle that is stressed when running a curve and on deceleration. There is too much strengthening using non functional exercises in prone and supine positions. The solutions are simple, but require understanding muscle function and compliance to a program. More lunges in all planes, step-ups both low and high, more emphasis on running turns and at least two days a week of all out sprinting outside the game. It takes time and preparation with attention to detail.

Crash Programs

2008-04-01T12:23:00.000-04:00

Training adaptations take time. Three to six week crash programs generally are a waste of time. Crash programs can give some short term results, but you usually end up paying the piper later on. There is no substitute for a well planned long term program that has a balance of all training components distributed throughout the training phases. Balance of the training components and time yield the best and longest lasting results. Unfortunately marketing and hype lead people to believe otherwise. Crash programs do just that, eventually they crash!

Retro Track & Field

2008-03-28T07:40:00.001-04:00

This really brought back a flood of memories for me. I used to train at this facility when I first started training for the Decathlon. For all you coaches who have never seen a dirt track and had to drag, rake and line it, you have missed an existential experience. I am happy for Russ, because I know how hard he has worked over the years for an all weather track, but this old track was special. It was cool to see that they had one last meet on the old track. This a newsletter from Russ Smelley the head coach to Friends of Westmont Track & Field:

What a beautiful day we enjoyed here at Westmont for a dual meet with George
Fox University. The setting for our track is dynamic with the mountain
backdrop, the facility looked great and the weather was ideal. It took some
time to get the crushed brick and clay in good condition, but after it was
lined and primed, it provided both teams with a lot of good competition.
Being billed as the last ever crushed brick and clay retro meet, it was
delightful to have the athletes embrace the historical passing of almost 50
years on this facility and that they dressed for the occasion in 70's style.
In a couple of years, the athletes requested a rematch and another theme
meet. I will gladly comply.

For the Warriors, Alison Sharp (FR) had a good day with wins in the discus
(114'2") and shot put(36'11 /1/2") and a second in the hammer (101'6").
Isaac Hayes (FR) won both the 100 yards (10.2) and 220 yards (23.1).
Roslyn Wolfshorndl(FR) made it over 10 hurdles for the first time as she
prepares for a first ever heptathlon later this season. She also placed in
the javelin, high jump and sprint medley relay. Andrew Dixon (JR) pulled
away from his teammates to win the mile(4:27.3) while Ryan Kraft (SR) wore
himself out with a 440 sprint medley relay leg, won the 440 and placed in
the 220. Chris Targoni (JR) did his usual solid duty by placing in the
hammer (138'8"), shot put (43'11") and discus (128'4") Full results at
www.westmont.edu

May I confess that I enjoy working on the track. There will be work to be
done on our future all-weather facility, but there is some romance in
working the crushed brick and clay surface, with a dose of silt and sand, to
the right consistency, trying to keep the surface level and laying down the
lane lines. It is an old craft that has passed its days but it still feels
good to get dusty and dirty in the process. What a pleasure it is to have
such an enduring facility with decades of good memories of competitions
past. The world's most beautiful classroom, the Westmont track, was dressed
up nicely for competition today and my heart was glad to be a part of the
history. Both teams honored its venerable history with an outstanding Track
& Field meet. May you enjoy some good memories yourselves today of great
moments gone by.

In God's grace,

Russell C. Smelley
Westmont Track & Field

Yesterday

2008-03-28T07:25:00.001-04:00

Every once in awhile there are days when a workout clicks. Yesterday was one of those days with Venice volleyball. It was the last workout before spring break, it was one of those chamber of commerce Florida spring days with a high blue sky in our weight room without walls (AKA – the Parking Lot). This group of young athletes gets it and yesterday it really clicked. We are nearing the end of a training phase and six of the young ladies are into their second year of training. The concentration and energy was above the norm which is already high. The baseball coach came over to see part of the workout because his assistant had told him how impressed he was with the kids. He was equally impressed. If you came and watched the workout you would see organized chaos, but if you observe closely you will see great quality, teamwork, communication among the athletes and a buy in to a work ethic that creates an atmosphere were champions are inevitable. I think a lot of it traces back to the coach Brian Wheatley who sets a high level of expectation and does not compromise his core beliefs. I am so lucky to be working with these kids, they are very special. I do not know if they will win a championship next year, but they are giving themselves a good opportunity, regardless they are already champs in my book.

Athletic Dark Holes

2008-03-28T06:48:00.002-04:00

Some debate on the validity or concept of the dark hole in physics, there is no doubt that they exist in training athletes. Throughout my career I have had athletes disappear into dark holes never to reappear or if they did they were a shadow of their former selves. What is an athletic dark hole? Biased one sided training that emphasizes development of one physical quality to the exclusion of all others. The two biggest and most frequently occurring dark holes are strength training to the exclusion of everything else an emphasis on aerobic work to build a base that then takes away all explosiveness. Neither physical quality is bad unto themselves but without context they possess the potential to kill an athlete. All components of training must be trained during all phases of the training year in the context of the objectives of that phase and the needs of the individual athlete. No physical quality is an end unto itself, they all must interact with the result a synergistic effect producing a highly adaptable athlete.

Connections

2008-03-27T08:45:00.000-04:00

Everything is connected. Impossible to isolate one system of the body, when one is working then all are working. You may designate a workout as having a metabolic emphasis or a neural emphasis, but there will be profound effects on all systems of the body not just the “targeted” system. I particularly enjoy swim coaches who have all these neat color coded charts with workouts in very specific heart rate zones designed to target specific energy systems – the body is so much smarter than that, it is always seeking to adapt and preserve homeostasis. It is IMPOSSIBLE to isolate one energy system or for that matter one system of the body whether it is neural, cardio vascular, muscular, or endocrine hormonal. Recognize that there is always a spillover effect, for example 3 x 150 meter sprints at 95% with full recovery will maximally tax all systems of the body. You will be working at greater than VO₂ max during a portion of that sprint. Understanding this has great implications, as a coach it took me too long to figure this out. You will find if you grasp the idea that you will need to do less “fitness” oriented training when you realize the cumulative effect of all the components of training.

Awesome Post

2008-03-26T07:55:00.000-04:00

This was posted by Seth Godin on his blog today http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ Great thoughts that apply to everything. It made me think of how often the past several weeks I have been putting out fires

Managing urgencies

Do you have a plan?

A long or medium term plan for your brand or your blog or your career or your project?

You can have grand visions for remodeling your house or getting in shape, but if there's a fire in the kitchen, you drop everything and put it out. What choice do you have? The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time.

I gave a talk the other day, all about the unstoppable slow decline of interruption (traditional) media and the opportunities for rethinking how we communicate with people. At the end of the talk, someone came up and had very nice things to say about what he'd learned. The he leaned over and asked me to help him brainstorm about his brand's upcoming ad campaign, because it was due to his boss on Friday.

Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today's emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.

If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.

Basic Movements and Connections

2008-03-26T07:48:00.000-04:00

I was thinking the other day when I was swimming, what is the basic movement skill of swimming? Yes the core is important, arm position – yes, the kick yes. Someone commented that is common to segment to teach and refine the swimming stroke. I understand that and the need for that at certain times, but isn’t it more basic than that? How about floating? Every year when I visit Michigan at the start of the season I watch Jim Richardson take his swimmers to the diving pool, put front snorkels on so they can keep their head in the water and breathe. Then they work on floating. They play, experimenting with what happens when you move one arm out, raise your head. They quickly realize how connected the body is and how one small movement at one end of the body has a profound effect somewhere else. It is very elementary, very basic but the foundation for all the strokes. Each sport has foundational elements as the basis for advanced technique. After watching volleyball practice the other night, I know I am going to work on opposition and fundamentals of throwing with some of the freshmen. Throwing is a root skill, spiking a volleyball is an advanced skill.

Communication

2008-03-26T07:35:00.001-04:00

To quote the famous line from Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” After reading some of the comments regarding posts from the last week I am a bit concerned that people are reading things into the posts that are not here. Read what I write, not what you think I write, there are no hidden meanings. I am focusing on thoughts, ideas and questions that arise from my work with athletes, questions people ask me or something stimulated from my research. I working hard to not lapse into personal attacks or criticism of training programs I have no experience with and I would hope that you would do the same. This blog is a labor of love for me, I enjoy sharing ideas and stimulating thought. I understand that are many roads to Rome, some are more direct; everyone is entitled to take their own path. If you are unsure of my philosophy or where I am coming from I direct you my web page so that you can understand the background and context of my ideas and thoughts. Learning, teaching and coaching are my passions. I have had the advantage and sometimes the disadvantage of doing this for a long time, I think that gives a perspective that many people new to this field do not have. When I talk about something like the term “core” it is with a historical context, understanding that this term originated with Gaijda and Dominguez in 1983, but it has still not been clearly defined since then. Frankly I think it is this perspective that is missing in the current generation. Most of the ideas that are currently popular and espoused as being new have been around for a very long time. I will end by saying again read what I write not what think I am writing.

Michigan Women’s Swimming

2008-03-25T09:27:00.000-04:00

I want to congratulate Jim Richardson, his staff and the swimmers at University of Michigan for their ninth place finish in the NCAA Women’s Championship. This is the fifth year I have helped Jim in designing their Dryland training program. It has been a great learning experience for me. He is a great coach to work with. He is always challenging me and helping me think of new ways to get things done. Jim has done a superb job of correlating the water training with the Dryland training. Unlike many coaches who use the Dryland work as another way to hammer their swimmer, Jim has used it enhance what is happening in water.

Limits

2008-03-25T09:19:00.000-04:00

“The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.” Arthur C. Clarke English physicist & science fiction author (1917 - 2008) I saw this quote this morning and it reminded of so many things that I have seen in my coaching career. I firmly believe that nothing is impossible. Most of what we think is impossible is because of mental barriers that keep us from achieving what we are capable of doing. I also think that so often we are limited because of what other people say or think. When someone tells me that something won’t work or that I can’t do that because we already tried and it didn’t work, that is more motivation to get it done.

Core?

2008-03-23T17:08:00.001-04:00

In the popular press, in the scientific literature, at conferences everyone is talking about and writing about the core. Have we put the cart before the horse here, everyone is using the term core, but has anyone ever accurately defined the term? If there is a concise and accurate definition I have not seen it or been able to find it. It bothers me to see the term “core” used in peer reviewed sports science and sport medicine journals without any accurate definition of the term, perhaps I am being fussy here, but if we want to be accurate in exercise prescription and movement analysis shouldn’t we be more exact in our terminology? Pretend for a minute that you are from another planet sent to the earth to study training methodology – could you figure out what the core was and how it was defined from what we see as best practice and research?

Reductionism

2008-03-21T09:06:00.000-04:00

There a tendency to take a reductionist approach to training, there is a focus on a muscle that is weak or not firing, a single exercise that will do it all. It seems to me a more balanced and in some ways sane approach is to look at the whole and see how everything is working together or cooperating. The same is true with exercise or training method selection look for exercises and methods that are synergistic, that help the body make connections. Breaking movements into small parts or focusing on individual muscles will lead to disjointed uncoordinated movement. I think this occurs because it is easier to analyze movements part by part rather than as a whole. As far as isolating muscles that is the way we are taught anatomy. All of this leads us away from the direction we need to go. In movement the whole is significantly greater than the sum of the parts. One must constantly consider the interaction of the three movement constants, the body, gravity and the ground.

“More is not enough”

2008-03-20T08:16:00.000-04:00

In some ways this a corollary to the activity trap post of yesterday. For too many athletes and coaches more is not enough. Pushing to do more work is not the answer. I used to be like that, more is not enough and is definitely not better. A little bit more often is a better mantra. Be specific and directed with the training to achieve the stated objectives of the training. As my good friend Gary Winckler is fond of saying “Work capacity is not a Biomotor quality.” It is constant choice between: Want to do, Nice to do and Need to do. The majority of training should be in the need to do category. No fluff and extra exercises or garbage miles. Get down to the need to do and target that. What you want to do and what you can do often do not reconcile. There are many things I want to do with my girls volleyball team, but I am one coach with 22 players with limited time. Stay on target with a good plan and a means to evaluate the short term and long term effectiveness of the plan.

The Activity Trap

2008-03-19T07:32:00.000-04:00

Many of you have mentioned GPP – General Physical Preparation work in response to the posts on aerobic base. Yes work capacity work is GPP, but be careful. GPP has become another throw away term for mindless work that makes the athlete tired. Every exercise, every session must have a theme that is in concert with the theme of that training block and each session must have specific measurable objectives. Just throwing a bunch of unrelated exercises together and calling it GPP is as bad as slogging, it is just work. Training must have a purpose that fits in the context of the demands of the sport, the demands of the position and the needs of the individual athlete. Beware of the activity trap!

Chasing Numbers

2008-03-18T08:49:00.000-04:00

How often in training are we just chasing numbers rather addressing all components of athletic development? Numbers like Max VO₂, max bench press, max power clean and 40 yard dash times are numbers – what do they mean? Do they really transfer to performance improvement or are they artifacts, mere curiosities that people have latched onto as being significant? I think we need to challenge conventional wisdom and see where these numbers fit into the big picture of athletic development. There is no doubt that it is easy to get caught up chasing numbers, and see better numbers, but what do those numbers really mean?

Mind Full or Mindful

2008-03-17T08:16:00.000-04:00

I was rereading Presentation Zen this weekend, just like any good book it has proved valuable on several levels, first it stimulated me to improve my presentations, second it has proved to be a very good coaching book. After all, what is coaching? It is communicating ideas and concepts. The secret to good coaching is to get the athlete in the proper state of mind, that state is no mind. The athlete does not need to be burdened by verbiage in terms of detailed instructions and long discourses on technical minutiae. That creates a Mind Full, the result is robotic mechanical movement, that has no carryover to competition. To be real and insure optimum transfer training should be Mindful. The athlete should be encouraged to explore movements, to feel what works for them, to be creative, to explore the full palate of possibilities in terms of solving a movement problem. Somehow we need to break away from the mechanistic paint by numbers approach we have taken to teaching movement, step back and look at the big picture and emphasize rhythm, flow and spontaneity. After all we don’t play games in a phone booth, drills for the sake of drills make the athletes robots that cannot create and explore space and time in their sports. I am reminded of the endless “ball skill drills” I see in soccer. Seldom if ever do I see them put into the context of the game. They are just neat looking drills that the player “must master” to be a good player. I saw a combine prep situation where a football player was “rehearsing” the agility test by walking through the movements counting steps. How about filming the drill at full speed, tell him to take less steps and show him the difference before and after. He will figure it out and it will transfer. There is a whole new world out there for those willing to be creative and explore.

TED Presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor

2008-03-15T10:37:00.002-04:00

Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)

Watch Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Bottom of Form

This is the transcript of the talk.

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true -- what is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common, shared reality, so they instead become delusions?

So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared to the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder?

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain, which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then with what quantities of those chemicals. So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this kind of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But on the morning of December 10 1996 I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.

If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. [Thanks.] So, this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of the brain with a spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor. While our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each hemisphere thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say, they have very different personalities. [Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy.]

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home, and eat 'em in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you.

And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me and then it released me. Then it just gripped me and then released me. And it was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought OK, I'll just start my normal routine. So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. I thought "that's very peculiar" and I looked down at my body and I thought, "whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all every peculiar and my headache was just getting worse, so I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perceptions so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I could actually hear the dialog inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "OK, you muscles, you gotta contract, you muscles you relax."

And I lost my balance and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me, what is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and -- total silence.

And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, "Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help." So it's like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful -- and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says "Hey! you've got to pay attention, we've got to get help," and I'm thinking, "I got to get help, I gotta focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work, I gotta get to work, can I drive? can I drive?"

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?"

And then it crosses my mind: "But I'm a very busy woman. I don't have time for a stroke!" So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine, OK."

So I gotta call help, I gotta call work. I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go in my business room, I pull out a 3-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top, and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell, that's not the card, that's not the card, that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards.

In the meantime, for 45 minutes the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here, I'd take the business card, I'd put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I come back if I'd already dialed those numbers.

So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump, and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality I'd be able to tell, yes, I've already dialed that number. Eventually the whole number gets dialed, and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Whoo woo wooo woo woo." [laughter] And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever!" And so I say to him, clear in my mind I say to him. "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Whoo woo wooo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever." So I couldn't know, I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried.

So he recognizes that I need help, and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air just, just right out of the balloon I felt my energy lift and I felt my spirit surrender. And in that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life, and my mind is now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expensive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But I realized "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated my to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who's a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

Quick Fixes

2008-03-14T08:30:00.001-04:00

In Athletic Development, just like in life there are no quick fixes. A shortcut in one area will usually lead to roadblock in another area. To develop an athlete’s physical qualities takes time. There is a simple paradigm regarding time to adaptation, I have found nothing in my 39 years of coaching to refute this paradigm. The paradigm for time to adaptation is:

Flexibility – Day to day

Strength – Week to Week

Speed – Month to Month

Work Capacity – Year to Year

Building and rebuilding an athlete is a cumulative time consuming process that demands systematic, sequential, and progressive application of training. Remember the body is smart so give it increasingly difficult movement problems to solve and it will continue to adapt.

More on “Aerobic Base”

2008-03-13T13:55:00.001-04:00

I asked Jack Blatherwick to address his viewpoint on establishing an aerobic base. Jack is with the Washington Capitols and was conditioning coach for six American Olympic Ice Hockey teams including the 1980 “Miracle Team”). The following is his response:

Establishing an aerobic base

by Jack Blatherwick, Ph.D

This question comes up often: is it appropriate for young sprinters and athletes in sprint-interval team sports to establish an aerobic base with long, slow distances?

With few exceptions -- perhaps professional athletes recovering from an intense season -- the answer is "NO," for the following reasons:

1) The word "base" is used inappropriately quite often. For sprinters, of course the most important base would be speed -- in concert with strength and power. It is a waste of time -- and perhaps counterproductive -- to train with long slow distances. Aerobic/cardiovascular fitness is essential for all young athletes, of course. The important question is how to acquire it.

For most team sports the definition of endurance (or "in shape") would include ... the ability to compete just as FAST and SKILLFULLY at the end of a game as at the beginning. The key words (FAST, SKILLFULLY) should determine how one would train for an endurance base in these sports.

2) Regarding team sports that require skill and athleticism, the mistake made by many fitness coaches is to "compartmentalize" the training into separate workouts -- aerobic endurance, anaerobic power, anaerobic endurance, skill, agility, strength, etc. etc. etc. Of course in a game, all of these attributes are required at the same time, so we should be looking for more ways to incorporate the various elements into "integrated workouts."

Compartmentalizing the metabolic training is analogous to isolating each muscle separately in our strength workouts, and it is just as non-productive.

Attempting to identify which portion of the endurance and performance in a team sport is "aerobic" or "anaerobic" often leads to compartmentalized training. Athletes who follow this mythical tradition in preparing for a season, invariably will say, "I did a lot of endurance training this summer, but I don't feel like I'm in HOCKEY SHAPE or GAME SHAPE." Their terminology is much more profound than the Latin words (aerobic/anaerobic), and should cause us to re-think our training advice.

Furthermore, anaerobic interval training is highly aerobic, and can be a more intense cardiovascular workout than what fitness gurus would call a "cardio" workout. College hockey players doing six weeks of dryland training composed of "anaerobic intervals" for quickness and power made greater gains in aerobic and cardiovascular measures than if they had trained with aerobic distances for the same period (see Overspeed.Info and click to Recent Articles).

3) Establishing a metabolic base: It is well known from scientific research, that much of the supply of energy during an anaerobic workout is aerobic. Note: the only way an anaerobic workout could be truly anaerobic is if we didn't breathe!!! Oxygen utilization is high, and slow twitch muscle fibers are supplied with carbohydrate from lactate produced in fast-twitch, glycolytic fibers. This process is called the Cori cycle (do a Google search) and for team sports like hockey, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, football, etc. this is the metabolic "base" upon which endurance is built.

4) There is a neuromuscular consequence for everything we do -- including endurance workouts. This means we are forming habits at all times -- physiological habits that might be very difficult to break. If marathoners do too much long distance training, they establish a comfort zone, running below their anaerobic threshold. To improve times, they must run faster, of course, above their threshold -- and there are quite severe respiratory and cardiovascular consequences. This is a physiological habit, not a psychological one, and "speed" work must incorporate intervals to elevate the comfort zone.

Patterns of slow strides are imprinted just as "permanently" into our neuromuscular memory as the quick strides that a sprinter would like to record. Just as a golfer would not intend to include repetition after repetition of "bad" swings when he practices, neither would a sprinter.

5) Recent research shows that "game-like" endurance training is highly productive for team sports. Most coaches would have as their goal for training … "to prepare my team to compete faster, more skillfully, without decrement for a longer time."

Given this, it is obvious we should re-think our compartmentalized approach and add "overspeed practice." This means pushing the team out of their present comfort zone -- to perform skills and make read-react decisions at a faster pace, using appropriate intervals. Then, as the training season progresses, increase the length of the intervals and total length of the overspeed practice.

This approach certainly does not include long, slow distances, because "slow" is not part of the mission.

Building an Aerobic Base

2008-03-13T08:08:00.001-04:00

For some strange reason the myth that you must build an aerobic base for sprinting still lives. All over the country now as high school track practice is starting sprint coaches are working hard to get their sprinters ready. I have had several emails in the past ten days asking me about the need to build an aerobic base for sprinters. It is not necessary to build an aerobic base, you need to build a work capacity base, not an aerobic base. Taking a group of sprinters and running then for 30 or 40 minutes continuously will have no positive effect on their development. In fact everything about that is negative: 1) The kids get turned off, they are in the sprints because they are faster and explosive – fast, explosive people do not tolerate running slow 2) Irrefutable empirical and scientific evidence tells us that continuous slow aerobic work significantly compromises explosiveness. Very simply said, you are what you train to be – if you train slow, you will be slow! To get fast you must train fast. Start by teaching good running and acceleration mechanics. Get them functionally strong, do something fast every day. For more on this see my book, Athletic Development, this is a recurrent theme throughout the book. Once again I invoke the mantra, train your athletes to be adaptable rather than adapted. Incidentally the same concept holds true for you soccer, field hockey and basketball coaches out there. This will be a whole topic in our Apprentorship program. It is a huge problem today and the genesis of many injuries. This is a topic for another blog.

UNC Visit

2008-03-12T10:43:00.001-04:00

I spent the day yesterday at University of North Carolina, one of my favorite places to visit, beautiful campus and great people. What a combination. Visited with Anson Dorrance who just the day before was named to the US Soccer Hall of Fame, Greg Gatz, Director of Strength and Conditioning for Olympic Sports and Jonas Sahratian, the conditioning coach for men’s basketball. I was there on business to demonstrate and get their input on a monitoring system for a company I am consulting with, but after we sat around and talked shop. Great people, between Anson, Greg and Jonas I was in awe of the number of championship teams they have worked with. I am a big admirer of Anson Dorrance and what he has done at UNC, it was fun talking about sustained excellence with him yesterday. It is easy to talk about, which many people do, but to live it as he has done throughout his career is amazing. The intensity and commitment necessary is difficult to comprehend. The kind of sustained excellence they have achieved is not a chance occurrence. He is always looking for the edge. There are many factors for their continued success but I think one of the biggest is that players are held accountable. That is not very fashionable today, but it is something that is essential for success. It is always uplifting to be around the people that I visited yesterday. They got me fired up!

CSPAN Q&A with Robert Compton

2008-03-10T08:03:00.001-04:00

Last night the CSPAN Q&A was very interesting. It featured an entrepreneur/venture capitalist Robert Compton, who has taken an interest in education. His thesis is that the current generation of American children and those going forward will not be able to compete with the Chinese and Indian children who are receiving more rigorous education in science and math. Much of the program was centered on a documentary he produced comparing two American high school seniors from Carmel Indiana to their counterparts in India and China. It certainly was though provoking and got the wheels turning. He game down on the time “wasted” in competitive athletics, but did advocate physical education. If you get a chance look at it or download the podcast, it will get you thinking.

Interview
Q&A with Robert Compton
C-SPAN, Q&A
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 204250 - 03/06/2008 - 1:00 - $19.95

Compton, Robert A.

Filmmaker

Venture capitalist Robert Compton's travels to India in 2005 and 2006 laid the groundwork for his decisions to author a blog, publish a book called Blogging Through India, and produce a documentary called Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination. Two million minutes is roughly four years, the amount of time high school students have to prepare for life. The documentary compares and contrasts the education experiences of six students; two from each of the countries of India, China, and the United States. It includes statistics on the amount of time spent in the classroom, the influence of the student's parents on their decisions to pursue a certain career, and the degree to which those choices impact their free time during their high school years. Robert Compton talked about his documentary film and the education community's response. Video clips were shown.

Mediocrity

2008-03-08T09:01:00.001-05:00

Seth Godin posted this on his site the other day. It certainly resonated with me, hopefully it will make you think.

The forces of mediocrity

Seth Godin

Maybe it should be, "the forces for mediocrity"...

There's a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it's right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you.

In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it's unlikely it would be worth the journey. Persist.

Bear Bryant Quote

2008-03-07T07:42:00.001-05:00

I saw this quote on my Google homepage the other day - Good advice for all of of us!
"When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don't repeat it." Paul "Bear" Bryant, I Ain't Never Been Nothing but a Winner

Stephan Widmer Interview

2008-03-07T07:34:00.002-05:00

Stephan Widmer is the Head Coach Queensland State Swimming Centre. I first met Stephan in 1999 at training camp in Australia. I was able to visit with him again this past spring and catch up. The opportunity to watch him coach a session last May was one of the highlights of the last year for me. He was trained in Switzerland in a classical physical/coaching curriculum with a great blend of practical exposure to teaching methodology and sport science. You certainly see this reflected in his coaching.

What are most essential requirements for a successful conditioning program?
A passionate & visionary coach!!!

What are the most common mistakes in conditioning?
Too much focus on too many details.

What is "functional training" from your point of view?
Learn about specific requirements of your sport in general and for the individual? Then create very specific learning opportunities and progression levels for your athletes.

What do you do to make training more functional?
I utilize the information from swimming specific muscular skeletal screenings, my own experience and my S&C coach’s expertise to create the next level of functional training.

How important is specificity?
I only focus on training the swimming specific muscles:

· Swimming specific injury prevention like shoulders

· Make the propulsive muscles stronger and more powerful

· Create a functional range of motion (ROM): joint flexibility and stability

· improvement and body awareness

What aspect of conditioning athletes is most difficult and how haveyou tried to address it?
Strength improvement in the gym whilst swimming at race specific pace in the pool (speed drops off too much). Lower rep methods.

With the plethora of information available how can you determine what is best?
Great experience, believe in my intuition and a good amount of courage!

Where do you stand on nature versus nurture? How much difference can
training make?
A talented athlete will never achieve her/his potential without great guidance!!!

What is the sure sign that a self proclaimed conditioning guru is not a good source of advice?
They don’t talk about the athletes, but about themselves! Everything we do should better our athletes! Therefore I’d like all my coaching and support staff focusing on them.

What do you differently with the female athlete in terms of conditioning?
More focus on strength development then with the male athletes.

What has been the biggest innovation in training that you have seen during the course of your career and where is the biggest room for innovation in training athletes?
Process driven coaching and the study of human behaviour, especially the motivation psychology!

What's the biggest issue in training athletes today?
The new generation likes to have success over night! And they forget that they have to stop to only dream, but wake up and work hard for success! Resilience is not a strength of this generation.

Who has been a role model in your career and why?
Scott Volkers taught me to believe in myself and how to create belief in my athletes!

What are the biggest professional challenges that you have had to face?
To get my athletes to keep up with me and passion to break constantly through to the next level – without stopping at an already achieved mark! This is my nature and probably as well my biggest slip-up!

What do you enjoy most about what you do? Dislike?
Seeing an athlete’s smile after accomplishing their dreams! Seeing an athlete’s Tear after not accomplishing their dreams!

Did there come a time in your career where you were faced with a "fork
in the road?" If so, do you ever revisit the decision you made or
didn't make?
I have been twice at a cross road of giving up coaching in my short career of 13 years. I keep on looking for alternative professional solutions for myself and in the improving my skills in non-coaching areas as well. But I won’t move on from coaching in the next 5 years.

What inspired you to get into the field you are in?
As a 12 year old swimmer I was already dreaming about becoming a swimming coach one fine day – not knowing that it wasn’t a profession in my country of origin (Switzerland).

Is failure ever valuable?
Fail, fail better, fail even better. Failing - if used wisely - can teach resilience!

Which changes now taking place in your field that should be
encouraged, and which resisted?
Bio feed back: precise measurement of training reps or sets to challenge the athlete to the next level: rep by rep.

· If every Rep is executed at a 1% better level, then the Set ends up being a better one!

· If every Set is executed at a better level, then the Training Session ends up being a better one!

· If every Training Session is executed at a better level, then the Training Week ends up being a better one!

· If every Training Week is executed at a better level, then the Season ends up being a better one!

The essentials of S&C training are to help athletes achieve their maximal physical performance potential without incurring injuries. Strength training provides many important benefits that cannot be achieved by any other exercise or activity.

Good luck: I hope you enjoy all the wonderful benefits of a safe and effective strength training program.

Swimmingly fast, Stephan WIDMER - Head Coach – State Swimming Centre

GAIN Apprentorship Faculty

2008-03-05T08:16:00.002-05:00

The apprentorship is a combination of an apprentice experience and a mentoring experience. In my career I was fortunate to be an apprentice coach and was mentored by some great coaching role models. My thought with this program was to combine the two experiences into an apprentorship. This is a combination of hands on experiential learning coupled with the conceptual foundations designed to develop leaders in the emerging field of athletic development. With that in mind we are quite fortunate to have a faculty with a myriad of experiences both practical and academic. Look at this video to meet this outstanding group of professionals.

Slogging

2008-03-04T09:37:00.003-05:00

Slogging is not in the Oxford dictionary so don’t bother looking it up. It appears disguised as training, usually included as integral part of warm-up or disguised as aerobic work. I am beginning to think it is a disease. It consists of thousands of very percussive negative foot contacts repeated very slowly. Slogging is slower than jogging. Yesterday I was driving by one of the Major League baseball complexes here where I live when I saw a painful sight up ahead on the sidewalk. There were eight big guys (pitchers) slogging along doing their “flush run” to remove the lactic acid after they pitched. All I could think of was why? It was a flashback to 1986, I thought that we had progressed from this. What does this have to with pitching or anything for that matter? It is certainly not preparing for the ballistic explosive movements involved in pitching. It is not removing lactate because that was metabolized in the time it took them to walk off the mound. Slogging will make you slow and compromise explosiveness. So why do it? It occupies time. If you slog eventually it will compromise velocity. It is a simple proposition you are what you train to be. If you train slow, sooner not later, the body will adapt and you will be slower. Instead use short sprints, in place jumps, short shuttle runs, power endurance circuits, intervals with short rest on a slide board, all would be better use of time than slogging. If you feel you need to do aerobic work then find a mode that allows the pitcher to work with a degree of intensity and that is low impact. If you do aerobic work I recommend nothing over twenty minutes and no more than one out of every six workouts. Remember the goal is create adaptable rather than adapted athletes. Slogging is not even good for general fitness, it creates more problems than it solves.

Simplicity Yields Complexity

2008-03-03T08:56:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was the birthday of Theodor Geisel, AKA Dr Seuss. The following from yesterdays Writers Almanac made me think again of how simplicity yields complexity.

He went on to publish a series of fairly successful books for older children, and then, in 1955, an educational specialist asked him if he would write a book to help children learn how to read. Seuss was given a list of 300 words that most first-graders know, and he had to write the book using only those words. Seuss wasn't sure he could do it, but as he looked over the list, two words jumped out at him: "cat" and "hat."

Seuss spent the next nine months writing what would become The Cat in the Hat (1957). That book is 1,702 words long, but it uses only 220 different words. Parents and teachers immediately began using it to teach children to read, and within the first year of its publication it was selling 12,000 copies a month.

A few years later, Seuss's publisher bet him $50 that he could not write a book using only 50 different words. Seuss won the bet with his book Green Eggs and Ham (1960), which uses exactly 50 different words, and only one of those words has more than one syllable: the word "anywhere." It became the fourth best-selling children's hardcover book of all time.

In movement we should be able to do the same. Think of combining reaching, bending, pushing, pulling, running, jumping and throwing – the movement equivalent of Green Eggs and Ham.

Innovation and Change

2008-03-03T07:47:00.001-05:00

I am fascinated by innovation in any field and constantly challenged by change, so when I read the article “Fast and Furious” by Grant Wahl in the February 22 issue of Sport Illustrated, I was both fascinated and captured. Think of this you have a court with defined dimensions, you have ten players and two baskets ten feet high, a shoot clock and a set of rules in a game that is over a 100 years old, how do you change or innovate given those constraints? Vance Walberg did and in the process has started an offensive trend that is spreading fast to all levels of basketball. Back to basics, seeing the same thing through different eyes is the secret of innovation. Walberg the innovator of this offense says this: “The biggest strength of this offense is I feel we’re teaching kids how to play basketball instead of how to run plays.” This article really got me thinking. Are we all too stuck in old paradigms to try new things, to see the world with different eyes? It made me think of Frans Bosch and Roland Klomp who took a relatively primal activity like running and looked at it differently, they certainly have got us all thinking. What other opportunities are out there for innovation in sport and training? Unfortunately too much attention is directed to technology and not enough has focused on the human element. Think of it, how did American football start? Someone picked up the rugby ball and passed it forward. Who will be the next person to pick up the ball, pass it forward and lead change? As Patton said there are clear choices:”You can lead, follow or get out of the way.” I do not know about you, I want to lead, I want to innovate and change, find better more efficient ways to make the athletes I work with better.

Reading

2008-03-01T07:51:00.016-05:00

Several people have asked me to comment on what I am reading. Most of my reading in the area of training has been research studies in journals. This is what I have read since the first of the year:

Symphony or Jazz

2008-02-29T10:05:00.005-05:00

Is movement and movement skill a symphony or is it more like jazz - improvisational? Yesterday when I was working with my beach volleyball players this thought occurred to me. We were working on some movement patterns and I had fallen back into the old trap of teaching them like robots, a step here, crossover there when I flashed that this was borderline useless. They have to be like Miles Davis, they need to know the notes and improvise, just play. So what I need to do is sharpen their knowledge of the notes and let them play and see what happens. I can rehearse them like a symphony but they are not playing Carnegie Hall, they are playing in a jazz club in the Village. I am reading a real thought provoking book that has really challenged my thinking on all of this. The book is Dynamics of Skill Acquisition – A Constraints-Led Approach, by Keith Davids, Chris Button, and Simon Bennett. The concepts presented will make you think of movement more like jazz. Every move is an opportunity for personal expression. Teach them the notes, sharpen the notes and let them play!

Throw Downs

2008-02-28T07:47:00.003-05:00

The exercise that you see Jalen Rose doing in this video was at one time a very popular exercise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq54mOaZAQI I personally used to do them all the time, until I realized that every day after including them in my workouts my low back was sore. I took them out of my toolbox awhile ago. Have an evaluative criteria for selecting an exercise or a training method, just copying someone else does not get it done. Ask yourself: Does it work multiple planes of motion, is it proprioceptively demanding, does it address the demands of the sport, what is the context it is used, how do you progress form this exercise?

Footwear

2008-02-28T07:38:00.001-05:00

For the reader who commented on the shoes that the Venice girls are wearing, I could not agree more. I do not advocate the higher heeled shoes worn as training shoes today. I also believe in training barefoot given the correct surface and situation. All of that being said, now let’s be practical. I do not have control over what shoes these kids wear. It is totally their choice based on what they can and cannot afford. Also as you can until we go indoors in June all the training is done asphalt. As homework I have assigned certain players barefoot work. In addition there is a big emphasis on three dimensional clave stretching. As a side note tone of the girls who broke her wrists last fall and was unable to participate in practice did all her plyo work during that time on the court barefoot. Before that she has problems with chronic ankle sprains – no more, in addition a nice vertical jump improvement.

Wisdom of the Body

2008-02-27T07:13:00.000-05:00

R. A. Dickey a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners does not have an ulnar collateral ligament. There is a story in today’s New York Times sports page about this. “For him to be able to throw at all is pretty phenomenal in itself,” said Rick Griffin, the Mariners’ head athletic trainer. “But he’s doing it in the major leagues. People in sports amaze you physically, but this is something you’d never suspect. It’s like a running back in the N.F.L. having no anterior cruciate ligament in his knee. It’s amazing.” Is this really that amazing or is another case illustrating the wisdom of the body? Jerry Reuss, who had a long (20 plus years) and a very successful major league career as a starting pitcher was missing one of his rotator cuff muscles. Roy Wegerle, a member of two US World Cup soccer teams had no ACL. In the days before we were so quick to put the player under the knife or MRI every ache and pain I suspect there were a lot pitchers throwing with torn rotator cuff muscles and labrums. When I played football there were a fair number of players around who had a “trick knee”, I now realize that they did not an intact ACL. What does all this mean, simply that the body has a highly innate intelligence. It can substitute and compensate if it needs to. The body is self organizing and completely adaptive. Out of fear or insecurity we fail to give the body credit and allow it to do its job. If we understand the structure and function of the body we would quickly realize it is not about one muscle or a particular ligament, it is about muscle synergies. It is analogous to a good a good basketball coach during a game, when the coach sees a player getting tired the coach will put in a substitute. The body has many substitutes we just have to make sure that all those substitutes are as highly trained and finely tuned as the starters so they can do the job when called upon. How do you do that? Simple train across a spectrum of movements, with resistance and assistance, work though all planes of motion to challenge the body to solve increasingly complex movement problems.

Where’s the switch?

2008-02-26T10:07:00.000-05:00

Where is the switch to turn on those magic muscles in Shaq’s butt? The drivel and misinformation that is passed around continues to amaze me. “He has weakness in his gluteus muscles” according to Phoenix suns trainer Aaron Nelson. Wait it gets better: “The medical issues that forced the 7’1” O’Neal to miss sixteen games this season were not, they say precipitated by structural abnormalities, widespread tendinitis or lingering ramifications from surgeries to his right big toe (a bone spur removed in 2002) and left knee (a scope in 2006). Rather, the tight and weak muscles have prevented have prevented him from moving freely. “We can get those areas firing,” says Nelson.” Sports Illustrated, February 18, 2008 page 35. This is just another example of the reductionist approach that does not work. The athlete becomes dependent on the therapist to “activate and get those muscles firing”, they do not get a feel for their body and the movements necessary to stay healthy and efficient. It is amazing to me that they dismiss the toe surgery and left knee scope as unimportant. If you have anything wrong with your big toe it sets off a chain reaction up the kinetic chain that will cause a myriad of problems. Sure he is tight in his calves and hips, he has to be to be to make up for what is happening down the chain with his toe and knee. Folks this is not rocket science, think big picture and remember it is ultimately about the athlete. He must be motivated and compliant and want to get better and stay healthy. Stop looking for the switch to turn on those magic muscles and focus on movements and coordination of the body parts working together.

Lifting Real Weight

2008-02-26T07:30:00.000-05:00

This was posted in response to my post on the Venice Girls program – “FOR THE RECORD - This team got smoked by Palisades Charter HS which is lead by three girls that lift real wts and regularly perform Olympic lifts. Palisades Charter HS, not Venice, won the League and City Championships.” Sorry friend get your facts straight, this is Venice High School in Florida, not California. As far as lifting real weight bring your girls back to do a workout with us anytime and see who is fit to play volleyball. We are not preparing weight lifters we are preparing volleyball players. One of the biggest impediment to progress is that idea that you have to “lift real weight” to get strong and powerful. Last night one of the beach volleyball players lifted over 6,000 pounds total load in a dumbbell complex series. No matter how you slice it that is a lot of real weight, lifted through full ranges of motion in multiple planes. A high pull and a snatch are Olympic lifting movements whether they are done with a bar, dumbbell, kettelebell or a sandbag! Welcome to the real world where we are training adaptable athletes to be better volleyball players.

Weight Room Without Walls

2008-02-22T09:53:00.002-05:00

Outside or inside it does not matter - A hallway is just as good - Get it done! Never let facilities or lack thereof limit a workout. Never let equipment or a lack of it limit your training. Building champions is about getting the job done, not style points.

Venice Volleyball Workout – February 21, 2008

2008-02-22T06:54:00.012-05:00

These are pictures from yesterday’s workout. These girls are awesome! I thought the group last year was focused and worked hard, but these kids have taken it up a notch. As you can see by our “facility” it is not about facilities! We have a great “weight room without walls.” Spirit, work ethic, imagination and effort make up facilities. What you see in these pictures is all you ever need to prepare teams to win championships!

A Thought from Steve Myrland

2008-02-22T06:38:00.002-05:00

Steve Myrland and were talking about various presenters and presentation we have heard when he shared this thought with me:

There are two kinds of presenters*:

The kind that want you to know what they know

The kind that want you to be impressed by what they know

* You are wise to mistrust both

Venice Volleyball 2008 Training Plan

2008-02-21T09:52:00.001-05:00

Venice High School Volleyball

2008 Training Plan Overview

Mission Statement

To train with intensity, concentration and effort to be the most athletic

and specifically fit volleyball team in Florida

General Theme

Make Connections

Phase	Theme	Duration	Comments
Foundation I	Get Structurally Strong Lay the Foundation	Six Weeks January/ February	Test and teach
Foundation II	Strengthen the Foundation	Six Weeks February/ March	Build the volume with DB Complex & Leg Circuit
Adaptation	Fast & Explosive	Six Weeks March/ April	Higher intensity work/ lower volume
Application	Get Vertical	Six Weeks April/May	Emphasis on Jump Improvement
Pre Season	Recycle	Six weeks June/July	Integrate strength, power and jump gains with VB skills
Competition I	Hybrid	Six Weeks August/Sept	Individualized programs 3 x week
Competition II	Hybrid	Three - Four Weeks October	Individualized programs 2 - 3 x week
Championship Season	Peaking	Three Weeks October/ November	Individualized programs 2 x week

Why Train Like the Pro’s?

2008-02-21T09:40:00.001-05:00

Even if you are a pro why would want to train like the pro’s train. Stop and think for a minute, it is a big mistake. I see so many commercial programs that advertise using this mantra. Is what they are doing athlete appropriate or is one size fits all? Let’s remember one thing about the pro’s, that their main focus is competition, the actual time they have to prepare for competition is minimal. It is a fundamentally flawed model, so why copy it. The other thing to remember is that the pros are physically mature; they do not have to deal with growth and development. Do you really know how the pro’s train, don’t believe the hype on commercials or what you see on ESPN. Over the years what I have seen of professional teams training is often eyewash, they are benign programs designed to not get someone hurt in training rather than doing things to make them better. Sure there are some real good programs out there, but a common characteristic of those is the unqualified support of the head coach, that does not happen often. Here is one example I just heard about that is almost comical if it were not true. A pro football team now has a scanner that scans the player’s body and through some magical process determines which individual muscles are weak and then the results are given to the strength coach with instructions to strengthen those muscles. WOW, isn’t that neat, I think I will find out if can get the franchise for that machine! How about Ladanian Tomlinson’s secret workout that appeared on the television program Sixty Minutes? Real secrets, BOSU, slide board and medicine ball, give me a break. Anyone can beat someone up and make him or her tired, but that is not training. Training is specific directed work with a goal and purpose. The message: Don’t train like the pros, train using good sound principles and methodology that takes advantage of the cumulative effect of training. You are invited to come and see the Venice Girls volleyball team train, they are more professional in their approach than most pros.

GAIN Apprentorship Opportunity

2008-02-20T08:41:00.004-05:00

Don't miss out on this opportunity to innovate and learn. For more information go to www.gambetta.com/pdf/ApprentorshipOverview.pdf or for an application go to www.gambetta.com/pdf/ApprentorshipAp.doc Feel free to write me at gstscoach@gmail.com or call me at 941-379-3455 if you have other questions.

Thought for Today

2008-02-19T07:11:00.002-05:00

"A champion is something you have been and can become - it is never something you are" Bjorn Daehlie

Strengths Finder

2008-02-19T07:08:00.001-05:00

I was exposed to these ideas in the audio book version of Now, Discover Your Strengths which I listened to on a drive across country after a disastrous work experience. The message struck home with me, but I never actually used the assessment until this January. I was at the book store and picked up Strengths Finder 2.0. I did the online assessment; it was thought provoking and helpful to gain further insights on a path of continual improvement.

Experience

2008-02-19T06:55:00.001-05:00

How often have you heard the statement: “I tried that and it did not work” or the other classic,” that will not work here.” How often are you limited by your experience? What do you do with your experiences? Aldus Huxley said: “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens.” In my career I have been around too many people who have had 30 years of experience, when in reality they have had one experience thirty times. Each situation, in fact each new day is an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to gain new experiences. Just because something did not work before does not mean it will not work now under a new set of circumstances. Use past experiences as a springboard for growth. The beauty of coaching is that we are change agents. Our job is to constantly force change and adaptation in the people we work with, but sometimes I think we forget that we must change and adapt to foster continued growth.

Wisconsin Track Coaches Association

2008-02-18T07:00:00.002-05:00

The clinic this past Friday and Saturday was one of the best have spoken at in years. It was so uplifting to see a group of coaches so eager to learn and share. They asked great questions. I think the parents and children of Wisconsin are very lucky to have the caliber of professionals that I saw and interacted with this past weekend working with their children. I think what struck was the number of coaches that were actually teachers, in so many other states there are more and more “walk on” coaches. By “walk on” I mean coaches not employed as teachers, but who come to coach after school to coach. That is what I do art Venice High School with volleyball and I know having been a teacher that it is just not the same. I think that there is a real advantage for the coach being able to be around the school all day and actually have the athletes in the classroom as students. It presents a bigger picture to the coach and the athlete. This is such an important age for the development off the athlete, not just athletically but cognitively and emotionally. If you ever get a chance to go to this clinic it is well worth it. I am going to go back again even if I am not speaking.

Monica Seles

2008-02-16T08:15:00.005-05:00

I saw yesterday that Monica announced her retirement. She is one of my favorite athletes, a real class act. I had the honor of working her for about five months in 1998-99. She was as focused as any athlete I have ever worked with. Never complained about anything, very positive. She certainly is the antithesis of some of the spoiled prima donnas of today. She was a very good athlete who was given a very good athletic foundation by her first coach who was here father. He had been a triple jumper and trained in the elements of track and field. I wish her all the best in her life outside of tennis; something tells me that in the future we will be hearing more from her. All the best Monica - you have been a terrific role model for young and old!

WOW

2008-02-15T08:29:00.002-05:00

I sure do respect all of you that live in cold weather. I am in Milwaukee to speak at the Wisconsin Track Coaches Association, it is 11 degrees right now with a whole bunch of snow on the ground. I will never complain again when my wife wants me to rake leaves in 75 degree weather, sure beats shoveling snow. It also explains all those Wisconsin license plates in Sarasota. Seriously I am looking forward to the clinic, there are over 1,000 coaches in attendance. Hope to keep them some practical ideas appropriate for high school boys and girls.

Good Quote

2008-02-15T07:26:00.000-05:00

Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. ~ George S. Patton

Why

2008-02-14T07:25:00.002-05:00

Why was congress having a hearing on drug use in baseball? I did not watch it, I was traveling all day, I would not have watched it if had been home. The commentary that I heard on the News Hour last night made it sound like a soap opera, which it is. I could not but help but think that with all the issues that we have in our country today, why is congress wasting their time on this. Don’t get me wrong, I dead set against drug use in sport, but this served no purpose. Who was not lying? There is no solution to this problem that is outside the commissioner’s office, it is amazing how silent the great Bud Selig is on this. I really believe he hopes it will all go away, all he cares about is asses on numbers, selling tickets.

From the Ground Up

2008-02-13T06:40:00.001-05:00

I read this quote yesterday from Japanese player Kosuke Fukudome, who will play for the Chicago Cubs this year. Despite what many American hitting gurus think it is not the hands! Strong powerful legs and core, this guy gets it:

“I was explaining to them that if you told a man to stand on his hands for a day, he couldn’t do it,” Fukudome said. “But if you told him to stand on his legs for a day, that would be no problem. The point is your legs have more power than your arms so when you’re batting, you’ve always got to be concerned with how to transfer the power of your legs to the bat in your hands.

“Since the hips are the midpoint between the two, the way you rotate them is crucial for delivering the strength from your legs. This isn’t the stuff of home runs, it’s about effectively harnessing the power from below to make contact with a strongly pitched ball and not be beaten by its strength.”

Latest on Muscle Fatigue

2008-02-12T19:04:00.000-05:00

Finding May Solve Riddle of Fatigue in Muscles

By GINA KOLATA

The New York Times, Published: February 12, 2008

One of the great unanswered questions in physiology is why muscles get tired. The experience is universal, common to creatures that have muscles, but the answer has been elusive until now.

Graphic

A New Explanation of Muscle Fatigue

Scientists at Columbia say they have not only come up with an answer, but have also devised, for mice, an experimental drug that can revive the animals and let them keep running long after they would normally flop down in exhaustion.

For decades, muscle fatigue had been largely ignored or misunderstood. Leading physiology textbooks did not even try to offer a mechanism, said Dr. Andrew Marks, principal investigator of the new study. A popular theory, that muscles become tired because they release lactic acid, was discredited not long ago.

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion.

In recent years, says George Brooks of the University of California, Berkeley, muscle researchers have had more or less continuous discussions about why muscles fatigue. It was his work that largely discredited the lactic-acid hypothesis, but that left a void.

What did make muscles tired?

The new work in mice, Dr. Brooks said, “is exciting and provocative.” It is a finding that came unexpectedly from a very different line of research. Dr. Marks, a cardiologist, wanted to discover better ways to treat people with congestive heart failure, a chronic and debilitating condition that affects an estimated 4.8 million Americans.

Its hallmark is a damaged heart, usually from a heart attack or high blood pressure. Struggling to pump blood, the heart grows, sometimes becoming so large that it fills a patient’s chest. As the disease progresses, the lungs fill with fluid. Eventually, with congested lungs and a heart that can barely pump, patients become so short of breath that they cannot walk across a room. Half die within five years.

In his efforts to understand why the heart muscle weakened, Dr. Marks focused on the molecular events in the heart. He knew the sequence of events. As the damaged heart tries to deal with the body’s demands for blood, the nervous system floods the heart with the fight or flight hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine, that make the heart muscle cells contract harder.

The intensified contractions, Dr. Marks and his colleagues discovered, occurred because the hormones caused calcium to be released into the heart muscle cells’ channels.

But eventually the epinephrine and norepinephrine cannot stimulate the heart enough to meet the demands for blood. The brain responds by releasing more and more of those fight or flight hormones until it is releasing them all the time. At that point, the calcium channels in heart muscle are overstimulated and start to leak.

When they understood the mechanisms, the researchers developed a class of experimental drugs that block the leaks in calcium channels in the heart muscle. The drugs were originally created to block cells’ calcium channels, a way of lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Marks and his colleagues altered the drugs to make them less toxic and to rid them of their ability to block calcium channels. They were left with drugs that stopped calcium leaks. The investigators called the drugs rycals, because they attach to the ryanodine receptor/calcium release channel in heart muscle cells. The investigators tested rycals in mice and found that they could prevent heart failure and arrhythmias in the animals. Columbia obtained a patent for the drugs and licensed them to a start-up company, Armgo Pharma of New York. Dr. Marks is a consultant to the company.

It hopes to start testing one of the drugs for safety in patients in the spring, but the tests will not be at Columbia because of the university and investigators’ conflicts of interest. In the meantime, Dr. Marks wondered whether the mechanism he discovered might apply to skeletal muscle as well as heart muscle. Skeletal muscle is similar to heart muscle, he noted, and has the same calcium channel system. And heart failure patients complain that their muscles are extremely weak.

“If you go to the hospital and ask heart failure patients what is bothering them, they don’t say their heart is weak,” Dr. Marks said. “They say they are weak.”

So he and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.

Then, collaborating with David Nieman, an exercise scientist at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., the investigators asked whether the human skeletal muscles grew tired for the same reason, calcium leaks.

Highly trained bicyclists rode stationary bikes at intense levels of exertion for three hours a day three days in a row. For comparison, other cyclists sat in the room but did not exercise.

Dr. Nieman removed snips of thigh muscle from all the athletes after the third day and sent them to Columbia, where Dr. Marks’s group analyzed them without knowing which samples were from the exercisers and which were not.The results, Dr. Marks said, were clear. The calcium channels in the exercisers leaked. A few days later, the channels had repaired themselves. The athletes were back to normal.

Of course, even though Dr. Marks wants to develop the drug to help people with congestive heart failure, hoping to alleviate their fatigue and improve their heart functions, athletes might also be tempted to use it if it eventually goes to the market.

The odds are against this particular drug being approved, though, cautions Dr. W. Robb McClellan, a heart disease researcher at U.C.L.A.

“In heart failure, there are three medications that improve mortality, but there have probably been 10 times that many tested,” he said.

Even if the first drug that prevents calcium leaks does not work in patients, Dr. McClellan added, the important advance is to understand the molecular events underlying fatigue. “Then,” he said, “you can design therapies.”

So the day may come when there is an antifatigue drug.

That idea, “is sort of amazing,” said Dr. Steven Liggett, a heart-failure researcher at the University of Maryland. Yet, Dr. Liggett said, for athletes “we have to ask whether it would be prudent to be circumventing this mechanism.”

“Maybe this is a protective mechanism,” he said. “Maybe fatigue is saying that you are getting ready to go into a danger zone. So it is cutting you off. If you could will yourself to run as fast and as long as you could, some people would run until they keeled over and died.”

From Today's Writers Almanac

2008-02-12T17:09:00.001-05:00

TUESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY, 2008
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "In The Middle" by Barbara Crooker from Radiance. © Word Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

In The Middle

of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day I look out the window,
green summer, the next, the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,

again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail, a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

Curt Schilling

2008-02-10T11:43:00.000-05:00

“Schilling said he passed all physical exams when he negotiated his new contract.” How many times have we seen this? The Boston Red Sox are supposed to be a moneyball team, what do you think the physical consisted of, probably an MRI (Might Reveal Injury), a Biodex isokinetic evaluation and some manual muscle tests. Was there any functional testing done? What about medical history? Isn’t the best predictor of future performance past history, especially when it comes to injury. What about biomechanical analysis? You would think with the millions of dollars at stake teams would invest in pre and post biomechanical analysis to track changes over time. We did this with the White Sox in the early Nineties when it was more difficult than it is today. Where does he do his off season conditioning? Professional sports – entertainment or sport. I guarantee you that the preparation of elite Olympic athletes is more sophisticated that what occurs in MLB, NFL and NBA, no stone is unturned and nothing is left to chance.

Good Eats!

2008-02-09T13:01:00.000-05:00

If you are ever in Sarasota on Saturday I highly recommend you stop by at Choo-Choos for some BBQ. When I ride east from where I live you can smell this BBQ two blocks away. When I am home on Saturday it has almost become a ritual - ride 20 to 25 miles, go home shower and back to Choo-Choos for some pulled pork or ribs. Definitely not health food , but it is sure good. Best BBQ this side of Houston. They are only there on Saturday.

Some Thoughts from Maya Angelou

2008-02-09T09:02:00.000-05:00

Maya Angelou said this:
'I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.'
'I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.'

'I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.'

'I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life.'

'I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance.'

'I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.'

'I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.'

'I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.'

'I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.'

'I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.'

'I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.'

Training to Your Strengths

2008-02-08T09:17:00.000-05:00

Training to your strengths is certainly not a new idea but in many ways it runs contrary to the way most coaches think. There is something about coaches and coaching that lead us to do the opposite, train the weaknesses. It is so typical to hear a coach talk about what if. What if so and so had a better kick, was stronger or could just handle running heats? I propose that before you focus on what the athlete cannot do find out everything they can do. What are their strengths? How do they use their strengths? How is their training structured? Is an inordinate amount of time being given to training to improve weaknesses to the exclusion of the strengths? If this is the case, mentally the athlete begins to focus on their weaknesses to the exclusion of their strengths.

With the young developing athlete, ask the obvious question: Are they in the correct event, position or even the correct sport? Instead of spending an inordinate amount of time working on a perceived weakness see if the athlete is better suited for something else. Sometimes what is perceived as a weakness in one event will be strength in another. Find the talent that suits the event; do not try to make someone they are not.

Know yourself and know your athlete. Recognize the patterns that are strong and build on those. Just as you should not be defined by the competition, the athlete should not be defined by their weaknesses. Focus on weakness makes a fallacious assumption

1) that anyone can become competent in most anything

2) The greatest room for growth and improvement comes in the persons weak areas
Each athlete’s strengths are unique and personal. The more that we as coaches can help the athlete explore their strengths the more sold they will be on the training. They will see progress and then begin to factor in work on strengths that can be systematically addressed.

Do not focus on strength to the exclusion of working on the weakness, rather learn to manage the weakness. To begin to deal with the weakness first identify it. Is it something that is holding you back from being significantly better? One approach is to let your strengths overwhelm your weakness.

Is it really your weaknesses that are defeating or are you not completely exploiting your strengths. To do this you must start by being acutely aware of your strengths. To really be a strength the athlete must be able to do it consistently. This is not to say ignore your weaknesses. Work around the weaknesses to enable you to use your strengths more wisely. Make sure the weakness does not undermine the strength. Do not take your strengths for granted, learn them, and appreciate them. What is standing in the way of using your strengths?

Using Scientific Studies

2008-02-07T08:33:00.000-05:00

This is from Seth Roberts’ blog, http://blog.sethroberts.net it particularly resonated with me because of a conversation I had just the other day with Dean Benton, form Leicester Tigers on this same subject. I know I am guilty of this. Thought provoking!

How to Be Wrong

February 6, 2008

There are two mistakes you can make when you read a scientific paper: You can believe it (a) too much or (b) too little. The possibility of believing something too little does not occur to most professional scientists, at least if you judge them by their public statements, which are full of cautions against too much belief and literally never against too little belief. Never. If I’m wrong — if you have ever seen a scientist warn against too little belief — please let me know. Yet too little belief is just as costly as too much.

It’s a stunning imbalance which I have never seen pointed out. And it’s not just quantity, it’s quality. One of the most foolish statements that intelligent people constantly make is “correlation does not imply causation.” There’s such a huge bias toward saying “don’t do that” and “that’s a bad thing to do” — I think because the people who say such things enjoy saying them — that the people who say this never realize the not-very-difficult concepts that (a) nothing unerringly implies causation, so don’t pick on correlations and (b) correlations increase the plausibility of causation. If your theory predicts Y and you observe Y, your theory gains credence. Causation predicts correlation.

This tendency is so common it seems unfair to give examples.

If you owned a car that could turn right but not left, you would drive off the road almost always. When I watch professional scientists react to this or that new bit of info, they constantly drive off the road: They are absurdly dismissive. The result is that, like the broken car, they fail to get anywhere: They fail to learn something they could have learned.

GAIN Apprentorship

2008-02-06T07:32:00.000-05:00

Gambetta Athletic Improvement Network (GAIN) Apprentorship

Coaching athletic development from design to implementation

The GAIN Apprentorship program is a special educational experience for professionals who desire to follow the functional path. The inspiration for this program derives from my experience with the European Sport School format, and the direct learning opportunities I had early in my career. The program builds on the weekend and one-day seminars, which are often valuable experiences, but can only scratch the surface of training topics due to time and facility constraints. The Apprentorship blends theory and practice in a five-day coaching school with a small teacher-to-student ratio. You will share with other professionals to learn in an atmosphere designed to raise the level of expertise of all those attending—including the mentors.

The initial coaching school is just the beginning. In the year following the school, there will be webcasts and web meetings to foster continued growth and interaction. At the conclusion of one cycle of the full program, we will have a “Meeting of the Minds”— a symposium style gathering of those who have participated in the Apprentorship featuring presentations from recognized experts and graduates of the program.

Our first Apprentorship school will be June 26 - July 1, 2008 in Sunrise, Florida, at the KICS International Holiday Inn Sports Complex. The second school will be December 4 - 9, 2008 at the same site. It is open to sport coaches, conditioning coaches, athletic trainers, physical therapists, chiropractors and doctors. Apply now, to be one of the twenty accepted to each school.

For more information go to www.gambetta.com/pdf/ApprentorshipOverview.pdf or for an application go to www.gambetta.com/pdf/ApprentorshipAp.doc Feel free to write me at gstscoach@gmail.com or call me at 941-379-3455 if you have other questions.

Stretching

2008-02-05T08:35:00.001-05:00

I want to make sure that people do not get the impression that stretching is not important. Stretching as a means to improve functional flexibility is very important. It is a separate training unit. Stretching is not warm-up! I think at various times in my career I have tended to ignore this vital component. My exposure to Kelvin Giles and his ideas and his subsequent influence on Dean Benton have convinced of its importance. The key is to evaluate each athlete to determine their individual flexibility needs and then address them individually. I saw this done very efficiently last year with the Brisbane Broncos. The players bought into and did a very good job because they were working toward specific goals of improving their flexibility competencies. It was interesting to see their flexibility scores in relation to performance measures and see the improvement in both. Generally with today’s athletes in the populations I am working with the emphasis needs to be on the hip, psoas and calves. I am trying to do a better job of doing this post workout with my volleyball players and to give homework stretching to do on their own. I do think it is important that flexibility be put in context. It is important to not get carried away and attack joint integrity. It is important to have different flexibility tools in your tool box and know how to use them and when to apply them. It is also important to remember that strength and flexibility are closely related. I have seen good range of motion increases as the athletes got stronger and were better able to control their movements.

Aging and Training

2008-02-05T08:17:00.000-05:00

As I get older the whole area of exercise and aging interests me even more. Last Thursday’s New York Times had a very good article on the subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/health/nutrition/

31BEST.html?ref=health

Some key points in the article and what I have seen with my experience:

Intensity – This is true at any age, more is not better. Shorter more intense workouts also seem to fit with my lifestyle.

Consistency – Another one that is true at any age, but I find that if I miss a series of workouts now it is harder to get back into it.

Strength Train - Definitely more important as you age. Consistent strength training with variety particularly appeals to me.

Flexibility – Another must, especially work in the hip girdle area and the calves.

Old Injuries & Improper training from your younger days haunt you – In so many ways you reap what you sow. I know that the niggling injuries that I used to ignore and train through now are bigger and keep me from training.

There is no doubt that exercise is the key to having a quality of life. I am not sure I have to compete in order to motivate me to train, for me training is a lifestyle and it is a daily opportunity to test myself in different ways and to keep experimenting. We are going to learn more about aging as our population gets older. Every time I go swimming I am inspired by the masters swim group that trains at the pool, several of them are in their eighties, it is neat to see how enthusiastic they approach their training.

Put warm back in warm-up

2008-02-04T08:04:00.000-05:00

In my opinion warm-up is one of the most important components of training. It is something you must before each training session. It is a precious time period that has a very specific objective of preparing the body for the subsequent demand of the training of the training session. Warm-up is the bridge from their normal daily activities to the training session. It must be thoroughly planned, just as the training session is planned. If you don’t think warm-up is important start adding up the time spend in warm-up, 10 to 20 minutes a session multiplied by the number of training days, represents a significant time commitment. If for no other reason than this it is important how much a warm-up can contribute to overall fitness in the course of a training year. It is a given that warm-up must raise core temperature and elevate heart rate. This is quite easily accomplished with an active and dynamic warm-up. For me warm-up is another key coaching opportunity. It is a time to analyze basic movements, to teach and reinforce good patterns and as previously mentioned accrue a cumulative training effect. Warm-up must address the common injuries and the stress area in the sport. I also take into consideration time constraints, space constraints and number of coaches available to help. Competition warm-up is not always the same as training warm-up, you must also have a warm-up routine for the bench player in the game and another warm-up for halftime of a game before the second half. Stretching is not warm-up, although some active stretching should be done in the later third of warm-up. Rolling around on foam roller is not warm-up. Wallowing around on a physioball is not warm-up. Get up and get moving. Get the nervous system stimulated; get ready for the training session. In today’s world warm-up looks a little like physical education class because this is the time to address fundamental movements that prepare them for specific sport movements. The cooldown is the place in the session to place static stretches and use of foam rollers. That is the time when I want a calming effect.

Yes these are my opinions, but they are grounded in best practice and sound sports science research. I have been using these concepts in warm-up with athletes in both individual and team sports for 35 plus years. I tried the static stretching route when I first started coaching. I did not like what I saw, but I give it a full shot for three years before going back to an active dynamic warm-up. I am a coach not a personal trainer, I do not have make my clients happy by chatting with them for ten minutes while they stretch, I have to get my athletes ready in the time alloted. Once again I implore you to think.

Super Bowl

2008-02-04T07:38:00.000-05:00

Last night I made the mistake of watching the Super Bowl from start to finish, I had not done that for at least 25 years. Now I know why, somewhere stuck strategically between ads there was a game. If there was ever any doubt about professional sport as entertainment not sport this settled it for me. I will take soccer or rugby any day – nonstop action. One ad did catch me eye though, it was for the NFL fit kids. Quite ironic. The NFL needs to take a close look at its own fitness and health standards before passing that onto kids. I also learned that you need to eat bananas at half time to prevent cramping. Just a small tidbit of high tech sports medicine information from the NFL. I could not help but reflect the Rugby matches that I saw in Australia where the majority of the players played 80 minutes, never saw cramping. It would be fun to watch some of these NFL guys play 60 minutes. Randy Moss ran 75 yards on a pass pattern near the end of the game and he was gassed. They would need tons of bananas.

Kevin McGill on Specialization

2008-02-03T12:59:00.000-05:00

This is Kevin McGill’s response to my post on specialization, a little different viewpoint.

One of the most famous progressions in track history is the development of Igor Nikulin, from age 6 to 21. His father had been in the Olympics, and of course, taught the little guy the basics with a very light hammer. (It is the same with Koji Murofushi) No one in the US knows exactly what the father had little Igor do. I doubt it was 100% hammer, but...the goal was to prepare him to throw in competitions each year, from a young age. When Nikulin came to the US to compete as a 17 year old, he was throwing a 16 lb hammer far in excess of what he AR was in the high school 12 lb. hammer. Hopefully, little Igor was not forced into doing throwing at such a young age. He competed until he was past 35, so he wasn't bored with the hammer.

The Finns will start the javelin very early, but many of their top young throwers were also XC skiers. The javelin coaches there have long believed this was good javelin training. When I went there in 1993, the young throwers under 15 were better technically than any of the US elite throwers of the day.

It seems that specialization can be a cultural phenomenon. When there is an acceptance of this, maybe there is also the lack of forced activity, so common in the US. I have seen young children forced into soccer...and they cry on the sidelines. I don't think soccer is the answer for each kid, but better parental control is. In the US, there is such an emphasis on excelling at a young age...even soccer can be ridiculous at age 8. Around here, parents have been ejected from youth games because of yelling, and carrying on. When we were in El Salvador several years back, the ONLY sport or activity available to any kid was soccer.

In Kenya, prior to this recent mess, we all recall the films of the young kids running back and forth to school, sometimes 10 miles each way. Talk about specialization. In areas where you simply don't have money to develop full programs, you are lucky to have the ability to specialize in something...or else you do nothing. In parts of the world, it is soccer...or drugs, or just watching TV.

So, I would not put specialization in the category of evil, but rather the adults who overemphasize participation, when kids really are not ready. It is also a very competitive world we live in, and many stories of successful athletes like Eli Manning...who certainly spent a lot more time throwing a football, than anything else.

That is how I see it.

Burn with Vern

2008-02-02T09:44:00.001-05:00

Six or seven years ago I did a year long consultation with North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois to help them with their athletic program and physical education program. Patrick McHugh, the athletic director and track coach keeps in touch with me on a regular basis. He sent me this cartoon drawn by two of his athletes who were wondering who this guy Vern was. They keep me hearing my name in the context of their “Burn with Vern” circuit workouts. Hope to meet them sometime; it brought back fond memories of a real neat year. Thank you Peter and Cindy for the cartoon.

Early Specialization

2008-02-01T09:11:00.000-05:00

There was an interesting story in Tuesdays USA Today about Wes Welker Wide Receiver for the New England Patriots. He is undersized 5-9 185 and slow by NFL standards, but he is very good athlete. Guess what sport he played as a youth, yep that un-American sport of soccer. His college coach attributes a good degree of his success to the body control and footwork he learned in soccer. When you think about it really is not that remarkable. It is just another example of building a broad foundation of athletic development. The evidence is overwhelming is favor of building a good base of athletic movement skill, this is just one more prominent example. Why do coaches want kids to specialize earlier and do nothing but sport. Wouldn’t it be better to make the goal creating the best athlete possible by giving them a full toolbox of athletic skills, rather than locking them into a narrow range of movements? Athletically you have to earn your right to progress to the next level by learning the athletic alphabet and the multiplication tables, a sound foundation in athletic literacy so to speak. There is another dimension to early specialization that everyone seems to be ignoring, injuries. Not so much the injuries the injuries that occur when participating and training in youth sport, but the injuries that occur later because of the one dimensional movement patterns these athletes develop by doing years of the same movements. When they have to do something outside their skill set they get hurt. A good foundation of athletic literacy will armor them against these types of injuries. There are so many dimensions to the problem of early specialization that it would a book to address them all. Suffice to say that say that early specialization leads to early stagnation.

Trivialization of Training

2008-01-31T07:39:00.000-05:00

Just because you are an elite athlete do you really need a stretching coach, a strength coach, a massage therapist, a technique coach, a speed coach and a conditioning coach? I came a across an article about an elite athlete the other day who was taking this approach. This is actually quite common. Isn’t this a little over the top? I wonder if they all have certifications for their specialties. From a practical standpoint how do you connect all of these? Who is the captain of this ship? In the instances where I have seen this none of the specialists are communicating with each other on a regular basis, therefore what you really have is total confusion, not solid training. Somehow this model has taken hold and each athlete has a posse of specialists. I witnessed this first hand a couple of years ago where the athletes where getting therapy several times a day. If that is necessary then there is something with the training. Even at the elite level it is about basics, getting fundamental things done on a consistent basis. When you lose sight of that it is no longer training.

Notre Dame High School

2008-01-30T10:34:00.000-05:00

I had a great visit to Notre dame High School in Sherman Oaks California. That make two weekends in row I have been able to meet with high school coaches who really get it. In Jacksonville Sid Maxwell from Sequoyah High School in Canton Georgia came down to hang with the rugby guys. Sid came to the third seminar I did in 1992 and has been implementing the concepts ever sense. Nick Garcia is the Athletic Coach, also coach’s freshman football and is the throws coach at Notre Dame, he is a young coach with a tremendous background in training. The athletes at these two schools are lucky to have coaches like this who really care and are always willing to learn. It was so refreshing to go two weekends without hearing a, can’t do that or I already do that. Joe McNab the track coach and defensive backs coach at Notre Dame was also there. He is great coach, having won several CIF Track championships. He has had several boys under 10.5 in the 100 meters, but his passion in track in the 400 meters. We had a great time talking 400 meter training and helping to fine tune his program. The interesting thing that struck me at Notre dame is that all but four of their football players compete in track. They still do the off season lifting in the morning and do their other football stuff, but they train for and compete in track. I am not seeing that here in my part of Florida and other places in the country. On the flight back I could help but reflect on how lucky the athletes at Notre dame to have coaches like this. It also reminded me that is it is about people not facilities, they have fine facilities, but it is the expertise, passion and enthusiasm of the coaches that is the real secret.

Thought for the Day

2008-01-26T10:18:00.000-05:00

You are not leading if no one is following.

Australia Day

2008-01-26T10:14:00.000-05:00

Happy Australia to my mates down under wish I were to help celebrate. The following is from the Writers Almanac for those of you who are unfamiliar with Australia day.

Today is Australia Day, the day on which Australians celebrate the establishment of the first British settlement in that country in 1788. Captain James Cook had been the first European to discover the island continent in 1770, and he informed the British government that it might make a good place for a settlement. By 1780, Great Britain's prisons were growing overcrowded because they had lost their colonies in America, which was where they had been sending prisoners. So they decided to start sending convicts to Australia, which was then called New South Wales.

The first shipment consisted of about 730 convicts, among them highway robbers, jewel thieves, and a woman who had tried to steal 24 yards of black silk lace. The military guards carried no ammunition, so that their guns could not be used against them in a mutiny. Two attempted mutinies were put down during the voyage. Forty-eight people died before they reached their destination, which was considered a remarkably successful survival rate. They arrived on this day in 1788 and settled an area they called Sydney Cove, around which would grow the city of Sydney.

Theme

2008-01-25T08:34:00.001-05:00

Each training year with each group that I work with I have a global theme. This year with the 2008 Venice Volleyball team the theme is Connections. Last year it was ICE – Intensity, Concentration and Effort. I chose connections because that is precisely what we want to do, make connections. Make connections from the exercises to the movements they execute in volleyball skills and make connections between all the links in the body to get everything working together. I try to take advantage of this theme to remind them of why they are doing exercises, in essence to make it more mindful rather than mindless work. It amazing to see the returning players get it, for the young freshmen it is still a bit too abstract, for them it is still work, but they will get it.

More Rollers

2008-01-25T08:27:00.000-05:00

Let be clear about one thing props like foam rollers cannot be a focal point. They are just that, props. In the scheme of a training system and in the smaller scheme of the actual workout they are a small segment of the big picture. I am bothered when in my travels I see foam rollers the focal point of a warm-up. They are a remedial tool to be used sparingly and individually. In 1996 with the Tampa Mutiny professional soccer team I had six players that had a five minute routine on rollers to address specific issues that had never been addressed in their careers. They were veteran players who had developed some serious issues in then hip and groin area. The point is that this tool worked well for those players in that time and place, but there was no universal application to the rest of the team.

Off to California

2008-01-25T08:02:00.001-05:00

Today I am off to California to do staff development the next two days with Notre dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California. Nick Garcia, the athletic development coach and assistant track coach is bringing me out. I am psyched for this; my passion is the developmental athlete, so anything I can do to help at this level gets me excited. Then Monday I am off to Santa Barbara to visit friends and family. I saw this quote from the author Edward Abbey, it reminded me why I love and miss California Where I grew up and began my coaching career: “There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And there is California.”

Holy Rollers!

2008-01-24T07:22:00.000-05:00

Rolling around on a foam roller is not warm-up. Forget all that activation crap and get back to a real warm-up that gets everything connected. This is another fad that creates a dependency on a piece of foam roller, you don’t need it, learn to tune into your body. Sure I use foam roller, about three minutes in a 7 day microcycle, usually in cooldown for someone who has IT Band issues. Let put the warm-up back into warm-up. Go to my web site www.gambetta.com then go to the resources page for a free download of a dynamic mutli-stage warm-up. Better yet see my DVD, Warm-up and Preparation that covers the warm-up from A to Z. There is even some cooldown foam roller exercises in it.

Excelsior Orthopedic – Functional Path Seminar

2008-01-24T07:09:00.000-05:00

Many of you have asked when I will be doing seminars. I am doing a new version of Following the Functional Path Seminar at Excelsior Orthopedics in Buffalo New York, March 29 & 30, 2008. This is the only seminar I am doing this spring that is open to the public. Excelsior Sports Training is hosting this seminar; they are part of the GAIN Network. (excelsiorortho.com/est) This is a great venue, with adequate space that affords lots of opportunity for active leaning situations. This is designed for Physical Therapists, Athletic trainers, Athletic Development coaches, personal trainers, and sport coaches. NATA and NSCA CEUs. For information and enrollment contact Ron Brissette at rbrissette@excelsiorortho.com or call 716-250-6500. Hope you can make it.

South Sydney Workout

2008-01-23T13:04:00.001-05:00

This is an attempt by a certified luddite to post a video for the first time.

Perplexed

2008-01-23T12:36:00.001-05:00

I just found out that needed a certification to teach jump rope. What should I do? Same thing to use kettlebells, I am very confused. How have I been able to coach without these certifications? Is it really about letters after your name? There is nothing wrong with certification if it is meaningful, but with the plethora of certifications out there how do we know what is meaningful?

Undulating Periodization - The Reality

2008-01-23T09:32:00.000-05:00

Why does Periodization or as I prefer to call it Planned Performance Training (PPT) have to be either linear or undulating? Frankly in my application of the principles of planned performance training for 39 years I have observed that adaptation is always undulating. The body does nothing in a linear manner, so therefore all Periodization is undulating. I think this distinction is just another exercise in intellectual gymnastics. You may write a linear program but the response will not be linear. I have analyzed my training results over my coaching career; I have NEVER seen a linear adaptation! Planning is planning; we must remember that it is always about the individual and their adaptive response. Variability and contingency must be built into the plan. Plan, execute the plan, evaluate the plan, revise the plan and execute the revised plan.

Good Article

2008-01-22T13:18:00.000-05:00

Don't Just Stand There, Think

New research suggests that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies

By Drake Bennett | January 13, 2008, Boston Globe

WHEN YOU READ something confusing, or work a crossword puzzle, or try to remember where you put your keys, what do you do with your body? Do you sit? Do you stand? Do you pace? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you move your eyes in a particular pattern?

How you answer questions like these, it turns out, may determine how long it will take for you to decipher what you're reading, solve your puzzle, or get your keys back.

The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another recent study suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. And in one study published last year, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is "embodied cognition," and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions - not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct - on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.

"It's a revolutionary idea," says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. "In the embodied view, if you're going to explain cognition it's not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what's going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what's going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment."

Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin's Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, "Ago ergo cogito": "I act, therefore I think."

The emerging field builds on decades of research into human movement and gesture. Much of the earlier work looked at the role of gestures in communication, asking whether gesture grew out of speech or exploring why people gestured when they were talking on the telephone.

But today, neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers are making much bolder claims. A few argue that human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body. If we didn't walk upright, for example, or weren't warm-blooded, they argue, we might understand these concepts totally differently. The experience of having a body, they argue, is intimately tied to our intelligence.

"If you want to teach a computer to play chess, or if you want to design a search engine, the old model is OK," says Rolf Pfeifer, director of the artificial intelligence lab at the University of Zurich, "but if you're interested in understanding real intelligence, you have to deal with the body."

. . .

Embodied cognition upends several centuries of thinking about thinking. Rene Descartes, living in an age when steam engines were novelty items, envisioned the brain as a pump that moved "animating fluid" through the body - head-shrinkers through the ages have tended to enlist the high-tech of their day to describe the human cognitive system - but the mind, Descartes argued, was something else entirely, an incorporeal entity that interacted with the body through the pineal gland.

While a few thinkers, most notably the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s, challenged Descartes' mind-body separation, it remained the dominant model up through the 20th century, though its form evolved with the times. After the development of the modern computer in the years after World War II, a new version of the same model was adopted, with the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that ran on it.

In the 1980s, however, a group of scholars began to contest this approach. Fueled in part by broad disappointment with artificial-intelligence research, they argued that human beings don't really process information the way computers do, by manipulating abstract symbols using formal rules. In 1995, a major biological discovery brought even more enthusiasm to the field. Scientists in Italy discovered "mirror neurons" that respond when we see someone else performing an action - or even when we hear an action described - as if we ourselves were performing the action. By simultaneously playing a role in both acting and thinking, mirror neurons suggested that the two might not be so separate after all.

"You were seeing the same system, namely the motor system, playing a role in communication and cognition," says Arthur Glenberg, a professor of psychology and head of the embodied cognition laboratory at Arizona State University.

This realization has driven much of the recent work looking at how moving and thinking inform and interfere with each other. For example, a pair of studies published in 2006 by Sian Beilock, now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and Lauren Holt, one of her former students, examined how people who were good at certain physical activities thought about those activities.

In one study, Beilock and Holt had college hockey players, along with a non-hockey-player control group, read a sentence, sometimes hockey-related, sometimes not. Then the subjects would be shown a picture and asked if it corresponded with the sentence. Hockey players and non-hockey players alike almost invariably answered correctly, but on the hockey-related sentences the response times of the hockey players were significantly faster than the nonplayers. In a second study, the researchers found similar results with football players. According to Beilock, the difference in response time wasn't a matter of knowledge - after all, all of the subjects in the study got the vast majority of the questions right. What it suggested, Beilock argues, is that the athletes' greater store of appropriate physical experiences served as a sort of mental shortcut.

"People with different types of motor experiences think in different ways," she argues.

These sorts of results aren't simply limited to thinking about sports, or other highly physical activities. A 2003 study by Michael Spivey, a psychology professor at Cornell, and his student Elizabeth Grant, found that people who were given a tricky spatial relations brainteaser exhibited a distinctive and unconscious pattern of eye movements just before they arrived at the answer. The subjects seemed to unconsciously work through the problem by enacting possible solutions with their gaze.

A study published in August by Alejandro Lleras and Laura Thomas, two psychologists at the University of Illinois, built on those results by inducing the eye movements Spivey had discovered. Lleras and Thomas found that doing so greatly improved the rate at which people solved the problem - even though most never figured out that the eye movements had anything to do with it.

"The subjects actually think that the eye-tracking task is very distracting," Lleras says. "They think we're doing this to keep them from solving the problem."

Other studies have looked at non-spatial problems and at memory. Work led by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has found that children given arithmetic problems that normally would be too difficult for them are more likely to get the right answer if they're told to gesture while thinking. And studies by Helga Noice, a psychologist at Elmhurst College, and her husband Tony Noice, an actor and director, found that actors have an easier time remembering lines their characters utter while gesturing, or simply moving.

The body, it appears, can subtly shape people's preferences. A study led by John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, found that subjects (all non-Chinese speakers) shown a series of Chinese ideographs while either pushing down or pulling up on a table in front of them will say they prefer the ideographs they saw when pulling upward over the ones they saw while pushing downward. Work by Beilock and Holt found that expert typists, when shown pairs of two-letter combinations and told to pick their favorite, tend to pick the pairs that are easier to type - without being able to explain why they did so.

What's particularly interesting to neuroscientists is the role that movement seems to play even in abstract thinking. Glenberg has done multiple studies looking at the effect of arm movements on language comprehension. In Glenberg's work, subjects were asked to determine whether a string of words on a computer screen made sense. To answer they had to reach toward themselves or away from themselves to press a button.

What Glenberg has found is that subjects are quicker to answer correctly if the motion in the sentence matches the motion they must make to respond. If the sentence is, for example, "Andy delivered the pizza to you," the subject is quicker to discern the meaning of the sentence if he has to reach toward himself to respond than if he has to reach away. The results are the same if the sentence doesn't describe physical movement at all, but more metaphorical interactions, such as "Liz told you the story," or "Anne delegates the responsibilities to you."

The implication, Glenberg argues, is that "we are really understanding this language, even when it's more abstract, in terms of bodily action."

Some linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers go further - arguing that the roots of even the most complex and esoteric aspects of human thought lie in the body. The linguist George Lakoff, of the University of California, Berkeley, along with Rafael Nunez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, have for several years advanced the argument that much of mathematics, from set theory to trigonometry to the concept of infinity, derives not from immutable properties of the universe but from the evolutionary history of the human brain and body. Our number system, they argue, and our understanding of addition and subtraction emerge from the fact that we are bipedal animals that measure off distances in discrete steps.

"If we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes," Lakoff argues, "math might be very different."

These ideas have met intense opposition among mathematicians, but also among some cognitive scientists, who believe they reflect an overreaching reading of a promising but still sketchy set of experimental results.

"I think these findings are really fantastic and it's clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He remains skeptical, though, that the roots of higher cognition will be found in something as basic as the way we walk or move our eyes or arms.

"Any time there's a fad in science there's a tendency to say, 'It's all because of this,"' Markman says. "But the thing in psychology is that it's not all anything, otherwise we'd be done figuring it out already."

While embodied cognition remains a young field, some specialists believe that it suggests a rethinking of how we approach education. Angeline Lillard, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, says that one possibility is to take another look at the educational approach that Italian educator Maria Montessori laid out nearly 100 years ago, theories that for decades were ignored by mainstream educators. A key to the Montessori method is the idea that children learn best in a dynamic environment full of motion and the manipulation of physical objects. In Montessori schools, children learn the alphabet by tracing sandpaper letters, they learn math using blocks and cubes, they learn grammar by acting out sentences read to them.

To Lillard, the value of embodied cognition in education is self-evident.

"Our brains evolved to help us function in a dynamic environment, to move through it and find food and escape predators," she says. "It didn't evolve to help us sit in a chair in a classroom and listen to someone and regurgitate information."

Sway Drill

2008-01-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

Yes they were doing an adaptation of the sway drill. To learn how to do the sway drill also called the Oregon Shift Drill go to page 248-49 of my book Athletic Development – The Art and Science of Functional Sports Conditioning. I learned this drill from Jim Radcliffe at University of Oregon.

South Sydney Rabbitohs

2008-01-22T07:49:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I visited with the South Sydney Rabbitohs in Jacksonville. They are over to play Leeds from England in an exhibition match. I was first able to visit with Vince Kelly, Head Strength and Conditioning coach and Grant Duthie, his assistant when I was in Australia last May. At that time I was able to attend a game. This time I was able to attend three training sessions. It certainly is great to see dedicated professionals at work. They take a total Athletic development approach to a very physically demanding game. In the workout I saw and the plan they went over with me they do a fine job of blending strength, power, aerobic and anaerobic endurance, speed and agility. They never lose sight of the fact that they are preparing for a series of high speed collisions for 80 minutes with only ten substitutions’ allowed. This was a very athletically fit group of players, as you will see from the pictures. You cannot carry any excess fat when you have to do the amount of running they do and play 80 minutes. Each session ended with extensive static stretching and some form of recovery either pool or ice bath. I would also like to thank Errol Alcott, Athletic Performance Coordinator and Jason Taylor, the head coach for allowing me total access to the workout. It was an enjoyable weekend, a little bit of Australia.

Dave Reddin Interview

2008-01-21T07:08:00.000-05:00

Dave Reddin is the former head conditioning coach for the English National Rugby team. It is generally acknowledged that his innovations in conditioning for Rugby Union were a major factor in the English 2003 World Cup win. Dave was educated at Loughborough University, universally recognized as the "cradle of coaches" for it's renowned physical education curriculum.

What are most essential requirements for a successful conditioning program? A thorough needs analysis of the sport, and the position the athlete plays within that sport, allied to a comprehensive profile of the athlete – top to toe, heart to head, background to foreground.

What are the most common mistakes in conditioning? Assuming what works for one, works for all. Not understanding the concept of thresholds of need in conditioning i.e. string enough, fast enough etc, not as strong as you can make them, fast as you can make them etc. Overall, perhaps related to the above question, failure to work with others in an inter-disciplinary team. So many people work in silos – S & C in the gym, coaches on the field, nutritionists in the lab etc – sharing information in the profile is the most important concept and the least well practiced.

What is "functional training" from your point of view? I try to keep it simple – it needs to be so I can understand it. Functional for me means training what makes a difference to performance (in every respect), not training what you are good at training. Functional is a bout, therefore understanding the sport and finding the simplest way to get the most performance improvement in the minimum time for the athlete, so they have maximum time available for all the other stuff they need to do.

What do you do to make training more functional? Analyse – video, biomechanics, talking to coaches and athletes, previous programmes, movement patterns. I then try to get to the fundamental movements and actions and energy systems which matter. To make something more functional, I don’t necessarily make it look more like the sport, but the fundamental movements, actions and energy systems must relate. i.e. I can do a functional conditioning session for a skier on a rowing machine.

How important is specificity? Generally, it’s really important to me, but specificity is not the same as ‘looks like’. Specificity in terms of fundamental movements, specificity of muscle actions, speed specificity, energy system specificity are really important to me. However, there will be times, with certain athletes, with limited training time, and limited history, where I will hit them hard generally, by which I suppose I mean I build a base for them – professional soccer players are a good example here. Their strength history is very limited, so I may include exercises which are incredibly non-specific to their activity, just to get some horsepower into the system. This for me has produced great results as the gym time vs the pitch time is so limited. We end up with a combination of very general in the gym, and very specific on the field.

What aspect of conditioning athletes is most difficult and how have you tried to address it? In many ways, true power training is tough, or at least has been in the past. Athletes thrive on feedback in my experience, and so lifting something maximum feels good as they can see the load increasing week by week. Without feedback, lifting, throwing or dragging moderate loads really explosively, it can be tough to engage the athlete and I think in the past this area has suffered as a result. Using feedback systems, e.g. jump mats, micro-muscle lab, Rob Newtons Ballistic measurement systems etc really helps in this regard as it gets the athlete engaged through competition with themselves and the rest of the squad.

With the plethora of information available how can you determine what is best? Read it all, be sceptical of it all, and keep coming back and challenging your basic principles. I normally assume, rightly or wrongly, that if something is heavily publicised and advertised, then its probably too good to be true. Whilst I am a disciple of the placebo effect, I also know that much of what is promoted as cutting edge with joe public doesn’t work with bill elite. I also spend a lot of time talking to old experienced guys like you Vern who’ve been there, tried most of it, and generally save me a lot of time!

Where do you stand on nature versus nurture? How much difference can training make? The potential to be a champion is in the genes, but the environment determines whether someone makes it or not. The wrong training can make a huge difference! With the best athletes, I think we must constantly assess what we can really add, unless we understand their sport as they do. Many coaches suffer by forcing their doctrine on their athlete. I think I’m always surprised about how little of the right training it takes to make a significant difference, and how much of the wrong stuff it takes before things go really wrong. In other words, training is the icing on the cake for the best athletes, whose talent tends to win through almost in-spite of the training sometimes. I also believe, the less talent the athlete has, the more difference training can make.

What is the sure sign that a self proclaimed conditioning guru is not a good source of advice? They are always proclaiming how good they are instead of letting the results speak for themselves. The real gurus are the ones no-one knows.

What do you differently with the female athlete in terms of conditioning? Nothing – same process – assess the individual requirements and profile and build the plan

What has been the biggest innovation in training that you have seen during the course of your career and where is the biggest room for innovation in training athletes? Biggest innovation? – would have to say the internet and the ability to communicate more easily and access information. Biggest room for innovation – feedback in training and monitoring of athletes

What's the biggest issue in training athletes today? Young athletes who get too much done for them too early and who fail to appreciate the need for pure hard work

Who has been a role model in your career and why? My good friend Craig White – he is constantly looking for different approaches and information, inspires his athletes and has great standards

What are the biggest professional challenges have you had to face? Working (now) in new sports where the coaches are close-minded and require significant education and re-education. Also the challenge of working effectively but remotely from athletes – technology is a great help, but there is never a real replacement to hands on

What do you enjoy most about what you do? Dislike? Like : the challenge of sport and of understanding what it is about each person you work with that can make a difference to them. The buzz of competition.
Dislike : Administration! Did there come a time in your career where you were faced with a "fork in the road?" If so, do you ever revisit the decision you made or
didn't make? Recently when after leaving England rugby after 10 years I had to decide whether to stay in the game, or to look at other sports. Not as simple as it sounds when you’ve perhaps become institutionalised! Havent regretted moving on from rugby for a second. I had great and life changing experiences there, but to apply your principles elsewhere is a bigger challenge. I’ve learned so much in the last 12 months – wish I’d done it earlier!

What inspired you to get into the field you are in? If you can’t play (to a high enough level)…… coach!

Is failure ever valuable? It should always be valuable if the reflection is honest and open-minded. Great lessons get learnt from failure. However, I do think most people, teams and coaches spend way too much time analysing failure and attempting to learn the lessons from it, but hardly any time analysing success (their own and that of others). There is at least as much to learn from that, its just that we are so often so busy enjoying being successful, we don’t always acknowledge the reasons for it at the time. That can be dangerous when failure comes, as it always does at some time, as you may find yourself throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Which changes now taking place in your field that should be
encouraged, and which resisted? Encourage : greater sharing of information, and much greater applied research i.e. problem solving research. I would love to see more of an approach in sport which relies more on case studies from elite athletes as opposed to some of the nonsense that comes from some of the more academic studies. Statistical significance can be a severe barrier to progress in sport – the margins are much smaller than science can often reveal, and the population specificity of any study also calls into question the application of many of the findings to real world elite sport. We would all learn more if more coaches were prepared to share case studies of their own experiences with elite athletes.
Resist : Gimmickry and packaging of simple concepts into complex marketing spin. If you want to get strong, lift a heavy rock, ……………if you want to get quick, run fast…….. sometimes we can get too far away from the fundamentals.

Aging Study

2008-01-18T08:02:00.000-05:00

A short report on my ongoing aging study, on Wednesday I turned 61 so I decided on Thursday to test myself with a good workout. I have to say this workout made feel 61! I have tight hip flexor but I decided to tough it out and do the workout with my beach volleyball players. The leg circuit was done with a sandbag that was about 20% bodyweight. The little sadistic addition to the leg circuit was the hurdle unders at the conclusion of the leg circuit, needless to say that put the icing on the cake. Today I am driving to Jacksonville (Four Hour Drive) to spend the weekend with the South Sydney Rabbitohs Rugby League team visiting from Australia; I will probably have to stop every fifty miles to stretch my hip flexor. Here is the workout – it was a killer.

Warm-up

Mini Band

Med Ball – Walking Rotations

Lunge & Reach

Core

Standing Core

Jumping Jack Core

Strength Train

KB Swing

3 x 8 Two Arm

High Box SLS 3 x 6 (with Kettlebell)

Dumbbell Complex x 5

High Pull x 6

Alt DB Press x 6 each arm

Db Squat x 6

Db One Arm Row x 6

Leg Circuit x 4 (3 with Sandbag – 1 without load)

SB Squat x 10

SB Lunge x 5 each leg

SB Step-up x 5 each leg

Ice Skater x 10

Hurdle Under x 1 each side

Cooldown & Stretch

Hurdle Overs x 6

Baseball & The Mitchell Report

2008-01-17T13:05:00.000-05:00

I have not written too much about the Mitchel report and the fallout from it ( In fact this is probably all I will write). I m trying to figure out if Bud Selig and his merry henchmen are truly clueless or they just do not want to know what is really going on. Either way it is really amazing. How about the medical exemptions? Give me a break! I am astounded at the people not interviewed by Mitchel - they essentially got a free pass. Sport or entertainment , is there any doubt?

Athleticism to the Max

2008-01-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

Watch this, it is athleticism to the max. Just imagine if we could all of our athletes to have this level of body awareness and control http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LOKvvcBxVQ

Stephan Wolfram on Simplicity

2008-01-16T17:16:00.001-05:00

Stephan Wolfram http://www.stephenwolfram.com asserts that all complex phenomenon are produced by simple rules. Scientists, he says should be striving to uncover the underlying simplicity – not just searching for explanations by carving complex phenomenon into smaller and smaller digestible pieces.

Connections

2008-01-16T08:42:00.000-05:00

It has almost become trite to say that the body is a kinetic chain with all the parts connected. Every workout reminds me of this. Yesterday I started with Venice girl’s volleyball in preparation for the 2008 season. It was amazing to see the kids who were beginning the second year of the program. They have mastered the ABC’s and the multiplication tables of movement, they can make connections. Contrast this to the freshmen who are beginning the program. In warm-up during the balance single squats you could clearly see the inability to connect. Interestingly enough the girl who had the greatest difficulty with balance and subsequently the single leg squat has a history of knee problems. She came to me after the workout and asked me if I had exercises for her knee. I explained to her that after the second workout I would give her a special remedial routine that would be her volleyball homework, but that it would not focus on the knee. Instead it would emphasize the hip, the ankle and balance. I explained to her that the knee is somewhat helpless because it is stuck in the middle with no place to go. It all comes down to all the pieces working together and connecting to produce efficient coordinated flowing movement. In fact I have decided that out training theme for the year will be connections. I will keep you posted on our progress. This is a great group of young ladies who are willing to challenge themselves and do the work. It will be fun!