Training Athletes- Part 2

Training Athletes- Part 2

When I left off in the last article I went into some lengthy discussions of: specificity, speed, and multi joint training. Now, just as a reminder, this is my personal list and yours doesn’t necessarily have to look like mine, but I have compiled this list from my training, training other athletes and from the influence of some the greatest minds in the field. So enough of the boring stuff, onto the meat.
The first topic for this article is going to be the importance of training midline stabilization. This is better known to the rest of the world as core, but I hate using the gimmicky catch phrase words that is powering the pretend fitness industry. For that reason I stole the term midline stabilization from Greg Glassman of Cross Fit. I think that it really puts into perspective what the important muscle groups are. It is more than your abdominals, which is what Billy Blanks wants you to believe. It is any muscle that helps to stabilize your midline.
The long and short of it all comes down to the fact that in athletics you use your entire body to accomplish a task, I touched on this earlier. Now it is impossible to use your upper and lower bodies with out the use of midline stabilization. Without it, athletic movements become less efficient and performance drops. So the info to take from this is; train the musculature that affects the spine and hips: erectors, abdominals, hip flexors and extensors, and upper back. Preferably train all these muscles in conjunction, such as with a clean or a squat.
One thing that I have learned from working with athletes, that I never realized when I was the athlete was the need to hold them back. I don’t really believe in overtraining, but I do believe in under recovery. A huge part of training young athletes is telling them to take a break. In today's society it is hard to believe that it is beneficial to an athlete to tell them to go take a break and relax. Not only is this great for recovery, but mentally will give them a break from competition too, but needs to be assessed on a case by case basis. And please don’t go saying Coach Kolb told me to train for football by playing Madden 2007 and watching Friday Night Lights, please take it in context. Most kids are training themselves constantly, going from one sport to another, and doing the same lifting workout with no deload, and sooner or later there will be a break down if recovery is not allowed to take place. With consistent weight training, a deload week should be taken about every 6 weeks. This is not exact for all athletes, I have seen kids that need to deload every 4 weeks and up to 8 until they need a deload, the point is they will need it so schedule it in.
An area that I think that Joe Shmoe personal trainer is actually doing well in is to have people using only one extremity at a time, single limb training. I have seen to many trainers using this as their gold standard for strength gain, where I do think that it is important and should be incorporated into an athlete's training, it is just another tool in the training tool box. In sports most of the time is spent performing movements with the arms doing two different things, or only one leg on the ground etc. Since we want to train like we will compete it is important to do lifts and movements on one leg and with one arm. All of the movements that I will do with single limb are generally dynamic in nature; single leg hop or jumps, single arm snatch, and so on. The dynamic nature mimics athletics better. A little further with this concept is the idea of alternating extremities. Often times our limbs are doing the same movement but in an alternating manner, so training this way will help to improve efficiency and coordination.
Coordination, balance, and agility are essential in athletics, but the way that most people are training it is ridiculous. Pick up any catalog that sells sports performance equipment and look at the amount of "crap in a box" people are trying to sell. Agility ladders, wobble boards, swiss balls, BOSU balls etc. the list has become almost endless. I think that all of these items have their place, a limited place, but can be used to enhance performance, especial in the novice athlete. If I constantly perform movements on a wobble board, it has very little carry over to on the field or court. All it has done is improve performance on the wobble board, so if wobble boarding is your sport have at it, if not do something useful. This was proved recently by the NSCA in an article in there Journal of Strength and Condition. The quick explanation of this is that when our body knows what movements we are about to do, such as on a ladder, it only needs to remember that set pattern, not adapt by increasing agility. In order to train agility the body has to be forced to change direction with no set pattern or warning. Like anything else these items have there place in the tool box, but who really uses the metric system.

You may notice that the descriptions are a bit shorter in this article, and the reason, if you haven’t noticed is because I am hot linking to articles that I have already written. No need to reinvent the wheel, I would probably have just cut and paste if I didn’t do it this way. The main concept touched on in this article of the series is that everything has its place in training, it just comes down to what are your specific goals and what you have access to. It would be great to training using every method, but think of training as a box, it can only get so full, eventually to put something in something else will need to come out. So put only the best items in your box.




Questions/Comments tkolb@northernmichigansportsmed.com