Could it be possible that the training method that brought a person to stardom over a short period could also lead to their slow athletic regression over the next half-decade? This was the case with javelin throw sensation, Tero Pitkamaki, who rose to stardom in the later half of the 2000’s through his incredible power and throwing technique.
Nobody was more fun to watch throw the javelin than Tero, and he was also a beast in the weightroom, causing the circulation of numerous training videos. Unfortunately, could it be that the weightroom would lead to his slow and steady decline in the event? Check out the video below.
Tero’s neck-driven cleans, and teeth-clenched squatting/benching reinforced a “distal-over-proximal” muscle firing pattern that contributed to a slow and steady throwing rigidity, and subsequent decline in his javelin performance from 2005 to 2011
In late 2011, Tero switched his coach to Jan Zelezny, after not making the world championship final due to a lower back injury. After watching the above video, it isn’t that hard to see why. Fortunately for Tero, his world record holding coach, Zelezny, realized that all of the heavy lifting had left Tero tense and rigid, and unable to throw at his highest level. Restructuring the way that they trained allowed Tero to begin to return to his old form, and his performance increased 4 meters in the course of two years.
Strength training is a cultural and personal thing, as much as it is a tool of improving athletic development. Many coaches and athletes will blindly prescribe and glorify repeated, maximal effort lifting, in the absence of proper muscle recruitment patterns. How many strength coaches are repeatedly conscious of the neck and wrist firing patterns of their athletes during the course of their strength training?
Many athletes, whose sport can also find short and medium term success in absolute strength boosts (such as throwing, or American football) will find themselves entrenched in an iron mindset, which clearly isn’t a bad thing if the end-goal is medium term success. Take a look at the dominating NCAA success of Larry Judge’s throwers at South Carolina in the late 1990’s, who lived and breathed iron (and their women were stronger than a lot of men’s NCAA throwers), and you’ll see that the barbell has some powerful offerings for performance enhancement in select time-frames. Looking at what Judge’s throwers accomplished after college is a strike for simply getting insanely strong on the platform of repeated, international success.
Proper strength training gives many athletes a massively needed boost to their athletic performance, but I’ve also seen exactly the reverse. The idea of routine, heavy strength work is a grey area, for sure. Its greatest help, is undoubtedly in the medium to short term of things, and mapping a path to the optimal, long term development of the athlete is an area where strength practitioners requires more of a guiding light. It is for this reason, I have rolled out two lists of 10 pro’s and con’s of barbell work for athletes, to allow coaches and athletes a means of better management of this training medium.
10 Pro’s of the Barbell for Athletes
- Improves basic muscle recruitment and coordination in athletes. The lower the level of athletic qualification, the greater the impact. The immediate performance results that athletes find through coordination improvements are substantial.
- Improves awareness of posture, as well as increased recruitment and tone of postural muscles, when performed correctly and in balance. This is more effective when athletes have proper breathing patterns and don’t have underlying postural pathologies. Repeated, heavy axial loading a lordotic/kyphotic athlete will eventually backfire.
- The barbell promotes self-confidence and self-image. What is in the mind is in the body. If arm curls help someone feel better about their image, it can and will also show up in their performance.
- Increases testosterone and growth hormone release. This boost can help to maximize the development of other specific speed and power training means in the training program. This is also where one or two set, high rep schemes can offer a great boost to other aspects of training with minimal motor learning or CNS invasiveness.
- Offers another means of developing goal-oriented force development in a training program. Some sort of quantitative measure in training is critical for improvement. What you measure, you improve. Improving measured power output in a 2/3 range squat is one of my perennial favorites for nearly all athletes.
- The barbell offers a lower-impact method of achieving high muscle tension. The joints can only handle so many plyometrics, and the hamstrings can only handle so much sprinting and acceleration. Athletes who can’t physically handle particular ballistic workloads can make up some of the work through barbell means.
- Can assist in the motor development of relevant athletic movement patterns. For example, properly performed Olympic lifts can assist in the development of explosive triple extension in jumping. There is a ceiling for the motor learning assistance of these exercises, however.
- Can provide a temporary (10 min to ~72 hours) boost in the sensitivity of the Central Nervous System. The more substantial the lift, the greater the potential boost, but fatigue is also greater, so a longer rest is required in this case. This system of checks and balances must be carefully addressed.
- Strength work is a fantastic method to create balance in the athletic body by providing strength to under-utilized muscle groups or patterns. This is one of the best ways that strength training can help to prevent injuries, especially in team sport play where movement is not as specialized as a sport like track and field, where specialization and “training athletes where they live” is the key to the last 2-3% of performance increment improvement.
- When correctly performed and planned, barbell work can increase the usable pool of type II fibers, particularly through the “overshoot” of the type IIx fibers during periods of de-loading and tapering periods. For the most part, just lifting will increase the pool of the hybrid, IIa fibers, which is still, not a bad thing at all.
8 Con’s of the Barbell for Athletes
- Can increase resting muscle tension beyond optimal levels for athletic performance. In “The Science of Running”, Steve Magness lays a clear image of how various training modalities can either increase or decrease muscle tension. Things like barbell work increase tension, and things like distance running on grass decrease it. Clearly speed/power athletes need a somewhat high level of muscle tension, but if it’s too high, elastic performance will hit a bottleneck.
- In the same vein, excessive barbell work can hamper the ability of muscles to relax quickly. The faster antagonists relax, the faster agonists can fire. If you want to reach your highest genetic speed potential, fast relaxation is a must.
- Heavy axial loading can actually hurt posture if performed out of balance, particularly squat and bench driven programs where posterior chain work isn’t properly addressed. Barbell work is also not a postural fix for athletes with chronic postural issues and breathing patterns. Bilateral work tends to drive an athlete into anterior pelvic tilt (look at any Olympic weightlifter), where unilateral work can help to neutralize, or reverse this occurrence.
- Heavy lifting, particularly in the absence of technique, can impair athletic muscle sequencing, by reinforcing “distal to proximal” recruitment patterns. This means that athletes who over-recruit distal stabilizers (such as the neck and tibialis) are going to hit a performance ceiling due to teaching their body to “fight itself” during athletic movements. See Pitkamaki’s neck in that first video for a good example of this.
- Extensive lifting can cause increased bodyweight beyond what is optimal for a given sport; the extra weight being partially due to increased size of stability, postural (mostly slow twitch) and distal muscle groups. This is a big reason why many NCAA football players really don’t get faster once they get to college vs. what they were doing in high school (Jacobsen, 2015).
- Excessive barbell work can bring the total CNS cost of a training week above the line of over-reaching, and hurt an athlete’s ability to recover from the total work-load.
- Repeated, heavy axial barbell loading can cause an athlete to hold onto force for a period that is longer than what is needed in sport. An example of this would be excessive parallel squats for a track and field sprinter or high jumper. The long period of force application found in a parallel squat could bring about a negative transfer for training to an elite sprinter if the squats were performed in enough volume. This is the reason why many track coaches prefer dynamic partial squats to full depth parallel squats, especially on the elite levels.
- Repeated squatting, deadlifting, incorrectly coached Olympic lifting, etc., builds a “rear-foot” dominant athlete with limited plantar extension and power to the big toe. Coaching everything “through the heels”, is a recipe for an implosion of explosive abilities, and although seemingly counter-intuitive can even be a contributor in knee injury due to a lack of tibial stability with an inactive foot.
A Basic Primer on Using the Barbell to its Maximal Advantage
With this in mind, let’s try to make the grey areas of lifting a little more understandable and manageable for athletes and coaches. These are some points of impact that I have realized and refined through my years in the NCAA track and field, and strength training realms.
- Lean towards using Bondarchuk’s thoughts and methodology on barbell work and spend most of your time working with 55-65% of the athlete’s 1RM. This method yields most of the advantages of heavier weights (as far as athletes are concerned), with less drawbacks.
- If you do go heavy (over 85% of 1RM), be aware of the individual athlete’s response to this type of work. Some athletes will be energized and the neural charge will positively impact subsequent speed work. For some athletes, this will be too much strain on their nervous system, and they will be slightly dis-coordinated in following workouts, where others will thrive.
- For athletes who do responds well to the “over 85%” lifting, realize that they’ll need somewhat frequent breaks from this type of work, or negative elastic changes and over-reaching bouts will ensue.
- Always do something “fast” after a bout of heavier lifting, as this will help both recovery, and “looseness” (muscle tension) in the subsequent training session.
- Be aware of strained necks, shins, tense wrists and brachioradialis muscles, as well as postural deviations during floor-based barbell lifting. Athletes who have poor spinal integrity during barbell work aren’t doing themselves a favor in terms of long term patterning, and can often use a hefty dose of muscle patterning, activation, and targeted corrective exercises.
- Don’t just go for standard, up/down versions of lifting, but utilize various tempos that revolve around a solid isometric phase, fast eccentrics, and fast reversals. Oscillatory reps are also a powerful tool, and escape from the norm. I’ve found that oscillatory style reps tend to limit the amount of compensating that athletes can manage by accessory muscles, and help restore functional ability, while maintaining, or even improving strength.
- Coach Olympic lifts correctly. When athletes turn the Olympic lifts into shortened-extension, reverse arm curls with limbo-style catches, they do far more harm than good. Bar speeds must remain high for good transfer to athletic abilities here.
- Pair barbell work with similar plyometric or ballistic activities. This isn’t even for “potentiation”, so much as it is to maintain the correct neural pattern throughout the course of the lift that ultimately transfers to speed and power on the playing field. If you don’t’ pair barbell work with a ballistic exercise, pair it with a functional or corrective movement.
- Do a good amount of single leg lifting, not necessarily for maximal strength, but rather to help maintain the proximal, functional ability of the body. Any athlete should be able to bang out bodyweight pistol and skater squats without much of a problem. There shouldn’t be an award for the athlete who can do 100lb pistols, however, as this is taking a means to and end a bit too far.
- Use the weightroom to promote a positive team culture, environment of encouragement, and incubator of self-confidence. There is more to a weightroom than a land of muscle-building.
- Give low volume strength work a shot. Try things like 1 set of 10-20 reps for squat, bench, deadlifts, etc. This training ideology might seem foolish, but it can be very effective when an athlete is already doing tons of jumping, sprinting, change of direction, etc.
Conclusion
So there you have 10+ years of my experience with the barbell in around 2000 words. Some people likely think that I am a hater when it comes to heavy weights, but in reality, I’m not, I’ve just been around the strength world long enough to pick up a few ideas. I’ll leave you with this video of Tero Pitkamaki training with Zelezny in his return to form. May the barbell serve you well in your upcoming training sessions, and road to optimal development.
The answer in a return to optimal performance isn’t found in strength numbers, but rather, refining the simple, effective movement patterns that allowed you victory in the first place. Remember, the best athletes in the world do the simple things better than everyone else.
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” ~Abraham Maslow
References:
Magness, Steve. The Science of Running: How to Find Your Limit and Train to Maximize Your Performance. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Longitudinal morphological and performance profiles
for American, NCAA Division I Football players, by
Jacobson, Conchola, Glass, and Thompson, in The
Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (2015)
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