If I’ve found one thing as a coach for a variety of different sports, both on the track and in the weightroom, it’s that anybody can improve quickly over the course of a few months, but not everyone can continue to advance their explosive competitive performance for an extended period of time.
To this end, I’ve listed 5 things that have taken me some time to learn and apply in my experience as a coach. They are as follows:
- Take breaks
- Stay close to the most specific training means, but alternate emphasis
- Use competition and high-energy practices to allow you to be your best
- Slow cook your strength development
- Motivation is key
1. Take breaks
I’ll start with a point that is honestly the most important, but least glamorous of all, which is the need for rest and recovery at strategic points throughout the season. I’m not just talking a deload of every 4th week either, but rather, a 2-3 week active recovery period between main training cycles where athletes are either resting (in the offseason) or doing something actively different (pre-season).
In season, I still think taking an actively easy 1 week break, such as the time period between indoor and outdoor track, is essential for continual progress, in fact, I’ve seen one of the most successful NCAA track programs in history take advantage of this simple idea… let athletes go on spring break and have fun, so they can recharge their batteries to dominate in the outdoor push.
When it comes to explosive performance, it’s all about the nervous system. The nervous system needs to recharge itself in many cases in order to continue its ability to learn and climb upwards.
So many times I’ve seen track athletes get hurt, spend 2-3 weeks in the sports medicine room doing rehab, and then get back on the track to then set a lifetime best shortly thereafter! Obviously, the rehab is often an important piece too, since it forces athletes to have a deeper understanding of the fine points over their movement, rather than the more global pounding from heavy weightlifting that also doesn’t get unloaded often enough in traditional programming.
At a HMMR Media seminar in Berkeley, I listened to Nick Garcia and Martin Bingisser talk about how the success of each 20-40 session developmental cycle of training often hinges on how long an athlete had to restore their adaptation reserve in between each developmental cycle through the use of “cleansing cycles”. If you didn’t get enough time to rest, it might mess up your next developmental 20-40 session cycle.
I’ve been around track long enough to notice an interesting trend. Teams that go to an outdoor meet right after indoor ends (often times, the week right after, with no break) to “stay hot”, and get a qualifier for some championship meet (or head down south for a spring break competition) will oftentimes, never recover from not getting a break, and have a lousy outdoor campaign! I’ve even seen a high jumper in my old conference clear 6’9” indoors and barely make 6’2” most of outdoors after not getting any sort of break after the indoor campaign. He was flat, and never got a chance to recharge his battery.
The season I jumped 7’ in high jump, which was 4” better than the season before, I took a 1 week road trip for spring break, where I barely worked out, outside of some jogging, and one lift session in a friends porch gym setup. I jumped 7’0 3 weeks after that break.
Indoors was a similar story, actually, as I had been training hard all fall, and stayed at things pretty well over the winter break like a good track athlete is supposed to. The first week back in January, I pulled my hamstring going over the hurdles, and had to take a total break for a few days, and then lower intensity work for the upcoming weeks. A month later, I blew away my old high jump PR of 6’8, and went 6’10 or better for 3 meets in a row. I also destroyed my old triple jump mark by 4 feet. Would I have done this without the break? Maybe. Would I want to go back in time and see if I would have done the same, or better without it? No way.
I believe that those rest periods were crucial in me doing well. I’ve seen a similar story many times over in my experience coaching track.
There is only 1 exception to this principle, which can happen due to point #5, but even with this accounted for, there is a high chance of injury or burnout.
2. Alternate periods of emphasis, but don’t stray too far from what works really well
This one is pretty simple, and that is to use training that improves the bottom line for athletes all year, while switching the emphasis and mode to do so regularly. The simplest way to look at this is the training of Bondarchuk’s throwers, where every developmental cycle is based on the same idea: Do the same training program that is centered around the most specific and effective means to help an athlete improve to be their best until an athlete exhausts their adaptation, rest for a bit, then do the same thing again. Repeat this up until the primary meet on the year, where you can use what you learned in regards to an athlete’s adaptation cycles in the previous training months.
There is no “strength phase” or “hypertrophy phase”, just finding the most effective modulations of the factors that link directly to better performance.
This should be pretty straightforward, but if an athlete isn’t getting faster or jumping higher in whatever training cycle you are on, then you need to change something. Don’t do a “hypertrophy phase” if everyone gets slower while you do it, just because the exercise book told you the “strength phase” or “power phase” would fix it later on. Don’t do a strength (90%+ 1RM) phase for 8 weeks if after 3 weeks, everyone’s batteries start to drain and reactive strength indexes go in a tailspin.
Each phase in the year should be someone different in terms of components, but it is the job of the coach to utilize those components in a manner that yields gains for the given cycle. In an optimal world, each training cycle will utilize training means that carry a heavier CNS intensity and impact, which might mean saving that lifting phase at 90% until deeper in the season where the potentiation effects are fresh and ready (the best track meet of my life, I hit my heaviest “2/3 depth” squat 4 days prior. It could also mean saving those depth jumps until later in the SPP, and utilizing low-contact time hurdle hops to prime mechanics and habits early on, as well as a variety of other means.
3. Use competition and high-energy practices to allow you to be your best
For athletes to perform at their highest, a particular number of “high-energy practices”, aka. competitions, are required. No matter how good training is, unless athletes have a particular number of experiences where adrenaline and motivation bring out the highest threshold motor units and optimal coordination, results won’t be as good as they could be.
I’ve never seen an athlete PR on the first track meet of the year, and then stagnate thereafter unless their coaching and training broke every other rule in this article.
Since the competitive environment is the most “specific” means of performing a skill (since it brings out the highest threshold motor units), it makes sense that a number of sessions in that environment is a requirement. Coaches can also use competitive adrenaline to their advantage by doing things like Tony Holler’s “gauntlet 40” where teammates will surround a lane and cheer for a teammate running a timed 40 yard dash. This practice will usually yield massive PR’s (Gauntlet 40 document), but Tony only uses it 2 times in an 8 week training stretch.
The most success I have in training athletes online is generally with those who have a training group or play pickup basketball a few times a week. Getting extra jump attempts in after a pickup game is over is one of the best training exercises an athlete can do, since the neural warmup of the game itself is very strong, and then the crowd environment for the jumps delivers a stimulus that cannot be replicated by regular training.
4. “Slow cook” your strength development
When it comes to strength training, coaches are often in a rather large hurry to “get athletes strong” in the first few training cycles of the year, citing that they are far too weak, and won’t perform to their potential unless drastic “move the bar from A to B with more weight” measures are applied early.
Let’s get one thing clear. One rep maxes don’t mean you’ll win, and they don’t even mean that you’ll run faster or jump higher (although many times they can, if done in the right balance of things).
Like Mark Watts talked about on my podcast, if one-rep maxes were correlated with winning, then yes, I’ll get your athletes really strong. Most strength coaches know this, and get athletes strong within the scope that they need to be, and realize that line where they are no longer getting athletes strong in an athletic patterning.
Over the course of a year though, I prefer the “slow cook” idea of building strength. I got this term from Jay DeMayo and his 1×20 ideal which is Dr. Yessis’ system of training. By gradually and easily adding weight over the course of training, it accomplishes a few things:
- Allows an athlete to not treat the weightroom as a stress point, and focuses the adaptation on the field, track, water, etc.
- Minimizes the compensation patterns an athlete picks up in the weightroom by otherwise grinding out that last rep to make the strength coach happy
- Reduces burnout, not only on the macrocycle, but also the quadrennial
- Allows the strength an athlete gains playing their sport (yes, sprinting, jumping and swimming at maximal clip will make you stronger) to infuse itself into the weightroom in a natural, global manner, ala, strength of the organism
5. Stay motivated
The last piece is the lynchpin in all of this, and that is of motivation. In absence of other ideas on this list, a highly motivated athlete can find extended success over the course of a season where the training load is extremely high vs. a less motivated one, particularly if they have a lighter competition schedule. I’ve heard stories of throwing training groups that lifted heavy 50 weeks out of the year, and had a super Type-A coach that motivated them to accomplish this, get really strong, and throw far. The thing was that most of these athletes didn’t do much after college was over… they used it all up.
What is in the mind is in the body. If an athlete finds motivation and belief in what they are doing, it can over-ride a low physical readiness indicator, a tough competition schedule, or even “overtraining”.
Being sluggish and needing a deload happens largely on a psychological level, just as much as it does a hormonal one. When the mind has been pressing hard on a task, rate coding drops, and motor pool availability is lessened. Reactive strength index goes down, and athletes have to compensate their way to try and do the same explosive power movement they did before.
The fact is that you always have more in the tank, you just need to unlock the brain. I realized this first-person when I tried out the “I am the greatest!” method from Douglas Heel, that I learned from Chris Korfist. I had just come off of a big powerlifting training cycle, which had left my vertical jump crippled to a pathetic 26.9 inches (although I did finally hit 2x bodyweight on deadlift). After getting back into some power training for about a month, I was up to 29, but still well off the 34-35 that I had been capable of in the not-to-far past. One day, I got on the mat and tested 29. Tried again… 29.2. I decided to let out an “I AM THE GREATEST!!”, and see what happened.
32.7 inches. (+3.5 inches)
Yes, my nervous system had more to give. F*&k hormones and blood chemistry! (I kid… partially)
Here’s the best ideal in all of this though. Don’t use being smart in training (the first 4 points in this article) as an excuse not to bust out this type of “neural motivation” throughout regular training cycles.
Whether it’s positive affirmation, gauntlet 40’s, circling the team around a lifter on the platform, or delivering an inspiring speech (or action), combining motivation with a smart training system will yield the highest results.
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