Have you ever read Bondarchuk or Yessis and found yourself wondering, “I just read a whole page of words and got absolutely nothing out of it”?
You’re not alone. Two of the greatest minds in sports science and yet many people have questions about how to practically apply the principles these two coaches write about. In this article series, we will spell out a few ways you can bring it together for team sport athletes.
What you get with these two coaches is basically a merger between two applications of a new paradigm on training theory as a whole. Doc (Yessis) has his methods and AB has his. They both have merit, in our opinion, especially for the team sports strength coach who is looking to do more with the time he has in the gym than just make powerlifters. As with all useful things, it pays to step back and lay a framework of context before we get too wrapped up in the details.
Historical Context: Shaping Training Philosophies
For our purposes here, the story begins in the early 20th century in, what was then, Imperial Russia. A bloated academic system, inefficient and obsessed with itself, was festering and making marginal gains. Sound familiar to anyone in the U.S. today?
One researcher dreamed of merging science and practice, into a pedagogical system that was accredited and given opportunity to be published in journals. This man was Peter Lesgaft. He began his break from the traditional Tsarist education system in the 1860’s. Fast forward a decade and he had finally received a commission from the War Bureau to establish a sport and fitness program in Russia (1). This was the start of a gigantic movement, one that would consume the world of sport.
Long story short, over the next 50 years his work would eventually evolve into the pedagogical monolith that was the Soviet Sports System. Let me clarify here, exactly what this meant for coaches. Instead of research on college aged males doing single joint exercises, coaches read and wrote research about training blocks and competition results. The proof was in the results, numbers in exercises and wins on the international stage.
Rather than trying to find ways to fit a decade worth of rehab research into a strength and conditioning program, coaches were able to take research on periodization and exercise selection and apply it right now.
The Russian coaching system was built on practical and immediately applicable research and training methods.
Motivations for this environmental shift was due to many factors, the spread of communism being one of them (1). We would be remiss to not mention drugs (e.g. anabolic steroids) in this part of the article. The fact of the matter is that drugs were and are a fact of life in elite sport. However, drugs cannot replace effective training planning and assessment. But we digress….
Regardless of the motivations, what we observed in the 1960’s was an acceleration of the pace of innovation in sports science. This acceleration was spurred on when the founding fathers’ (Platonov, Vorobyov, Kuznetsov, and others) methods were no longer working (2). Elite athletes at the very pinnacle of sport were becoming over trained and not improving their results.
Coaches and researchers began testing uncharted waters to get results (including the deep end of drug use, which proved ineffectual and even counterproductive). This is a small aside, but for the sake of intrigue we wanted to include a few of the monoliths of this era of experimentation. Here are a few of the characters in this drama that unfolded on World stages for over 3 decades.
Exhibit A – Yuri V. Verkhoshanksy
- Invented plyometric training
- Invented block periodization
- One of this class of hybrid researcher/coaches
Exhibit B – Anatoliy P. Bondarchuk
- Pioneered methods in the transfer of training (not dynamic correspondence)
- Invented a new periodization model
- Arguably the winningest coach in the History of Sports. Ever.
Exhibit C – Ivan “the butcher” Abadjeev
- Invented the Bulgarian Method of strength training
- Piloted one of the most dominant weightlifting clubs in history
- Discovered and developed “The Pocket Hercules”
Exhibit D – Viktor Y. Seluyanov
- One of the first to propose muscular adaptations for increasing aerobic capacity
- Performed pilot research on hyperplasia in the 1970’s
- Invented ubiquitously used bodybuilding training models
There are many other coaches, of course. But for the sake of this article we return to the coaches at hand.
This period of time was a veritable renaissance of the theory and practice of physical preparation. Soviet athletes began to absolutely clean house at the Olympics. They beat everyone so bad. It was like the pub scene from A Bronx Tale every single fucking Olympics. It was just understood that the Russians were going to show up, beat everyone, and the rest of the World was fighting for second place.
Take for example Anatoliy Bondarchuk’s hammer throwers. His athletes won Gold, Silver and Bronze for three Olympic Games in a row. That’s every Olympic hammer medal for 12 years in a row. This is a record which has never been approached before it happened or since by any coach in virtually any sport discipline.
During this time of sports growth in the East, coaches in the West were obviously seriously curious about what was happening. There were some clear barriers to entry, as you may guess. Language barriers, politics, and the geographical distance were some of the main issues with intellectual exchange.
There were a few however, who ventured and brought back valuable information to the US. One of these coaches was Dr. Michael Yessis. A former high school athlete, he graduated from what was then called the City College of New York (now the University of New York), and got his Undergrad and Master’s Degrees in Physical Education with an emphasis in Biomechanics.
In the 1960’s when the Russians began to show their dominance in the Olympics, and with his heritage stemming from the Soviet Union, Dr. Yessis began to study Russian sports science at the Library of Congress. By the early 1960’s Dr. Yessis was the first American to make a connection with soviet scientists and coaches. He began corresponding with Russian scientists and in 1966 translated and published the first issues of the Soviet Sports Review.
These translated articles were published quarterly and were a combination of research articles from various Russian sport coaches and scientists. In 1967 Doc had moved out to California and received his PhD. from the University of Southern California. By the 1970’s Dr. Yessis had made several visits the former Soviet Union making connections with such scientists as Verkhoshansky, Donskov and several others. At this time Dr. Yuri Verkhoshansky also joined Dr. Yessis with editing the Soviet Sports Reviews. From the end of the 1970’s through the 1980’s Dr. Yessis had made several more visits to the Soviet Sports Institutes and had been instrumental in bringing Soviet science into the United States.
Now as you can see, both AB and Doc bring unique things to the table. AB has a background in coaching and competing. His training theory comes from being on the field at world championships. So, naturally his contribution is largely based on doing what works and why it works. Thus his Seminal work is a book about training transfer (3).
Now Doc is more from the academic side of things, he’s a highly qualified biomechanist. He hasn’t spent decades in the competitive arena, grinding out Olympic prep cycles and competing year in and year out on that level. He spent his time navigating the academics and international brain trusts which store and exchange training information, applying what he learned to coaching along the way. His methods have worked incredibly well with athletes of every type of sport known to man. Doc’s primary contribution thus becomes the exercise selection and methods for inventing new exercises for your sport and athlete.
This is where we (as team sport coaches) can have a nice little dove-tail merger of the two methods, a little East/West jive, Biggie and Tupac thing.
Philosophical Foundations
What follows is a description of the underlying philosophical structure of training that upholds the methods used by both coaches.
Exercise Classification
All sports can be broken down into their component parts, compared to the competition exercise from most specific (highly similar) to most general (least similar). Sport is a combination of physical and psychological factors that work together to produce the result. Excellent results, therefor, are a combination of excellent physical and psychological preparation across the spectrum of exercises. Based on this model, exercises fall into four categories:
- (GPE) General Preparatory Exercises
- These exercises typically do not repeat the competitive actions as a whole or in their parts. Other muscle groups take part in the work being done.
- (SPE) Special Preparatory Exercises
- These exercises do no repeat the competitive actions as a whole or in their separate parts. However, they use similar muscles groups in their execution. The training work serves to activate the functions and the body systems from which an increase in sports results in the main movements depend. Identical or close to identical regimes of muscle work and different functions of other systems are involved.
- (SDE) Special Developmental Exercises
- Executing them, one and the same muscle groups participate, together with activation of similar systems and organs. They not only repeated the muscle regime and other systems of the body which venture further increase in the competitive exercise, but also supersede them. The specialized about mental exercises more or less re-create all the elements of the competitor activity, and in doing so, make it possible to more effectively and seductively have an effect on improving or developing the same or other physical abilities.
- (CE) Competition Exercises
- The exercise is the sporting event
Individualization of Training
All athletes adapt to training in different ways. This literally means that everyone will “peak” (cease to see gains) after a highly variable, entirely individual, number of times doing an exercise. Now, this variability is way lower between the untrained, the young, and those lacking skill in the exercises being used. So, for kids and those who are new to the lift, game, or technique you are coaching it’s safe to assume they will adapt at a similar rate.
However, Yessis and AB were working with elite athletes. This means that each athlete walking in their door was going to be a totally different adapter than the previous athlete, particularly in special means of training. Why? Because an elite athlete has been training for a long time, and that comes with doing lots of workouts, repeatedly, until they stop making them better. Literally to the point that these athletes simply will not get better if a change is not made.
Tests to Determine Transfer
Testing for both coaches begins with the sport. Firstly, training planning is based on calendar of competition. Examining the time allotted for preparation is one of the first steps in planning desired adaptations. Say for example you have an athlete who has not yet reached peak height velocity (PHV), and they are facing 6 weeks of off-season training. This sets parameters for how much transfer can be achieved when considering the other two factors. Secondly, specific exercises will be programmed for each stage of development to determine transfer and rate of adaptation. Both coaches will do this in different ways.
Dr. Bondarchuk will plan in what he calls “test exercises” to test adaptation. In less specific stages of training, these exercises will be strength or speed based drills, such as squats or sprints. In more specific stages, they will be SDE or CE exercises and some objective measure of progress will be closely tracked. For hammer throwers, this is the distance the hammer is thrown.
Dr. Yessis will begin by assessing athletes on their biomechanics in their sporting movements. Dr. Yessis does this by using slow and ultra-slow motion video analysis for the athlete’s technique or skill that is used in their position on the field of competition (4). This means he will video, and then evaluate in slow motion, an athletes running, cutting, jumping, throwing, swinging, skating, or serving. When assessing an athlete’s mechanics, Doc is looking for several things. Does something stand out that shouldn’t, such as energy leaks? He is also looking for ways that the athlete is trying to generate power that could lead to an injury. For example, if an athlete has a long term shoulder injury that could be causing pain in the leg, due to compensatory mechanisms the body is using to guard the old injury.
Fundamental Assumptions
Based on what is laid out here, we can begin to form a structural framework upon which to build a period of developing some type of adaptation. Athletes will get better at their sport if they get better in training, but not all exercises are created equal.
For youngsters, everything is going to work (more or less) so you’re better off being big on the basics. This is good for a few reasons; 1) it prepares them for more advanced training later; 2) you don’t waste time doing advanced exercises that they suck at, due to being too weak or slow to perform them, which will inevitably have to be redone later (but now with bad habits to overcome).
For advanced athletes, general exercises are not going to increase sports performance, but they are critical for maintaining fitness. Only SDE and CE will show real, hard core, gains in the sport.
For team sport athletes, this looks like points on the board, and stops in the defensive zone. Quickly, we want to unpack this idea briefly as it presents a HUGE paradigm shift for team sport strength staffs. In the paradigm under which AB and Yessis are operating, when you see gains (PR’s) in SDE or CE, you as the coach should be 85-95 percent confident that they will score more points or make more stops on game day.
Just think about that for a minute. This is a foundational assumption of the system.
Seeing PR’s in the Special Developmental and Competitive Exercises can give you confidence as the coach that your athletes will perform better on game day
Can you, as the strength coach, go the head coach and say with that level of confidence that a faster 10m. sprint or a bigger 1RM will mean an extra touchdown or a hat-trick on Sunday? If not, maybe your SDE isn’t quite as specific as you think.
This idea and paradigm challenges us all, and it’s a big shift in thought. However, these are the operative, living, and actionable principles that make this view on training unique.
In Part II of this series, we will present how to classify specialized strength exercises and give several examples of how we have applied this system of training to team sports. We look forward to discussing with you all more on the subject!
About Jeff Moyer
Jeff Moyer is the owner of Dynamic Correspondence Sports Training, whose motto is, “We Build Better Athletes.” At DC Sports Training, athletes work on the physical, mental and visual aspects to the sports. Their goal is to deliver the athletes of the greater Pittsburgh area the highest, most efficient results year after year of training with us. We will exhaust our means in order for our athletes to achieve the highest results, and to create a system model that will develop our athletes both physically and intellectually. Education must be the road to which will help us set this standard. Our results will be the vehicle which to drive us.
Jeff graduated in 2004 from Hartwick College where he was a two sport athlete (Football & Track & Field). Jeff has been a sport coach (Basketball & Football) at the youth, JV, Varsity and College level for football for over 10years. Jeff has been in the strength in conditioning industry for over a decade, having worked in the medical, private, team, high school and collegiate settings, training clients from youth development, to rehabilitation and sport performance.
Jeff has a relentless passion for all things physical preparation. His pedagogy is heavily influenced by Eastern Bloc sport science, while apprenticing under Dr. Michael Yessis and Yosef Johnson of Ultimate Athlete Concepts. Jeff has also been fortunate enough to extensively study with and work with Dr. Natalia Verkhoshansky, Mike Woicik of the Dallas Cowboys, Louie Simmons of Wesitside Barbell and Fellowship under Dave Tate of EliteFTS.
About Jake Jensen
Jake Jensen is the Head strength and conditioning coach at EHC Eisbaeren Berlin, a professional hockey club in Germany. He earned his bachelors degree from the University of Utah in 2016. Jake has had the pleasure of working with many outstanding professionals in a variety sporting of fields, throughout his career. Notably, he has worked as translator for Ultimate Athlete Concepts, working primarily on books written by Anatoliy P. Bondarchuk.
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