In order to hit your highest potential as an athlete, it is not just the set-rep schemes and exercises that need to change during the course of training. It is also the environment.
I recently took a trip to the “Great Western Power Company”, a rock climbing gym a few miles down the road from my main spot to climb, Berkeley Ironworks.
It’s always a great experience to be able to train in new places. As athletes, and human beings, we don’t do well with total monotony. Just imagine how happy you were to move from elementary school to middle school where you actually went to different classrooms throughout the day.
Climbing in a new place was invigorating, not only from the novelty, but also some of the great features, including a dungeon like training wall.
I was actually just discussing with a few fitness professionals that, in any gym, there must be some section of the place that is just a straight up dungeon, where daily sacrifices are made to the powerlifting gods to the tune of chalk, heavy metal, and stale sweat in the air.
When it comes to training gains, it is extremely important to consider one’s environment, training partners, and general routine. If you have hit a performance plateau, or just want to schedule a better yearly program for your training group, there are two important ideas that can be helpful:
- How often to change training venues
- How psychology might dictate how some athletes might do better swapping training spots more often than others
- What is a better training spot: luxurious, or simple and “Spartan”?
How Often Should I Change Training Locations?
Generally speaking, it really depends on a few factors, as well as practicality, but my best advice is that you look at the year in terms of solid training phases, and transition phases, and plan your location accordingly.
Let’s take track and field for example, a sport whose competitive season many coaches are familiar with. Athletes will often start training in the fall (if they aren’t playing football), and the competitive season will start in late January.
Smart coaches know that track is a long season, and many won’t start training from square one on the same track surface that the athlete will also be pounding away at in 7 months! The Jamaicans do much of their off-season training on the grass. A very successful sprint conglomerate based on Tony Wells’ ideals will do tons of grass bounding and hurdle hops in the early fall months, staying away from sprinting on the track initially.
When I was coaching at Wilmington College, we had an arboretum that I would measure out 100 and 200 meter loops that we would do much of our early sprinting through. Additionally, any bounding or multi-jump work was done on grass exclusively. We would run hills on the other side of campus, and play ultimate Frisbee in the main courtyard once a week up until late October.
It has been postulated (and I agree with this) by the Russians (and probably most everyone else) that doing workouts in nature is one of the most psychologically effective means of achieving variation.
Many elite athletes who have the financial benefit will be able to do their base training in the form of training camps at an exotic locale. Talk about the ultimate variation in this aspect of performance!
The change of location is really all you need in some respects, in terms of early training variation. Just because it is the fall doesn’t mean you can’t run fast (you should run fast in the offseason), but when you do, just have it in a different environment, and you’ll still be progressing when you actually get in spikes and get on the track.
Aside from early periods, transition periods are a fantastic time to change locale. Winter and spring break training/competition trips are probably the epitome of this. Even athletes who go home to train for winter breaks or thanksgiving are receiving a godsend in terms of breaking monotony.
One of my personal best transitions in training locale was for Thanksgiving when I went to Barcelona Spain for 10 days and trained in the Olympic Training Center. I went into the trip with my training batteries drained, as I remember not even being able to hit a 265lb deep squat for a double (compared to the low 300lb effort I was capable of later in the year). After the trip was over, I came out ready to roll, and actually jumped a 4” practice PR in high jump within a month out of the trip.
Bottom line, use early training periods, as well as transition periods between intense cycles to utilize a different training locale.
Do Some Athletes Need a Change of Location More than Others?
Although I am speculating a little here, I personally think that some athletes need to change their environment more often than others. Lately, I’ve been using a lot of the “Braverman Test” to help determine, or confirm some things I’ve thought about athletes and how they respond to training. If you aren’t familiar with the test, it coincides with Charles Poliquin’s “The 5 Elements” work (Poliquin is the guy who figured out that the Braverman test corresponded to the elements), which I also created an article based on a few years ago.
The basic rundown of the Braverman test, and corresponding neurotransmitter dominance is as such:
- Dopamine dominant: Highly charged athletes who handle intensity very well, yet need fairly frequent changes in exercise, as well as de-loads.
- Acetylcholine dominant: Athletes who also can handle intensity well, but only for a limited period of time before they must switch their training volumes. They can also handle high volume well for a period of time.
- GABA dominant: Athletes who are essentially “Thomas the Train Engine” (this is a Poliquin quote). These athletes can sustain a similar workload for an extended period of time, and don’t really do well with high intensity.
- Serotonin dominant: Serotonin is more associated with pleasure and living in the moment, so athletes who are high in serotonin, but low in everything else likely aren’t athletes, as they may not have the forward thinking discipline, or dopamine drive for athletic feats.
It is my thought that athletes who are extremely high in Acetylcholine may get more out of more frequent changes of venue than other types of athletes. Of course, when working with a team, this may not really be an option, but in working with individuals, it certainly could be.
I take some of this from my own experience, as I am an Acetylcholine dominant individual, and have always done extremely well coming off of changes in training location for extended time periods. Right now I’m doing some work with a lot of elite swimmers, and finding (no surprise) that many of them are pretty GABA heavy, with some good accompanying dopamine response, but high Acetylcholine has been a little rare.
What is the Optimal Environment to Train?
Perhaps you may not be able to continually change your environment, but what is the best place to train for optimal performance? Although nice clean, state-of-the-art facilities might be shiny with all the bells and whistles, are they really the best area to train?
It has been postulated that this might not be the case.
I’ve found through books like “Bounce” and “The Little Book of Talent” that the best performers in the world often come from small, ratty dens of training, that are incredibly Spartan in nature. No bells, no whistles, but these broken down training facilities that are packed with hungry talent resonate of underdog mentality and the mindset of overcoming.
Daniel Coyle of the talent code also wrote a great article on Spartan training facilities, where he makes a case on mixing training age groups, as well as keeping facilities “Spartan”, or minimalistic, and even a little junky, and the important idea of investing money in good people and good coaches over improved facilities.
In “The Little Book of Talent” Coyle talks about how simple, humble spaces neurally boost training, because they allow an athlete, both consciously, and subconsciously, to achieve a greater focus on the task at hand. Coyle is a strong proponent that, when choosing between “luxurious” or “Spartan” training environments, pick the crummy one.
My thought is that this is at least important some of the time. Athletes must always have a connection with their sport or event on the rawest possible level. If you can maintain that connection in a luxury training environment, then great, but if not (and I would imagine most of us might have a problem with this), you might just need to find that place to get that focus, aka, the “Eye of the Tiger” back.
An interesting anecdote I’ve found from my own career as a track coach is that at both Wisconsin LaCrosse and Wilmington College, the training facilities in those locations are far from pristine. Wisconsin LaCrosse had, and still has, a small dingy (compared to most schools) indoor running facility, but it never held them back from dominating NCAA division 3. They also had to run outside until December in western Wisconsin temperatures. Think it held them back? Probably not.
Wilmington College doesn’t even have an indoor track, but back in the mid-2000’s they were beating big division 1 programs in the 4x400m relay, and running long standing conference record times in races like the 4x200m. The athletes there ran stairs once or twice a week as a staple of their training when it was impossible to run outside. When weather permitted, they would shovel snow off of the track to run. I don’t even believe in stairs for building sprinters, but those athletes bought into it, and used the idea of beating their opponents despite the disadvantage to fuel their training efforts. Since they were confined to stairs, they also learned to get more skill out of them than other runners might, focusing on tall posture and hip flexor power amongst other things. They embraced the idea of being an underdog, lacking facilities, and still winning, and they did.
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