“Everything is a poison and a medicine”
If you stay familiar with this concept, you can avert un-necessary anxiety over which stance to take on the latest twitter war on various exercises or training ideologies.
Training doesn’t work in absolutes.
In the world of sports performance training and sport coaching, there is often found a rift regarding heavy traditional strength training as a primary means of training athletes.
We do know for certain that there is a point where getting stronger at the powerlifts no longer transfers to one’s ability in sport, and each sport has its own particular level of being “strong enough”.
Beyond the “strong enough” idea, however, is there another important concept when it comes to why some people tend to look at an emphasis on heavy weightlifting as “bad” for elite sport movement?
In another realm, “sprint drills” are another debated point. Are they good? Are they bad? Do they do nothing for sprint mechanics at best and simply serve as a rhythmic, cool looking warmup?
The main thing to consider with any of these arguments is simply, what’s good and what’s bad about these movements. I’ve already written a fairly extensive piece on the pros and cons of lifting in an article several years ago, and you can check out my take on the major drawback of most sprint drills in my new book “Speed Strength“.
A common negative between both lifting and sprint drills (and many other sport training drills) is that they can really re-enforce “pre-programming” in movement.
Pre-programming can be thought of as, rather than allowing the body to flow freely in response to a stimulus (in the cases of sprinting and jumping, the stimulus of ground force and internal forces of the body), telling the athlete which position joints should be in ahead of time. Basically pre-programming teaches an athlete to anticipate a force, aligning their joints in a manner to accept it (conscious mind driven), rather than reacting to the force (subconscious mind driven).
So what’s the problem with this?
Movement Complexity and Reductionism
In any athletic movement, from something instinctual and linear like sprinting, all the way to something very complex and reactive like hitting a 95 mile-per-hour pitch, there are external and internal forces to respond to. By pre-aligning the body and anticipating where to be ahead of time, we lose the reactivity inherent in movement.
A simple anecdote here I’ve heard from Boo Schexnayder that makes a lot of sense is regarding the coaching instruction to actively “paw” the ground in triple jump, and how he doesn’t teach it. Instead, Boo wants the ground contact to be reflexive and consciously pawing at the ground, or coaching an athlete to do so will really take this instinctive reactivity away.
I remember watching a USC track practice video a while back where former Olympian Joanna Hayes was coaching a hurdler, telling her not to “beat up the track” and keep it smooth (see 1:00 in the video below).
As a training community, we embrace maximal force, punching and stomping the ground (perhaps because it represents the “maximal” of something, as we often try to over quantify some things that don’t need to be), but this over-cue hurts the “dance with the ground” as Dr. Emily Splichal so eloquently mentioned in episode 128 of the podcast.
Punching at the ground is a pre-programmed action that happens without respect for the feedback loops and reactions between the athlete and the ground. Granted, great athletes will produce a lot of force against the ground, but it’s done in a manner that respects the vibration between the foot and the surface.
Elite athletes are equal parts dancers and force producers. The latter is what is given 90% of the consideration in coaching because it’s easy to quantify in a linear manner.
(I don’t necessarily discourage the idea of stomping the ground to draw contrast, i.e. here is the maximal amount of force you can possibly deliver to the ground, but I would never coach athletes to run that way)
Coaching Robots
In many physical preparation environments, the trend can easily be to “coach athletes up” on lifts heavily. Do this with your chest, your knees, your head, your elbows, etc. etc.
Now, for the sake of safety, I totally get this idea. You don’t want an athlete under several hundred pounds in the wrong alignment. Athletes need to learn how to operate under loads.
The thing is that in strength training, the patterns of movement that happen in the weightroom happen when an athlete is moving in sport. For example, the spinal mechanics of an athlete in a squat will show tendencies of lumbo-pelvic mechanics in sport movement.
An athlete who does a spiderman pushup in a segmented robotic manner will move in sport that way. An athlete who does it fluidly will not rely on a conscious “1-2-3”ordering to their sport movement, they’ll just go out and perform and respond to their environmental signals and cues.
I’ll say it here though before I get too far down one pipeline; I am a firm believer in the importance of strength training for nearly all athletes on a physical, psychological and emotional level. Strength is not just a bio–motor quality but it is also a representation of the signal strength of the nervous system, and even a state of mental being. I say this after exploring both far ends of the arguments for and against this work. Now let’s move forward.
Think of all the cues athletes get in training:
Remember, patterning in the weightroom shows up in sport.
I’ve found that the best athletes in sport, and the most skilled athletes I work with (think of a tennis player with a flawless stroke or a swimmer with uncanny feel for the water and technique) tend to mentally avoid lifting weights that are heavy to the point where their degrees of movement freedom are “locked down” to only one solution, at least in normal training situations.
It’s no wonder as well that I hear from coaches like my colleague Paul Cater of Alpha Project and the Baltimore Orioles that the best All-pro baseball players are not the best in the weight room while many guys hoping to make it to the higher level are the big lifters who really go hard with the barbell.
According to Paul “The guys on the cusp tend to look to routine to deliver them to the top, which will in fact be a downward spiral to injury and ineffectiveness”
(Paul is also hosting the 1st North American Global Hamstring Project this upcoming weekend in Salinas CA)
In any case, lifting is important for athletes, but for maximal success (especially in the long term), coaches should take a good hard look at pre-programmed tendencies and find ways to get athletes to be more fluid and responsive in a manner that transfers better to sport.
I’ve recently gone through most of “The Laws of Human Nature” by Robert Greene (excellent book!) and one thing that really resonated with me was ideas on masculine versus feminine style thinking.
Masculine thinking is defined by linear thought processes, categorizing things, and taking things apart like a machine. It looks at things from the outside without attaching emotionally.
Feminine thinking is holistic and looks at how parts come together. It focuses on how one things grows into another, meditating on multiple patterns, letting them “slow cook” and the solution coming to a person over time.
The greatest scientists such as Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein and Margaret Mead can utilize both types, having the not only the scientific chops, but also the ability to use their intuition and opening their minds to connections between wide-ranging phenomena.
Masculine thinking is essential for data/sport science, periodization/training organization, exercise selection and creating the overall “structure” of training, but it isn’t very good for cueing and technical acquisition. To me masculine thinking correlates heavily with internal or canned/robotic cues that tend to not work with a machine as complex as the human body.
Feminine thinking is the “art” in the art and science end of coaching. It is the relational process by which a coach can get an athlete to slow cook sensory info, awareness and ideas over time to create an optimal technique of their own intuition. It is a process and not immediate.
I hope you aren’t put off by this, because, the rule isn’t that men should think only in a masculine manner and women shouldn’t think only in a feminine manner; the highest revered individuals of our time in all areas (it’s easiest to see in music) can utilize both.
Finding Fluidity
All this being said, what’s the moral of the story? You need to find ways to achieve fluidity of movement through good coaching practice and the environment you create for the athlete.
Coach less and watch more.
When you do instruct an athlete, think carefully about how they are moving and what areas of awareness they’ll need to perform that movement in a more connected and fluid manner.
Avoid using excessive internal cues. In fact, I’m making a strong effort to generally have internal cues as last on my list of things to correct technique if I use them at all.
Like Jerome Simian mentioned in episode #133 of the podcast,
“For the RDL I’ll pinch the skin on the lumbar spine… and that teaches them how to get into the proper position… I don’t like telling them pull with this, think about a muscle, etc.”
Jerome, one of the most brilliant physical preparation coaches I know with an incredible resume of results is definitely not your traditional strength coach, and has an instructional set for the athlete that preserves movement and eliminates pre-programming.
In a talk I had with John Kiely, internal cues can be useful, but this is in the context of the attention they draw to what a limb is doing more–so than the athlete following that exact instruction.
In that sense, internal cues can be sensory stimuli if the aftermath is the athlete simply paying attention to that element of movement, rather than a hardline fact as to what they should do.
For example, it’s been said that athletes who actually succeed with the POSE method of running do so because they actually don’t do the exact POSE running technique (the actual POSE method has a LOT of flaws and is a faulty way to run), but rather the system allowed them to draw an awareness to their stride that allowed them to solve their running movement issue.
When coaching anything, consider, rather than hardline cues, points of awareness that athlete can draw. Have them pay attention (with no judgment of right or wrong) to their posture, to their spine, to their feet, after watching a movement demonstrated correctly.
Simply drawing awareness to an area when an athlete sees what they are supposed to do often does the trick.
External cues are also an option as they integrate the system much better than internal cues. Here is an example for Med Ball Throw:
Internal Cue. Pull down with your hip flexors into the bottom position.
External Cue. Drive the ball down towards the ground as fast as you can before you reverse it.
(I probably wouldn’t use either of these cues, if anything I’d have an athlete experiment with a spectrum of speeds of dropping)
My external cues are almost always related to the environment. For example, when teaching cleans, I don’t spend much time working on internal cue based position work. Rather, I demonstrate basic hinging with sensory awareness for those athletes who need it and we work on this in a slow tempo manner.
Once we have a basic hinge in place, we teach the position where the “hit” of the clean happens, and allow athletes practice in experiencing what it feels like to bump the bar with the forward push of the knees, and feel how the bar should reflexively lift in turn.
You’ll never get an athlete to do a good second pull with internal cues (i.e. “push your knees forward after your hamstrings stretch load as your knees extend following the lift off the floor”!)
I’m not totally bashing internal cues here, I’m just saying don’t make them the primary way that you coach athletes, and try to think of how you coach in terms of sensory and feel-based information to the athlete.
Experiencing Fluidity
Other ways of coaching fluidity is to infuse elements of randomness into the training session. These could include pieces like:
Perception and reaction work is the next wave in getting the sports performance field to carry over more into real time sport play. Having this as a part of a gym training session is important because it really fosters and hones the importance of fluidity in movement, and avoiding pre-programmed states.
Grappling is something I spoke with Keir Wenham-Flatt about in episode #125, and it is something he makes use of in training his collision sport athletes with regularly. Grappling is yet again, something you can’t succeed by being robotic and pre-programmed. Below is Keir’svideo with one of his training groups doing a contact-based game in the gym.
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Inertial training is a favorite of my colleague and friend Paul Cater, as you can’t anticipate exactly where and how the cord will pull you, and each rep is never the same.
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(Note the way Paul Coaches the movements and how they are external driven)
Finally, intermixing actual sport skills with strength training is a big deal. Not only does it keep bringing training back to the actual sport skill to be improved, as well as administer a good dose of novelty into training (listen to any Derek Evely podcast on how important this is!) but it has significant advantages over doing a gym session alone.
Paul Venner (owner of Ultimate Instability) found this out in his research that intermixing lifting with hitting versus doing the two workouts in sequence was superior for improving bat speed.
Paul Cater has a version of this he calls “Deadlifts and Dingers” that is more potentiation based. Whatever your sport, for the sake of novelty and growth, potentiation, or the novelty and motor learning of performing a sport skill in a state of slight muscular fatigue, this can have a beneficial effect. To the tune of this article, it also keeps sport movement and fluidity at the forefront, and everything in the session can be coached and attuned to as such.
Another point I wrote about recently with my experience learning from Gary Marinovich,is spontaneous coaching, which involves giving commands to exercises to keep athletes from digging into a preprogrammed conception of how to do the exercise while still delivering a good strength-speed stimulus.
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Not only does this mode of work help keep athletes from over-thinking movement and putting it in a routine box, but it also can really help light up the nervous system of an athlete, and I find it particularly valuable in the early portion of a workout.
Finally, you can use “shake outs” or wiggling of limbs to help avoid a pre-programmed limb position when doing running or jumping. This was first introduced to me by Adarian Barr who would have me “wiggle” my feet and ankles before pushing off from a 3 point sprint start, or even between each step in an acceleration. When he first suggested the idea to me, I was a skeptic, but then I actually did it and BAM, my starts had me feeling like a rocket with huge energy return through my body and the ground.
I was experimenting with another version of this while doing depth drops on a training trip to Hawaii (a realm of huge creativity). I found that when landing in a pre-programmed manner, I could feel the tension from the landing end up in my knees, but when “wiggling” the feet in the air, the force was mitigated smoothly through the force of rotation.
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The possibilities here are virtually endless.
Now not every single set and rep in your workout has to utilize the above ideals, but I would recommend a healthy dosage of them at some point in the workout to maintain quality of movement.
Final Notes
Without making this article too lengthy, just realize that most sports performance coaching revolves around exercise selection and periodization (more “masculine”concepts) and not enough on coaching and how the athlete processes instruction that leads into intuitive technical acquisition (more “feminine” concepts). Coaches of either gender should focus on improving both ends of this spectrum for maximal effectiveness in their program and for their athletes.
This being said, I challenge you, as I have been challenging myself to take a deep look at the way technique in the gym shows up in sport movement, and how to coach that movement more effectively to lead to an athlete’s highest performance ceiling over time.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and trains athletes and clients in partnership with Evolutionary Fitness in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and trains numerous clients in the in-person and online space.
In 2011, Joel began Just Fly Sports as a central platform to promote information for athletes and coaches to reach their highest potential. In 2016 the first episode of the “Just Fly Performance Podcast” was released, now a leading source of education in the sports performance field. The evolving mission of Just Fly Sports is focused on teaching athletes to realize their true, innate power, and achieve the highest joy in their training, competition, and in the community.
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