This is an excerpt from Joel Smith’s weekly newsletter. To get posts like this delivered weekly to your email inbox, head to just-fly-sports.com/free-ebooks/ to sign up or fill out the form at the bottom of the page.
There is an irony in sports performance training.
While sport is complex and “alive”, athletic performance training, and even much of sport coaching, is taught in a simple, “pre-formatted” manner.
- Drills.
- Exercise prescriptions.
- Sets and reps.
Real life athletic performance and human movement is not found in “neat little boxes.” It is found in much of the same way we see movement unfold in nature.
Nature never knows how far or long it is going to run. Each movement is rarely the same. Terrain and weather offer regular variability. Everything is highly task-dependent. Culture and community play a large role in development.
Nature is the ultimate teacher of movement and performance.
Gym prescriptions are simple, and in that simplicity, they are useful in the role they have.
They can fill strength gaps and bridge performance divides. They can help bring physical abilities up to a needed mark and assist in maintaining tissue quality.
Ultimately, simple gym prescriptions will help athletes with simple qualities and tasks from an athletic skill perspective.
If you lack power in your jumping, doing a “4×5 squat program”, along with a 6×3 trap bar jump/Olympic lift prescription can overload the missing strength and power gap. If tendon pain is bothersome, you may use a “5×30 second” isometric training prescription.
At the same time, simple gym, plyometric and speed progressions are not “the meat and potatoes of performance.”
Elite athletes we see in sport are not “made in the gym.”
They are made through “natural processes” (and there are less of these true “natural athletes” year over year, as our sport system becomes more manufactured, and de-coupled with natural development).
As Steffan Jones states, “Most naturally talented athletes, in fact, develop outside the system/structure academies and the confines of a rigorous structured training programme.”
These elite performers had good existing genetics (some with phenomenal genetics) and bolstered those genetics through:
- Free play
- Environmental constraints
- A superior mental game
- An obsession with improvement.
The “roots” of the athletic tree are not “drills, strength prescriptions, and a myriad of training specialists.”
If we are talking speed and power performance, the roots of natural performance for elite athletes are found in explosive team sport play, and creative free play, not a plyometric or strength progression starting at age 10.
If you look at the progression of explosive athletes, such as professional dunkers, you find that the common bond of their youth training was not strength work. It was obsessively playing, dunking, and jumping.
Strength work was brought in as a supplement later (and to a high degree of effectiveness at that point).
This was the story with high jumper, Stefan Holm, who didn’t start lifting until age 19 (and quickly took his personal best 10cm higher in a short period of time).
Back to the image of the tree. Once the roots of development are established, the “trunk” is the incorporation of more robust physical methods (i.e., strength, plyometrics), where needed and applicable.
What is overlooked, however, is the next step—the branches of the tree.
This is life “after strength and plyos.”
This is the “re-expansion” and the creative adaptation of what has been previously established.
You could relate this creative application to the ability of an artist to re-invent themselves after early years of success. You could look at it as an elite athlete, like Steph Curry, continuing to have fun and push the envelope of their abilities (like pre-game shooting exhibitions).
In more “physical” sports, such as high jump, you could look at it in the light of the creative training seen from Stefan Holm, even later into his career (multiple ways to jump a high jump bar, “Holm Hurdles“, creative rhythm drills in the gym or high jump).
So much of creative training today is actually the over-complication of the “tree trunk”, of simple training means (coming up with dozens of ways to do pre-planned multi-lateral plyos, lifting variations, box jumps, etc).
This has been emphasized, rather than looking to understand and explore more complex, relevant, sport skills and abilities. Ultimately, we must consider the roots, trunk, and the branches.
The following are just a few examples of practical ways to consider the creative “re-expansion” of relevant training means (and also reconnect with the multi-lateral athletic roots of performance).
- Add complexity to jumping via a variety of takeoff styles (i.e. left-right and right-left plant, left and right leg jump as a few examples), or participating in parkour jumping
- Add complexity to one’s specific sport skill by increasing and exploring the velocity of movement
- Add complexity to one’s agility training by using games designed to specifically overload aspects of the tactics in sport
- Add complexity to sprinting via “plyosoidal” adaptations (see image below)
- Add complexity to strength training by complex training adaptations that involve sport skill KPI’s (see image below)
Plyosoidal sprinting (pieces of track to create subtle, high-speed stride variance)
Giles Cometti had many creative adaptations of complex training into key sport movements in the 1980’s, that have generally failed to be used, or expanded on, in the age of personal training/social media.
Ultimately, the more we are aware of the aspects of the full athletic journey, the better we can serve the athlete where they are at.
If you are interested in learning more, in person, on these concepts, be sure to check out my June 8th seminar alongside Austin Jochum, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Free Training Guides!
Sign up for the newsletter, get your FREE eBooks, and receive weekly updates on cutting edge training information that will help take your knowledge of athletic performance to a new level.