In reading “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock , I’ve learned that breakthroughs in life come through the power of insight. Insights are totally dependent on the unconscious mind at work, which frees us from established logical thought processes. An insight is more likely to come to you when you are not using your conscious mental machinery to solve a problem.
There is nothing more freeing than the trains of conscious logical thought than being immersed in a workout, so here’s to week two of the insights that hopped into my head in the course of my workout time.
Applying “Easy Strength” to Speed Work
The more I learn about training, the brain and life itself, the more I continually think of the principles of “Easy Strength” , one of the best training books, if not the best training book I’ve ever read. Give two of the top physical trainers in history (Dan John and Pavel Tsastouline) 2 years to write a book and… whoa! You’ll get a true modern classic.
One of the Easy Strength principles, or really the combined principle is to do things you want to get good at a lot (such as the “one lift a day” program), in low daily volume, and follow the rules of not getting emotionally over-invested in any given set. In other words, lift heavy but don’t lift “hard” (You’ll see this continually resonating throughout my writing and taught by the best in the athletic performance field… the “grind” is toxic.. a Tony Holler quote I love).
When we try too hard on any movement, that moment when we move beyond the natural energy return inherent in anything we do, and really start laying on “the grind”, we bring on both compensation patterns and un-needed muscles to a movement, as well as hurting the slow-cooked progress pattern that keeps the CNS from throwing a fit and slamming the brakes on your progress.
In speed training, this is… even MORE true. When doing a 40-yard dash or 10m fly, “trying harder” never really works, and we must always look to the subtleties that exist in terms of rhythm, posture and timing.
Conscious thought really doesn’t help speed either (but it can help lifting… which is the point where a habitual internal cue driven pattern in the weight room can actually rub off in making you subtly slow and more injury laden over time) and so we must learn to feel what good running it, rather than think it. (In this same vein, learning to “feel” things in the weightroom more is also good practice) .
Keeping speed training experiential rather than internal cue driven, and “try hard” driven is the way to keep good results coming through, especially in the midst of a lot of high CNS cost work. Finding ways to stimulate dopamine through competition and revolving PR’s (such as Tony Holler’s recent adaptation of the BFS ideology, see the next point) is a great way to do this.
In “feeling” workouts better, experimenting with different rhythms (particularly slightly asymmetrical ones), using imagery, external tools (like pulsers or exogen suits), breathing drills, shoe insoles (like Adarian Barr’s creations), as well as different drills between runs can be magic. Doing various “sprint-float-sprint” work on short intervals (such as 5-20m intervals) and parameters that force an athlete to truly experience different components of good sprinting (you can find these components in my book Speed Strength), you can “up” the experiential component of the work.
At the end of the day, we want our experience network brain to be in charge of the workout more than our default network brain (see Dr. Mike Roussell’s article for more info on this). Think of experience network brain as doing sprints in the context of playing football, while the default network would be doing an 8x200m workout on 32 seconds and 3’ rest….blahhh.
The BFS PR System, Dopamine, and Psychological Momentum
I loved Tony Holler’s last podcast, and I’m always thinking about the athlete’s mental state during any workout we complete. As a collegiate strength coach, I’m always thinking of ways that athletes can feel and see progress in the weight room, even if they are already “strong enough” for high performance in their sport.
Sometimes this can mean changing the mode of exercise, such as in the Triphasic Training system. It can also manifest itself in the way you alter a quantifiable power-oriented exercise, such as Keiser squat jumps. Just doing the exercise over and over again with a typical counter-movement eventually gets a little de-motivating just because after a few months, you’ll have various up and down days, and of course the volume of your actual sport specific practice is going to be a big factor in your raw outputs. In the midst of these up and down days… the default network is sure to creep in, as well as the possible doubts that arise when you don’t get a great score.
By putting things like oscillatory twitch reps into a “measured movement” in the gym like a Keiser jump, or anything else, and measuring it, you now have a new way in which to get a “PR” on an otherwise routine test, and do so in a way that conserves elastic energy and doesn’t reward “the grind” as much typical weightroom 1RM’s or even heavy velocity-measured lifts.
An Explanation for Physioball Hamstring and Leg-Circle Work and Better Squatting Patterns
After last week, I found that just doing some physioball kickbacks and leg circles seemed to give me the same benefit in regards to fixing my hip shift in bilateral squatting that I’ve gotten from doing PRI wall-breathing and repositioning drills. Again, any time you can do an exercise or movement that doesn’t come off as “corrective” to fix an issue, use that to fix the problem! “Tricking” an athlete into fixing something is 10 times better than telling them they are broke and they need to be doing something to fix it.
This type of work comes in about 4:40 of the above video.
This being said, I had an idea why the physio ball kickbacks were good at fixing my hip shift, and the answer is this. The simple reason behind hip shift in squatting is an “AIC” pattern inherent in squatting, which is the left pelvis being more anteriorly tilted and externally rotated, with the right pelvis being more posteriorly tilted and internally rotated. When an athlete squats like this, the right leg is more “available” so more weight can be put on that leg. Simply telling an athlete to shift in the other direction isn’t a good corrective strategy since it works against the alignment of the body!
When doing kickbacks and hip circles, my thought is that the dynamic “kickback” action can actually put the left pelvis in a little more of a neutral position due to the nature of the leg swing (posterior torque on the pelvis), especially when you load it with a leg weight. The circles may be good for improving the internal/external rotation imbalance of each hemi-pelvis.
Although it’s really importance for an athlete to be able to activate the left external oblique and get that ribcage to move, I think that the physioball work solution can be superior in many cases, and can be combined with wall-breathing work if desired.
How to Leverage Circuit Training to It’s Maximal Benefit (More than Just Cardio)
During endurance oriented circuit training (such as 5-8 work stations for 20-45 seconds of work with only a few seconds rest in between) what is the most important adaptation? The strength of the aerobic system without excess wear on any given myo-fascial pathway or joint is the clear one, but is there another potential benefit that offers excellent movement coaching opportunities, which is what happens to athletes in movements when fatigue begins to set in. Another opportunity is the idea of moving as explosively as possible without accumulating a lot of fatigue in a variety of movements by being as elastic as possible.
For example, in sit-up med ball throws, something I was doing for 40-second stations with a 10lb ball where I was working for around 35 or so seconds. After about 20-25 seconds I was really reaching some local muscular exhaustion from the movement, so my goal became how to use my joints and elastic energy better to make it through the interval by “grinding” as little as possible. When the rectus abdominis “run out” of energy, all you are going to do is start drawing in other muscles to compensate, and this usually results in greater activation patterns in the neck and jaw.
Eventually this meant lifting my hips off of the ground a little bit in order to get some subtle momentum going, or subtly twisting joints to find a way to get better elastic return on each throw.
This idea isn’t dis-similar to Wayde Van Neikerk running the 400m, as he utilizes different “styles” of running throughout the race to mitigate energy usage and loss between his arms and legs.
The more speed coaches can use exercises that cause an athlete to “sense” how and where
fatigue is coming and how to work around it, the better sprint times will generally get. Adarian Barr once had me run a 300 fast using only one arm (I held the other one relatively loose at my side) . I very quickly found
out a strategy that didn’t work and later adopted one that did for my working arm.
Basically, during circuit training, or anything fatiguing, the pattern is king, and if an athlete is going to compensation patterns, especially in the neck and face, the set needs to stop or they need to pick a new pattern. Again, “The grind is toxic”.
Let Your Impulse Coach Your Run: Single Leg Bounding
A lot of coaching out there is driven based on positions. Get the knee “this high”, or your stride should be “this far”. The good thing in these situations is that the human body is an incredible machine, and can compensate to various tasks amazingly well. The problem in a holistic system is that coaching one thing will have an impact on another, and a well-intentioned cue often has negative consequences somewhere else in the chain.
If you listed to podcast #132 with Adarian Barr, you know that the quality and length of the ground impact as transmitted through the foot and ankle is a big factor on how the limbs should end up positioning themselves in the air.
If we think of the body, say the hips and shoulders in particular, as ever-spinning gyroscopes, then it is in our best interest to maximally conserve the energy inherent to those gyroscopes without making them speed up and slow down all the time for the sake of some sort of mechanical position.
The single leg bound is probably the best example of how full/ankle/Achilles quality will impact the rest of the system. In the first video, I’m doing single leg “speed bounds”, and if you watch closely, you’ll see that my arms and swing leg tend to lag a little behind my ground impact.
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After thinking about this and working with Adarian a little more, I decided to scale back my bounding to shorter distances and fast contacts. In this manner, my timing is better because my swing leg and arms can reposition to a better place when my foot hits the ground, and I recycle energy better. I feel that this represents, “inside out” bounding and movement, where the initial focus is on the quality of timing and the impulse, and let distance come over time.
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That does it for this week’s worth of workout related thinking; we’ll see ya on the other side, and as always, if you have a comment or thought, leave it below!
Check out Though-Melee Week 1 or Week 3
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith, MS, CSCS is a NCAA Division I Strength Coach working in the PAC12 conference. He has been a track and field jumper and javelin thrower, track coach, strength coach, personal trainer, researcher, writer and lecturer in his 8 years in the professional field. His degrees in exercise science have been earned from Cedarville University in 2006 (BA) and Wisconsin LaCrosse (MS) in 2008. Prior to California, Joel was a track coach, strength coach and lecturer at Wilmington College of Ohio. During Joel’s coaching tenure at Wilmington, he guided 8 athletes to NCAA All-American performances including a national champion in the women’s 55m dash. In 2011, Joel started Just Fly Sports with Jake Clark in an effort to bring relevant training information to the everyday coach and athlete. Aside from the NSCA, Joel is certified through USA Track and Field and his hope is to bridge the gap between understandable theory and current coaching practice.
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