It’s been a few weeks worth of ideas to roll into my head during the process of working out that I’m excited to share with you today. I’ve definitely realized over the past year that the ideas of Adarian Barr are like a force-multiplier in terms of helping me be more creative in my own process. When you have a new awareness of the feet and arms, and how any exercise can change based on manipulating these variables, you have a lot to play around with in the course of getting better.
If all you believe is “force, force, force” you have very little to manipulate. Few degrees of freedom to adjust in the search of the optimal technique.  Black and white thinking doesn’t solve many problems.
All this being said, here are some main bullets of the ideas in my brain through the course of the last 2 weeks of workouts
- Foot position manipulations during lifting and dynamic work
- Importance of slow tempo (e.g. 5-0-5) work in deloading weeks, base training, or in athletes with “weaker nervous systems”Â
- The importance of rest in non-compensatory adaptations
- Basketball drills and impulse training
- 5 Minute Extreme ISO lessons and observations
- The arms are not just important in sprinting, they are critical
Foot Position Manipulations in Training
The feet are an important component of training, yes? We admit to their importance, but I think we don’t take full advantage of exploring how we can use both sensory and coaching cues to change foot pressure and position, and therefore change the effect of an exercise.
A few weeks ago, Adarian Barr showed me how a “front triangle” (ball of pinkie toe, ball of big toe and light big toe pressure) could optimize my mini-bounds.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BtwLpLlnMLo/
Since doing this, when I lift, I’ve expanded my thought on how we instruct the feet. I do think that simply giving athletes sensation of a mid-tripod (heel and ball of 1st and 5th) or a tripod plus light big toe pressure, and just letting the lift unfold from there is fine. We also sometimes coach feeling the arch which can also work, but there are considerations for those who have a dropped arch.
Any lift can be changed by manipulating foot pressure and sensation. Here are some configurations I’ve been playing with that I’d invite you to experiment with:
- “Front tripod” heel down
- “Front tripod” heel up
- Indiscriminate heel up
- “Full Tripod” (heels + metatarsals)
- “Full Tripod” + Light Big toe
We all know that “through the heels” is a cue that hurts athleticism, but even saying things like “push through the big toe” can be overly volitional when the concentric phase of movement is more of a reflex action. Start with the tripods and explore from there.
The Importance of Tempo Training
I’m continually reminded that:
- Barbell training is fundamentally different than athletic movement, especially bilateral barbell training
AND
- If you want to move better, start with “human movements“, and make those better before you run to something easily quantifiable, such as using a tendo unit on a barbell.  Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Having athletes blast upwards with a barbell on their back in a lousy pattern is setting them on a path for a glass ceiling of performance. If there is any compensation pattern present in that squat (such as quads overdoing the glutes), this is going to become the pattern that is intensified in regular movement!
On top of this, basic human movement such as sprinting or jumping is much more reliant on impulses and the release of elastic energy (and joints getting into the right position fast enough to do so well) more so than “volitionally” producing extra concentric power to perform those movements.
It’s the idea of picking the “force” path or the “speed” path (which will you choose?). Â
All this being said, I do like lifting weights. I think they can be a great tool if utilized well.
Since having a barbell on your back is quite different than running and jumping without one, I do like using slower and more controlled tempos to enhance movement patterning and awareness.
As “counterproductive” as it seems, a 5-0-5 tempo squat is awesome, because you can use it to teach the glutes to fire first to get an athlete out of the bottom of a squat position, where if there was no tempo and heavier weight, the athlete would have initiated with their quads and erectors.
Jerome Simian used this ideal when building a better extension pattern in now decathlon world record holder Kevin Mayer in the snatch grip deadlift.
Slowing things down helps not only patterns, but also can be a mental break from needing to constantly lift more weight. For more on lift tempos, check out my book Speed Strength.
The Importance of Rest in Non-Compensatory Compensations
This was just a thought, not much experience in measuring this, but in programs that don’t rest an athlete enough between hard speed or jump sessions, it’s reasonable to assume that the only way an athlete can “progress” in these scenarios is through compensation patterns; i.e. one muscle firing when another should be, or altering the timing of major muscle groups. In this sense, progress is slower and more importantly, of poor quality!
I think this is much easier to see in strength setups than speed. When an athlete isn’t firing well, but needs to lift heavier weight regardless, they’ll just adjust their movement pattern to get the weight, usually in the form of the erectors shortening and pulling the athlete further into a spinal extension pattern. They’ll usually twist heavily into their AIC pattern if they have one. By not resting enough (and of course not coaching right) athletes will really dig into these AIC and PEC patterns as “strength training” progresses forward. Â
Basketball Drills and Impulse Training
One of the coolest ideas I’ve been working with is Adarian Barr’s ideas on foot and ankle impulse as a biomechanical lynchpin. Simply put, we can say that how fast our ankle loads and unloads force (a product of range of motion, tensile strength and then joint control) is a huge factor in what our sprinting and jumping looks like.
What I’ve found is that the vast majority of training is NOT conducive for building a fast impulse, in fact, most training is quite the opposite. We are so “force” heavy in our general training prescriptions, that this filters over into our speed work as well.
Think of what happens when we bound as far as we can or jump over as high of a hurdle as we can, our ankle range of motions and ground contact times increase. Do this long enough in cushiony shoes and you’ll start to gradually increase the “default” setting on how quickly you produce force from the ground up.
Team sports are the kryptonite of elongated ankle and foot impulses, as these sports are naturally loaded with many instances where the foot and ankle must react extremely quickly in lower force conditions.
I was warming up for a workout the other day when I remembered one of my favorite basketball drills from my JV squad, the “tip drill“. There are probably a lot of names for this, but it’s performed by simply throwing a basketball off the backboard, jumping to grab it, then quickly putting it back in the hoop.
You can’t spend too long on the ground, or someone will block your shot. In this case, the quick ground contact is a product of necessity and not a coach with a force plate or some other quantitative measuring system. In this regard, training is fun, and you “trick yourself” into getting off the ground faster… the best situation in many cases.
Is this a plyometric? Survey says “yes”
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the impulse in the Olympic lifts, as well as the quality of the “hit” and “catch” in the second pull. In many training scenarios, the way the Olympic lifts are performed are actually making our impulse worse, rather than better.
Extreme ISO’s, Occam’s Razor and What Really Matters in Training
I’ve been thinking a lot about extreme ISO’s and their effectiveness in training. An isometric is really the simplest possible movement one can do in training, and when they are performed with body weight only this is true even more so.
Occam’s Razor says that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. I think it’s easy to think that our athletes need a huge variety of interventions revolving around the Olympic and Powerlifts to be great athletes. Starting with the simple assumption of needing to do simple ISO’s well as a cornerstone of athleticism will put us in a better place. I now use analyzing and coaching ISO’s as a mechanism to make lifting better.
Is an athlete’s running not where I want it to be…. ISO’s.
Is a clean not hitting the harmonics I like…. ISO’s.
This is starting to become a trend.
On the topic of extreme ISO’s I’m starting to see links between the subtle fatigue and fitness curves of ISO’s and tempo running in track and field, and I’d say they both operate on similar mechanisms.
The Arms Aren’t Just Important… They are Critical!
It’s funny how many coaches can say that the arms aren’t important in running. I honestly thought this was true for a long time. Now I know better.
Watch even how Aries Merritt’s arm action is different in hurdling than his other competitors… is he just a freak athlete… or has he figured out something that others have not? I would contend that the latter is true.
The hips and shoulders are ever-cycling figure 8s in movement. So are the wrists and ankles. When navigating hurdles, if we know the wrists and hands help control the feet and ankles, perhaps we would really look more closely at mirroring arm and foot action of contra-lateral limbs?
Check out 2:00 for a symphony of wrist flaps and spiraling figure 8’s
I’ve been playing with some “super simple” running drills, all of which have inspiration drawn from Adarian Barr. After a practice where Adarian showed me some “backside arm” action running drills, and then had me run a 300m sprint using only one arm, I found that I could easily put these in practice to allow my brain to self-organize movement in a better way. Try running a 100m with “backside arms” and see what you learn about ankle impulse in the sprint cycle.
To this end, one thing I did recently was timed flying 30’s with “backside arms”, (and then run the last one with normal arms.)Â You learn a ton about timing, impulse, and why intentionally running with high knees will kill your top-end speed.
In the spirit of chasing Aries Merritt’s hurdle technique, I’ve also been doing a lot of single arm hurdling and loving it. Try it and see how your body learns. Now compare this to a technical model-internal cue driven coaching style.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuKc5A8HpBf/
Conclusion
That’s it for this week’s thought melee, I hope you found some things that will give you some fuel for your next training session, as well as thought processes in the future. Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Though-Melee Week 1 or Week 2
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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