This is the first article in a series dedicated to simplifying the training process. The reason I am writing this particular series is that many of those visiting my site or reading my articles might not be too familiar with some of the core concepts of training theory. My goal as a writer has always been to provide readers with training concepts that I feel are not well known that are important to developing a solid training program. These articles and concepts can get a little complicated, but in reality training is fairly simple. Some, and perhaps even most of the best athletes in the world today have reached their levels of athleticism with fairly primitive training schemes and setups. Hopefully through reading this article, you will become better acquainted with how simple becoming an amazing athlete really is!
Three years ago, I began teaching a course on sports performance development in the college I currently work at. The book I chose for the course was“Science and Practice of Strength Training” written by Vladimir Zatsiorsky and William Kraemer, two extremely intelligent sport scientists. I feel that teaching this class and becoming very familiar with the simple concepts of training in conjunction with actual training and coaching experiences has allowed me to provide a concise manuscript on basic training principles. Sometimes when we get caught up into all of the current research and dichotomies that exist in the field today, it is tough to really see though the fog and look at the groundwork that gets so many athletes so far in their given sport. With that said, let’s get to the basics of training theory!
I am going to divide this article into a five sections, and then finish with a few examples of how these training concepts can be combined to produce a serious athlete! The sections that we will deal with will be as follows:
- Part 1 CNS training and structural training Specificity in training
- Part 2 Training the body as one piece Arranging training
- Part 3+4 Training progression
- Part 5 Proficiency vs. Efficiency Training environment
Once you have learned these sections, you will realize that 90% of applicable training theory is right here in this article. The first part of this four part series will talk about CNS vs. structural training and then the importance of specificity in training.
CNS and Structural Training:
Training the human body primarily has effects on two “systems”: The Central Nervous System and then the actual structure of the muscle-tendon complex. It is important to learn the difference between these two systems and the types of training that will influence each one. The Central Nervous System, or CNS for short represents the brain, spinal cord and all of the muscles that it innervates. It is the ultimate controller of all movements in the human body and is far more important in expressions of strength and power than the actual composition of the muscles themselves. Within your own body is the capability to produce amounts of force beyond what you ever thought possible, such as lifting a car off of a child to save a life.
We do have enough force capacity within our muscles to perform incredible feats, but the fact that we would all be in the hospital with strained backs if we went around lifting cars on a daily basis is a good reason for the body to put a severe limit on when we can perform these type of movements. The CNS will limit the power production ability of the muscles until it is trained to do otherwise. Training does two things really. The first is that it will teach the CNS to be more powerful by recruiting more nerves/motor neuron units each time that an exercise is performed. This is only true up to a point, however, and training needs to be very intense to reach high levels of CNS recruitment. The second thing that training does is strengthen the muscles and connective tissues to the point that they will be able to withstand the more intense signals given to the muscles by the CNS.
Training will always influence both the CNS and the muscular tissues of the body in some way, it is just that some training happens to stress one more than the other. Examples of training that will be more demanding on the CNS are heavy weightlifting, plyometrics, maximal jumping, maximal sprinting over short distances (less than 40 meters), and throwing objects with max power. If you didn’t notice, the word “maximal” is key when it comes to CNS training activities. You are going all out to attempt to increase the number of motor units that you are activating. Training that will enhance the structure of the body to a greater level tends to be of the more repetitive type. Although more repetitive training does not maximize the CNS and motor recruitment, it is still important in developing the total athlete. Examples of training that will emphasize the muscle-tendon structure in the body would be strength training for more than 15 seconds in each set (usually around 8-10 reps or more), repetitive jumps (such as skipping rope or cone hops), repeated submaximal sprints, long hill runs, and repeated multi-directional work (such as playing a sport where lateral movement is involved). Multi-directional work is important in training the structure of the body as it will assist the in the development of the stabilizing and supporting muscles of movement.
The average athlete who plays a team sport is going to be getting both types of this training in their system, as most sports have explosive, repetitive, and multidirectional components. The key in training is to develop the CNS and structure of the body in a balance that is appropriate to your sport. Training only one system can have potentially negative side effects. Performing only CNS work will tend to make athletes prone to injury or overtraining. Highly trained and genetically superior athletes can tend to handle a greater amount of CNS training as opposed to genetically weaker athletes, and those with little training experience. On the other hand, performing only structural based training is going to severely limit the upper power potential of the body. It is a bit safer form of training (as long as ridiculous volumes are not performed), but it will tend to limit the explosive performance of the athlete in tasks such as jumping and sprinting.
Specificity of Training:
This is a pretty simple concept that most people are familiar with. If you want to be better at a given movement, you need to practice that movement, or at least movements very similar to it, on a regular basis. There are essentially three methods of improvement in any sporting movement:
Primary: Performing the movement itself (The fastest way to improve)
Secondary: Performing the movement with resistance (A stronger training stimulus and the second fastest way to improve)
Tertiary: Strength Training (Supports the primary movement and are processes that improve over time)
Practicing the primary sport movement is always the fastest way to improve performance. Let’s take for example, jumping. If you do not have a lot of training experience, the fastest way to jump higher is simply to practice jumping a lot. When you practice, of course, you need to practice jumping as high as you possibly can, because after all, you don’t want to practice jumping low (unless your goal is to jump low)! Your training results will tend to be quite specific to the training that you put in! The big reason that many streetball style dunkers can jump so high is mostly just because they practice jumping all the time, and have decent levels of general fitness that they gain from simply playing basketball. For another example, look at the training of Michael Johnson, the world record holder in the 400m dash, and former world record holder in the 200m dash. Johnson did not do many squats or Olympic lifts in his training regimen. Plyometrics were nowhere to be found. What Michael Johnson did do to become great was practice his primary movement, which was running very often. He also did this in a very organized and systematic manner under one of the greatest track coaches of all time, Clyde Hart. Fancy training regimens are not nearly as important as practicing the sport movement you want to improve often, especially performing it in a competitive environment!
Along with the primary movement being vital to the training process, it also need to be trained with the proper technique. Performing your primary sporting movement under the eye of an experienced coach, or at least a video camera can be one of the best ways to increase your performance. This aspect of training is more important in more complex movements, such as the field events in track and field, or sport movements, such as a golf swing or tennis serve. In terms of basic motor movements, such as running and jumping, repeated practice of these from a young age often allows athletes to form a good working technique, although there will always be room for improvement. Various forms of these movements can be implemented to teach proper technique, such as performing scissor bounds to assist a sprinting athlete in learning the motor pattern of recruiting the glute and hamstring muscles to a greater degree in the ground phase of the sprint.
The second fastest way to make performance gains is to practice a movement with resistance. Using the vertical jump example, to add resistance, one could perform maximal jumping attempts with a weight vest or ankle weights on. Depth jumps would also offer a form of this primary training method with a degree of resistance. When training only the specific sport movement, the body will eventually adapt to just jumping with ones own bodyweight, so an athlete will need to try either jumping with a vest or doing depth jumps to continue to make performance gains. If you were working on improving your sprint speed, an example here would be making the use of an incline like a hill in your training.
The third method of improvement is that of strength training. Strength training by itself will not typically yield direct gains in performance in a short period of time. In reality though, strength training is almost never performed in isolation, especially with team sport athletes. If you are playing a sport and lifting weights, you are getting the primary pieces of training you need to become a great athlete. The most important thing to realize about strength training is that it is typically not the fastest way to improve athleticism, but in the long term development of an athlete, it is possibly the most important method of the three that I have listed.
Strength training is very important in the total development of an athlete because it raises the potential of that athlete’s force production. Performing training methods such as sprinting, throwing and plyometrics are nice, but they do very little to increase the total amount of contractile proteins/size of the muscle past a fixed level. Training without using weights or strength can be very effective up to a certain point, but there will come a point in the training of many athletes where progress will no longer be possible unless some sort of strength training is performed. This is due to the fact that the body is recruiting the majority of available muscle fibers, and there simply is not any more muscle for the CNS to recruit in a given movement! In this case, creating more muscle cross sectional area will be necessary for further gains. Science has shown that performance gains that are made as the result of increased muscular/myofibril size and density will last for a longer period of time than gains that are made because of improvements to the nervous system. This leads to a tangible example that gains which are made from months of strength training will last longer in terms of performance improvement than gains made from months of plyometric training.
The last point in this section is as follows: The sport specific movement looking to be improved needs to be practiced on a regular basis through all levels of training. A positive aspect of team sports is that participating regularly in games and practices will help to ensure a regular diet of functional sports movements. This is only positive so long as the practices and games are not extremely taxing on the lactic and aerobic pathways of the body (excess conditioning). Many people get very caught up with secondary and tertiary methods at high levels of training, and will forget the training mode that got them there in the first place, which is actually practicing the main movement. To continue to improve your results, the primary sporting movement must be present on a regular basis.
SUMMARY
- If you are a speed/power athlete, limit the time over the course of the year that you are performing general/conditioning based training. Focus your training of profiency/power, and less on efficiency/conditioning.
- Try and emphasize the specific movement you are trying to improve in your training. If you want to run faster, than sprint fast in practice! If you want to throw faster, throw a lot! If you want to jump higher, jump as high as you can a lot!
- Perform the sport specific movement in a competitive environment for the best possible results.
REFERENCES
Baechle, Thomas R., and Roger W. Earle. Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2000. Print.
Gambetta, Vern. Athletic Development: the Art & Science of Functional Sports Conditioning. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007. Print.
Moore et al. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. In Press. Moura, Nelio A. “Training Principles for Jumpers.” Training Principles for Jumpers. CoachR, May-June 2001. Web. 31 Oct. 2011. http://www.coachr.org/tpjrs.htm
Verkhoshansky, Yuri Vitalievitch., and Mel Cunningham. Siff. Supertraining. Rome, Italy: Verkhoshansky, 2009. Print.
Zatsiorski, V. & Kraemer, W. (2006) Science and Practice of Strength Training, 2nd Edition, Human Kinetics Publishing, Champaign IL.
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