Welcome to the second section of five in this series devoted to the basic foundation of training athletes. In the article, you will learn the importance of training the human body as one piece and how to optimally arrange training for maximal results.
Training the Body as one Piece
The best training exercises for speed/power athletes are those that involve multiple joints and are a ground based movement. These would include plyometric exercises such as depth jumps and bounding, and weightlifting exercises such as the Olympic lifts, squats, deadlifts, lunges and step ups. Single joint, non-ground based movements would be things such as leg curl or leg extension machines, and these will always be less effective than ground based movement in helping athleticism. Full body, ground based work allows your body to link its neural machinery in the best possible manner to improve performance in ground based sports.
Single joint work can be effective for increasing the size of specific muscles, but it also has some serious drawbacks. Single joint exercises will isolate muscles from the rest of your body and will have a very limited effect on power compared to ground based work. The muscles in the human body work together to produce a maximally effective result; they rarely work in isolation. There is a sequence that your muscles need to go through for each sporting movement to attain the greatest speed or power. Training muscles in isolation can potentially hurt this chain of movement, especially if muscles are developed out of balance from the other muscles in the chain! This is a pretty simple concept, but as this is a basic training article, it cannot be overlooked!
There are only two potential uses of single joint work in training. One is added muscle size in areas that may need it, and the second is to boost the general fitness level of the human body. The muscle group that is most often isolated for athletic enhancement is that of the gluteal/hip group. Watch any track and field meet, and it is a guarantee that you will see most of these athletes warming up with some sort of hip isolating exercises, typically performed in a quadruped position. (Although it is debated how much single joint glute exercises transfer to the utilization of the hips in athletic performance) Bottom line, most of your training exercises should be multi-joint movements that direct force through the ground if you are a speed/power athlete.
is important to train the body as one piece because it is essential to link the most important muscle group of human locomotion, the glutes, to the rest of human musculature in an efficient manner. There are a lot of exercises and training programs coming out in modern coaching and literature in an attempt to increase everyday athlete’s amount of gluteal activation. It is important for athletes, in their training, to learn to activate the glute muscle group and to tie the increased activation of this group into everyday activities such as running and jumping. This can be accomplished by performing functional human movement drills under the eye of a watchful coach. Increased glute activation can also be picked up in the weightroom through the use of deep squats, wide-grip deadlifts, glute ham raises, and hip thrust style movements. The bottom line is, better glutes will equal better results in performance.
Along with having better functioning glutes through training, it is important to emphasize explosive hip extension in the variety of training movements that are available to athletes. Quite possibly the easiest way to do this is through the use of medicine ball and shot throws where the emphasis is on the explosive forward movement of the hips. In the performance of the Olympic lifts in the weight room, explosive hip extension is a must! Athletes who perform too many movements that emphasize a slow hip extension, such as constantly squatting heavy with slower tempos, may end up suffering in their dynamic movement (sprinting and jumping) because they have fed too much slow hip work into their system. Now squatting heavy is certainly not a bad thing, but if it is not complimented with a heavy dose of explosive hip exercises, it can be derogatory to explosive movement.
Arranging Training
Designing a training program comes down to deciding what exercises to do, and when to do them. This aspect of training is significantly more difficult than learning or teaching exercises, and is the most complex and often confusing part of the entire training process. Training templates take a little while to really understand, but once the basic framework is learned, one will realize that training is actually quite simple. Many athletes have achieved elite results from just playing their sport every day in high levels of competition and then doing some minor supporting work on the side.
Some zealous coaches and trainers will tend to create excel spreadsheets detailing the whole year, using different methods and means throughout the time period to maximize performance and peak for important competitions. This is all well and good for elite athletes, but in many cases these detailed plans (especially with less experienced coaches who are simply more of the “hyper organized” type) will not be any better, and might even be worse than just going by the “seat of your pants” and just planning your training a few weeks at a time. The reason for this is that every athlete will respond differently to the training stimulus and training has a constant need for adjustment as the training year moves forward.
Training on the smallest level comes out to one single training day. Planning out training in one single day is pretty simple. The major principle that needs to be adhered to for the single training day is simply not to put too many different types of training together in a single training session. Speed and/or power training seems to work well in one training session, where mixing heavy aerobic/conditioning work and speed/power work will not prove effective. The body will respond better if fewer training stimuli are mixed into a single session. If you must do both power/strength and conditioning in a single day, it is a good idea to train one type of training in the morning and then another in the afternoon/evening.
Setting up a training week can prove a bit more complicated than setting up a training day. There are a multitude of ways to plan out a training week which can make things fairly complicated, but I feel there are two templates that I feel really simplify the process for intermediate/advanced athletes. The first method is to group high intensity exercises into one day, and then perform these hard training days every other day, with easy days in between. This type of training setup would look something like this:
Monday: Hard CNS Day/Easy Conditioning Day: Weights and Plyos or Speed
Tuesday: Hard Conditioning/Easy CNS Day – Conditioning Work
Wednesday: Hard CNS Day/Easy Conditioning Day: Weights and Plyos or Speed
Thursday: Hard Conditioning/Easy CNS Day – Conditioning Work
Friday: Hard CNS Day/Easy Conditioning Day: Weights and Plyos or Speed
Saturday: Hard Conditioning/Easy CNS Day – Conditioning Work
Arranging training in this manner will allow the body 48 hours of recovery between intense training sessions of the same type. It is a very typical training setup amongst many track and field coaches and it a good way to build overall athletic development. Another great way of arranging training is to group your training days by exercise types according to speed of movement. This training can be even more effective than the first setup I have listed in terms of producing fast gains, but, it can also lead to overtraining is performed too early in the training process. This training method will have only lifting exercises on one day, and only plyometric exercises on the other. This training program can work well due to the fact that strength training in intermediate to advanced athletes really only takes 24 hours to recover from. Heavy plyometrics, on the other hand, take around 48 hours of recovery, but that is where a clever weekly setup kicks in. Here is what I am talking about:
Monday: Strength Train (unique slower CNS stimulus) 24 hour recovery
Tuesday: Plyometric/Speed/Sprint Train (unique faster CNS stimulus) 48 hour recovery
Wednesday: Conditioning and easy training (12 hour recovery)
Thursday: Strength Train (unique slower CNS stimulus) 24 hour recovery
Friday: Plyometric/Speed/Sprint Train (unique faster CNS stimulus) 48 hour recovery
Saturday: Conditioning and easy training (12 hour recovery) Sunday: Rest and take care of residual fatigue from week’s training.
Regarding the planning of training, it is also quite important to look at how an athlete’s training needs to change depending on their experience level. It is important to know that beginning athletes will need to have more spacing in between their heavy training sessions than advanced athletes. Advanced athletes can handle up to 10 times the training load that athletes with only 6 months of training under their belt can handle, so it is important to plan accordingly. Elite Olympic weightlifters lift 7 days a week, 2 times per day, and train heavy each day! You won’t see that in any vertical jumping or combine prep program on the internet! Beginning trainees really can only handle about 2 and maybe 3 days per week of intense training without seeing performance decreases due to overtraining (heavy lifting or plyometric work). As athletes advance in training, they will be able to start adding extra heavy/demanding sessions in per week. Intermediate/Advanced athletes can usually handle about 3-4 heavy training sessions per week and sometimes more.
Another important aspect of training is recognizing that, as an athlete becomes more advanced, they will require more specific training. Beginning athletes can make improvements in their performance by performing a variety of training methods, including those that are not terribly specific to their primary sport. A raw beginner in training without much experience is going to be able to perform just about any training method and increase their performance to a degree. When training vertical jumping, a beginning athlete can perform a very non-specific program, such as a high volume of repetitive jumping exercises that are done with submaximal effort and still manage to improve their leaping ability. Beginning powerlifters can perform leg presses, leg curls and leg extensions as a primary training form and will reap great results. These training methods will only help for a short amount of time of course. Performance at the high end of any sport is extremely specific to the neural pathways of that given sport. This means that, as a beginner progresses towards elite status in training, the total number of exercises that they use in training will drop. Elite athletes tend to only really want to utilize exercises that are somewhat close in nature to their actual skill. Having too many supporting exercises at the elite level can keep the athlete away from true motor proficiency. Beginners, however, can utilize a larger number of exercises that are not all that specific to their sport and still make good gains from training. In terms of training volume, beginning programs will always be of a lower level than advanced athletes.
Summary
- Train the body as one piece when strength training. This means focus on ground based, multi-joint movements, such as squats, deadlifts, and Olympic lifts when in the weightroom. Single joint movements are significantly less effective.
- Training should be arranged to group exercises with either similar intensity or similar training speeds together on the same training day.
- Elite athletes must train much more specifically to attain results than novice athletes. Beginners can achieve significant gains from non-specific training methods.
- Recovery times should be appropriate to the type of training being performed. Light/Medium strength training and conditioning can be recovered from in 24 hours, but more intense work such as plyometrics can require over 48 hours of recovery.
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