I’m looking forward to the future, and feeling grateful for the past.
Mike Rowe
2015 is here (by the time you read this), and I spent my New Year’s Eve morning writing down a few things that I learned about strength, power, and life in 2014 along the way. Looking back on our past is a great way to improve our future. In no particular order, I’ll start with a most important lesson for dealing with athletes, the value of rest periods in the training year.
Rest athletes more than you already do
What if I told you, that by implementing just one change in your program, your athletes would be stronger, faster, and more resilient to injury? That change is more rest. You see, most coaches are more afraid of doing too little, more than they are of too much.
2014 might be the year I gained the biggest chunk of knowledge in learning of the power of rest and recovery. As we all know, any coach can “Rock Bottom” their athletes with tons of work. A team of highly trained monkeys could likely pick out workouts sheets from a library and hand them to athletes in excess. Work is easy. When to rest, and how much, is a bit harder.
It takes a lot more experience and hard work, learning when to rest, and how long to do it. Knowing this is the feather in the cap of a great coach. It shows, not just the books they have read, or training programs they found on the internet, but what they have experienced and learned from. Good coaches also track the success of future phases based on the amount of rest they gave athletes during down-periods, and use this information to make their program better.
One of the best experiences I had in learning the value of rest was working with men’s swim this past year. Swim coaches are masters of rest, as much of the years training success depends on the “taper” at the end of the year leading into conference and national meets. Watching swim coaches make decisions on the individual taper and rest characteristics of each athlete was a wonderful learning experience for me in optimizing rest on the individual level.
Another amazing thing, outside of rest and peaking, was rest’s effect on setting up future strength gains. The swim guys I worked with spent about 6-8 weeks combined, before and after the NCAA championships in March performing a minimal amount of strength work to prepare for their highest competition, and then reset from the long season of training.
When I got the guys back again, after this 2 month hiatus, within 3-4 weeks most of the guys were hitting lifetime best strength levels, something that I had not intended on at the start of that new training cycle! Would the guys have hit those numbers, and been that strong had they not had those two months with minimal/no lifting? My guess would be no. Sometimes, you need to embrace the power of rest to hit a new level of performance.
On another note, I am also starting to see and get more information on athletes who were worked insanely hard, with almost no rest during their high school, or college experience, and even if they were able to tolerate that load (usually through lots of motivation), how that strongly influenced their (lack of) performance during the next cycle of their competitive career. The more I look at the long term training routines of great foreign nations, the more I realize that it is their late 20 something athletes that are hitting lifetime bests, and winning championships, not their teen or even early 20 something athletes. Granted, most athletes in the USA probably want to peak in college, as they won’t be competing afterwards, but I digress.
Fast vs. slow twitch training differences
2014 was a year of learning more about the training differences of fast-twitch and slow-twitch athletes. Bottom line of what I found is that fast-twitch athletes generally need more spacing between hard sessions, adapt to stimuli faster, and need longer to taper for maximal performance. Slower twitched athletes need to take advantage of their ability to do more work. They can handle more sessions in a smaller time period, and they can perform at a high level with more consistency than their fast twitch counterparts; this of course, is never a license to throw quality out the window. Slow twitch athletes also seem to handle longer cycles of similar training without turning into a pile of molasses, especially if they are very motivated.
You get what you prime yourself for
In life, you get what you prime yourself for. If you work in a messy environment, chances are that you’ll be unorganized. If you clean your work area, you prime yourself to stay on task. If you make your bed immediately upon rising, you’ll prime yourself to do things right away throughout your day, and not procrastinate. (On a side note, through a quick survey, I realized that athletes who make their beds immediately upon rising are also much more likely to immediately rack their weights after they are done with their sets without me harassing them about it).
“Thinking Fast and Slow” was a great book that I read in early 2014 that highlighted some fantastic research on the phenomenon. Some examples given here of priming were:
- If you have recently seen the word EAT, you are more likely to fill in SO_P with “Soup”, rather than “Soap”.
- John Bargh, at New York University, had students assemble four word sentences from a set of 5 words. The students were asked to perform another experiment down the hall after they completed the assembling of sentences. The students who were tasked with assembling words based on the elderly (Florida, forgetful, bald, gray) performed the hallway walk slower than the other students who assembled non-elderly words! Having “Elderly/Old” in their head made them move slower.
- The way you carry yourself influences your mood. If you are “forced” to smile, your body will take on the emotional (and likely physiological) characteristics of being happy. Same thing with frowning, as you’ll take on the characteristics of being unhappy.
On an athletic note, if you prime yourself by watching inspiring videos, and working out in a motivational environment with great athletes, you’ll be better “primed” to perform a big-time athletic feat of your own. If you are a coach, you can prime your athletes for success by being on-time, organized, encouraging, playing motivating music (or videos) and being able to create a fun, but highly competitive environment. Also, success breeds success, so a high level team in practice is a highly priming entity by itself. Athletes who are coached by a person who has a great track record are going to be primed to succeed better than a coach with a shaky record.
Don’t be a perfectionist in your head, no frame of mind prepares you for life
“If you want to learn how to swim, jump in the water. On dry land, no frame of mind is ever going to help you”.
Bruce Lee
“Get out of your head and into your heart. Think less, feel more”.
Osho
Don’t think that I decided to give up “thinking” in 2014. This would be the furthest thing from the truth. What I have become more and more aware of, is simply, the need to do more, and spend less time thinking about it. I certainly agree with the “measure twice, cut once” philosophy, but for many people, this can become “measure 20 times over a month, and hopefully I’ll get around to cutting sometime down the road”. This mentality must be avoided at all costs.
If you really want to find out how things work, you must jump in the water and experience them. It is also easy to sit there and intellectually talk down about the things that other professionals are doing. My question is, have you actually experienced or performed those other things that you are talking crap about? Have you been in environment where you have seen it done, and seen the results? How can you know unless you have experienced it for yourself?
Some of my best training programs I ever handed out were written in the midst of a social media conversation, where I came up with the program on the spot. Some of my best articles, and the best business decisions I have made have been the ones that I thought about the least. I just decided to do it, and see what happened. I have also learned how to scramble with purpose like none other by just doing things, and fixing what goes wrong on the fly, rather than sitting and thinking about it for day, weeks and months before-hand, and delaying the project, or worse yet, never finishing it.
Amongst the day to day hustle, I find that my subconscious mind has some great ideas, and I need to let life and experience help my conscious brain make sense of it all.
Some athletes just don’t need to train hard often
I learned in 2014 how some athletes just don’t need to train very often. Coaches sometimes almost always model the training of their athletes based on what worked well for themselves in their heyday. I am not immune, but when lessons teach me otherwise, I get smarter and walk away with more weapons in my coaching arsenal.
Case in point, over this past year, after working my online clients with a training frequency that had given myself and many other clients for some serious training gains, I noticed a small portion of my very strong/explosive clients just weren’t seeing the same results. After our paid training time was over, these clients would start training on their own, based on their own intuition on training frequency, or off of some pointers I had given them. In their new system (which was always a much lower training frequency and volume, usually around 2x a week), these clients got some awesome results. I would say that the average gain in the switch to low frequency work was about 4 inches on jumping ability in already well-trained clients who needed this approach to see their highest result. Obviously, part of this can be ascribed to the LDTE of our primary training cycles, but you can’t argue how much they needed a strong period of lower training frequency.
I spent a good portion of the last month re-visiting Dan Pfaff’s training methods In one of Dan’s videos, he talked about the individual training response in a few of his athletes in regards to his rollover training system. Dan mentioned that record holding sprinter, Donovan Bailey liked training hard three times a week. On the other hand, through Henk Kraaijenhof’s findings via the Omegawave, they found out that sprinter Obadele Thompson generally needed about 4 days of rest or easy work between intense training sessions, before he was ready to train hard again. True speed work just shot his system for a few days! What if you took Obadele and tried to sprint him hard 3 times a week? Or even worse, what if you tried to train him in an old-school 400m training system?
Not every athlete fits into the exact same system, and this is where even basic monitoring of some basic functional indicators can go a very long way in allowing athletes to reach a higher level of performance.
A strength coach is more than an instructor of muscle forces
I learned in 2014 that a strength coach is much more than an instructor of the barbell. A team’s strength coach, especially in football, is often referred to as “the heart and soul of the team”. Why is this? I think that part of it is the difficulty and reward of many of the conditioning sessions that puts players in a position to gain self-confidence.
Part of the explanation can also be gleaned from looking at the position from a “tribal” standpoint, in which the strength coach is typically viewed as a form of a “tribal elder”. Reading the book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover”, helped me to understand the role that coaching individuals can play in the lives of young men (and women) in a society that is no longer based on the close knit family and “tribal community” where the ritual rites of manhood were applied.
With this in mind, coaches should be fully aware of the platform of impact that they are placed in, in the life of the student-athlete. It is both an opportunity and responsibility. The presentation that one gives of one’s self in front of the team they coach is enormous. It is a great chance to push discipline and character development. It is also a reason to have confidence in your methods, and display that confidence through your coaching knowledge and style.
This revered position is also a reason that the strength and performance professional must walk what they talk. It also helps the more “legends” and “stories” there are of their athletic prowess. Examples would be: “I heard that Coach “X” used to bench press 500lbs back in the day, and ran a 4.2 second 40 yard dash!. The more athletes believe in what you do or have done, the more they’ll believe in your program. It also helps to have a few “feats” of old man strength in your back pocket that give you mild legendary properties amongst those you may coach.
What is success?
Our ability to handle life’s challenges is a measure of our strength of character.
There are a lot of things by which we can label our lives as “successful”. I came across a quote this year that refers to how one’s success in life can be defined by one’s character. I like that quote. The character points I have been focusing on this year have been those of discipline and empathy. I hope that by improving these areas, I can consider my life more successful and impactful on others.
The fine points of training variability
In 2014 learned the finer points of training variability, particularly within the powerlifting community. I gained more on my “big 3 lifts” utilizing 12 weeks of the Cube method (which utilizes a rotating max effort, power and repetition based lifting day) than I had at any other point in my mature lifting career. I also learned how this can apply to dynamic athletic performance. Using the Cube prompted me to re-research Dan Pfaff’s 3 day rollover, and compare it to the training programs I used in the past.
Funny enough, Dan’s 3 day rollover looks a lot like a training program I happened to unknowingly slap together when I was 17 years old, performing an Explosive training day (the Science of Jumping plyometric workout and deadlifts) on Monday, then a pickup basketball and dunking day (technical and conditioning) on Thursday, and then a speed/speed-endurance day (4-5 all out 40 yard dashes, timed using thigh weights) on Friday or Saturday. This was all done on my own timing, which was usually about 3 days rest after plyos, and 2 days rest after basketball. I also happened to pick up about 5” on my vertical and a good amount of speed in a pretty short period of time on this instinctual and uninformed but useful “system” I threw together.
This also prompted me, in 2014, to refine my 4 week training cycles down to a very manageable system that moves density, strength and power emphasis in a symmetrical manner while also allowing for a deload in the 4th week. This new cycle format has been one of my most effective (and reproducible) for bringing about increases in strength and power.
Just how much slower you can become by focusing only on absolute strength
I learned in 2014, that, despite the fact that getting stronger in powerlifting is lots of fun, it wreaks havoc on my athleticism when I focus only on my absolute strength levels. (Now that I’m strongly in my 30’s and not competing in track anymore I care more about strength than speed, so not a big deal for me) This year, specializing to gain 25lbs on my deadlift and 15lbs on my squat also cost me 3” on my vertical jump (and counting!). If I had just started lifting, this wouldn’t be the case, but since I’ve been strength training for so long, it takes my body a completely different direction, in order to adapt to the direction of lift maxes. Of course, I already knew this, but this is the first time I truly experienced it.
Athletes need to train their primary explosive movement skills hard (accelerating, decelerating, jumping), and let that help bring up their barbell levels, and not focus on the weightroom as the main driver, and time consumer of their athletic improvement (although it is important). Athletes that can go to the weightroom and get really strong without “trying too hard” have it made, and set an unattainable example for the weaker, and driven, ones among us. Barbells are important, but ultimately, complimentary.
Other random learnings:
That I thought I had a good handle on Olympic lifting technique, until I was actually instructed by some of the best and realized how little I really was aware of as far as the competitive technique is concerned.
That I cannot handle “moderation” when it comes to video games. There is a reason I gave my Xbox away 4 years ago, why I won’t download Clash of Clans, and that I don’t have any games on my computer or phone (except wheel of fortune). I was reminded of that by wasting a week of my life playing the latest Civilization game on a new Mac I bought for my wife. If the games aren’t there, I won’t play them.
The plasticity of the brain and human experience is a fascinating area.
The dynamic systems theory, and its influence in the way we use strength work as a baseline for technique should be learned by every coach.
That it is easier to have 5 things going on in your life than 2 when it comes to getting things done.
That finishing writing a book takes a lot longer than you originally think it will. Starting is easy.
I learned about the power of visualization and the subconscious mind, and the positive role this can play in athletic recovery and pre-competition performance.
That alpha GPC is the best pre-workout I have ever used. No caffeine required.
That I like sleep. Because I don’t do well with less of it in my system, I must make my daily hours count that much more, which has caused me to form more effective habits in my daily routine.
That upon rising, not checking emails/facebook, and instead taking a cool shower, going outside, then playing “epic” music gives my day a much better start than getting caught up in what others are up to or find interesting.
Conclusion
So all this is what I learned in 2014. How about you? What will you try and improve on in 2015 and reach your training or coaching goals?
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