Smart Circuit Training

An athlete’s ability to repeatedly produce high amounts of power - and then recovery quickly to do it again (and again… and again…) is the definition of fitness for team sports.

Lately I’ve been working with an athlete rehabbing from a lower body injury who needs to keep her cardiovascular conditioning and fitness as high as possible. It’s been a great challenge and has gotten me utilizing some methods and equipment I don’t regularly utilize.

Circuit training, in particular, has been crucial.

It’s really important to keep training, even with an injury, you just have to be smart about it. Otherwise, the athlete will come back from injury only to find themselves woefully out of shape - which can lead to a new injury simply from fatigue when they try to pick up their sport again.

There are truly unlimited possibilities when it comes to circuit training. A basic understanding of what you want to get out of the session should help guide some decent decision making. Always be sure to factor in some rest time and/or active recovery.

I’m also a big supporter of self-regulation. If your body says it needs to go slower or rest, then give it what it needs! We always want to train with the intent to “live to fight another day”. There will be another workout to push to your limit.

Here is a circuit that I designed for myself that focused on repeated efforts of maximum power with active recovery. All active recovery exercises were chosen for my specific injury prevention needs:

Explosive Belt Squat x5

*Scap Pull-up x10

Explosive Lat Pulldown x5

*Heel Raise x10

MB Keg Toss x5

*Full cans/Empty cans x10

Explosive Push/Pull x2/way

*Elliptical x:60

Active recovery exercises indicated with the asterisk and italics.

I was able to monitor power output on a rep-by-rep basis throughout the session, but if you want to give this a try and do not have access to that type of feedback just simply do each of the main exercises with as much speed/force as you can generate for every single repetition.

Let me warn you: the above is not for the faint of heart. The repeated focus on power was a real difference maker. Be smart with the amount of total time you want to work. This session was done for 7 rounds and that took around 45-minutes. It was exhausting. Like impacts-the-rest-of-your-day exhausting. I suggest targeting 20-minutes or so for your first time.

Feel free to substitute your own exercises for the active recovery choices. If there’s a chink in your armour, this is the perfect opportunity to know your staying fit and pushing yourself with exercises that are safe for you, while also getting the extra reps on your prehab/rehab exercises.

Since you’re here: We have a small favor to ask! At SAPT, we are committed to sharing quality information that is both entertaining and compelling to help build better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage us authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics.

Thank you! SAPT

Conditioning for Team Sports: Buck the Tradition

The conditioning that I've started relying on focuses on the energy systems that I need my players to be able to work efficiently in. We are constantly pushing the body to recover as quickly and as efficiently as possible. That does not mean stopping and fully resting. It almost never means stopping for me anymore. The game of basketball never really stops, for free throws and foul shots yes, but not for very long. More often than not, they have to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, and then there's a burst. Soccer is very similar to this, that game does not stop, literally it does not stop.

So we have to be training for that, not training for the most extreme ridiculous thing that never happens in the game or the match. This means understanding when you use a five second work period, and when you use a 15 second work period. And when you could use what would be the extremes for these team sports, a 30 to 60 seconds work period. Use those minimally, that's extremely intense when you do those work periods. Even when using those extremely intense methods, the focus is always recovery, because that's what's going to really help you win.If the players can only be super fast once or twice, and then they can't recover, they're no good to you.

To train for this recovery, we have to be working in the correct heart rate zones. In the offseason, I'll run this type of conditioning and we will do very general recovery, generally called active recovery in between work periods. An example of this would be max effort broad jumps to work on explosive power and then to recover, it might be something like jump rope, battle ropes, or weighted carries. The active recovery is more general in nature during this time, but as we get closer to the season and into the season, the active recovery will become more specific. An example of this would be again using a broad jump and then using light layups for example for active recovery. Now, we're working in a place and working in a way where we're minimizing the impact, because we're being very smart about when we actually asked them to run. And we're being really smart about getting creative on things where running isn't required. If they're out there doing their sport, that's probably enough of the high volume running, that’s something we want to minimize as much as possible. I may keep short sprints on a treadmill or something during the season, but all of our active recovery is going to be through different methods. This could be slow step ups, where there isn’t much impact but that's still working the running muscles, right?

What we are really looking for with conditioning is how hard the heart is working, or beats per minute. So you can look strictly at that, but then you also can't forget about what the sport entails, specificity of that movement, and the current workload of the athlete. So if you look at what the athlete’s currently doing, and you think, okay, we're in season they’re getting a lot of sport specific training in, this should change the exercises used during conditioning. For example if they are fully in season let’s take away the joint pounding and do short sprints and a kettlebell carry to recover. This works because at this point we are only really looking at what the heart rate is doing. Now, if we're getting ready for a training camp or preseason time period, a time we're not heavily involved in practices, then we want to get more sports specific movements and sports specific muscle groups involved. So that same all out sprint, might then be paired with, you know, some more jogging, for example, to actually recover.

There's a lot you can do with this. It's just like anything else, get creative. There’s not one correct to do things. BUCK THE TRADITION. Forget all of the suck it up buttercup, if you cant finish it you’re weak and didn’t prepare conditioning sessions. You need to be looking at what the sport requires to be successful in it, and where your athletes actually are, where you actually are and bridge that gap between where they need to be and where they are right now.

Since you’re here: We have a small favor to ask! At SAPT, we are committed to sharing quality information that is both entertaining and compelling to help build better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage us authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics.

Thank you! SAPT

Conditioning for Team Sports: Conditioning & Energy Systems

The next thing is we need to discuss with conditioning is making it specific to the energy systems used during the athlete’s sport.  The energy systems that our body is using while we're sitting down and watching TV are very different than the energy system that it's using when we go for a light 30 minute jog, which are different than the energy system that we use when we are sprinting, which are different from what’s happening on the court during a game.

Basketball athletes typically push hard for 15, maybe even 30 seconds at a time. Then they get rest periods where they are still moving (often quickly) but NOT at max speed.This is similar to soccer, where you sprint for short bursts of five seconds, and then half the field jogs and walks. While the fast action goes on elsewhere on the field. And then they sprint again. And then they get a nice recovery period where they’re jogging or walking. Lacrosse is in that same boat, all of these sports use very similar energy systems.

Using giant traffic cones adds to the drama of any drill.

Now, one of the things that you can talk about is the energy system requirements of different positions in soccer in particular, where there are differences that should be accounted for. But let's just talk more generally right now. And say, if we can look at real heart rate data, or even just get a stopwatch out and time these sprint versus walking periods. I have never seen soccer players max effort sprint and change direction for 60 seconds over and over and over again. Nothing resembling the 300m shuttle test for example happens during these sports. It just doesn't happen. For more information on this idea please see our previous blog post on misconception about conditioning.

The closer test would be the one where you sprint then full field, jog to recover, and then do it again. That's a good midfielders test. We have to understand that, to be the best that we can be at the sport, we can't be going way outside the realm of what the sport actually requires. Now there is a cross training period that we can do in the offseason. But even then, you're not going to be going to these extremes and just asking the body to do these ridiculous things.

We have to look at what's happening in the game, which are these small bursts of dynamic movements. The athletes are all over the place, they're in different planes of motion, they're not running straight forward the entire time, they're changing direction like crazy.  We have to look at the work time period for these small bursts of dynamic movements and the active rest between them.

This is where the concept of active recovery comes into play. The next article in this series explain how this type of conditioning can be accomplished but for now, try to make the conditioning match up with what the sports asks of the athletes.

Since you’re here: We have a small favor to ask! At SAPT, we are committed to sharing quality information that is both entertaining and compelling to help build better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage us authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics.

Thank you! SAPT

Conditioning for Team Sports: Monitoring Load

So getting back to this idea that there is a better way to condition our athletes, besides these white knuckling feel like you're getting punched in the face and kicked in the gut workouts. Is there a better way?

I say yes, absolutely.

The first thing that must be done is accepting the idea that not all workouts should be that hard. Embracing a monitoring system (HRM, external load, etc) or at a bare minimum using the RPE system is an absolute must. The RPE scale is a rating of perceived exertion, which is the idea of rating the difficulty of a workout/training session on a scale of 1-10. You as the coach should have an idea of how hard do you want this to feel for the athletes on a scale of 1 to 10.

That's really, really important because, if you are wanting to give your athletes a stimulation day, which is going to be a little bit lighter, then we will want to hit at a 6 or 7 on a scale of 10. This isn’t too tough and should feel pretty good. It’s enough to improve fitness while not interfering with the ability for the athlete to recover. If after the session they come back and they're all reporting that the session was a 9 or 9.5 then you've missed your mark. If you absolutely destroyed them, because you’ve missed your mark, you don’t understand the fitness of your athletes and this is going to cause problems.

Now, with that said, if you are getting reports back showing a 9 or 9.5 and you say, you know what, I've done this workout 1000 times, this is a 6/6.5 at most on that scale. Your response should not be to tell them they're out of shape, they didn't do what they had to do, or they’ve got to just pick it up.

Your response has to be okay, what am I going to do to adjust this program to meet the needs of my athletes, because right now, they're not in the kind of shape that I want them to be in. You need to get them to the point that this workout does feel like a six or a seven. A lot of coaches take this attitude of, well, you know, I haven't been playing the sport for 20 years, and I can still do this. So what, you are not your athletes, and your athletes aren’t you. It is your job as the coach to make sure they are a proper fit.

Since you’re here: We have a small favor to ask! At SAPT, we are committed to sharing quality information that is both entertaining and compelling to help build better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage us authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics.

Thank you! SAPT

WOW: Week of Workouts 4/3/18

WOW: Victory Lap (aka Whatever Doesn't Kill You...)

In complete contrast to last week's WOW that was focused on injury prevention, we present three workouts designed to push your limits.

As you go through these three workouts, you'll either feel like you are celebrating a well deserved victory lap from the hard work you've put in over the last 8-weeks OR the whole experience may feel like a punch in the face as you careen from one exercise to the next.

Victory Lap

Let's start off the week with a nice, even, full body burn.

Here is week 8 of the 8-week conditioning program. If you haven't started but want to give it a go, please head on back to Week 1 to get going!

Thank you to our intern Ashley for her hard work on putting together these great workouts over the past 8-weeks. 

WOW: Week of Workouts 3/27/18

WOW: Prehab and Injury Prevention

As an athlete, injuries are the ultimate enemy.  Staying healthy is what allows us to play our sport and being strong is what helps us thrive. In this week of workouts, we focus on injury prevention for three of the most prevalent and devastating injuries to all sports:  knee, shoulder, and low back. 

These workouts are great to be added into your current programs since they are just a little extra focus on the muscle groups directly affecting these main injury points. Also, for those who are more likely to hurt those areas due to injury history or sport, adding this prehab in once or twice a week can give you an edge.

Below we have divided the week up into 3 days: knee, shoulder, and low back. 

Let's start off the week with a nice, even, full body burn.

Here is week 7 of the 8-week conditioning program. If you haven't started but want to give it a go, please head on back to Week 1 to get going!

As always, please reach out if you need a form check.