Great Warm-up Movement You've Never Tried
MB Push + StartWhat is it? A great warm-up tool for getting the CNS firing and reminding the body how to produce a lot of force against the ground. The movement approximates the start for a sprint event. You can’t get as low as you do in the blocks, but it helps teach and reinforce how to produce great amounts of force as you are falling forward.
Why use it? See above, plus it’s fun!
Who should use it? Any athlete that is concerned about a “quick first step.”
If I were to coach myself based on my demonstration in the video, I clearly need to work on allowing myself to fall a fraction of a second longer and spend another fraction of a second extending through and taking advantage of the triple extension moment.
Overall, not too bad for a woman who had a baby exactly one-year ago tomorrow!
Hill Sprints...
Real quick, I had a great time in Charlotte at our business getaway/powerlifting meet. I was quite inspired by how the SAPT’ers competed; beautiful, strong lifts were performed by all. I’m gonna ride this wave of inspiration as long as I can. For those who don’t know, my training has taken a little dip in recent months (just not as frequent or as focused as I’d like), but I intend to turn that around.
One of the mechanisms I’ve reintroduced into my regimen is hill sprints. Readership, meet my hill:
I like hill sprints for many reasons, those being:
Safer
For those who haven’t done much sprinting since their “glory days,” hill sprints will be a much safer option than flat-ground. The risk of having your hammy blowout the backside of our leg, our achilles run up into your glute (yes, slight exaggeration) will be minimized in this setting. The reason being, due to the grade of the hill, there will be less eccentric stress placed on the joint (and it’s connective tissue) and surrounding musculature.
Builds Strength
Your posterior chain will be barking for days (hammy, glutes, etc.) after a hill session. Just ask my wife (whom I’m very proud to say has been accompanying me on these hill ventures). The day after our hill sprint session I received a text saying, “My behind is starting to hurt!”
Adaptable
By adjusting your work to rest ratio you can just as easily acquire speed and acceleration improvement as well as improved conditioning. Longer rest periods will be needed to improve speed (think 3 min between sprints), and for conditioning more of a constant pace (less rest between sprints).
Before you go all willy-nilly on a hill sprint session, heed the following precautions and recommendations:
Warm-Up
Perform a dynamic warm-up prior to engaging in the sprints. Then, run up the hill at about 60%, then 70%, and finally about 80% before kicking into hyper drive.
Protocol
For beginners I’d recommend finding a hill that’s about 20-40yds. Start with about 5 sprints (trust me, this will definitely be enough), and then gradually increase volume over time. Two hill sprint sessions per week will be more than sufficient. I’d also recommend running with about 90-95% intensity as it’ll allow you to recover more quickly between sessions and incur less CNS fatigue.
And careful of the pine cones on the way down…
Chris
Diminishing Pushups
These are great for athletes who are in-season or for anyone looking to improve strength-endurance. Here’s how Diminishing (or Depletion) Pushups work: Do… 3xAMAP – translation: 3 sets of As Many As Possible repetitions
Rest… :90 between each set
What will happen… set 1 will be a high repetition set, the second set will be approximately 50% of set 1, and set 3 will be the lowest at about 30% of set 1.
Why do them?... For athletes in-season, depletion pushups are a great way to end the training week. They are tough, but do not cause any big time fatigue or CNS drain. The big upside is that, via the total body bracing that occurs throughout, the lower body muscles will actually get stimulated and encouraged to maintain strength simply from the main working muscles. Please note that what I’m suggesting here is only appropriate for very high level athletes who are nearing the end of their competitive season. In no way am I suggesting this is an appropriate long-term way to maintain strength during the season.
For everyone else, they can be added to the end of an upper body training session to encourage upper limb conditioning, better core bracing/strength, and to achieve a pretty sick pump.
Tabatas Everywhere
If there was one study that has influenced the fitness industry more than any other, it's gotta be the Tabata Study. Unfortunately, this study is also one of the most misunderstood (and blown out of proportion) studies that I am aware of. It seems that almost everyone caught up in the "high intensity rage" touts that all you need to do to improve both your aerobic and anaerobic capacity is tabata work. Tabata this, tabata that....These same people probably didn't actually read the study, which I'll explain in a bit.
For those of you who don't know, "Tabata" intervals are where you perform 20 seconds of work (ex. sprinting, cycling, burpees, squats, etc.) followed by 10 seconds of rest. This is done for 8 total rounds, (for a 4-minute routine).
Now, for the record, I think this work:rest protocol can be a great tool for fitness clients, or for people just looking to try something different in their daily workouts. Nick Tumminello, for example, has given some great ideas on how to properly progress someone with this protocol and also gave some cool ideas for how to use it. The point of this post isn't to tell you that you should never use a 20:10 work-to-rest ratio, but to clarify some very important points for trainers or strength coaches that read this site. Got it? Cool. Here we go...
Key Points to Understand About the Tabata Study
1) Less than 1% of those who claim to use tabatas are not actually doing tabatas. You may be using a 20:10 work-to-rest protocol, yes....but you're not anywhere close to doing an actual tabata. The test subjects in the study were working at 170% VO2max for each work interval. That's almost impossible to sustain. Unless you've performed a VO2 max test yourself, you can't come anywhere close to actually understanding how difficult it is to work this hard. Let me put it this way: you'd have to be chased by a Saber-Toothed Tiger to sustain this type of intensity, and even then you'd probably fall prey to natural selection due to your inability to hold out for even four minutes.
2) The protocol calls for eight rounds, but the test subjects didn't even always complete all eight. Some had to stop at seven rounds because they couldn't sustain the 170% VO2max output. Again: you're not working as hard as you think you are.
3) Some fitness gurus proclaim that all they need to do is perform tabata intervals to improve both theiranaerobic and aerobic capacity. Again, they couldn't have read the original study. The high-intensity group also performed a session of steady-state work each week. Does this not now befog the entire study by adding in a session of pure aerobic work each week to the high-intensity group?! You can't say that (based off the study) tabata intervals are superior at improving both anaerobic and aerobic qualities when the "tabata group" also performed aerobic work as part of their protocol.
4) The high-intensity group never even achieved the level of aerobic development that the endurance training group did! (See the graph below, which is taken from the original 1996 study). So, does this mean that all you need to do is a bunch of tabatas to improve your aerobic capacity?? Clearly - at least based on this particular study - this isn't optimal.5) Most of the improvements in the high intensity group flat plateaued at the 3-week mark (specifically, the gains dropped from a 20% improvement to only 5%, and it didn't get any better). The anaerobic energy system actually "taps out" very quickly (I say this not based on the Tabata Study alone, but on other research and personal experience), and you don't need to spend all year developing it. If you (or your athletes) are performing tabatas year round then you are wasting valuable time that could be spent improving the energy systems for your given sport.
6) The workload used (on the stationary bike) was supra-maximal. The bike is one of the only pieces of equipment you can use for this magnitude of intensity because of safety concerns (if you fatigue, you won't get hurt due to the fact that you can just stop pedaling). Just understand that if you're using front squats or thrusters or whatever (and using somewhere around 50-115lbs) you may be replicating the work:rest duration of tabata intervals but you're nowhere close to replicating the actual workload.
7) The interval training group didn't perform anything else throughout the course of this study. They weren't doing maximal strength training, power training, attending sports practice, etc. Imagine adding the true tabata protocol to a full schedule of strength and conditioning? Chances are (if you don't pass out from fatigue) you won't improve much at anything else.
Again, my main point is not to say that no one should perform the 20:10 interval ratio. You can certainly use it from time to time, just understand that you're not actually performing a tabata (honestly, as a strength coach, I think I just become a bit miffed when the semantics of it all is abused).
And I'm certainly not anti-high intensity training. It DEFINITELY has its uses, it's just very important to understand how to wield it appropriately.
If you're a strength coach, or train athletes in any way, you'd be unwise to regularly utilize the tabata protocol to prepare your athletes for competition. Could it be a tool to use for a friendly competition every now and then? Certainly. But not as a tool to optimally prepare your athletes for their respective sport.I'd also like to clarify that I'm not trying to be the pot calling the kettle black on this one. When I first started searching the internet for training methods I quickly came across the tabata protocol and handed it out like water to everyone I knew. I'm just glad that I eventually investigated the matter a bit further, and wanted to spread the word.
On My Mind Grapes
Over the last few months I’ve been battling with some programming that seems easy, but is actually a pretty complex problem to solve: the proper progression and periodization for some of the most talented sprinters and jumpers in the country. It’s like when something is so simple it becomes paralyzing in its complexity! Let me give you a little background on the team… the George Mason men’s sprinters and jumpers are extremely talented. Extremely. This past weekend they won the outdoor season’s conference title for the second year in a row. And we didn’t just win - the team annihilated the rest of the conference. In fact, the win was so “in the bag” that the 4x400 team didn’t even run the 4x400. Why? Because they didn’t need to. Those guys are focused on the NCAA National Meet and nothing else. Currently, they’ve posted the 9th fastest time in the NATION. There are some other high points with guys ranked nationally, but I think you get the picture.
Outside of great talent, the unique quality about track and field coaches is that they actually understand and apply sound programming for their kids. So, for the first time in the 6 years I’ve been a NCAA D1 strength coach, I’m interacting with coaches on a daily basis who understand some pretty important concepts that most team sport coaches don’t appreciate: how to get individuals to “peak” at the end of a season. (I’m not trashing team sport coaches, they have many other things to worry about: skill, technical aspects, X’s, O’s, etc.)
To ensure my programming efforts are matching those of the coaching staff and athletes, I’ve been doing a lot of research on training and coaching practices for elite level sprinters and jumpers.
Recently, I came upon Charlie Francis’ lecture on “Weights for Speed.” Charlie Francis passed away almost exactly one year ago (May 12, 2010) and was best known as the coach of the first ever athlete to be stripped of an Olympic Gold Medal (Ben Johnson) for doping. Outside of what, in reality, is a tiny blip on the radar of a great career, Charlie Francis has contributed some wonderful information to the sport. I liken him to Mel Siff in the unbelievable volume of precise training information he managed to produce in his lifetime.
Two of Francis’ closely held coaching tables are the Force/Time Curve and something called Vertical Integration.
In the Force/Time Curve (see my beautiful sketch below), Francis has marked up the curve to reinforce his argument for why the Clean exercise is a poor choice for sprinters (especially as they advance in training age). Francis points out that while plyometric jumps and the Clean come very close to the Sprint in terms of the Force/Time Curve the closeness is actually a problem as it's consistent execution/practice actually takes away from sprint performance. He recommends, instead, to focus on General Strength exercises ONLY for the duration of an athlete’s career. Francis points out that a coach and athlete must develop ALL qualities of the Force/Time Curve (including maximum strength, strength-endurance, etc) to make overall progress, i.e., faster sprinting and longer jumping. I agree wholeheartedly.
The Clean uses 85% of the same muscles that is used in an actual sprint, Francis admits that while being counter-intuitive, this is simply too close for comfort. Especially if using the Vertical Integration style of coaching.
What is vertical integration you ask? It is the concept of training session organization by training age. You can see in the picture below that as years pass the speed work takes up increasingly more training time while plyometric training all but disappears. But general weight training remains an important part of the training week and career long constant. Francis states that the Clean does not fit into this model of training because it TOO closely resembles the sprint. So, in Vertical Integration, an athlete would be walking into the weight room after a speed and light plyometric training session, and then would be required to perform a high skill lift that recruits 85% of the same active muscle that has already been fried in the earlier sprint session. Overtime this continued practice will STALL PROGRESS.
Charlie Francis claims that NO sprinter who has ever broken into the 9.7-9.8s 100m dash time has EVER had a Specific Weight Training program. He claims they have ALL been on General Training programs.
So, what’s the moral of this story? Honestly, I’m not sure. As a general rule, I rarely implement the Olympic lifts with any of my teams. George Mason strength finds its roots with Conjugate Sequence System programming based off the power lifts (squat, bench, deadlift). But, I’m not yet ready (nor have I ever been) to write off Olympic lifts entirely. I believe it’s important to keep as many training “tools in the toolbox" and have a thorough understanding of what to use at the proper moment to ensure an athlete continues to progress safely forward at a higher level of performance.
Does anyone get the 30 Rock “mind grapes” reference? - Sarah
Quick yet brutal workout
It wasn't enough time for a proper warmup and a strength-oriented training session, so I decided to do something that would require very little time and give me my "dose of cardio." I hadn't conditioned in about 8 weeks (I was performing a rough weight gain experiment on myself), so this seemed to be what I needed.
If you think that running is the only way to "get your cardio" on, think again. Try this routine and you'll be gasping for breath within 6 minutes. I grabbed it from Ross Enamait when I was looking for something to do (that wasn't written by me), and it's called "Work Capacity 101."
Basically, start the clock and perform:
- 5 pullups
- 10 med ball slams
- 15 burpees**
- 20 jumping jacks
Continue until you're done (probably anywhere at the 60-90second mark) and rest until the 2-minute mark. Repeat for five to ten rounds, or a 10-20 minute routine.
A few notes:
1. If you can't do pullups (you'll want to be able to do 8-10 comfortably for the pullups in this routine to be appropriate), then perform an inverted row (on a barbell or TRX) to decrease difficulty.
2. If you don't have access to a medicine ball, perform an abdominal exercise of choice
3. The burpees are the most difficult portion of this routine by far. If they render you unable to complete the routine, then try elevating your hands, omitting the pushup portion of the burpee, or reducing the number of burpees from fifteen to ten.
Give it a shot! Be warned: it is WAY harder than it looks. After the fourth or fifth round you'll really be questioning your sanity. I filmed an example round that is located on the right of this webpage, or you can view it HERE.
**Burpees are as hard as you make them. Don't short-change yourself here. A true burpee is completed with a FULL pushup at the bottom (chest to floor) and a JUMP at the top. You can omit the pushup, but understand you are now doing a "squat thrust" or "up down," not a burpee.
P.S. I don't recommend doing something like this very often if increased strength and power are a primary training goal. But it can certainly be used periodically, or for those "cardio junkies" out there!
-Steve
