Tuesday, 20 March 2018

Need For Speed

March 20, 2015

To increase speed you’ll see trainers have their athletes do ladder drills and run over hurdles. I believe this is a total waste of time. You would be much better off working with a strength coach who knows how to get athletes fast.

My athletes are always amazed at how much their speed improves when we don’t perform a single “speed” session on the field. We don’t have a sprint training program. All the work I do with them is in the gym.

Below are some of the things I work on with my athletes to increase speed.

FMS & Structural Balance

The way we go about increasing speed in our athletes is to first of all work on any structural imbalances. To do this we run the FMS and structural balance assessment which allows us to see where the athlete is weak, tight, what their strength deficit is, and much more, plus it allows us to orientate the training program to ensure optimal performance. Year round specialization tends to lead to muscle imbalances and in the general preparation period we work to correct these issues to decrease the risk of injury. If we find a weak VMO for example, we know that this can affect running mechanics, and can also lead to loss of force being applied into the ground, so by strengthening the VMO we can in turn increase running speed. For more information you can read the FMS and structural balance testing articles.

Relative Strength

You need to be strong to have a fast start. Being strong will help you overcome inertia.

One reason for the increase in running speed by getting stronger is that you will be able to apply more force into the ground; most people believe that you need to be able to swing the arms and legs faster. The fact is that while you sprint your muscles need to be able to support more than five times your body weight.

Another thing to consider is muscle mass. Generally, any increase in muscle mass will make an athlete faster. While many of my athletes want to put on muscle mass it is important that this added size is functional. By that I mean if they gain 5 kg on a hypertrophy style program but don’t gain any strength then the extra weight gained is pointless as it will not correlate with increased sports performance. On the other hand if you use the correct training methods that recruit the high-threshold fibers the gains in muscle mass will make an athlete faster because these fibers contribute to speed.

Another important point on muscle mass gains is that if you gain muscle mass too quickly, even if it’s with the right type of training, you could decrease performance at first. Due to the heavier bodyweight and change in mechanics your timing may be off and it can take some time to get used to this new found muscle. The way to go about increasing size optimally is to focus on hypertrophy methods early in the off season to have time to adapt to the changes in body structure or even better it is best to work on the increase in size earlier in the athlete’s career, focusing more on relative strength later on.

Exercise Selection

With all my athletes I use full range of motion free weight exercises. Too often I see athletes focus on exercises such as the leg press and leg extension. These exercises do not carry over to the playing field as well as snatch grip deadlifts on a podium or full squats for example. Machine based work should only be used around 20 percent of the time.

I also like to use complex training, combining traditional exercises with plyometric exercises, rather than doing plyometrics as a stand-alone method. It has been shown that complex training is a great method to increase neuromuscular efficiency through a training effect called post-activation potentiation.

I do zero so called “functional training”. Balancing on a bosu ball and doing squats doesn’t recruit any more muscles than doing regular squats. The reason why stability exercises are a poorer choice is because you have to use less weight.

Decreasing Body Fat

With all of my clients I start by doing their BioPrint. This gives me an insight into their hormonal profile and allows me to design a tailored nutrition, lifestyle, and supplementation plan. For more information you can read this article on BioPrint.

When an athlete gets leaner they increase speed because they aren’t wasting energy carry around an extra 5kg of fat. Fat doesn’t contract and it doesn’t help you run fast. If you want to test this out try carrying 5kg and running a 40m sprint. Compare that to your normal sprint time and you’ll see a pretty big change in time.

This drop in weight isn’t a loss of muscle mass. In fact my athletes drop body fat while increasing their lean body mass. This is important because as we spoke about above, an increase in muscle mass is generally related to an increase in speed.

The advice given by most trainers and dieticians won’t cut it. Calorie restriction will lead to a loss of muscle mass and aerobic exercise which most trainers recommend to lose fat will train the slow twitch fibers and make the fast twitch fibers behave like slow twitch fibers, in turn decreasing speed.

There are many other ways to increase speed. These are just some of the things I do to help my athletes increase their speed and performance on the field. If you want to increase your speed, please feel free to come and train with me or get your program designed and put these methods to the test.

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Wednesday, 18 October 2017

Structural Balance Testing

Structural Balance (SB) Testing

August 13, 2014

Nathan Waters - Total Health Performance

The Need for Structural Balance

The concept of structural balance has been around for many years although it is underutilised in modern program design. Russian and Eastern European countries used this system to classify athletes and to better prepare them for competition. The modern use of structural balance, and in my opinion the best use of this concept, was created and implemented by world renowned strength coach Charles Poliquin.

Charles came up with the concept of structural balance because over the years of working with many national teams he was trying to reduce injuries and increase performance, and every team he worked with needed normative data for selection.

You need normative data so you can determine which athletes will succeed in a given sport and you also need predictor lifts to be able to select the best individuals for that discipline. So for example, Charles figured out early on that in bobsleigh, you needed to be able to double body weight front squat or there was no point in you trying out for the national team because you wouldn’t be strong enough to overcome the inertia of the sleigh.

By using predictor lifts you can determine what each athletes strength levels need to be, to be able to perform internationally or at the top of their chosen sport.

The two main reasons you want to do a structural balance test are:

Reduce injuries
Increase sports performance

As the old saying goes, you are only as strong as your weakest link. The more in balance you are the greater potential for strength you have. As an example, if you are trying to increase your bench pressor if you have stalled in this lift, it may not be that your pectoral or triceps strength is under par, it could be a weakness in the upper back, particularly the rotator cuff. The reason for this is that if the rotator cuff is not strong enough to stabilize the shoulder joint while bench pressing, your brain will send a signal to shut down your working muscles (in this case the pec’s and triceps), to protect the shoulder from injury. So to increase your bench press in this case, you would need to get your rotator cuff strength to match the given norms before you would progress.

As proof, one season Charles trained pro hockey player Jim McKenzie, who improved his 36cm, close-grip bench by 23kg in 12 weeks, from 127kg to 150kg. He did this by focusing on rotator cuff strength – in fact, Charles said he did not have McKenzie do any benching at all during this training program. Six weeks later McKenzie did a close-grip bench press of 172kg.

Another reason why you want to do the structural balance test is that you need to know where to orientate your training. If you don’t have the normative data from the test showing you which muscles are weak and what your limiting factors are, you are just guessing what sort of training you should be doing. So for example if you find that you did have a weak rotator cuff, you would know that you need either more rotator cuff training, more intense rotator cuff work or more varied work for these muscles.

What types of tests do we do?

In the upper body we pick exercises that give an indication of how the shoulder and elbow flexors move. By getting the normative data on these lifts we have an idea of what is going on with the athlete and how to prevent injuries and also what we need to program for them to improve their sports performance.

For the lower body, it depends on how qualified the athlete is. For most, we do challenge tests which can tell us all sorts of things from whether or not the athlete has a weak VMO, weak hamstrings, weak glutes, a weak lower back, tightness of the hip flexors, a tight piriformis, and much more. By doing this we can progress the athlete into being able to perform full squats and Olympic lifts with a reduced risk of injury and in the long run an increased performance in these lifts.

For those that come in and are pretty well structurally balanced, we use lifts such as the power snatch, power clean, front squat and back squat to determine where an athlete needs to focus their training. For example if someone comes into testing and they have a very strong back squat but their power snatch is below the norm, we know that this athlete needs to improve speed with relatively lighter weights or may need more technique work for the power snatch.

What else can be determined from the structural balance test?

We can also test fibre type using the structural balance test. It is not as accurate as a biopsy but it is far less invasive and much more practical to implement. By taking 85% of the 1rm for a given lift and getting the athlete to lift it to failure we can get a picture of what type of athlete we are dealing with. The lower the reps an athlete achieves the more fast-twitch they are.

Training age and the type of training the athlete has done in the past can influence the result of this test. So if an athlete has done excessive amounts of aerobic work in the past they may appear more slow-twitch than they actually are. If you give this athlete a couple of months off aerobic work they can return to the fibre type they are genetically programmed towards. To counter these slight variables within the fibre type test, we correlate these results with a neurotransmitter profile we run on each athlete to determine the best rep schemes, rest periods, rate of change of exercise, and the type of training systems we use for each individual.

This test is important to ensure optimal program design and rate of progress for the individual. For example if you give a fast-twitch athlete a program that is more suited for a slow-twitcher they may lose muscle mass, adapt to the training program too quickly and plateau, overtrain, increase risk of injury, and actually decrease performance in their given sport.

This is true individualisation of training, by using the structural balance test and our other screening procedures; we create a complete profile of the athlete so we can prioritize the training to the athletes needs and optimize their gains by periodising the plan specifically to meet their goals.

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Structural balance testing