This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 286 – ALTIS

 

Are you thinking about sprinting when you are playing a team sport?

”I always share the story of me playing soccer and I remember vividly having a one on one with the defender.  Now this was my second stint playing soccer as a 30 yr old having retired from the game at 24 yr.  I hadn’t changed anything else in those six years apart from spending a lot of time learning how to run faster and more efficiently.  As I push the ball past him, my brain just goes somewhere else for a split second and I lock into my sprint technique thinking about leaning forward, head down, pump my arms, then as soon as I get by him, my brain locks back into the sport and off I go again.

 

Now the ecological dynamics people say it is always an interaction between the task and the environment.  Well, it’s not always.  Sometimes we use these fundamental skills that we develop in other areas of the physical preparation, whether that’s jumping, or running or squatting.  Sometimes we use them as metaphors within the confines of the game, and you refer back to all the training you have done and for a split second your brain goes back into a fundamental skill before you lock back into the game.

 

When, where and how do you incorporate speed sessions into Youth athlete programmes?

”Firstly, it depends on what you mean by youth? Are you talking about an 8 yr old or perhaps a 15-16 yr old?  Have they started to specialise in their sport? Generally what you will see if you look at a playground with a group of 8-10 yr olds running around, most of them run a lot, sprint a lot and they are pretty efficient in how they move.  It is probably getting a little bit worse as they play less but generally it’s pretty good.  If you look again at that same group 5-6 years later, most of them are no longer moving well.

 

If they are 8-12 yr old you are probably doing enough sprinting within their play already, now you may have a few that are not great movers who you might want to say okay, twice a week for 10 minutes we are going to work on making you a little more efficient in the way in which you move.  But the training may be enough if they are running around and sprinting.

 

Now when they are 15-16 yrs the technical demands are playing a much greater importance than the relevance of some of these other things like sprinting, such as doing small sided games and having less and less opportunities to open up and run.  So I would encourage coaches, for whom this is your case, to provide your athletes with opportunities to open up and running and sprinting.  It doesn’t have to be a lot, just work it into your warm ups and do 5-10 mins sprinting, say three times a week.

 

 

Sprinting in warm-ups

On a related issue of warm-ups I find it totally baffling having watched some Premier league soccer warm-ups that the players will not do any sprinting during the warm-up.  Sure they’ll do 4-5 step bursts or some really sloppy strides but not once do they do any actual sprinting!!

 

And as far as planning it into training days, look at what the technical plan is for the training session.  If the plan is going to do a lot of sprinting, we’re not doing any small sided games (SSG), okay well then I’ll just put 3-4 x 20-30m sprints at the end of the warm-up.  Or if we are doing mostly SSG today then we won’t open up a lot so I’ll have to work more sprinting into the warm-up and do 5-6 x 20-30m.  The take home is not so much how we do it, but that we do it! We’ve gone too deep into the specialisation of the sport and the technical demands of the sport, and started to ignore the capacity demands and the strength, power and speed and how people move!

 

At Altis we look at three different speeds, slow, medium and fast velocity.  We have three planes of movement- forwards, sideways and backwards.  And we look at three arcs- short- medium and long arc (with a long arc being the entire body is working fully).  When we get together as a group we will do something to hit all nine components over the course of a session.

 

What is your philosophy of what goes on in the weight room (both for track athletes and then secondly as team sports)?

First and foremost, we always start with the sport and the athlete as individuals. So understanding the athlete is primary.

 

So the first question I ask is, why is this athlete in front of me good at what they do?

 

I then design my programme towards whatever is it that makes them good at what they do (strengthen strengths).  So if they are good at what they do because they have got really good force producing capabilities, then I’m going to spend more time doing, relative to other things closer to when they need to compete well, on force producing abilities.  So I will train them towards that kind of work.  Now that’s for elite sprinters.

 

But if I’m working with a 14-15yr old I’ll still ask the same question, why is this athlete in front of me really good at what they do, but I’ll spend more relative time filling in the gaps at what they are not good at.

 

They are super strong- so I’ll do stuff in the weight room to make them super stronger.  And when they are competing I want them feeling good about themselves- doing things they are confident in and comfortable with.

 

Philosophically as a coach, we tend to see a weakness in an athlete and they say, ‘if only I could improve this weakness, this athlete would be so much better.’  I worked with a speed skater in Canada who for almost four years leading into the Winter Games 2010 was one of the best sprint skaters at the time, he had the World record, he had won a number of world cups.

 

In the year leading up to the 2006 Winter Olympics the coaches and physiologists decided there was a gap here, I think we can make this athlete better if we spend more time on building his strength endurance. Now he was really pretty dominant on the first lap, and he was even pretty dominant on the second lap but tended to drop off a little in the second lap.  So in the Olympic season, you can guess what happened? he lost his mojo, he lost his top end speed because we only have finite amount of stuff we can fit into the envelope, so by working on more strength endurance stuff around the second lap, that took away from what actually made him, him, what made him good! And because you took away stuff that made him feel really good about himself he started losing his confidence and started competing less well.

 

Now I think he went into the games and didn’t even medal, maybe 5th or 6th where he went into the games and the previous quadrennial period as the dominant skater!  So this is a little lesson to think about when to work on strengths and when to work on weaknesses.  We need to be really careful on where we spend time working on things where athletes aren’t very good at.  How does that make you feel psychologically if you just go into every training session doing things that are hard and you feel you suck at?  You can just become a totally different person.

 

What is your process in determining the exercises in the weight room that have the biggest transference into sprinting?

Part of that is just experience, having access to literally hundreds of athletes in Calgary and put them into little boxes and try stuff out and over the course of that time we figured out so much of what can transfer and what can’t.  But now that I’m working with 10 athletes who are all hoping to go to the Olympic games it doesn’t give me much opportunity to trial and error.

 

We know that for example, there isn’t a high degree of transference between say a heavy back squat and running fast.  That may be surprising to some of your listeners.  If you look at the eight finalists in the 100 m sprint and you ask yourself how much these guys can back squat.   Now some strength coaches will look at the story of Ben Johnson who apparently did a 600 lb back squat the day before the 1988 Final and that’s kind of become the bedrock of their understanding of the relationship between strength and speed.  Where he was an anomaly.  If you look at the the eight sprinters at the final in Rio (2016) there wasn’t one of them who could of full back squatted over 150 kg.  I had one of them (the Bronze medalist) and he couldn’t back squat 60 kg!!

 

So strength as we typically define it in the weight room as ‘load’ is not transferable to speed.  Now some governing strength abilities within that do, so eccentric RFD is very important, so can you find some exercises within the weight room to develop that ability within strength that transfers a lot better!

 

Werner Gunther was in the Swiss bob sled teams and I got the chance to watch this guy train over the course of a winter.  Around the same time in 2001 I watched a guy called Adam Archuleta who lit up the NFL combine that year, and his metrics tested out of the roof!  Now his trainer at the time Jay Shrayder did a lot of drop catch work with a really overloaded fast eccentric component as a part of his strength.   I also listened to D Schmidtbleicher who found within his research it was that the stretch was the most important part not the shortening, it was the first ‘s’ in the SSC (stretch-shortening cycle).  What I took from that was that we have a finite amount of energy available to us so we can choose to say do hurdle hops or depth landings.  We can probably do more depth landings if we don’t have to worry about the concentric component (the second ‘s’), than we can full hurdle hops so it is a little bit more efficient.

 

So taking what I learnt from these three athletes around 20 years ago I started working with my athletes what I eventually called reflexive eccentrics (Reflexive Eccentrics. Term used to describe low-load, high-velocity eccentric (yielding) exercises)

which is taking a weight 40-70% 1RM and then dropping explosively into a catch position. So for a squat, if you’ve got an athlete that does 200 kg for 3 reps then we put a 100kg on them at drop into a half squat explosively for 3-5 reps.  Be as quick through that eccentric portion as you can.  This is the part of the work that we do in the weight room that has the most transference and then what we do is try to identify the specific exercise that that type of work transfers over the most for each individual athlete.  So we category athletes upon the way in which they move, are they double leg or single leg dominant, or are they push dominant or pull dominant?  So if we have an athlete that is a double leg push athlete we will do a lot more double leg squat movements.  Whereas if you have an athlete who is a single leg puller then the exercise we would be doing more in the weight room would be say for example, a single leg RDL.

 

How do you categorize the athletes into the full buckets (double, single, push or puller)?

Observe and ask questions

I watch them!  Now that is not a good answer for a young coach because a young coach doesn’t have the experience or the eye to see that this is how the athlete moves, but I actually challenge coaches to do this.

 

The easier one to observe is if they are anterior chain or posterior chain dominant.  If the sprinter has big glutes, big hamstrings, big calves, long Achilles, he/she is almost certainly going to be a puller.  They pull themselves down the track.  On the other side of the equation, if you have someone who has big quads, chest, shoulders, triceps, and a little bent over the waist chances are they are a pusher.

 

Also, ask an athlete which athlete they prefer. If they prefer a squat they are probably a pusher, and if they say Dead lift chances are they are a puller.  Also then ask them if they would prefer to do it on leg or two legs? They are always going to choose the one they are best at, because that’s their bias.  If they are not sure, you can get them to try and see what movement they are more comfortable with, and use our philosophy of moving towards their strengths.

 

Arcs and fascial chains

 

This goes back to what I said about asking the question about why are they good at what they do?

 

• Are they super stable in performing BIG OPEN SHAPES? Big arc person vs. small arc person? Big arc is perhaps more fascially dominant and small arc is perhaps more muscularly dominant
• Snatch is full chain arc (foot to overhead), clean is medium chain arc (foot to shoulder)
• Super tall really skinny fascial dominant athlete might be good at overhead back MB heaves but not so much at underhand forward heaves