First things first, I have an apology to make.  In 2023, I managed to post in 9 of the 12 months – 24 posts in all, so not a bad run averaging two a month.  2024 hasn’t been a great year for writing blogs with only two so far, and it’s already September.

Truth be told, I decided to develop myself in other areas of my business from April to August 2024, delving deep into social media marketing approaches and AI using ChatGPT.  That didn’t leave a lot of mental energy left for S&C specific blog writing and I didn’t feel this blog was the right vehicle to write about my digital marketing and AI learnings (but tell me if you feel otherwise and would like to hear about it!).

I’m back at it now, and I’ve got quite a few Pacey Performance episodes to review as well as some updates on the APA Method and some of the projects I’ve been working on.

In today’s blog I’m bringing you another Pacey Performance Podcast Review.  This podcast came at a great time as I have been reflecting on the APA Method in recent days.  Whenever you onboard a new member of staff (we have recently recruited a new part time and full-time S&C coach in one of our Tennis Academy contracts) it’s naturally a good time to reflect on your keystones or “pillars” of the programme.

Episode 502 – Gerard McMahon – “Activation exercises: Are they really improving performance or preparing your athletes?”

In this episode of the Pacey Performance Podcast, Gerard McMahon joins us to discuss “activation” exercises and their role in improving performance and preparation. Activation exercises have long been touted for their ability to improve performance by targeting specific muscle groups and maximizing motor unit recruitment. However, Gerard challenges this notion, suggesting that these exercises, often misunderstood and misapplied, may not be as beneficial as many people think.

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

Discussion topics:

‘Let’s set the scene.  What does muscle activation actually mean from your experience and knowledge, and how does that differ to what people actually think it means?”

”Really the neuromuscular system, muscle activation is pretty much it’s bread and butter function.  Muscle activation is a very, very simple function for the neuromuscular system to carry out.  If we’re talking about muscle activation and actually look at how it’s quantified and what it is quantifying, muscle activation is the combination of motor unit recruitment and motor unit firing rate (the number of action potentials discharged by a motor unit).

Motor unit recruitment is where we gradually (according to the Henneman Size principle) and depending on how much force we want to create, we recruit generally larger and larger motor units and the firing rate is the number of action potentials discharged that come with that.  The two of those processes control force levels and combined together they are “muscle activation.”

If you’re talking about what people understand it to be, it’s a little bit different.  I doubt that they know that that’s how muscle activation is quantified.  It’s one of the first questions I ask people.  They will probably throw out a bit of technical jargon but they don’t actually understand how it’s quantified and what it reflects as a measure.  They might draw parallels with post activation potentiation (PAP) which is a completely different thing.  So I think there is general confusion both around what it is and what specific processes you are referring to as well.”

“From your experience, why has this term [activation] found its way into the common language, when clearly the explanation of what it actually is doesn’t seem to come together?”

“I’ve had this conversation a few times with different practitioners, but a couple of us think it might have originated from the sports medicine world potentially, where you have either a clinical population or potentially an athlete population that is injured, or rehabbing and there are with some of those conditions issues with muscle activation.  But, the problem with taking it from the context that is used in those populations, and the way that it is being referred to there, to move that to a healthy population where you are warming up those athletes where there are no issues and anything wrong with, it’s completely superfluous; it’s unnecessary to go down that route because they are healthy.  So I think the practitioners have become seduced by the language, as much as anything.  It sounds really fancy, it sounds as though it is going to be really impactful.

If you want to sprint you activate muscles, if you want to stretch your backside you activate muscles, if you want to blink you activate muscles, it’s literally the bog standard function of the neuromuscular system.  It came probably from the clinical world, sports medicine world, it filtered in but it is out of context because a lot of people use it with heathy athletes when it’s completely unnecessary.  We’ve seen it appear in for example a RAMP protocol for a warm-up:

• Raise Heart rate
• ACTIVATE
• Mobilise
• Potentiate

So coaches are coming across these terms in some of our neurophysiology textbooks with guidelines for working with athletes but again, to me they don’t make much sense in those contexts either.

“So what factors affect muscle activation levels?”

“Really if you go back to what affects muscle activation, you have to go back to the fundamental way it is measured and quantified which is a combination of motor unit recruitment and motor unit firing rate (also known as rate coding).  So, if people want to increase muscle activation they have to increase either motor unit recruitment or rate coding or both of those in combination.  Those are the two big ones, there are one or two other but those are the two you want to be looking after if you want to increase activation.

The two ways to increase muscle recruitment and motor unit firing rate is:

• Muscle force – you have to generate more and more force to drive up motor unit recruitment

It depends on the muscle group as well.  If you take the adductor polis in you hand, a small muscle found in the hand full of slow twitch fibres, its motor unit recruitment is maximised (completely maximal) at about 30% of maximal voluntary contraction (MVC).  So only 30% of your maximum effort and you have recruited all of the muscle fibres within it already.  So with the bigger mixed muscle groups that contain a bit more Type II (fast twitch) muscle fibres, they might take a bit higher forces – so you’re probably looking at anywhere between 75-85% MVC for those muscles.  So the large muscles with the bigger motor units (because they contain more muscle fibres) require more force.  Because most sports involve those big muscle groups and motor units (quadriceps, hamstrings, Gluteals etc) that’s going to take higher forces to get up to the maximum recruitment.  The key thing is that it doesn’t need to be a complete maximum force/effort to get all of those motor units involved.

Rate coding – motor unit recruitment can be maximised at submaximal levels (most of them are between 50-85% MVC) but actually rate coding is much more important that the motor unit recruitment for the highest forces that you want to produce.

• Develop force rapidly – so speed or power.  The control of that is slightly different as you don’t get maximal motor unit recruitment because you don’t have time essentially, to get all of those motor units and you don’t develop maximum force as well.  But what you do do with a fast or powerful contraction is you do get very, very high amount of action potentials discharged (firing rates).   You go through far higher discharge rates during a fast contraction than you do through a maximum isometric contraction, for example.

So, in a nutshell, if you want to get high muscle activation the muscle contractions need to involve HIGH FORCES or submaximal forces with a HIGH VELOCITY.

So, that’s what your exercises need to look like if you want to attain high muscle activation, by definition.  There are other smaller matters like the joint angle, as the joint angle will change the muscle’s length, and at different muscle lengths there are better muscle activation levels.  So, when a muscle is fully extended, if you take the knee joint for example, when the leg is fully extended activation doesn’t tend to be as high during maximal efforts, or if it’s really flexed like if you’re deep down in a squat, activation isn’t quite as high either.  You tend to get the best activation of the quadriceps in and around moderate to slightly long muscle lengths, that pretty much follows the force-length relationship of those muscles.

Muscle temperature has the potential to decrease rather than increase the activation so if the muscle temperature is raised too much you may get a decrease in muscle activation but again the affects of that are not particularly high unless the muscle temperature is exceedingly high.  Joint angle and muscle temperature play very much second fiddle to the big ones which are muscle force and contraction velocity.

“In terms of quantifying it, where has this confusion around EMG come into play?”

“EMG is a very useful measure.  That is a global representation of muscle activation, it’s more of a mathematical representation of it more than anything, and it contains (the EMG amplitude that you see, the EMG reading) information both on motor unit recruitment and the motor unit firing rate.  But it is NOT an exact representation of that, because what you need to do to get those numbers out for motor unit recruitment and the motor unit firing rate, is you need to decompose that surface EMG, which is where high density EMG comes into it, where you’ve got mathematical algorithms etc and ways of breaking down and decomposing those signals.  So they’re quite complex and representative but where a lot of people go wrong is in the interpretation of those amplitudes and what those amplitudes mean because they are affected by so many different factors that you have to account for, the underlying physiology and the metabolic condition of the muscle and things like that.  They all affect the neural system so it’s not a very simple, straightforward cause and effect.  You can get changes in EMG without the muscle making any more force, without a change in function.  But you can also get a neural change that does match the function.

If you look at EMG I would argue it’s absolutely meaningless without other measures to back it up such as a force measure or something that is able to show you what function changes as a result of that change in EMG amplitude.

What comes along with activation, when practitioners talk about how I’m doing this exercise to increase muscle activation, they don’t ever measure it!  You’ll find GPS units, you’ll find heart rate monitors, you’ll find all sorts of different monitoring tools but muscle activation seems to be for some reason that thing that people say they’re trying to do, but they don’t ever try to quantify it using EMG.  But I wouldn’t necessarily try to encourage that anyway, because unless you have a background in it, you need to have such tight controls and processes as part of your EMG methodologies so it is not something you decide I want to start doing tomorrow, pick up electrodes and run with it.  You have to have a very good background because how stringent your EMG methodologies are dictates how good quality data you have and actually what kind of inferences you are trying to make with whatever you’re trying to measure.  So it really is a minefield and also with advances in technology we are still learning a huge amount of things about the neurological system so it’s not the sort of thing you can dip your toe in and use here and use there, you need to be consistent at using it.

“EMG shorts, not to throw any companies under a bus, people are probably wanting to replicate what they see in these studies and rank exercises based on activation but what value do they bring?”

“I would argue minimal.  The biggest limitation of surface EMG to begin with, no matter how good you are at  it, it’s based on the skin and the skin can move relative to the underlying muscle, so that’s one thing you have to be really careful with when you’re interpreting EMG because how close you are to the neuromuscular junction changes the EMG amplitude signal on its own regardless of changes in force.  So if your skin is moving at all relative to that, that’s changing the amplitude, not anything to do with the exercise you’re doing.  That happens at the best of time in EMG, so if you have EMG in shorts or a piece of clothing that’s embedded in the fabric, that fabric is also sliding over the skin as well so how you can have any idea or be able to make any valuable inference between what you’re recording through EMG shorts and what’s happening in the underlying muscle when you’ve got skin and fabric sliding all over the place – I don’t think you can make those sorts of calls.  It’s a nice idea but again you have to be aware of the underlying limitations of what you’re measuring and the validity and reliability of those, and if the validity and reliability is poor it’s not worth doing.”

“Where has the use of low level activation often using bands pre warm-up come from?”

“That practice did come out of left field over the last 10-15 years and I don’t even remember the last time I’ve seen a warm up without someone using some sort of band.  I think it was probably from the sports medicine world, and this is not me blaming them by the way, it’s just been moved out of context from where it has been used appropriately, to out of context and not used appropriately.  Probably if they’ve had an injury and they’re doing some work around that injury, and the physio and doctor may have communicated that they were using a band to activate such and such muscle, so the athlete goes “oh, I must need a band to activate this muscle,” without being familiar with what the definition of muscle activation actually is.

The practice then just falls incredibly short of theoretical rational so again we go back to the practice where the bands are taken out and the exercises are used, I suppose to be clear, the bands aren’t the problem per se.  It’s relative ease or lack of stiffness of the bands.  So some of the bands are quite tough and stiff and not easily stretched.  If you put force and effort against the band that you can barely move, that will activate the muscle okay.  But what we do see in practice often is very, very low resistance bands being used for the exercise that aren’t challenging the muscle to produce force.  They aren’t performed with any speed so again going back to motor unit recruitment and motor unit firing rate, if you do activities that don’t require much force or don’t require much velocity you aren’t increasing muscle activity levels at all, and that kind of defeats the purpose of what you’re trying to do.

Following on from that is the specificity of it all.  When we look at a lot of the big gross locomotive motions (jumping, sprinting, change of direction) and we have our EMG research done on those types of activities, those activities get you much higher muscle activation than any of those band activities (60-100% EMG).  Those band activities usually quantify anywhere between 20-40% EMG (clams, monster walks).  If you’re going to running in the game, then run in your warm up to increase your muscle activation.  Why on Earth would you try and do an isolated exercise to replace it when it going to give you a low level of activation.  And if running is going to be part of your warm up anyway and supersedes that band work, again, what has that band work achieved?

If you’re coming back from injury and you’re returning to sport you would need to be in very bad shape or have a very specific ongoing injury that is going to affect muscle activation that’s going to require any specific activation.  You should regain in most cases in most injuries full neuromuscular properties back again.”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

1. Definition of muscle activation – the combination of motor unit recruitment and motor unit firing rate.
2. Two ways to increase muscle recruitment and motor unit firing rate is: generate more force, or develop (submaximal) force rapidly.
3. EMG – make sure you back it up with a measure such as a force measure or something that is able to show you what function changes as a result of that change in EMG amplitude.
4.  Measure what matters – when practitioners talk about how I’m doing this exercise to increase muscle activation, they don’t ever measure it!
5. Bigger is better – big gross locomotive motions (jumping, sprinting, change of direction) and we have our EMG research done on those types of activities, those activities get you much higher muscle activation than any of those band activities (60-100% EMG).

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
• Share this post using the buttons on the top and bottom of the post. As one of this blog’s first readers, I’m not just hoping you’ll tell your friends about it. I’m counting on it.
• Leave a comment, telling me where you’re struggling and how I can help

Since you’re here…

…we have a small favuor to ask.  APA aim to bring you compelling content from the world of sports science and coaching.  We are devoted to making athletes fitter, faster and stronger so they can excel in sport. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — APA TEAM

=> Follow us on Facebook

=> Follow us on Instagram

=> Follow us on Twitter

In today’s blog I’m bringing you another Pacey Performance Podcast Review.  This podcast came at a great time as I have been reflecting on the APA Method in recent days.  Whenever you onboard a new member of staff (we have recently recruited a new Head of S&C in one of our Tennis Academy contracts) it’s naturally a good time to reflect on your keystones or “pillars” of the programme.

I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Kelvin Giles when he came back to the UK in 2008.  He was doing some consultancy with British Tennis at the time and he was kind enough to share with me an early version of his “Movement Dynamics” physical competency manual.  This manual was a huge influence on my understanding of how to help young athletes improve their movement efficiency and ability to “move well.”  Taking players through a Physical Competency Assessment (PCA) became a keystone of APA’s method, which is still there to this day.

Kelvin talks extensively about the broader topic of how to engage our current and future generations of young people with an active lifestyle, and in his opinion, the failings of having the only solution being one based around competitive sport.

“Every activity, every word spoken to the young people in our physical education or in our junior club coaching sessions is geared around Results, Ranking and Rewards, which creates ongoing critical stress points to this young person, who is just trying to navigate their growth and and it’s detrimental to their individual progression to adulthood.

79% of 8-14yrs old are not getting the required amount of daily physical activity. 

Just from the stats of “how much” physical activity they are getting, we are in a woeful situation.  But one of the key things for me when you start  to discuss and debate this topic, is let’s not just deal with how much physical activity, the critical one is HOW this is being done.  What are these kids being exposed to by these adult ambitions that are being forced upon them? What’s the progression that they are going on for the next decade?  The physical was taken out of physical education around 40 years ago, and it was decided that our physical education in schools and our junior sports development would build everything around a competitive games-based solution, and we think that it’s the only vehicle we can ever use to get kids moving!  The only solution is to give them a competitive  win-lose type of strategy.  It’s failed, and it’s failed for 40 years!  The 3 Rs are not conducive to development.  There is no such thing as a high performance talent at 8-15 yrs.  We need to give children the enthusiasm to move and to keep moving for the rest of their lives so they stay active is vitally important. The 3 Rs is for high performance but we have a bigger responsibility to the rest of the people in our community.”

[Daz comment- Although this topic is one close to my heart, for this particular blog post I’ll summarise the first 30 minutes. I  then skip to focus in on the second part of the discussions around your “coaching toolkit, which was discussed in the last 20 minutes.]

Episode 481 – Kelvin Giles – “Changing the narrative around health and performance of young athletes and people.”

In this episode of the Pacey Performance Podcast, after 7 years since he first appeared on the show, Rob is joined by High Performance Consultant, Kelvin Giles. With a career spanning decades in both the UK and Australia, Kelvin brings a wealth of experience and insight into the challenges and successes of coaching. This episode takes an in-depth look at the shifting landscape of youth sports, focusing on the critical need for a holistic approach to training and well-being.

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

Discussion topics:

”The high performance interest from professional clubs.  At the bottom of their pyramid is participation – it’s physical fitness in schools.  That’s where they are picking from at 8,9 and 10 years old.  So with that in mind, what is the solution in terms of that base level of keeping kids active or pushing on to high performance?”

”Whether you want to send them on the pathway to high performance sport, where all the money goes, or you want your child to have health and wellbeing for the rest of their lives, they both start at the same place, so there is no excuse!

If your development programme and your high performance programme look exactly the same, then one of them is wrong.  If all you’re doing is watering down the high performance factors, and trying to force that into the children so you think you’ll have an easier pathway to high performance, you’re wrong!  And you’ve been wrong for 50 years.

So it’s going to come down to, who is brave enough and wise enough, to change the mindset of the adults, the language of the adults, the general outcomes that we are going to put down and applaud which is not results, ranking, and rewards.  It’s going to have to be something else, like ENGAGEMENT.  How can we keep engaging them every single day, this individual that keeps turning up.  How can we PROGRESS them appropriately?  Can we engage the individual in this group, or we just going to lump them all together and just wait until we see the one talent.

Coach Education & Mentoring

• Are the coaches using sound learning tools from their toolbox (discussed later in the blog), from implicit learning right through to explicit learning?

• Where’s the quality control coming from?  How’s the national governing body interacting with the coaches? Are they coming down to your club and seeing how you are and watching what you’re doing and mentoring you forward?

Usually the reply is, “No! Once we’ve got our certificate we’re on our own, so it’s in those areas that the solutions have to be found, from the mindset, the vocabulary, right through to what we are teaching our teachers and coaches.  What skills are we wanting the coaches to have?

It took me three years to get anywhere near understanding how I’ve got to try and teach physical education, and even that wasn’t enough, let alone doing just one weekend course for £250 and then letting you loose and hoping that you can go and win the medals for people. 

Can’t you see how it’s just a nonsense.  Yet there are bureaucrats continuing with this process.  But there are pockets of best practice dotted around the world including notably Jeremy Fisch

In the second part of the podcast, we switch up to focus on the “Coaches’ Toolkit.”

”The last thing we will discuss is what should be in a coaches’ toolbox, and I think by coach we could mean someone in high performance, we could mean someone who is working in a primary school or a secondary school etc”

“I’ve got nine things, and the sad thing about just you and me chatting now, is that unless you’re in a room with these people and you’re with them for a couple of days and you’re with them for several weeks, and you say okay, get out your chairs; we’re going to choose one of these tools here and you’re going to practice it.  You’re going to practice it in pairs, then you’re going to practice it in a group, and we’re all going to watch!  We are going to criticise it and then help you out and then you’re going to do it again.  Then we’re going to come and do it again tomorrow and you’re going to keep practising and practising, and you’re going to make terrible mistakes.  We’re going to be here to support you and we’re going to help you through this and we’re going to build your confidence!

1. THE INDIVIDUAL – who are they, where are they, how are they? Not just when they first arrive, but all the way through the session, through the week, through the month, through the cycle, the year, the decade. it never stops!
2. UNDERSTAND THE KEYSTONES – those central pillars of a movement pattern, or an individual pattern inside the foundation movements, or a collective pattern inside the fundamental movements that glue everything together.  It takes a long time to become au fait with those, but that’s part of the job.  For example, getting kids to run as one of the fundamental movements.  So my keystones, the ones that I’ve settled on after 50 years of doing this might not be the same as what you might do.  Mine are: where the foot hits the ground, and in what direction the foot comes off the ground.  Every exercise and activity I do is aimed around those keystones.  So if I take that to the next step, when I see that happen in front of me, it means “toes up, heel to hamstring, step over the opposite knee,”  that becomes where I keep all my attention and I aim at that, and I know if I get those optimal for this individual, those keystones optimal, whatever exercise I pull in are all all aiming slowly in some way, generally. related, specifically, efficiency, consistency, resilience that’s where I’ve finished up
3. PREPARE FOR SESSION – you’ve got to understand time management, space management and equipment management inside this session.  You’ve got to manage time between technical, tactical, physical and behavioural.  We have to keep a sport specific element going on, there has got to be an essence of the sport that the athlete has turned up at a rugby club to play rugby!  That time mangement has got to handle the general to relatedness to specific to make sure I’ve given enough time to those.  Is there enough space for this activity to be done well and safely?  Is there enough space so that there is no queuing going on? Is there enough space for you to coach in, by walking around.  Is the equipment appropriate?.  Have you got enough and where is it?  The athlete will determine what comes next.  So write the session plan in pencil because you’ve got to have adaptability in your coaching because you might need to spend more or less time on something depending on how they respond.  You might need to accelerate an activity for an individual or group who is flying, or you might need to back off if they are struggling.  Where should I stand to look out for the keystones?
4. PLAN THE SESSION ITSELF – a typical session for children is 10 five to seven minute units for a group of 8 year olds.  Ten different sections to keep their attention and cover all the things I’ve said before: Let’s take an example of a running based session plan: warm-up, general running (forwards, backwards, sideways), then some locomotion of hopping, skipping and galloping and then I’m going to work on the event specific keystones, then I’m going to do some of my physical work (squat, lunge, brace, rotate, gait) then I’m going to apply some of the things we have learnt into a fun game such as a relay race.  Now I’m halfway through my session and I’m going to go through it all again, and then I’m going to warm them down. If it’s with the 14 yrs old then maybe I’m going to spend a little bit longer in each unit and do eight times eight units because their attention span is a little bit better.  You are going to fit this programme to these athletes, the opposite has never worked!  Change it on a second to second basis to fit with what is going on.
5. UNDERSTAND THE TOOLS OF PROGRESSION – static to dynamic, simplex to complex, slow to fast, big to small, unloaded to loaded.  Turn the exercise up/turn the exercise down – you do what they can do, you don’t chose how fast they can learn it.  Start with what they can do.  Whoops that was too hard, go back to what they can do!
6. MANIPULATE THE TASK – use analogies to try and create pictures.  Get them to have an external focus, get them to use observation skills with their partner
7. BRING VARIABILITY INTO THE WAY YOU TEACH
8. PROVIDE FEEDBACK – when, what are you are going to feedback, and how are you going to feedback? Start with what’s going right.  You never try and give them feedback while they are doing it.  Choose words that give them pictures straight away.  Ask tjhem questions more than giving them instructions.  Try harder, go faster are meaningless feedback
9. REFLECTION – after 5 minutes ask is this working? Have I engaged them all? Then reflect at the end of the session? Did I engage them all? Was it fun? Will they all want to come back again? Did I progress them in some way, not just outcomes of winning performances?

Top 5 Take Away Points:

1. Results, Ranking and Rewards – creates ongoing critical stress points to this young person.
2. Today’s children are inactive – 79% of 8-14yrs old are not getting the required amount of daily physical activity.
3. Current solution is not fit for purpose – we build everything around a competitive games-based solution, and we think that it’s the only vehicle we can ever use to get kids moving!
4. Time for change – We need the key stakeholders to change the way we approach the coaching of the athletes and also the coaching of the coaches!
5. Importance of a coach toolkit – the essential skill any coach needs to successfully coach a group of athletes.

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
• Share this post using the buttons on the top and bottom of the post. As one of this blog’s first readers, I’m not just hoping you’ll tell your friends about it. I’m counting on it.
• Leave a comment, telling me where you’re struggling and how I can help

Since you’re here…

…we have a small favuor to ask.  APA aim to bring you compelling content from the world of sports science and coaching.  We are devoted to making athletes fitter, faster and stronger so they can excel in sport. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — APA TEAM

=> Follow us on Facebook

=> Follow us on Instagram

=> Follow us on Twitter

In today’s blog I’m bringing you another Pacey Performance Podcast Review.  Full disclosure, I’ve focused on part 1 of the podcast chat – which focuses more on the conditioning methods chat.  Part 2 was all about the role of sport science, which I haven’t mentioned below, so if you’re interested in listening to what they spoke about on that topic, you’ll need to listen to part 2.  This podcast came at a great time as I have been gearing up to support a few professional tennis players on their “pre-season.”

As Aaron discusses in the podcast chat, certain sports present certain challenges from a physical conditioning standpoint.  Even though Aaron was talking about MMA and later on about baseball, I think almost all of the lessons apply to Tennis.  In Tennis, you can compete year round, and as one of my colleagues in Tennis, Joe Reed mentioned during his first experience working in Tennis over 2 years ago,

“This opportunity opened my eyes to a new sport (tennis) which can only be described as potentially the most physically, mentally and emotionally demanding out of any sport I’ve coached in. Due to the 11 ½ month competition schedule and non-existent off-season, which is seen in the majority of sports. The athletes are expected to endure long weeks in which they have to manage school, and tennis and maintain outside interests from the age of 10 and up.  The realities of the sport gave me a true appreciation for the athletes that compete and the level of drive necessary to compete at the highest level.“

I’m not going to get into a mud slinging debate as to which sport is the toughest physically, or which one is the toughest to plan for physically.  Let’s just leave it as tennis is right up there.  As for the “non existent off-season” that Joe was describing, to give you a taster, the pro athlete I’m preparing a plan for is currently out competing, starting their second of three final events of the year. They will come back for a less than one week “off-season” over the Christmas period, and then doing a one month “pre-season” to prepare for playing around 60+ matches over at least 25 weeks of the year, that will start at the end of January 2024.  Now, if that same player isn’t consistently qualifying through to Main Draw (which you need to do to earn professional ranking points) then they likely will need to play for more than 25 weeks to chase those ranking points.

Even though that might not sound quite as hectic as a baseball, cricket or basketball competition period, you have to remember that in reality most players trying to climb up the rankings are out there for 25+ weeks of the year in competition mode, have perhaps a few weeks at best completely off to rest, and 4 weeks “pre-season.”   This leaves around 20 weeks to “top up” physical qualities, usually in mini training cycles of 7-21 days, often book-ended by travel from and to their next competition.  So you have to allow a few days either side to manage fatigue.  In reality you have to be really clear on what are the physical themes that will give you the most bang for your buck and push the physical envelope, as you might only have a 7-day window to create some adaptations that will support their physical development throughout the year.

Episode 473 – Aaron Cunanan – “What team sport coaches can learn from UFC about conditioning methods.”

In the Pacey Performance Podcast, host Rob Pacey engages with Aaron Cunanan, the Director of Applied Sports Science for the Cincinnati Reds, delving into various facets of his professional journey and perspectives on sports science. Cunanan begins by acknowledging the influence of mentors like Duncan French, Jeff Head, and John Wagle, who have significantly impacted his development both as a professional and an individual.

Cunanan’s career transition from a weightlifting athlete to a coach marks a pivotal point in his narrative. His initial coaching experiences under Dr. Kyle Pierce at the International Weightlifting Federation provided him with valuable insights into systematic and process-oriented coaching in Olympic sports.

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

Discussion topics:

”From an adaptation point of view, maybe the weightlifting comes first (to mind as a training tool, given your background in weightlifting), can you take us through an example where you intended to go with X in an ideal world, but because of A,B,C and X,Y, Z we have had to go this route?”

”During my time in the UFC and seeing those athletes train and looking at some situations where you have a long time before athletes fight, and they have several months before they next fight, you are able to go through an actual general [physical] preparation phase (GPP) where you might include some weightlifting movements and maybe you are starting out with someone who has zero resistance training experience, and you are going through basic barbell exercises and introducing some simple derivatives or variations from weightlifting.   But the world of MMA is insane.  There are so many different training elements that they are managing from day to day.  You have striking, grappling, wrestling, Ju jitsu, then actual MMA training, then you throw the physical preparation on top of it, recovery and all that sort of stuff.  They may be training for 5, 6, sometimes 7 days a week and maybe things are going great, like I said, you’re introducing these basic weightlifting variations, and suddenly they tweak their shoulder during Ju jitsu, or they tweak their knee.  That may put certain exercises or variations off the table, at least in the short term, or maybe for the rest of the training block.  So, during that general preparation phase you are trying to build general physical capacities, and if you have taken that specific exercise or group of exercises off the table, how are you going to adjust?

Maybe you switch over to loaded plyometrics, or something like that.  So even in a world where resistance training hasn’t always been very embedded within martial arts and MMA (The UFC has done a great job of advancing the approaches to development and training within MMA) you are getting people that for the most part have a really low training age, and you really have to think about the other demands that are being placed upon them.  A lot of time you do have the time from a learning standpoint and a physical development standpoint to make good use of the weightlifting movements but maybe because of all the other things they are doing that day, that week, those exercises are off the table because of not necessarily injuries, but slight tweaks, or soreness or fatigue that may just make that type of training ineffective.  So you have to be able to understand what is the next best thing, or what else can I do in place of that?

Keeping in mind the quote,

there is no perfect fit.  You do something to gain in these things, but you also may lose out on some other areas.  As a practitioner, it is important to be able to and willing to stand behind your decisions and have a good rational and thought process in place for why you make those decisions to be able to defend them if you need to, and being aware of a variety of different modalities so if you do have to make an adjustment, you have different options that you are able to call upon.”

“We have seen that [sport] coaches are looking to track & field coaches for education, inspiration, knowledge, experience in building fast people and we are integrating that into team sports.  I think that is definitely happening more in the conditioning world, people looking to different sports who are perhaps a little bit further ahead in the conditioning sphere, and trying to see how it can be transferred into baseball, for example.  So, I’d just like to get your take on UFC and what you learnt there from a conditioning perspective, and how that’s influenced and helped you transition into other sports like baseball?”

“For me, one of the most exciting things as a practitioner and as a fan of MMA, I think it is the ultimate n = 1 sport in the world.  You have so many different scenarios of working with a fighter who has just signed their first contract with UFC and they’re getting ready for their first fight, all the way through to champions in a weight class that are getting ready for a title defence, and everything in between, including fighters that are changing weight classes, so literally no two instances are the same with any of the fighters, so that can create a lot of challenges but that for me I think is one of the exciting things about trying to solve those challenges, and how you come up with appropriate “trade offs” for those scenarios.  But it does create a lot of difficulties in dealing with these fractured time lines, or these unpredictable time lines.

You might get a scenario where you are working with a fighter who doesn’t have a fight scheduled and they get a call for a short notice fight in 2 weeks.  So, what do from a conditioning standpoint for a fighter who has 2 weeks to prepare?  Or what do you do with a fighter who is on an 8-week training plan, getting ready for a fight and then their opponent gets injured so then the fight gets pushed back another several weeks, so you have just completely disrupted the timelines there.  So, from a periodisation standpoint there is certainly a lot of challenges in terms of how you go about approaching that and addressing that.  But I think that utilising the principles of periodisation and periodised programming still can really help you address all of those different scenarios from a conditioning standpoint.

I talked earlier about all of the different training elements involved in an MMA athlete’s day to day, so you are really trying to make sure that you are aware of and managing all of the different units of training and you should be, I think, trying to maximise training economy.  Where are those opportunities that you can work on conditioning, or specific elements of the conditioning, within some sort of sport specific martial arts practice versus what should you try to address within an S&C specific session?  In an ideal world, if you have the ability to run a full quote unquote “training cycle”, principles of periodisation can be followed:

• Simple to complex
• General to specific
• High volume to low volume
• Less intense to more intense

From a conditioning standpoint, one of the clearest or most useful spectrums to think along is Global adaptation to local muscle endurance, and how that transitions or fits across that ideal timeline.  You may start to work with a fighter at any point along that spectrum and they may not have already gone through a GPP phase, but you pick them up when they would be in a specific preparation phase (SPP) or in the case of a fighter who is taking a short notice fight, in 2 weeks.  That is not enough time from a physiological standpoint to chase cardiac adaptation or any sort of big changes in capacity.  That could be enough time to work on some high intensity endurance through high intensity intervals but with that comes some additional fatigue during a time when (especially if they weren’t specifically preparing for this fight) probably should be sharpening their skills or making sure they’re up to the task from a technical standpoint.  So we know that there is a relationship between increased fatigue and technical execution so what’s the trade-off there that you’re willing to go after?  Is that periodised training? If periodised training is aligning your goals and objective to the available timeline, then I think so.  Some might argue otherwise but the reality of the situation is that you have to understand what adaptations are possible within a given timeline?  What’s your proposed ideal plan for sequencing those adaptations? Then, being able to coordinate with the technical side of things and the sport specific training, I think that’s where you can make the biggest gains or have the biggest impact in terms of not adding too much additional fatigue outside of what they are already doing, but making sure you have a specific training effect to the adaptations or conditioning that they might need.

A realisation I’ve had, which is not something I expected, is that I see so many similarities in terms of weightlifting through to the MMA world through to the baseball world.  Those tight schedules, a lot of training elements, high skill natured sport with focus on the technical execution and the importance of that.”

“From a conditioning point of view in baseball, moving to the present day, what does conditioning look like for your guys?  Obviously there is probably multiple buckets of athletes depending on positional requirements, and scheduling wise, who’s involved, who’s not involved etc  But what does it look like for you?”

“Going back to what are the demands of the sport, we can focus on pitching specifically, by and large it is not an aerobic task in the sense that it is not long continuous activity, but I would say that it is aerobic, or at least, has a high cardiac demand from the standpoint that when the pitcher is on the mound their heart rate is 85% plus of heart rate max the entire time they are on the mound, even though with the introduction of the pitch clock this last season, they are throwing a pitch every 15-20 seconds, depending on if there is a person on base or not.  And so that ability to repeat those high intensity efforts of throwing a pitch at max or near max effort with an elevated heart rate for that prolonged period of time, I think, to me points towards the importance of having a strong cardiovascular system from a very basic standpoint.  Then throw on top of that from a bioenergetic standpoint, rephosphorylation of creatine is primarily takes place through mitochondria respiration which requires aerobic capacity.  So, not to dive into the physiology too much, I do think that there is a strong case for having a robust cardiovascular system to support the efforts of pitching both from the cardiovascular strain that these pitchers experience while they are on the mound, and then also from their recovery in between those high intensity efforts.

It’s pretty clear, you can go into any physiology text book, to see how to improve those things.  Going back to talking about what we were talking about earlier, how do you do that within the environment that you are in, both in terms of equipment that is available, time that is available, when during the year you have the ability to work with these athletes?  In terms of setting a base and foundation standpoint, I think that’s my general philosophy.  And then obviously how that fits in with a specific pitching standpoint in terms of the arm and shoulder being conditioned and ready to throw at high intensity, and what the throwing programme looks like from the off-season, to preparing for that spring training camp, to getting ready for the season.  Again, if we are looking from a macro periodisation standpoint, your off-season training, pre-season training and in-season training, sport specific activity from a throwing standpoint is going to be different just like any other team sport, or any other sport, your conditioning activities off the field should compliment what the objectives of the sport specific training are.  So, you may go from more general aerobic capacities in the off-season from a conditioning standpoint, to more introduction of different circuits, whether that is plyometrics circuit or med ball circuits, or whatever, with just a little bit more higher intensity, repeated effort type circuits, to more pure high power output type activities as we get really close the the spring training period.  Those timelines may shift, or emphasis may be more or less depending on the specific case but speaking in generalities that gives you the meat and potatoes of it.

“One of the easiest adaptations to go after in the off-season would be increasing left ventricular volume, and you do that through low-intensity steady state for really extended periods of time, it’s boring but it is super effective.  From a compliance standpoint, there is probably a more nuanced conversation to land on what the exact training prescription is going to be but you are looking at heart rates at zone 2  (which is all the rage these days) for really extended periods of time, 30 minutes to an hour plus of uninterrupted zone 2 type training around that heart rate intensity.  That helps to target the increase of the left ventricular volume to help increase the amount of blood that is getting pumped out with each beat to the periphery.

As you transition closer to the pre-season camp or your spring training, then you might be able to go after your longer intervals of 4-6 minutes at 80-90% heart rate max, or maybe a little bit higher depending on the fitness level.   That’s where you are getting into stressing the cardiovascular system and the heart specifically to sustain that high heart rate for extended periods of time.  So for me, that’s how I would manage that transition of building a capacity of the heart to fill and deliver blood to the periphery and then you’re making it a little bit more specific with the longer intervals at the higher intensities to be able to allow the heart to sustain and manage that workout or output for those extended periods of time.  That would then probably shift into shorter intervals, not necessarily running or bike but more of the whole total body whether that is med ball or some sort of plyometric interval-based approach, where you are doing repeated high intensity outputs every 10-15-20 seconds, 3-5 reps of that, multiple sets of that to build in that robustness to be able to execute those near maximal or maximum efforts back to back to back.  So that would be the general sequence of those type of activities that would be appropriate.”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

1. Maximise training economy – Where are those opportunities that you can work on conditioning, or specific elements of the conditioning, within some sort of sport specific martial arts practice versus what should you try to address within an S&C specific session?
2. Global adaptation to local muscle endurance – From a conditioning standpoint , one of the clearest or most useful spectrums to think along is Global adaptation to local muscle endurance, and how that transitions or fits across that ideal timeline of a training cycle.
3. Utilising principles of Periodisation – you have to understand what adaptations are possible within a given timeline?  What’s your proposed ideal plan for sequencing those adaptations?
4.  Pitching has an aerobic cost – heart rate is 85% plus of heart rate max the entire time they are on the mound.
5. Conditioning should compliment not compete with technical practices – your conditioning activities off the field should compliment what the objectives of the sport specific training are.

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
• Share this post using the buttons on the top and bottom of the post. As one of this blog’s first readers, I’m not just hoping you’ll tell your friends about it. I’m counting on it.
• Leave a comment, telling me where you’re struggling and how I can help

Since you’re here…

…we have a small favor to ask.  APA aim to bring you compelling content from the world of sports science and coaching.  We are devoted to making athletes fitter, faster and stronger so they can excel in sport. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — APA TEAM

=> Follow us on Facebook

=> Follow us on Instagram

=> Follow us on Twitter

Episode 450 – Tony Blazevich – “Activation” sessions and asymmetries: Are they really that important?

Email: [email protected]

🔉 Listen to the full episode here

Discussion topics:

”In terms of biomechanics, and one of the disciplines, I suppose that normally encompasses a sport science degree, is biomechanics the most scary for an S&C coach?”

”Well, I mean, it depends on your background, but I would say, yes. But here’s the thing. I mean, biomechanics is normally first up, also not the favorite of any sports science student. And what I would say is, I nearly failed maths in high school, I really struggled with maths, physics is a whole different kettle of fish. I loved physics, because it made sense. Maths was very abstract. And so I think with biomechanics, if you are taught by someone who really focuses on techniques, technology and the mathematical underpinnings, then it’s going to scare a lot of people who don’t have happy experiences in that realm. But to me, I always thought when I was a sports science student, that I would end up as a physiologist, because after all, isn’t that what they all were?

But actually, as I got further into my degree, I realized that if I don’t know the movement patterns that are required, if I don’t know the forces we have to develop, if I don’t know the ranges of motion I have to move through. And if I don’t know the speeds that I need someone to move at, then how can I possibly set any kind of useful training program? And so I ended up having to move further and further into the biomechanics. And by the time I got to my PhD, my questions were simply, how do we give an optimum strength training program to a sprint runner? And I would already figure out that maybe just imitating or trying to imitate velocity was not really a key, but there are lots of adaptations as we train it in very different velocities. But maybe there’s something about the movement pattern that we need to replicate.

And I really, in my early career got into this idea of understanding how much we need to replicate a movement pattern, or whether just with lots of sports training, we can just give some basic lifts. And of course, the answer is very, very complicated. And the more I learned, the more I realized I never knew at the time, but that meant that I really had to focus on biomechanics. And ever since then, comparing how humans move to birds and cheetah and monkeys or primates, other primates. That kind of biomechanics really informed me and that was when I was over with you guys in the UK, there are people at UCL and King’s College and that who were really on the animal side, and it really opened my eyes to understanding how any organism can actually complete a task. And once we just break everything back and say, “What organism have I got? What is their goal? And what would be an optimum solution to this movement problem?” Then we start to be able to develop plans. And to be honest, it’s just the most enjoyable part of Sport Sciences, if we just stick to sport today is trying to understand a human from that level. So yeah, I would say, get into your biomechanics as much as you possibly can.”

“One thing I want to start with Tony, and I think it’s probably the thing that with time with an athlete, especially on the field, the S&C Coach has relative carte blanche over, and that’s the warmup. Whether you get 20 minutes, whether you get half an hour, whether you get 10 minutes, is the time where the S&C coach can have some sort of influence and a regular influence.  Why do we do a warm up in the first place? And then we will get into the intricacies of different phases of the warm up, I suppose, in a second?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, there are a lot number of reasons we do the warm up. And you have kind of hit on this idea that if you are the S&C expert in sports like football, I know it’s very common that the warm up is sort of that one place where they say, “Right, you are that person you go and lead it and everything else is really up to the coach.” In other sports, of course, rugby, for example, collision sports, S&C coaches usually have a lot more input, including even the technical aspects of, how to hit and all this kind of stuff. But if we do accept that warm up is all you have got, I mean, ultimately, the warm up is there to get the body ready for optimum performance from a physiological perspective. So that’s everything from changing muscle temperature, remember that around about a one-degree increase in muscle temperature can increase the power output by about 5%. So it’s quite a significant effect having a higher muscle temperature, we have got increasing blood flow and getting the aerobic energy system really kicking along to reduce that oxygen debt when we need to then do high intensity exercise, we have got increases in muscle water, which I think a lot of us forget and maybe we are not still sure of exactly what the overall benefit is. But if you have read studies from the 60s and 70s, you will be very convinced that as the muscle draws a bit of water mostly dragged in by lactate ions or molecules, that muscle water increases muscle force production and improves it across the velocity spectrum. So we think that might have a big effect.  And, that’s sort of, in addition to the neurological perspective.

The neurological is, of course, if you are talking about an S&C, and only having a certain amount of time and trying to figure out how to make the most of it, I think what most of us talk about is, “Well, how can I use that as a way to ingrain optimal movement patterns? How can I use that as a learning opportunity, because I am doing a warm up in every training session and before every game, instead of just literally warming them up, how can I get more bang for buck?” And that’s where a lot of your listeners will think about using drills or skills to optimize movement patterns, putting in situations specific skills and drills that allow players to learn to pick out and notice patterns of play, which the more you see them, the more you start to get them naturally, that can be done in training, understanding how they can regulate their psychology for optimum levels of arousal that can be done during the warm up so that they can then continue to monitor that throughout whatever their competition game or match is. And so there are lots and lots of things you can achieve in a warm up, if you know how to then put the pieces together.”

“Just going back to the animals and it may come back to the same universities, you never see a cheetah stretching and going to do mobility before they go and sprint and catch prey or whatever it is. That’s obviously a far-fetched comparison. But where does that actually come from? Is there anything there whatsoever?”

“Yeah, I mean, first start with the cat. I mean, cats do stretch, by the way. But they don’t do it just before they hunt maybe, they usually have been stalking and moving before they hunt. So they are moving. But you are absolutely right. I mean, the question there, as we could always ask is, “Well, what if the cheetah could warm up would they have been more successful?” And the answer is, we don’t really know until we do the experiments, right? But if your question is, then seriously, why is it that humans feel the need to do these sort of long, protracted warm ups when every other animal on earth, goes about their daily existence without having to do the warm up? And all I would say is that it seems like at least in humans, and this is the same for most mammals, though, is that when we are sitting at rest, our body is not in an optimum state for movement. If you are about to be chased by another animal, we immediately increase body temperature, we increase sympathetic drive, we increase blood flow, we take all the blood from our internal organs.

But when we are about to play a game of netball, or basketball or run 100 meters, we don’t necessarily have that absolute life and death physiological response. And so we then have to imitate it, then once we try to imitate that to some degree, we then start to say, “Well, what else can we bolt on that would make us absolutely optimum?” Because in the end, when we are trying to win a game by one point or one goal or 1/100 of a second, and so then we start to say, “Well, what else can we do?” And this is where the warm up starts to get longer and more complicated when we really tried to fully optimize human performance. I don’t think we need to do that for every weekend warrior, or everyone who just wants to exercise I think these sort of proper, highly developed warm ups are really optimum for competitive athletes and we are trying to do something pretty extraordinary.”

“Do we need to do activation before a training session for rugby or a training session for football? What is the purpose? What do people think is the purpose?”

“Okay, well, I am probably going to have to give a slightly complicated answer here. Just to allay people’s fears, it is not the case that if I just get a glute band and do some side shuffles, and then 15 minutes later go and warm up fully for my sport and perform in the sport that there is likely to be some sort of major and significant effect on performance. That’s probably not the case. But let me just try to allay everyone’s fears across the whole spectrum here. It could be the case that some motor pattern opportunity is being gained by just practicing a very discrete skill first, and that maybe loading it by adding a band just presents more feedback to the central nervous system to know where the body is in space. The idea that it’s somehow then allowing us to activate the agonist muscle to some degree to get more force, I am not sure it’s true. And I can go into much more detail as to why but the idea that the brain needs to get calibration as to where its movements are in 3D space, could be a reason why those sorts of brief short activation sequences might make people feel like they are doing something well. I would argue that if you actually did a very sports specific, skill specific warm up, we would see that those initial activations are not doing anything at all.

But I just want to remind people, though, that it is the case that you might hear, particularly in the physiotherapy fraternity that these activation exercises are maybe more common than in the sports science fraternity and you wonder why and you think, “Well, maybe it’s because we are trained considerably in exercise, whereas they have to be able to diagnose so they get less time to actually learn about exercise.” But at the same time, remember, physios are there with a lot of people who have pain, a lot of people have been injured for a prolonged period of time. And we can talk about this, it absolutely affects your motor pattern and the way the brain communicates through the spinal cord to the muscles. And so in athletes who are struggling to adopt an optimum motor pattern, it is true that if we spend a very small amount of time deliberately trying to activate a muscle or muscle group at a certain length or at a certain joint angle, and we slowly increase the amount of force reproduced in that joint angle, that over the next minutes or even hours, that specific motor pathway will be highly excited, that it will be a pathway that is easier to send signals through, the possibility then exists in those athletes, that when they then start to do the warm up, they are actually feeling like they are able to hit the appropriate technique better.

Again, I am not saying that, that means that they can all of a sudden activate the muscles so remarkably well. What I am saying is that long term potentiation, by long term, we are talking seconds, minutes, maybe hours. Long term potentiation of a neural pathway literally is a way to allow our brain to activate a very specific action or muscle with less central or descending drive. So I just want to say that whilst I would normally not think that what we tend to see as activation exercises are going to have a significant impact on the majority of athletes, I just want people to take that step back and accept that potentially in some people, there is a reason to do it. And it might then help them further down the track through the warm up and into a game or a match.”

“Why did the glutes get such an emphasis on this because I have been places and people call it glute activation, So why focus there? And I know this is a horrible question. But is that focus necessary?” 

“Yeah, I am going to give you my answer. And then I am going to give you that little caveat again. In the majority of people, doing a glute activation exercise is not going to affect the way they then perform a very complicated high velocity task. Okay, so for the majority of people, I have seen no evidence that lying on your back, one leg with your knee very flexed, which just takes your hamstrings off stretch, and trying to activate the glute then affects the way the body works. And I know that there are one or two studies maybe concluding that there is but when I delve into the actual data, I either don’t see that it backs up the conclusion or in fact, I would have taken the opposite conclusion that this actually is indicating that the nervous system is not using it right. So the question then is, “Why is everyone focusing on the glute?”

Well, for a start, if we are talking about running based athletes, it is true that when the hip is relatively flexed, and then generates an extensor moment, the gluteal muscles are very, very important. In that case, gluteus maximus is a really important hip extensor along with the hamstrings. Once the foot is on the ground, you have other gluteal muscles that are really important, minimus medius, as well as tensor fascia latae and a few of your, I will call them just hip rotator muscles a bit like your rotator cuff, you have got like a rotator cuff around the hip. And they are trying to hold the pelvis in the optimum position to allow the hip as the leg swings to store and release elastic energy. And if the hip is falling, that’s energy that we are using to cause rotation. And that’s not energy going into forward propulsion. If the hips are moving like this, then when the thigh moves back, the muscles that are storing elastic energy and not the ones that are then trying to drive the hip flexion once the hip then comes back and corrects itself.

So what we need is for the axial skeleton and the pelvis to be held in very specific body positions, we need a very complicated activation pattern to do it. This requires a lot of the muscles that help to do it, either to extend the hip in the first place, or to hold the pelvis or gluteal muscles, not just glute maximus. And in my experience, I have to admit, I am particularly working in football or in soccer, where you see flattened bums in some athletes, the amount of hip rotation being caused is significant. And when we have then spent eight weeks doing exercises, both the running drills and strength work to get the hip extensors working more effectively, the glutes firing if you like, the running mechanics fix up, and the injuries are moving away. And they are running faster. So I know we don’t like to say, “I want to activate my glute better.” And then people say, “Well, if I couldn’t activate my glute, I couldn’t walk.” And I would say, “Well, I can do a push up, but I can’t bench press 200 kilos.” At the elite level, it could be the case that working a certain motor pathway is very, very useful. And because a lot of us are running athletes, the glute probably caught a lot of that stuff. But look, at the end of the day, the predominant power output is actually coming from your ankle when you run, not from your hip. Your hip obviously does the work that is stored at the ankle. So it’s still absolutely vital. But in lots of other sports and lots of other movement directions. There are many other muscles that need to be activating appropriately for optimum performance. So I am not sure why glute is always specifically targeted. But at the same time, I just want to put in that caveat that in a lot of athletes who aren’t highly trained sprint runners and are doing sports where they are often performing under fatigue and start to get into bad motor pattern habits, that working on how the hip extensors function can be very, very useful for those athletes.”

“So if I am a S&C coach, and I am working in a professional club, and I have sold the coaches, that I need an extra 10 minutes per day, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday for an activation session, what would you recommend that looks like for a group? Do we continue down the glute activation? Because that potentially, based on your previous comments, could be beneficial ?”

“Now, that’s an unanswerable question in the sense that what you would have to be doing is you would have to understand how your players are moving. You have to be thinking about what you believe their current weaknesses are and then if you could improve the way they move, that would reduce injury or improve performance, what exercises would they be? Now, first of all, it’s going to be different for every individual. So you are going to have to prescribe it individually. But let’s pretend that most of your athletes are running in a certain way. Well, the thing is, is that what I would ask is, whether doing some side shuffle glute band stuff is actually going to then optimize the technique you are trying to improve, whether that’s running, running acceleration, changing directions, swerving, whatever it is.

That is if your rugby player is not getting low enough to engage in a tackle, should you be imitating something like that with walkover lunges, or bear crawls on the ground to improve the mobility through the hip? If you have got an athlete that is struggling to decelerate, you might want to then just give a couple of opportunities to decelerate. A lot of athletes have a problem decelerating, and then changing direction and re-accelerating. And so the idea of actually giving them a specific task might be better. And if you want to really peal it back again to replicating glute activation, you know things like one-legged walk over lunges so that we can practice how the hip is going to extend from that, flexed position where we are relatively weak, you can do those kinds of, I guess, activation exercises to remind the brain of where the pelvis is in space, where the hip is, and to remind the brain to make sure that you are using glutes, hamstrings and everything to actually extended the hip. Every coach is probably aware that if you want to optimize a complex task, it can help to break the task down into smaller chunks, allow an understanding of those chunks and then build it back up. And I would argue that as the S&C Coach, you have got the opportunity to do exactly that. And if it looks like a glute band exercise, because you have decided, whatever, that’s not for me to judge, if it looks like a walkover lunge, or it looks like a sprint running drill, or it looks like whatever, that’s up to you. But breaking down a task, and then building it up is not a bad way to spend 10 minutes of a warm up.”

“The influence of the track coaches has made its way into the team sport world and having the audience that we have got mainly in a team sport environment, should they be looking to the best sprinters in the world and saying “I need to use that as my technical model. I need to move my athletes towards what that looks like” Or should we have an alternative model that is more appropriate for my athletes?”

“So there’s a global understanding of how most humans would relatively optimally run at high speed.  There’s a certain configuration of the leg that if we get it about right, we are actually able to store and release elastic energy.  These sorts of ideas, I think are good for every team sport athlete, and there’s no doubt that having a basic understanding of running mechanics and doing basic sprint running training is going to be good for athletes. And, I guess in the US a lot of them have done track at high school, and then they go on to the NFL and they can run, their mechanics are actually really generally very good, not comparing to the elite. I guess the thing that differs is that first of all, there are individual differences. Second of all, you can’t spend all your time doing sprint training. It’s a bit like the S&C coach who wishes they could spend all the time of the athletes in the gym. That’s just not going to happen.

But first of all, there are some nuances. There are some differences in how someone has to run when they are on a field, changing direction and responding to patterns that are in front of them. There’s no doubt that you can only change direction when your foot is on the ground. So having a longer stride may not always be optimum, because you can swerve at long stride, but you can’t change direction effectively at long strides, we may never try to deliberately run our fastest.  A lot of running backs say, “I never actually try and run as fast as I can,” because you are so busy scanning and manipulating that you are not necessarily trying to run as fast as you can. Centre of gravity might be slightly lower, because remember, to change direction, you need to land with some knee flexion and push outwards. And if you are high, you literally can’t do that. And there’s an ACL risk there, because you can align with a straight leg. So there is the idea of keeping centre of gravity lower during acceleration and waiting for changes in direction. There are lots of reasons or lots of ways that I would argue that we manipulate the technique to reduce arm length, stride length, lower centre of gravity, and increased stride rates that are useful in the field sport context that we wouldn’t teach a 100-metre runner. So again, maybe the answer to the question is globally, yes, I actually do believe that understanding how to teach someone to run fast is useful. But then understanding then what you are actually trying to achieve on the field or the court and optimizing that motor pattern is really an important consideration. So just getting someone who can run a fast 100 meters doesn’t mean, they are then going to be extremely good at a sport.”

“So you mentioned sprint drills there. And again, it’s something that’s come up multiple times in conversations with guys that are in the trenches every day with team sport athletes trying to get them fast, or sprinters trying to get them fast. Do you see that there could be potentially poor use of sprint drills, lack of understanding of what the actual end goal is for these particular drills?”

“Yeah, and so in my opinion, my current belief system, where I am at the moment is, again, if we think about trying to learn a very, very complicated movement it is very useful to break it down into smaller components and make sure that the brain understands where the body is in space, then start to move it faster, then start to add on more and more components until we learn a complex activity. In sprinting, which is a very complex sport, we might argue that what we call sprint drills are meant to do that. And I personally have had a lot of success in taking chronically injured athletes and not only improving mobility and balance and a few other things, but taking them back to basic sprint running drills. Because what they are then learning is where their body is in 3D space and getting the nervous system to be able to control this hugely complex environment to move in a pattern that is much more optimum for performance and also for reducing the risk of injury.

And so, if we just take something like a knee lift drill, why do a knee lift? Notice I never call it the high knee lift drill. And that comes down to the cue that if someone’s trying to do the highest knee lift, they tend to lean back, the toes are pointed. I mean, what’s the point? There is none… I can’t understand the reason for that kind of drill. And that’s where we see it, we see people doing drills, but not actually understanding what they are trying to achieve with the drill. Some of the common drills, I never use, to be honest, because I am just not sure what I am trying to learn from it. But if you have got a set of drills, where you know exactly what you are trying to get the human to achieve, and then you build them up into a run. And then if you notice that there’s an issue, you might come back and work on another drill, and then go back into the run and see if that motor pattern has helped. That’s where I think those drills are very, very useful. And if you do them for, particularly from a young age, for years, your body knows exactly where you are in space. And that movement pattern becomes really, really important.

And I will just remind you, because obviously there will be people saying, “Yeah, but the only problem during drills is you have to stay very internal. You always think about where you are, when you are on the field, you can’t do that.” I completely agree. And that’s the whole point right, if every warm up, and every off-season, every pre-season…? Yeah, we do it with our youth development squads from young ages, once it becomes naturalized, you don’t think so much anymore. And that’s the other benefit to warm up is if you just optimized it now, your brain doesn’t have to think, it’s the optimum motor pattern you have just practiced, then you can actually focus on the field and the tackling and the ball and the motor, the patterns that you are trying to achieve external to you and your body should follow a more optimal motor pattern. So I am a big fan of an appropriate drills done with specific rationale in the lead up to proper complex running, change in direction skills.”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

Remember:

• If you’re not subscribed yet, click here to get free email updates, so we can stay in touch.
• Share this post using the buttons on the top and bottom of the post. As one of this blog’s first readers, I’m not just hoping you’ll tell your friends about it. I’m counting on it.
• Leave a comment, telling me where you’re struggling and how I can help

Since you’re here…

…we have a small favor to ask.  APA aim to bring you compelling content from the world of sports science and coaching.  We are devoted to making athletes fitter, faster and stronger so they can excel in sport. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — APA TEAM

=> Follow us on Facebook

=> Follow us on Instagram

=> Follow us on Twitter