This is the second part of my instalment on the presentations I listened to at the Middlesex Student S&C Conference a few weeks ago!

I have written several times about Power.  Check out this blog here.  However, it is always great to hear people speak who are at the cutting edge of the research in strength and power development.

So it was great to listen to this next session.

Paul Comfort

Programme leader for the MSc Strength and Conditioning (University of Salford)

Head of Sports Science Support for Salford City Reds Rugby League Football Club.

Power and RFD Methods and Research

Study 1

Paul took his through the findings of his research in the J Strength Cond Res 25(12): 3269–3273, 2011.  This first study looked at variations of the Power Clean.  All variations were carried out at 60% of 1RM Power clean to determine force-velocity characteristics of each.  The variations included power clean from the floor, a power clean from hang (low), and two versions from the mid-thigh hang (high).

Findings:

• mid thigh clean pull (at 60% 1RM of Power clean) has highest value of Power (Watts), Force (Newtons) and Rate of Force Development (N/s)- see graph below

Discussion points:

• the reduced bar displacement  from a hang position requires greater acceleration of the bar
• Other research was cited which notes time to peak RFD during midthigh clean pulls, at all loads (30, 60, 90, 120% of 1RM Power Clean) was shorter (Peak at 30% 1RM, 99.8 milliseconds) than time to peak RFD in both vertical jumps (194.7  milliseconds) and countermovement jumps (263.3  milliseconds).

Application:

• the use of mid thigh power clean variations to develop Force may assist with the development of sprint speed.
• mid thigh clean pull and mid thigh power clean have practical benefit in that both are easy for less experienced athletes to learn and require less technical excellence.
• during a strength-based Mesocycle, it is suggested that the midthigh clean pull be used because this can be performed at loads >100% 1RM power clean, because the catch phase is not required.
• during a power-based Mesocycle, it is suggested that the midthigh power clean may be advantageous because it results in higher peak power output, peak Fz, and RFD compared with the other variations of the clean.

Study 2

Paul then took his through the findings of his second research study in the J Strength Cond Res 26(5): 1208–1214, 2012.  This study specifically looked at the force-velocity characteristics of the mid-thigh clean pull across a range of loads.

Findings:

• peak power occurred in mid thigh clean pull at a load of 40% 1RM of Power clean
• this corresponds to a bar velocity of 1.65 m/s
• peak force occurred in mid thigh clean pull at a load of 140% 1RM of Power clean
• peak rate of force development occurred in mid thigh clean pull at a load of 120% 1RM of Power clean

Comparison of peak bar velocity across loads

Seeing as there is a lot of current interest in velocity based resistance training it was interesting to note the velocity associated with the mid thigh clean pull during peak power.  According to Paul if you wanted to assess someone’s Power clean 1RM who can’t catch the bar it might be possible to use the weight which corresponds to approximately 1.25 m/s on the clean pull and use that as a guide to predict power clean 1RM!

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Peak Force across Loads

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Rate of Force Development across loads

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Peak Power across loads

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Discussion points:

• these findings are in contrast to the previous findings of Kawamori et al. (2006) who identified that peak power (2,228.9 6 192.3 W) was achieved at 60% of 1RM (power clean) when comparing loads of 30, 60, 90, 120% of 1RM
• peak power achieved at higher loads by Kawamori et al. (2006) is likely a result of the subjects being experienced collegiate weightlifters who may demonstrate a higher level of competence in such exercises
• at 140% 1RM there is a 69% decrease in velocity,  in contrast to only a 10.6% increase in Force!
• stronger individuals maximize power output at a different relative intensity than less strong individuals
• It is likely that the higher loads (70–80% 1RM) previously identified to elicit peak power output during the power clean and hang power clean are as a result of the additional phases of the clean (first pull and transition to mid thigh, or transition to mid thigh only) permitting greater time and range of motion to accelerate the bar before the second pull phase, technically unloading the bar because of its momentum
• the load that appears to elicit peak power output during this study is similar to the loads identified during the squat jump by Stone et al. (2003) of 40% 1RM

Application:

• when training to maximize peak power output, lower loads are recommended. Moreover if the goal is to train force, impulse or RFD higher loads, of 120– 140% 1RM, are recommended
• such exercises should be periodized to progress from max strength (Force) to peak power, in a sequential manner; therefore, it may be beneficial to begin at high loads (>100% 1RM) and progressively decrease loading to maximize velocity and power.

References

Kawamori, N, Rossi, SJ, Justice, BD, Haff, EE, Pistilli, EE, O’Bryant, HS, Stone, MH, and Haff, GG. Peak force and rate of force development during isometric and dynamic mid-thigh clean pulls performed at various intensities. J Strength Cond Res 20: 483–491, 2006.

Stone, MH, O’Bryant, HS, McCoy, L, Coglianese, R, Lehmkuhl, M, and Schilling, B. Power and maximum strength relationships during performance of dynamic and static weighted jumps. J Strength Cond Res 17: 140–147, 2003.

Did you know?

1st4sport offer over 285 qualifications delivered by over 850 centres, including 192 coaching qualifications, in 39 sports!

APA are very proud to say we are one of those endorsed centres qualifying coaches in the Level 2 Certificate in coaching Strength & Conditioning for Sports (L2CCSC).

Here’s what two recent attendees had to say about their experience:

Had a great 4 days on the Level 2 S&C course with APA, the course was delivered in a fun, practical and easy to understand manner in a great learning environment. Any questions/problems I had were quickly sorted face to face or via email with the course leader. ”  Nathan Atlay.

“I would like to thank you for all your work and helping me getting my Level 2 in S&C. I am now confident to safely deliver a program helping my athletes to get stronger and faster and most of all to stay injury free for as long as possible. The course you delivered highlighted my lack of sufficient knowledge in the science behind the S&C and thank to you I will be able to rectify this.”  Sebastien Scaux.

If you are interested on finding out more about the next Level 2 qualification then click HERE for more details.

In the mean time I thought I would discuss a topic to give you an idea of what kind of things we discuss.  We get lots of questions from the candidates on the course so I thought I would try and answer a common one in this post.

Writing training plans for athletes

What do you recommend for training?

 
Train a group of muscle per day? I.e. Monday legs, Tuesday arms and shoulders, Wednesday chest, Thursday back  

Train a group and its opposite I.e. Monday back and chest, Tuesday legs, Wednesday arm and shoulders, Thursday core  

Or train everything during the same session? Maybe with an emphasis on a group of muscle?  

And in term of periodisation how much strength would you have compare to SAQ? I personally think it would more strength at the start of a cycle leading to more SAQ when getting close to competing.

Well let me start by answering the first part of the question.  The type of approach to strength training prescription you are describing there is something we call ‘split routine‘ training.  This is widely used in the sport of body building.

It is important to remember that in our pursuit of athletic performance in certain sports such as tennis, football and rugby, S&C coaches have sought to learn from those sports that are the best in the business at getting strong, powerful and defined.

• Power lifting– the best at developing maximum strength (1 Repetition Maximum in Back Squat, Deadlift and Bench press)  

• Olympic weightlifting– the best at developing Power (1 Repetition Maximum in Clean & Jerk and the Snatch  

• Body building– the best at developing the physique of the body.  Bodybuilding is the use of progressive resistance exercise to control and develop one’s musculature.  An individual who engages in this activity is referred to as a bodybuilder. In competitive amateur and professional bodybuilding, bodybuilders appear in lineups doing specified poses, and later perform individual posing routines, for a panel of judges who rank competitors based on criteria such as symmetry, muscularity and conditioning.

Going back to your original question I would say that split routines are effective for making physique gains for those athletes who are in pursuit of symmetry, muscularity and conditioning.  The split routines are exactly are you describe it, usually working one or two muscles per gym session.  The exercise prescription usually uses sets and reps schemes we would associate with ‘hypertrophy.’  This is a specific type of strength training that we associate with training adaptations that result in increases in the cross sectional area of the muscle.

So the question is should we train athletes who play sports like body builders?

 For the majority of athletes my response is…… No!

But like most things in life it depends!  I think it’s important to distinguish between functional and non-functional hypertrophy.  If you type these terms into the web you’ll get lots of articles on this topic.  Click HERE for a nice summary of Functional Hypertrophy from the Poliquin (Charles) Education Team.

Functional hypertrophy is muscle growth that is strategic so that it grows your muscles in a way so that it will improve physical performance.

Functional hypertrophy training:  

• Strengthens your Type II muscle fibres  
• Involves heavier and more explosive lifting  
• Associated with growth of sarcomeres (contractile proteins)

The problem with body building routines?

The issue is that most body building routines could be considered examples of sessions designed to build non functional hypertrophy! Body builders may have the most impressive physiques but they are not the strongest.  They train you to get big but slow!

Non functional hypertrophy training:  

• Uses forced reps at a slow speed  
• Develops your Type I muscle fibres  
• Associated with growth of sarcoplasm (non contractile elements of muscle cell)

Example of Functional Hypertrophy Workout (Poliquin System)

A functional hypertrophy technique that I teach at my Hypertrophy Bootcamps is the use of Giant Sets. A giant set is a group of four exercises that target one part of the body. For instance, a lower body giant set would be eccentric-enhanced squats, followed by heel-elevated squats to isolate the quads a bit better, followed by lunges, followed by trap bar deadlifts. This is an excellent way to shock the lower body into getting stronger and it will also train cardiovascular fitness. It triggers a robust anabolic hormone response and is particularly effective for boosting growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-1.

Training giant sets and using related training techniques such as varying tempo is the best way to subject your body to something it’s not used so that it has to adapt. The variation of tempo is a complex training strategy in which you alter the amount of time spent on different parts of the lift such as doing eccentric-enhanced squats that use a slow tempo (4 to 6 seconds) for the down motion and a fast tempo (explosive) for the up concentric motion.

APA thoughts on this

There are a couple of principles that I stick to:

• Train Movements not Muscles  
• Unbalanced programmes are needed to get a balanced athlete  
• Train the entire Force-Velocity curve

I think that what Poliquin described above could definitely work as an upper body-lower body split routine.  Doing squats (knee dominant bilateral pattern), lunges, (unilateral hip dominant pattern), deadlift (bilateral hip dominant pattern) respects APA’s first principle of training movements not muscles.

Sometimes you need an unbalanced programme to balance out the body.  So often athletes are over dominant in the push and knee dominant movements and weaker in the pull and hip dominant movements.  The example above is well balanced so if someone is very knee dominant you could tweak that to emphasis more hip dominant exercises.

Finally, it uses variations in tempo from slow eccentrics to explosive concentrics to work both the strength and power ends of the force-velocity curve.

3 is the magic number

For far more in depth analysis on programming considerations please check out one of the APA Philosophy blog posts HERE called ‘3 is the magic number.’

Thanks for reading!!!

This week we will be re-introducing some lifestyle education sessions for the full-time junior athletes that APA work with at Gosling Tennis Academy.  A big part of this is education on nutrition.  I have written several blogs on nutrition over recent months.  To be honest these are based on understanding more advanced concepts such as nutrient timing and periodisation of nutrition.

With kids these numbers will just get lost and it’s a lot more effective to talk about foods rather than grams and calories!  We can start by introducing them to the 6 Pillars of Nutrition, which I have taken from the work of Dr Mike Roussell.

The Healthy Diet:

1.  Eat 5-6 Times per Day  

2. Eat Minimally Processed Foods Without Added Sugars  

3. Eat Fruit and Vegetables  Throughout the Day  

4. Drink more water and Calorie Free Beverages  

5. Focus on Eating Lean Proteins  

6. Be Strategic About Your Starches  

A Picture paints a thousand words

One of the key messages we want to get across is that processed foods with added sugar need to be replaced with protein, fruit and vegetables!

Let’s pick a few of the Pillars and go through an example of the kind of things we might discuss with the kids.

1. Eat 5-6 times a day

A lot of people panic at the thought of having to eat this many times.  But actually all we are asking the child to do is add two healthy snacks to their diet.

A Fruit and a Fat snack  = 1 Apple + 1 portion of Nuts (almonds or pistachios)

2.  Eat Minimally processed foods without added sugars

Don’t over complicate this- we have a simple rule that the kids can’t eat the following while they are at the Tennis Academy

• Fizzy drinks
• Chocolate bars
• Cakes
• Biscuits

You might need to have specific conversations about particular types of cereal bars, flap jacks and so on but the above list is a non-negotiable list

3. Eat Fruit and Vegetables throughout the day

4.  Drink more water and calorie free beverages

With adults the issue might be with coffee and tea, and with kids it is often fizzy drinks.  Cutting these out or down might be as challenging as cutting down smoking so you have to wean them off them gradually.  The 4 steps below work for people who are drinking several cups of tea/ cans of fizzy drink per day!

Step 1: remove 1 fizzy drink / cup of tea from your day!

Step 2: replace 1 fizzy drink/ cup of tea with a diet version / decaffeinated version or green tea

Step 3: replace the fizzy drink / cup of tea with a glass of water

Step 4: Drink 2 litres of water per day

5.  Focus on eating lean proteins

When you talk about protein you have to talk about fats.  It’s about getting the kids to recognise that we want them to eat MEAT and FISH.  Now these animal proteins also contain fats so we need to teach them which ones are better.

Good protein- lean meat (chicken, turkey, fish)

Bad protein- fatty meat (pork, bacon, some cuts of beef)

We can then talk about healthy fats and teach them which sources of fat are better.

Good fat- avocados, nuts, fish, eggs

Bad fat- cheese, butter, pastries, fatty meat

6. Be strategic about your starches

Now at some point we can start to talk about nutrient timing with the kids and explain about how they need to increase or decrease the amount of sugar they are eating depending on how active they are.

However, at the beginning we first want them to understand the different types of carbohydrates.

We will talk about the difference between whole grains (starches) and sugars

So there you have it 6 Nutrition lessons for kids and some examples of the way we might go about introducing these topics to kids!  Keep it simple and talk to them about foods rather than numbers. Even better is to get them to work with the foods and taste them by doing cooking lessons.  There are so many cool ways to get them interested in healthy eating!

Good luck!

Are you a sports coach? As a Sport coach you spend hours with your athletes, so why not join forces with APA and learn how you can make your athletes faster yourself?

Workshops are a way to bridge the gap between coaches and trainers. We need to work together for one common purpose: to give the most and the best for the athletes that walk into our programs.  So come along and find out more about getting your athletes faster!

Title: Speed, Agility & Quickness Training for Sports

Time: 9-12pm Saturday April 25th

Location: Gosling Sports Park

Rate: £30.00 per coach/parent

Student Rate: (14+ athletes): £15.00 per student-  email [email protected] for a discount code

What have we got planned for you? 

Introduction and Overview of Workshop and APA (10 Minutes)

Prepare to Move by Moving to Prepare (20 Minutes)

• Perform and teach a thorough team warm-up (coaches participate)
• Allow for Q & A during this time

Foundations of Speed (20 Minutes)

• Discuss the importance of mobility, range of motion, etc.
• Discuss the importance of reaction training

Mechanics of Speed (20 Minutes)

• Break the mechanics of speed down in this section. We take you through drills, as if you are first teaching your athletes about the mechanics.
• We have you do it/feel it

Speed Drills (We pick our favourites) (90 Minutes of Content)

• Name it
• Demonstrate it
• Break it down and teach it
• Have attendees perform it
• Show 1 or 2 variations
• Indicate application to different sports (or specific sport that you are doing the clinic for)

Repeat this process for as many speed drills that we would like to cover.

Q&A (20 Minutes)

Places are limited so book HERE to reserve your place.

If you would like a comprehensive guide to getting faster that you can read from the comfort of your arm chair then check out the SAQ Training for Sports Bible

In recent years the Full time Academy programme at Gosling Tennis Academy has grown significantly.  APA now write the training programmes for up to 13 full-time junior Tennis players, who are all committed to being the best Tennis player they can be.

In today’s blog I would like to give an example of a Training programme that would be appropriate for this age group.  Then I am going to talk about how we are using the Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale to monitor individual responses to the training programme.

Credit where credit is due, I like to acknowledge the work of other practitioners within my field and it looks like there is some quality programming being done at Proformance Strength & Conditioning in Gloucestershire.

I have included an example of his Key Stage 4 Programme which is an excellent example of a multi-lateral strength & conditioning training programme.  Vern Gambetta would call it a ‘complex‘ programme because it is targeting several biomotor abilities in the same session.  This is a sound approach with developmental level athletes.

Theme: Multi-Directional Speed & Agility & Strength Development

Foam Roll – Issue areas: Quads/Glutes/Calves/Hamstrings

Activation:

Lateral Mini-Band Walk x 10m
Monster Walk x 10m
Hip Flexor Activation x 10/leg
Shoulder Taps x 10/arm

Movement Prep:

x 10 reps per exercise

Glute Bridge / Cook Hip Lift
Overhead Squat
Full Spiderman + Press UP
Forward Lunge
Side Lunge
1 Leg SLDL
1 Leg Squat

Jumping:

Leap & Stick (In Place) 1 x 5/leg
Leap & Stick (Linear)  1 x 5/leg
Leap & Stick (Lateral)  1 x 5/leg

Hop & Stick (In Place) 1 x 5/leg
Hop & Stick (Linear) 1 x 5/leg
Hop & Stick (Lateral) 1 x 5/leg inside & outside

Multi-directional Speed & Agility:

Week 1: Cutting

Lateral Shuffle x 3
Rehearsed Cut x 3
Random Cut x 3
Spin Cut x 3
Speed Cut x 3

Strength & Power Development:

Clean from Thigh 2 x 6
Squat or Deadlift variation
DB Bench Press or DB Overhead Press
Split Squat or RFE Split Squat
Feet elevated TRX Row or Pull Up

Year 10 = 3 x 10 reps
Year 11 = 3 x 6-8 reps

Plank Combo – Left, Right & Front
Skydiver (Prone AW – Scap Retractions)

Recovery:

Full Chain Glute
Hip Flexor Lunge Sequence
Prayer Stretch
Pec Stretch
3D Calf Stretch

The Need to Individualise  

Now Properformance have included this as an example for a fairly homogenous group of Year 10 and Year 11 students.

So what kind of things can we change to regress and progress the athletes in a mixed group?  

There is a pretty large age range  (between 11 and 16 years) in the full-time junior Academy group.  So we need to individualise by adjusting the parameters such as distance/height jumped in the jumping section, we could add challenge to the speed and agility by giving the older players bungees to work against, and in the strength section we can give the players more weight to work against.

But what about managing tiredness levels within the group?

It’s too easy just to say to everyone, ‘this is the session so just get on with it and do the best you can with the energy you have.’ Often you’ll get at least a few athletes who will come up to you and say, ‘I’m too tired today, can I just foam roll?’  But, if you say yes to one and no to another the players might think you’re being unfair.  So how do you manage this?  The first thing is EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION.  

So with our work with Gosling Tennis Academy we have started to get the player’s to monitor more closely their perception of exertion while following a similar programme.  Using the RPE scale we have found it to be a good way of ensuring that we can modify the sessions of players who are perhaps more or less tired than we expected.

We can now look at the player’s Training Load scores together with the player for the previous few days and correlate this with jump scores, and then make smart decisions based on evidence.  This gives us the ability to individualise the workload of the players to account for tiredness and generally we have three options:

1. You’re not as tired as you think you are- get on with it!  
2. You’re tired- reduce the volume by half but keep the intensity up  
3. You’re very tired- do a recovery session and take the next Tennis session off too!

Check out the video below which goes into detail about how we are using RPE, but it also covers a lot of insider information on the kind of Volume of Training players should be doing right from 5 years old all the way up to the professional level.