Below are details of the next APA Workshop on Speed, Agility and Quickness Training for Sports.

Date: May 24th

Location: Gosling Sports Park

Time: 9-12pm

Cost: £30  with 3 license points for Tennis Coaches 

For those of you who made the last workshop (of the same title) I encourage you to come to this one too! I want to pick up where we left off on the theory and get stuck in to some more practical and really consolidate our learning. 

For those who didn’t make the last one, don’t worry, I’ll give you a summary of the key theory on the day so you understand the key concepts behind the drills!  

Full details are at the link on the website

To wet your appetite check out this video of some of the work APA have been doing with our pro team Tennis players at Gosling Tennis Academy this winter pre-season!!

Please enjoy our latest Blog contribution from APA coach Fabrizio Gargiulo        

The human body is vastly complex, comprised of several ‘systems’. Some are commonly known, others less so. Today we take a look at one of these systems known as the Myofascial system. Most people understand the make up of the body as a series of muscles, tendons and ligaments attached to the skeleton, all surrounded by skin and protecting the vital internal organs. In this blog I aim to challenge the belief that muscles are individual and can operate in isolation and to explain why we (at APA) train our athletes predominantly in compound exercises.

The term Myofascial refers to the unit comprised of muscle and connective tissue. Myofascial meridians join the bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and connective tissue throughout the body in a web-like chain covering the whole body from the ground up to the head. The connective tissue is what connects a chain of muscles together. The muscles could and should be viewed, not as lots of individual muscles attached to bones, but as a single muscle running from head to toe that attaches at many points in order to allow movement. Indeed muscle is not even attached to bone directly but through the connective tissue – fascia. All too easily, however, we are seduced into the convenient mechanical picture that a muscle ‘begins’ or originates here and ‘ends’ or inserts there, and therefore its function is to approximate these two points. This is certainly how it is taught throughout academia, perhaps for simplicity, however a deeper understanding of the connective tissue enables the S&C coach to better plan and articulate training programmes.

The fascia acts as a ‘double-bag’ surrounding the bones, cartilage, and synovial fluid in the inner bag, the periosteum and ligaments forming the inner bag. The muscle fibres being in the outer bag, with the outer bag itself being formed of structures called fascia, intermuscular septa, and myofascia. In total all the bodies structures are connected via fascia, this can from time to time cause problems when one area is placed under stress or trauma, there is likely a chain reaction to another connected part of the body. However it can also work in the advantage of the body with the ‘transfer of tension’ enabling some outstanding feats of strength and athleticism.

The principle researcher in the area of Myofascial meridians for many years has been Thomas Myers. Myers’ talks about the influence of injury on the fascial system with an analogy – if a tree falls on the corner of a building, the corner collapses but the building can remain intact. Much treatment therapy of the body operates with this view of the body – fix the broken part. If one looks at the body as a tensegrity model, however, the entire structure will give when a stress is applied in one corner. “Load it too much and the structure will ultimately break”. Ultimately the strain placed on a structure is distributed throughout that structure and the tensegrity of the structure may have a weak point, which I likely to be the place of collapse or in the human body, point of pain.

Within the human body there have been several ‘lines’ of fascia identified (sometimes known as sling systems) as shown in the diagram.

Athletic movements are dynamic by nature and utilise many if not all of these lines when performing sporting actions such as running, throwing, jumping, kicking a ball or swimming.  It is important therefore that we as strength and conditioning coaches consider the implications of the training we administer to our athletes – ultimately the goal of which is to improve performance and reduce injury risk.

Compound movement training is nothing new, but it is something we advocate highly at APA. Our athletes from a young age are taught strength exercises such as how to squat, lunge, push and pull. With sports such as tennis being multi-directional and explosive, we also focus on teaching landing mechanics, jumping mechanics, change of direction mechanics and Olympic lifting techniques. . Compound exercises are an excellent way of getting the body to utilise many of the lines or sling systems of fascia in the body to stabilise movement, produce power and decelerate the mass of the body.

 As our athletes develop, the early teaching of compound movements such as squats or Olympic lifts will gradually become loaded exercises. Thus enabling us to strengthen the entire chain of the body; myofibrils, connective fascia and the nervous system that feeds them in order to improve athletic performance. Once an athlete has fully developed, the intensity of the training they complete will be the increasing factor, designed to replicate the stress placed on them during competitive situations.

Specificity vs. Athletic training?

There has long been a discussion about training athletes in the specific movements for their sport. The methodology used at APA is to establish a fundamental athletic base from which sport specific training can be added onto. Our predominant athletic population is tennis players, however many of our young players (5-12yrs) will play various other sports alongside tennis, until they choose to focus on one sport. We encourage young players to participate in many sports whilst they are still developing the cognitive and proprioceptive skills needed. However as APA operates in a tennis environment, we train and improve the movements specific to tennis alongside gross motor skills and compound athletic exercises. One of the primary reasons for compound exercises being used is the range or extent of muscles used as part of the exercise and the cross-over or translation to movements within sport.

Examples of which can be found in the Olympic lifts – primarily challenging the superficial front and back lines – which focus on taking the body from a ‘triple flexed’ position to a ‘triple extended’ position under load. A not too distant example of a sporting move is the serve in tennis, although the added rotation and implements of the racquet and ball make it a more complex skill to complete, the muscular actions are very similar.

Running and squatting also utilise similar musculature and fascial lines…

The superficial front and back lines are predominantly used for both running and squatting.

Throwing and kicking a ball also challenge connective fascial systems and so benefit from training the lines and muscles used in each action, such as squatting, lunging, pushing, pulling, rotating and overhead pressing. The lateral and spiral lines are both involved in actions requiring a degree of rotation.

As you can see in all the photos above the body is being placed under severe mechanical stress and it is the fascia and connective tissue that is holding everything together. Without compound training, the myofibrils of the muscles would be the primary target of strength training as in isolation exercises such as leg extension or bicep curls. By training compound movements we are improving our athletes’ whole body and everything that goes into physically performing an explosive task.

If you are interested in using APA to help you improve your athletic performance please get in touch.

Fabrizio Gargiulo

For those of you who were at the recent workshop as promised here is a review of the day.  We tried to get through a lot of topics so it’s probably a good idea to take stock of what we went through by reading this Blog.  For the first of our two part installment I will go over the key messages from the presentation.  In the next installment I will go over the practical exercises. 

For those of you who weren’t there we had 14 attendees, 10 of whom were Tennis Coaches, 2 who were Tennis/S&C coaches and 2 sports studies undergraduate students who are aspiring S&C coaches.  Therefore, the context for this presentation was the sport of Tennis!  It was a 3 hour workshop and we started with an hour presentation. 

Presentation

For me the key outcome of the presentation was to take the Tennis coach into the world of the S&C coach and get them to see human movement through the lens of an S&C coach.  The great thing about working with sports coaches is that they will help us to keep focused on the bottom line, getting an improvement in performance where it counts, on the sporting arena, in this case the tennis court.  And this means that we need to make sure that our physiological adaptations will actually positively transfer to improved sports performance either immediately or at some point in the future. 

Equally we need to help the sports coach realise that there are a number of ingredients that go into helping an athlete realise their body’s full potential to express their athleticism, and not all of the reasons why an athlete may appear to move poorly on the court have to do with a lack of basic speed and power. 

So I talked about efficiency and explained that two key ingredients we need to produce efficient movement are:

1. Suppleness

2. Skill

Suppleness: 

We talked about how if athletes have limitations in mobility that they will be unlikely to achieve the most desirable body positions to efficiently and effectively move.  I showed the example above of an athlete carrying out an aggressive lateral cut and saying how important it was to have ankle,  hip and thoracic spine mobility.  Also, remember that proprioceptive stability is only effective at the ‘normal’ length-tension state in the muscle so if you force the body to get into a position (as can happen at speed in dynamic situations) your proprioceptors in the muscle could be compromised.

Skill:

I wanted to make the point that strength & conditioning coaches can sometimes be guilty of focusing on physiological adaptations as a means to an end and will see it as the sports coaches job to ‘transfer’ those qualities to the sports field.  I feel that skill is an important biomotor ability that S&C coaches can also develop and I broke it down into:

1. Reaction speed

2. Balance

3. Coordination

If you think about the cycle of hitting a shot in tennis it ALWAYS starts with an action in response to something perceived in the environment.  You act or ‘react’ to the movements of the opponent and the ball, you then run to stop and hit the ball in a balanced position (or unbalanced position) and then have to time the segments of the body’s kinetic chain to produce the force (stroke production) at the right time.  The Tennis coach is the best person to develop the skills of reaction, balance and coordination as they relate to hitting the ball. 

Having said that, even though skill is traditionally thought of as the domain of the sports coach targeting these biomotor abilities in S&C sessions makes it easier for athletes to acquire the skills of their sport.   We are assisting the athlete to better organise their bodies by developing their senses especially vision, and proprioception.  

Reaction speed is traditionally thought of as the precursor to quickness.  It can be reactions which involve whole body movement such as a short sprint to chase a ball, but equally it can be the quick reflex action to duck when something is coming towards you, or the quick clap of your hand when you hear the coaching command.  It’s about training an immediate reflex (such as a fear response to danger) or train a response to the information in your environment.  The thing that makes expert performers appear so fast is they have trained this skill to a level where they can ‘act’ in anticipation rather than ‘reacting.’ 

Dynamic balance (stability) is reflex driven hence why balance exercises build upon postural corrective exercises. As well as doing all the physio type ‘activation’ exercises to correct poor static posture we need to do lots of jumping and landing and running and stopping to develop an ability of the proprioceptors to help us manage the body’s constant shifts in centre of gravity during dynamic tasks. 

Coordination is focused on the timing of the movement to get the correct body parts to fire in sequence.   Remember that every sport has a unique motor programme (technique) that is built on a basic coordination foundation.  We can perform get the athletes to perform all sorts of movement puzzles that require good timing such as running to jump and catch a ball in the air or performing sequences with the feet and hands.

Discovery Learning:

I finished discussing skill by making the point that these qualities are REFLEX DRIVEN meaning they are developed in response to changes in the landscape of the environment.  I used to believe that my role as a coach was to make my athletes look good; now I believe it is to challenge them to take them to the point where they struggle.  Beginners will be fine to start with predictable and pre-planned movements because they will bring their own inherent unpredictability to the party.  Think of the task of riding a bike going from doing it with stabilisers to doing it without.  But as soon as possible take the stabilisers off and let them discover how to solve the movement problem.  This is a metaphor for good coaching practice!

 Challenges like this will require Mental effort.  There is a clear Intent to stay on the bike and the Attention should be kept on external focuses such as avoiding obstacles.  This is called ‘Discovery Learning.’  The opposite is known as ‘Teaching’ and would focus on internal factors such as where to hold the handles, how to shift your weight on the bike and how fast to pedal etc.  There is a place for both.  I make a case for doing more  learning and less teaching.

Strength:

Kudos goes to Duncan French who put me onto this.  We know that perhaps more than any other factor, strength is the biggest player when it comes to being athletic and specifically being fast.  Force into the ground is what causes acceleration (A=F/m) so bigger forces at the same body mass cause bigger accelerations!  You need force to overcome your own inertia but you also need even more force to overcome your own momentum and stop!  The qualities of force and rate of force development are where the S&C coaches really can take the lead on. 

Just remember, those adaptations need to help develop better performance on the sporting arena somewhere down the line.

Inter-disciplinary Team Integration:

And leads nicely to my last point and that is something that I think we should be clear on; how we work together to develop athleticism that actually transfers onto the court.  I think there needs to be an honest assessment of the skills that each member of the team brings to the party.  Some S&C coaches have a very vast sport specific knowledge base (and consider themselves a sport specialist), others may be limited in their technical understanding of the sport.  This works for Tennis coaches too; some have different levels of technical knowledge of their sport and different levels of S&C knowledge.  At the end of the day there is no single solution, every team and athlete brings different challenges.  But there needs to be joint accountability and the best interventions are always the ones that are followed through on together.

Louis Cayer said it best, when he said that, ‘a Tennis coach doesn’t need an S&C coach to make a tennis player move well on the court for one game.  But they need them to make them move well on the court for a match, a tournament and a career.’

APA Workshop

Gosling Tennis Academy, 22nd February 2014 9.AM- 12PM

Workshop cost £30

About the workshop:

Athletic Performance Academy (APA) will be hosting a workshop with APA Director and Head of Strength & Conditioning at Gosling IHPC, Daz Drake.  This workshop will bring together the presenter’s extensive experience and background in the field of youth and pro player coaching to give the participant a thorough overview of the current theory and practical application of basic to advanced techniques that can assist in the development of speed, agility and quickness for Sport.

Tennis coaches can claim 3 licence points for attendance

The content will include but is not limited to the following areas:

• The theory and application of Speed, Agility and Quickness training for children, adolescents and pros
• The two types of speed and how to train them
• The two types of agility and how to train them
• The four types of quickness and how to train them
• An insight into the recent movement sessions conducted with 3 of the top 6 British Men Tennis players based at Gosling IHPC during the preseason

  This half day workshop will be split into two parts and will include a theory session and practical training.

About the presenter:

Daz Drake is currently Head of Strength and Conditioning at Gosling Tennis Academy and is Director of Athletic Performance Academy who consult with numerous sports organisations in the south of England.  Daz currently looks after the S&C programmes of some of the top ranked male professional Tennis players in the country, including 3 of the top 6 ranked British Men players.

Click on the link below to save your place on the workshop!

https://athleticperformanceacademy.co.uk/product/speedagilityquicknesstrainingforsports/

Well, it’s got to that time of year again where the junior Academy programme quiets down for Christmas but the Pro team are back with a vengeance to really hit their training hard!!  Christmas time means only one thing in Pro Tennis- Pre-season!!!!  I get to work with our pro players for any where between 4 and 6 weeks of uninterrupted training.  

Most of the guys came back the start of December 2013 and will train with APA up until the end of the second week of January 2014 ready for the British Futures circuit.  For those guys who are ranked inside the top 250 in the world they started a bit earlier because they need to be fit for the start of the Australian Open qualifiers.  It’s been well documented in British Tennis that Gosling Tennis Academy currently have 3 of the top 6 men in British Tennis training there! So some are staying in the UK and some are travelling to Asia/Australia for the ATP tour events!

For this blog I thought I would summarise the overall themes of the Training Blocks that these guys have been following and discuss some of the rational for the design of the training.  If you haven’t already read the APA Training Philosophy blog series I did in October 2012 I would definitely recommend you read APA Philosophy 8 on Training Density.  This is a pretty good overview of my thoughts on how to set up a training week for pro athletes.  It’s worth mentioning that tennis doesn’t really have an extended off-season.  After a few weeks off in mid November to recover from the long season (January to November!) they kind of jump straight back into training- which I guess is more like the pre-season of other sports.  Normally, you would be looking to develop qualities of speed, strength and power in the off-season over 2-3 months and then look to bring up the conditioning aspect of endurance in the pre-season over another month or so. As Tennis is not afforded the luxury of time you have to get the balance between developing the qualities mentioned above in a space of 4-6 weeks!!!

APA Pro-Team Training Block

My initial aim is to develop the important qualities of strength and power but also have one eye on the fact that they may be required to endure long matches right around the corner so we can’t neglect conditioning completely.  To achieve this I break the 6 weeks into two- the first phase is more focused on strength/power and speed.  The second part is focused more on endurance.  The first part has what I consider 6 sessions focused on neural overload (those in red or green boxes) and 4 sessions focused on metabolic overload (those in purple). The rest are either tennis sessions, recovery S&C sessions or off court classroom sessions.

Start of the Training Block: 

Figure 1. Pre-season week 2 of 5.

I’ve chosen week 2 to show you as week 1 was slightly different due to it including testing sessions on Monday and Tuesday.  Week 2 is a pretty good guide to the set up for the week’s training where I am focusing on strength, power and movement.  So basic structure is half-day Wednesday and full day-off Sunday.  The idea is that high neural demand activities that require the athlete to be reasonably fresh (strength/power and movement sessions) are done earlier in the week and/or following a rest day.  The highest volume of conditioning work is saved for the end of the week.  This way I can start the week with neural overload and finish it with metabolic overload.  Therefore, Monday and Thursday are big strength/movement days (lots of neural fatigue- planned specifically to be done the day after a rest).  Friday and Saturday are focused on conditioning.   

Note: all sessions in purple boxes are metabolic focused.  The power circuit on Friday is a metabolic session because it involves repeated efforts of jumps, throws and sprints with incomplete recovery.  The aerobic session is an submaximal interval session usually on a bike, and the anaerobic session is repeated sprints on a tennis court, again with incomplete recovery.

Neural vs. Metabolic Training

I did think about leaving out the conditioning session on Tuesday afternoon.  There are a lot of coaches that will say don’t mix your neural and metabolic sessions in the same day, especially if the last session of the day is metabolically demanding.  The rational being that you will dilute the training effect and the body will remember the last training stress of the day and adapt to that most.  But I put the aerobic session in because I wanted to make sure that the athletes were getting a sufficient volume of training in on the full days (3 sessions a day of S&C including the recovery session) and I felt there was still a strong enough emphasis on neural work over the course of the two days to warrant them doing one conditioning session (aerobic intervals) as the last big session of the day on Tuesday.

Strength vs. Power vs. Hypertrophy

In my previous blog on Training Density I talked about how in-season I normally go for 2-3 weights sessions per week due to the competing demands of the athlete’s sport.  Well in the off-season/ pre-season I’m open to going up to 4 or 5 sessions because this is the only time I can create enough fatigue to overload the body without worrying about them being able to perform in their sport.  I guess the template I have gone for is similar to the one Olympic weight lifters use where there is two days of push (maximal strength- Monday and Thursday).  But I haven’t gone for two pull days (power -typically done on Wednesday and Saturday).  I’ve gone for one power day (Tuesday) and one more hypertrophy only day (Saturday). They are power endurance athletes so I replaced one of the power sessions for a power endurance circuit.

Maximal Strength:  

I personally subscribe to the view (which is supported by research- see blog for more information) that you only need to do 2 maximal strength sessions per week to develop strength in advanced lifters.  I consider this particular group advanced because they can all squat between 1.5 and 2.0 body weight on their 1RM test to good depth (thighs parallel). Therefore in this programme I have elected to do 2 maximal strength sessions (Monday and Thursday) with the first session having a more lower body emphasis and the second having a more upper body emphasis.  However they squat in both sessions.

The power session is on Tuesday.  I will go into more detail on how I do a power session for Tennis players in another blog.  For now just appreciate that they combine a moderately heavy explosive lift (such as a high pull) with a body weight jump or medicine ball throw.  They are not fatigued while doing these supersets.  Now again you could question why it follows the day after a maximal strength session- it should be Wednesday right, like the Olympic wieightlifters?  This would surely give them more recovery?  Or at least do it on Monday before you do the Maximal strength session?? Well, again it goes back to what I am trying to achieve.  I wanted to create neural overload in the first two days (Monday and Tuesday) and make sure I created metabolic overload on Friday and Saturday.  I wanted to have rest days on the Wednesday and Sunday to recover from this BUT I was content to do the power session with a little bit of fatigue because I really wanted to make the maximal strength session my priority and do this when they are fresh.  I was happy for the power session to be in the presence of a little bit of fatigue, knowing that the weights would be a bit lighter.  I also felt the previous day’s heavy lift could potentiate the following day’s explosive lifts.

The Saturday hypertrophy session was a weight training session but without any maximal strength (primary/secondary lifts) or explosive power lifts.  If you read my blog on Exercise Selection you will see this session is pretty much just muscle conditioning (just assistive and auxillary movements).  Because it can be a big ask to expect the athletes to come in on a Saturday for a half day I like them to look forward to this session because it is what I call a vanity session.  They do plenty of functional single joint exercises but there’s also room for them to pick a few exercises for their arms and work the guns!!!  By including this session this means they are doing 4 sessions in the weights room during this training week which I feel helps to ensure there is a good focus on getting stronger in the early part of the training block.

Well that pretty much sums up the overview of a typical training week at the start of the pre-season.  In the next instalment I will look at the training week for one of the final weeks of the pre-season where conditioning is the focus.

Below is a quick video we made to highlight some of the work the guys have been doing.  Hope you like it.