Warm Up Outline (10-20min)

Parkour Generations: Rendezvous 2

Anaerobic threshold (AT) is a frequently used term that sometimes causes a little confusion. What is the AT and how can you use it to run faster? For starters, the AT is an extremely reliable and powerful predictor of performance in aerobic exercise. To explore further, I will begin with a brief, oversimplified, review of physiology. Muscles can “burn” glucose two ways, aerobically (“with oxygen”) and anaerobically (“without oxygen”). Both systems generate a temporary energy store, called ATP, which in turn produces mechanical work. However, there are some major differences.

An all out sprint, which requires a great deal of power output in a short period of time, uses the anaerobic system. The energy is quickly available, but the anaerobic pathways are not very efficient ; short term energy stores are rapidly depleted, lactic acid builds up, and exercise soon comes to a halt. After a brief rest, the system is recharged and ready for the next sprint. Distance running, which requires a steady power output over a long period of time, uses the aerobic system. These pathways can’t generate the speed of the anaerobic, but they do possess a great deal more efficiency and endurance. Depending upon the distance, and effort, the body can use different proportions of both of these systems. Those who have raced the 800 meter know it’s too long to be a sprint, but too short to be distance. This is right at the cross-over between the aerobic and anaerobic systems.

While running at a comfortable pace you use both systems, but the anaerobic:aerobic ratio is low enough that the lactate generated is easily removed, and doesn’t build up. As the pace is increased, eventually a point is reached where the production of lactate, by the anaerobic system, is greater than its removal. The AT, also known as the lactate threshold, is the point where lactate (lactic acid) begins to accumulate in the bloodstream.

The AT varies from person to person, and, within a given individual, sport to sport. Untrained individuals have a low AT (approximately 55 % of VO2 max), and elite endurance athletes, a high AT (approx. 80 – 90% of VO2 max). You can train your body to remove lactate better and to juice up the aerobic mitochondrial enzymes, thus raising the AT. Don’t worry you still get to experience the joy of lactate-laden legs that won’t move, but it will happen at a faster running speed. Applying the right types of workouts is the key to properly shape your AT.

Interval work consists of a repeated series of short, high intensity, runs alternating with rest periods. Regardless of the race distance you are training for, 5k or marathon, interval work will help you run faster. Intervals should be creative, fun, and definitely not done every day. Whether it’s 10 x 800m, or a 200m, 400m, 800m 400m, 200m pyramid, continually pushing yourself into a lactate burdened state makes your body adapt. Your aerobic enzymes get supercharged, and you become better at processing lactate.

So how do you know if your workouts are pushing your AT? After several track workouts, you’ll notice the feeling when in the anaerobic zone. There are also exercise tests which can estimate your AT (e.g. Conconi test), and now, through the miracle of modern medical technology, a hand-held device for directly measuring lactate. A small pinprick, one drop of blood, and in less than a minute you know the exact blood lactate concentration. The corresponding heart rate at the AT gives you a convenient way of monitoring your workouts. Regardless, always pay attention to how running feels. Repeat testing several months later can show you how your training is shaping your physiology, and can help fine tune your training plan.

COPYRIGHT ©1997 SportsMed Web

Andrew Charniga, Jr.
Sportivnypress©
2009

Section A

The January issue of Strength and Health {S&H 01:12:1964} reports Tony Garcy established new American records in the snatch with 120 kg and in the clean and jerk with 152.5 kg. The snatch mark exceeded the previous record of Tommy Kono (117.5 kg) created in 1952. The clean and jerk mark exceeded Tony Terlazzo’s record of 150.5 kg set in 1941.

There is no mention, let alone an explanation, as to why it took so long to break these two records. The longevity of Terlazzo’s clean and jerk record is especially noteworthy. It was established in 1941, seven years after Terlazzo became the USA’s first Olympic gold medalist. Terlazzo employed the biomechanically crude “splot” style of lowering his body under the barbell for the clean. This was an awkward combination of a scissoring and partial squatting, i.e., the lifter is unable to lower his center of mass near as far as in the squat style, which was employed by T. Garcy.

The aforementioned two American records stood for 11 and 22 years respectively. The accelerating rate of new world records, without the participation of the USA, was becoming very evident by 1964. For the most part, there are monthly reports in Strength and Health of new world records being established by Russian and other East European lifters. Whereas, the record setting pace even for American records in the USA is inexorably slow.

An article which profiles the career and training of Lou Riecke  appears in Strength and Health {S&H 01:21:1964}. Eight of the ten pictures in the article are of Riecke performing immovable isometrics in an isometric stand. He will be a member of the 1964 Olympic team.

In his report of the 1963 World Weightlifting Championships {S&H 01:74:1964}, Bob Hoffman describes the USA’s middleweight in the press. “He was pressing his old, slow style, very correct, but it handicaps him greatly as compared to those who use the knee kick style of pressing.”

Hoffman later mentioned that this same lifter had injured his thumb so could not train as usual for the snatch; “he could only do power training.” However, because of all the power training (probably a great deal of pulling), “He thought his snatching power was fantastic, but he did not have quite enough to snatch the 125 kg, as it was not even close….”

This simple description of the competition indicates the American lifter (likewise the team as a whole at that time) were not prepared to perform the new looser, speed strength style of pressing. Instead, they still relied on absolute strength with the old idea that still persisted on this side of the Atlantic; if one developed the strength and muscle mass to pull the barbell high, this, under a mistaken assumption, would convert to a big snatch.

In this same issue {S&H 01:76:1964} and report, Bob Hoffman notes, “Zdrazila is a ‘muscles wonder’” and in reference to a Japanese lifter, ”we don’t like to see our lifters jump back.” At least two rather “skinny guys” (H. Zdrazila and W. Baszanowski) who jumped back in the snatch won gold medals at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

The following observations from Bob Hoffman {S&H 02:17:1964} are to be found frequently in his reports of the World’s Championships. “I expected a 135 kg snatch from Gary, he has a back on a larger scale like Chuck Vinci and has a lot of muscles he has not even used yet.” And, in reference to Baszanowski, “We tried to find where this slender looking lifter gets his amazing strength.”

It is for him a concept simply too difficult to grasp and for many more in the USA in those days. How does the man with big muscles fail to lift a weight a man with much smaller muscles lifts without those superficial trappings of strength?

Slender “muscleless” wonders like world champion S. Kolecki are are no longer unusual in weightlifting. Charniga photo

That big muscles are not only no guarantee of success, but, in fact, they could be a hindrance in the quick lifts is a concept inconsistent with the firmly entrenched ideas about weightlifting training and technique in those days.

In the same issue of Strength and Health Hoffman makes the following observation in reference to 90 kg class. “These men who weigh approximately 200 lbs are the best built of the contestants.” But, later in the same report in reference to the Russian 90 kg bronze medallist, he wrote, “Brovko is a mystery man. He presents a fatty appearance.”

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Pat Mendes is unreal to watch!!!

Think of a sport—any sport. How often do you see an athlete sprinting at top speed for 40 yards? How about 400 yards?

The answer is: almost never.

A high school basketball court is 28 yards long. Covering the distance from home plate to first base in baseball takes 30 yards; in softball it’s 20 yards. Moving to the net in volleyball takes just 10 yards.

How often does a football player actually run most of the field? Only when occasionally something really good—or really bad—is happening!

What you do see in sports competition is the majority of athletes accelerating and decelerating over and over and over again.  Unfortunately, as we will discover, that is not what all training sessions for those sports look like. Before we get to the dirty secret of this article, let me share some interesting information about the ability to accelerate.

Training mythology has often boasted that the some of the fastest 10m to 30m sprints in history have been performed by Olympic weight lifters and throwers. How can they be as fast or faster than a world-class sprinter? The solution becomes apparent when we examine what makes great acceleration happen. Acceleration requires huge force production over a longer ground contact than at top speed. Because of this, maximal strength in relation to body weight is critical for success during this acceleration stage. The shot putter or lifter may have the edge here. We also know that stride frequency and stride length are slower and shorter than at top speed. Because of this, the world-class sprinter cannot take advantage yet of their superiorly firing nervous system and subsequent greater turnover. Upper body strength is also critical to great acceleration. Improved arm strength and mechanics are more important to driving the athlete forward than at top speed. This could also give the thrower or lifter the edge. Now as the race goes on, acceleration becomes less and less as the athletes approach their top speed. At the 30m mark, most athletes should be at 95% or more of their top speed. Here is where the sprinter starts passing the shot putter.

The moral of the story? Your athletes have to run the best 10 yards at the beginning of the race. They have to be fast at “getting going”— that’s where the game is played. This is why I have defended the 40-yard dash (and the 10-yard portion especially) as a predictive test that tells me a lot about an athlete.

Because of tests like my cherished 40 (21 4.3’s at the NFL combined over the last 9 years), however, many athletes only think of acceleration in terms of running straight ahead for a short distance. In reality, acceleration can take place in any direction. In actual play, athletes accelerate forward, backward, sideways, and diagonally. Many think acceleration occurs only from a static start. On the contrary, acceleration can also take place from a moving start at any number of speeds. For instance, a receiver in motion may have to accelerate quickly or decelerate quickly on the football field. Both of these are forms of acceleration, and both can be improved with proper training.

As I describe acceleration, I’ll use the classic training situation of forward acceleration from a static start as a common way to describe muscles and biomechanics. Remember that this is not always what happens on the sports field, and that we have to prepare our athletes accordingly.

There are a number of physical and technical characteristics that can lead to poor acceleration. The first and most important characteristic is relative body strength. How strong an athlete is for how much they weigh is directly proportional to how well they can accelerate. Since acceleration is an athlete overcoming their own inertia with the force they produce, the leaner (less body fat) and the stronger they are at that weight are predictors of how well they will accelerate.

To look at the situation generally, the major muscle difference between acceleration and top speed, is that the quads are used more in acceleration, and the hamstrings and hip flexors are more utilized during top speed. The most important areas to strengthen for acceleration are the gluteal and quadriceps muscles, the calves and muscles of the upper body, especially the anterior deltoid. Maximal strength is important here because ground contact times are much longer during acceleration than at top speed. Since there is a greater amount of time to produce force, the more absolutely strong a muscle is coupled with great relative body strength, the better the acceleration. For acceleration training, more maximal weights can be used in exercises such as the squat, hip thrusts, lunge walks, chin ups, calf raises, incline bench and step-ups.

We know that acceleration has a longer ground contact, smaller stride length, less stride frequency, different technique and teaching cues and relies differently on the muscles of the body when compared to top speed. Since there are different muscle actions during acceleration and top speed, it is logical that there will be different cues used when teaching technique. For instance, for force production at foot contact, acceleration should be taught as a “pushing” motion.

For good acceleration, keep the center of gravity low and forward while trying to push out as long strides as possible. It is difficult for any athlete to learn to lean forward. We’re genetically programmed to keep our bodies from leaning forward and falling. (As explained in my Evolution Manifesto: You fell. A large ferocious animal ate you. You learned.)

Driving arm action is also critical to proper acceleration. The athlete should draw in breath right before the acceleration and hold it for the first few steps. This will allow for a Valsavla maneuver and a subsequent better opportunity for your nervous system to produce force. This is all part of what makes it necessary to teach the skill of acceleration to your athletes.

Now for the Dirty Secret

What you have just read is an opportunity to make your athletes faster, but this information alone could also make them more prone to injury!

We have more training information available than ever. We have more trainers training athletes than ever. Kids are starting training younger than ever. We have better equipment and scientific tools than ever. We have fitness screens, performance tests, and better supplements then ever. Why then, if everything was working according to plan, do we have more injuries than ever?  Did you ever think about that as you chuck another plate onto the bar and have your kids take off haphazardly into another sprint?

Deceleration: Not Another “Expendable” in Training

To me, deceleration training is like getting eight hours of sleep and eating right. We all know it is important to the point of being potentially life-threatening, but we still don’t do it as often as we should. Because I believe so strongly in deceleration, I felt compelled to title this piece as provocatively as possible in hopes it would be read and remind every trainer and coach that uses deceleration even less than they eat their broccoli.

Not sure exactly what deceleration training is? Here’s a metaphor to hammer home the point:

Let’s take a car, an athletically-challenged friend’s sturdy, dull kind of car. We’re going to remove the engine and replace it with a high-performance engine built by the best racing engine designers in the business. The car is now going to look pretty much the same, but be phenomenally fast.  Oh, with the addition of that monster Hemi engine, we’re also removing the brakes. Get in, buckle your seat belt, and enjoy the power and speed –until we need those brakes and crash.

Our athletes are crashing. And the injuries that are happening at an all-time rate just might be our fault! With the advent of the internet and sites like this, we have more information at our disposal than ever. We train them to be faster. We train them to be stronger. We “train in” incredible acceleration, powerful speed, heightened jumps. As we put those metaphorical high performance racing engines into their bodies, the forces that can cause injury increase. So, we need to train them to decelerate, to stop, to land jumps; we need to install high performance braking systems because unlike or natural tendencies to run and jump, we were not given the software programs for stopping, cutting and landing. The unchecked increase in non-contact ACL injuries confirms the escalating accident rate. Practice and training have to mimic the actual demands of the sport on the athlete – the kids have to stop, they have to land in an actual game. While it seems counter-intuitive, improving stopping speed and technique not only prevents injuries, but improves speed on the field.

The human body is not designed for modern sports. Stopping, cutting quickly while moving, landing from heights—these abilities are not built into our biomechanical systems. So we either stop playing sports (and we’re all out of jobs we like), or we start teaching our athletes how to control the tremendous forces that are teaching them to generate in these movements.

Studies show the techniques to slow down, stop and land, when taught and practiced are as high as 80¬%-90% effective in reducing the chance of injuries. Across genders, injury prevention and increased performance are built on proper deceleration and landing techniques. The techniques of deceleration are designed to reduce force, obviously, if you reduce force, you put less strain on the body. Remember, tremendous force, subsequently strain, is present every time an athlete incorrectly decelerates or incorrectly lands from a jump. The scary part is that can be thousands of times a season.

Every sports movement uses all three of these muscle functions:

• • • Concentric contractions to create acceleration (or force production).
    • Isometric contractions to create stability.
    • Eccentric contractions to create deceleration (or force reduction).

Training and practices tend to focus on concentric functions, but eccentric contractions set up the concentric. To increase athletic performance and decrease injuries, we need to make eccentric training part of every practice. Deceleration techniques improve neuromuscular control, augment the structural integrity of connective tissue, and reduce forces the body was not built to handle.  We can work the eccentric contraction in the weight room and on the field. The key is to pay attention to another critically important, yet often abused training variable, tempo.

The coaching profession generally doesn’t teach and practice deceleration or landing because we assume that kids know how to slow down, know how to stop, know how to land a jump. They don’t. In order to deal with the demands of modern sports on athletes’ bodies we incorporate three elements into our training regimes.

1. Every drill has a start and a finish. Just watching the start of a sprint is the equivalent of just watching the start of the game. A coach needs to watch technique at the end of sprints as closely as at the beginning. Watch the landing of a jump. Watch the lowering process of a lift. Be there and be on them to finish and lower just as well as they start and press.
2. Teach force reduction, or deceleration, techniques and then continually correct technique. It takes more effort to change a learned bad technique than it does to insist on proper technique to begin with. Unfortunately, by high school most athletes have acquired some really bad deceleration techniques; demonstrate correct technique and insist on its practice.
3. Add tempo to your lifts. Not many athletes care about how much they can lower or how well they can land from a vertical or box jump. Start to value this as a coach and your athletes will start to value it too. Their knees, ankles, hips and wrists will thank you for it.

Estimates are that there are 200,000 ACL injuries alone in the United States each year. Estimated cost for treatment exceeds a billion dollars annually. Economically, how much might our sport insurance rates drop if we could prevent even a quarter of those injuries? How much more money would that give our programs?  If good deceleration techniques can prevent a significant percentage of those injuries, how many of our athletes would be on the playing field, increasing their abilities and self-confidence, instead of in rehab?

I will never be so bold to think we can prevent ever injury. I will also not make you believe that lifting and running are the sole mechanisms behind the injury rates. Yes, there is still a ton we can fix about our training. And yes, we do want to improve the performance and ability of our kids. We just need to focus on the whole picture, and deceleration is one piece of that puzzle.

We know that an athlete who can decelerate actually is faster and performs better on the playing field. Deceleration is a skill. It can be learned. For this learning to occur, it must be continually practiced.

It’s time to start paying as much attention to the brakes as we do the engine.

YOU WANT TO BE A BETTER COMPETITOR?

Article written by Barrie Nelson, GBPF Referee and Coach

What follows may all seem glaringly obvious to you. It certainly does to me. But, I’ve seen more people than I care to remember make an absolute ragshop of competing because they didn’t seem to understand the very basics of competitive powerlifting.

Right off the bat: Not many people will remember what you missed, but you certainly will. (Particularly if it happens to be all three attempts on the same lift – you’ll remember that all right! Or, you should!)

Listen, anyone can ‘bomb’. It’s happened to some real experts. Nobody’s immune.

But, there are ways to make it a hell of a lot less likely. And, I’ll tell you the old one about the three most likely reasons for bombing out – Too heavy, too heavy, and too heavy. It might be an old one, but it’s still mostly true.

So, very obviously: always start with a weight you can do properly, any time, anywhere, in any conditions, on any kind of equipment, and in front of any referees in the world. Having seen some of the decisions I have that can sometimes be a tall order, but you’ve got to try your damnedest to see that that’s the case.

It’s no good giving it, “I did it for two/three/five in the gym last week”. This is contest day! Never mind what you had written on the piece of paper when you walked in the place. Try and find out what you’re going to be good for today, at this competition. Bear in mind what competition it is, where it is, when it is.

If it’s a World Championships, for instance, and you’ve traveled half way round the world, you’ve had time changes of 7 or 8 or more hours, it’s 30 degrees hotter or colder than it was at home, you’re lifting in what’s normally the middle of the night for you, you’ve probably been hanging around for a couple of days, trying to stay relaxed, the referees are going to be as strict or more strict than you’ve ever seen before. Believe me, you’d better be prepared and ready to make some adjustment to what you’d expect at your local contest where you set off from home an hour or two before weigh-in.

You often hear people, having seen the results from an International, saying that certain lifters were down on expectations. Who’s expectations? The reader’s? If you’ve been lifting abroad much you’ll know there are a dozen or more reasons for the prospect of totals being lower than a lifters previous best. Not always, of course, but sometimes. Quite understandable, given the various changing circumstances that can, and do, arise.

Still, this is about maximizing your abilities on contest day – wherever and whenever it is. If you take a look at the results of almost any meaningful powerlifting contest, in the majority of cases the better-placed lifters will have more passed lifts than the lesser-placed lifters. There you go.

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