I’ll let you into what I think really makes the difference: Commitment. When people find out I work with high performance athletes they invariably get round to asking me what it’s like to work with pro athletes. The perception is that it must be some sort of utopian world where every athlete rocks up with a spring in their step, ready to go hard in the gym.

They ask, “Those athletes must be super motivated, right?” Wrong. Elite athletes are just like you and me: They have good days and bad days. They have days where they are bang up for training and they have days where they simply can’t be arsed. They have days where they are super pumped and super motivated (probably due to the quotes they’ve just read) and they have days when motivation to train has dropped off the edge of a cliff, and no amount of “seize the day #mondaymotivation” is going to help.

The secret sauce that separates those that push on through dips in motivation is commitment. If you look at the graph below, in which the red line represents motivation levels in athletes and the blue line represents their commitment levels, you can see that motivation fluctuates massively.

When motivation is high, we are eating clean, training double sessions, and posting selfies with our t-shirts pulled up. But like a rollercoaster, motivation will inevitably dip, and then we are tucking into a tub of ice cream and washing it down with a beer whilst cancelling our gym membership. The key to long-term success is fully committing. Commitment is all about being dedicated to an activity, and the good thing about commitment is it’s far less volatile. Sure, it will also have peaks and troughs but the shifts are nowhere near as violent as the ones we typically experience in motivation.

What you see with an athlete preparing for an Olympic Games over a four-year cycle is their ability to crack on even when motivation is at an all time low. What allows them to push through slumps in motivation is the fact that they are fully committed to the outcome.

I think most people reading this article that struggle to stick to a training plan when it gets tough are doing their own version of the hokey cokey dance. When motivation is high, they put the right foot in, when motivation is low, they put the right foot out. They continue to go in out, in out, and shake it all about, never really accomplishing anything. Successful athletes are rubbish at the hokey cokey, because right from the get-go they jump with both feet in and they stay in for the long haul. That’s what separates elite athletes from most of us. Athletes are very good at committing because they are both feet in.They can ride the motivation rollercoaster because they are committed.

Consider that the reason you struggle to stick to your plans is exactly because you need a feel good motivational quote to get you started, rather than the knowledge that you’ve fully committed to the task. I know for me, I’m not particularly interested in hearing how motivated someone is – I’d much rather see their level of commitment.

Ready for some more real talk?

Life Ain’t Easy: Train Anyway

The post Why Commitment Is More Important Than Motivation appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Evidence supports simple and specific sprint training. No more. [Photo credit: U.S. Army Europe via Flickr CC-BY 2.0]

This sort of crap is reaching epidemic level and if we’re not careful, the skill of developing well-crafted speed, agility, and change of direction training sessions is going to become a lost art. I suspect the people putting these videos online don’t even know there’s a distinct difference between agility and change of direction.

Most of the gizmos and gadgets you see being used in these video such as ladders, parachutes, bungees, reaction belts, and balls have no place in a speed development programme. They should be consigned to the store cupboard, only to see the light of day when some kit is needed for an obstacle race.

All of the evidence – and I’m talking about research, not YouTube clips – supports the use of simple and effective training methodologies to improve sprint performance. A recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research summed it up beautifully: to improve sprint performance, distance-specific training should be implemented.¹ Simple.

There’s no mention of parachutes, elastic bands, hurdles, reaction balls, cones or ladders. The crazy academics have looked at all of the available evidence and figured out that athletes wanting to show their opposition a clean set of heels should focus on….wait for it…wait for it: simple and specific sprint training.

If you want to improve speed, agility and change of direction, here’s what you should spend your time doing.

1. Sprint over the distances that are relevant to your performance, particularly if you need to be rapid over distances greater than 20m.
2. If you need to be quick over shorter distances (i.e., less than 20m), supplement training with resisted sprint training. Towing sleds loaded with around 10% bodyweight will improve horizontal force production, step length, and ground contact time which in turn will help linear acceleration.¹
3. Throw in some strength, power, and plyometric training for good measure. Legendary coach Charlie Francis said: “to go faster, you need more force.” This is once again borne out in the research. A recent study showed changes in maximal squat strength (absolute and relative) can be linked to improvements in speed over distances of less than or equal to 20m.²

The bottom line is, if you want to be quick, give the social media crew with sharp hair cuts and funky drills a wide berth and find a great coach. Stop looking for the sexy, cool, and fancy stuff to spice up training. Stick to the basics and do them well, run fast, run over appropriate distances, and get strong and more powerful. Avoid coaches that hide behind drills and tricks. The bottom line is they just don’t know what they are doing.

References

1. William J. Styles, Martyn J. Matthews and Paul Comfort, “Effects of strength training on squat and sprint performance in soccer players,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 30 (6) (2016) 1534-1539

2. Michael C. Rumpf, Robert G. Lockie, John B. Cronin and Farzad Jalilvand, “Effect of different sprint training methods on sprint performance over various distances: a brief review” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 30 (6) (2016) 1767-1785

The post Why Most Speed and Agility Training Protocols Suck appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If injury prevention works, why are footballers constantly tweaking their hamstrings? [Photo credit: Pixabay]

The problem with my bold claim was I went to work with international gymnasts and soon discovered that injuries came with the territory. When you hang upside down on a set of rings in an inverted cross, your shoulders go really up against it. Do it day after day, year after year for fifteen years and guess what – your shoulders are knackered.

Injury prevention is a term borrowed from public health, and it’s a very poor one to use when working with athletes of any level. That’s why I’m calling bullshit on all the fitness specialists and rehabilitation experts who believe they can ‘prevent’ sport and training-related injuries.

Injury is Always Possible

They can’t prevent injuries, because if you train and take part in sport at any level there will always be a very real possibility you will pick up an injury.

If you still don’t believe me, I challenge you to pick an injury, any injury, and then look at all of the injury ‘prevention’ programmes that are out there. There are tonnes to choose from. If these injury ‘prevention’ programmes all worked we wouldn’t have any football players constantly pulling up with hamstring injuries. But hamstring injuries have increased by 4% annually in men’s professional football, since 2001.¹

In the same way, ACL ruptures in netball would be a thing of the past. But according to national data from Australia, knee injuries are the most common injury sustained by netballers and netball often ranks in the top five sports in Australia for incidents of ACL injuries.² Patellar tendinopathy would no longer sideline athletes who jump a lot, but we know that the highest prevalence of patellar tendinopathy (14.4%) in recreational athletes is in volleyball players^.3 If we’re all so good at injury prevention, even CrossFit competitors would be bouncing around injury free.

It’s Time For a Reality Check

Let’s start being realistic and talk about injury reduction. You may shout at me that that’s just semantics or feel that I’m quibbling over terminology, but the reason I have a bee in my bonnet is because when you tell athletes, coaches, and parents that you can prevent an injury, you’re setting everyone up for a fall.

We need to have a reality check. The best we can do is reduce injury risk by establishing effective physical preparation programmes that improve robustness and resilience. If we get this right, we will in turn develop athletes capable of withstanding the demands placed upon their body during training and competition. If we do a really good job, the athlete will come to the end of their career without any serious injuries.

Even so, the reality remains that if an athlete’s played football, rugby, tennis, golf, or even tiddlywinks for long enough, they’re probably going to pick up an injury. We can’t prevent that. What we can do is reduce the associated risk, occurrence, and severity of injuries. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

References:

1. Jan Ekstrand, Mark Walden and Martin Hagglund “Hamstring injuries have increased by 4% annually in men’s professional football, since 2001: a 13-year longitudinal analysis of the UEFA Elite Club injury study.” British Journal of Sports Medicine 50 (2015) 744-750

2. Aliza Rudavsky and Jill Cook “Physiotherapy management of patellar tendinopathy (jumper’s knee).” Journal of Physiotherapy 60 (2014) 122–129

3. Max Stuelcken, Daniel Mellifont, Adam Gorman and Mark Sayers “Mechanisms of anterior cruciate ligament injuries in elite women’s netball: a systematic video analysis.” Journal of Sport Sciences 34 (16) (2016) 1516-1522

The post The Myth of Injury Prevention appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Athletes and trainers have sleepwalked into believing traditional training periodisation and the various iterations it’s gone through over the decades is the key to success. Jump online or hang around a gym long enough and someone’ll tell you about their linear, blocked, semi-undulating programme with a transition into wave loaded concurrently conjugated patterns. Just like the Emperor in the classic tale The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, they’re playing along with traditional ideas of periodisation because they don’t want to appear stupid.

For a number of years, John Kiely has been the little boy shouting from the rooftops that we need to take a more critical look at periodisation. He believes we shouldn’t accept periodisation models as fact because a bunch of coaches back in the day figured out a few training systems that worked for their athletes. Kiely has also shown substantial evidence to challenge the appropriateness of applying generic methodologies, believing many of the periodisation models out there apply overly simplistic decision making to the planning problems posed by inherently complex biological systems.¹

In other words – they’ve got no clothes on.

3 Problems with the Traditional Model

Traditional models believe that established time frames exist for the development and retention of specific fitness adaptations. At best, these time frames are a consensus opinion that can only be applied in general terms. I don’t work in general terms – I work with specific athletes.

Traditional models suggest that various fitness attributes are best developed sequentially (for example: strength before power, endurance before speed). But what if I wanted to flip everything on its head and develop speed first, then add volume to improve endurance performance?

Traditional models believe established training structures work across a wide range of sports, athletes, and competition structures. Really? Will the same structure work for a professional golfer playing twenty-four tournaments a year and a centrally funded and trained gymnast peaking for the Olympic Games?

The Alternative Model: Flexibility and Adaptability

I’d rather write a plan that works for the athlete or team I’m working with, not one that was knocking around Eastern Europe in the 1960s. I’d rather develop structured plans that have continuity running through them whilst incorporating enough variation to elicit performance gains. I’d rather allow time for the athletes I’m working with to recover from the day-to-day demands of training and life, progressively overloading my athletes and not continuously kicking the crap out of them every session – keeping in mind that if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it.

I have no idea if this is a conjugated, semi-blocked, linear periodisation model. But it is a fluid, flexible, and adaptable plan that will result in improved performance. I’m not suggesting we forget all of the pioneering work by Matveyev, Bompa, Verkoshansky, and Issurin. But we must not be constrained by it.

Systems and models developed in Eastern Europe fifty years ago may not be applicable in 2016, so stop blindly believing they are. Rather than wearing the straightjacket of traditional periodisation models, we need to cast a critical eye and figure out what really works.

References

1. John Kiely, “Periodization Paradigms in the 21st Century: Evidence-Led or Tradition-Driven”, International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance 7 (2012) 242-250

The post The Truth About Traditional Periodisation Models appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It would appear we’ve learnt very little since Mel Siff’s Supertraining hit the bookshelves thirty years ago and definitively addressed the recovery process.

There are two common problems when it comes to recovery and regeneration in training. The first is that it’s often overlooked in the overall training process, and the second is that the majority will try the sexy quick fixes over thinking about the long-term training picture.

It would appear we’ve learnt very little since Mel Siff’s Supertraining hit the bookshelves thirty years ago and definitively addressed the recovery process.

Restoration is an integral part of overall training and practice…it must be applied with the short-term and long-term goals constantly in mind. – Mel Siff.¹

Why do I think we continue to overlook recovery and make such a mess of what is one of the simplest training principles?

Ignorance. Ignorance is why there are so many gym goers, fitness enthusiasts, and athletes are burying themselves on a daily basis in the gym and not simply reaping the performance benefits they are chasing.

They are ignorant of the invisible side of training: the adaptations that take place the other 23 hours of the day they are not in the gym. You can’t take a good selfie of yourself sleeping or walking the dog, so no one appears to be doing it.

If you really want to get #Gainz from your programme, you need to forget about all the fancy stuff that’s in the media.

It’s time to look at the fundamentals of recovery and regeneration that are based on scientific principles.

The Recovery Cycle

In the early 2000s, images of athletes like Paula Radcliffe in ice baths were everywhere, and anecdotal reports of sports teams using complicated heart and brain pattern technology and cryotherapy chambers emerged daily.

Recovery and regeneration was catapulted into the forefront of coaches’ and athletes’ minds. But with the initial wave of interest came a huge amount of confusion.

In 2005, I sat down with a colleague at the English Institute of Sport and attempted to create a simple, logical framework for the application of recovery and regeneration strategies.

The Recovery Pyramid was our answer to what had become the wild west of training.

The Recovery Cycle is the first level of recovery strategies from that pyramid.

These three elements should be nailed before exploring the multifactorial nature of fatigue. (Graphic: Nick Grantham)

The Recovery Cycle: 1. Body Management with Passive and Active Rest

Make sure you’re implementing both passive and active rest into your training programme. Forms of passive rest include reading, listening to music, and watching a film.

Active rest includes walking, cross training, and flexibility training and is also beneficial to overall recovery.

Massage has many physiological and psychological benefits, and a proper post training cooldown incorporating flexibility and mobility is a great way to recover physically and mentally from training and competition.

The Recovery Cycle: 2. Refuel and Rehydrate with Decent Nutrition

Nutrition is one of the cornerstones of a comprehensive recovery strategy and can be strategically used to optimise training and performance. A solid approach to refueling and rehydrating will have a positive impact on your response to exercise in terms of hormone control and muscle function.

Stop worrying about pre, during, and post workout nutrition. Get the basics right first: eat regularly, go easy on sugars and processed food, incorporate lots of fruits and vegetables, and drink plenty of water.

The Recovery Cycle: 3. Sleep

Sleep is a basic requirement for human health. Studies have shown that as little as 30-36 hours of sleep deprivation can result in a loss of performance² – and those hours don’t all have to occur at the same time.

Hours of lost sleep can gather over a period of time and negatively impact training performance.

Sleep is one of the most important forms of rest by providing time for the body to adapt to the physical and mental demands of training, and simply increasing your total hours of sleep each night can positively affect your performance.³

Forget Trends and Focus On The Basics

All the nonsense around recovery needs to stop. We need something simple. We need the Recovery Cycle. In more recent months I’ve seen a second coming of overcomplicated recovery strategies, thanks to the success of a team in the English Premier League called Leicester City.

Numerous column inches have been given over to the secrets of their success, and every recovery intervention from cryotherapy to beetroot juice has been touted as Leicester’s secret weapon. Now every man and his dog wants to drink purple shakes whilst being slowly frozen.

No. It’s time to get back to basics. Recovery and regeneration are the key components of an integrated performance conditioning programme, but we need to focus on fundamentals and not the latest trend. I’ll leave you with a simple insight from Professor Damien Hughes to consider in your own training.

“Formula 1, the fastest sport on earth, is won by those who learn how to take pit stops most effectively. The same principles apply to humans.”⁴

Teaser photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Appreciate the straight shooting? Discover more recovery real talk:

Lower Stress to Increase Fitness

References

1. Mel Siff, Supertraining (Denver, Supertraining Institute, 2000) p.440.

2. Cook, C. J., Kilduff, L. P., & Cook, M. R. “Recovering effectively in high-performance sports,” in High-Performance training for sports, ed. David Joyce & Daniel Lewindon, (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics 2014) 319-330.

3. Laura E. Juliff , Shona L. Halsona, Jeremiah J. Peiffer, “Understanding sleep disturbance in athletes prior to important Competitions,” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 18 (2015) 13-18

4. Nick Grantham, The Strength and Conditioning Bible: How to Train Like an Athlete. (Bloomsbury, 2015)

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