by Robert A. Panariello MS, PT, ATC, CSCS

In a recent conversation with my good friend Hall of Fame Strength and Conditioning (S&C) Coach Johnny Parker he commented on his recent visit to a D1 University where in discussions with this University Head S&C Coach regarding the review of the football team’s weight room program design, it was stated that approximately 80% of the program design placed emphasized toward athletic performance and approximately 20% placed emphasis on “prehab” and injury prevention. A breakdown of this football training program design revealed a 50%/50% split of the program exercise volume for both athletic performance and prehab/injury prevention and not the assumed 80% to 20% originally stated.

Coach Parker and I had previously spent time together at a D1 University to present on the topic of program design for the S&C staff at this institution with an emphasis on football program design. We also observed and made recommendations during the football team’s participation during their off-season training.

During our first “classroom” session with the football S&C staff, they were asked to list in order of importance; the exercises they felt should best be incorporated in their football program design. The top 2 exercises listed were the squat and the Olympic lifts. A breakdown of this particular D1 football program design revealed that approximately 10% of the total program volume was dedicated to the squat exercise performance and approximately 12% was dedicated to the Olympic lifts. Just as in Coach Parkers recent visit, you could imagine the surprise of this D1 football S&C staff when the actual numbers presented were very far below the program design perceived squat exercise and Olympic lift volume of work. These examples of the misconception of the actual work performed occur more often than assumed. Why does this incident of perception vs. reality of program design exercise (athletic performance) volume occur? Before I proceed I would also like to mention that these two D1 programs have excellent Head S&C Coach’s and staffs. These S&C coaches have the respect of their players, football coaching staff, and university administration. They are very organized and run outstanding and successful programs, i.e. conference championships, bowl game appearances, etc.

Why does Perception vs. Reality in the Program Design occur?

With all of the available training information presented at conferences, in books, articles, and videos, as well as the gazillions of internet articles and blogs, etc. available, the S&C Professional is faced with a significant dilemma, which exercises to include and which exercises to omit from the athlete’s training program design. What appears to transpire is that the S&C Professional attempts to include everything they can in their program design i.e. as many exercise’s as possible for athletic performance and prehab/injury prevention. This seems to occur because the S&C professional is faced with the concerns of (a) if I don’t include all of these exercises am I cheating my athletes from being the best that they can be and (b) If I don’t include everything in our training program design and my competition does, do my opponents now have an unfair advantage over our players?

This trend also occurs in the field of rehabilitation as I have witnessed less experienced physical therapist’s and athletic trainer’s who will appropriately add more advanced exercises as their patient’s/athlete’s condition progresses, yet do not remove the easier basic rehab exercises performed at the initiation of care. As this tendency continues over time the total volume of work performed by the patient/athlete may become excessive and may lead to the risk of overuse type pathologies.

With regard to the S&C program design, how does the S&C Professional determine which exercises to include and which ones to omit?

Establish a Training Philosophy

It is important for the S&C Professional to establish an athletic performance training philosophy. Once this philosophy is established, regardless of the type of philosophy, the S&C Professional should adhere to this philosophy to allow enough significant time for this philosophy to make its impact upon the athlete regardless of all the “outside noise” of additional exercises of which the coach may continue to be bombarded. Now does this infer that the S&C Professional should not continue to strive to progress and improve to achieve the best training program design as possible? Of course not as to do so would be certainly be foolish and limit the positive outcomes of the athlete during the training process. However, with that said the S&C Professional should not ignore the successes of the past.

Continue to read this article by clicking HERE. 

We asked the leaders in Sports Medicine and Performance Training what they are either currently reading or have read and here is what they said!

See complete (and ever growing) list of suggested reading at the BSMPG LIBRARY. 

INIGO MUJIKA

GERRY RAMOGIDA

Continue to read Derek's article by clicking HERE 

Purchase Charlie Weingroff's new DVD by clicking link below

We asked the leaders in Sports Medicine and Performance Training what they are either currently reading or have read and here is what they said!

See complete (and ever growing) list of suggested reading at the BSMPG LIBRARY. 

BOO SCHEXNAYDER

We asked the leaders in Sports Medicine and Performance Training what they are either currently reading or have read and here is what they said!

See complete (and ever growing) list of suggested reading at the BSMPG LIBRARY. 

BRANDON BOVEE

We asked the leaders in Sports Medicine and Performance Training what they are either currently reading or have read and here is what they said!

See complete (and ever growing) list of suggested reading at the BSMPG LIBRARY. 

ERIC OETTER

Thank you to all the attendees who journeyed to Boston this past May 16-17, 2014 for our annual seminar. Without you, none of this is possible!

Planning has already begun for our 2015 event, and like each seminar to date we expect this one to be the biggest one yet! 

Details regarding date and speakers will be announced shortly.

See you in 2015 - Stay Tuned for Details!

"BSMPG is a great seminar to attend. It is a smaller conference filled with intelligence and passion that creates a strong atmosphere for people to learn, network and grow. Thanks for a great weekend BSMPG!"

- LeeAnne Ketchen MS, ATC

"This was my first BSMPG meeting. After hearing about it for a number of years from colleagues regarding the quality of topics, and the quality of the organization, I can tell you Boston will now be an annual visit on my conference calendar!"

- Lorne Goldenberg BPE, CSCS

"The presenters at BSMPG had such a dominant grasp of the content they were presenting, it created an electric learning environment even for some of the most successful strength coaches, therapists and trainers out there. This was the best continuing education experience I have ever had."

-Sam Sturgis

"I have very high expectations when attending seminars and the BSMPG came strongly recommended to me. I found the organizers and presenters to be outstanding and exceed all my expectations. Definitely an event I will attend in the future."

- Kevin O'Neill MS, CSCS, USAW Director of Strength and Conditioning The Noble and Greenough School

Charlie Weingroff's new DVD Training = Rehab 2:  Lateralizations and Regressions is on sale now, and at a special price through the end of the month.  

• The 3 Perspectives of Movement (Biomechanical, Neuromuscular, and Neurodevelopmental)

• Updated views on the Joint By Joint Approach based on each Perspective

• Review of methodology claims and personal methodology

• Mobility Lab

• Hands-On and Neurodevelopmental Progressions of Breathing, Rolling, Crawling, Hinging, and Upper Body Diagonal Patterns

"Here we report that, in patients with chronic hand pain, magnifying their view of their own limb during movement significantly increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. By contrast, minifying their view of the limb significantly decreases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. These results show a top-down effect of body image on body tissues, thus demonstrating that the link between body image and the tissues is bi-directional.

Ten right-handed patients with chronic pain and dysfunction of one arm participated in our study (see Table S1 in the Supplemental data available on-line). Patients watched their own arm while they performed a standardized repertoire of ten hand movements, at a set speed and amplitude, and in randomised and counterbalanced order. Four randomised conditions involved different ways of looking at the arm: Control (looking without any visual manipulation); Clear (looking through binoculars with no magnification); Magnified (binoculars with 2x magnification); and Minified (inverted binoculars). The patients’ pain (on a 100 mm visual analogue scale) was worse after movements than it was before,but the extent to which it was worse depended on the type of visual input. That is, the increase in pain was greatest when participants viewed the magnified image of their arm during the movements (mean ± SD increase = 41 mm ± 15 mm) and least when they viewed the minified image of their arm during the movements (19 mm ± 18 mm; Figure 1). Swelling — the circumference of the fingers, relative to the unaffected hand — also increased less when participants watched a minified image of their arm during movements than when they watched a magnified image (p < 0.01), or when they viewed their limb as it normally appears (p < 0.02). Recovery to pre-task pain was slowest when the visual input during movements had been magnified but quickest when it had been minified (Figure 1B; see Supplemental data for statistics). Two patients terminated movements in every condition because of intolerable pain and two other patients terminated movements because of intolerable pain in the magnified condition only (Figure S3 in the Supplemental data). These results support the hypothesis that making a limb look bigger increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. Remarkably, they also demonstrate that making a limb look smaller decreases the pain and swelling evoked by movement."

These results support the hypothesis that making a limb look bigger increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. Remarkably, they also demonstrate that making a limb look smaller decreases the pain and swelling evoked by movement.

"The obvious clinical implication is that if manipulation of visual input can reduce the pain and swelling evoked by movement, it may assist in the rehabilitation of acute and chronic physical, neurological and psychiatric  disorders associated with certain body image disturbances. Regardless of the mechanism(s) underpinning the effect, modulation of pain and swelling via distortion of vision establishes that the link between pain and tissue condition on the one hand, and distorted body image on the other, is a bi-directional one. The result also suggests that the manipulation of visual input might lead to novel clinical applications, should the reduction in swelling and pain following the viewing of the affected limb through a minifying lens demonstrated here be shown to lead to longer-term beneficial effects in future research.

Join us at the 2014 BSMPG Summer Seminar and travel down the rabbit hole of Elite Sports Medicine and Performance Training - your patients, athletes, and clients will thank you!

Question 1:  The fine line between tapering and of course detraining is getting smaller as seasons are getting longer. With some metrics of fitness and power varying, how does one know if they are reaching a point of lost fitness in team sports? Some teams are monitoring fatigue but not managing training outside practice. What are ways to make non-specific training outside of practice a combination of both adaptation and monitoring physical abilities? Any good workouts for soccer that can help monitor power or conditioning that would be good for college and or professionals?

Iñigo Mujika:  In my view, the key metric to assess where an athlete is at each point in time is performance in training and in competition. If an athlete is not performing at his or her expected level, we need to make some kind of performance-fatigue assessment. If performance is indeed declining, we should assess why this is the case, starting with exclusion criteria such as confounding illnesses. We should also assess whether there are clear errors in the athlete’s training program: insufficient training volume, intensity or frequency; excess or insufficient competition; nutritional errors; and other confounding factors such as psychological problems, social issues, travel fatigue, etc. We can of course make use of biological markers such as resting cortisol levels or maximal lactate production, but I have always believed that communication with the athlete is the most important way to assess what is going on.

Not assessing training or physical activities outside of formal team practice is equivalent to trying to make a nutritional assessment including only the foods ingested by an athlete at team meals, but ignoring what they eat once they are on their own. We need to know what the athlete does outside of formal practice, as this may have a huge impact on the way they adapt to training. All physical training should be included in the quantification of an athlete’s activity profile, and this can be done with the use of physical activity questionnaires, or by means of technological tools such as heart rate monitors or accelerometers.

In terms of tests or workouts that may help monitor power or conditioning, I am sure that every fitness coach has his or her own method, which could be a reference training set, a countermovement jump, a repeated effort test, a maximal or submaximal Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test, etc. The most important thing is that these reference workouts or tests should be carried out in standardized conditions, be relevant to the sport, valid, reliable and sensitive to changes in an athlete’s fitness level.

Question 2:  Small Sided Games are popular ways to work on tactical and technical areas, but you mentioned years ago that longer sprints may be important to prepare for injury reduction. Linear sprints being the most common way of scoring as well as the most common cause of hamstring pulls, what can sport science do to help the medical and team coach with practices during the season by integrating a balance between skill and general training?

Iñigo Mujika:  Small sided games can be very effective training exercises. As you say, they allow to work on tactical and technical aspects of the game, and they can also be effective at improving players’ fitness. Nevertheless, I consider that basing fitness training exclusively on small sided games is an error that is often justified by the wrong assumption that training should always be as similar as possible to the game itself. If that were the case, the best practice would simply be to play the game all the time. My philosophy is that we need to identify the factors that determine physical performance in the sport, then try to find the right training mix that includes proven methods to improve each and everyone of those factors. A soccer player, for example, requires high levels of endurance, speed, power, strength, agility, repeated sprint ability… We as coaches need to make use of the best training methods to improve each one of these qualities, and simply playing small sided games is certainly not the best possible way to achieve this. Of course we also need to be aware that the technical and tactical areas are also key to performance, and after assessing our team’s strengths and weaknesses, we need to determine the training time that will be specifically allocated to each of these areas, and the time needed to optimally integrate them to maximize each player’s contribution to the team’s overall performance. Within this framework, injury prevention is also a key aspect of daily training. In a sport like soccer, the physical qualities required from the players should be trained in conjunction with injury prevention (e.g. core training, proprioception, use of eccentric overload training of thigh muscles, dynamic stabilization through vibrations, uneven and unstable surfaces, etc.). In this respect, I believe that it is better to have your best players at 90% of their physical capacities on the pitch, than having them sidelined due to injury.

Click HERE to continue reading this interview from speedendurance.com  

BSMPG 2014 Summer Seminar - Keynote Speaker Iñigo Mujika 

SPONSORED BY:  

Keynote Session: Tapering and Peaking for Optimal Performance

Breakout Session: Detraining following Injury

Iñigo Mujika earned Ph.D.s in Biology of Muscular Exercise (University of Saint-Etienne, France) and Physical Activity and Sport Sciences (University of The Basque Country). He is also a Level III Swimming and Triathlon Coach and coaches World Class triathletes. His main research interests in the field of applied sport science include training methods and recovery from exercise, tapering, detraining and overtraining. He has also performed extensive research on the physiological aspects associated with sports performance in professional cycling, swimming, running, rowing, tennis, football and water polo. He received research fellowships in Australia, France and South Africa, published over 90 articles in peer reviewed journals, four books and 30 book chapters, and has given 210 lectures and communications in international conferences and meetings. Iñigo was Senior Physiologist at the Australian Institute of Sport in 2003 and 2004. In 2005 he was the physiologist and trainer for the Euskaltel Euskadi professional cycling team, and between 2006 and 2008 he was Head of Research and Development at Athletic Club Bilbao professional football club. He was Physiology consultant of the Spanish Swimming Federation in the lead-up to London 2012. He is now the Head of Physiology and Training at Euskaltel Euskadi World Tour Cycling Team, Associate Editor for the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, and Associate Professor at the University of the Basque Country.