This weekend saw my first Sunday of NFL, and I loved it! Since planning our new business in the USA I have immersed myself into the world of American Football, because of all the big American sports this is the one I feel most drawn to. I have read ‘The Blind Side’, ‘Friday Night Lights’, both autobiographies of Lawrence Taylor, and a ton of other books, I even got Corina to buy me ‘The Idiots Guide to Football’ because I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t have a clue about the game! I have watched all the films I could get my hands on, TV series, you name it. As someone brought up on soccer and rugby, which I also love, I think the NFL is fantastic. I love watching the All Blacks play rugby, I love watching the majesty of the magnificent Newcastle United and I love the NFL.As an exercise professional I love watching the athleticism of guys the size of houses pirouette and then charge down the field at breakneck speed. The contact between these giants is unbelievable, it is like being hit by a truck who’s job it is to hurt you. So it came as a bit of a shock when a commentator on one game noted that the new strength and conditioning coach for the team had switched their emphasis to free weights and olympic lifting… what were they using before? Machines?
In the NFL the players need to be big and strong, they need to be able to move fast, change direction, take a hit and deliver big hits, they need to be agile, nimble and mean. I cannot imagine many more unpredictable and hostile environments in sport. One minute you are sitting on the bench and the next you need to run, evade, doge, throw or smash, and the whole world is watching. The last thing a strength and conditioning coach should be doing with this type of athlete is resistance training mainly using machines.
When you first come into the world of fitness/athletic training you are taught about the SAID principle. Simply this means that the body makes:
Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands.
Simple right? This means that if you give the body the right stimulus it will adapt, and specific stimulus yields specific adaptations. The basis of all training is built upon this principle, train and you get stronger. There are a lot of variables controlling the outcome, there are many ways of training, but if you know what adaptation you are looking for you can find the right training stimulus to achieve your desired outcome.
In endurance sports if you train at a low intensity for a longer duration your body will adapt by becoming more efficient at metabolizing fat as an energy source and increasing the density of mitochondria. If the intensity is not low enough these adaptations will not take place and your body will adapt in another way by becoming more tolerant to higher levels of lactate. This is why we do blood lactate testing, in order to tell you how slow you need to go in order to get the adaptation you need. Conversely if you want to become more tolerant to lactate and strengthen your anaerobic system then you need to exercise at a much higher intensity. The adaptation is specific to the stimulus, and the stimulus must be there long enough to allow the body to adapt. Training once a week is not enough! Don’t get me wrong you will burn off some calories but it highly unlikely that you will get any hypertrophy or other desirable changes through this type of training. If your training stimulus is not consistent over time the body will not be given the chance to adapt. So doing kettlebell training one week and ropes the next, followed by a yoga class or pilates session will just confuse the body; it won’t know whether you want it to become stronger, build muscle, develop muscular endurance, develop stability, or relax and make the muscles longer. In other words you can work hard and get nothing from your training. Sound familiar?
When you train for a specific sport or activity the exercises that you must perform should be similar to that which you need for your sport. This is in order for there to be an increase in performance due to your training. We call this ‘functional carry over’ and it means that your training should benefit your performance. You can train the body in the gym all you want, you can make the body look beautiful like a bodybuilder but it doesn’t mean that it is functional. Doing muscle isolation exercises in the gym using traditional machines makes you stronger in the gym but no where else. In the real world there is never a situation where you use just one joint, the seated adductor machine (for ladies) and the pec dec (for men) are fantastic examples of exercises that have no functional carry over.
Players in the NFL regardless of position need to be strong, nimble, resilient and be able to adapt to changing circumstances in a split second. This is actually the case for most sports though the specific needs will obviously differ. So the training should mimic the conditions on the field of play. In Scotland the guys at the Institute of Sport calculated the angle at which the forwards needed to push during a scrum, the players then squatted through this range of motion in the gym, building very specific strength to help this aspect of the game, this is a fantastic example of sport specific training. Training NFL players on machines is dumb, they need to be working in a dynamic environment where their bodied need to adapt to changing circumstances, they need to be explosive and destructive, and they need to do this while on their feet, or even in the air, rather than sitting on some machine and doing bodybuilding exercises.
“This is the way we have always done it.” This is the response I often get when I ask coaches why they are doing a particular type of training. Don’t get me wrong some of the ‘old school’ methods are still as valuable as ever, yoga for instance has been around for many hundreds of years and is still one of the best forms of exercise you can do. But you must think about the outcome of your training before embarking upon a training regime that is wasteful of your time and effort. If you want to do a weekly exercise class to have fun with your friends and burn off a few calories excellent, but don’t kid yourself that it will make your muscles bigger! In the rugby preseason I treated a forward who had knee pain, he told me that the coach had made them all run a weekly 5km cross-country… This guy was nearly 250lbs and built like a truck, his job on the field was to pick up the ball and run into the nearest player on the opposing team. The training for some of the players on the team should have included this type of training, but for tis guy it was the equivalent of getting a 100m sprinter to do mile repeats; just dumb and it lead to injury.
In my opinion it is a lack of intensity that leads to most exercise programs failing to get the required results. The training is not hard or easy enough to get the right adaptation, this is true for both gym based strength training and endurance training. You need the right stimulus applied regularly enough for your body to adapt and change. If the exercise is wrong or the intensity is wrong you will not get optimal adaptation.
It takes 6-12 weeks for the body to build muscle, the nervous system adapts much faster. It takes time and the right stimulus to make the body more efficient at burning fat or tolerating lactate. But whatever adaptation you are looking for you need the right stimulus. Variables such as intensity, sets, rest, and exercise selection are crucial in determining how successful your training will be. I am always amazed at the lack of understanding of these simple concepts when it comes to designing exercise, it is not rocket science.
The Chargers play tonight and after my soccer team got beat at the weekend I am looking forward to a victory away to Kansas. Remember what I SAID!
Alan
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