Across a range of different high-intensity sports like running, sprinting, changing direction, throwing and kicking, the body creates stability by cocontracting or co-activating muscles that surround joints or regions that are under stress. Cocontraction provides stability to some segments or body regions – so that they can be controlled – whilst others move. Read more
No matter the sport, speed matters. Speed is a topic we’ve covered a lot here on HMMR Media, and it is also a topic we will keep coming back to because it is so vital to elite performance. In July we put together a variety of resources on the topic from 10 contributors, including 1 new video lesson, 5 new podcast episodes, and 7 detailed training articles.
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Some of the training concepts laid out by Frans Bosch in his book Strength Training and Coordination: An Integrative Approach can be intimidating. Many disregard his ideas without even reading the book. Others read it and get lost in the details of motor learning or anatomy, as I did at first. But when you look at the coaches successfully putting the ideas into practice, it is quite easy to see that it doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, even Bosch himself takes a very straightforward approach to implementing the ideas. Read more
There are several hot topics and challenges facing team sports at the moment such as hamstring injuries, how to best measure and use training load, and developing sport specific speed. These are hardly new questions, but they have proved tricky since the currently favored solutions don’t seem to be doing the trick. Edinburgh Rugby’s Nick Lumley spends his offseason visiting clubs around the work to get the pulse of team sports training. He just returned from his latest trip and joined this week’s GAINcast to share his perspective on these issues and where he thinks we should be looking to move forward. Read more
Team sports require a mix of physical qualities to be trained concurrently due to the performance requirements, but one stands out above the others: speed. Speed is often the difference between elite and sub-elite teams. Speed is not just about that one breakaway play, it underpins all aspects of the game such as the overall tempo of play or the ability to execute skills at high speeds. Therefore, there should be an emphasis on training speed “in” within a structured training period. Read more
Hamstring strain injury (HSI) has remained a problem for athletes across a range of sports that involve sprinting. In team sports such as soccer, HSI is responsible for more games lost than any other injury. Athletes with a history of HSI, or who are older, are at greater risk of injury. Although these risk factors cannot be controlled, there are other risk factors that can be addressed in the physical preparation of athletes. One risk factor is low hamstring strength, and it is common for strength and conditioning (S&C) coaches to prescribe hamstring strengthening exercises as part of an injury prevention program. The choice of exercises has become a controversial issue with practitioners debating the pros and cons of hip dominant or knee dominant exercises, as well as eccentric exercises (e.g. Nordic) versus isometric exercises. Read more
High intensity training can have a massive training effect, but at a certain point intensity alone is not what drives adaptation. You have to be more creative. Stuart McMillan has confronted this issue first hand in working with post-collegiate sprinters at Altis and joins the podcast this week to discuss how he searches for adaptation and his thoughts on many more topics. Read more
As a young coach, one thing I didn’t realize was how variable speed requirements are between different sports. We might think of speed as a single quality trained in a single way, but the reality is that speed manifests itself differently in each sport and therefore needs to be trained differently. As I have gained experience in different sports, my thought process has slowly evolved. Read more
We all know less can be more, but doing less is hard. We all hate to be out worked. Coach Tony Holler came to track and field coaching as an outsider and stumbled upon the benefits of minimalist training. On this week’s GAINcast he joins us to talk about how his training program came about, how it is put together, and additional thoughts on training speed. Read more
One of the key principles of training is overload. The overload principle states that body system adaptation fails to occur without an overloading stimulus. In other words, we have to give the body a challenge beyond what we are accustomed to in order to adapt to a higher level of performance. Somewhere along the way coaches started to think that we can only find overload in the weight room. In reality, for some qualities that is the last place we want to look. Maximum speed sprinting, for example, can provide overload in many areas that no other exercises can match. Read more
