Good Books

Just a quick message to let you know about a couple of books I have been reading recently. I was inspired after meeting Bill Knowles from the Vermont clinic (http://isporttraining.com) who talked about the value of exercise technique being perfect every time in order to lay down myelin along our nerve pathways. Basically, myelin is an insulator that allows neurons (nerves) to fire more efficiently and with better timing, causing signals to be sent either faster or slower depending on what effect is needed. Myelin is grown or layed down through focused effort or i other words, deep practice. This is the feeling you get when you’re totally focused on something and trying to figure it out by problem solving and working it through.

Bill said his inspiration for this practice came after reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle which talks about talent being created through deep practice and not simply genetics. Daniel talks about visiting all of the best talent centres around the world which create elite athletes and also truly great artists, pianists etc. What he found was that all of these people had one thing in common, they worked really really hard, even when they didn't think they were. They also had a great ability to problem solve themselves, therefore going through deep practice.

This practice is all about breaking skills into pieces which are more easily done. From a musical point of view this may be by way of slowing down a piece of music to learn it. Once this is mastered we must then repeat it over and over again. Next we must learn to feel the movement or skill or tune or whatever the case may be and this is often mastered when we can recall how it feels to fail at this skill.

More to the point for S&C coaches was the section of the book that talks about master coaching and this highlights the importance of correct cueing and also details the fact that this in itself is a skill and thus takes time to master. Coyle gives some excellent examples of coaches who do this and i found it very insightful.

I would highly recommend this book and it inspired me to then read Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin which is along the same lines and again an excellent read.

Apologies for the lack of content recently, I have been busy busy recently but more to come in the coming weeks. I have got Bill coming over to present in February also so hopefully he will give me even more insightful thoughts from his incredibly inventive brain.

Himalayan Rock Salt and Sole

Despite what people say, without salt we would not be able to function properly and it is actually as important to us as water! I am not talking about refined table salt that most people see everywhere and can cause poor health.

I am referring to the wonderful Himalayan Rock Salt which originates from the primal seas of years gone by, where life originally began.

Pink himalayan salt contains every trace element and mineral found in the body and is totally pure.

As long as you are drinking enough water then salt is essential for the bodyt to maintain blood chemistry, balance water content in blood and cells, aid digestion and allow our nervous system to function properly.

The best way to take in the profound health benefits of this amazing product is through drinking sole (pronounced so-lay).

So what is sole?

Basically when salt combines with purified water there ions become hydrolzed which creates new structures. The minerals are now sm,all enough to be able to pass into your bodies cells which if you think about it is pretty important, why take something if your body can't absorb it?!
Sole will also make your body more alkaline which we now know is so important to all round health and long term health in particular. The human body depends upon 84 of the known 106 elements to maintain optimum health and Himalayan pink crystal salt contains ALL 84 minerals, the 5 essential minerals all trace minerals. Add in that these minerals are then ionized in water by making sole and so are they are then readily absorbed and utilized by the cells in your body.

What minerals and elements does our body need?

- 5 essential (major) minerals: calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium.

- Important trace minerals: chromium, copper, iodine, iron, manganese, and zinc.

- Other trace minerals: selenium, sulphur, nickel, cobalt, fluorine, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

How To Make Sole

To make the sole solution just add a desert spoon of crystals into a glass jar then fill it up with filtered water(ionized through reverse osmosis if you have one).

Put the lid on and leave for 24hrs for the crystals to dissolve. Once they have dissolved, then add some more and leave them again, up until such time that the crystals stop dissolving and sit as sediment at the bottom.

At this point the solution is fully saturated at 26% rock salt and ready for consumption.

Take 1 teaspoon in filtered water every morning in a glass before breakfast. This is enough minerals for around 24 hours unless you are training and sweating alot in which case you may wnat to drink more.

Try it and feel more energetic throughout the day and hey its so cheap too!!

S&C or Personal Training for Health Benefits?

How many coaches are training people and not really addressing why they are doing what they are doing and then not even checking to see that it works. The job of a strength and conditioning coach is not to simply make players tired and fatigued, although this may lead to increases in some elements of fitness and even in elite sport people do it.

I think what is very important though is that the only goals of a strength and conditioning coach are :

1: Prevent Injury

2:Improve Physical Performance

I think that the two goals written above get mis-interpreted and sometimes athletes end up following the personal trainer route of training for general fitness.

Dont get me wrong there are some amazing PT's, I know a few myself but in many instances they are faced with clients who dont really have a goal other than drop a dress size, lose fat or look better. It is very important then that the training done by many PT's (probably rightly for those goals) and to be honest, normal gym goers, who get on the bike or treadmill for half hour and burn calories, is not performance enhancement training for sports. Just making people tired as is seen in circuit training and other such activities is not a basis for performance enhancement. Athletes need to be following structured training programs which are multi-faceted after being screened for movement inefficencies via something along the lines of the PCA. This will measure athletes in the basic movement efficiency that make up sports and games, such as lunge, squat, step up, brace and rotate. This then gives a basis for program writing and allows a specific plan to be created and monitored/adapted as the days/weeks pass.

This program must be adaptable and this is where good coaching comes in and many miss the trick. Vern Gambetts talks a lot about watching movement and that "testing is training and training is testing". We never stop assessing our athletes because we should be constantly looking at how they move and where the weaknesses lie and adapting their program to make them move better over time, giving them a better base and mechanical resilience.

For goal #1 above I think that every S&C coach should work with a physiotherapist or sports rehabilitator for a few weeks a year and try to see and feel what they see and feel. This will give you a solid grounding in how the body breaks down through injury so that we can then try to prevent it by giving our athletes the movement efficiency to cope with their sport. Kelvin Giles says that every injury has a journey and we need to be trying to source the paths that it took so that we can not let it happen again in others. This analysis of injuries and MDT group discussion about how they occured over time builds personal experience and when coupled with a solid anatomical and bio-mechanical knowledge, allows coaches to see poor movement that could leads to injury in a gym or field setting.

Specificity and S.A.I.D

I like some of the cross fit/circuit training ideas and training modalities and think that they may have an excellent place within some sports conditioning programs. In my opinion this type of training or more specifically, always training to fatigue, whether it is in the gym during a strength training session or out on the field doing conditioning training has become all too common in sports such as rugby. Any monkey can make people tired but that is not the goal in physical training is it?! We are trying to create specific adaptations within the athletes to improve performance and prevent injury.

The SAID (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand) principle is one of the most basic principles in sports science and means that when the body is placed under a stress, (i.e: possibly a strongman session) it will adapt to that specific task. This is the basis of specificity and by no means should ALL training be based around this principle alone but I think it is often overlooked in programming. Remember, your body will try to become better at exactly what you do in your training.

This information impacts on areas such as metabolic adaptation, neuromuscular adaptation and also motor learning and skill development. Bill Knowles talked recently about a great book called "The Talent Code" which I would recommend to any exercise professional writing programs and more specifically coaching other people. The book talks about the importance of deep practice learning and about the laying down of myelin on our neural pathways. Without spoiling the book for you, the importance of practicing perfect technique cannot be over emphasized and then working as specifically to the movements in our sport then the book tells us that the more we continually practice this way the more we will improve. Bill Knowles also came out with a great saying, "if you can't slow it down then don't speed it up" and this sums up the importance of exercise technique perfectly.

In sports such as rugby there is plenty of research in both union and league detailing energy and metabolic demands of competition and also some excellent data detailing the type of work that each position demands in the modern game. This is absolute gold for planning the training of athletes and should not be overlooked in favour of solely empirical evidence unless you are very experienced and have ridiculous mathematical skills whilst watching games and competition, giving you an ability to calculate work to rest ratios. This should be the basis of conditioning programs and so for example, Grant Duthie has done some excellent research showing us that, “training should focus on repeated brief high-intensity efforts with short rest intervals to condition players to the demands of the game and that training for the forwards should emphasise their higher work rates in the game, while extended rest periods can be provided to the backs.” Sports Medicine, Volume 33, Number 13, 2003, pp. 973-991(19). The differences between forwards and backs are stark in rugby union and they should be conditioned that way. Backs needs to be capable of skills such as sprinting after a kick or making a break and they then inevitably getting a longer break enabling them to recover before repeating. Forwards have shorter rests but importantly shorter skills demands and so sending a forward for a 3 mile run will do little to improve his performance whereas asking him to do 10-20m sprints with short rest in between may well be more effective at mimicking working between rucks in rugby. Work to rest ratios become crucial to this part of planning and the closer these mimic game demands the better.

Anybody can make people tired without even thinking about it but making performance changes is different and requires both a detailed needs analysis and a sound physiological knowledge to be able to program effectively.

Building a Solid Base

Houses are built on foundations aren't they?!

We wouldn't consider building a house on sand or without foundations and if we did we would be waiting every day wondering if that is the day that it will fall down or collapse in some way. This is the best analogy I can think of for athletes that I see everywhere who train without correct movement efficiency.

Lots of the worlds best strength and conditioning coaches or athletic trainers as they call them in America spend the majority of their time building solid movement mechanics and efficiency. In the last month i have been lucky enough to meet Vern Gambetta, Kelvin Giles and Bill Knowles, three of the greatest coaches in the world. One message that came through from all of them loud and clear is that we need to be coaching movements and not muscles!! Athletes with poor movement take longer to come back from their injuries.

Look at a game of football, rugby , tennis, netball, basketball etc etc and watch it in slow motion. It is all about start, stop, change direction, start, stop, change direction, over and over again. Well how often do you stop on one leg in these sports? If you watch in in slow motion you will see that it happens all the time so athletes need resilience to this movement.

The physical competence assessment (PCA) that Kelvin Giles has developed is based around assessing athletes ability to properly squat, lunge, push, pull, brace and rotate as well as jumping, landing and importantly controlling landings.

I think that as sports science and strength and conditioning moves forward in the next ten years this is the path that it must follow especially in younger, developing athletes. One example I personally have witnessed many times over is athletes being loaded in bi-lateral squats without having the stability in their legs to do a single leg pistol squat.

Vern Gambetta says that athletes should be competent at pistol squats before being loaded bilaterally. Some of the video evidence that the gurus produced was great and clearly showed how things such as small sided games involving rapid changes in direction put massive pressure on the body to move fluidly and as one to produce force without breaking. Single leg efficiency is so crucial to resisting injury in change of direction sports where between 5 and 8 times body weight is going through one leg and if poor movement has been allowed in training and then overloaded, your athletes are in trouble.

As Kelvin put it perfectly we need to give athletes mechanical efficiency leading to movement resilience leading to injury prevention. Human beings are very adaptable and as such if we exercise with poor movement then the body will find a way to adapt (poorly) leading to overuse and wear and tear injuries.

A simplified way of looking at this is as follows:

Poor movement -> microtrauma(but we cant see it yet!) -> poor movement again and again -> compensations start occurring -> degenerate and now macrotrauma -> tissue failure and major injury.

Get your athletes doing lunges, pistols squats and other movement I will cover in the next few weeks and give them the mechanical efficiency to handle the movements that their games demand for success without getting injuries that could have been prevented.

Why Buy Food Locally?

Recently, a fish farm that supply national supermarkets was fined and fish recalled when it was discovered that the fish were being fed recalled dog food. So what is not good enough for your dog to eat ends up becoming the building blocks that create you?! Terrific.

90% of the products in supermarkets come in some kind of container and in order to preserve the way they look for longer and so that you will buy them, they are loaded with preservatives (chemicals that kill bacteria). The other 10% of edible foods, fish, meat and dairy can also be put through some very unnatural steps to keep them looking fresh! For example Tesco gets to choose the colour of their ‘fresh’ salmon fillets before they are dyed!!

Imported foods have to be transported and in the process of getting them from field, farm, or some far and distant ocean to your plate, your food is exposed to a chemical mix that includes fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides (to kill the bugs that might compete for the food), hormones (to fatten animals faster or make them produce more milk), and antibiotics (to prevent animals with weak immune systems from getting infected). It goes through invisible processes like radiation (X-raying to eliminate bacteria, which also kills nutrients), pasteurization (extreme heat to kill pathogens—along with helpful enzymes), hydrogenation (altering fats and oils to make them shelf stable, a condition that harms your own cells when you eat them), and even cosmetic procedures like waxing (to make the fruits look nicer in the supermarket).

As a test that I do at home, buy two chickens, one free range and one of those cheap ready done ones from the supermarket. Now when you take the meat from them look at how easily the bones break on the ready cooked one. This is because they very rarely get to stand up, never mind walk, run or fly and so their bone density is very low. Also look at how weak the tendons are on them, the meat falls off the bone whereas with free range birds it os difficult to get the meat from the bones.

Water and Hydration

WATER

Water constitutes about 75% of our muscle tissue, 22% of bones, 74% of your brain, 25% of fatty tissue and works within every single cell in the body to transport nutrients and remove waste products. It regulates body temperature allowing heat to evaporate from the skin in the form of sweat. Put simply, the body breaks down without adequate fluid! When we are dehydrated, blood becomes thicker so the body must work harder to transport it to the brain so we lose concentration and feel fatigued.

It is also important to note that too much water is detrimental to performance. The latest research from the American College of Sports Medicine and USA Track & Field says that thirst is an appropriate guide as to when fluid replacement should be commenced. This means drink when you feel your body needs it and stop when you feel satisfied. From this point on in your session consume water regularly.

Bottled water has nudged past milk to become the second most-consumed commercial drink in the country. Due to this there are purified, fortified, enhanced, flavoured waters and more and so it’s worth considering which type is best. I would say simple bottled is best wherever possible and this is due to the endless amounts of research detailing contaminants in tap water and realistically it varies region to region so much that I couldn’t hazard a guess at the quality we drink daily.

Hydration after Exercise

· Weigh yourself before and after training.

· Drink 500-600ml water for every 1 lb lost. You can include your water used for mixing the recovery drinks and protein.