Training for Sport and life – What should you expect from your workout?

Training for Sport and life – What should you expect from your workout?

Ken Baldwin – As coaches and trainers, our major goal is to get the best from our athlete or teams. To do this we need to be able to train the body as closely as possible to replicate the skill we want them to perform in their sport. Yet we continue to train in isolation and not use our full body to integrate the movement patterns we need.

All the research coming out today shows that we have to reinforce the Brain/Body connection for a fluent and efficient movement not train or move in ways that are segmented. Are we spending too much time in the gym on exercises that never translate to a movement pattern on the field?  Why do we continue to push strength in a bench press motion when this lying on our back pushing up motion is not reproduced in any sport played today?

Here is an extract from an article written by one of our Presenters, and the Creator of  ViPR, Michol Dalcourt. Michol is a top Strength and Conditioning Coach in the USA and he enjoys sharing his research and practical knowledge into how we should train.

                     Figure 1                       VS                      Figure 2

Most of the time, when I make my way into the hallowed halls of training, I see the latter … and it troubles me.

Have you noticed that in general we are moving less at work, play, and in the gym? Doesn’t this seem odd? … We were designed to move… Right??

Our current, conventional approach is to split the body up into parts in the name of safety and periodization, except more and more research is indicating that we in fact cannot separate the body into parts … as much as we try.

Here is a personal story that marks this point.…

I began my career quite differently than most. I was a geek, obsessed with the many mechanisms in which the body crafts its design. I was never a star athlete; in fact I was no athlete at all. I was an awkward mover who was always the last picked for the team, so you might think that I would have a penchant for the arts, but I didn’t. There was something most compelling about the human body, how it moved, how it was designed.  Thus my post-secondary educational pursuits were earnestly focused towards Exercise Science, so that I might find out more.

As I entered the Fitness Industry and the world of Strength and Conditioning, my mind was full of uncertainties. I took on the dubious honor of working with athletes … namely Ice Hockey players.

Figure 3

You see for most Canadians (Figure 3) there exists only one thing, and that is Hockey. In fact, if a Canadian cannot play Hockey, you are kicked out of the Country.

I poured everything I knew into my hockey players’ training and programming, everything that I was taught that is. You see my beliefs and perceptions of the body were about to be put into question, based on the fact that I was not properly preparing these athletes for success on the ice. My viewpoint about the body was strongly rooted in the notion that we are made up of constituent parts. An arm, a head, a nervous system, a hamstring muscle; and these parts made up the whole. The most important factor in success, I thought, was training these parts one by one. Then life proved me wrong…

For 3 years I trained my Hockey Players to develop speed, strength, stamina, and agility – all in a 14 week ‘off-season’ training program. Then, every ‘in-season’ I would ask the scouts (those that watch each and every game to evaluate players) how my players were doing? There answer never changed for 3 years … “they need to improve their strength on the puck” they would say. That’s odd; I thought at the time, strength is what I am training! Yet there did not appear to be a significant transfer into their sport?! For the first three years, I would tweak my programs in order to effectively obtain a strength transfer into Hockey, and for those three years the scouts would report the same deficiencies.

It took me three years to ask a rather important question…. “who is beating my players to the puck, and why”? The scouts’ answer has echoed in my head ever since. Their answer was neither arcane nor esoteric; it was not what was trendy or capricious. “The farm kids are beating your players to the puck” they said.…

I knew this to be true. In fact everyone in the sport did. The ‘toughest’ players were always the farm kids. On the surface it made little sense. They did not train with weights (i.e. barbell / dumbbell), in a gym, nor did they periodize any training stress. They would rarely overload a muscle, or perform the same motion repeatedly to get ‘stronger’ … and yet they were. When I finally analyzed what these kids were doing, it served to elucidate my training and program design. These farm kids were ‘truly’ functional. Everything that they did was performed with varying loads, in all three planes, at various speed, and various ranges of motion … they called it chores. Moving farm equipment by hand, shoveling, lifting, squatting, crouching, rotating, lunging, pushing, pulling etc. etc. – all with an expressed goal which was task driven. They had an objective (i.e. loading a trailer with dirt), and their body’s got the job done … by integrating every body part. Isolation training did not exist on the farm; and if it did it would not last long. It was too inefficient and ineffective. The body and its parts would wear out far too quickly.

The body is designed to spread forces and stress out into the system, through each joint and tissue in the body. The more effective that this is accomplished, the less that injury will plague the system. There is inherent wisdom in what those farm workers did, and as soon as I adopted similar strategies in the gym, I began to see something incredible. My players became stronger, quicker, and more agile, with less incidence of injury.

Here are 4 key points that must be addressed to be “farm-worker” worthy.

1 – Integration.

There exists an old adage that we are “stronger as a whole, than the sum of our parts”. Human anatomy would agree. By connecting our myofascial system (muscle and fascia) together as one system, it is stronger. Fascia research is compiling at a rapid rate and holds a key to understanding human biomechanics. When one looks at human anatomy in dissection, one can easily see the morass of collagen (which is the fascia) that holds our structure in place. This framework is strengthened when trained as a whole and undermined when trained in its constituent parts.

2 – Timing.

Rhythmical motion allows structures to dissipate forces through the system. This is consistent with body design. Muscles need to turn on AND off. Proper joint function is predicated by proper muscle timing.

3 – Three Dimensional.

All muscles and all joints are designed to function in all three planes of motion. To ignore a plane of motion is to be ignorant of nature. Tri-planar muscle and joint action serve to mitigate stress through the system.

4 – Gravity Infused.

Human form was designed and shaped through the influence of gravity. Gravity loads our bodies and allows us to become stronger and more efficient. If we utilize gravity in the same manner as our intended goal (i.e. for Hockey), we take advantage of the elasticity of tissue; which means that we can generate more force with less effort. This means that an athlete or client that needs to be successful while standing should training in upright positions most of the time.

The next time you are training, think about those wise farm workers and ask yourself … “do my exercise selections hold up to scrutiny?, are they ‘farm worthy’?”

Ken Baldwin – Regardless of age or ability, we need to be able to train and move how we do things in everyday life and sport. We used to move well as kids when we played by running, hopping, jumping skipping, crawling and climbing. Let’s get back to how we used to move instead of sitting at a desk all day, playing computer games, and training through isolated ranges of motion. Let’s teach our clients how to move properly by integrating Functional Movement into training and conditioning.