June 23rd, 2010
Hey,
Last post I talked about how training programs will all work, and they will all see results. But now if that’s the case, you may be wondering why I have spent so much of my life learning about how to get “faster, higher, stronger” and why there is so much research into the same goals. Well I’ll tell you. Simply yes if you work hard everything you do will contribute to your overall well being, but there are other factors to consider, and there are better ways to do it. Plus depending on your goals, certain training types may not work for you.
When a Strength and Conditioning Coach is making a training program for an athlete, they generally use something called Periodization. Periodization is, to put simply, how we arrange a long term training plan.What this means is those 4 training focuses I discussed last time (Hypertrophy, Strength, Power and Muscular Endurance) are arranged so we get the right type of compensation. Here’s an analogy I’ve developed that I think illustrates Periodization really well. It’s simply this: If we think of our muscles as a water bottle. Then lets say our water bottle can fit 500ml in it, then we can only get 500ml of anything in it. If we keep trying to force more and more in the bottle, maybe it will eventually stretch, but it’s really like fighting an uphill battle. Now if we think of the water in the bottle as our strength, well once our bottle is full, our muscles are at their full potential, and we really don’t have much to do to make them stronger. Beyond Strength we also need Power in our muscles, so for this we have our Gatorade mix. If we have a lot of water, we can add a lot of Gatorade, but if we only have our bottle half full, we can really only get so much in until it just sits at the bottom as un-dissolved crystals. If we play with this analogy we can really see different scenarios and how they emerge.
A body builder works almost entirely in a hypertrophy phase, the hypertrophy phase is simply building a bigger water bottle. But the bottle sits nearly empty, and this is where we get the type of people that look big, but can’t lift much. Power lifters will usually work almost entirely in Strength and Power so they are constantly trying to cram more and more into an already full bottle, and they can be successful doing this, but it takes a lot of work. If we take a normal untrained population we have a lot of room to do anything. Most people are probably sitting with fairly empty bottles, and so that is where if you do anything, you will see great results. You will develop strength quickly, and increase health benefits in no time. So everything you try will work. It’s when you get into high performance athletics that now we have to be specific and deliberate. We need to first build a bigger bottle, fill it up with some strength, and then add our Power for flavor. I haven’t entirely figured out where Muscular Endurance fits into the analogy, but for now we’ll just say that when you’re drinking the bottle and using what you have. The endurance is how fast you drink, and how fast it refills so you can drink more, and sooner.
Pierce Hnatiuk, BPE, CSCS, CPT High Performance Strength & Conditioning Coach Alberta Sport Development Centre – NW Grande Prairie Regional College phone: 780-539-2040 phnatiuk@gprc.ab.ca