Hey guys, a more in depth look at the evolution of training, with a slight focus on the Packers' program:
GBPG Link Weight training evolves, adapts to demands of game
When Brett Favre stayed home in Mississippi for most of the 2005 season, he embarked on a personal-training program at the Green Bay Packers prompting that helped nudge the buzz words core training into the mainstream.
Four years later, that phrase remains widely misunderstood, but Favres well publicized foray into a personalized and core-oriented program embodied the latest evolution in athletic training.
Especially over the past six or eight years, advances in the understanding of anatomy and movement have led to important changes in training for professional athletes that are trickling down through all levels of sports. Those changes have prompted trainers to adapt the use of traditional weight-room work to individual athletes and their specific sports and combine it with other training methods, both old and new, to better transfer training to the field of play.
It used to be just as simple as go in the weight room, throw some weights around, try to get stronger, said Ken Croner, the trainer from Athletes Performance in Tempe, Ariz., who went to Mississippi to work with Favre in 2005 and 07.
But through studies, through personal experiences trainers have had with athletes, theyve found there is probably a better way, because the body functions as a unit. Theres that old adage you should train like you play, and a lot of times if we look at the athlete individually we can help the body function better.
For all the gains made in anatomy and kinesiology (the study of human movement), there still are differences among well respected trainers around the world on how to best train athletes. Training, not only for competitive sports but for general fitness at large, is a burgeoning industry, and in the Internet age coaches and athletes at all levels can find an avalanche of information, some reliable and plenty not.
The differences in opinions even among the most successful trainers suggests sports science has a long way to go. But professionals seem to agree that the greatest recent advancements in athletic training are the personal screening of athletes and a move toward more core-oriented, sports-functional training.
Professional trainers routinely put clients through a series of diagnostic tests to identify weaknesses and imbalances in sports-related movements. There are any number of test routines, though most consist of six or eight basic movements.
Packers strength and conditioning coaches do that with every new player, and they retest all players periodically to monitor improvements as well as changes caused by injuries. A players workout program is then tailored to correct imbalances a weak ankle, leg, hip, shoulder or whatever and build from there.
The biggest advances are in the approach to anatomy, said Mark Lovat, who is in his 11th year as an assistant strength coach for the Packers. A more functional, anatomical approach to looking at athletes, looking at (movement) patterns and recognizing postural distortions and addressing those or not contributing to those, thats really where its at.
Screens often reveal that while training at all levels is getting more sophisticated, many workout programs are surprisingly bad. Ed Fitzsimmons, director of strength and conditioning at the University of Buffalo, said he routinely finds glaring weaknesses and basic functional deficiencies in Division I athletes who look like physical specimens when they show up on Buffalos campus. Theyve been athletic enough to compensate for the fundamental shortcomings of their high school workouts, but they are injuries waiting to happen.
They may show you theyre great athlete, they seem very athletic, but its mostly directed at the sport, he said. When you start to look deeper, they really are missing some vital components.
From the screenings, though, workout programs can vary greatly, depending on the sport and the teams training philosophy.
Though some training components apply to almost all sports requiring explosive movements, functional training for football is different than functional training for a rowing or baseball, and functional training even within a sport can vary widely based on the position. A baseball player performs in short, explosive bursts with long periods of rest; basketball and soccer players combine constant motion with regular bursts in any direction; and football players perform explosively for several seconds, then rest for 15 seconds to 25 seconds, and do it again for up to 65 times a game. And within football, a quarterback requires far different training for scrambling and throwing than an offensive lineman for pushing against 300-pound defensive tackles or pass protecting against explosive 250-pound defensive ends.
So, the Packers set the tempo of their weight-room training to the tempo of their game. They structure traditional weight-room work to build power endurance that is, repeated strength-oriented bursts and in-between sets, they perform other exercises, such as for the abdominals. Most of their lifting is with free weights while standing, and the emphasis is on movements such as the squat and power clean that require triple extension that is, flexing the ankles, knees and hips that most sports require.
Its that ability to extend, extend, extend, said Dave Redding, the Packers new strength coach. Stop on a dime and start on a dime, change directions on a dime, plant your feet. To me, athletes should be training on their feet and in space, because thats what they do.
Weight-room training also seems to be evolving away from heavy work toward using lighter weights moved more explosively, though again, trainers differ on the degree. The biggest concern is injury, because heavier weights place greater stress on the joints and back. Some trainers also think that moving lighter weights faster builds power better than moving heavier weights more slowly.
Fitzsimmons, for instances, said his Buffalo basketball players usually use less than 50 percent of their one-repetition maximum in squats and Olympic lifts. The goal is to do the movement explosively over four or six repetitions per set.
Its the how, not how much, Fitzsimmons said. If I can keep them moving forward and doing it correctly with no shivering and waving back and forth, you have the same results.
The goal, after all, is not to get stronger for weight-lifting competitions, but to become more athletic in other sports. And thats where the generic phrase core training comes into play.
The core is commonly misconstrued as the abdominal muscles, but in fact its all the muscles, both front and back, from the buttocks to the top of the shoulder blades. The core is further broken down to the inner core, which is the muscles around the pelvis, and the global core, which is predominantly the muscles you can see. Together, core muscles connect and coordinate athletic movement of the arms and legs.
Its the word functional thats gotten so abused, Fitzsimmons said. Its more of training movements, not (isolated) muscles. But that in itself is not it. Its how you train them, then how you condition them, then how you connect them. If you dont connect them correctly you havent got anything. Most of our athletes coming up now are so severely unintegrated like that, they cant do anything.
There are almost limitless ways to strengthen the core and integrate it with the arms and legs, both with traditional weight lifting and especially without. The core is heavily involved in all major full-body movements, so squats and Olympic lifts help integrate the core. So do plyometrics (explosive jumps and hops), which were first studied systematically in the old Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s and have become a staple of almost all training programs today.
But there also are numerous ways to target the core more precisely without isolating it, and thats often done with slightly new twists on exercises that go back years, decades, even centuries.
For instance, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates made perhaps the first reference to a medicine ball as a training device more than 2,000 ago, and for the first half of 20th Century, they were a big part of training grainy film images show boxing legend Jack Johnson throwing one around while working out in the early 1900s. By the 1970s, medicine balls were considered outdated, but now theyre back as a major component in training because of the variety of moves, throws and twists that carry over to almost all sports.
What youre doing there is getting a lot of bang for your buck, Croner said. Developing power, developing speed, full-body stuff, which is no different than when youre on the field.
Calisthenics such as pilates, the core-oriented body-weight program designed by Joseph Pilates to train the Italian Army for World War I, are another way. Pilates classes not only are now popular in the general public, but professional trainers and therapists use many of those moves to strengthen the core and integrate it with the rest of the body.
Many trainers also advocate performing some exercises on unstable surfaces such as a Swiss Ball, wobble and slant boards, foam pads or a BOSU ball. They force the core and central nervous system to work harder to perform coordinated movements with the arms and legs.
We let them progress to a certain point on a (weight-lifting) load and then say, OK, lets go to an unstable surface, Redding said. That load (declines). Then well progress to a certain load with that surface and we make the surface more difficult. So the difficulty doesnt become the load, the difference becomes surface change.
In fact, the ways to train the body for athletic improvement are nearly limitless. Croner, for instance, tied rubber tubing to Favre and had him perform rollouts, scrambles and awkward throws against its resistance. Its all in the name of function.
What youre doing should be about performance, Lovat said. Were not training to see how much a guy can lift, thats not our competition. Our training is a means to another end, playing football. So were going to draw from wherever we see fit as long as its applicable to playing the sport.