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For most consumers, the idea of monitoring movement through wearable technology is new. However, coaches, trainers, and athletes have been using lightweight sensing devices for more than a decade. While the consumer markets have focused on activity tracking and coaching, the power and accuracy available in today’s wearables are bringing lab-grade technology into the field for specialized use cases. This includes everything from tracking your golf swing to concussion sensing.

At Scribe Labs, we developed a wearable sensor for running, called RunScribe. Over the past year, we’ve amassed what we believe is one of the largest databases of “real world” run data comprised of advanced metrics, including: symmetry, flight ratio, pronation, pronation velocity, footstrike type, shock, impact Gs, and braking Gs. At last count, we’ve captured more than 45,000 runs, 200,000 miles and 245 million steps. From those runs, we’ve calculated more than three billion run metrics. So yeah, we’ve got a lot of data. With that data, we have a unique perspective on what works—and what doesn’t—when sports professionals bring wearable tech into their programs.

We’ve captured more than 45,000 runs, 200,000 miles and 245 million steps.

The Wearable Tech Opportunity

First, let’s start with the opportunity. Wearable tech offers substantial benefits. These include the following.

Real World Data

By capturing metrics “in the wild,” wearable data reflects an athlete’s natural movement. It doesn’t provide a complete or accurate picture when you’re restricted to lab environments or video analysis that can only evaluate narrow aspects of an athlete’s performance — like one or two steps of a marathon. Running on a treadmill is different than running on a trail [1,2]. With wearables capable of capturing every footstrike of a race or training program, we can get a much more accurate and nuanced view of performance, form, and risk.

Small and Unobtrusive

The last thing you want is to impede an athlete with technology. Today’s wearables can weigh just a few ounces and transmit information wirelessly. This means that athletes can focus on performance without distraction.

Low Cost = Democratization of Data

With the cost of advanced sensor tech dropping, many of these systems are priced below $200. This finally makes them accessible for everyone from high school track teams to the pros.

A Better Yardstick

When advanced metrics are accessible on a consistent basis, coaches and therapists can quickly quantify progress in performance and injury recovery, and identify areas of weakness. A couple of examples of this are:

• A coach can watch an interval session and see the entire team successfully completing intervals at pace, but some individual athletes report struggling. Looking at the data, that coach can then determine what changed in the running mechanics over the last few intervals and get a better picture of how fatigue affects those athletes. In turn, coaches can add specific drills that address those kinematic changes.
• A therapist who suspects that over pronation or high pronation velocity is contributing to a patient’s knee pain can try multiple orthotics or shoe inserts in one session. They can then collect objective data quickly and inexpensively, to see which insert may have the best result before sending the athlete out on a longer run.

Understanding Variability

Variability is a natural part of running, and understanding it is the Holy Grail. Mechanics change with pace, shoes, terrain, and fatigue. It is not unusual to see a 30% difference in a particular metric when an athlete changes terrain. Wearable technology gives an opportunity to understand variability in ways that haven’t been possible before.

For instance, while you may have previously just assumed that a forefoot striker is always a forefoot striker, this is not necessarily the case. You may shift your footstrike pattern based on the shoes you’re wearing or the terrain you’re on, or as you get fatigued over the course of your run. The understanding of variability is a huge missing piece in the way that runners are assessed and helps to make decisions on training programs and shoe wear.

Understanding Specificity

Many runners don’t understand the importance of training specificity. In order to race successfully at a given pace, an athlete needs to spend significant time training at or near that pace. Many of us that don’t train with a coach or a group will often do the same thing in training almost every session and then whine about not getting faster. Movement patterns and footstrike characteristics can be very different at race pace, as compared to an athlete’s standard training pace. If you run the same pace every day in training then, by default, that becomes your race pace. Real-world wearable data illustrates these differences and can help athletes and coaches to develop pace-specific programs.

Wearable Sports Tech Risks

Wearable technology can provide more meaningful running metrics that capture real-world performance. However, as with any technology, there are risks and reasons to be cautious.

Accuracy and Consistency

Sensor technology has become increasingly accurate with incredible processing speeds, but the devil is in the details of what you do with that raw sensor data. We’ve all heard that the accuracy of step counters and activity trackers can be off by as much as an astounding 20% [3,4]. Validating metrics through third-party research is critical to becoming a trusted tool.

Scribe Labs is one of the few wearable tech companies to publish our research and validation studies on Running Unraveled. In the rush to take advantage of wearable technology opportunities, we’ve seen a substantial range in accuracy and consistency. If coaches and athletes make training decisions based on new metrics, it’s important to research the validity of the data. Companies are always working to improve accuracy and handle outliers, but it’s important to have transparency in data accuracy and validation.

So Much Data

Did we mention that we had three billion calculated footstep metrics? That’s a lot of data, and it can be overwhelming. New metrics are less understood and there can be a learning curve to grasping their implications. Wearable technology is shortening the time frame between academic study and practical application. This is exciting, but it can also be daunting. New communities are popping up where athletes, coaches, and trainers share how they use wearable technology in their programs. Scribe Labs publishes its research and use cases on Running Unraveled.

Oversimplification

There is a deep human desire to narrow down complex information to its simplest form. In a sport like running, this can cause more harm than good. In analyzing the RunScribe community data (all three billion footsteps!), there is very little that we can generalize about running. At first glance, what seems like common sense gets twisted.

For example, to the naked eye, many world-class runners appear to be very light on their feet, so you might assume they have low impact Gs and shock. And yet, looking at data from an Olympic runner with sky-high shock values, we could see they’ve learned that higher impact values and a shorter ground contact phase help utilize elastic energy to propel them forward. However, many average runners wouldn’t be able to withstand that level of pounding for long.

There are also a number of generic “metric targets” around stride rate (180 target) or contact time (200ms) that don’t hold true for everyone, or even show consistent correlation to hitting goals. In a study done at the 2015 New York City Marathon, we compared stride rate to finish times and found almost no correlation. But we did find that flight ratio is much more likely to correlate to finish times.

Coaching

Many running wearables provide real-time feedback and coaching through a mobile app. This makes a lot of sense. “You’ve given me all this data—so tell me what to do with it!” The problem is that most of these coaching applications fall victim to the risks we’ve outlined.

The oversimplification of advice can range from being slightly useful to dangerous. Providing guidance without accounting for variability or context is a huge risk because we know there is no “one size fits all” advice for runners. For example, the Golden Rule of a 180-step rate was derived from legendary coach Jack Daniels, when he was observing middle and long distance runners at the ’84 Olympics. The key to this “rule” that is nearly always missed is that these athletes were running at race pace. We see some apps and coaches assuming that a 180-step rate should be a target at every pace. It shouldn’t.

Integrating Wearable Tech Into Your Practice: Coaches

So how are coaches and trainers using wearable technology in their practices? We’re seeing the RunScribe system used in very different ways, based on the type of user. For coaches, RunScribe data quantifies performance and progress, but also helps solve very specific issues. Here are some examples.

Establishing a Baseline

If you’ve got a healthy runner, get their data snapshot. This allows you to do an in-depth assessment, identify areas of potential concern (rapid and extreme pronation, large asymmetries, high shock values, and big differences in metrics in different shoes), and track progress. Additionally, if a runner does get injured, having a baseline assessment of their metrics can help coaches determine when they are fully recovered.

Tracking Progress Holistically

For running, it all comes down to pace. But we know that the way athletes get to pace can be very different. Traditionally, there have been limited metrics to guide a runner’s training, like cadence, pace, and heart rate. While useful, these metrics don’t provide a holistic view of performance. By tracking change against an athlete’s baseline, a coach can see if progress is being made with efficiency metrics like flight ratio and contact time, but with an eye toward maintaining consistent motion and shock metrics. Slow and steady improvements can win the race and keep a runner healthy.

Solving Problems

Coach and author, Steve Magness, wrote a case study on how he uses RunScribe data to help his athletes run a better race. By breaking down interval sessions, he can see when his athletes are hitting their rhythm, and can help train them to find their rhythm faster without exerting needless energy.

Understanding Fatigue

The implications of pace on mechanics are relatively straightforward: As running speed increases, impact Gs, pronation, pronation velocity, and flight time usually increase; whereas contact time drops because our feet spend less time on the ground. When fatigue is introduced, the dynamics change: Impact Gs can rise as pace decreases; contact time can increase even though a runner maintains pace. Understanding how a distance runner’s mechanics change to compensate for fatigue can open up opportunities for training to target areas of weakness and combat the impact of fatigue [5].

Integrating Wearable Tech Into Your Practice: Clinicians

For sports doctors and therapists helping athletes recover from injury, or adjusting mechanics, wearable technology is supplementing and—in some cases—replacing, lab-based systems like high speed motion capture and force platforms. In the case of RunScribe, data collection and analysis tends to have a faster turnaround time than traditional lab-based equipment and can be extremely helpful in gait retraining scenarios. Therapists can send their clients out into the real world and find out if changes seen in the lab are maintained outside.

Here are some examples of applications of wearable technology being used in clinics today.

Environmental Assessment

Wearable technology allows sports pros to capture client run data in the wild, establishing a baseline for a runner’s mechanics in their preferred environment—on a treadmill, track, trail, or road. Understanding the impact of variables on a runner’s stride creates deeper and more meaningful insights during the assessment process.

Risk Quantification

Advanced metrics can provide deeper insight into a runner’s symptoms. Pronation excursion and velocity, symmetry, footstrike, impact Gs, and braking Gs frequently provide a clearer picture of a runner’s issues.

Motion-Capture Enhancement

Accurate wearables eliminate the need for manual calculation of metrics from video footage. Physios and PTs can use advanced metrics to reinforce and quantify what they see in video footage. When tracking progress for injury recovery or the impact of orthotics on stride, wearables rapidly illustrate the changes in a runner’s mechanics.

Asymmetry Identification

Symmetry imbalances are a natural part of runner’s stride, but identifying substantial asymmetries—particularly in footstrike patterns, pronation excursions, and pronation velocities—help to assess the severity of issues and the effects of treatment over the course of multiple sessions.

Objective Feedback Loop Creation

The success or failure of a treatment plan is frequently based on a client’s ability to stick to the plan. Overdoing it or overexerting is common. By using wearable technology between appointment periods, clinicians can monitor the effects of the plan and also evaluate objective data to ensure the runner is sticking to the program.

Wearable Sports Tech Is Not a Threat

No wearable device is ever likely to replace the value a coach or clinician can bring to a runner. That wealth of knowledge and the ability to analyze the many components of a runner’s history and form is invaluable. By providing reliable and accurate measurement tools in the field, wearables like RunScribe put more meaningful data in the hands of sports professionals, which allows them to perform in-depth real-world assessments, track change, and quantify progress. As this data becomes more accessible and more broadly understood, we can learn to train smarter and improve treatment programs as a community.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Bios

John Litschert is the biomechanist and co-founder of Scribe Labs. Prior to co-founding Scribe Labs, John worked at the U.S. Olympic Training Center and at Colorado State University where his focus was on gait analysis.

Tim Clark is CEO and co-founder of Scribe Labs. Tim’s background in engineering has spanned consumer electronics to sports technology. Previously, Tim worked at Red Octane (Activision), MetriGear (Garmin), and the U.S. Olympic Training Center.

References

1. Nigg, Benno M., Ruud W. De Boer, and Veronica Fisher. “A kinematic comparison of overground and treadmill running.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 27.1 (1995): 98-105.
2. Wank, V., U. Frick, and D. Schmidtbleicher. “Kinematics and electromyography of lower limb muscles in overground and treadmill running.” International journal of sports medicine 19.07 (1998): 455-461.
3. Sasaki, Jeffer Eidi, et al. “Validation of the Fitbit wireless activity tracker for prediction of energy expenditure.” J Phys Act Health 12.2 (2015): 149-154.
4. Dannecker, Kathryn L., et al. “Accuracy of fitbit activity monitor to predict energy expenditure with and without classification of activities.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 43.5 (2011): 62.
5. “The Unescapable Fatigue Effect.” Running Unraveled, 1 August 2016, www.runningunraveled.com/2016/08/01/the-fatigue-effect.

All training programs should integrate Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) to contract muscles forcefully. The best minds in sports performance all agree that EMS is a valuable tool, particularly at the highest levels of performance. However, professionals in all sports—particularly at upper levels—do not fully understand the applications and benefits of EMS technology. Many coaches and trainers have purchased EMS devices but have not yet integrated the technology into their regular day-to-day routine. With just a little knowledge, you can help your athletes make big improvements.

You may face two obstacles to making the best use of EMS for athlete performance and health. First, you cannot learn about EMS without holding a device in your own hands. Like any technology, you must fiddle with it and, through trial and error, find out what works and what doesn’t. With some of the stimulation units, consumers often complain that user manuals do not teach how to best use the technology. Rather than reading a book on how to use barbells, massage tables, or treadmills, your own determined practice can find the best application for any tool in question.

The second obstacle to using EMS regularly to aid athlete development, recovery, and rehabilitation is that many individuals feel that only certified physical therapists can use it. Your initial caution is commendable, but I can see no good reason why only physical therapists are best qualified to use EMS on athletes. EMS contracts muscles forcefully. Isn’t this what training athletes do themselves on a daily basis in the weight room, on the track, and on the field? Coaches and strength professionals understand the principles of progressive loading, recovery, and work-to-rest ratios, and the careful integration of multiple training elements in a complementary fashion.

These are the same principles required to master EMS technology with an athlete. Any coach that is comfortable with implementing effective conventional training programs should have no problem understanding the value and applications of EMS for their athletes. We must not take the attitude that coaches are children, not to be trusted with such sophisticated technology. People are using smartphones on a daily basis with technology that is a thousand times more sophisticated than a simple EMS circuit board.

But before everyone rushes out and purchases a new EMS unit, we should talk more about how it can optimize the preparation of your athletes. There are infinite reasons to use the technology on a daily basis, particularly in professional sport, where the schedules are ambitious and the wear-and-tear on athletes is significant. Remember, we are all breathing, walking, and talking because of our brain’s ability to send electrical impulses throughout all areas of our body in an exceptionally coordinated fashion. Without electricity, we would cease to be thriving organisms.

Although electricity can be considered a hazard, in the right amounts and forms, it can be used effectively to further our health and well-being. In some instances, innovative medical researchers, like Dr. Bjorn Nordenstrom, have done truly amazing things. Dr. Nordenstrom successfully used electricity in the treatment of cancerous tumors. While we do not expect all EMS users to solve the world’s health problems, we can expect to find simple and effective ways to improve muscle function with some straightforward guidelines.

Here are six reasons why the sporting community—both competitive and recreational—should embrace EMS technology on a broad scale.

Research has proved that EMS works. Positive results support the use of EMS for strength enhancement and performance gains. Like any training tool, you will achieve optimal results when using the technology appropriately in terms of specific settings, timings, frequency, and overall volume of work. In cases where EMS did not produce performance gains in trained athletes, the researchers did not use the technology appropriately in conjunction with a well-organized training program. This is the key. Simply slapping on the pads and turning up the current is not enough. You must have clear goals and objectives for EMS, as well as a plan for how and when to use the technology.

Coaches maximize EMS benefits when they integrate the units with well-planned conventional training. Many research studies say the use of EMS alone, at best, provides the same benefit as voluntary training; that EMS is no better than regular training methods. Because EMS requires no central nervous system input, it will not fatigue the brain of an already over-taxed athlete. The combination of conventional training and EMS provides a significant advantage over either method alone because the cumulative effect of both methods provides a boosted training scenario with less energy cost to the athlete. This is a win-win proposition, especially if the stresses of life and training over-stimulate an athlete’s nervous system.

EMS delivers a clean, complete muscle contraction. Our athletes are over-inundated with excessive “noise,” but not from iPods or fashionable headphones. Accumulated stress—both physical and psychological—can not only create excessive fatigue, but also interfere with athletes’ thought processes and autonomic signals within their brains and bodies. If we rely solely on voluntary strength training to prepare athletes, we are selling them short. Using an EMS, an athlete can contract a muscle group more completely and cleanly than by lifting weights. EMS bypasses the “noise” and works directly on the muscle to get a complete contraction. This is particularly important when targeting fast-twitch muscle fiber, which you can preferentially target with the correct stimulation frequency.

If you plan to use EMS as a sole means of eliciting strength gains in muscle, you can be certain you will get a more effective muscle contraction—albeit using an appropriate amount of current—than when training three times per week. However, I do not recommend that you rely exclusively on EMS for your strength training unless you are using it for rehabilitation purposes, or you are trying to reduce wear-and-tear on a specific joint structure. EMS works best when integrated with a conventional training program that requires a coordination component for more efficient transfer of the training adaptation. You will achieve the best results by supplementing conventional voluntary training with EMS sessions in proper proportions, supported by general conditioning and recovery.

Using EMS makes us more intelligent coaches and rehabilitation professionals. Not only does the use of EMS make us think more about the recruitment characteristics of skeletal muscle, but it also helps us to diagnose problems related to fatigue and injury in both the peripheral and central nervous systems. When an Olympic weightlifter suffered a significant knee injury, voluntary strength training was not restoring the atrophied quadriceps muscle. In essence, the lifter’s brain was not allowing the muscles to contribute fully to the movement of the knee joint in basic squatting and pulling motions. Because the message from brain to muscle was not getting through, inhibition was dominating the program. Even when my team started using EMS, the amount of current required to contract the quadriceps muscles on the injured leg was two to three times that of the healthy leg. As a diagnostic tool, the EMS unit also indicated when the inhibitory response was dissipating, and larger volumes of conventional exercise could be successfully reintegrated into the athlete’s training program without re-injuring the knee.

The reconditioning specialist, Bill Knowles, brought up a good point that all peripheral injuries are also “brain” injuries. A muscle injury damages the connections between mind and body and thus disrupts the brain. EMS helps to repair those connections and work through the inhibitions created by the brain’s self-imposed protective mechanisms. In the case of the Olympic weightlifter, the use of EMS was essential in moving past the obstacles and inhibitions to provide maximal recruitment of that muscle group on the injured leg, particularly since we could strengthen the quads without stressing the knee joint. Once recruitment patterns were re-established and, the quadriceps muscle was fully restored through both isolated EMS use and superimposed EMS training, the knee did not present any further problems for the athlete.

In cases of both fatigue and injury, the signals between the brain and the body are easily disrupted. EMS can not only restore, but also enhance those connections. Additionally, EMS can help assess the neuromuscular system by monitoring the amount of current required to contract the muscles in question. As the neuromuscular system improved through the rehabilitation process, less and less current was required to attain a full contraction. Monitoring the levels of intensity on the EMS unit can show the progress of muscle rehab (and the central nervous system) in injured states.

EMS facilitates recovery. In tight schedules, when athletes might not have the time or energy to implement recovery and regeneration protocols, EMS is an extremely useful tool. Active recovery protocols that encourage circulatory mechanisms within the body help facilitate a more complete and expedient recovery. Optimally, athletes can implement tempo running, but sometimes stationary bike intervals or swimming-pool exercises can hasten recovery. Because not all situations are optimal, other tools can aid recovery. Athletes can take the EMS units home after training and apply them while riding home (not while they are the driver, of course), or when sitting down and reading or surfing the web. Typically, an athlete places the EMS pads on larger muscle groups and employs a pulsing program not only to promote circulation, but also to loosen muscle and reset tone.

EMS is effective in situations where athletes must travel. Long trips and waits in airports can be not only exhausting, but can also lead to the stiffening of muscles and joints. If athletes perform periodic recovery protocols with an EMS unit, they can keep their bodies supple and well-maintained, in terms of oxygen circulation and the removal of waste products. Athletes report feeling significantly better after using the EMS unit on their trip, and some sleep better when they arrive at their destination.

It is also important to note that athletes using maximal strength, power, and speed protocols with EMS have reported feeling more recovered the next day in terms of muscle looseness and joint mobility. EMS has the ability to essentially reset muscle tone and provide athletes with not only the means to contract muscle more efficiently, but also to relax and de-contract muscle more effectively. This benefit is critical in explosive cyclical movements, such as sprinting, where the nervous system is required to contract and de-contract muscle in a very short amount of time, at very high speeds. EMS can help these athletes minimize muscle stiffness, cramping, and general peripheral fatigue.

Current portable EMS devices are exceptionally convenient. My first EMS was a large device that fit in a medium-sized suitcase. EMS devices now are slightly bigger than a smartphone and can pack a pretty good punch. The portability of the devices, combined with easy-to-use adhesive electrodes, make them a strength training and recovery tool that you can carry in your pocket. As mentioned previously, the travel benefits of EMS are obvious. Having one in every athlete’s gym bag is an obvious solution for getting that extra edge, particularly if you don’t have an entourage of support staff to help you with recovery and massage. If Bill Gates wanted a personal computer on every person’s desk, why can’t every athlete have a personal EMS unit in their equipment bag? The portability, power, and efficacy of these devices are indisputable.

My recent conversations with a number of professional sports teams (NFL, NBA, and NHL) confirm that athletes who rely on their bodies for their income realize the benefits of EMS. The schedules and demands of the regular season are so stressful that every athlete needs help with their recovery and the maintenance of strength. EMS provides a simple, convenient solution to this problem.

It is important to note that not all EMS devices are created equal. Less-expensive EMS devices are available online in the $100-$300 range. While it may seem that this is a cheap way to get into the market and still get the benefits of electrical stimulation, there are some significant shortcomings with the cheaper units in terms of power, flexibility, and build quality.

I chose to work with Globus Sport and Health technologies on their SpeedCoach series of muscle stimulators because they have very robust and powerful units. Their lead sport technology engineer, Giovanni Ciriani, created programs and protocols that work with athletes. We work iteratively to determine which programs yield the best results with athletes in different sports, and we make changes to accommodate their needs. In the last few years, we have developed programs and protocols that no other company has in their units. Because we work with athletes on a daily basis, we have the ability to monitor progress and make changes where necessary. This information is funneled back to Giovanni at Globus, and he makes the necessary adjustments to waveforms, frequencies, pulse widths, and timings.

My hope is that more and more coaches and athletes recognize the benefit of EMS technology in the next few years. The technology has not changed much since the 1970s, but we have made great inroads into the development of the protocols surrounding the technology. This is where the big advances will be made: The optimization of protocols and the most efficient integration with conventional methods. Such advances can only be accomplished by working with EMS and athletes on a daily basis. So don’t wait any longer—get yourself a high-quality EMS unit to advance your knowledge and improve the development of your athletes.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Dr. John P. Sullivan is a Sport Scientist and Clinical Sport Psychologist. He has more than 20 years of clinical and scholarly experience, and he has worked with the same team in the National Football League (NFL) for the past 16 years, coordinating clinical care and sport science.

Freelap USA: Clinical mental health has focused mainly on symptoms stemming from concussions in sport, but depression and other challenges of the human condition affect athletes just as much as the rest of the population. Can you go into the reason that the profession of psychology should move towards a compass model instead of being typically on the bottom of many organizational totem poles? The brain is the top organ, yet it is often left until the end of any investigation into complex problems.

John Sullivan: What I think you are asking is what the barriers are for sport psychology to be optimally and fully integrated into sport. First, I would say that this question certainly has cultural context for each sport organization, so there is not just one model for all organizations. That being said, sport psychology and the brain sciences continue to take a one-down position in sport which is—in part—due to a lack of education about the brain and a few lingering myths in sport.

In general, we tend not to learn much about the brain in our education systems. In fact, unless someone has specialized in the study of the brain, there would be very little working knowledge about its impact on our daily lives. What is even more concerning is our lack of knowledge about brain health as the driver of our quality of life. That is one of the many reasons why Chris Parker and I have written the book, The Brain Always Wins (release date October 2016), to assist in closing this gap in knowledge.

To be clear, when I use the term “brain,” I am not speaking of “the mind,” as they are very different scientifically. That is, the brain is our organ that drives eleven other sub-systems, and the mind is our consciousness, which science (to date) does not fully understand.
The first myth in sport that often acts as a barrier is the belief that performance and health are separate concepts or processes. The evidence is clear that our ability to perform in any context is based upon our health, and this starts with the brain.

The second myth is that “mental toughness” and “grit” are sufficient, or even protective, barriers against the actuality that sport is trauma. The actual evidence about mental toughness and grit is that they have little to no scientific validity. The importance of context is ignored (most significantly, psychophysiology) and, when used as blunt tools or terms (which they often are, such as an athlete/individual being blamed for not being “tough” or “gritty” enough), we are ignoring the point that performance is comprised of many factors.

Mental toughness and grit have the illusion of validity, and people have belief bias concerning the terms because they seem to make sense. However, in actuality, they are overstated concepts that lack validity. The scientific truth is that the brain is wired to survive—so performance and survival are not about toughness or grit, and instead are the result of training, which allows for adaption, and eventual evolution.

The third myth that shifts us away from including the brain in sport is that we desperately want to believe that sport and high performance are achieved via a simple formula, consisting of engaging in repetitions or perhaps having the right genes. However, the reality is that high performance is a complex multifactorial process that includes the brain every step of the way.

Although I think that psychology as a field can do more to advocate for incorporating brain health, it is also the case in sport that we critically need to work with others in sports medicine and sport science in a transdisciplinary fashion. This would require genuine collaboration with licensed and properly trained professionals, including licensed sport psychologists who have completed proper training in sport. It is also key that sport organizations advocate for these sorts of positions as a priority.

Freelap USA: Many sports technology companies try to ride the excitement of pro sports for bigger markets because venture capital (VC) money wants a big return on investment. This has left coaches feeling used or having management invest in the wrong technology because science—specifically biology—was out of the equation. Can you share how teams can invest into sports technology wisely, as nothing is perfect but it must be valid and accurate/precise enough to be effective?

John Sullivan: Since sport technology is a free market system, it can be difficult to differentiate what is actually “science” versus “marketing.” Furthermore, with the technology we have available to us at this time, we can measure almost anything. So, one way to answer your question is to provide critical questions that should always be considered when utilizing sport technology:

• Is there any chance of harm?
• Why and what are we using the technology to assess/measure?
• What are the ultimate goals?
• Who will be handling the data? (e.g., How are you protecting the data and who has the competency to interpret it?)
• How will the data be used, as well as what validation research has been conducted on the technology itself (e.g., construct, signal, laboratory, and ecological validation)?

In the September edition of the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, you can find a commentary on this topic. “Wearable Technology for Athletes: Information Overload and Pseudoscience” was a project that I had the pleasure of working on with Dr. Shona Halson from the Australian Institute of Sport, and Dr. Jonathan Peake, Lecturer in the Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology.

Freelap USA: Injuries and burnout are real at lower levels and continue up to the pro levels. What do you feel is a great resource for coaches to help with the retirement of elites and even very successful athletes at lower levels? Giving up a sport forcefully because of age or injury is rough, and this process is often neglected with sports psychology because athletes usually come for help with cliché problems like “choking” and other similar things. What are good resources for this?

John Sullivan: Retirement from sport—either by choice or otherwise—comes with inherent challenges and health concerns. There has been a great deal of psychological research conducted in this area (e.g., 95,000 scientific articles on retirement from sport, and 2,090,000 scientific articles on psychological factors related to injuries (1)). A critical issue, considered another way, is the extent of involvement and support within organized sport with the goal of helping athletes transition from sport (e.g., by providing education and career planning), as well as having a focus on the integration of well-established psychological science in rehabilitation from injuries. Although some transition and planning programs exist, they are often not based on best practices or even sufficiently funded. A good starting place for learning more about this is the International Society for Sport Psychology’s (ISSP) “Position Stand: Career Development and Transitions of Athletes” (2).

We can all be doing a better job for this effort by asking for such programs within our organizations, including a team of properly trained professionals who can support and facilitate care. Furthermore, sport coaches and strength and conditioning practitioners can engage with continuing education to increase their awareness and competency regarding identification of issues, and thus know when to refer to licensed psychologists if/when brain health issues arise.

Another resource comes from the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA), which has led a multi-association call for increased competency (3,4). They will soon also be offering further continuing education focused on brain/mental health.

Properly executed sports medicine and sport science require collaborative efforts, so increasing our working knowledge of other areas will allow us to increase the health of those we serve. Noting that health is the foundation of high performance ensures that talent is protected and allowed to develop.

Freelap USA: Sleep is a very popular topic of discussion, but few teams actually assess sleep beyond subjective questionnaires. Could you show how teams need to slow down and audit the process instead of skipping over things and giving superficial advice? Many athletes need more than casual suggestions like setting their alarms differently, darkening their rooms, or changing mattresses. Sleep is often disturbed by overreaching issues or personal problems like financial and family stressors, and athletes are human. Could you share anything you think teams are missing the boat on?

John Sullivan: There is no single panacea, but I would say that the lack of proper assessment, interpretation of data, and tailored, systematic programming with athletes are all keys with regard to sleep.

From my observations across a range of populations and cultural contexts—e.g., youth to elite sport, and individuals on different continents—I think that sleep is often misunderstood and underestimated. What I see with regard to sleep being misunderstood has to do with proper human intelligence/expertise, programming, and tools. The work needed to educate individuals about sleep is varied and complex, and this challenge is typically intensified when dealing with athletes who have a tremendous amount of human variation and demands on their systems. What I have observed with regard to programming is that sleep is either being ignored or there is no systematic approach to enhancing sleep behaviors. The belief is often that providing information alone will lead to the desired changes. Although providing information is an element of behavior change, it is far from sufficient to facilitate lasting change.

Importantly, tools that are used to evaluate sleep have often not been properly evaluated for their reliability and validity, so they offer little to no value. In some cases, where the tools/assessments are scientifically appropriate, the recipients of the data are not trained and therefore unable to translate the data accurately, so no value is added even still. Sleep is any organization’s No. 1 performance enhancer because of its protective factors for the brain and, ultimately, its impact on optimal performance and brain health.

Freelap USA: Fatigue is always seen as a neuromuscular factor, which oversimplifies the situation into a weak muscle or lack of specific exercises. While strength and conditioning is clearly a prime variable, general fatigue from meetings, emotional strain, and countless human components are also factors. Can you go into some fresh ideas that coaches can tap into regarding fatigue without getting too esoteric? Right now, we are seeing a lot of pseudoscience creating confusion here. It would be great to know how we can manage fatigue better without just doing the known physiological monitoring.

John Sullivan: A helpful way to think about fatigue is to understand that our brain is very focused on energy management because it stores very little of its own energy. Therefore, if we do not establish habits that provide energy balance, our central nervous system (CNS) reacts by shifting into varying degrees of survival. This, in turn, reduces essential adaptation throughout all of our systems and sub-systems (e.g., enteric nervous, cardiac, endocrine, skeletal, and neuromuscular systems).

This domino effect emphasizes the crucial need for systematic assessment of a performer’s habits through examination of strengths and areas for development—the outcome of which should be a developed plan that increases readiness and resiliency. Everything we do loads the brain, thus impacting our energy balance: Therefore, an ecological assessment (e.g., in situ review of daily activities) is key to assisting a performer and protecting their ability to recover and, in turn, increasing their readiness, resiliency, adaption, and evolution.

Similar to the points raised above regarding implementation of tangible plans related to sport technology, injury, and sleep, there is no single answer or “6:00 abs” response to share. Instead, it is critical for athlete success and care that we take a comprehensive and collaborative approach to proper assessment, interpretation of data, and tailored, systematic programming based upon sound scientific principles.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. Google Scholar search conducted 9/8/2016
2. Stambulova, N., Alfermann, D., Statler, T. and Côté, J. “ISSP Position Stand: Career Development and Transitions of Athletes.” International Society for Sport Psychology (2009).
3. Neal, T.L., et al. “Inter-Association Recommendations for Developing a Plan to Recognize and Refer Student-Athletes With Psychological Concerns at the Collegiate Level: An Executive Summary of a Consensus Statement.” Journal of Athletic Training. 48(5) (2009). doi: 10.4085/1062-6050-48.4.13.
4. Neal, T.L., et al. “Interassociation Recommendations for Developing a Plan to Recognize and Refer Student-Athletes With Psychological Concerns at the Secondary School Level: A Consensus Statement.” Journal of Athletic Training. 50(3) (2015). doi: 10.4085/1062-6050-50.3.03.

Team Culture

A few years ago, I decided to take our girl’s track and field program a step beyond workouts to become something truly special. With the help of my coaches and team captains, we came up with several ideas to improve the team’s sisterhood.

Big Sister Little Sister Program

One of the first things we implemented was the Big Sister Little Sister program. Track and field is one of the few sports kids don’t experience in elementary and middle school outside the scarce physical education (PE) track unit. We felt it was important for our rookies to bond with teammates during week one.

The big sister’s job is to help a rookie on the team through the tough first couple of weeks. They partner-stretch their little sisters during warm ups and help teach them the weight room routines during strength training.

After the first few weeks, they buy their little sisters personally decorated water bottles to bring to practice and track meets. The water bottles are handed out during our Red Carnation Ceremony. The Red Carnation Ceremony is a bit of an initiation where the big sisters fully welcome their little sisters by giving quick speeches about how excited they are for their little sisters to join them on the path to greatness.

At the Red Carnation Ceremony, each new athlete receives a flower from me. I address the new athletes as a group, officially welcoming them to the program. I chose the red carnation because red is our high school’s main color as well as the color of my college and fraternity. In my fraternity, TEKE, our flower was the red carnation which we gave to fraternity sweethearts. I’m a sentimental chap, and I always wax nostalgic at the Red Carnation Ceremony.

Team Theme Days

We stole this idea from Jim Lohr of Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School. The morning before most track meets, the girls dress up in goofy ways to celebrate the coming day’s meet. This is always meant to be fun and is never hazing kids.

Our go to themes are Dress Nice and Tennis Shoes, Pride & Pig Tails, and Twins. When other students see our kids dressed in a unique way, it gives our athletes the chance to tell their classmates about the upcoming competition.

We developed Dress Nice and Tennis Shoes to keep the kids from wearing outrageously dangerous stilettos or sandals that harm young people’s feet and ankles. Pride and Pig Tails is a fun way to dress up in school colors, face paint, accessorize with ribbons, etc. Twins is a day where the big sister and little sister dress the same. Girls who don’t have little sisters team up with a pair of girls to form triplets.

The girls decided Twins day was a nice way to honor my wife, who lost two of our triplet babies in a difficult pregnancy. Two of our daughters didn’t make it past in utero to this world, but this doesn’t mean their lives or anyone who loses a child to miscarriage should be diminished. The kids tend to do this team theme during the infertility week.

To say there are very few dry eyes would be the grandest of understatements. Kids will surprise you in unique ways. As heavy and sad as this seems, it allows me to share our story and celebrate the miracle that is our child, Isabelle, who lived. The message I try and share with the kids is life can be tough, but with the faith and love of a friend, we can overcome the most difficult things in life.

Team Breakfasts

We hold Team Breakfasts on the morning of a track meet. It’s hard to control what happens during the twenty-one to twenty-two hours your athletes are away from you. By providing a team breakfast, we give the kids a chance to have at least one healthy meal on the day of their event.

Our kids meet in my room which allows me to touch base with each of them before the meet for special instructions, injury issues, event changes, etc. The kids are responsible for bringing the snacks, plastic items, and drinks. Each week, we choose a different group of kids to bring the goodies. While we’re snacking, I play an Olympic or World Championship track meet highlight reel on my overhead projector. It’s fun and gets the kids inspired. Once we get a large enough number of athletes together, we take a group picture to post on social media.

Reward Systems: All World List, PR Bar, and Interval Cards

Pundits criticize rewarding kids for fulfilling basic expectations. On the other side of the spectrum, old school coaches rarely give their athletes a complement let alone a trophy or prize. Even the grandmaster of sport psychology says athletes should find intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic rewards don’t create the type of motivated athlete we are looking for long term.

Throughout the year, I do like to do small things for athletes of different abilities to help motivate them. It creates many small moments of positive energy that can be contagious to the rest of the team. Kids also become more aware of their progress.

All World List

When I first started coaching, I found it crucial to uncover as much of the girl’s track and field history I could. I wanted to create an accurate top ten list for our record book. Thankfully the few years before I started coaching, the leadership kept great records.

But as I worked back to the mid-1990s, I had no clue what former athletes ran, jumped, or threw in the regular season. I even went so far as to enter the Missouri State High School Athletics Association’s vault to look at the old state media guide and searched for Parkway Central state qualifiers. Sadly, I only found a handful of athletes.

I realized a historical top ten list would always be incomplete. At this point, I changed direction and created the All World List.

The All World List is different from a top ten. Instead of adding names to an increasingly difficult top ten list, I created a standard based on numbers and distances athletes must hit to be placed in Parkway Central’s track history books.

In the 200 dash, for example, an athlete must run under 28.00 seconds. The trick to the All World List is that the standards must require a high enough performance that most team members can’t hit the numbers without some talent or work. On the other hand, the standards need to be attainable to provide early motivation for athletes entering the program.

After a major meet, it’s always fun to add names to the list. I hope these lists become so long that our yearly track and field media guide will become hundreds of pages long. I always let the kids know when they’ve made the list and where they rank in school history. It’s so much fun to see the kids climb up the list during their school careers.

PR Bar

After reading Coach Guthrie’s book from his tenure at UW-Lacrosse, I implemented a Personal Record (PR) Bar reward system. Any time an athlete gets a PR, they earn a candy bar. Every couple of meets, we buy bags of individually wrapped candy bars to reward dozens of new PRs. I like the idea because even the slowest or least talented kid on the team will get many PRs throughout the season.

Occasionally giving the kids a candy bar also sends the message that it’s ok to enjoy sweets or treats. I always tell my kids, “It does not matter what the scale says, instead it’s about how you look and feeling in your clothing.”

We hand out the bars near the beginning of practice during our team huddle. We have all the athletes who hit a PR at the previous meet stand. Once all the PR athletes are standing, we go around from left to right and have the athletes tell us how many PRs they got and the mark they hit in the event.
Each PR gets a Colt Clap. A Colt Clap is one loud unified clap by the kids. The single clap quickens the time it takes to recognize all the PRs and limits wasted time if you have a long training session planned for the day.

Interval Card

I developed the idea for an interval card while watching Willy Wonka when the characters found Golden Tickets. We give the interval card to an athlete who has done something truly special in practice or at a meet. An athlete can use the ticket to sit out an interval during any workout the rest of the season.

It’s amazing how much harder a sprinter will work for the chance to get out of an interval in the future. Having this option also lets a kid who needs a break to take one without feeling guilty. What I find really humorous, though, is that some of the athletes never cash in the ticket.

To use this reward effectively, specific rules must be followed, or the interval card could be abused.

• I never allow sprinters to use the card on the longest interval in practice. Speed endurance is an important component of success on the track. This sends the message that everyone has to do the longer and tougher intervals when scheduled.
• An athlete can only use one per practice. I have key workouts in the middle and late part of the season, and I don’t want my athletes to hoard the cards to miss an entire practice. A complete absence from practice disrupts our training plan.
• If an athlete misses a practice and the absence is unexcused, the sprinter cannot use the card for a week. They don’t lose the card, they just lose the right to use it for a week.

Social Media

A couple years ago, my assistant coach told me about a team that used social media to promote their program to a large audience of alumni and parents. At that moment, I decided we could enhance our presence on social media by increasing the number of weekly updates by our coaches.

Before, during, and after a track meet, it’s now common to hear about our team’s accomplishments during the week. Getting the word out and spreading the love is always good for the kids, parents, and track alumni to see. #bantavsweather is a funny ongoing social media battle I have with good ole Mother Nature on a private Facebook page.

I love the way new and old athletes and our coaches share their love of the sport. It can be highly entertaining to see a former Parkway Central athlete and state record holder yelling, “Pay the MAN!” and former athletes making plans for road trips to see their old team achieve state dreams.

Connecting the past, the present, and the future is a valuable way to build energy and community for the program. When and where possible, create an easily accessible social media homepage dedicated to your program for people to visit, share, and add to the positive energy. Social media can also help you to communicate last minute changes and adjustments to your athletes and a much needed quote of the day to help steer the conversation at practice during the team huddle.

Secret Track Buddy

Secret Track Buddy is a game like Secret Santa. During the season, I take the team roster and put everyone’s name in a hat. Once we start the game, the secret buddies have a week and a half to do three sweet things for their buddy. These do not need to cost money and can range from a personal poem to a gift card to St. Louis Bread Co.

We usually schedule the Secret Track Buddy reveal the day of a track meet. The kids have a chance to hand off their last gift at our team breakfast or before our warm up for an evening track meet.

Six Recruiting Ideas

Create communication between the high school and middle school programs and PE departments. You can do this several ways. For example, post a bulletin board in the middle school highlighting your team’s accomplishments.

Our middle school PE program does one track and field unit. During this unit, teachers record each performance and reward the top performers in each class. I receive this list every year and target the kids who I believe can help us.

The middle school also has a yearly intramural track and field meet with the middle schools in our school district. Each year I go to this meet so I can see the kids in action.

Have a middle school teacher on your coaching staff. This isn’t always easy because middle school usually has a different daily class schedule that conflicts with practice time. But if you can sacrifice having them at the beginning or end of practice, they can help build relationships, spread the word, and open the door to the possibility of running track in high school.

Every year, I send each of 300-plus incoming freshmen a letter highlighting our program’s accomplishments. I also mention the benefits our sport provides young people–goal setting, fitness, improving their main sport, and participation. As we all know, there is no bench in high school track and field.

For the best prospects in the high school, I write each a personal letter discussing how they could help improve our program. I mail this to the athletes’ parents. I also bold face the personal part of the letter. This is a little trick that creates an opportunity for the parents and kids to have a positive conversation about our sport and to receive a nice letter complimenting them.

Hold a team informational meeting and post fliers before the season starts. I like to send the letters six weeks before the season starts and hold the informational meeting a couple of weeks later. We talk about team expectations, rules, and complete a lot of the paperwork.

After the meeting, we post fliers highlighting action pictures of our athletes. The fliers include important information about the season, including the start date.

Spread out the events mentioned above to stay in the kids’ thoughts and, at the same time, avoid becoming a wall of noise.

Offer an offseason conditioning program. Each state has different rules on how many days you can meet and what things you can do during conditioning. In Missouri, we’re lucky because the rules allow us to get our kids into shape.

This program should be open to everyone and any sport. If done correctly, it will prepare your kids for success. It may also help you attract athletes who enjoy the time you spend with them so much they’ll join your team in the spring.

The time spent in the offseason can dwarf the time spent coaching during the regular season. The time commitment is intimidating but, in the end, it’s well worth the effort.

If all else fails, personally introduce yourself to a talented kid, shake their hand (very important), look them in the eye, and tell them how much you would enjoy the chance to coach them.

Promoting the Program: Coaches are Cheerleaders

Coaches have to be the biggest cheerleaders for their kids. Before our season starts, I plaster the walls in our building with large laminated color posters of current athletes in previous track meets. These posters can be very expensive, so each year I make about eight to add to the collection.

Before our school switched how we made announcements, I would have a detailed track and field statement after all track meets. We would announce the team score, varsity event winners, and any records set in the process. Spring sports tend to be forgotten amid the end of year responsibilities, and I like to keep them on people’s minds.

For every kid who’s awarded an All-State Track, XC medal, or becomes a Division I athlete, I hang a framed black and white picture on my wall among the social studies maps, presidents, and other famous people I have displayed in my room.

I also like to display the trophies we win in my room for potential athletes to see. Since my room is now getting crowded, I’ve decided that my assistant coaches will display, on a rotating basis, any upcoming trophies we win other than the conference, district, or state trophies. Sharing these trophies is another way to positively reinforce our program to athletes in places other than my classroom.

Speaking of assistant coaches, it’s important to build a group of diverse but popular personalities inside the school. There are always kids who won’t have a relationship with you. Other staff members can help bring these kids into the program or help retain them from a previous season. My current staff is the best group I’ve coached with, and we grow closer each season. My assistants have done an outstanding job promoting our program and pushing our athletes to their potential.

Kids Spell Love as T.I.M.E.: Winter Conditioning and Summer Track

Attitude reflects leadership. If you want your kids to commit 100%, you can’t give them 50%. This means you’re there on cold winter days and during hot summer months. You ride the bus. You’re the first person to the track and the last one to leave. Even when you’re ill, you show up as long as you’re not contagious.

Athletes need to train all year to become great. This doesn’t mean you blast their legs out all year long. Each season should have a different point of emphasis to build toward the important championship phases of indoors, outdoors, and cross country seasons.

For more on team culture, see my podcast with Joel Smith sponsored by SimpliFaster

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

This past summer, I was lucky enough to spend some time with JB Morin. I was excited because I am always interested in learning more about acceleration. In my typical fashion, I immersed myself in the topic to the point of borderline OCD. I bought a 1080 Sprint to experiment with my athletes. Then, about a year ago, JB published his paper on acceleration, “Sprint Acceleration Mechanics: The Major Role of Hamstrings in Horizontal Force Production.”

One part of his paper that caught my attention was the displacement difference between the best and worst runners. Or, in other words, how fast each athlete got to his first step. If you study Frans Bosch’s “Strength Training and Coordination: An Integrative Approach” (and it is a book to study, not read), muscle slack and co-contraction principles can really help with this. I will talk more about this in another article.

Another point that interested me was about power: It is not how much horizontal power an athlete can produce, but rather the effectiveness of the power he uses. Morin uses a unit that he calls the Drf, or the decrease of effectiveness of horizontal power. His claim is that a good starter only loses 5% of the effectiveness of his horizontal force production as he runs toward top end speed. A slower athlete will lose 10%. To improve the effectiveness of this force, he recommends heavy sled runs. However, sometimes the body may not be ready for a heavy sled run, or even a light one, either. The effectiveness may break down due to biomechanical issues.

I was sent a series of videos to review because the athlete in them seemed to stagnate on his progression. I don’t know him and I have never seen him run in person. As I watched the video clips I was sent, I thought about his Drf. If I weighed a sled for him to pull—heavy or light—I thought the results would be minimal, due to some of his movement patterns or lack thereof. I responded with a breakdown of what I saw in the start. After all of the feedback I received from my Building a Champion article, I thought I would do the same with this athlete.

Acceleration: Toe Off and Ankle Stiffness

I started with the side shots. His toe off is picture perfect and he gets good glide time. A telltale sign of that is when his toe comes off the ground, there is a delay on the landing with the next foot. Better yet, at toe off, the swing leg knee is still moving up. His foot placement is good. It is close to underneath his center of mass (hard to tell for sure at the angle). However, when his foot hits, his right ankle gives or lacks stiffness, and the problem it creates changes the angle of his shin. As the ankle sinks and he goes to push forward, the force becomes less horizontal and more vertical because, as the ankle softens, the shin becomes more vertical, resulting in less effective horizontal force.

This might be why that stride length is smaller than the next step. The same thing happens with his next right leg stride: He collapses and pushes vertical. If I were to have him pull either a heavy or light sled, would his ankle become more rigid? Or would it become softer, due to the force opposing his push, and cause a new compensation pattern?

Video 1: This is a left-side view of a sprinter toeing off. He demonstrates perfect toe off, good glide time, and good foot placement. But when his foot hits, the right ankle is not stiff enough and this changes his shin angle. The result is less horizontal and more vertical force, which may be the reason his stride length shrinks.

Video 2: This video shows good toe off. The sprinter shows very little break in the ankles as he accelerates. As he pushes back, his body/ankle is rigid. He would do better with a heavy sled. In fact, we used EXERGENIE for resistance and I used to anchor it to my four-way hip machine. When he accelerated, he pulled the whole machine on its side and dragged it down my driveway. He ran a 6.2 FAT 55.

This view is from the front and, again, he takes a great first step. But as he lands, you can see some rotation in the right leg that causes a push not only back, but to the right also. His knee shifts to the right. The force is now pushing to his one o’clock and his foreleg ends up on the wrong side of his body. This causes a balance issue and forces his right arm to throw farther, creating another balance issue. This could be because he missed his big toe and found another part of the foot to push from. However, that remains to be seen until we look at him from the back.

His left foot gets to the big toe, and that is why he has a better drive from that side. In fact, you can see the stiffness when he lands and goes through a moment of ankle rocker to get the momentum going forward and keeping his horizontal forces horizontal. The second right step again has a spin to it and his vector is not straight. The footage of when he is close to the finish line show his right foot clearly pushing to the right. As he becomes more upright, his left foot starts to roll to the outside and he doesn’t make it to his big toe. This can account for his block 10 and block 30 times. He has a decent block 10, but his block 30 does not correlate. So his Drf is probably not as good as it could be.

Video 3: A view of the runner from the front. While his first step is great, the landing leg is rotated, throwing him off-balance. He has better drive on his left side, pushing through his big toe, but the left foot starts to roll to the outside as he becomes upright. This decreases his horizontal power (Drf).

The back is an interesting angle. His first step is really good. He is coming off his big toe and, at toe off, his swing leg hip is reaching up to his armpit. At mid-stance of his first step, his hips are almost parallel to the ground and his swing stays under the corresponding hip. But, that toe off position from the right creates some lateral movement, which is shown by the drop in his right hip. He doesn’t get his left swing leg up to his armpit. From that point, he stays on the outside of his feet and never comes through to his big toe. This becomes cyclic as he moves down the track.

Video 4: This view of the back of the athlete shows a good first step. However, his toe off on the right creates lateral movement and, instead of coming through his big toe, he continues to stay on the outside of his feet.

What is interesting is that this athlete’s vertical jump video from the back will also show that he pushes through his feet in the same fashion as he does when he comes down the track. Maybe this is why there is a correlation between vertical jump and acceleration times. A good jumper will go through his big toes, like a good starter.

Video 5: This shows the same athlete jumping, from behind. Notice that he pushes through his feet in the way that he does when sprinting down the track. This may be the reason that there is a correlation between his vertical jump and acceleration times.

This video of the Asafa Powell vs. Tyson Gay comparison shows two different techniques. Powell was going through his toe drag phase, which is quite a clever technique. The drag causes a pretension in the opposing hamstring, which may cause it to be more reflexive. Both men keep their hips parallel to the ground, which allows for better balance. Both men show the ankle stiffness that rolls into an ankle rocker to improve their Drf. And both drive to their big toe to get a true triple extension.

Video 6: While runners Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay have two different acceleration techniques, they share some commonalities in form, too. Both get better balance by keeping their hips parallel to the ground. Both improve their Drf using stiff ankles rolling into an ankle rocker, and both drive to their big toe.

Outward Explosion From the Start

Again, we are looking for how effective an athlete’s acceleration can be. In the previous section, we saw the importance of getting to the big toe and ankle stability. An athlete can have all of the hip extension power in the world, but if the ankle is not rigid or the drive in the foot is not forward, they will not accelerate well. Or they will have a poor Drf.

Now, we have a different case. This athlete is different than the previous one. His needs are almost the opposite. While this athlete has a better vertical jump, he does not have the outward explosion that the previous athlete does. So, let’s take a look.

From the side, his first step has some explosion. To see this, I am looking at the hang time from toe off to contact of the opposite foot. But, his torso is curved quite a bit, which can reduce some power output. It is more difficult for the body to organize and release power when the spine is as curved as this athlete’s. The collapsed torso will also inhibit how high his knees come up as well, which means his foot strike is out in front of his center of mass. This will delay the time for the next push because the mass takes time to move forward.

This is the reason that explosion out of the blocks is critical. It gets the momentum moving faster, so foot strike underneath is more probable (JB Morin’s research about velocity differences before first contact). This athlete also lacks some ankle stiffness. Watch as his ankle hits the ground and his heel sinks downward and to the rear, which forces his shin to move to a more vertical angle. His horizontal velocity now becomes more vertical in nature.

Another reason for his vertical force is that his knee is extending without his hip extending. His hips seem to stay behind in his start as his legs do the work. His next step almost happens at the same time that his toe off occurs. This shows a lack of power, which could be either from the lack of toe off or from his curved posture. There is no insight as to why this happens at this point. Step No. 2 has an ankle give as well and he is becoming more vertical. Again, at toe off, Step No. 3 is about to hit the ground and contact is becoming more out in front.

Step No. 4 shows some good ankle rocker but lacks stiffness elsewhere. The front and side will show more, and the timing is critical at this point. The lack of hang time is not allowing for the swing leg to follow through and, with his center of mass not moving quickly, the foot contact will be premature. He is now “late in his gait.” The concept of Drf is that effectiveness of the acceleration. By Step No. 5, his shins are almost vertical. His horizontal force is all created by his lean and his arm drive.

Video 7: As we study explosion, we notice that the athlete in the video has some explosion in the first step. However, his torso is curved, which reduces power release and delays the next push. Additionally, his ankle isn’t stiff enough, which forces his shin to a more vertical angle and leads to vertical velocity instead of horizontal velocity.

Video 8: This view is of the same athlete, but a little more to the side/front, showing the points made in the previous video. The vertical force is also due to extension of his knee without corresponding extension of his hip, His toe off needs improvement, as it’s currently premature. His lean and arm drive are creating horizontal force, but not his legs.

From the front, we are looking for cues that will show that, despite his ankle rocker, something else is not rigid to allow ankles to work properly. In his stance, with no blocks to help align his feet, he is already off balance. His feet are lined up behind one another. Without balance, all else will fail. His main concern at this point is to not fall. Acceleration has now become secondary.

The initial push is through the big toe but, due to his stance, he is already moving to the side. Additionally, his posture doesn’t allow for space to let his hips and shoulders move. At toe off, it looks as if his hips are staying behind. Previous to contact, he is already rotating his pelvis and his right shoulder is falling behind and his left arm is crossing. This rotation continues throughout his start.

Video 9: The athlete starts out off-balance, with not enough rigidity despite his ankle rocker. The result is that he remains off-balance and moving to the side, with rotation through his pelvis, a falling right shoulder, and a crossing left arm. His focus is not on acceleration—as it should be—but on not falling.

From the back, at toe off, his right hip doesn’t come forward at all. In fact, to get distance, he drives his knee laterally. On steps 1, 3, and 5, his lateral chain collapses and he loses power from the additional rotation of the wind-up he uses to push forward. This may cause problems with his timing of his hips. His hips never seem to advance his body forward and he loses his ability to move his center of mass. Watch the back view in reverse—it looks like he is falling into a hole on his right side. This is the lack of stiffness on that side and it is a huge power leak.

Unlike the previous runner, this runner has good ankles and toe off, but the rest of his body is lacking in timing and stiffness, especially in the hips.

Video 10: The back view of this athlete shows that his hips are ill-timed, which means they don’t seem to advance his body forward. Instead, he relies on his knees. While he has good ankle stiffness and toe off, he still needs more stiffness in the rest his body, as well as better timing.

So, how do you improve on this? Come to the Track Football Consortium from December 2-3 in Hinsdale, Illinois. I’ll have a lot of cool stuff to share on acceleration.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Regardless of the level you are coaching or competing at, it is always a goal to try and prolong a peak level of performance for a long period of time. The question is, how do you do this? In the traditional system of periodization, it is common to hit peak for one big meet and then try and hold this peak for as long as possible. This is especially true in the U.S. for both the collegiate and professional seasons.

College athletes and coaches have to be prepared for conference meets, regional meets, finals, possibly the U.S. Nationals, and even the World Championships and/or Olympics. Professional athletes have to be ready for nationals and then try and hold that peak until the worlds or Olympics, often while trying to make money at Diamond League or other European meets. Looking back at both past and present performances, holding this peak level of performance using a traditional periodization program has proven not to be so easy. However, looking at this year’s results, Coach John Smith did a great job accomplishing this with Raven Saunders. She was able to win NCAAs, have a great result at nationals, and then throw a personal best and finish fifth at the Olympics. The question is, how do we go about doing this using Dr. Bondarchuk’s System?

To review, in the past two articles I wrote (The Cycle and Exercise Classification of Dr. Bondarchuk’s System and Choosing Exercises and Applying Data Using Dr. Bondarchuk’s System), I discussed the different cycles built into this system: Exercise Selection and Implement Selection. Although I discussed the Maintenance Cycle briefly, I would like to go over in detail how to set up and implement it effectively. I was originally exposed to one way of implementing a Maintenance Cycle within this system. Now those of us who use this system have two ways to set up a Maintenance Cycle. I will begin by detailing the first way, and follow up with the second—the most current way we are using to maintain a peak level of performance for a long period of time.

It is important that you first know in which sessions your athletes hit peak form. This is important because, in order to have an effective Maintenance period, you have to go into the Maintenance Cycle at peak form. For example, I know that my peak form during a Developmental Cycle takes place in anywhere from 14 to 22 sessions. If I only have two SPEs, it will take 14 to 20 sessions. If I have three SPEs, 16 to 22. This has been true for every Developmental Cycle I have ever completed. Therefore, if I know that I have a Maintenance Cycle next, I will start my Maintenance Cycle two to three sessions after I hit peak form: either at 16 or 18 sessions. In my opinion, it is important that you start the Maintenance Cycle earlier in peak form then later. You don’t want to wait too long in peak form and start to have your performances decline.

Before we get into the setup of the Maintenance Cycle, let’s first discuss how you determine that a Maintenance Cycle will follow your current Developmental Cycle. It would be optimum that you only compete when you are at peak form. However, this is not always the case for athletes at the high school or college levels because there are often dual and invitational meets every week. Therefore, you may compete in many meets when you’re not in peak form. However, once you reach peak form, it may be necessary that you stay in form for the next number of weeks because all of the bigger meets are back to back.

For example, once our big meets start at the high school level in Southern California, they don’t end until the state meet is over. This period can last six weeks, including a league meet, CIF Prelims, CIF Finals, Masters, and the state meet. This is five meets, but I say six weeks because the league meet is often a week and a half before the next major meet, which is CIF Prelims, so you have to be at peak form for up to six weeks.

The same is true for college. However, there are less meets in that span of time, including conference meets, regionals, NCAA Finals, and even U.S. Nationals. These meets usually fall two weeks apart from each other, which means that you have to hold peak form for up to eight weeks. So back to the point: How do we determine when to go into Maintenance? It is determined by looking at when your athlete hits peak form and deciding if there is enough time to run another Cleanse/Rest Cycle and Developmental Cycle before the next big meet. If there is not enough time to run both those cycles again, then going into Maintenance would be the best thing to do.

“Go into Maintenance when there’s no time to run Cleanse and Development cycles before the next meet.”

Let’s have a look at two hypothetical situations. I will use both high school and college examples, to make it easier to understand how this works. At the high school level in So Cal, we have a meet called the Arcadia Invitational at which many coaches and athletes would like to perform well. This can be considered to fall in the middle of our season, although the latter half of the middle. I would have my athletes hit peak form for this meet, knowing that I have enough time to run both a Cleanse/Rest Cycle and Developmental Cycle again so that they can hit peak form for a second time starting at our league meet. Once they hit peak form at the league meet, I know that each of the following weeks are big meets that have eliminations. Therefore, I know that we cannot go into another Cleanse/Rest phase or another Developmental Cycle, due to the importance of each meet.

I will now choose to go into Maintenance for each of these meets. I can choose to go into Maintenance either at the league or CIF prelim meets, based on how long my athlete holds peak form during the Developmental Cycle. If I have my athlete hit peak form on the day of the league meet, I know that they have roughly six sessions of peak performance. I can manipulate the number of sessions that we have between these two meets to hold off going into Maintenance until after CIF Prelims. This is where the art of the coaching profession comes into play. You’ll have two options, and the best way to figure out what to do is to experiment.

When applied to the college setting, we can compare the Arcadia meet—which falls in the middle of the season—to a major dual meet against a cross-town rival that is extremely important to your program. Examples are USC vs. UCLA, Cal vs. Stanford, etc. It may be of extreme importance to hit peak form at this meet and then again starting at your conference meet. Therefore, you have to determine if enough time lies between the two to run both a Cleansing Cycle and Developmental Cycle. If it does, then you do so; planning to hit peak form again at the conference meet. After hitting peak form at the conference meet, it would be time to move into Maintenance for the remaining big meets—regionals, finals, nationals, etc.

Setting it Up

As I mentioned before, we have two options. I call one “The OG Maintenance Phase,” and the other, the “The Terracing Maintenance Phase.” To begin, both are set up as so:

• CE
• SDE
• SPE#1
• SPE#2
• GPE Circuit
• A. Twist
• B. Back
• C. Frontal Plane
• D. AB

Like I said, the Maintenance Phase is set up exactly like any Developmental Phase. However, the way it is implemented is entirely different. Yes, it is still important to keep good data. However, the point at which you change the cycle varies depending on whether you’re doing the “OG style” or “Terrace Style.”

When using what I call the “OG Style,” you switch all exercises every 14 days no matter what. It doesn’t matter if you got four sessions or 10 sessions during this period. At Day 14, everything changes. New implements (CEs), new SDE, new SPEs, and new GPEs. Personally, I have held a level of performance of +/- 20cm for up to six weeks after hitting peak form using this style of Maintenance.

When using the “Terrace Style,” exercises are switched in a more conservative style. This concept is to cause less shock to the body. So how do we apply this style?

The first thing you do after hitting peak form and determining that it’s time for Maintenance is to change the implements or CEs. After two to three sessions using new implements, you switch out the SDE. Now you have the new implements and a new SDE. After two to three more sessions, you switch out SPE No. 1. After two to three sessions more, switch out SPE No. 2. Finally, after two to three more sessions, you switch out the entire GPE Circuit. At this point the entire training plan is different and you start to repeat the sequence for as long as needed.

I have not personally used this style. However, I have applied it to my athletes and we have held a level of performance after hitting peak form for up to six weeks as well. To make it a bit clearer on how this style would look, I have included a chart below with a hypothetical situation.

Original

• Throw: 16-14-6k
• SDE: Nieder Press: 3×5
• SPE #1: Hang Clean: 3×5
• SPE #2: Back Squat: 3×5
• GPE Circuit (3 sets)
• Long Twist x10e@10K
• RDL: x8@60K
• KB Windmill x8e@12K
• Ab Wheel x10

Start of Maintenance

• Throw: 18-16-15
• SDE: Nieder Press: 3×5
• SPE #1: Hang Clean: 3×5
• SPE #2: Back Squat: 3×5
• GPE Circuit (3 sets)
• Long Twist x10e@10K
• RDL: x8@60K
• KB Windmill x8e@12K
• Ab Wheel x10

2-3 Sessions into Maintenance

• Throw: 18-16-15
• SDE: Nelson KB Throw: 3×5@16K
• SPE #1: Hang Clean: 3×5
• SPE #2: Back Squat: 3×5
• GPE Circuit (3 sets)
• Long Twist x10e@10K
• RDL: x8@60K
• KB Windmill x8e@12K
• Ab Wheel x10

4-6 Sessions into Maintenance

• Throw: 18-16-15
• SDE: Nelson KB Throw: 3×5@16K
• SPE #1: Close Grip Snatch: 3×5
• SPE #2: Back Squat: 3×5
• GPE Circuit (3 sets)
• Lon g Twist x10e@10K
• RDL: x8@60K
• KB Windmill x8e@12K
• Ab Wheel x10

6-9 Session into Maintenance

• Throw: 18-16-15
• SDE: Nelson KB Throw: 3×5@16K
• SPE #1: Close Grip Snatch: 3×5
• SPE #2: Speed Step Up: 3x5e
• GPE Circuit (3 sets)
• Long Twist x10e@10K
• RDL: x8@60K
• KB Windmill x8e@12K
• Ab Wheel x10

8-12 Sessions into Maintenance

• Throw: 18-16-15
• SDE: Nelson KB Throw: 3×5@16K
• SPE #1: Close Grip Snatch: 3×5
• SPE #2: Speed Step Up: 3x5e
• GPE Circuit (3 sets)
• Long Twist x10e@10K
• RDL: x8@60K
• KB Windmill x8e@12K
• Ab Wheel x10

As you can see, after 8-12 sessions all of the exercises are completely different. This style offers a slower change; in theory, causing less shock to your system. However, we have had success using both styles and it is up to you to figure out which works best for you or your athlete.

I’m hoping this article wasn’t too long-winded in reaching the main point. However, I must stress the importance of knowing when your athlete hits peak form and knowing if there is enough time to run another Cleanse and Developmental Cycle or move into Maintenance.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

The University of Oregon Ducks football team has seen a major resurgence lately. How has a program that once went 37 years—from 1957 to 1994—without winning even a share of a conference title suddenly become a perennial national title contender?

The logical answer would be great players and great coaches, which the Ducks have had in droves. Joey Harrington, Dennis Dixon, LaMichael James, Kenjon Barner, and Marcus Mariota all finished in the Top Ten of the Heisman Trophy voting. Mike Bellotti, Chip Kelly, and Mark Helfrich are all proven winners as head coaches. Jimmy Radcliffe might be the best strength and conditioning coach in the country.

Facilities is another potential answer. Although Autzen Stadium is certainly above average for big-time college football, it is not nearly as hallowed or historic as Michigan’s “Big House,” Ohio State’s “Horseshoe,” Florida’s “Swamp,” or USC’s “Grand Old Lady.”

Perhaps it’s the uniforms? Now, I am not suggesting that Oregon somehow has a performance advantage based on their uniforms—though we will talk about performance apparel later in this article. I am suggesting that Oregon, whose uniforms were voted as the best in college football, has an advantage in recruiting based on their uniforms. While most longtime college football powerhouses like Alabama, Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Florida, Texas, Nebraska, Auburn, USC, and Oklahoma keep the same uniforms for decades in order to stay branded in tradition, Oregon is appealing to our current generation by trotting out new uniforms every single game. Not many college football teams have 739 words on their Wikipedia page dedicated to their uniforms.

Figure 1: The University of Oregon football team appeals to today’s generation with their attractive, unique uniforms. Every game sees a new combination of helmets, jerseys, pants, socks, and shoes. Their uniforms, which have been voted as the best in college football, help attract top talent to Eugene and keep the Ducks winning. It certainly doesn’t hurt to also have marquee athletes such as Devon Allen, an Olympic finalist in the 110m High Hurdles, on the team as well.

At Oregon, the football resurgence started at the turn of the century with Pac-10 titles in 2000 and 2001. A seemingly innocuous change in the school logo preceded this resurgence, from the outdated overlapped UO logo to the now-famous stretched O logo you still see today.

That was just the beginning. In 2005, the Oregon Ducks wore nine different uniform combinations. The team was now a staple in the Top 25 college polls, but had yet to truly scare the regulars up top. Then, in 2009, they hired Chip Kelly, whose high-octane, fast-paced offense revolutionized the college game and brought the greatest success in the program’s history. In his four years, Kelly led the Ducks to three outright conference titles and four berths in BCS Bowl games, including an appearance in the 2011 BCS National Championship game. Mark Helfrich took over in 2013 and has kept the Ducks in the national spotlight, including another berth in the BCS National Championship game in 2014 and the program’s first Heisman Trophy winner in Marcus Mariota. Success garners headlines, and success in fresh new uniforms garners the attention needed from top recruits.

How important is looking good to football players? Apparently, more important than their long-term safety. Two NFL players in the late 1980s and early 1990s—Mark Kelso and Steve Wallace—wore oversized helmets during their playing days. The helmets made play safer for those wearing them and—because the outer shell was softer—for those getting hit by them. Both were made fun of quite often about the helmets, even by television announcers.

Kelso himself says, “Players thought the padding didn’t look cool, so they didn’t want it.” [1] You read that correctly: Players want to look cool, even at the risk of injury. Kelso added, “With football players, aesthetics wins out over safety every time.” [2] Oregon’s fancy, varied uniforms did not decrease their safety, of course, but they are winning the war of aesthetics over their competition.

Figure 2: Steve Wallace helped protect quarterback Steve Young on the San Francisco 49ers’ run to the Super Bowl XXIX title. Wallace himself was protected by an oversized helmet. Plagued by concussions early in his career, Wallace added a layer of foam around his helmet to protect his head. His dedication to safety earned him mockery and derision from players and announcers.

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There will mainly be two parts to this article—competition and practice—both focusing on how apparel can make your team better.

Competition Apparel

The function of your competition uniforms is obviously more important than their form. However, advances by apparel companies have taken the job of functionality out of your hand, for the most part. Nobody wears heavy cotton jerseys or big, baggy shorts in Track & Field anymore. Basically, all the outfits on the market are of high-quality fibers that are great for performance. Still, having a knowledge of the various uniforms can put your team at an advantage.

Options

Your uniform choices for Track & Field should be almost as varied as the events. Tight tops might be great for your sprint crew, but would you want to wear them if you were running the 3200m on a hot day? I am the head boys coach at Lake Forest High School (IL). Our varsity athletes are all issued the same jersey top, a Nike DQT Victory singlet. Their bottoms, however, are issued depending on their events. Sprinters, jumpers, hurdlers, and vaulters are given tight shorts; distance runners are given their typical “short shorts”; and throwers are given regular athletic shorts that hang down almost to their knees. If an athlete wants a different pair of shorts, that’s fine as long as we have enough in stock.

The variance in our uniform bottoms serves to accommodate function as well as form. Distance runners typically do not like tights because the tights often make them hotter during a race, as well as in between races. Running the mile leads to quite a sweat, and nobody wants to walk around at a meet with a tight, sweaty item stuck to them, especially with another event coming up. Distance runners have also generally embraced the short shorts. Wearing them is a source of pride because those tiny shorts are now unique to their discipline.

Some coaches have taken the issue of lower body apparel completely out of the picture and let their athletes wear whatever they choose on their bottom half, as long as it is a certain color (usually black). This saves the school money on apparel and also allows the athletes to individualize their look.

If you have the resources, variance in jersey tops is desirable as well, both for function and form. You may have noticed that the U.S. Olympic marathon runners wore jerseys with holes in them. The weather was predicted to be hot and the marathon is obviously quite long, so having light, thin uniforms with holes in them made a great deal of sense. Female distance runners at the professional level virtually never have their midriff covered, though this look is not allowed at the high school level.

While some athletes love the look and feel of speedsuits, others hate them. All speedsuits are not created equal, either. I loved our speedsuits my first two years in college, and hated the new ones we got my junior year. My personal advice for speedsuits at the high school level is to make them exclusive. We will cover exclusivity later in this article.

Compression

Swimming and Track & Field are often compared to each other, which is quite understandable. One area where they should not be compared, however, is apparel. Obviously, the medium for the sports is quite different. Nobody disputes the amazing effect of compression suits in swimming. Speedo claims that their Fastskin-3 suit reduces passive drag by 16.6% and improves oxygen economy by 11%. [3] Just getting into those suits takes 10-15 minutes, and they are generally only ideal to use for one competition. The benefits of compression suits are so obvious and undeniable that coaches and officials do not even expect the athletes to be in team apparel during the championship season! Athletes buy their own suits and caps, regardless of whether they match the school colors or not. In what other sport does this happen?

Can we apply those benefits to compression apparel in Track & Field? Certainly, an appropriately tighter uniform will keep you warmer and be slightly better for wind resistance. But, despite what the companies trying to sell you these items would like you to believe, those are essentially the only benefits. Multiple studies, including those by researchers at Indiana University [4] and many for the Journal of Sports Science & Medicine [5], have concluded that compression apparel in Track & Field has essentially no effect on running performance.

My suggestion here is not that speedsuits, compression shorts, and the like are worthless and have no place in Track & Field. However, their use as a performance enhancer is essentially a placebo effect. But you know what? Most of the time that is good enough. Athletes should feel faster in a speedsuit. They should feel faster in cool new clothing. Our coaching colleague Tony Holler points out speedsuits as one of his five speed enhancers. Loren Seagrave once told me, “When the athletes take off those warm-ups and reveal that jersey, it’s like Clark Kent going into the phone booth and coming out as Superman. You are faster than a speeding bullet.” That is the way your jersey should make you feel.

“Compression apparel may not affect performance, but if an athlete feels like it does, that’s enough.”

Appearance

In the early 1990s, the University of Michigan’s “Fab Five” entertained the world of college basketball with, not only their exuberant youth, brash play, and incredible talent, but also with their bald heads, black socks, and baggy shorts. [6] Most basketball jerseys in the 1980s and 1990s were awesome—we will talk about retro appeal later—but the Fab Five were pioneers of promoting the way they looked just as much as the way they played. Everybody wanted those baggy shorts. Their student union started selling the team shorts and could not keep them in stock.

At around the same time, the Lithuanian men’s basketball team was looking to make a splash in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Lithuania’s independence was restored in 1990, but while they were thick on basketball talent, they were thin on funds. Thankfully, the Grateful Dead read a story about their plight in the San Francisco Chronicle and decided to donate $5,000 to one of Lithuania’s stars, Šarūnas Marčiulionis. Part of the donation went to their tie-dyed warm-up shirts, which featured a skeleton dunking a basketball. When their most famous athlete, Arvydas Sabonis, saw the shirts, he exclaimed, “Wow, this is really a free Lithuania.” [7] Lithuania, in shirts that reflected their attitude, won the Olympic bronze medal in 1992, 1996, and 2000.

Your apparel does not necessarily have to make such a bold statement. You do not need to change history with your uniforms, but your apparel should attract people to your team. Athletes in the school should see your team apparel, see pictures of your jerseys, and say, “I want to be a part of that.” You may argue that the type of kids who come out for the team just for the uniforms are not the type of kids you want on your team. But how do you know? Do the Oregon football coaches say to their recruits, “Don’t pick our school just because you like the uniforms”? I have never been on a recruiting visit with one of their coaches, but I guarantee the discussion is more along the lines of, “We have the best uniforms in the country.”

Appearance matters! The look of your uniform will never literally win you a race, but feeling good about your appearance has a great psychological effect. Remember when your aunt would buy you something embarrassing for Christmas and your mom would make you wear it to school? How much confidence did you have that day? Compare that to the day you got a haircut, new shoes, and new shirt. Imagine heading into every track meet with that sort of confidence.

Denis Sheeran was the coach who preceded me at Lake Forest High School, and we overlapped for three seasons there. He took a broken program that was lucky to have even one athlete at the State meet each year and turned them into a powerhouse team that won the North Suburban Conference championship in 2008 and 2009. His first book, Instant Relevance: Using Today’s Experiences to Teach Tomorrow’s Lessons, is the No. 1 new release on Amazon, and is about making learning relevant in order to increase students’ engagement and desire to learn.

Coach Sheeran, a brilliant math teacher, understands that making students interested in what they are doing is essential to progress. He used the same theories in his coaching; reasoning that athletes need a desire to come out for a program that had been sorely lacking in relevance. The speedsuits you see in Figure 5 were designed by Coach Sheeran.

Retro

Though there are many companies, such as First To The Finish and GTM Sportswear, that sell great jerseys at very low prices, many teams and athletic departments simply do not have the funds to purchase new uniforms very often. But most schools have some attractive apparel lying around collecting dust. Retro uniforms! Go into your school’s equipment room and see what you can find.

How many examples of popular retro uniforms in sports do you need before you will consider digging into your equipment room to see what gems you can unearth? NBA, NFL, and MLB teams are constantly bringing back old uniforms and highlighting their return. Many colleges are having similar events in almost every sport. Even video games are getting in on the trend. Every time that NBA Live is released, the new version seems to have more retro uniforms to choose from. When is the last time you turned down an invitation to an ’80s party?

This past season, our dual meet between Lake Forest High School and Antioch Community High School was a #RetroMeet. Given that it was the last time the two teams would be having a dual meet against each other—due to our conference splitting apart—Antioch coach Chris Bailey and I decided that throwing back the clock was a good idea. Thankfully, the kids loved it too. We actually had more athletes than retro uniforms at Lake Forest, so we had to limit it by only giving retro uniforms to those athletes who had not yet accumulated an unexcused absence. On a cold, blustery day in early April, the Scouts and Sequoits battled each other in a variety of short shorts and old nylon jerseys.

Accessorize

The fact that we call the outfits we assign to our teams, “uniforms,” is all you need to know about their individuality. The uniform is a way to get everybody to look the same. But, while we assign the athletes their jersey tops and bottoms, there are still plenty of ways that athletes individualize their look. They have their choice of socks, spikes, headbands, wristbands, shoelaces, jewelry, undershirts, tights, etc.

If you are not aware of what is popular among today’s athletes, my advice is to develop some awareness as soon as possible. I have never been cool or trendy in my entire life, so I ask my athletes what is in style. Thus, our team apparel handout in 2016 included “bro tanks,” Nike Elite socks, and 3/4 tights. These apparel order forms can be critical to your team. I have the athletes give me input on color schemes, materials, styles, designs, etc. What I want pales in comparison to what they want.

At our awards banquet in 2015, the athletes got fleece vests as their team gift. When I was in school, that vest would have been donated to Goodwill or buried at the bottom of a dresser drawer. At Lake Forest, I see athletes wearing those vests all of the time. This past year, the athletes got a tank top, since Lake Forest is right on Lake Michigan and many of our athletes spend their summers at the beach. They also get a spike bag every single year, because those bags are extremely functional and cheap. Find something that connects to the athletes at your school. Athletes wearing that apparel become a walking promotion of your team.

One of the best athletes I have ever coached, Brad Fortney, is now the head girls coach at Kenosha Bradford High School in Wisconsin. He swears by headbands, putting them on their apparel order form and getting matching headbands for his athletes at the championship meets. These headbands cost about $5 each, but the athletes clamor for them. Each of the four members of the USA’s gold medal men’s 4x400m Relay team at the IAAF World U20 Championships was wearing a headband. Headbands are in!

Figure 6: Kahmari Montgomery and Ari Cogdell both sport headbands at the IAAF World U20 Championships. Accessories like headbands, socks, and even shoelaces can help your athletes give a personal or meaningful touch to their appearance.

Spikes

Let us be completely honest here. The best part of track apparel is the shoes. No track coach in their right mind will have “team” shoes like the basketball team does. There are so many different kinds of shoes for so many different events, in so many brands, and so many colors. Every time I see a cheap pair of spikes, I buy them. Somewhere down the line, I will have an athlete without spikes who will need them. If you want to see a happy kid, watch one trying on a pair of spikes for the very first time.

Having a cache of spikes also helps athletes determine which type of spikes work best for them. Some like a rigid plate; others a more neutral feel. Some athletes like to be forced up on the balls of their feet while others prefer a flatter shoe. Some like a ten-spike plate; others a four-spike plate. While a baseball player can try out a dozen gloves in the store and catch a ball with each of them, there are very few options for athletes to truly get on track with spikes before they buy them. During the track season, my trunk is filled with extra spikes in all different sizes.

Spikes are also the most functional part of a track athlete’s apparel. Beginners may buy some “all-around” spikes—usually mid-distance spikes—while figuring out what events they are going to do. But your top athletes should have specialized spikes if at all possible. The actual implements should also be replaced often. As you head into the championships season, check the spikes in your athletes’ shoes and swap out the ones that need replacing.

Exclusivity

I remember wanting to play varsity basketball as a kid because they had awesome uniforms. Early on in basketball, you would just get a cotton T-shirt, then a reversible mesh jersey. As a high school freshman you would get last decade’s varsity uniforms—which, in 1994, meant your shorts made John Stockton’s look baggy. I abandoned basketball as a sophomore in order to join the swim team, where our Speedos were about the same size as the freshman basketball shorts. The fact that the varsity basketball jerseys were better and newer than the lower-level jerseys was important. They were exclusive. The best for the best. The CEO of a company certainly has a better office than an entry-level hire.

Youth sports are creeping toward that tradition now. Nine-year-old soccer players are issued high-tech jerseys, shorts, socks, and duffle bags. Names on the back of football uniforms used to be reserved just for varsity athletes, but now I see names on the back of middle school uniforms, team bumper stickers on their mom’s minivan, and signs on the front lawn declaring that “a middle school football player” lives there. I understand that the coaches of those programs want to make their athletes feel special, but what is left to discover in high school? I do not blame those lower-level coaches at all. They are taking ideas that worked at one level and applying them to their own program. They understand exclusivity.

In Track & Field, many programs now have “championship” uniforms. We have speedsuits at Lake Forest that we break out during the Conference Championships. If you want the privilege to wear these speedsuits, you have to be good enough to make varsity at the end of the year. Even some of the distance runners on the team clamor for a speedsuit.

We also have an exclusive baton at Lake Forest: Baby Blue. Only our varsity sprint relays get to use Baby Blue, and only if the coaches believe those athletes have a chance to win or place very high. Using Baby Blue is an honor because we have made it an honor. You can see my athletes in Figure 5 holding Baby Blue. There is an aura around that baton. I once threatened to withhold Baby Blue from a team that was not taking their handoffs seriously in practice. They shaped up quickly, and their handoffs the rest of the practice were perfect.

Practice Apparel

Track & Field is an odd sport in that there is no standard practice apparel. As far as I can tell, coaches of the basketball, football, volleyball, and swim teams never really have to worry much about what their athletes wear to practice. Their practice apparel is set. Our sport is different.

Sometimes we are indoors; sometimes we are outdoors. Sometimes we need spikes; sometimes we do not. Some athletes need shorter shorts than others. Athletes also often have to shed layers during practice. Apparel that helps one part of practice may hinder another.

Functionality

What is the ideal practice outfit for a high school Track & Field athlete? That depends on the event group. Since I am primarily a sprint coach, I will start with the sprint crew. Ideally, I would like my athletes to wear a relatively tight T-shirt, light athletic shorts that are at least a couple inches above the knee, a non-hooded long-sleeve top, light athletic pants that are cuffed at the ankle, a hat or headband that covers the ears, light gloves, athletic socks, shoes, spikes, a digital watch, and either briefs, boxer briefs, or spandex.

The distance runners will basically have the same apparel, though their shorts are usually shorter and they will need more breathable apparel on hotter days. Throwers generally do more standing around in practice and build up less of a sweat while outside, so an emphasis on warmer clothes should be considered when they venture outdoors. Obviously, they will not need spikes and probably not a watch, either.

As you can see, we want our athletes in light, non-baggy clothing that does not impede their running ability. This clothing must also keep them cool in the heat and warm in the cold. Sweatpants may seem like a great idea when it is cold outside, but they are usually fairly heavy, and most sweatpants I see athletes wear are loose at the cuff. This means they flop around on the athlete’s legs and get wet on the bottom.

I have a rule that my athletes are not allowed to wear hoods or pull their sleeves over their hands while running. Both of these change the athlete’s form. If you do not want your head and hands cold at practice, bring a hat and gloves. Simple. At a meet, hooded sweatshirts are great. They keep the athletes warm between events. But at a practice, I prefer that the athletes do not wear hooded sweatshirts.

The gender of your athletes will obviously make a big difference, both in simple biology and in the popularity of certain apparel items. Girls’ coaches do not need to worry about boxers and boys’ coaches do not need to worry about sports bras. Brad Fortney, the coach I mentioned above, puts winter headbands with a ponytail hole on his apparel order form and sells a ton. If I tried that with my boys at Lake Forest, I might sell three or four. Girls are also much more likely to wear long tights and short running shorts; both very functional items that most boys are simply unwilling to wear.

Your apparel order forms are a great way to get your athletes to buy appropriate practice apparel. Put the items you want the athletes to wear at practice on there. Long-sleeve T-shirts, technical T-shirts, tank tops, gloves, hats, watches, tights, shorts of appropriate length, headbands, etc. Hand out a form to the parents at the beginning of the season with the expected practice apparel at the same time you hand them the apparel order form.

One great item I will be including on our apparel form this year is NIX ELITE zip-away tights. Designed by three-time World Champion track athlete Greg Nixon, they are running tights that zip all the way down from the hip to the ankle, allowing athletes to quickly remove them before a race. This very functional piece of apparel is also a head-turner. I dare your athletes to see a competitor zip off their pants that way before a race and not say, “I want those.”

Video 1: NIX ELITE track pants may revolutionize the market. They are cool, functional, and stylish, and were designed by Greg Nixon, a three-time World Champion track athlete.

Practice Shoes

The biggest battle I face with practice apparel is convincing the athletes not to wear Nike Free, Nike Flex, or any other similar shoe to practice. Unfortunately for track coaches, Nike has done an incredible job marketing such shoes, and they have become very popular. They are also terrible shoes for track practice. They flex too much and provide very little support. It’s fine if athletes want to buy them for walking around in, but I do not want to see them at practice. There is some consolation in the fact that the Nike Free is at least ranked in rigidity on a scale of 0-10 (with 0 being barefoot and 10 being a “normal” running shoe like the Nike Zoom Pegasus). [9] So, while I prefer that none of my athletes wear a Nike Free, I would rather they wear a 5.0 than a 3.0. Please do not get me started on Vibram FiveFingers and the like.

Be sure your athletes are not showing up to run in basketball shoes, skating shoes, cross trainers, or anything else. Thankfully, the market is flooded with running shoes. Nike, Adidas, Puma, Brooks, New Balance, Saucony, Asics, Mizuno, Under Armour, Pearl Izumi, Hoka One, and others all make great running shoes in a variety of types and colors. You can even look up how many medals were won in the Olympics by runners wearing each shoe brand. [8]

Because footwear is so important, an athlete showing up without their running shoes can derail their practice. Sometimes they can borrow shoes from another athlete, but what if they cannot? I suggest using long-forgotten lost-and-found shoes and worn shoes from your own personal collection to create a stockpile of available shoes. Find a place in the locker room or similar area to store them. This is also a good place to keep extra sweatshirts, athletic pants, and spikes, just in case somebody forgets those. You can even have athletes donate their shoes and spikes at the end of the season.

Most specialty running stores will have experts who can help fit your stride to a particular type of shoe. Three main types of running shoes are for those who over pronate, neutral pronate, or supinate. I personally prefer a lighter shoe, while many athletes love a little extra support. Recommend that your athletes go to a specialty running store to get fitted for proper shoes. The potential for reduced injuries should far outweigh any extra costs.

Apparel Days

Practice is important, but it can be a drag. Many coaches are using apparel days to break up the monotony of practice and keep their athletes interested. I know of teams that do Throwback Thursday, tight-tee tuck-in Tuesday, ’80s day, neon day, headband day, jersey day, and even a Halloween costume thrower’s competition. Coming to practice on those days is fun. Athletes will be taking pictures of their outfits and sharing them on social media.

We do a T-shirt relay where athletes wear crazy outfits and run a relay to “win” a choice from a stockpile of old tees donated by the coaches and the athletic department. Eric Kush, the center for the Los Angeles Rams, promotes “Fat Arm Friday,” where he encourages everybody to wear tanks. This was a highlight of the Rams’ appearance on “Hard Knocks.”

Team pictures are another way to creatively use apparel to promote your team. Let the athletes choose—within reason—what to wear for the pictures. The tradition at Lake Forest before I arrived was for the seniors to wear blue button-down dress shirts and everybody else to wear white button-down dress shirts. The rest of the outfit was the same: dress pants, dress shoes, and a tie. In 2013, we decided to make it more fun. The freshman, sophomores, and juniors still had to dress in the traditional outfit, but we gave the seniors the option to pick their own outfit. That year, the seniors picked blazers, bowties, and khaki shorts. In 2014, they went with robes and ascots. The 2015 seniors wore bowties, Chubbies, half-calf socks, and boat shoes. In 2016, the choice was blazers, turtlenecks, jorts, half-calf socks, boat shoes, and gold chains.

Apparel Impacts Performance

What have we learned from the example set forth by the University of Oregon’s football program? Attracting top athletes to your team can have a great impact on your success. Functional, eye-catching apparel may be the performance hack your team is missing. Athletes who look good and feel good are bound to perform well. Coaches who only focus on the “X’s and O’s” are consistently having less success than the innovators who coach the soul of the athlete, as well as the body and mind. Your apparel matters, from form down to function.

Last February, I gave a speech titled “Winning With Speed” at the WISTCA Clinic in Madison, Wisconsin. In that speech, I encouraged all of the coaches to attract the best athletes in their school to their track team. One suggestion was to get cool uniforms and team apparel. At least one coach who attended my session took the handout from my speech and used it to convince his athletic director to help his team purchase new uniforms. I am hoping this article will have the same impact. Please consider all the great effects that apparel can have for your program. If you have better suggestions or apparel items than I have mentioned here, please list them in the comments below.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. Easterbrook, Gregg. “Change in helmets needed for 2011.” ESPN.com, 26 October, 2010.
2. Kleps, Kevin. “Mark Kelso, mocked and shunned for his padded helmet in the 1990s, is still fighting to reduce concussions.” Crain’s Cleveland Business, 30 April 2014.
3. Morrison, Jim. “Spanx on Steroid: How Speedo Created the New Record-Breaking Swimsuit.” Smithsonian.com, 26 June, 2012.
4. Laymon, Abigail and Nathan Eckert. “Compression clothing and athletic performance – functional or fad?” EurekAlert!, 3 June 2010.
5. Beliard, Samuel, et al. “Compression Garments and Exercise: No Influence of Pressure Applied.” Journal of Sports Science & Medicine. 14 March, 2015. 14(1), 75-83.
6. Albom, Mitch. The Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, and the American Dream. Warner Books, 1993, pp 71-73.
7. Hoekstra, Dave. “Lithuania finds Glory in ‘The Other Dream Team.’” Chicago Sun-Times, 10/11.
8. Hanratty, Mathew. “How Did the Sponsors Do in Rio?” Track Stats, 23 August 2015.
9. Click, Calvy. “The Complete Performance History of the Nike Free.” Complex.com, 23 March 2013.

Performance programs in rugby should center on the game’s physiological, psychological, and logistical demands.

While a periodized training plan might look perfect, rugby is far from perfect regarding movement. Set plays happen at high speed, and defensive players must decide how to best tackle the oncoming attackers. Predictable drills certainly have a part to play in practice, but it’s important to progress toward more random drills.

During agility training, I advocate using medicine balls as a constant stimulus. Coaches often believe athletes need to understand exactly what’s going on. Naturally they need a basic understanding, but when focusing on agility, keep an unpredictable element up your sleeve to further challenge your players’ biomotor capacities.

Rugby has the advantage of a clear and definite schedule that allows training sessions to be designed around the annual fixture list. Rugby is also a sport in which the likelihood of players being in optimal condition all season is extremely unlikely. This makes the role of support staff all the more interesting.

In this article, I’ll describe numerous contributing factors that influence the outcome of individual games and overall seasons.

Rugby is a contact sport played over two 40-minute halves where high levels of force are both generated and absorbed upon impact. Teams are made of fifteen members, and players are divided into forwards and backs.

The stereotype, with limited truth, is that forwards tend to be immobile and thrive on physicality. Their primary role is to secure possession of the ball. That’s not to say, however, that attack is strictly off limits.

In a game analysis conducted by the International Rugby Board, forwards completed an average 42% of passes at the 2011 Rugby World Cup. This shows that forwards are integral to an effective attack.

Conversely, if athletes have speed, power, and skill, they are often placed as backs. As rugby becomes increasingly dynamic, however, every player will need to be comfortable with the ball in hand and with making active defensive tackles.

Factors That Influence Performance and Game Outcomes

Injuries

A Northern Hemisphere season begins in September and will continue until the end of May. On the professional level, this is eight months of competition, not including international duties. Almost every year, international rugby will add an additional two months to the playing calendar.

As a result, several team members will have sustained injuries preventing them from playing for their clubs. In a competition such as the Six Nations, which begins in mid-February and usually finishes in late March, a player carrying an injury adds the risk of missing the remainder of the season or, perhaps more noticeably, limiting their work capacity during pre-season.

Ball in Play

Rugby places unique and extreme physiological demands on the body. The average mass of England’s forwards, for example, at the 2015 Rugby World Cup was 108kg, and the average height was 6’1”. The backs had an average mass of 91kg.

An important element of needs analysis for the game is total time spent on the field. Ultimately, some players are unlikely to play for the whole 80 minutes. Considering the size of modern day rugby players, it’s remarkable they have the ability to perform for at least sixty minutes.

At the 2011 Rugby World Cup, the average number of close contact situations, in rugby terms rucks and mauls, was 162. The average ball-in-play time was 35 minutes 25 seconds, the lowest time was 29 minutes 34 seconds, and the highest time was 43 minutes 54 seconds. Although the amount of time seems relatively low, it’s a significant increase from the times recorded at the 1991 World Cup.

Psychology

The importance of psychology’s role in rugby is growing. It’s always existed even though some traditional coaches try to avoid it.

It’s a team sport with cohesion at its core. When players are injured, they’re likely to be excluded from team training, or they may perceive themselves as being excluded. This offers a challenge for support staff because exclusion can hinder progress in the gym.

External stimuli in professional rugby, the crowd, is often a source of psychological fatigue. Making decisions under pressure during a game situation is essential as it’s often those decisions that determine the game’s outcome. It’s very important to incorporate skill-based drills into a conditioning program.

Logistics

The impact of game logistics, particularly in Southern Hemisphere rugby, is overlooked; traveling does not promote optimal performance. I’ll refer to English Premiership rugby, purely because I know the distances.

When Exeter (South West) competes against Leicester (East Midlands), one of the teams must travel for at least four hours on a coach. I’m not suggesting that a four-hour journey will have disastrous effects, but it’s not ideal, and coaches should account for it. In any sport, logistics will affect recovery, performance, and overall preparation during the training week.

Team Dynamics

The final element of performance is team dynamics. It’s an area that I follow with interest because it’s incredibly important in a sport as physical as rugby. With the risk of sounding trite, each player has to understand they are part of a group. The last thing any coach wants to see is a rift among teammates.

Team dynamics should be at the top of the list before writing a program. Without a buy-in from every player, a program won’t be effective.

If possible, get the team in the gym at the same time. This will add a bit of competition while building team cohesion. It’s essential to keep competition in the weight room under control at all times, however, because players will inevitably want to push themselves toward excessive overload. The goal is preparation, not demolition.

Considerations for Training

Energy System Development

Energy system development is integral in rugby performance because all three energy systems are used (Bompa and Claro, 2009). In their simplest forms, ATP-PCr depletes within seconds, the glycolytic system degrades within 20-30 seconds, and the aerobic system supplies energy during periods of lower intensities (Morton and Close, 2016).

While an aerobic base is necessary for rugby players to maintain a homeostatic environment, the majority of play is anaerobic. There are numerous rest periods during a game, and a set of plays will usually last no longer than one minute, making the two anaerobic energy systems the key drivers.

Rugby is plagued with ineffective training protocols. The idea that “to be fit, you have to do an hour of vomit-inducing work,” still loiters at the amateur level. Occasionally, that method is beneficial but, as total volume, intensity, and external stressors increase, it should be kept to a minimum.

Of course, a rugby coach could argue that athletes need to be overloaded, and they’d be correct. But running around the pitch, which is typically 340 meters in circumference, is training for the wrong event. Unless Forrest Gump is on the team, the chances of a player running around the pitch during a game are very slim.

I experienced this as a player and now realize how time was misused during our weekly training sessions. The coaches had us run around the pitch, do a few static stretches and then, after appropriately cooling us down during what was meant to be a warm-up, they proceeded to ask us to run into one another. That’s not the coaches’ fault. At amateur clubs, they usually coach voluntarily, and it’s unfair to expect them to be clued in on training methodology.

It also likely that junior rugby coaches played during a generation when continuous training was the norm.

As sports science information continues to become increasingly accessible, it would be beneficial to develop standards for all levels leading up to the professional level.

Physical Demands of Rugby

Video 1. This video clip depicts rugby’s physical demands. This phase of play occurred in the 70th minute of the game which makes the physicality all the more noticeable.

To build upon the video, it’s worth recognizing the conditions of the pitch surface. It’s often an uncontrollable and unavoidable factor in rugby, particularly for the visiting teams. And it would be unrealistic to assume the pitch won’t influence the overall performance. While players’ physical conditioning will cover every aspect of a game, a boggy pitch will, in most cases, slow them down and increase the onset of fatigue.

Rugby is predominantly a speed and power sport. To generate force, there must be a foundation of strength; strength is a prerequisite for speed and power generation (P = FV). Still, a physically competent player with foundational strength does not guarantee high performance. Regardless of how strong a player is, if they are unable to generate and apply force efficiently, they will not be very effective.

In my experience, the players who can apply large amounts of force will successfully evade or defeat defenders upon contact. This is not to say that size does not benefit a player. That would be naive. What’s important to remember is that size is not, and should not be viewed as, the determining factor.

I’ve heard stories of young players who are not selected for academies because of their size. If a player shows technical competence with “rugby intelligence,” they should be given every chance to progress. Far too often, size potentially excels or diminishes a young player’s career.

Strength and Conditioning

It might not sound glamorous, but strength and conditioning in rugby should focus on the fundamentals. As in most field sports, players are sprinting, jumping, cutting, and decelerating. Without these skills, chances of progressing as a player are small.

Unique to rugby is the need for players to be able to grapple effectively, which is why Mixed Martial Arts has gradually been introduced to training. To grapple and win, core strength and postural integrity are essential.

By core strength, I refer to the ability to rotate, flex, and extend efficiently. In my eyes, core strength is an umbrella term that people often mistake for having visible abdominals. The core is more than just the abdominals. Barr and Lewindon (2014) refer to the core as the musculature of the hips, the three sections of the spine, the gluteals, and the trunk.

In rugby, the focal point of most strength programs is developing a strong posterior chain, where the large majority of force is generated. Most movements occur through the frontal plane, which lends itself to dominance in the anterior chain. That is by no means a negative, but it has to be balanced with posterior chain strength.

During the season, the number of gym sessions per week is almost always reduced purely because of the schedule. Unless there is a break in the fixture list, which is becoming increasingly rare, there will be a game every weekend. For this reason, making time for accessory work is redundant. In rugby, the saying “we are training movement” could not be more true.

As strength and conditioning become increasingly popular, there is a self-imposed pressure on some coaches to be innovative. The principle of specificity is exhausted to a point where sessions might look good, but they won’t give players the desired stimulus.

When looking at specificity, we typically look at energy system demand or timing. What often goes unnoticed is the biomechanical relativeness. Not many movements performed in the weight room are biomechanically specific to rugby but, as with most things, there are subtle adjustments that we can make.

Not many weight room movements are biomechanically specific to rugby until we make small adjustments.

Exercise variety has reached the max mark, and there are very few opportunities to develop a completely new training system. Strength and conditioning coaches provide the ingredients for high performance and then it’s then up to the technical coaches to make the athletes better players. A strength and conditioning program isn’t the sole factor in developing world class players.

I mentioned that not many exercises are biomechanically specific to rugby. If specificity is the goal, Olympic lifts cannot be overlooked. While there are some remarkably mobile rugby players, many players are not sufficiently mobile. Sometimes injury has reduced a player’s range of movement, and some of the players are just extraordinarily large humans.

To use Olympic lifts in a program, coaches can regress the complete movement to keep force generation and velocity high. That’s the goal, isn’t it? If we’re training power, producing high force and velocity is the way to do it.

If a 6’4”, 115 kg Second Row player is performing power cleans, for example, but not demonstrating movement proficiency, what would be the regression? Go back to hang cleans or move into clean high pulls.

There are also the proven movements of squats, deadlifts, pushing actions, and all of their respective variations. Squats can be changed to jump squats, ¼ squats, box squats, and front squats.

I’ve excluded overhead squats because they’re rather difficult. If the player is competent then, yes, consider including them. However, during the season, the time and effort required to display overhead competence are not an effective use of resources.

Deadlifts have several variations. Stiff leg deadlifts are popular for good reason. If eccentric strength is developed, connective tissue strength improves and, significantly, maximum force output should rise.

I added pushing movements as a general category because an endless number of strength exercises are available.

For performance, we need to move away from isolation exercises and focus on dynamic efforts.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. IRB Rugby World Cup 2011: Statistical Review and Match Analysis.
2. Bompa, T., and Claro, F. 2009. Periodization in Rugby. 1st ed. Maidenhead: Meyer & Meyer.
3. Morton, J., and Close, G. 2016. “The Bioenergetics of Sports Performance.” In Strength and Conditioning for Sports Performance, edited by Ian Jeffreys and Jeremy Moody. Routledge: Abingdon.
4. Barr, A., and Lewindon, D. 2014. “Stabilising and Strengthening the Core.” In High-Performance Training for Sports, edited by David Joyce and Dan Lewindon. 1st ed. Champaign: Human Kinetics.

Before you can run fast in the sprint hurdles, you must learn to 3-step. Sometimes athletes can 3-step without having to learn, but you will most likely work with beginners who need to be taught how to do so at full speed and full race distance.

Whether you are a 12-year-old sprinting over 30-inch hurdles to 80 meters, or a 24-year-old sprinting over 42-inch hurdles to 110 meters, the race is absolutely the same. Learning technique is very important as a hurdler, but it is good for nothing if you cannot run full speed over the hurdles in rhythm. Three steps are all you get to create as much speed as possible, and the athlete who can do so without crashing wins.

The key to helping hurdlers 3-step as soon as possible is to get them running and sprinting over the hurdles with only three steps, at whatever distance necessary.

• Phase 1 – Ingrain Rhythm
• Phase 2 – Push Rhythm to Max
• Phase 3 – Adapt to Race Distance

These are the three phases to learning to 3-step. In this article, I am going to show you how keeping the hurdles close is the key to building the good habits and confidence your athletes need to 3-step in races.

First, though, I need to answer the question: “What height should the hurdles be placed at?” The hurdles should be at their lowest height year round. Just as I never allow my beginners to run over race-distance hurdles in practice, I also never allow them to practice over race-height hurdles. This goes back to allowing them to progress properly before advancing.

Advanced hurdlers (who can already 3-step) will work for most of the season with the hurdles placed one notch lower than race height (36 inches for my high school boys, 30 inches for my high school girls). But, once again, they will rarely—if ever—run full speed with the hurdles at 39 (or 33) inches in practice.

Phase 1: Learn the Rhythm

All of my hurdlers, no matter if they’re youth or advanced, begin the season performing three hurdle drills:

1. The One-Step Drill
2. The Cycle Drill
3. The Cycle Ladder Drill

These drills help ingrain a good 3-step rhythm before putting the spikes on and running full speed. With about two solid weeks of nothing but these three drills, all hurdlers should establish a good rhythm and execute sound fundamental technique. It is with these three drills that beginners will begin to feel comfortable clearing the hurdles in rhythm, so they should perform the drills as long as it takes to establish a good rhythm.

Many coaches will want to rush straight into running full speed over the hurdles on Day One, or at least Week One, but I caution against this. The faster hurdlers go, the quicker it sinks in and becomes automatic to the nervous system. If you begin with sprinting at full speed on Day One with bad rhythm and form, you will ingrain bad hurdling and it will have to be undone somewhere down the line in the future.

The One-Step Drill

The one-step drill should start at 6-7 feet apart with the hurdles as low as possible. Move over the hurdles and work to establish consistency and rhythm. You will know when an athlete has learned the one-step drill when they display rhythm over the hurdles.

Begin with five hurdles and, as they learn to clear them faster, advance to seven and 10 hurdles. They will eventually find that “automatic” movement over the hurdles—that is rhythm. This is what you will work to get them to feel over the hurdles at full speed. Although the journey will be long, this early experience with rhythm will make it that much easier because you will now know exactly what to chase.

Coaching Cues:

1. Stay Forward
2. Swing the Arms
3. Heels-to-Hips

The Cycle Drill

All athletes over 11 years old will be able to 3-step between hurdles spaced 15 feet apart, which is why this is the perfect starting distance for the cycle drill. Again, the key is to watch for rhythm over the hurdles. Simply moving over them without having to stop is a good start, but there must eventually be an automatic reaction to the hurdles with an emphasis on moving forward.

Coaching Cues:

1. Stay Forward
2. Swing the Arms
3. Heels-to-Hips

The drill should start at 15 feet apart, but your hurdlers should be able to progress fairly quickly from there. Once they can perform the drill with all hurdles at 17-18 feet apart, they can progress to the cycle ladder drill.

Video 2: In the cycle drill, the hurdler focuses on pumping their arms and bringing their heels straight up and straight down, with their body leaning forward. The lead leg should not come out towards the hurdle and the trail leg should not go wide.

The Cycle Ladder Drill

The cycle ladder drill will challenge hurdlers to clear increasing hurdle distances without shocking the system with full-speed running. The drill should be executed exactly like the cycle drill, but there must now be an emphasis on driving the trail leg down to the track off the hurdles. The trail leg should land close to the lead leg and it should give a noticeable push forward.

Coaching Cues:

1. Stay Forward
2. Swing the Arms
3. Heels-to-Hips

The drill should begin with the first two hurdles spaced 11 feet apart and increase by 2 feet every hurdle.

• 5 Hurdles
• 11-13-15-17 feet

After they can move through these hurdles in rhythm, I replace the last hurdle with the first and add 2 feet. The progression would be:

• 5 Hurdles
• 13-15-17-19 feet

Once the hurdlers can perform this drill in rhythm through about 20 feet, they will be ready to begin taking full-speed runs over the hurdles.

Video 3: Hurdlers doing the cycle ladder drill should pump their arms and cycle their legs from their hips to the ground, keeping their body leaning forward. The trail leg should feel like it’s landing next to the lead leg as it drives down to the track, and that action from the trail leg should push the hurdler to the next hurdle. Hurdles are moved as per the detailed progression above.

Phase 2: Push the Rhythm

Your athletes very likely did not master hurdle drills in two weeks, but they should have found rhythm and be comfortable clearing the hurdles. Now it’s time to introduce some speed.

Since there are meets to be run and championships to be won, you must advance to the next phase of training. If, however, you have a few months to train before your first competition, you could certainly take as long as you needed to truly master the three drills above.

After a few weeks of solid hurdle drills, athletes will have good form and rhythm, but will not be ready for full speed at race distance. The cycle ladder drill finishes at 19-20 feet (23-24 for advanced hurdlers) but the race distance is (approximately) 27 feet (28-30 for 100/110h) in between hurdles. That is a 7-foot difference for youth hurdlers and one that simply would not be covered in a 3-steps sprint yet. Forcing them to attempt the distance at full speed would only destroy the weeks (or months) of drilling and ultimately slow their progress.
The very first full-speed workout you should perform with hurdlers of all ages is Jammed Hurdling.

For youth hurdlers, jammed hurdling is 4 feet closer than race distance. So, where the race distance for youth is (approximately) 27 feet, the hurdles in practice should be set up at 23 feet apart. This may seem like an exaggeration, but, believe me, it is not when you are working with beginners. Remember: You want to get them to run between hurdles in order to develop good habits and instill confidence. Therefore, you should always keep the hurdles as close as necessary to ensure they are running.

Advanced hurdlers would start the hurdles at the jammed distance as well, but since they already 3-step without thinking about it, they can begin with the hurdles 27 feet apart (3 feet closer).

Bunched Hurdling is the next progression for learning to 3-step, and it is simply taking the hurdles and moving them 1 foot closer to the race mark. For youth hurdlers, this would be 3 feet closer than race distance, or (approximately) 24 feet apart. Advanced hurdlers would be the same, with bunched being around 2 feet closer (28 feet apart).

Video 4: Here is a look at one of my youth hurdlers this past summer, performing full-speed hurdling at the jammed and bunched distances. You can see that she was not running in between the hurdles on the first rep. However, as she progressed and developed the habit, I moved her out to bunched spacings and she continued to adapt quickly.

You must have patience. Don’t assume that hurdlers who performed drills well during Phase 1 will instantly be able to hurdle at full speed. They are beginners and you must allow them to develop at their own pace.

Phase 3: Adapt to Race Distance

The last phase for learning to 3-step is over-speed hurdling, aka 5-stepping.

To 5-step, simply remove a hurdle from the track.

• 1-2-3-4-5

becomes

• 1-2-3-removed-5

Many hurdlers will “bail out” on their first or second attempt, but in my experience they can usually complete the repetition by the third try. If not, move the fifth hurdle 1 foot closer (moving them closer is always the answer).

At the end of the 5-step run, there will be a sixth hurdle with only enough space for three steps, but slightly farther than what they’ve been running over. This will allow them to adapt to a farther hurdle distance, without allowing their doubts to creep in.
Here is the way to set up the workout in order to have your hurdler learn to cover the distance at 25 feet, by 5-stepping between the third and fifth hurdles.

• 1-2-3-4-5-6
• Hurdles 1-5 are bunched (24 feet apart)
• Hurdles 6 is bunched +1 (25 feet apart)

Now remove the fourth hurdle, so that there is room to 5-step between the third and fifth hurdles.

This setup will allow them to move through the first three hurdles at the distance they were last training at, build extra speed through the 5-step zone, and clear the sixth hurdle at a distance they had not previously covered before (bunched+1).

In the example with my youth hurdlers this summer (Video 4), we began full-speed hurdling with the hurdles jammed (23 feet apart), and then bunched (24 feet apart), and finally performed the first 5-step workout with the sixth hurdle at the 25-foot distance.

Here is an example of how the progression would help hurdlers clear greater distances with the 5-step workout:

• Hurdles 1-5 at 24 feet apart
• Hurdle 6, 25 feet from the fifth hurdle (this is the new distance)
• Now remove the fourth hurdle for the 5-step zone (between the third and fifth hurdles)

In this example, the hurdler would 3-step over the first three hurdles, 5-step to the fifth hurdle, and clear the sixth hurdle at the new distance of 25 feet.

When it looks good at 25 feet, you can increase the distance between hurdles 5 and 6 to 26 feet, and so on and so forth until they are within 1-2 feet of race distance.

If they do not 3-step their first race, you simply continue on with the over-speed hurdling, and gradually get them closer to race distance.

Successful Accomplishment of the 3-Step

These are the only three phases necessary to get athletes 3-stepping. The accomplishment usually comes early in the season, which gives you enough time to get Hurdle Volume and Rhythm-Endurance work in before the championship season begins.

When they follow this progression, most of your hurdlers will learn to 3-step before the season starts, and the full progression will allow them to not only 3-step, but continue setting personal best times all the way through the end of the championship season.

I hope this has been informative and you have learned how to successfully help your beginners learn to 3-step. If you would like to learn more, join my Hurdle Rhythm Training Series to learn all of the drills and workouts in detail, and how to prepare for championship season with hurdle endurance and rhythm endurance workouts.

Run Fast. Make Them Chase You. — Coach Cotto

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