The Rubiks Cube of Athletic Transference
17 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Yesterday I had a long and interesting talk with Ethan Reeves, the head strength coach at Wake Forest University. We waxed philosophic about a variety of fitness related issues and strategies. His approach towards training athletes is sophisticated yet practical. It is his job to make good athletes great and great athletes superb. The issues he deals with on a regularly reoccurring basis are complex and fluid: take an athletic youngster and make them better. Of course the nuanced subtleties slip in when you seek to define better. How best to enhance talent without distorting or destroying that talent? I recalled a conversation with Baltimore running back Jamal Lewis at the end of his 2000-yard season. He let it slip that he had to de-emphasis weight training; not out of laziness but out of necessity. Lewis, au natural, stands 5-11 and weighs a dense and compact 235-pounds carrying a 9% body fat percentile. At this weight he is capable of a 4.4 forty yard dash. He said, If I lift weights seriously I blow up. He made a motion around his body to illustrate an enlarged Jamal. I would respectfully amplify his point: a genetic wonder like Jamal could easily blow up to 265 while retaining his 9% body fat percentilegreat for pure power and strength but bye bye 4.4 forty and bye bye lightning agility and quickness needed to dance, spin and avoid collision. On the other hand the serious weight training Jamal need avoid is exactly what thousands of athletes must do to make the NFL grade.
Walter Payton built himself up from a gifted 180-pound great college runner who likely would have had a nice NFL career into a 205-pound immortal with a 400-pound bench press. Undersized athletes use weight training to provide them what they lack: muscle, size, power and hellacious strength. It is no accident that every single professional team, regardless the sport, have weight training facilities and strength coaches on staff. Coach Reeves talked about his philosophy for making good athletes better. Deadlift variations, power cleans, squats and a preference for lifts done standing up - which echoed my conversations with John Gamble, longtime Miami Dolphin head strength coach who told me, Marty, they play standing on their feet and I want them to excel at lifts done standing on their feet. Amongst the coaching elite compound multi-joint ballistic movements are mixed with short-stroke power movements to cover all the bases. Coach Reeves found that adding plyometric leaps and bounds to the training mix improved explosiveness that translated to the playing field. Improving the ability to propel the body upward and outward has direct athletic applicability and this approach can be traced back to Iron Immortal Paul Anderson who used to leap up onto a 36-inch picnic table for sets of 10 to improve his squatting ability quite a feat for a 370-pound man. Paul could do a standing broad jump of 10-feet anywhere, anytime. The Big Red Machine, the Soviet Union and their Iron Curtain affiliates, formalized Andersons primordial plyometric efforts and Russian Olympic lifters included bounding leaps and jumps into their rugged regimen. Yuri Vardanian, world and Olympic 181 pound champion supposedly could leap up onto a 44-inch platform.
Training athletes in such a way as to improve specific sport performance is a Rubiks Cube dilemma and smart, cutting-edge strength and conditioning coaches are open to new and different ideas: being dogmatic, fanatical and close-minded, swearing unswerving allegiance to a single system or method is a great way to end up unemployed. No one method trumps all other methods. Open minded experimentation and a never ending quest for new ideas is how the best stay the best. Fossilized thinking prevents new ideas and presents a fixed target for opponents to shoot at. Each individual athlete has his or her own unique physiology and psychology circumstance and the ideal strength and conditioning coach is able to devise a customized program that enhances strong points, brings up weak points and in the end creates a final finished athlete that is better at the sport then when they commenced the regimen. The idea is not to build a better weight lifter, powerlifter, bodybuilder or endurance athlete the idea is to build a better football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, wrestler or track athlete. Weights and cardio are means to an end - not an end in and of themselves. The ideal strength and conditioning coach amplifies the students strong points, eliminates weak points and delivers to the sport coach an athlete better able to perform at the chosen sport. When John Gamble was the strength coach at University of Virginia he related to me the story of a 6-3 180 pound freshman who could run and leap like a gazelle but was frail and relatively weak. After four years of Gamble-school Herman Moore weighed 210, was drafted in the first round and went on to a 10-year NFL career. John molded and shaped Herman: he enhanced his gifts, eliminated his weaknesses and reconfigured a good athlete into a great one. JG developed methods that transferred from the weight room to the gridiron; he didnt turn Moore into a great powerlifter and turned him into a great football player. I strongly suspect the open-minded non-dogmatic coach Reeves is doing the same thing at Wake Forest.
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