Pat and Dan talk about the motivating importance of having goals beyond the gym. Then, as usual, QnA with the audience.
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The Importance of Setting Goals Beyond the Gym w/ Dan John
Shared Article by Dan: Snapacity and Peaking
There is an odd feeling during superlative performance. Time slows. Colors leap. The efforts of the past decade(s) suddenly feel effortless. Yuri Vlasov, the great Soviet Olympic lifter, called these: “The White Moments of Victory.”
We dance on the razor’s edge in high-level performance. Too much work, or too little, crushes the moment. Tension, arousal, heart rate and, that dangerous tool, thinking all have to be at the right levels. Too much, too little…
Just right.
Coach Goldilocks taught this principle well.
I use an odd example when I explain most people’s attempts at delivering an optimal performance at the right time (“peaking” for short). We are like archers: we pull back the bow string. Then we pull some more. And then, just to be safe, we pull back more.
And, instead of just letting go and letting the arrow fly, we grab the arrow and try to throw it.
This is the hardest lesson I ever learned as a coach and athlete: superlative performance comes when you let the arrow fly.
And, yes, throwing the arrow works. It just doesn’t work very well.
I coined the term “snapacity” to explain how I train elite performers. The snap, exactly like snapping your fingers, is that explosive movement that separates the great from the average. Work Capacity is this idea of being able to do something over and over, in this case, snapping.
Shove “snap” and “work capacity” together and you get snapacity.
Only a few times in my career did I get this right. Considering my athletic career started in 1967, this isn’t high praise for me. Once, in San Jose, I threw the discus and I almost fouled the throw on purpose as it felt completely effortless. Only the yells from the stands kept me from taking a foul throw (stepping on the elevated ring around the circle).
I had added ten feet to my lifetime best.
Effortlessly.
Preparing to peak is preparing to snap. Preparing to peak is to prepare to move effortlessly…with intelligent effort.
Like the arrow, you have to let it go.
The mistake many coaches make, and I am marching in that throng with all of them, is to prepare to “let it go” means you have to prepare the athlete (or yourself) to trust that the arrow will fly a lot farther if you let it go rather than throw it.
It is a multi-faceted approach. Let’s talk.
Let’s begin with the obvious one: the physical preparation.
Basically, we want to plan a season, or career, by dealing with two things:
- Appropriate techniques
- A broad foundation of qualities. Later, we will focus and isolate perhaps one to three of these qualities.
The key to nearly every sport is turning the human body into a rubber band. The term is “stretch-reflex,” but my junior college throws coach, Wolfgang Linkman, had a far better way of saying…in his extremely limited English:
“Ssssssh-Ku!”
“Sssssh” was the stretching of not only an individual muscle but of the whole chain of muscles that were involved in the movement.
“Ku” was “letting go.” Like a rubber band, we pull the band back from one of our fingers, release it and it hits Rita in the back of the head while she sits across the schoolroom.
She complains to our teacher, an Irish nun, and, once again, I stayed after school. Later, I figure out that actually talking to her was a far better way to get her attention. But I digress.
Yes, muscles contract like my Grandson’s bicep when he explains what lifting weights does. And, yes, muscle tension can keep you hanging from a rope dangling over a river full of crocodiles. A good training program will explore building tension in the muscular systems through both isometric movements and more dynamic movements.
The apex of muscular performance is utilizing the stretch reflex. Before you jump, you pre-stretch quickly in a movement that is so natural you may have never noticed. When you throw or kick, you “wind up” before you “sling” it. If you do it right, there is a noticeable whip.
Wind up.
Sling.
Whip.
The job of a good coach is to build this in the techniques of the athlete. It’s the snap of snapacity.
I was taught the Bow and Arrow the first time I was actually coached on the discus. We put our hands on the posts that supported the pull up bars and turned our whole body away from that hand.
My right arm held firm and the coach noted that this was the arrow. That feeling from the elbow to the chest to the hips and down to the knees was the bow.
“Feel that?”
I did. And then I searched for that feeling in the full discus throw for another seven years.
Utilize the stretch reflex at every opportunity in training. Search for places in the techniques to amplify the stretch reflex.
It can also be trained. Let’s talk about building that broad foundation.
Tension is the great gift that strength coaches can teach the world. Strength coaches can take a wet spaghetti noodle and turn it into an iron rod. Tension makes the weight room safer, the lifter stronger and sends performance soaring.
There is something else that sounds like tension that is also crucial to elite levels and should be part of the foundational training of every athlete (every body).
It’s called “tensile strength.” It’s the key to the stretch reflex, the bow and arrow and the Ssssssh-ku.
Let’s explain it the Old School way:
Ut tensio, sic vis.
Since Latin isn’t be spoken in most discussions today, let me translate:
As the extension, so the force.
This is the work of Britian’s Robert Hooke. In the late 1600s, he explained how springs work like the ones on your car and mattress. This insight also explains why relatively slighter people can often perform incredible feats of strength. It’s not the size of the muscle, it is the extension PRIOR to the movement.
Hooke’s Law explains Bruce Lee’s “one-inch punch.” This law explains why some people jump higher, throw faster and kick farther.
It’s nothing new for those of us in the world of performance sports. Percy Cerutty taught us, long before anyone accepted his “mad” methods of lifting weights, running hills and proper diet, that tensile strength is the key to training.
“The development of tensile strength that is necessary in order to reach one’s potential can be acquired in three ways during the conditioning period: 1. Intensive weight lifting; 2. Gymnastics; 3. running on the spot regularly at the end of a workout to speed up the thrower’s reflexes.”
Training with Cerutty, Larry Myers
Page 127
When Cerutty was coaching, few coaches had fully embraced any of these three concepts. Lifting weights, fundamental gymnastics and simple plyometrics would now be considered the cornerstones of off-season training.
I think it helps to think of tensile strength rather than off-season conditioning (conditioning, conditioning and more conditioning). Tying the concept of discovering the technical areas where pre-stretch is appropriate while consciously striving to develop more abilities to support this technical model seems to be so logical, one should have to say it.
Except I have to say it: Strive to teach the Bow and Arrow effect while also building a bigger bow, a stronger bow string and tougher arrows. Yes, this is an analogy but, isn’t that a nice way to explain the goals of the off-season and pre-season training?
We are not out here to just get tired; we are here to build snapacity.
The lifting, gymnastics and simple plyometrics doesn’t have to be sport specific or extremely complex. Paul Flick argued for a basic template of strength training in the power and Olympic lifts in 1964.
“As the late Harry Paschall put it, “The strength of the lower back and hips determines one’s ability to run, twist, jump, throw or lift, whichever the particular sport requires.””
Luck, Accident or Plan
Paul Flick
Strength and Health Magazine, May 1964 (Pages 58-59)
Paschall, a writer and cartoonist famous for his lifter “Bosco,” died the week after I was born, yet his work still lives on. His programs were simple and to the point and probably are still better than most of the nonsense we see today. His “Program Two” was:
- High Pull and Press (also known as the “Continuous Clean and Press): a warm up movement
- Curl
- Rowing
- Bench Press
- Squat
- Deadlift
This brings tears to my Easy Strength eyes.
Flick’s programming, much like Cerutty, was the basic basics. Both men were track coaches and they both had amazing success. I beat this point to death, but it is important: track and field, like swimming, is one of the few sports where you can see clearly whether or not something worked.
If you go faster, farther or higher…whatever you did was RIGHT.
It’s not a debate class. Even though his coaches tried to dissuade him, Dick Fosbury flopped over the high jump bar. It’s the way everyone does it now. If a technique raises the bar (literally here), one has a choice to stick their old techniques and start losing.
Or adapt.
Getting strong is the first step towards tensile strength. Using gymnastics and proper plyometrics knits the athlete together.
Just don’t get too cute: stick to the basics. Teach the stretch-reflex and build tensile strength.
It’s that easy.
It’s a snap.
Questions
- Part of the reason the Easy Strength program(s) work well for athletes is that the athlete can focus on the sport. Focusing on the sport “might” help them learn “snap.”
True
- Tensile-strength and stretch-reflex are keys to elite sports performance.
True
- The key to elite sports performance is getting the athlete’s tired.
False
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