Does your weight training programe enhance or hinder your motor skill learning?
In order to improve your sporting performance you may do some form of resistance training. This may be to make you faster or fitter, or to prevent injury.If you are rehabilitating from an injury, you may be looking to isolate certain muscles to help get them stronger. The pain associated with injured muscles may interrupt the nerve signals and motor control of that muscle. Working these muscles in isolation at an early stage allows you to concentrate on regaining some from of strength and control.
However, in healthy athletes and for those at medium stage of rehabiltiation, working muscles in isolation will hinder your motor patterns, and could actually make them worse. Extrapolating data from the injured population about how their muscles work and then applying this to healthy sporting populations is tenuous at best.
In sport your muscles work fast and together. Trying to consciously "trigger" or "engage" one muscle group before another will not work in the heat of competition. Rotator cuff exercises commonly used in tennis training may slow your serve down because you are encouraging work in isolation and at the wrong speed.
Exercises such as press ups, dips and pull ups all use your rotator cuff muscles to stabilise the shoulder joint, in conjunction with a pushing or pulling action. In a healthy athlete, there is no need to isolate the core or shoulder- everything is working well together already.
A thrower, a boxer or a cricket bowler all do fast explosive actions with their shoulders, so this too should be incorporated into their resistance training programme. This can be with medicine ball throws, or with drops onto the ground that allows the shoulder girdle to absorb force and impact in a manner similar to the sport.
Using opposite leg and arm actions is the advanced stage of development for children- either walking or throwing- so enhance this pattern by incorporating such movement in the gym. Same sided exercises actually regress the motor learning pattern to a developmental stage. Athletes with some form of learning difficulties would benefit from opposite sided activities to help their fine motor control. Sitting down and doing exercises is also a regression- unless your sport requires you to sit down!
Finally, avoid jumping jacks like the plague, they are a completely abnormal movement pattern that does not occur in any sport.
Enhancing Sports Performance
www.excelsiorgroup.blogspot.com
Weight training complexes made simple
Complexes made simpleDespite their name complexes are an easy way to get fitter and stronger in a hurry. Increasing strength, work capacity and reducing body fat are often thought to be time consuming or difficult to manage. Complexes allow all three to be done at the same time.
Complexes are a sequence of exercises that are performed without putting the weight down. Barbells, dumbbells, sandbags, kettlebells and medicine balls can all be used to create the desired result.
Istvan Javorek has really made these popular in the last 20 years. His book complex conditioning lists hundreds of different combinations of these types of work. One of the basic ones is:
Javorek's Barbell Complex #1
Barbell upright row x 6
Barbell high pull snatch x 6
Barbell behind the head squat and push press x 6
Barbell behind the head good morning x 6
Barbell bent-over row x 6
That is 30 repetitions without putting the barbell down. If you only use a 20kg bar you have moved 600kg in one set. Compare that with sitting down on a bench and doing 5 sets of 3 reps of dumbbell shoulder press with 3-4 minutes rest between sets and you get an idea of work effort.
The advantages of complex training are:
- Huge amount of work in limited time
- Grip strength improves rapidly
- Doesn’t require a lot of space or equipment
- Because of the relatively high number of repetitions the load on the barbell is limited so it is more suitable for beginner to intermediate types.
- Suitable for team training as you can work on a “one on, one off basis”
Doesn’t work on specific areas of fitness·
Limited rotational/ multiplanar lifts·
You don’t actually go heavy.
Sequencing is important when designing a complex you can either work on power and difficult exercises first like this one:
Hang snatch
Overhead squat
Back squat
Good mornings
Row
Deadlift
Or you can work from the ground up in a logical sequence so that the bar eventually passes over your head and you finish with back squat like this one:
Deadlift
Bent over row
Hang clean
Front squat
Military Press
Back Squat
You can try different amounts of repetitions, but I wouldn’t go higher than 8 reps per exercise. My standard format is 6 exercises, 6 repetitions, with 6 sets. Sometimes I do 5 sets of 5 or 3 sets of 3 ( No real science behind this, it is just that the athletes I train have difficulty remembering more than one number at a time!).
By changing the mode of resistance you get different benefits from the same sequence of exercises. Barbells allow you to go heavy, dumbbells and kettlebells allow for a lot of variety and flexibility, sandbags are good for balance and just making it awkward, and medicine balls allow you to add throws and slams.
Be warned, they are more fatiguing than you may first realise, but if you are looking for time, space and equipment efficient forms of exercise, complexes offer a valuable change.
Enhancing Sports Performance
www.excelsiorgroup.blogspot.com
