Chapter 14

1. Chapter 14 C H A P T E R 14 Improving Performance: Work and Sport

2. Objectives This chapter will help you do the following: • Use the principles of training • Improve performance in your favorite sport • Use diet to enhance performance • Develop psychological skills to help you play your best game more often

3. Training Principles • You should follow 15 principles to make steady progress in your training and avoid illness and injury. • Principles are based on research studies and the insights of successful coaches.

4. Principle 1:Readiness Value of training depends on the physiological and psychological readiness of the individual. • Goals clearly defined • Prioritizing time for training • Discipline to get adequate rest

5. Principle 2: Health • Athletes need to be healthy when they train. • Appropriate periodization, rest, and recovery • Additional factors include the following: • Good nutrition • Sufficient sleep • Good hygiene • Pay attention to what your body is telling you and adjust training appropriately.

6. Principle 3: Individual Response People respond differently to the same training • Heredity • Maturity • Nutrition • Rest • Sleep • Level of fitness • Environmental factors • Illness or injury • Motivation

7. Principle 4: Overload • Training must place a demand on the body system if desired adaptations are to take place. • Training must exceed the typical daily demand. • If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

8. Principle 5: Adaptation • Training induces subtle changes as the body adapts to the added demands. • The principle of adaptation tells us that we can’t rush training. • The day-to-day changes are so small as to be immeasurable; weeks and even months of patient progress are required to achieve measurable adaptations.

9. Principle 6: Progression Observe progression in terms of FIT: • Frequency (increases in sessions per day, week, month, or year) • Intensity (training load per day, week, month, or year) • Time (duration of training in hours per day, week, month, or year)

10. Principle 7: Periodization • The process of planning systematic variation into training • At several levels: daily, weekly, seasonal, and career

11. Principle 8: Long-Term Training • Allows for growth and development, gradual progress, acquisition of skills, learning of strategies, and fuller understanding of the sport. • Excellence comes to those who persist with an enjoyable, well-planned, long-term training program.

12. Principle 9: Specificity • Exercise is specific. When you train, adaptations will take place in the muscle fibers used during the exercise. • Specific training brings specific results. • Specificity does not mean that you should avoid training opposite or adjacent muscles.

13. Principle 10: Rest and Recovery • The essence of this principle is that athletes need to listen to their body and adjust their daily training to what they are feeling. • It is during recovery when adaptations occur.

14. Principle 11: Variation • Vary your training program to avoid boredom and to maintain your interest. • When workouts become dull, do something different. • Failure to include variation leads to boredom, staleness, and poor performance.

15. Principle 12: Warm-Up and Cool-Down • A warm-up should always precede strenuous activity to increase body temperature, increase respiration and heart rate, and guard against muscle, tendon, and ligament strains. • The cool-down is just as important as the warm-up. Abrupt cessation of vigorous activity leads to pooling of the blood, sluggish circulation, and slow removal of waste products.

16. Principle 13: Maintenance • It is possible to reach a performance goal and wish to stay at that level of training for a period of time. • When athletes peak, they are able to maintain that fitness level for only a few days or weeks.

17. Principle 14: Reversibility • The adaptations achieved from months of hard training are reversible. It takes longer to gain endurance than it does to lose it. • On complete bed rest, fitness can decline at a rate of almost 10 percent per week.

18. Principle 15: Moderation • Moderation applies to all aspects of life. Too much of anything can be bad for your health. • Elite athletes vary their training, taking easy days between hard training sessions.

19. Training Fallacies • Fallacy 1: No pain, no gain. • Fallacy 2: You must break down muscle to improve. • Fallacy 3: Go for the burn. • Fallacy 4: Lactic acid causes muscle soreness. • Fallacy 5: Muscle turns to fat (or vice versa). • Fallacy 6: You can run out of wind.

20. Four-Step Plan to Develop a Successful Training Program • Goal setting Provide a destination: A destination gives direction, drive, and motivation. • Needs analysis Know where you are, where you want to go, and how you can get there. • Plan and periodize the program Look at the long-term picture first and then determine how to periodize your year, then each month, and finally week. • Monitor the progress and health of your athletes. Most important concerns of training are to maintain health and to recover adequately.

21. Periodizing Your Training Program • To tailor a training program suited to your needs, you first must know the energy sources required in the activity. • See figure 14.1 in your textbook. (continued)

22. Periodizing Your Training Program(continued) Interval training and training intensity • Easy aerobic training • Endurance athletes may spend upwards of 90 percent of their total training time doing this type of training. • Race pace-plus intervals • Race pace-plus intervals are always adjusted to your current performance speed. • Doing intervals slightly faster than current race speed, you will be training both the appropriate energy system and learning the neuromuscular coordination to move slightly faster. • Maximal Intervals • These are maximal efforts for short periods.

23. Figure 14.3 Periodizing Year-Round Energy Fitness Training

24. Figure 14.4 Periodizing Year-Round Muscular Fitness Training

25. Annual Periodization Off-season period This is the time of recovery from the previous competitive season and will include nonspecific, nonstructured activities done at a low intensity with duration dependent on the motivation of each individual athlete. (continued)

26. Annual Periodization (continued) Basic training period • Focus of this period is to build a strength and energy fitness foundation to support the higher intensity work that will be done as the competition season approaches. • Basic training period lasts a minimum of 8 weeks and as long as 5 months in order to optimize muscle recruitment for strength and lay an adequate foundation for aerobic energy. (continued)

27. Annual Periodization(continued) Precompetitionperiod • The transition from basic training to competition • Lasts 6 to 8 weeks for school sports and 12 to 14 weeks for year-round programs (continued)

28. Annual Periodization(continued) Early competition period • More time will be spent on technique and tactics • Generally lasts 4 to 5 weeks for school sports and as long as 10 weeks for year-long programs (continued)

29. Annual Periodization(continued) Peak performance period • 1 to 2 weeks leading to the most important event, athletes may taper their training in an effort to peak for an important event. • Effective tapers gradually reduce training volume and stress by 40to 60 percent. • Peaking can improve performance by 2 to 4percent.

30. Figure 14.5 Weekly Periodization

31. Daily Periodization • Vary the physical stress of the training days. • Vary the overall stress of the training days so that you seldom have more than 3 high-stress days in a row without allowing an easier day for recovery. • Endurance days, even if the pace is slow, may be stressful if the duration is long.

32. Psychology of Performance • Competitors and performers • Play your best game • Relax. Contract and then relax your muscles and say “Let go” as you learn muscle relaxation • Concentrate. Focus your attention on an object in the game to free the mind of fears and negative judgments and to allow your best performance. • Mentally rehearse and physically rehearse.

33. Overtraining • Recognize the symptoms of overreaching and beginning to move toward overtraining. Symptoms include lethargy, fatigue, poor performance, sleep loss, loss of appetite, and illness. • Symptoms arise slowly. • Overtraining is difficult to diagnose.

34. Figure 14.6 Overtraining Detection

35. Summary • Chapter 14 presented a simple approach to the development of a year-round training program that provides for the systematic development of aerobic and anaerobic energy sources and for muscular strength, endurance, and power. • For more detailed information on training and programming, consult Sport Physiology for Coaches (Sharkey and Gaskill 2006).