500 Words a Week - Contrast sets for optimal athletic development
A favourite training tool of mine is the use of contrast sets for optimal athletic development. I enjoy using many varieties of contrast sets with the athletes I get to work with. This may include classic contrast sets of super-setting our main strength lift with a jump or ballistic exercise, or it may include a constraints based exercise super-setted with the actual skill we are trying to improve to hopefully facilitate an optimal learning environment.
If we look at the classical use of contrasts sets, your standard meat and potatoes, strength lift and jump/ ballistic exercise. I believe we all have a grasp on some of the physiological based evidence for this type of training, such as an increased motor unit recruitment in the ballistic exercise due to the strength exercise performed beforehand. However, I think there are other benefits beyond this. We perform our major strength lifts for many reasons, being able to put more force into the ground, improving tissue strength, allowing us to handle larger on-field workloads, but this shouldn’t come at the expensive of building athletic movers and snappy athletes. Often, the main strength lifts we prescribe are very compressive in nature, and it can be fair to say our athletes may feel un-athletic after them. This is the main reason I like to marry up our main strength lift with something athletic and ballistic. With this we are trying to complement the physiological adaptations from our heavier strength lifts, but protect from the downside of that pure compressive stimulus on the body elicited from the heavier strength lifts. We are building the level of force our athletes can produce with the strength lift and then putting them in a situation where they get to express that force in a more athletic endeavour, hopefully building a more balanced athlete.
I think my appreciation for this has come through my own experience in weightlifting, when peaking for competition I tend to be relatively unathletic in anything that isn’t in the sagittal plane and doesn’t require me to move some external mass. This is fine for my sport, as all I have to do is try and lift an external mass in the sagittal plane, but if trying to apply concepts of strength training derived from strength sports to team sport athletes I must be cognizant of this. Here, we come across how some of what we learnt about periodization may not be applicable to our team sport athletes. Most of the periodization work we read comes from sports where athletes only need to compete 1-2 times a year in a very specific sport. However, in light of this, I’m a big believer in you need to know the rules before you can break them. Sure a lot of this work doesn’t apply to team sports, but some of the principles do, be that as simple as gathering a true appreciation for the beauty of progressive overload and the SAID principle.
