500 Words a Week - Fearing Absolutes
The more time I spend within S&C, the more I begin to fear absolute statements and am weary of coaches who frequently make them. We can still learn from these coaches and try to understand their reasoning behind why they say you have to or shouldn’t do certain forms of training, but we don’t have to always work in line with their statements.
Take me for a case study, a few years ago I would have said that machines have no place in a structured training programme. Quickly followed by another statement that “they aren’t functional”. The more I develop, the more I realize machines can play a wonderful part in training programmes. They are super effective in rehab situations where many athletes have several limitations to what they can do. They allow you to be hyper specific to target certain musculature.
A major component about why I like machines is that for athletes looking to put on more size they are an incredibly effective way to add more volume into your programme. This can be especially important for team sport athletes and even more so important in-season. Sure we could look to increase volume by adding reps/ sets to whatever their main lifts are (squat/ RDL…). However, this can be incredibly fatiguing for our athletes. With machines we can get in the extra volume that they need to improve size in certain local tissues without being incredibly taxing on the systematic load our athletes experience.
I’ve mentioned Bosch before on this blog. Every time you have a conversation with someone about Bosch, majority of the time it’s either they like his stuff or hate it. Without seeing that we can take some great concepts that he proposes and add them to our inventory. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. We can easily add in concepts from Bosch such as hip lock work, co-contractions, and reducing muscle slack. We don’t have to abandon all our other training concepts and solely adapt what Bosch proposes.
Another form of absolutism I struggled with was getting out of the mindset of always ensuring we have to hit every big movement pattern every week. We must be far more adaptable than this, and at times we must prioritize imparting a stimulus on our athletes over ensuring we hit each movement pattern. This is another key component to in-season team sport programming that must be considered, potentially more so with senior/ older age academy players where there is more emphasis put on freshness for games. Rather than worrying if we got a squat, hinge, lunge, SL variant, in times of congested fixtures are we ensuring that each major muscle group is getting a stimulus. By using various isometrics, we can easily ensure each muscle group is hit. Again, doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You might still want to hit your major lift of the day (squat, trap bar deadlift, etc..), but use isometrics to replace your accessories to limit the amount of fatigue accumulated. This may be different for younger ages where you are still trying to teach and refine the movements and the athletes cannot tolerate a large enough load in the exercises to fatiguing themselves to a high level.
