500 Words a Week - Low Hanging Fruits
When I mention low hanging fruits, I am mainly referring to three main concepts. The first being to look at the sport you work in and analyse what don’t the players receive from their sport training? For academy football, this might be a strength stimulus, exposure to max velocity, true ballistic/ power work and due to the intermittent nature of the game, athletes rarely are constantly moving for longer bouts of time. Through identifying these aspects that our athletes rarely receive in their sport practice, we find areas of physical performance we can easily target and see improvements in.
The second concept is identifying what our athletes are very poor in that requires little effort to improve. For example, if we are trying to improve proprioception in our athletes and we start by having them jump on foam pads or bosu balls, yet they can’t even balance on one leg for 30s without almost falling over. We are missing these low hanging fruits, these easy gains that require very little of our athletes overall adaptive capacity but are very easy to see improvements in. Another example might be basic submaximal bodyweight work or core exercises, do your athletes struggle doing 20 push ups in a row or performing a single leg squat, or holding a 30s front plank? We must simultaneously improve certain basic submaximal qualities to protect against injury, while also pursuing certain other more performance related qualities as mentioned above such as maximal velocity work.
From one of my previous blog posts, you will have read how I am a fan of working on maximal qualities (strength/ speed), I also believe we must place as much importance into our submaximal accessory work. It is through this we can ensure our athletes are constantly getting some form of strength stimulus into all key areas to ensure an optimal level of robustness ensues.
The third concept is just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Just because we can implement eccentric resistance training with youth athletes doesn’t mean we should. By implementing these more advanced training methods we are robbing the athletes of the low hanging gains in strength they can get by just following a structured and progressive programme. We are also robbing them further down the line when these types of advance training methods might be required to elicit further adaptation, but now won’t bring about the adaptation we hoped for as we have already exposed our athletes to this advanced stimulus.
As I have mentioned in my last blog post, it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Despite me discussing how some of this eccentric work might be inappropriate, I still see the benefits of targeting certain musculature through eccentric means such as the hamstrings. I also like to incorporate a small block of eccentric focused tempo work preseason to really drive tissue tolerance even with some of our younger athletes (once post peak height velocity). An important point here however is the length of time I would expose my athletes to these eccentric focused blocks is minimal and only once/ max twice a year for our younger athletes.
