500 Words a Week - Slow Down
I’m not a huge fan of the term “stick to the basics” as I feel coaches can hide behind it and use it to justify doing the same thing over and over again. However, I feel we may be jumping the gun at times in S&C these days. Rather than appreciating the process of slowly building up our athlete’s physical capacities and progressing simple exercises, we are looking to jump straight to complex forms of training and squeezing in as many fancy sounding terms in our programme as we can.
Mladen Jovanovic discuss’ two types of programming, one being “push the ceiling”, and the other being “pull the floor”. The push the ceiling concept assumes we can force adaptations in our athletes through progressions. The pull the floor concept describes how we slowly cook the athlete and adjust progression to their own rates of adaptation. Due to the nature of push programmes, and that we are trying to force new levels of adaptation onto our athlete, the programmes are short, must have an unloading phase afterwards, and cannot be frequently repeated.
The pull programmes are very repeatable and adjusted based on rate of change in our athlete, rather than forcing change. The difficulty with pull programmes, is that they can be “too easy” and might not provide enough stimuli for adaptation. To counter this uncertainty, we use the heuristic “consistency beats loading”, as well as getting frequent feedback on our programme to tell us if we are on the right track. In the pull programme, the athlete is focused on process goals and “punching the clock”, rather than chasing performance and outcome goals (push programming). Push programmes fixate on the destination, while pull programmes focus on the enjoyment of the journey.
Mladen states that with strength-generalists (certain team sports such as soccer), most of your programmes should be pull the floor programmes, as they are not competing in pure strength expression sports. Once a fitting opportunity emerges, we can use push the ceiling type programmes with our strength generalists. It’s no surprise that this should sound very familiar to Nassim’s Barbell Loading Strategy, in that we protect from the downside for the majority of the time, but when a moment of opportunity arises we purse the upside and aim to drive physical adaptations hard.
A reason I enjoy Mladen’s work so much, is that he can take complex topics and with the help of knowledge derived from people outside of our field, he can explain it to us in a simple and effective way. Mladen talks about the “sharpen-saw” concept taken from Stephen Covey. With this, we want our strength training to “sharpen our saw”/ develop our strength qualities, rather than test or demonstrate them only (the act of sawing). The pull approach can be seen as more developing (sharpening), and the push approach as more demonstrating (sawing).
“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe” – Abraham Lincoln
If we just keep sawing/ cutting wood with our saw/ axe pretty soon we will end up with a dull blade that is useless. This is true for our athletes if we are constantly performing a push programme, we will cause our athletes to overreach and slip down the overtraining spectrum. We must sharpen our blade to get the most out of it.
A lot of this blog is taken from Mladen Jovanovic’s Strength Training Manual which is an outstanding book that I would encourage every S&C coach to read.
