Energy Systems and Training Demands–What’s Missing in the Big Picture
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Loading ...In light of Xi Xia’s article on the Huddle about the brevity of ultimate points and the ensuing discussion, I thought the topic bears some revisiting.
Re-framing of the energy demands of ultimate
Taking the average point (not play segment) duration rounded up to 40 seconds, and with a conservative estimate pegging every game at 15-15 for 30 points/game we get an estimated 40 sec/pt x 30 pt/game = 1200 seconds, or 20 minutes, of “active” play per game. And we’re not even factoring in stoppages or “standing time” for your pulls, stack-setting players or non-active handlers, etc.
20 minutes.
In a conservative estimate1. Football seems to be in a similar timeframe for active play with all its stoppages…in terms of a single game’s demands, ultimate doesn’t strike one as particularly taxing endurance-wise, at a glance.
Set the notion of “taxing on endurance” aside for a minute. We have 20 minutes of action a game as a baseline figure. How spread out are those 20 minutes (In other words, what’s the work-to-rest ratio)?
You have to figure your typical ultimate tourney has rounds of at least an hour, some closer to 1:40-2:00 rounds. This pegs your work:rest ratio at anywhere between 1:3 and 1:6.
NOW, factor in that a given player likely only plays one way2–let’s assume again our 15-15 game, which presupposes even O/D loads (give or take a point depending on how the breaks lay at halftime). We can halve the effective workload, so now we’re talking about activity in the 1:6 to 1:12 work:rest range! You don’t have to be a sport physio to know that those kinds of rest intervals put activity squarely in the sprint/explosive range. Granted, it’s not just work:rest interval but the duration of effort that determines aerobic vs. anaerobic, but XX has established pretty well that typical play segment durations are not extending significantly beyond stressing your glycolytic (in other words, you’re still operating primarily in your anaerobic range).
All of this suggests that preparation should first and foremost be sprint work–exactly what XX advocates in the article.
But there’s more to it than just one game.
Parinella brings up a good point that we should perhaps be training for those points at the long end of the tail. Those can be more important than the quick, “easy” points–think of the morale swing that comes with winning/losing hell points3. The last thing you want is to lose for lack of conditioning on a drawn-out universe point.
More relevant in my mind, though, is the issue of ultimate as a Tournament. We almost never play just One Game of Ultimate–summer league, perhaps, but at any serious level of commitment you’ve got 3,4,5 games a day for 2-3 days (your extended 2-a-day Nationals formats are the exception, rather than the rule). That’s your 20 (10) minutes of action multiplied a few times and spread out. Regardless of how you’re training at home–whether it’s sprint-focused, or more aerobically inclined–you’re not putting your body under that kind of prolonged yet intermittent and intense demand, so your body invariably hates you by the time you’re piling in cars and vans Sunday afternoon (if not on Saturday night at the hotel).
The issue I’ve always had with training for tournaments revolves around this dichotomy between the intensity of a game–start, stop, change direction, sprint, break–and the extended timeframe of it all. Sure, you can get up for a single game, but can you get up for two? three? four? The third game the day after you’ve played four?
What impacts day-of performance?
For one, recovery.
While not directly relating to training itself, tournament nutrition is crucial for effective recovery of energy (primarily glycogen and electrolyte) stores over the course of a day and weekend. (To say nothing of pre-tournament nutrition). Even the best-conditioned athletes will run out of gas and cramp up if they don’t eat/hydrate properly.
For two, work capacity.
I refer you to Ross Enamait for a brief explanation and example workout4, but in short: work capacity is the ability to repeatedly perform at an intense (high) level. Sound familiar?
How do you train work capacity for ultimate? (Ross’ workouts are geared more toward the fighter’s short rounds–definitely some carryover there too). Seigs posed this question on his blog back when it still existed, and conventional wisdom seemed to be “play in more tournaments,” and let the principle of SAID (more here) take over, but I’m convinced there are better strategies than that, or at least alternatives.
I figure enough sufficiently strong training stresses in sequence–the equivalent of your football double sessions or the like–might do a good job of training work capacity; generally, I’m thinking in terms of stressors you can apply to ultimate athletes and then force them to perform at a high level in relatively short (but no too short) interval afterwards. For Dartmouth, where winter practice times tend to fall at late-night indoor locations or early-morning outdoor turf, perhaps having an intense track workout in the afternoon before an intense scrimmage/workout that evening, or a really hard conditioning session the evening before a morning hard scrimmage might do something to simulate that late-Sunday soreness that can be all too common–and, importantly, learn to work through it.
What are your thoughts? In college the two-a-day (two-a-<24 hour) seems to be fairly few and far between, but I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences with that sort of thing, as well as any other thoughts on training/preparing to perform in the tournament setting.
1 Admittedly for elite men’s play; I’d love to see somebody do similar analysis for other levels (bring a stopwatch to a tournament!) and compare–factoring in the fact that not all games make it to 15-15 and myriad other conditions (weather forcing a relatively less physically demanding zone, etc), I don’t know that 20 minutes is too far off base for other levels too.
2 Yes, some players routinely play a larger percentage of points. However, even taking the baseline 1:3-1:6 figure you’re still getting enough recovery to sustain anaerobic activity.
3 There’s another topic worth exploring: how often does winning the hell point correspond with winning the game, or at least exceeding expectations? I’m thinking you take games and compare actual results to RRI predictions–of course, you’d need to time points and/or have some objective criterion to define a “hell point.” Time out use? Turnover count?
You could also frame it in terms of looking at “momentum”–does the hell point winner then go on to break the next point(s)? With relatively higher frequency than at other points in the game?
4 I highly recommend Infinite Intensity. Really sound advice and workout resources and ideas–it was the foundation which I built my original summer workout plan upon.
Superb post, and second the Infinite Intensity rec.
Some data points:
I read recently that work capacity improves year over year rather than month over month. Looking back over the last year of my training data, this definitely seems true.
At regionals a few months ago, I burned 3700+ kcal in one day (about half an Ironman), and it looks like a chunk of that was in one particularly long game where I spent 23min in aerobic mode (< 168bpm) and 39min in anaerobic (> 168bpm, HRmax ~225bpm).
That said, on average over 10 games of heart-rate monitor data (Northwest regionals+sectionals) the active time does seem closer to 20 minutes (aerobic+anaerobic), with the harder games being predominantly anaerobic over aerobic.
L. Wu,
I think I read something similar to that recently too about work capacity (Vern Gambetta's new book?).
If we accept that as true, then training age becomes even more important and it's apparent that choosing better "athletes," who've been working harder for longer, makes for better frisbee recruits than simply selecting on a skills basis. I don't know if that's a deal-breaking difference if we're talking about a difference of one or two years, but comparing a guy with only a couple years to one with 5+ might make it more apparent.
Two other thoughts that stem from work capacity being a yearly quantity:
1) Staying active/playing in the off-season (ie, playing over the summer/training regularly for college athletes, playing/training in the winter for club ones) has a big benefit to improving tournament fitness–you're continually improving your work capacity rather than letting it sag.
2) It becomes important to push through soreness in an effort to improve work capacity, but at the same time it's important to recognize that on a given team (esp. in college where I imagine there are greater disparities than HS or club) some guys will be better prepared to handle such a load compared to others. I'm definitely planning on getting a (brief) training history from next year's team so I can at least be aware of, if not outright account for, these differences.
All of XX's analysis appears to come from Sockeye games and I'm left wondering if, perhaps, their style skews towards shorter points, which would in turn bias the data set.
I'm glad to see L. Wu's heart-rate monitor recordings which provide some corroborating support… Anyone else wearing monitors during tournaments?
Sean
PS I wonder if people worry too much about work capacity — that'll get better over the months and years you play at tournaments — and don't focus enough on the fundamentals. How do you move?
You *must* listen to this Gray Cook replay, at least as long as it is still available:
http://bit.ly/kb-gray
Where he talks about barefoot running as a self-limiting exercise, and describes how he works with top athletes (from Andy Roddick to the best NFL athletes in the Superbowl) to address underlying problems in their primitive movement patterns.
You can increase work capacity in at least two ways. Brute force increase your aerobic/anaerobic/lactic processing systems etc., or just be more efficient in using what you already have!
I was playing last night amongst a whole bunch of club teams in the Bay Area and it struck me how poorly most of the players moved. Not in terms of raw speed–there were runners here and there–but in terms of the quality, ease, and fluidity of their movement (running and planting to cut in particular).
I've struggled with this for months (years) but Gray Cook, Pavel, Mark Reifkind et al. have helped me make great leaps in being more efficient as an athlete, not just muscling it through like some folks I see.
Live strong and move well
Great stuff and thanks for the SAID principle shout out–much appreciated!
Rock on
Mike T Nelson
PhD(c), CSCS
http://www.extremehumanperformance.com
L. Wu,
Interesting link, thanks (though wow, they sure do bullshit-shine it up when they're making their sales pitch on it now).
There's definitely something to be said for movement efficiency. All the efficiency in the world still won't do much for a poorly conditioned athlete though–if I'm more efficient, perhaps I run faster at 100% effort, can cover more ground, etc. This likely means some reduction in how much I exert myself, but I'd say it's equally likely that I wind up exerting myself just as much, but with better results. You can't neglect conditioning. If you want to get into notions of conserving energy I think that's a little different than movement efficiency.